Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  The Ryan family had produced several distinguished Gaelic poets and I much preferred their spontaneous ‘Irishness’ to the Murphys’ turgid and embittered nationalism. Yet this comparison was unfair; for generations no Ryan had been directly involved in Irish politics and it is less easy to avoid bitterness when you have spent some of the best years of your life in jail, being treated as a common criminal. But perhaps what really appealed to me about the Ryans’ tradition was its genuineness. They had a cultural integrity not often found, for historical reasons, in Dublin families. When my father and his brother were sent to Saint Enda’s – the school founded by Patrick Pearse – and when the family went to the Donegal Gaeltacht for their summer holidays, to learn Irish, they were searching for something the Ryans had never lost.

  In other ways, however, the Ryans’ simplicity irritated me, even at the age of six. Everything was good and bad, right and wrong, black and white; and children who suggested the possible existence of grey areas were just being impertinent. I soon learned to hold my tongue, partly because it seemed right to conform to the standards of the household and partly because The Boss shared with my mother – for very different reasons – the unusual distinction of being able to frighten me. To an extent I probably found the Ryans’ authoritarianism reassuring, but sometimes I was driven to secret tears when my rudimentary intellectual probings evoked an altogether unmerited sarcastic reprimand. To this day I remain puzzled by my emotional ‘adoption’ into this outwardly unyielding family. Clearly the Ryans liked having me about the place to soften the harshness of daily life; I was impulsively affectionate and as a family they conspicuously lacked demonstrativeness. But why did they not cultivate a child less liable to outrage their various susceptibilities and generally more tractable? Perhaps they furtively relished the stimulus of being outraged, or they may simply have enjoyed trying to raise my moral tone.

  The Ryans and my parents never fraternised; whatever they might have in common, their differences far outweighed their similarities. So the relationship stuck at meteorological comment, though for years I spent as much time in the Ryans’ house as in my own. Moving daily between two households whose attitudes, opinions and standards were often opposed might have led to some confusion had I been more pliable. But for me this tension was healthy, part of the process of learning to accept other people as they are.

  During the ’30s my parents’ only local friends were a Catholic curate, a Fianna Fail senator and the senator’s elderly widowed sister, Mrs Mansfield.

  Father Power was pompous, smug and plump; though a good deal more intelligent than Jane Austen’s Mr Collins there were prominent affinities, including a weakness for titled nobility. Few people in the parish were prepared to talk interminably about his obsession – Early Christian Ireland – so he spent many evenings in our house, often bringing a half-bottle of claret and staying to supper. His brother was a wine merchant, but he seemed to imagine that a full bottle would give an air of debauchery to the proceedings.

  I much preferred Senator Goulding because he completely ignored me. A bachelor, he was small, slight and energetic, with a calm, precise voice, a dry sense of humour and not a speck of self-importance. When in Lismore – he was often in Dublin on senatorial business – he attended Mass and received Communion every morning, and every evening he again went to church, and had there been an afternoon service he would certainly have attended that, too. He was, however, the best sort of devout Irish Catholic, not a craw-thumper but a man who tried to make politics honourable through the practical application of Christian teaching. Having served Ireland for more than half a century he died poorer than he was born.

  Mrs Mansfield was childless and had been widowed young. One got the impression that she had unaccountably married beneath her and regarded Mr Mansfield’s premature death as his one gentlemanly gesture. She lived in a rambling, three-storeyed corner house at the junction of Ferry Lane and the Main Street; and the fact that the ground floor was occupied by a pub – once the property of her late husband – was a circumstance so unfortunate that to have referred to it in her presence would have been like commenting on someone’s club-foot – or wig. She and her brother affected to despise each other and had not exchanged a word, at least publicly, within living memory. They might be observed going to church by pointedly different routes: the senator trotting briskly up the South Mall while his sister sedately paced down the Main Street, tiny, slim and erect, the tapping of her silver-mounted cane being made to sound like heralds’ trumpets through the sheer force of her personality.

