Goats

Goats are a recurring presence around the family home: animals whose movements shape the garden’s boundaries, enliven the children’s play, and briefly threaten to interrupt their father’s authority. Their place in the memoir shifts from a winter problem to a springtime source of exuberant play, then back to the hill as the household’s routines falter during Susan McGahern’s illness.

The Garden Boundary

During a hard, dry winter, the goats came down from the hill. Susan McGahern feared they would strip the bark from the good trees around the house and break into the flower garden. Pat put up an extra fence to keep them out. The enclosure made the garden look still more like a beleaguered fortress set within a bare field and a winter wilderness. The image makes the garden’s protected space visible: its boundary is not decorative but a practical defense against animals able to damage what the family has planted.

The goats were not presented as a distant feature of the countryside. Their movements required a response from the household, and the fence altered the appearance of the garden itself. The narrator’s account holds both facts together: the family protects the cultivated plot, while the goats remain part of the surrounding land. The contrast between the small fortified garden and the open winter landscape gives the animals a concrete place in the family’s domestic world.

Kids and Household Play

By spring, each goat had a pair of kids, and the animals were often close to the house. The girls played with them in the evenings. Their play became a repeated circuit around the building, with the goats and kids chasing the children as they gathered sticks or sawed wood. The goats’ presence here is not merely pastoral background; their movement sets the pace of an ordinary family evening and gives the girls a shared game outdoors.

The narrator no longer joined in. He remembers feeling that the play might not be manly enough, or that he was too busy or too important for it. The change is small but revealing: as he distances himself from the girls’ play, he remains close enough to hear their excited shrieks. The goats and kids thus mark a shifting place within the group, preserving the sound of childhood play even as the narrator begins to stand apart from it.

The Near-Charge

One evening, while Francis (Frank) McGahern was explaining something important to the family, a mother goat seemed to take him for a stranger. Accustomed to the children’s rounds around the house, she lowered her horns several times, apparently preparing to charge him from behind. The children could not warn him. They imagined that if she knocked him down, he would take the incident personally and that an investigation would follow; they could not keep straight faces at the prospect. Something else distracted the goat before she charged, and the family was spared the confrontation.

The moment turns on the gap between the father’s absorbed explanation and the goat’s independent reading of the scene. She responds to a familiar place and its usual patterns of movement, but treats the still, speaking figure as an intruder. The children’s silence makes the possibility of a charge comic and tense at once: they are alert to the goat, yet also to the seriousness with which their father might interpret an accident. The incident ends not in a collision but in distraction, leaving the threat just short of becoming real.

The Goats and a Changing Household

When good weather came in June, the goats were back on the hill. The flower garden in front of the house remained intact, but no one tended it anymore, and the smaller flowers were barely visible in the grass. The garden’s condition contrasts with its earlier defense against the goats: the enclosure still stands as a protected space, yet the loss of care—not a breach by the animals—is what now allows the flowers to disappear into the grass.

This change occurs as Susan McGahern remains ill and spends her time in bed. The narrator sometimes walks up the railway tracks to the Keegans’ house, where he finds Bridie alone and receives tea and fresh bread with jam or honey. Against that altered domestic routine, the goats’ return to the hill quietly registers a seasonal and household change. Earlier they had pressed close to the house, prompting fencing and giving the children a game; now they are once again away from it, while the little garden persists untended. Their appearances connect the practical details of keeping a home with the memoir’s attention to childhood, family life, and the fragile continuities of the rural landscape.