the narrator’s paternal grandmother

The narrator’s paternal grandmother is a central and contradictory presence in Sean McGahern’s childhood: a family matriarch whose pride and possessiveness coexist with acts of care, while her violence leaves a lasting mark on the children around her. The memoir does not reduce her to either a villain or a protector. Instead, it returns to specific scenes in which affection, control, fear, and silence occupy the same household.

Identity and Family Setting

She had been a dressmaker and, in Sean’s recollection, stood arrow-straight in black dresses. She was a local beauty, vain and boastful, and the only child of her own parents. Her son, Francis (Frank) McGahern, likewise stood straight and was later described as proud, though the memoir distinguishes his manner from hers: he was not boastful. She repeatedly disparaged Leitrim’s poor land and its inhabitants, a habit that, the narrator observes, can hardly have helped her popularity.

Her family pride was bound up with appearance, male status, and position. Sean recalls that the McGaherns set great store by looks and maleness; they could be handsome and socially assured, but there was also a threat of violence in the family, and tact was scarce. His aunt Maggie recalled the contrast she felt at the wedding between her own people and the tall, handsome relations from Cavan. The grandmother’s boasts about her relatives thus belonged to a wider family culture of status and appearance, not merely to personal vanity.

The memoir draws a resemblance between her and Francis without claiming to know how it arose. Sean remembers both as violent and wilful, and wonders whether she had strongly influenced her son or whether their temperaments were similar from the beginning. The uncertainty matters: the family history supplies no simple account of how authority and cruelty passed between generations, only recurring behaviours that make the question difficult to settle.

Discipline and Calculated Cruelty

One of Sean’s earliest remembered encounters with her severity came when she caught him burning scraps of paper in the open grate of the small range. Fascinated by the flames, he was punished by having a finger thrust between the glowing bars. His mother protested in horror, but his grandmother dismissed the objection, insisting that there was only one way the child would learn and that he had already been half ruined. The episode makes discipline physical and immediate, while also showing the grandmother rejecting the gentler response Susan McGahern tried to offer.

Her authority could also take the form of deliberate inaction. After the arrival of the twins, Sean became intensely jealous of the attention they received. On dry days, the grandmother left Breedge McGahern and Rosaleen McGahern in their large pram on a sloping pass of clinkers between the house and the forge. She locked the brake and warned Sean to mind them when she went indoors. He learned to release it and, after checking that no one seemed to be watching, pushed the pram down the slope. It rolled off the pass and overturned; the twins were not hurt.

The danger did not go unseen. The grandmother had been watching from behind a curtain and could have protected the twins with a tap on the window or by going outside. She did neither. Sean remembers watching the pram overturn in terrified dismay, while the grandmother’s concealed observation gives the incident a second, disturbing turn: her inaction left the children exposed, and the memoir presents her as permitting the consequence to unfold rather than intervening. The scene joins his childish jealousy to a household in which an adult’s authority could operate through a cold refusal to act.

Possessiveness, Illness, and Reconciliation

The grandmother’s relationship with Sean was not simply hostile. He believes she had grown possessive of him, and suggests that this was one reason Susan took him along the lane to Lisacarn before he was old enough for school. When Sean contracted whooping cough, however, that possessiveness became separation. His grandmother shut him in her room and locked the door when she left, arguing that Susan had to go to school and that the twins and infant Margaret should not risk infection. Susan could not see him for weeks; even the Rosary was said with the door between them.

As the first wave of illness passed, Sean grew distressed that he could neither reach his mother nor have her come to him. He called to her through the locked door, while she urged him to be patient, pray, and hope that he would soon recover enough to walk the school lane with her again. The separation is presented through its concrete restriction—the closed room and the inaccessible mother—rather than through an abstract account of family feeling.

There was also a folk cure. Late one cold night, a neighbour, Tommy Quinn, brought a jennet, mule, or donkey to the back door. Sean believes the idea came from his grandmother and that the late hour was chosen so the ritual would not be observed. Wrapped in blankets, he was passed beneath the animal three times in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He remembers the frost on the hard ground and the star-filled sky, but the emotional conclusion is his return to Susan and their walk together along the lane. The grandmother’s actions therefore remain double-edged: she enforced the separation, yet was also associated with a cure after which the child was restored to his mother.

Afterward, Sean became her undisputed favourite, though he describes himself as wary and unwilling in that position. She began to boast of him as she did of her Cavan relations, saying, ‘Sean has the brains of the world and can do anything.’ Susan disliked this praise and tried to temper it. The grandmother’s favour did not erase the earlier fear; it changed the terms of their closeness without making it uncomplicated.

Hospital Visit, Death, and Family Silence

The last remembered visit to her took place in hospital. Francis gave Sean black grapes and sent him in first; the twins followed with chocolates, and his parents came later. The grandmother resented being put in what she called the poorhouse and left to die, refusing to accept that it was a hospital where she needed care. As the family prepared to leave, she tried to return the grapes and chocolates. Francis insisted they had been bought specially for her and scolded her for not making more effort to like a place where she was being cared for. This was the only time Sean saw her cry. Susan took the children into the corridor, while Francis stayed behind with his mother for a long time.

Some time later, the family added a Hail Mary for the repose of her soul to the prayers said at the end of the Rosary. Sean recalls that the prayers were recited mechanically, without the words carrying real import for the family. Her death thus enters the memoir obliquely, through the changed ritual rather than a narrated deathbed scene. The pattern echoes the earlier locked-door episode: religious observance is present, but its words do not necessarily resolve the emotional distance within the family.

A further silence surrounds her husband. She never mentioned him, and Sean never heard Francis refer to his father, despite his later insistence on the filial respect and duty sons owed their fathers. Rumours held that Francis was illegitimate and that his father had been a New York bar owner; Sean considers it more probable that the man was a small farmer or labourer who died soon after marrying the grandmother. By the time of the memoir’s reflection, this absent grandfather has nearly vanished from family memory, surviving chiefly as uncertain conjecture.

Narrative Role

The grandmother’s importance rests in the contradictions the memoir preserves rather than resolves. She is a dressmaker and a proud family historian, a caretaker who guards children from infection and an adult who burns a child’s finger, a source of praise and a figure from whom Sean remains wary. The pram incident is especially stark because her power appears not as an open command but as observation without intervention; the hospital scene, by contrast, records a rare visible vulnerability in her tears.

The retrospective account also marks the limits of what Sean can know. He cannot say whether she formed Francis’s temperament or shared it, and he is too young to decide whether she was herself a little mad. Those qualifications keep the portrait from becoming a verdict. Her remembered life is reconstructed through gestures, family habits, and silences—including the husband neither she nor her son discussed—and her presence reveals how affection and authority could become difficult to distinguish in the household.