Lisacarn School

Lisacarn School is remembered less as a place of formal instruction than as the destination of a lane walked with the narrator’s mother, Susan McGahern. Its single room, blue globe and jam jars of wildflowers belong to a childhood scene that the adult narrator recalls with sensory precision but qualifies with uncertainty: he doubts that he learned anything there, yet remembers the walk as a source of rare, lasting peace.

Setting and Approach

When the narrator was three, he lived with Susan McGahern and his paternal grandmother in a small bungalow about a mile outside Ballinamore. Lisacarn School lay beyond the main road, hidden among trees and bushes. In wet weather, mother and child waited beneath trees at the lane’s corner for Master Foran, whose big Model-T Ford was an unusual possession for a local teacher; in good weather they walked.

The route was part of the school’s remembered setting. It passed a drinking pool for horses and gates to houses, while banks crowded with wildflowers, vetches and wild strawberries. Susan named the flowers as they went, and sometimes they stopped to pick them for jam jars. The school itself had one room: Master Foran and Susan taught facing one another, with their pupils seated back to back on long benches and a clear space between the two groups. A blue Mercator globe glowed on a windowsill; wildflowers in jam jars brightened the windows and room.

A Childhood Walk Recalled

The memoir’s account distinguishes what the narrator remembers from what he later infers. He is sure he was extraordinarily happy on the walk, but presents that happiness as a reconstruction rather than a complete record: the lanes near his later home could, in rare moments, bring the childhood lane back, and the two seemed to become one. In those moments he felt a deep security and peace, as if he could live forever. The feeling vanished as suddenly as it came, before he could fully recognize or explain it.

That remembered calm does not erase the child’s unruly presence at school. He recalls being too young and spoiled to learn much, though proud of his copybook. Older girls competed to mother him during breaks. Once, after he sat on a pismire nest on the bank, ants crawled inside his short trousers. The girls carried him, kicking and crying, into the empty schoolroom to his mother, while everyone laughed. The episode makes the school both a setting for affection and a place where childhood embarrassment was exposed to other people’s amusement.

The School in Family Memory

Lisacarn mattered to Susan as well as to her son. In a letter, she described doing her daily work there, enjoying the summer mornings and the school’s particular spell; she noted that other teachers liked it too and that Mrs Gannon still felt lonely for it. Her words give the school a life beyond the narrator’s earliest memories: it was also a workplace and a community that remained emotionally present after people had left it.

The memoir’s portrait of Lisacarn therefore rests on more than the adult narrator’s recollection. The school appears in Susan’s letter, while the narrator’s sisters, Rosaleen, Margaret, Monica and Dympna, helped read and correct the manuscript and brought two important scenes back into the light. The account acknowledges that memory is partial and sometimes recovered through other people, even as it preserves the walk’s distinctive details.

Place, Memory, and Security

The school’s strongest significance lies in the contrast between the peace attached to its lane and the instability elsewhere in the narrator’s childhood. He remembers walking with his mother among named flowers and familiar landmarks; later, during his first long stay in the barracks, he was seven, separated from her and left uncertain about where she was. Against that disruption, the lane survives as an image of closeness and safety—not an uncomplicated account of school learning, but a remembered way of being beside his mother.

In adulthood, nearby lanes could briefly recover that feeling, joining the present landscape to the lost route without, as he puts it, the usual companions of pain and loss. Lisacarn School thus remains inseparable from its approach: the walk, the flowers Susan named, and the child who went with her. Its place in the memoir is measured less by what the boy learned in the classroom than by the security that the journey and his mother’s company left behind.