The burning of the McGeown home

The burning of the McGeown home is the violent rupture that forces Seamie, Betty, Mandy, and Davy out of their house and into flight. A bottle smashed through a window spreads flames across the sitting room, where the children had been sitting and Seamie could not readily escape his chair. The event is shown not only as fire damage but as a sequence of threatened lives, hurried rescue, police questioning, and displacement: after the family gets away, Cushla drives them from the estate and later takes them across Belfast to the home of Seamie’s brother.

The attack and escape

The attack is first encountered in the confusion of its aftermath. A woman condemns Tommy as a murderer, and the crowd begins to close in around the family as they try to leave. Cushla takes Davy’s hand and gets the others to her car. Seamie’s steps are slow; Betty supports him with his arm over her shoulder, while Mandy walks on the other side, her lips moving as if in prayer. The detail makes the family’s vulnerability immediate: escape depends on their moving together, and Seamie’s injuries and limited mobility shape how quickly they can get away.

A second siren briefly distracts the people following them, giving Cushla the moment she needs to get the family into the car. She tells them to lock the doors. A Royal Ulster Constabulary Land Rover pulls alongside as she starts the engine. One officer goes towards the house while another bangs on Cushla’s window and asks who they are and where they are going. Cushla identifies the family as the McGeowns and explains that they have just been burned out, challenging the officer to consider whether they should remain there and watch. He takes her name and address and lets them go. The encounter records both the urgency of the escape and the way official attention falls, in that moment, on the people leaving rather than on providing them with shelter.

Betty’s account of the fire

At Gina’s house, the practical work of making a temporary welcome begins at once: Gina butters bread for sandwiches and makes tea, while Cushla pours orangeade for Mandy and Davy. Seamie sits opposite the children with his palms turned upwards. Cushla pushes Gina’s cigarettes and lighter towards him before going to check on the tea. In the kitchen, Betty recounts how the window broke and the bottle smashed on the hearth. Flames spread across the carpet and up the side of the settee, where Davy and Mandy had been sitting.

Betty’s account preserves the attack’s disturbing rhythm: silence before it, then cheers afterwards. The fire is not described as an isolated accident but as violence accompanied by a response from outside the house. Seamie has to be hauled from his chair, which has to be tipped back to get him away from the flames. His impaired mobility, already visible during the family’s escape, makes the fire’s danger especially concrete. The children’s proximity to the burning settee and the effort required to move their father show how little separates an ordinary room from catastrophe.

Tommy’s arrest and the family’s departure

The account of the fire is joined to news of Tommy’s arrest. Betty says the police came for him at teatime. When Cushla recalls the woman’s accusation as they were trying to escape, she asks what has happened to Tommy; Betty explains that he was taken and that the authorities are saying he shot the barrister. A news report identifies the accused as an eighteen-year-old charged with the murder of Michael Agnew, a prominent Belfast barrister shot dead at his home the previous week. Betty’s response is to repeat that he is only a man and begin to weep. Gina puts a hand on her shoulder and speaks quietly to her. The family’s domestic disaster is thus bound to a second crisis, though the account does not establish that Tommy’s arrest caused the attack on the house.

Cushla subsequently drives the McGeowns away from their familiar surroundings. In the town, ordinary sights pass outside the car: bananas outside a greengrocer’s, a faded ABBA display in a record-shop window, a loose supermarket trolley, and a baker placing the last meringue on a pyramid. The McGeowns look out through the glass with an intensity Cushla understands as if they were seeing these streets for the last time. The contrast between the familiar routine of the town and the family’s forced departure makes displacement legible through what they are leaving behind, rather than through an explanation of where they will go next.

The route passes a boarding school, then streets crowded with flags and bunting, and the waste ground where Seamie had previously been left for dead. Seamie does not flinch as they pass the site, but Cushla sees Betty’s despair in the rear-view mirror. They reach the edge of the Catholic enclave where Seamie’s brother lives, with a Royal Ulster Constabulary Land Rover across the road and shipyard cranes above the rooftops. Betty helps Seamie out and leads him across the pavement. He puts his wounded hand against a wall and looks about him blankly. Mandy murmurs goodbye and goes to the wall where her father is waiting; Davy remains in the car, leaning between the gap.

Consequences and significance

The family’s arrival at Seamie’s brother’s marks a practical refuge, not a restoration of home. Betty thanks Cushla, who begins to apologise, but Betty raises a hand to stop her. The exchange leaves the help acknowledged without suggesting that it can undo what has happened. The family has been removed from the house, separated from its everyday setting, and delivered to another place under the watch of a police vehicle.

The fire’s significance lies in the way its consequences continue beyond the flames. It endangers Davy and Mandy where they sit, makes the extraction of Seamie from his chair urgent, and drives the whole family into a tense passage through the city. The repeated image of looking through glass—the children’s faces at the car window, and the McGeowns watching their town recede—marks the change from inhabitants to people passing through. The burning home is therefore both a physical attack on a household and the beginning of its displacement, unfolding alongside Tommy’s arrest and the accusation surrounding Michael Agnew’s murder without collapsing those events into a single, unproven cause.