The Firebombing of the McGeown home is the violent rupture that drives the family from their house and into Cushla Lavery’s care. Reconstructed through Betty McGeown’s account and Cushla’s recollection, the attack is marked by the contrast between a familiar evening at home and the sudden arrival of flames, public hostility, and police scrutiny. Its consequences extend beyond the damaged house: the family must leave their neighborhood, while Tommy McGeown is taken away and accused of murdering Michael Agnew.

Setting and Threat

The attack is recalled through what Betty tells Cushla after the family has escaped. The McGeowns had been inside their home when the window broke and a bottle smashed on the hearth. Flames spread across the carpet and climbed the side of the settee, where Davy McGeown and Mandy had been sitting. The furniture and rooms that should have sheltered the family instead became the path of the fire. Betty remembers a silence before the attack and cheers afterward, placing the violence within a surrounding crowd whose reaction made the family’s danger public.

That account gives the event a domestic scale as well as a communal one. The fire reaches the children’s immediate surroundings; Seamie McGeown, already unable to move easily, has to be hauled from his chair. The family’s escape is therefore not simply a matter of getting out through a door. They must move together while accommodating Seamie’s slow steps and the children’s fear, in a moment when their home no longer offers protection.

Escape from the House

As people begin to close in, Cushla takes Davy’s hand and urges the family to leave. Betty supports Seamie on one side, with his arm over her shoulder; Mandy walks on the other, her lips moving as if in prayer. The crowd follows them, but another siren briefly draws attention away. Cushla uses that interruption to get everyone into her car. The siren does not resolve the danger; it creates just enough space for an escape.

Once Cushla starts the engine, a Royal Ulster Constabulary Land Rover pulls alongside. Officers go toward the house while another comes to her window and strikes it, demanding to know who they are and where they are going. The questioning turns their flight into an encounter with authority: the family has just fled a burning home, yet must account for itself before it can continue. After an officer takes Cushla’s name and address, he lets them go. Only when they are out of the estate does Mandy begin to weep softly.

The car carries small, concrete traces of care amid the emergency. Davy rummages in his satchel and dangles a paper bag in front of his father, explaining that he has obtained his tablets so Seamie will be able to sleep. The detail brings the family’s ordinary needs into the crisis: even during flight, Davy is attending to his father’s illness and comfort.

Shelter and the Arrest of Tommy

Gina Lavery opens the door as soon as Cushla arrives with the family. She leads them to the kitchen and begins buttering bread for sandwiches and making tea. Cushla pours orangeade for Mandy and Davy, while Seamie sits opposite them with his palms turned upward in an imploring gesture. Cushla pushes Gina’s cigarettes and lighter toward him before going to check on the tea. These practical acts make the kitchen a temporary refuge, although Betty’s account of the fire follows the family into it.

The news that Tommy has been taken adds another threat to the family’s displacement. Betty says that police came for him while she was putting out dinner, forced their way in, went upstairs, and hauled him from his room by the hair. She says they are claiming that he shot Michael, the barrister. Cushla cannot reconcile that allegation with what she knows of Tommy: she wonders how he could have killed Michael when he could not even have known him. Gina also asks why the police would think Tommy was involved. At the table, Mandy and Davy stare at the sandwiches without eating, and Cushla suggests getting everyone to bed. Their exhausted silence follows both the fire and the seizure of their brother.

Displacement and Significance

The family’s departure becomes visible as Cushla drives them through town. The narrative sets the everyday bustle—the greengrocer’s bananas, the record shop’s cardboard ABBA, a runaway trolley, and the baker placing a meringue on a pyramid—against the McGeowns’ faces pressed to the car windows, as if they were seeing these things for the last time. The ordinary landscape continues unchanged, but for the family it has become something they may have to leave behind.

Their route passes the waste ground where Seamie had been left for dead, then reaches the edge of the Catholic enclave where his brother lives. An RUC Land Rover blocks the road, and shipyard cranes rise above the rooftops. Betty helps Seamie out of the car and leads him across the pavement; he puts his wounded hand against a wall and looks around blankly. The scene carries the family from one precarious location to another rather than restoring the home they have lost. Betty thanks Cushla, Mandy murmurs goodbye, and Davy, still leaning through the gap in the car, promises to write and says he knows Cushla’s address by heart.

The firebombing thus changes the meaning of shelter: the McGeowns’ house has been made unsafe, and the family’s next refuge depends on help from outside their household. Its aftermath also binds two crises together. As the family is driven from its home, Tommy is detained in connection with Michael’s murder, an accusation Cushla finds difficult to believe. The flames destroy more than the security of one evening; they mark the beginning of a separation and uncertainty that the move to another part of the city cannot settle.