McGeown home fire and Davy’s rescue

The McGeown home fire and Davy’s rescue mark a sudden passage from communal hostility to immediate danger: Cushla enters the burning house after Davy and brings him out, while the crowd outside offers little assurance of safety. The episode places her practical care for the McGeown family against a public response that appears compromised, and gives Davy’s school satchel a small but telling place in the rescue.

The fire and the rescue

As Cushla turns into the estate, the open doors and gathering residents signal that something has happened on the McGeowns’ street. She abandons her car because the crowd blocks her way. Among those present are women who had scowled during the aftermath of Seamie’s earlier attack, the girl who had confronted Gina, and Trevor, known for his dirty rhymes. Their presence links the emergency to a neighbourhood in which the family has already been exposed to hostility; the scene does not identify who started the fire.

Betty is outside with Mandy, holding her by the sleeve and trying to pull her back. Seamie is leaning against Betty with his face turned into her shoulder. When Cushla asks where Davy is, Betty says he was there moments earlier. Cushla pushes through the crowd, sees him enter the open front door, and follows him inside. This sequence makes the rescue a response to a specific and unfolding danger, rather than a planned attempt to intervene: Davy is missing from the family group, and Cushla sees where he has gone.

The sitting room is filled with smoke and the fire has spread through its furnishings and finishes. Cushla tries to call Davy, but cannot make her voice carry. She sees him on the landing with his eyes shut; he reaches for the banister and stumbles down the stairs. Cushla catches his hand on the fourth-last step and leads him out. A fireman then pulls them away from the house, and they fall onto the lawn. The account is focused on the practical sequence—Davy’s descent, Cushla’s grip, and their removal from the building—rather than on injury or spectacle.

The family and the crowd

Davy has kept his satchel in his arms through the escape. Cushla unfolds his hands to see what he is holding, calls his action brave but foolish, and takes him back to his family. Betty clutches him as Cushla asks whether Tommy is there. The question leaves Tommy’s whereabouts unresolved in this scene. It also shifts attention from the rescue itself to the family’s immediate circumstances: the house is burning, the family is gathered outside, and Cushla is trying to establish who is safe and who is missing.

The crowd does not become a source of help. A woman calls Tommy a murderer, and the people begin to close in. Cushla’s question about where the policeman is gives the scene an unresolved final pressure: a uniformed officer is present, but his presence has not made the family secure. The fireman’s intervention gets Davy out of the house; the police officer’s role, by contrast, is described as only a pretence of clearing people away. The distinction is consequential. Emergency services act on the fire, while the public threat around the family remains.

A compromised response

Cushla notices that the fire engine arrived quickly, and recalls having heard that the fire brigade was sometimes called before a blaze began, supposedly to prevent a house from being wasted by burning it completely. This is presented as a rumour she has heard, not as proof about this fire or its perpetrators. The distinction leaves the cause unconfirmed while showing how little confidence she has in the ordinary account of public protection.

The police have arrived too. One officer makes a half-hearted gesture at dispersing the crowd, but he knows some of its members and most remain where they are. The scene does not establish that the officer helped start the fire or deliberately permitted the crowd’s behaviour. It does show the limits of his intervention as Cushla experiences them: the people remain close, hostility is voiced openly, and she has to ask where he is as the crowd presses in. The rescue therefore ends without a corresponding resolution of the danger outside.

Place in the wider narrative

The fire takes place within the book’s broader record of political crisis and local intimidation, but the evidence does not make it a direct consequence of any particular political event. Earlier news footage moves from riots and a march on Stormont to an exploding parked car, ending with Mary Peters holding her Olympic medal. In a later recollection, Cushla watches coverage of the strike’s anniversary, the collapse of the power-sharing government, and Dublin streets marked by bomb damage. These public images establish a world saturated by violence and political upheaval; they do not explain who set the McGeown house alight.

Other remembered encounters likewise show the insecure social landscape without supplying a cause for this blaze. During the strike, Leslie brings milk to Gina and Cushla, while Gina questions whether his gesture is kindness or a demonstration of power. On another occasion, masked men stop Cushla and Gina on the way to the cemetery, and Gina recognizes Fidel among them. Such episodes make it possible to read the fire within a pattern of uncertainty about protection, motives, and community loyalties, while keeping the specific event’s cause open.

The rescue’s lasting significance is carried forward by Cushla’s continued search for Davy. When she meets him again in 2015, he is a middle-aged man, not the small boy she had imagined; she tells him she looked for him, and the narrative recalls her searching classrooms and telephone directories and replaying Tommy’s funeral footage for a glimpse of him. That later reunion does not settle the fire’s origins, but it gives the rescue a longer human consequence: Davy’s safety in the burning house is followed by years in which Cushla cannot find him, until their paths meet again.