Blue Baby Ford

The Blue Baby Ford is the car Francis (Frank) McGahern used to travel between the barracks at Cootehall and the family home, and its intermittent appearances give physical form to his distance from his children. In the narrator’s recollections it carries a father who could arrive without warning, a jar of sweets that was never opened, and the family on a rare visit to a dying grandmother. During wartime it stands immobilized on blocks, while a borrowed car takes Susan McGahern and her newborn daughter home. The vehicle is at once ordinary transport and a recurring marker of who is present, who is absent, and what the children cannot yet understand.

The Car Between Two Households

The family lived with Susan and their paternal grandmother in a bungalow outside Ballinamore, while Francis served as a sergeant at the barracks in Cootehall, twenty miles away. The children spent the long summer holidays with him at the barracks; on annual leave and the two days off he had each month, he came and went to the bungalow in the Blue Baby Ford. The car thus connected the two places without making them a single home. The father’s movement between them was governed by his own schedule, and the narrator remembers no occasion when he stayed in the bungalow, though he must have driven there many times.

That blank in the child’s memory is part of the car’s significance. The Blue Baby Ford is repeatedly recalled as an arrival, but it does not supply a corresponding memory of domestic ease with the father. Instead, the memoir sets the mother and child walking together to Lisacarn School against the father’s intermittent visits by car. The distinction is not simply between walking and driving: the lane belongs to an everyday closeness, while the car announces a presence that can change the atmosphere of the house.

The Dashboard Jar

On the dashboard sat a glass jar filled with long sugarsticks wrapped in cellophane. Most were yellow, with some green, red, and black. The narrator found them beautiful and desirable, but they were never unwrapped or shared. Their vivid colours made them visible objects of temptation, yet the jar’s closed state kept them beyond use. In memory, they seemed to serve the same purpose as permanent flowers: they remained there to be looked at rather than enjoyed.

The jar recurs in the recollection of a Sunday drive to Carrick-on-Shannon to visit the children’s grandmother. The careful clothes worn by the family made the outing unusual, and the sugarsticks were still on the dashboard as the car stopped at Maggie’s shop. Susan went inside to buy grapes and sweets; Francis, impatient at how long she spent with her sister, began muttering and sounded the horn. She came back apologetically, but he drove away in angry silence. The car carried the family toward a visit, yet even this shared journey registered the strain between its adults. The untouched sweets and the newly bought treats belong to the same scene, but only the latter were meant to be consumed.

Arrivals and Fear

The car’s arrival could also bring a sudden shift in the child’s sense of safety. On one late-night visit, Francis’s bad mood focused on the narrator’s face, covered with scabs from a childhood illness. He kept the boy from school the next morning, drove him to a doctor in Carrigallen, and then took him to a chemist. At home, he prepared a basin, mirror, towel, and sharp knife, and removed the scabs. The sores healed without scars, but the treatment remained frightening in the child’s memory.

The next time the Blue Baby Ford arrived, the narrator ran to a large chestnut tree near the house and hid among its branches. From there he could watch the house and car and hear his name being called, but he stayed hidden until evening, when the car had left and the calls had grown more anxious. The vehicle does not itself cause the fear; its arrival has become a signal through which the child anticipates his father’s unpredictable moods. On a later visit, Francis was charming, and the house remained content and peaceful through the day and night, until the family gathered outside to wave as the car drove away. The same arrival that could prompt concealment could, under different conditions, precede a stretch of calm.

Immobilized and Replaced

During the war, private cars were taken off the roads. Francis’s small Ford rested on blocks in a shed at the barracks, unable to perform its familiar journeys. When Susan, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, returned briefly from treatment and gave birth to Dympna, the narrator’s sharp memory of bringing them home is not of the Blue Baby Ford in motion. He went with his father in Packie McCabe’s car to the nursing home in Boyle. On the journey back, Susan carried the baby in a white shawl; laughter over the red hair shared by Dympna and Packie passed around the car, though the narrator did not understand it.

The substitution is concrete: the father’s car remains on blocks, and another man’s vehicle carries mother and child home. Susan stayed with the family at the barracks for about a week before leaving again, while Dympna remained in Bridgie McGovern’s care. The Blue Baby Ford therefore marks not only a route between households but also a limit on what it can repair. Its customary journeys had brought the father to the family and the children to the barracks; during the mother’s illness and separation, the familiar car could not make the family whole.

A Recurring Measure of Presence

The Blue Baby Ford appears across separate childhood recollections: the visits to the bungalow, the trip to see the grandmother, the frightening arrival at night, and the period when wartime restrictions left it standing idle. Its repeated presence gives the memoir a material thread through changes the child could not fully comprehend, from the father’s divided household arrangements to Susan’s hospitalization and brief return with a new baby. The dashboard jar holds one kind of distance, with desired sweets kept permanently sealed; the car itself holds another, bringing the father near without guaranteeing intimacy. Remembered through its colour, its movements, its stillness, and the objects inside it, the vehicle becomes a precise measure of the family’s changing access to one another.