“It might get us there if you did.”
“It’ll get us there anyhow. Yoo-hoo, Road! Yoo-hoo, Road!” he was shouting, driving very fast.
I tried to say something back but couldn’t. And in the silence a fragment of another day seemed to linger amid the sweeping wipers, and grow: the small round figure of my uncle getting out of the train away down the platform, childishly looking around, the raincoat over his arm, at the beginning of the journey — if beginning it ever had — that had brought each to where we were, in the now and the forever.
“Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo.…”
Author biography
John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and brought up in the Republic of Ireland. He trained to be a primary-school teacher before becoming a full-time writer, and later taught and travelled extensively. He lived in County Leitrim. The author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories, he was the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship, the American-Irish Award, the Prix Etrangère Ecureuil and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Amongst Women, which won both the GPA and the Irish Times Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a four-part BBC television series. His work appeared in numerous anthologies and has been translated into many languages. In 2005, his autobiography, Memoir, won the South Bank Literature Award. John McGahern died in 2006.