Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  What sort of person would I now be had I grown up a typical Dubliner, regarding the countryside as something to be enjoyed in literature and avoided in life? But I simply cannot imagine myself as an urban animal. To me, city-dwellers are The Dispossessed, unfortunates who have been deprived of every creature’s right to territory. There is a sense in which country folk, however impoverished, own their birthplace and all the land around it that can be covered in a long day’s tramp – the natural, immemorial limit to the territory of a human being. Or perhaps it is that each region owns its people, exacting a special, subtle loyalty, a primitive devotion that antedates by tens of thousands of years the more contrived emotion of nationalism. Either way, there exists an element of belonging such as surely cannot be replaced or imitated by any relationship, however intense, between the city-dweller and his man-made surroundings.

  2

  During the first year of my life the steep climb up to Ballinaspic was among my mother’s favourite walks. (‘Sure the creature must be mad entirely to be pushin’ a pram up there!’) Yet by November 1932 she could push me no further than the Main Street. Suddenly she had been attacked again by that rheumatoid arthritis which had first threatened her at the age of twenty. By my first birthday she could no longer walk without the aid of a stick and by my second she could no longer walk at all. On the 29th of that December she was twenty-six.

  There was of course no cure. But doctors in various countries were doggedly experimenting and, escorted by her favourite brother, my mother went to England, Italy and Czechoslovakia for six months, pretending to hope yet sure, inwardly, that she would never walk again. She spent the whole of 1934 either abroad or in Dublin, leaving me to be looked after by Nora under the vague supervision of my father. In theory this abrupt and inexplicable disappearance of an adored mother, when I was at the crucial age of two years, should have damaged me for life. Perhaps it has, but I am never troubled by the scars. I was by nature adaptable, my routine was unbroken, Nora was devoted and sensible and my father was attentive in his didactic way. (A family legend, possibly apocryphal but very revealing, tells of his bewildered grief when I failed, at the age of two and a half, to assimilate the rules governing the solar system.)

  In December 1934 my mother returned to Lismore as a complete cripple, unable even to walk from the sitting-room to the downstairs lavatory, or to wash or dress herself, or to brush her hair. Between them, my father and the steadfast Nora cared for her and for me.

  Now there were major money worries. My mother’s search for a cure had cost a great deal and my father was heavily in debt to numerous relatives. Both my parents found this deeply humiliating, innocent though they were of any imprudence or extravagance. My father was almost panic-stricken and it was my mother who calmly took up the challenge. Probably a practical crisis, and the discovery of her own unsuspected ability to manage money, helped her at this stage. She soon began to enjoy pound-stretching; I still have some of the little account books in which she neatly entered every penny spent on food, fuel, clothes, rent and so on. My father then happily returned to his natural money-ignoring state and for the rest of their married life my mother held the purse-strings.

  By this time my parents had realised that they could have no more children, which for devout Roman Catholics meant resigning themselves to an unnaturally restricted marriage. In our sex-centred world, this may seem like the setting for a life-long nightmare. Having been thoroughly addled by popular pseudo-Freudian theories about libidos, repressions and fixations, we tend to forget that human beings are not animals. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the ending of their sexual relationship imposed no strain on my parents, but they certainly found it a lighter burden than we might think. Religious beliefs strong enough to make sexual taboos seem acceptable, as ‘God’s will’, do not have to be merely negative; faith of that quality can generate the fortitude necessary for the contented observance of such taboos. Restrictions of personal liberty are destructive if accepted only through superstitious fear, but to both my parents the obeying of God’s laws, as interpreted by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, was part of a rich and vigorous spiritual life. This area of their experience – I felt later on – put them in a mental and emotional world remote from my own, where they were equipped with an altogether different set of strengths and weaknesses.

  Not long before her death, my mother told me that after getting into bed on their wedding night neither of my parents had known quite what to do next. So they went to sleep. In the 1970s it is hard to believe that two healthy, intelligent human beings, who were very much in love, could have devoted their wedding night exclusively to sleep. But perhaps they were not exceptional among their breed and generation. My mother had been curtly informed by her mother – who had brone seven children and endured countless miscarriages – that sexual intercourse was at all times painful and distasteful. And my father would certainly have considered any investigation of the subject, even in theory, to be grossly improper before marriage.

  Sex apart, an inability to have more children was agonising for someone as intensely maternal as my mother. It also put me, at once, in danger. All the emotion and interest that should have been shared among half-a-dozen became mine only. By the time I was five most people considered me a peculiarly nasty child and mistook the reason why. In fact my mother was such a strict disciplinarian that throughout childhood and adolescence I remained healthily afraid of arousing her anger. But what she could not avoid – my being the sole object of her maternal concern – was the encouragement of a ruthless egotism. However, this trait was no doubt useful at the time as insulation against the adult suffering around me. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote, ‘Perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.’ My mother – reading Bowen’s Court – once drew my attention to that remark. She did not comment on it, but I have since wondered if she meant it to comfort me. During childhood, I never stopped to sympathise with my parents’ situation. Indeed, only when I became a mother myself did I appreciate how my own mother must have felt when she found herself unable to pick me up and hug me, and brush my hair, and tuck me up in bed.

