Physical punishment and authority

In John McGahern’s memoir, corporal punishment is one of the everyday instruments through which authority is made physical. Canes, hazel switches, an electric flex, a father’s uniform, and the threat of school discipline belong to different institutions, but together they reveal a social order in which children have little recourse and adults’ power is rarely questioned. The narrative moves from the classroom to the home, church, and police barracks to show that violence is not confined to one unusually cruel individual: it is licensed by institutions and reinforced by the expectation that those beneath authority should submit.

School Discipline and the Child’s Body

At Augharan School, Mrs McCann kept bright yellow bamboo canes in a press. When they splintered, she cut ash, sally, and hazel from the hedges and used them throughout the day, punishing oral and written mistakes, inattention, and even the slightest indiscipline. The worst beatings took place in the corridor, away from the classroom. The variety of offences and the ready replacement of broken canes make punishment seem less like an exceptional response than a routine technique for governing pupils’ bodies and conduct.

John had probably not been beaten more than the other children, but he was unused to it. After the gentleness of Susan McGahern, the school’s violence felt to him like a descent into hell. He tried fiercely to leave Augharan School and go with his mother and the twins to Beaghmore School, but his efforts failed. His father, Francis (Frank) McGahern, supported the decision that kept him there. The contrast between his mother’s protection and his father’s endorsement of the arrangement makes the child’s lack of control part of the punishment: there was no effective appeal from either the school’s discipline or the parental decision that placed him within it.

The memoir resists treating Mrs McCann as a singular monster. John doubts that she was unusually violent for her time, and recalls men of his own age describing hands so black and swollen after school that they could not hold tools in the evening. They remembered blows across legs, arms, and shoulders, and the misery of setting out for school. By placing his own experience beside theirs, the narrative shifts attention from one teacher’s temperament to a tolerated practice whose cruelty could be absorbed into ordinary memory.

Violence Across School, Church, and Home

The school at Cootehall offered a contrast, but not an escape from physical discipline. Mrs Finan and Mrs Mullaney were severe teachers, and Mrs Finan used her fist; pupils learned to dread the rings on her fingers. Neither was as violent as Mrs McCann, yet the comparison establishes a spectrum of accepted force rather than a clean division between abusive and humane schooling. At the same school, older boys who had locked the schoolmaster in a cloakroom were caned by the women teachers. The schoolmaster then appealed to the guards to restore order. Francis, contemptuous of what he saw as weakness, cut an ash plant from the riverbank and sent it to him with ironic instructions for its use. The gesture makes the father’s own commitment to force visible even when he is not wielding the rod himself.

Religious authority could be still more imposing. After a boy broke into the poor box in Ballinamore, Canon Reilly extracted a confession and offered him the choice of going to the guards or being punished by the priest. The boy chose the beating. Canon Reilly opened his brown suitcase, removed a length of electric flex, and beat the child in the schoolroom while holding him with one arm. As the boy tried to sink to the floor and escape the wire cutting into his bare legs, the assembled pupils watched. When the beating ended, the crying, bleeding child returned to his bench; the priest put the flex away and lectured the school on the example they had witnessed. Punishment thus served not only to hurt one child but also to instruct everyone watching in the reach of clerical power.

The parish’s catechism requirement extended that power beyond school hours. In the Kilmore Diocese, teachers had to conduct catechism classes after Second Mass on Sundays, though enforcement depended on the priest. Children in and around Aughawillan knew to avoid Second Mass in Ballinamore: Canon Reilly stood at the church gates and delivered children to class by the ear, accepting neither arguments nor excuses. He had closed gaps around the church, making it difficult to pass without encountering him. The episode places bodily coercion at the boundary between religious observance and education, where a child’s attempt to avoid a class could itself become grounds for force.

At home, the same structure of unchecked authority took another form. After Susan was gone, the children were exposed to Francis’s scoldings, sudden rages, and beatings. His letters accused Susan of turning the children against him, while John’s account reverses the charge: Francis’s own conduct was driving them away. The children could be drawn toward him when he was charming, but he could not sustain the closeness he had solicited. Corporal punishment in this setting did not establish lasting obedience or intimacy; it helped produce distance and fear.

One remembered incident makes that violence sharply visible. Margaret, then about three and already the most wilful of the girls, ran from the house while Francis pursued her in full uniform. Susan stood in his way, but he was too enraged to stop and sent Margaret spinning into the rhubarb bed. The child caught herself among the stalks; Francis caught her before she reached the lavatory, lifted her, and shook her violently. She was too paralysed to kick or cry out. He eventually put her down without further chastisement. The stillness of the hot day, the open doors, and the family gathered near Susan frame a violent eruption within ordinary domestic space. Susan’s attempt to interpose herself offers a moment of protection, but not a lasting barrier against her husband’s force.

Normalization, Resistance, and the Limits of Law

John’s reflection on school beating connects physical discipline to a broader hierarchy. Once violence is licensed, he argues, it can become monstrous while scarcely being noticed. Parents might complain to a school or priest, or threaten legal action, but doing so was rare. Authority was understood to descend from God the Father and therefore seemed beyond question; violence was common in homes as well as schools. The memoir also associates this order with a sexual ethic that cast the body as unclean and sinful, permitted only within official limits. It does not claim that every teacher consciously acted from this doctrine: John specifically doubts that Mrs McCann was concerned with such theological dualism as she wielded her canes and switches. The force of the connection lies instead in the surrounding culture, which could subordinate the body while legitimizing the authorities that disciplined it.

The possibility of state intervention appears, but remains weak. The family lived in or beside the barracks, which always had a guard on duty, and the guards were subordinate to Francis. Several times, three guards approached him as a deputation, warning that if the cries and beatings continued they would have to report him or take action. Each warning brought a pause; the violence later resumed, and he was never reported. Their presence did not translate into sustained protection. The episode exposes a gap between having an institution nearby and being able to use it against someone who commands authority within it.

That gap recurs in school life. The Cootehall schoolmaster’s appeal to the guards earned Francis’s contempt rather than confidence that police could resolve disorder. More broadly, John remembers that the family’s association with the barracks offered only paper-thin protection in a society where law was regarded as alien, feared, and avoided. In the schoolroom, the church, and the household, other forms of authority could act more immediately than formal law, and their sanctions were enforced on children’s bodies.

Memory and the Meaning of Discipline

The memoir’s scenes distinguish physical severity from its consequences without reducing either to a simple lesson. John’s failed attempt to leave Augharan School, the classmates watching the poor-box beating, and Margaret’s inability to cry out each register a different form of helplessness. The details—the broken and replaced canes, the flex returned to Canon Reilly’s suitcase, the rings on Mrs Finan’s fist, the rhubarb stalks that helped Margaret regain her footing—make coercion concrete and recurrent. They also show how a punishment can become a public demonstration, a school routine, or a domestic outburst while retaining its power to frighten.

Retrospective narration widens the frame beyond the child’s immediate suffering. John sets personal memories beside other pupils’ recollections, teacher hierarchies, Sunday catechism rules, household violence, and the guards’ ineffective warnings. In doing so, the account treats corporal punishment as both an act committed by particular adults and a practice enabled by a wider distribution of authority. Its central consequence is not that violence reliably produces discipline, but that children learn how few places they can turn when those who teach, govern, or care for them are also the people permitted to hurt them.