The Nurseries

The Nurseries is a stone house on twelve acres at Grevisk, bought by Francis McGahern as a carefully considered retirement property. Its former gardens, long walks, mature trees and bridle path make it a place of unusual beauty in John McGahern’s recollection, but its significance changes with the family’s fortunes: it is first a promise of shared work and a peaceful future, then the centre of a household increasingly organized around Francis’s power, and finally a retirement choice he came to resent.

Setting and history

The house stood outside the walls of the Rockingham Estate, on land that had once supplied the gardens of the Nash house above Lough Key. At the property’s height as a nursery, fourteen gardeners worked the fields, and the head gardener lived in the stone house. The old layout remained legible in the grounds: great trees, exotic plants and flowers brought back from India and China, and walks that had become grass-grown. In contrast to the lean ground elsewhere in the family’s life, the soil here was rich.

A gate in the high Rockingham wall, across the road from the house, opened onto a bridle path running through woods and pastures to Rockingham House. The path carried its own history of estate life: Rockingham’s ladies had ridden along it to consult the head gardener about moving plants and shrubs from the nursery grounds to their gardens. The property thus retained traces of a working landscape and of the larger estate to which it had once been attached.

Francis did not buy the house on impulse. He pursued it through long negotiations, with retirement in view, and the deliberate purchase gave the family’s later plans a fixed centre. The Nurseries was both a particular place, shaped by its garden history, and a practical project: a house and farm where Francis expected to keep working after leaving the police.

Work and the imagined future

John McGahern remembered the place as beautiful and took pleasure in helping Francis in the fields and wild gardens. Their work included cutting up fallen trees, dosing the few black cattle and cutting back growth in the orchard. As they worked, Francis repeatedly presented their togetherness as a source of strength, insisting that they could face the world as a pair. The refrain gave the labour a meaning beyond the tasks themselves: for a time, the grounds became the setting for a hoped-for alliance between father and son.

That hope extended to John’s future. When John returned home at Christmas, Francis was flourishing and treated him with conspicuous charm, as if performing a new role. John was nearing the end of teacher training, and Francis pictured him becoming principal of a local school. He imagined that the two could work happily together, make money as they had in the past, and build a shared life around the property. John listened without encouraging or openly contradicting the plan; he recognized the force of the fantasy but did not accept it as his own future.

The plan acquired a practical shape when John returned to help Agnes McShera’s brother, Tommy McShera, put a new roof on the stone house. Tommy was a skilled and easygoing tradesman, and Francis welcomed the work because it cost him nothing. While the roof was being replaced, Francis’s idea that he and John would join forces took firmer root. He studied advertisements for teaching posts in The Irish Independent, but his interest centred on vacancies nearby, where John could remain within reach of the house and its work.

A home under strain

The property’s promise of a shared, settled life existed alongside Francis’s renewed hold over the household. Agnes was attentive and charming, but John came to understand that confidences shared with her were being carried back to Francis. As Francis absorbed her attention, Dympna and Frankie received less of the affection and praise they had been used to from Breedge and Rosaleen. Agnes’s approval and withdrawal of support helped direct their reactions around Francis, and the whole house once again revolved around him, though in a subtler fashion than before.

By the time John came home at Christmas with Monica and Margaret, the household’s initial gaiety could not conceal its worsening divisions. Dympna had become sullenly submissive, with bouts of high spirits that seemed unnatural; Frankie was openly confrontational and deeply disturbed. Francis used threats, scolding, abuse and sarcasm in ways that intensified the conflict, while Agnes defended herself through a passive aggression that proved effective. She also drew her own family more often into the house, even as she remained fiercely protective of Francis against criticism from outside.

John helped Francis with the land during that visit. Work offered the two men a way to conceal their profound temperamental differences, and Francis could be friendly in a bluff, jocose and forced manner. The same grounds that had once framed an appealing prospect of partnership now provided a temporary means of working alongside one another without resolving the conflict between them.

Retirement and regret

Francis eventually retired and went to live permanently at The Nurseries. His decision came after a transfer to Leitrim village had been arranged: it was close to Cootehall, offered comfortable living quarters, allowed Dympna and Frankie to remain at their school, and would have left him free to continue farming while preparing the house for retirement. He and Agnes even received a going-away present at a function in the parochial hall. A few weeks before the move, however, Francis changed his mind and retired to the property he had bought for that purpose. Almost as soon as he had done so, he regretted the choice and began to resent it.

The Nurseries therefore did not settle the future Francis had imagined. He had bought it through sustained negotiation, worked to make it ready, and pictured John joining him there; yet retirement brought no lasting satisfaction. Later, Francis spoke of selling the place and moving to Dublin, a city unfamiliar to both him and Agnes. John judged the proposal impractical, assuming Francis would turn against it once it became possible. This time, a letter sent shortly after John returned to Dublin enclosed an advertisement for a large, rundown property above a greengrocer on the North Strand. The projected move marked another turn away from the life The Nurseries had been meant to secure.