  After my parents’ deaths I came upon the letters they had written to each other, almost daily, during their six-month engagement. On the whole these might have been written by any happy young couple to whom marriage promised nothing but fulfilment. My father hoped to found a model county library service and write novels; with my mother to inspire him he felt certain these must be masterpieces. For relaxation he looked forward to some deep-sea fishing and an expanding record collection. My mother hoped to have six children at two-year intervals (three of each, if possible, though she conceded this might be difficult to arrange) and to use them – one gathered, reading between the lines – as guinea-pigs on which to test her various theories about physical and mental health. She also hoped to find time to study in depth, under my father’s guidance, the early schisms within the Christian Church – a subject of ineffable tedium to which she remained addicted all her life. She felt, too, that in her role as county librarian’s wife she should initiate a Literary Debating Society (she had not yet visited the town) and perhaps a Music Society. For relaxation she looked forward to walking tours in West Cork and Kerry, presumably on her own while my father deep-sea fished and their systematically increasing offspring were being looked after by some capable Treasure. This correspondence had just one surprising feature. Neither of my penniless parents ever mentioned money, or promotion, or buying a house or a motor car, or in any way planning financially for the future. Both seemed to assume that they would spend the rest of their lives in Lismore – my father wrote ecstatic descriptions of the surrounding countryside – and judging by these letters they were utterly without material ambition.

  The few personal memories I retain from my first five years are mostly painful. Our house – or half-house – was separated from the road by a six-foot stone wall, sprouting
valerian. When attempting to pick a bouquet for my mother at the age of three I fell and broke my nose. A few months later, driving with my father in the library van, I broke it again when he had to brake suddenly because of wandering cattle. I also remember being excited by the exotic springtime glory of the giant rhododendron tree which overshadowed our unkempt lawn. (I have seen none finer in Europe outside Kew, yet it was felled in 1972 because it took up too much space …) Behind the house were a small yard, a large garden and an enormous orchard securely enclosed by ten-foot stone walls. Here my movements were unrestricted and my chief companion was Billy, a rotund black pony who grazed the orchard, gave me rides and pulled us around the countryside in a trap. (At this stage we had no dog; my mother’s beloved Kevin had been stolen a few weeks after my birth.)

  In the spring of 1935 it was decided that for character forming purposes I needed ‘young friends’. My mother therefore arranged various juvenile social occasions and my most vivid memory from this period is a feeling of fury when other children disrupted the elaborate fantasy-world I had created in the orchard.

  For my fourth birthday party cousins and an imposing cake were imported from Dublin. But at three o’clock, when the local guests began to assemble, I was missing. Nora quickly traced me to a derelict shed, overgrown with briars, at the end of the garden. My detested beribboned party dress of salmon-pink silk – I can see it still – was torn and streaked with green mould stains, and my back, in every sense, was to the wall. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ fumed Nora. ‘Stuck out here all mucked up with that gorgeous dress rooned an’ your visitors waitin’ inside an’ even your blood relations down from Dublin!’

  My reply was to become a clan slogan. ‘I don’t want any bloody relations,’ I replied succinctly. ‘I’m staying here.’

  Nora, it seems, was familiar with this impasse. Compromising desperately, she assured me that if I consented to grace the party with my presence I need not wear ‘party clothes’; whereupon I meekly trotted indoors. One changes very little. I still dislike ‘party clothes’.

  In March 1936 our obese landlady died and my mother and I moved to Dublin for six months while my father was house-hunting. I stayed in turn with my mother and maternal grandmother and with my father’s parents.

  My mother’s mother was known as Jeff to her face, for some entirely obscure reason, and as The Battle-axe behind her back for reasons not at all obscure. She was an exceedingly disagreeable women who spoiled me methodically by way of tormenting my mother. As I was not allowed sweets she offered me sweets at every hour of the day and night and was piqued when I spat them out because they felt and tasted unfamiliar. As my normal bedtime was six o’clock she reorganised the household to prevent my getting to bed before eight o’clock. As comics were frowned upon, lest they might impair my tender literary taste-buds (a paternal directive, this), she bought me a daily comic. And so it went on, a spiteful campaign in which I was the unwitting weapon and her daughter the helpless victim.

  My mother dealt with the situation by telling me, ‘Different people have different views. While we are staying here we must respect your grandmother’s views.’ Thus she evaded direct condemnation while making it clear that on our return home the usual disciplines would be reimposed. For a parent who values consistency there is nothing more provoking than the deliberate undermining of a child’s régime. Yet my mother’s self-control never cracked. No doubt this restraint further incensed Jeff, who enjoyed nothing more than a good fish-wifely brawl.