  When not going to church Mrs Mansfield was invariably accompanied by San Toy, an irascible Peke with chronic asthma. San Toy once attacked a bull-terrier, in a fit of sheer spleen, and the terrier was so astonished he simply ran away. Having witnessed this scene I always deprecated Mrs Mansfield’s subsequent boastings about San Toy’s gallantry when unjustly set upon.

  Twice a week Mrs Mansfield called to drink tea with my mother and deplore the appalling inroads being made by democracy on good manners. She complained bitterly of being greeted with an ‘Hello!’ – she whispered the word as though it had four letters – by children whose parents she could remember walking in to Lismore on a fair-day with bare feet and scarcely a shirt to their backs. Those children of course knew no better; their elders had waxed too prosperous and brazen to teach them respect. But I, Dervla – she would swivel round to survey me through her lorgnette – I should know better than to run down the Main Street, endangering in my unseemly haste defenceless babies and feeble old-age pensioners. ‘A lady should never be seen to hurry, my dear.’

  ‘But she’s not quite a lady yet,’ my mother would protest mildly – avoiding my vulgarly winking eye. Then Mrs Mansfield’s expression would convey that if my mother did not act soon and drastically the necessary transmogrification was unlikely ever to take place.

  Before I was old enough to wander alone I often attended Mrs Mansfield and San Toy on their afternoon walks. For one of her apparent fragility and gentility Mrs Mansfield was a stout marcher, not at all deterred – once out of sight of the neighbours – by rough going and the accompanying indignities of climbing over fallen tree trunks or crawling under wire fences. And San Toy availed himself of these occasions to prove that he was no mere effete aristocrat. It was Mrs Mansfield who introduced me to the pleasures of strolling through old graveyards, striving to read weathered inscriptions and speculating about the fate of such as John Carney who, in 1811, at the age of fifteen, ‘loved peace but died violently’. Of the consequences of this addiction there will be more anon.

  * One of those two was Mark, of whom there will be much more anon.

  4

  One fine spring morning, when I was six and a half, my father escorted me to the local national school and my formal education began. I remember lying on the chalk-smelling floor boards of a huge, bright classroom, kicking in a tantrum and feeling tears running into my ears and noticing the chalk dust gyrating through a sunbeam. My father was standing over me looking helpless and worried and being assured by a little group of nuns that I would settle down the moment he left me.

  I had not any objection, in theory, to starting school, but the moment I entered that classroom I panicked at the prospect of being confined within alien walls until some unknown nun gave me permission to leave. At home I chose to spend hours alone every day, yet if at any moment I suddenly wanted to be with my mother she was always accessible. Here, however, I was trapped in a situation where it would be impossible to reach her no matter how desperate my need. So I screamed and kicked frantically while the other children, who had all started school at the age of four, regarded me with amused scorn, and the nuns, raising their voices above my howls, repeated firmly that I would soon settle down and tried to edge my father tactfully towards the door.

  Luckily I could not express my desolate sense of betrayal. Had my father realised that this was not just another bout of nastiness he might well have taken me home a
gain, thereby setting a disastrous precedent. As it was I did settle down surprisingly soon after his reluctant departure, having discovered that I liked the nun who was to be my teacher. She explained that if ever I needed my mother very badly I could at once be sent home in the charge of an older girl. Whereupon I discounted the possibility of ever again needing my mother very badly, either in or out of school hours, and by lunchtime being a scholar seemed a good idea.

  Yet I did not mean to profit in the accepted manner by my educational opportunities. Indeed, having learned to read at home I felt that the essential part of my education had already been completed. The world was full of books and I intended to read as many as possible before I died. What I did not intend was to waste the best years of my life – the only years of my youth – studying inexpressibly boring things like French and arithmetic. I knew by then of my parents’ plans: at ten I would be sent away to school, at eighteen I would be sent to the Sorbonne, at twenty-two or twenty-three I would return home with a degree in something or other and be welcomed as a complete, civilised human being. This programme might have fired many children with worthy ambitions, but I neither wished it to be carried out nor believed that it would be. We are born – I am convinced – with a certain basic foreknowledge about the pattern of our lives and I always regarded those parental plans as pipe-dreams.

