Athboy remembers former teacher John McGahern on Culture Night

Ten years after his death, the writer John McGahern is being remembered this week in Athboy, where he began his teaching career 60 years ago. The author of ‘Amongst Women’ and ‘That They May Face The Rising Sun’ taught in Athboy for a year from 1955.
Local townsfolk recall that he stayed in digs in Dempseys on Upper Bridge Street while he taught in O’Growney National School. The death of his mother still affected him greatly at the time, and his father had remarried the previous year.
In a commemorative booklet to mark the 50th anniversary of the school in 1999, past pupil Paddy Duffy, who went on to be a teacher himself and later advisor to the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, recalled writing an essay on greyhounds after attending a coursing meeting in Paddy Gilsenan’s field.
“When I wrote my composition the next week for my fantastic teacher, John McGahern, I wrote of owning a greyhound which was as sleek as the wind, clear-eyed as a fox, but gentle with his prey, which his master (me of course!) always let go,” recalled Duffy.
“The reason I remember the line from the composition was the lovely pencil set which McGahern gave me as one of the little prizes he used to give out on a Friday morning.”
It was in Athboy that McGahern learned how to play chess. In one particular shop in the town, the owner was an avid chess player and lads living in digs in the town would call in for a game before going home for their dinner. Dempseys, where McGahern stayed, housed various AI men, teachers and bank officials.
McGahern himself recalled in his autobiography, ‘Memoir’, published in the autumn before his death in April 2006: “In September, I got an appointment in the town of Athboy. I soon moved from there to Drogheda. Within a year, I was in Dublin.” Two of his stories, 'A Ballad' and 'Crossing the Line' are based on characters and events from his time in Athboy.
Journalist Joe Kennedy first encountered McGahern in Drogheda. He wrote: “When John McGahern was a young teacher in Athboy, some fellows in the house where he boarded used to throw their boots at the ceiling beneath his room and shout “the poet, the poet”
when they’d come in late from the pub.”
Kennedy said McGahern as a quiet, introspective chap and by all accounts didn’t seem to mind too much, being used to rural ways and the rough and tumble of young manhood.
The late Caroline Walsh from Bective, daughter of short story writer Mary Lavin, recalled McGahern visiting her mother’s mews in Lad Lane in Dublin in the 1960s.
“While my sisters Valdi and Elizabeth were old enough to be downstairs, I seemed always to have been put to bed when exciting people like Frank O’Connor, Tom McIntyre, Tom Kilroy and Nuala O’Faolain were downstairs,” Walsh, later literary editor of the Irish Times, recalled.
CMG Body: “John was the one that came upstairs to talk to me and read me Rupert Bear, conveying the impression that he was as fascinated by Rupert in his yellow trousers, red jumper and trademark scarf as I was.” She kept in touch with McGahern and his wife Madeline through letter and email until his death.
He was author of six highly acclaimed novels, and four collections of short stories and plays. His literary career took off with his second novel ‘The Dark’ which was banned in the mid-1960s and led to him being dismissed from his teaching post in Clontarf, Dublin, at the behest of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.
On Friday night, to mark Culture Night, Athboy Library presents' John McGahern agus a ceangail le Átha Buí', Tom French in conversation with Irene Duffy-Lynch, in a bilingual evening, from 7.30pm-8.30pm. The poet and librarian Tom French is the author of 'The Hummingbird of Athboy' (The John McGahern Yearbook 2010) and Irene Duffy-Lynch has recently translated McGahern’s 'Amongst Women' into Irish.