Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  Throughout the house we found peeling beige woodwork and wallpaper that had faded to a uniform grey-brown. Everywhere the paper was coming unstuck and in the dining-room rats had eaten through it at several points, thus demonstrating the fragility of the basic structure. Dry-rot afflicted the floor boards and some other sort of rot caused the ground-floor ceilings to snow gently if anyone walked about too vigorously overhead. This perhaps explains why I have always moved rather lightly for one of my build.

  At the end of the hall a semi-glazed door led to a narrow, dark, flagged passage with ominously bulging henna-distempered walls. Having passed a storeroom, a pantry and a larder one entered the kitchen. Here sly draughts sneaked up from damp non-foundations through gaps between ancient flags, and blatant draughts whined through the slits between rotting window frames and rattling panes. The roughly plastered walls were an evil shade of green and a temperamental coal-range stood in an alcove. A row of discoloured pewter bells hung high above the door; in our day these never responded to the relevant buttons being pushed but they emitted ghostly chimes when gales blew. A dozen iron hooks depended from the rafters – ‘The better to hang yourself on, my dear,’ observed my mother as she toured her new home. In one corner a steep ladder-stairs led through a trap-door to an attic where the servants would have slept in the Bad Old Days. An adult could stand upright only in the middle of the attic floor and this retreat soon became one of my Private Paradises.

  Behind the house were several collapsing stables and, beyond a wide cobbled yard, stood Lismore’s recently opened cinema, the property of our landlord, who lived next door. It was enormous and no one could tell us what purpose it had originally served; it may have been a series of barns whose internal walls had been demolished. Mercifully our landlord did not prosper as a film-wallah and within a few years the local doctor had built a new ‘Palladium’. Then the old cinema became another of my Private Paradises; in semi-darkness I leapt from row to row of moth-eaten red plush seats, being pursued by imaginary cannibals and collecting swarms of real fleas. These were not found tolerable by my mother, even when identified by me as rare tropical insects picked up while exploring in New Guinea.

  Beyond the cinema were our garden and orchard, half an acre of wilderness which, despite consistent neglect, provided us for many years with an abundance of loganberries, gooseberries, apples and pears. At intervals my mother would remark on the advantages of growing one’s own vegetables. Then my father would borrow some implements and might on the following Saturday be observed reclining beside a minute pile of cut brambles reading Plato’s Theaetetus or the latest Dorothy Sayers. Like myself, he lacked the urge to cultivate. Our genes have perhaps resisted change since the Age of the Gatherers.

  Although our new home was very nearly a ruin we tolerated it for the next twenty-one years. My mother must have abhorred these slum-like surroundings but she refrained, as always, from complaining about the inevitable. For a rent of ten shillings a week one couldn’t, even in Lismore in the 1930s, expect very much.

  The rent was so low not only because of the house’s dilapidation but because of the previous tenant’s suicide in the dining-room. This snag considerably influenced my destiny since it made it far harder to engage local maidservants, or to persuade those who came from a distance to remain in residence. It was not that any ghost operated – at least to our knowledge – but the neighbourhood vociferously believed that a suicide without a consequent haunting was against nature.

  As a child I always knew there was nothing to spare for non-essentials. But I was never hungry or cold so it did not occur to me to interpret this condition as poverty. Nor did I ever long for the unobtainable, with one spectacular exception – a pony of my own. And since that desire so clearly belonged to the realm of fantasy it caused me no discontent. In Dublin I enjoyed the luxury toys of my cousins – rocking-horses, tricycles, pedal motor cars and the like – yet I never asked or even wished for such things. They belonged to another sort of person who lived in another sort of world. And it was not a world I should have cared to inhabit permanently. It had no rivers, fields, woods, moors and mountains.

  When we moved to the South Mall Nora was replaced by Old Brigid, a formidable character who for the next three years – scornful of ghosts – impassively controlled the whole peculiar Murphy establishment. It cannot have been easy to contend with a disintegrating house, an invalid mistress, a chronically vague master and a nasty child. Old Brigid, however, took the lot in her slow, purposeful stride. When the foul-looking sink came adrift from the wall she said nothing to my mother but fetched the plumber, a man who normally took weeks to answer any summons but who meekly accompanied Old Brigid to the scene of the disaster. When my mother needed some attention as lunch was being prepared the attention was promptly provided but the meal was never late or ill-cooked. When my father wandered off to the Library one morning wearing his dressing-gown and slippers Old Brigid pursued him, looking reproving but resigned, and handed him his jacket and shoes halfway down the Main Street. When I staged a tantrum because I could not have everything exactly as and when I wanted it Old Brigid said, ‘Now, Miss Dervla, I’ll have no more of that nonsense – if you please!’ And the tantrum stopped.

