The father’s relationship with Frankie

Francis (Frank) McGahern’s relationship with Frankie is one of the clearest expressions of the father’s coercive rule over his children: physical attacks and threats meet resistance, then give way to efforts to enlist Sean in further violence. Frankie’s eventual departure for London ends their immediate confrontation without resolving it; even afterward, his father doubts that he can succeed.

Violence and Resistance

The conflict became physical when Francis attacked Frankie and Frankie fought back. In the struggle, Frankie knocked his father to the floor and held him by the arms while Agnes McShera shouted and struck Frankie over the head with a brush. At first Frankie was hardly fazed. He laughed as he imitated Agnes’s blows and his father’s groans and shouts, turning the episode into what the narrator calls domestic farce. The laughter did not mean the danger was over: Frankie became afraid only later, when his father began making dark hints and threats.

That shift—from comic retelling to fear—shows how the violence continued to govern the relationship after the struggle itself. Frankie had managed to overpower his father in that encounter, but the household remained under the pressure of what Francis might do next. The reversal of physical power did not produce security or reconciliation; it exposed the instability beneath the father’s authority.

The Attempt to Restore Schooling

When Sean took Frankie home, he was sixteen, nearly grown, and still had more than a year before his Leaving examination. Frankie said he had been thinking of going to England. Sean urged him to remain at school long enough to complete the qualification, acknowledging that the remaining time might feel long to him. Francis, however, received the homecoming as a drama in which Frankie had let everyone down. Agnes likewise blamed Frankie, while Sean argued that he needed encouragement rather than being cut down. Francis left the room, and the hoped-for improvement in the household did not follow.

A few weeks later, Francis asked Sean to help beat Frankie. His letter recounted that Frankie had returned to school after missing the morning because of a claimed toothache, and that Brother Placid had given him eight slaps. Francis proposed that he knew how to deal with Frankie, wanted Sean’s approval, and suggested Sean’s presence might be useful because of the risk that Francis himself would collapse, given his age and weight. He also considered letting Frankie drift for a year, but doubted that Frankie would choose school on his own. The appeal made Sean’s role stark: Francis sought not merely his agreement but his participation in enforcing the father’s will by force.

A Household Divided

Sean went to confront Francis, finding the household in a fearful state. Dympna had become an unhappy shell of herself; everyone except Francis seemed afraid to move, while he walked through the house with ponderous deliberateness. Alone with his father, Sean challenged the proposed beating as a serious offence. Francis answered by asking whether he had no right to defend himself. Sean understood that the violence they were being asked to administer could also be represented as self-defence, with Sean cast as his father’s supporter. He judged that saying everything he felt would be useless and returned instead to the practical question of getting Frankie back to school.

Francis answered that Sean might succeed where he could not, but predicted Frankie would attend only until Sean’s back was turned. He then insisted, repeatedly, that he did not count. The protest sat uneasily beside his control of the household and his request that Sean help discipline Frankie. His self-presentation as powerless did not end his authority; it made the family’s conflict harder to address, as Sean tried to prevent another attack without accepting his father’s account of himself as the injured party.

Sean went to the monastery and persuaded Brother Placid to let Frankie return with a clean slate, provided he kept it clean. Frankie was sheepish as well as defiant, but agreed to go back the next day. Francis called Sean a fool, said Frankie would come to nothing, and predicted that Sean would find him in a mental hospital on his next visit. The school arrangement bought little time: father and son remained at war, and Frankie again approached expulsion. The episode shows that Francis’s pessimism was not simply a private judgment about Frankie’s abilities; within the household, it accompanied a continuing struggle over whether Frankie could make choices beyond his father’s control.

Departure and the Father’s Judgment

Frankie eventually set out for school and instead hitchhiked to Dublin. He had already written to Rosaleen and was determined to go to London. When Monica and Margaret contacted Sean, he offered to share a Dublin flat with Frankie and send him to school there. Frankie listened, then broke down in tears and said he could not bear school or studying any longer. Sean recognized that he was too disturbed and restless to settle under his own or anyone else’s supervision. With Rosaleen ready to house him and meet him at Euston, the family took him to the boat at Dún Laoghaire. Sean spoke to the purser, who gave Frankie a small room beside his office and promised to help him make the London train at Holyhead. Rosaleen met him at Euston, and within a week Frankie had found office work.

The departure did not produce an immediate, smooth success. Frankie spent several rocky years around London before returning to night school. Francis remained sceptical about the prospect of his son returning to education and doubted that he could make a success of anything, while also expressing the hope that he was wrong. In fact, Frankie gained his GCE, passed accountancy examinations, and built a career that eventually made him Financial Controller of BBC Radio. The contrast between his father’s forecast and his later achievements gives the relationship a pointed ending: Francis’s judgment had treated Frankie’s restlessness as evidence of failure, but it could not contain the course Frankie made for himself. Their conflict is recorded through violence, estrangement, and a persistent lack of confidence, not through a final reconciliation.