Susan secures the Aughawillan post and Corramahon home

Susan McGahern’s campaign to return to teaching and establish a home at Corramahon takes shape during her cancer treatment, when her future is uncertain and decisions about the family’s life are also contests over independence and authority. With Maggie and Pat McManus working on her behalf, she secured a permanent post at Aughawillan School rather than return to the more distant Beaghmore School. Her husband, Francis (Frank) McGahern, eventually bought the nearby house and farm, but withheld the doctor’s grim assessment from her. The move promised a home of her own choosing and a return to work; it also exposed how carefully she had to negotiate the volatile man whose consent and money could determine what happened next.

Illness and the search for a school

While Susan was in hospital, Maggie and Pat McManus began looking for a school closer to the town where they could support her. Beaghmore School, along with the bog of Cloone and Carrigallen, lay too far away. Her serious illness gave the search urgency, overcoming the relatives’ customary reluctance to press for their own needs. They had local connections, and Susan and her family were well liked. Through their efforts, she was offered a permanent position at Aughawillan School, a two-teacher school on a hill three miles from Ballinamore.

The opportunity came with the possibility of a home and farm at Corramahon, about a ten-minute walk from the school. Between the property and the school stood Garradice Halt, a small railway station with trains to Ballinamore. These details made the offer more than a change of workplace: it would give Susan a practical base near her job, with transport to town. The priest agreed to hold the teaching position until she left hospital.

The family’s efforts produced another offer as well. Soon after Aughawillan was proposed, Susan was offered her old position at Lisacarn School. She chose Aughawillan. In a letter, she greeted the second offer with the observation that it never rains but it pours, but her decision had already settled on the school closer to Corramahon and her relatives’ help. The priest’s willingness to wait meant she did not have to choose between treatment and securing the post immediately.

Work as a claim to independence

The letters exchanged between Susan and Francis (Frank) McGahern show that the question of teaching was not simply a medical one. He would have preferred her to remain at Beaghmore School, probably because it was farther from her relatives. In the surviving correspondence, her tone is generally conciliatory and submissive, but on this point she was unusually direct: she did not need a substitute at Beaghmore; Aughawillan was what concerned her now. Her clarity about the school contrasts with her caution over the house and farm.

Susan planned to teach at Aughawillan for a day as soon as she was permitted to leave hospital, thereby securing the position, then arrange for a substitute and return to the Mater Hospital in Dublin for the rest of her treatment. The arrangement allowed an ill teacher to pay the substitute from her salary and keep the difference. It offered a way to preserve both her employment and some income while she continued care. Her resolve to keep teaching hardened amid repeated worries about fees and expenses; she reassured her husband that she was limiting costs, including by taking an ordinary hospital ward.

Retirement and a move into the barracks were also raised as an alternative. Susan appeared to consider giving up teaching for a small pension and living with the children and Francis (Frank) McGahern, which might at last bring them together as a normal family. But the idea carried a cost beyond work: her education and training had been hard won, and her relatives opposed a move that would surrender her independence and place her and the children in her husband’s volatile care. The family’s proximity and support were therefore not incidental to the plan. They formed part of the practical conditions under which Susan could continue working and make a home outside the barracks.

A prognosis kept from Susan

Francis (Frank) McGahern’s concern about the purchase and Susan’s employment was bound up with his fear of financial liability. He first opposed buying the property because it meant spending money and because he suspected her family’s influence. He also saw it as an investment. He wrote to the doctor asking whether his wife should give up teaching, what her chances of recovery were, and what percentage of patients recovered when treated at the stage at which she had been operated on. He described himself as pessimistic and presented her relatives as urging him toward liabilities that might become a disaster if she did not recover.

The doctor’s reply, dated 8 December 1942, advised against giving up teaching while Susan remained in good health, and said that she would probably be happier at work. The prognosis was grave: her cancer was highly malignant, and without treatment she would not have survived beyond a year from the doctor’s first examination. After radical surgery and deep X-ray treatment, she had a 30 per cent chance of complete recovery. The doctor advised against undertaking financial liabilities in the hope of that recovery.

Francis (Frank) McGahern did not share this report, or an earlier medical report, with Susan or anyone else. He went ahead and bought Corramahon. The narrator links the purchase to the sale of his homeplace at Gowna, which was rented and sold for a price that covered most of the cost of the new house and farm. Thus the purchase proceeded in the shadow of information Susan did not possess: she was making plans around her illness and work without being told the doctor’s estimate, while her husband acted on it privately and still committed himself to the property.

The first visit to Corramahon

Susan saw the new home for the first time in September, when she was allowed out of hospital for a few days. She travelled alone by train to Dromod, where Pat McManus met her; she stayed with him and Maggie in their shop in Ballinamore. The visit was too short for her to go to the barracks. She told Francis (Frank) McGahern that she thought it would be too hard to leave once she had been there. He did not come to see her, although Cootehall was only eighteen miles away. After returning to Dublin and the hospital, she sent him a long account of her visit.

On the morning the school reopened after the summer holidays, Pat McManus drove her to Father McEntee’s house at Aughawillan. The priest welcomed her. The narrator makes clear how much practical work Maggie and Pat McManus had done: Pat insisted on giving Father McEntee five pounds, the fee Susan’s surgeon had received for her operation. Teachers were expected to pay fixed dues to priests at Christmas, Easter, and appointment; although unofficial, the payment was understood as mandatory. After signing the necessary forms, Susan joked about being late for school because of Mr McMurrough’s peculiar way of keeping time. The priest reassured her that she was early by McMurrough’s own standards. Her first morning began with children staring at her before Mr McMurrough came to greet her.

Susan taught for that day, with a substitute already arranged for the period when she would be too ill to work. When the school closed, she went to see Corramahon. The house disappointed her: a small, two-storey, slated building stood isolated in a field, already deteriorating, with a similarly built cowhouse under an asbestos roof nearby. There was no gate, garden, footpath, or street in front of the house. Its most immediate advantage was its nearness to the school. She hoped plastering and painting would make it acceptable, and took comfort in the prospect of having something the family could call its own.

A home negotiated through letters

Susan’s first account of the property combined disappointment with practical hope. She acknowledged its appearance but argued that repairs could improve it over time. Francis (Frank) McGahern, the narrator says, would have been furious at the letter and suspected that her relatives were behind her plans for improvements. Susan then wrote defensively that she was glad to have the house because otherwise the family would have had nowhere to live. What had annoyed her most was damp in the rooms, apparently caused by loose piping; she recalled that he had previously judged the property favourably and suggested that he might have changed his mind.

In the next letter, written after she had returned to treatment, the strain became plainer. Susan said she would not have repairs done without his advice, but identified the walls, windows, and outside doors as the most important work, explaining that plastering before winter might help the walls dry. Even as she offered a specific assessment of what the house needed, she undercut her own authority by telling him he would know best. The letters show not simple agreement but a careful effort to advance the improvements while avoiding a confrontation with a husband who regarded decisions as challenges if they did not appear to be his own.

The episode ends not with the house transformed, but with Susan having secured a school, begun teaching for a day, and confronted the actual condition of the home bought in her absence. Her work depended on the substitute system and continued medical care; her ability to settle at Corramahon depended on repairs and on the family support her husband distrusted. The move therefore held two truths together: it gave Susan a route back to paid work and a home near her relatives, yet every step required negotiation within a marriage shaped by suspicion, financial anxiety, and his unpredictable moods.