  Despite her surface severity – or because of it? – I loved Old Brigid dearly. She always wore an ankle-length blue and white check cotton dress and a large starched white linen apron, without spot or stain. Every afternoon, while boiling the tea kettle, she also heated a ponderous iron on the hot coals, carefully placed it on its tin tray and ironed the next day’s aprons. She was small and stout, with grey hair in a neat bun and shiny red cheeks and sharp bristles on her chin. In 1936 she was sixty-five and had been fifty-three years in the service of a Tipperary family whose last representative had left her an adequate annuity; but she found idleness uncongenial. Since we paid her two pounds a month she must have regarded the Murphys as a hobby.

  Every morning Old Brigid bathed me at seven o’clock because the range idiosyncratically refused to provide hot water in the evening. Then she took me into the dark airing cupboard, which was considerably larger than the average modern bathroom, and told me fairy stories while drying me beside the gurgling, gleaming bulk of a gigantic copper boiler. I listened politely, concealing my bored disbelief. I had faith in only one fairy, Mr Dumbly-Doo, who was exactly my own height and wore silver boots and red leather breeches and a green silk shirt and a black velvet jacket and a gold brocade tricorn hat. A creation of my father – with acknowledgements to the leprechaun industry – Mr Dumbly-Doo occasionally left a mint-new penny under a certain stone beside a certain stile along a certain laneway. (I cherished these coins for their red-gold rather than for their purchasing power – though in those days that was considerable.) He did none of the exasperating things common to fairies in stories and since my father did not elaborate on his life style I was free to do so myself without feeling the victim of adult condescension.

  This wary attitude towards fairy tales was part of my unremitting struggle against grown-up power. Despite the affectionate understanding provided by my parents, in their very different ways, I tensely suspected the adult world of some sinister conspiracy to make me conform. I could not have felt more fiercely about this had my parents been models of conservatism instead of the individualists they were.

  Yet for all my rejection of the standard fairy tales I needed a fantasy escape hatch even more than most children do. So I created my own intricate world of magic animals and omnipotent teddy-bears. A family of the latter, comprising four generations, lived in the branches of my favourite tree – a superb elm, some 120 feet tall and reckoned to be more than 400 years old. Under that tree I spent countless hours, at all seasons, totally absorbed in the bears’ doings and in their dramatic personality clashes. Each one had a clearly defined character and in time they came to seem quite independent of my controlling imagination. For a few years they – and their tree – meant more to me than any human friend.

/>   That elm grew (and mercifully still grows) in the dense, dim wood which rises steeply from the Blackwater just west of Lismore Castle. The path leading down to it was an exciting tunnel through thick undergrowth. All around the other trees were old and tall, though dwarfed by its prodigious girth and height. Long before I had ever heard of pantheists, druids or sacred groves I used to stand at the foot of this elm, pressing with outstretched arms against its vastness, fingering its rough bark and looking up in reverence at the endless ramifications of its mighty branches. I was never to feel anything comparable under the influence of orthodox religious stimulants. But does it matter how we worship, if we worship?

  All this of course took place only after I had been given licence to roam alone, at the age of seven. But long before that my chief amusement was telling myself interminable convoluted stories – if ‘amusement’ is the right word. The longing to be alone with the denizens of my imagination was so intense, and the amount of time I devoted to them so abnormal, that one of my father’s sisters – a child psychologist – became seriously alarmed during a visit to Lismore.

  No doubt there was something neurotic about my elated relief as I escaped to the garden or the attic, and about the anger I felt when interrupted by the necessity to eat, or go for a walk, or learn my lessons. I often looked forward to bedtime. Lying happily taut under the blankets, with my eyes shut and my imaginative throttles wide open, I was at last safe from adult interference. I well remember the physical symptoms of excitement during those sessions: my heart hammering, my fists clenching and unclenching, my face contorted as I rapidly muttered the latest instalment, sotto voce. No wonder my aunt, who had doubtless contrived to spy on a daytime session, felt concerned.

  My mother, however, insisted that I was suffering from nothing more than a lively imagination. On principle she tended not to agree with her sister-in-law, who was very close to my father. And in this case she may have realised that my fantasy-world was a not unhealthy form of escapism. At some level I must have been aware of the domestic stresses and strains; and futile efforts to understand and adjust to them would have done me much more harm than my withdrawal into the company of golden calves, silver goats and arboreal teddy-bears.

  As I seem always to have known the facts of life I assume they were simply absorbed from my mother during that phase of obsessional questioning when everything in nature arouses a child’s curiosity. I therefore find it hard to understand the difficulties that even in this explicit age are said to surround basic sex instruction by parents. It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.

