Frank the Sergeant

Frank the Sergeant is the narrator’s father: a rural police officer who carried authority from public life into the household, where his children lived under his violence and control. The memoir presents a man able to appear dutiful, charming, and devout while keeping the past at a distance and making even unpredictable violence part of a protected order. His eventual loss of power does not resolve the relationship; it leaves the narrator with both hard-won understanding and lasting uncertainty.

Background and Public Roles

Frank’s life is recalled as a succession of parts. Before becoming a police officer, he was a gifted but difficult only child, over-protected and spoiled, yet exposed to his mother’s violent corrections. The narrator suspects that Frank’s happiest role was in the Irish Republican Army, where violence was tempered by cold calculation and self-preservation. He then joined the first intake of recruits to the new Garda Force and rose quickly to become head of police in rural districts, where he was the law from his early twenties until near the time of his last letter.

His authority at work rested on a reputation for duty and careful record-keeping. On retirement, his career was described as ‘exemplary’. At the same time, having secured the hand of Susan McGahern, a teacher with a salary, he could perform the handsome, charming sergeant around the country for years, including to girls and women, while remaining a man dangerous to cross. The contrast is central to the memoir’s portrait: respectable service and social charm did not make him safe at home, and a public role could protect the private conduct that contradicted it.

Violence and the Household

At home, violence could begin without warning. The narrator recalls that blows might follow a moment of irritation or misunderstanding, with no clear cause afterwards; he suspects there was something sexual in the violence, but presents that as his own suspicion rather than a settled explanation. By the time of the decisive confrontation, the house had become dangerous for everyone. The narrator had grown stronger, knew how to use the .22 rifle, and knew where its bullets were kept. He loaded it several times in preparation, though nothing happened while it stood loaded in a corner with its safety catch freed.

One evening Frank struck him hard. The narrator remembers falling in cold rage, rising to approach his father with his hands at his sides, and laughing as the blows continued. Each time he fell, he got up again; pain and fear gave way to a strange elation. His sisters later told him how terrible it had been to watch. Frank eventually broke off and turned away, crying, ‘God, O God, O God. What did I do to deserve such a life, to get saddled with such a pack! A son that would raise a hand to his father.’ The encounter did not end the violence in the household, but it changed the balance between the two men: Frank knew that something extraordinary had happened, and the narrator had passed beyond fear of him.

The immediate aftermath remained shaped by concealment. The narrator’s face was so bruised and swollen that he could not go out for days. Frank was anxious that no one should see him in that condition and became almost solicitous; the narrator, who could have left if he wished, also accepted the concealment. To expose the beating would have meant admitting what his father had done, but also admitting to the shame of having such a father. Their silence was therefore not reconciliation: it was a shared retreat from public disclosure.

Authority, Appearance, and Dependence

Frank maintained a boundary between the violence at home and the family he wished others to see. The beatings, cries, shouts, and anger lingered in the house, but the narrator says the time when Frank could do as he wanted was finished. When a visit was expected from one of Susan’s relatives with standing, such as the priest Charlie Friel, Frank gathered the children from wherever they were working, made them wash and dress, and presented them as a happy family. The performance did not undo what happened behind the appearance; it helped keep that reality at a distance from outsiders.

The danger sometimes came close to public view. The narrator recalls Frank striking him on the head with a shovel blade at the potato pit, and beating Margaret so severely that she went into a cataleptic fit. After an earlier episode of the same kind, Frank had called Dr Vesey, who gave her an injection; when the fit recurred, he did not call the doctor. The children bathed Margaret in warm water until her limbs and circulation returned, while Frank paced silently in and out of the room. On another occasion, after Breedge crashed her bicycle into the low wall and greeted him with an unexpectedly familiar “Howya!”, Frank beat her with a spade in full view of the barracks and the road. The crash had frightened and angered him, but she had escaped it unhurt; the bruises and limping that followed came from his blows.

The narrator’s later description of Frank as an actor gives these scenes a larger pattern. Frank moved among roles—IRA member, police sergeant, husband, father, and devout Catholic—while, in the narrator’s judgment, remaining protected within them. When Susan was dying, he wrote to her rather than visiting. He prayed and fasted for her and enrolled her in Novenas of Perpetual Adoration, yet as the stern Daddy he criticized and reprimanded her on her deathbed. Religious observance and the language of care thus coexisted with an unwillingness to offer kindness or comfort to the living person.

Daddy After Retirement

When Frank lost the role of sergeant, ‘Daddy’ remained. The narrator sees this as his most permanent part, altered gradually as his powers declined and his dependence increased. With extraordinary help from Agnes McShera, Frank continued trying to draw his children back within Daddy’s orbit. His authority no longer rested in the same way on his position as the law in a rural district, but the family role remained a means of summoning them into his plans.

His proposal to move to Dublin illustrates the calculation the narrator came to recognize in his father’s actions. The narrator had first dismissed the idea; rereading Frank’s letter about an immediate need to move, he understood how serious it was and how closely it fitted Frank’s habitual thinking. A Dublin property could, from Frank’s point of view, bring the family back under one roof and turn the rent they paid to landlords into rent paid to him. The move would also take him away from a place where he was no longer protected by his sergeant’s position, where he had accumulated enemies and dislike, and from Susan’s relatives and other people he had antagonized. The narrator further considers it possible that Frank might rent rooms to lodgers and put Agnes to work running a boarding house. Those last plans remain conjecture, but the proposal itself shows the narrator’s growing recognition that Frank’s apparent unpredictability could coexist with self-protective calculation.

Death and Retrospective Judgment

News of Frank’s death brought the narrator an intensity of conflicting emotions—grief, loss, and relief—that took him by surprise. He understands the reaction as being for the years in which their lives were entangled in a relationship neither wanted as much as for the man who had died. Frank had made many demands, given little, and always needed to dominate. The narrator connects that pattern to a life from which the past had been rigorously shut out: such a life, he writes, had to be a life of darkness.

The final judgment does not pretend to solve Frank. The narrator had more knowledge and experience of him than of anyone else, yet could not claim to have fully understood him; he leaves him to God, or to whatever truth, illusion, longing for meaning, or comfort that word might represent. That uncertainty stands beside the memory of Susan’s faith as she endured Frank’s demands, and beside the narrator’s conviction that the different life she gave her children had been a hidden strength without which they might have been broken. Frank’s story therefore closes neither in forgiveness nor in simple condemnation, but in an account of domination whose consequences outlasted the roles through which he exercised it.