London

London is both a place of practical independence and a temporary home for John McGahern and several members of his family. He first travels there in search of work, returns to visit Rosaleen, helps Frankie reach the city, and later settles there with Annikki Laaksi. Across these episodes, London provides wages, work and family shelter, but it does not erase the pull of Ireland or resolve the question of where John belongs.

Arrival and the promise of England

In the summer of 1954, when St Patrick’s Training College closed for the break, John took a boat to England to look for work on building sites. At Holyhead he continued by train toward London, thinking of Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens, whose work he had read and studied. The arrival carried an almost sacred charge: England seemed, for a moment, like ground made significant by the writers whose books had shaped his imagination. That sense of literary expectation accompanied a practical decision to earn his own spending money.

The work he found on a building site off Commercial Road was rough but well paid. London thus began not as a settled home but as a place where physical labour could provide a measure of financial independence. On Sundays he travelled out to Leytonstone to see Rosaleen, who was training as a nurse. His first London period was organized around this pattern: construction work during the week, visits to his sister on the weekend, and the effort to remain separate from his father’s household while keeping close to family.

Rosaleen and the family connection

Rosaleen had made friends among the Irish trainee nurses and was enjoying her studies. When John asked how she had adjusted to England, she compared its relative ease with the barracks life they had known at home. Their Sunday visits made London a place of sibling intimacy as well as employment. They hired a boat on an artificial lake and talked about the empty river and Oakport, carrying memories of home into an urban leisure scene that was unlike the landscape they remembered.

Their visits also became entangled with their father’s attempts to reassert authority. He wrote to Rosaleen asking for John’s address, and she eventually passed on one of his letters. The letter complained of John’s ingratitude and claimed that, after his remarriage, the family home was more open to the children than before. John replied that he had no quarrel with his father or Agnes and wished them happiness; he explained that he had come to London to earn independent spending money and to see Rosaleen. Further letters alternated between reproach and appeals to family unity. John answered some politely but considered the matter settled. In this exchange, London is not simply an escape from home: it gives John distance from his father while becoming a new arena in which the father’s claims continue to reach him.

A destination for Frankie

London later became the destination John helped Frankie reach after his younger brother’s conflict with their father and continuing difficulties at school. John offered Frankie the possibility of living with him in Dublin and returning to education, but Frankie said he was exhausted by school and intended to go to London. Rosaleen had received his letter and could provide a room, so John and his sisters took him to the boat at Dún Laoghaire. John explained Frankie’s inexperience to the purser, who arranged a small room beside his office and promised to see him onto the London train at Holyhead. Rosaleen met Frankie at Euston; within a week he had found work in a large city office block.

The episode makes London part of the siblings’ practical support system. The city could offer Frankie a fresh start in employment and a place with Rosaleen, although John’s earlier attempt to keep him in school had not succeeded. For the journey to work, London was not a distant abstraction but a sequence of arrangements made by siblings: a letter, a boat ticket, help from the purser, a meeting at Euston and a room in Rosaleen’s home.

A shared home and working life

John returned to England with Annikki, and the couple initially stayed in the large house shared by Breedge and Rosaleen, their husbands and their daughters while looking for a place of their own. The direction of assistance had changed: after relying on his sisters in earlier years, John now turned to them for help. He found work as a supply teacher without difficulty. Rosaleen’s nursing shifts and his school timetable shaped their mornings; she might be coming home from night duty as he set out to teach. Their breakfasts gave the siblings time together, and they often left them reluctantly.

After a month, John and Annikki rented a flat in Notting Hill; later they moved to an apartment overlooking Victoria Park in Bethnal Green. London became the centre of a sustained family network. John, Rosaleen, Breedge and their brother met regularly, visited one another and sometimes went shopping in markets or for drinks. The sisters’ home was therefore more than a temporary refuge: it enabled the siblings to maintain everyday closeness while each built a life in England.

Belonging, work and writing

The couple’s London life included teaching, translation, and the social world of dinners and gatherings in London and Oxford. Annikki translated Ostrovsky’s plays and later returned to Helsinki for work with Finnish Radio; together, she and John translated a Finnish novel. John continued to go in and out of school, while his attempts to write produced sentences that did not yet develop into satisfying work. He suspected that years of work in Dublin had exhausted him and was content to wait for the desire to write to return.

Neither partner felt entirely at home in England, though in different ways. Annikki felt unable to belong there despite her fluency in English and several other languages; John felt a similar distance but was less troubled by it. Their London years included cinemas, theatres, galleries, restaurants, bars and parks, alongside teaching and family life. The city offered them a workable shared routine without settling the question of belonging. For John, the connection to Ireland remained present even in that interval of ordinary life abroad, as he continued to feel bound to the writing vocation first imagined in the landscape around Oakport.