  By the age of six I was a proficient and dedicated masturbator and someone – probably Old Brigid – had infected me with an acute guilt complex about this hobby. So I consulted my mother, who said the activity in question was certainly not a matter to worry about. It was a babyish habit and quite soon I would grow out of it – just as I had grown out of wetting my bed. These remarks must have had the intended effect. Guilt evaporated and in time the ‘babyish’ habit was superseded by more cerebral sexual interests centred on scientific investigations of the male anatomy.

  I was about seven when an outraged neighbour complained to my mother that I had been seen, on the public street, removing a little boy’s shorts and examining him from every angle. All I can now remember is the colour and texture of this four-year-old’s shorts. They had been knitted from coarse burgundy-coloured wool and as he wore no underpants I pitied him, reasoning that he must feel miserably scratchy.

  The fact that this scene took place on the Main Street – ‘in broad daylight’, as our neighbour several times emphasised, unconsciously implying that had it taken place in a dark corner it would have been less culpable – the fact that this could have happened shows how well my parents had thus far protected me from Irish puritanism. But there are limits. The time had come to risk unhealthy repression and my mother told me that never again must I do such a thing because little boys are very sensitive to the cold around that area, and could get a bad chill if stripped in the open air. I was not, of course, deceived. I had got the message that the relevant area merited special treatment and indeed was, for some utterly incomprehensible reason, Taboo. This new awareness gave the physiological differences between boys and girls an extra fascination; but my investigations, from now on, were more discreet.

  Soon Providence favoured me; newcomers took the house opposite and within hours it became apparent that their eight-year-old son was a professional exhibitionist. He had perfected a variety of ingenious urinating techniques and his penis was public property. We were an ideally suited couple. He performed, I admired, and it occurred to neither of us that his penis could be put to other uses. Almost certainly he was ignorant of the mechanics of reproduction, as he was without curiosity about the female anatomy (he had five sisters). And it would no more have occurred to me to initiate an experiment than to smoke a cigarette. In my mind a clear line was drawn between the activities of grown-ups and children, and for all my defiance I was never tempted to cross this line prematurely. The world was organised in a certain way. There was a pattern and one felt no impulse to disarrange it.

  The South Mall had been skilfully planned. Looking due north from our hall door one saw, scarcely six miles away, the 2,900-foot main peak of the Knockmealdowns, its smooth blue curve rising directly above one of Ireland’s loveliest churches. A double line of stately lime trees led up to St Carthage’s Cathedral and the broad, grassy sweep between them, known as The Mall, made a safe children’s playground.

  Four doors down from us, on the same side of the wide street, was a house rather like our own – but detached and in perfect condition – which had recently been bought by a family of outsiders who seemed no better than ourselves at integration with the natives. They were, however, devoted to children and during the spring of 1937 they regularly invited me into their garden to play with an exuberant young Airedale named Bran and a sentimental black cocker spaniel named Roddy. The garden covered two acres and almost every afternoon a few members of the Ryan family were to be found working enthusiastically beside the gardener. (Here I first discovered what fun it is to watch other people digging and pruning, mowing and raking.) For a month or so I could not be induced to enter the house, possibly because I was afraid of the hypochondriacal Mr Ryan, who never ventured out before midsummer but could occasionally be glimpsed peering unsmilingly through an upstairs window. Everyone, including his wife, called him ‘The Boss’ and regarded him with an unwholesome mixture of deference, resentment, concern and scorn.

  Mr Ryan was a retired country schoolmaster, gruff, autocratic, keen-minded and at this time already in his seventies. Mrs Ryan – his second wife, much younger than himself – was gentle and placid with a subtle sense of humour. Beneath her placidity one could detect more positive qualities which if not repressed might, in the circumstances, have led to domestic disharmony. She, too, had been a schoolteacher and the eight children of their union had been brought up mainly by her unmarried sister, who never seemed in the least like a frustrated maiden aunt but had a permanent twinkle in her eye. She smoked secretly – in the summer-house, to be well out of nose-shot of the Boss – and gave me all her cigarette cards.

  Of the four Ryan sons two* were then curates, one was studying for the priesthood in Rome and the youngest was an army cadet whose buttons I loved to polish. Of the four daughters two were missionary nuns – educational pioneers in the remoter parts of Nigeria – and two lived at home. It was taken for granted that the Misses Ryan, though young, attractive and intelligent, would remain unmarried. Their ageing parents needed them and, having given five children to the Church, deserved them. They were never allowed enough freedom to be noticed by eligible men – though a father who had sired, in all, eleven children, and who could provide little financial security, might have been expected to consider both their emotional and economic needs. But in
rural Ireland forty years ago Mr Ryan’s despotism was not rare; and it was encouraged by Irish Catholicism, which has always given to involuntary celibacy the status of a virtue.