  Much as I relished Jeff’s spoiling I was never quite at ease in that semi-detached red-brick Victorian house. My mother’s parents had lived in it all their troubled married life and it had bad vibes. Family opinion blamed Jeff for the fact that her husband – handsome, charming and warm-hearted – was an alcoholic; but this may have been unfair. She can have done nothing to help him control his drinking, but it is doubtful if even the happiest marriage could have saved him from the bottle.

  There was an amount of instability in my grandfather’s background. His own father – the son of a senior civil servant at Dublin Castle – had fallen in love with the kitchenmaid, got a chamber pot thrown at his head when the betrothal was announced and soon after emigrated to America with his unacceptable bride and the statutory shilling. Three years and three children later the young couple returned to Dublin, my great-grandfather having found the American way of life insufficiently civilised. For the rest of his life he practised civilisation by drinking too much port and collecting coins while his wife – an energetic and courageous woman – ran an Academy for (very) Young Ladies. As she had been illiterate on her wedding day her husband perhaps deserves some credit for having taken the trouble to teach her how to read and write. Mercifully, Providence spared her any more children after the return to Dublin.

  At the age of fourteen my grandfather had to find a job and with wild illogic his father objected to his working as a messenger-boy for a firm of silk importers. It was perfectly in order for a wife to work eighteen hours a day to support an idle husband, but for a son and heir to run errands – no! Unthinkable! This son and heir, however, did not intend to run errands for long. On his twenty-first birthday, after a two-year training course in Lyons, he was made assistant-manager of the Dublin branch of his firm. And three years later he was managing-director – a good catch, then, for my unendowed grandmother.

  The trouble on her side was religion. Her mother, the daughter of a Scots Presbyterian cotton magnate, had come to Dublin on a holiday, fallen in love with a dashing Roman Catholic cabinet-maker – presumably when he was working in her host’s house as they would scarcely have been moving in the same social circle – and urged him to emigrate to Edinburgh. This he devotedly did and a clandestine courtship ended with an elopement – in a snowstorm, it is said, but I suspect this of being a period embellishment.

  My great-grandmother’s dowry would have been substantial had she married suitably and no doubt adequate had she married a cabinet-maker of her own faith. As it was, the statutory shilling again had to suffice though she did not herself become a Catholic. Sadly, her disinterested love was ill-rewarded; at the age of thirty-four she was left a widow with seven young children. When she despairingly contacted her family they offered financial help on condition that her four Catholic sons be brought up as Presbyterians. She herself must have been a convinced Presbyterian or she would have adopted her beloved husband’s faith. But on their wedding day they had agreed, as was then the custom, to bring up their sons as Catholics and their daughters as Presbyterians. She therefore declined her family’s offer of help and set up as a sempstress to provide for her children.

  Despite their aura of smelling-salts, Victorian women were a gallant lot – often widowed young, never helped by the state, without formal training yet indomitably resourceful when obliged to support innumerable children. In this case three boys and a girl died young of the tuberculosis that had killed their father. But my great-grandmother survived into her eighties and was affectionately remembered by my mother as a tall, thin, gracious old lady with an ineradicable Scottish accent. Regularly on Sunday afternoons she read the bible to her restive Catholic grandchildren before providing lavish teas at which they could eat their fill of home-made shortbread and oatcakes and honey.

  My mother and her siblings were not often allowed to eat their fill. Even when my grandfather was earning £3,000 a year – which in those far days meant affluence – my grandmother obsessively rationed the children’s food. Avaricious and covetous by nature, she could not forgive her own mother for having put honour before wealth. (I have always uncharitably suspected her of becoming a Catholic simply to spite my loyally Presbyterian great-grandmother.) And her sadistic withholding of plentiful food from hungry children was probably a way of taking her revenge on her husband for his generosity (admittedly not always prudent) towards less well-off friends and relatives.

  Jeff had a tight-lipped aversion to gaiety and pleasure, however innoce
nt. As a very small child I became aware of her total lack of humour though I could not then have defined what so often made me uncomfortable in her presence. I also became aware of the animosity she felt towards my mother, which possibly explains an odd little incident which occurred in the autumn of 1936.

  Jeff wore a wig, having been afflicted by total baldness as a girl, and though it was a most superior wig it did not deceive me. Sitting on her lap one afternoon I looked into the garden and saw her black Persian cat – strangely named Zog, after the King of Albania – stalking a bird under an apple tree. Then suddenly I knew that I was about to be very wicked. I remember thinking that there should be a choice – surely I need not be wicked – yet the compulsion to hurt Jeff was so overwhelming that it seemed to leave no choice. I turned and touched the wig and observed, ‘That’s not real hair.’ And as I spoke I was so appalled by my cruelty that I began to shake all over.

  Both my parents were present, sitting side by side in the background, and at once I glanced towards them. Yes, they had heard. My father looked grieved and my mother wrathful as she murmured something in his ear. Obediently he stood up, carried me out to the hall, reprimanded me sorrowfully and smacked me once very gently on the bottom. This was my first and last domestic experience of corporal punishment – if that is the right term for a chastisement that was virtually indistinguishable from a caress.