  My teachers found me an awkward, lazy pupil and the educational methods of the day did nothing to help. Another discouragement, for a child without any linguistic ability, was the compulsory use of Irish as the language through which all subjects were taught in free primary schools – except, significantly, religious instruction. By the 1930s most Irish families had been English-speaking for generations and only a tiny minority were interested in reviving their own language. So this lunatic law was extremely unpopular. It produced millions of Irish citizens who were, as one wit sourly observed, ‘illiterate in two languages’. The situation would be paralleled in Britain if Wales reconquered England and compelled all state-school pupils to study in Welsh.

  Even as a character-forming influence, Lismore school did me very little good. My classmates, instead of forcing me into the sort of rough and tumble I needed to remove my corners, generally deferred to me and expected me to be their leader – an expectation which was disappointed, for it was not in my nature either to lead or be led. Also, most of the nuns were too lenient towards me and too openly appreciative of intellectual attainments which would not have seemed at all remarkable in another academic setting.

  Fortunately there was one exception to this, whose class I joined when I was eight. Sister Andrew was a tall twenty-year-old with a pale long face, straight black brows and eyes that seemed to give off blue forked lightning during her rages. Verbally she flayed me and physically she battered me – often across the back, with a stout wooden pointer. If it is true that corporal punishment is inflicted only by the insecure, then Sister Andrew repeatedly betrayed her own uncertainty and inexperience. We were in fact using each other at this stage: she to prove that she could control even such a resolutely self-willed and obliquely insolent child as myself, and I to prove that I could and would withstand the adult world, however painful the consequences.

  I remember sitting upright at my heavy wooden desk, with its cracked, brass-lidded inkwell and countless carved initials and the splinter under the left side of the seat on which I was wont unobtrusively to clean my finger-nails. Sister Andrew was bending over me, whitely angry, ordering me to write the letter ‘h’ in the approved manner. I knew quite well how to write a standard ‘h’ but I was determined not to do it according to the specifications; I had my own method, which I naturally preferred. And so, under Sister Andrew’s flashing gaze, I deliberately rewrote ‘h’ as I thought fit. Meanwhile the rest of the class, who always relished our duels, watched with bated breath. Several emotions simultaneously possessed me in that instant: a spiteful sense of triumph, regret that our duel could not take place in dignified seclusion instead of in the middle of a classroom, fear of the physical pain that I knew was imminent and a sharp stab of shame because I could not but recognise the futility and stupidity of my own behaviour. This was one of the occasions when the pointer left bruises on my back. Since I was able to write a perfectly legible ‘h’ it might be argued that Sister Andrew should have ignored my method of achieving it; but then it might also be argued that I did not mean my defiant originality to be ignored.

  For a year or so we were sporadically at war. Many were the afternoons when I hurried home, trembling with resentful fury, affronted, humiliated and longing for the balm of maternal sympathy. But these rages usually cooled on the way and I rarely mentioned Sister Andrew. The verbal flayings hurt me far more than the beatings, but I was shrewd enough to realise that if I repeated those criticisms verbatim my mother would simply add, ‘Hear! Hear!’ Besides, complaints about the school authorities were discouraged at home and many years passed before I discovered how much worry my bruised back had caused on one particular occasion. From the ’70s such violence looks primitive and uncouth. But in the ’30s even doting parents, themselves too sensitive to hurt a fly, did not really object to having the hell beaten out of their wicked brats by somebody else. (N.B. – for the past thirty-five years Sister Andrew and I have been very good friends.)

  An interesting aspect of childhood is the democracy of those who have not yet been trained to think or feel undemocratically. And one of the oddest functions of middle-class parents – which seems inconsistent with the civilising parental mission – is to destroy this democratic instinct for the sake of maintaining standards often of far less value to society than the attitude being sacrificed. At the age of seven or eight my classmates and I were not prepared to accept the operation of chance as a valid foundation for either superiority or inferiority complexes. The barriers built within the adult social world were unknown to us and differences in speech, manners, attitudes and interests neither embarrassed nor amused us; we simply ignored social frontier posts.

  During this period my few school friends were wild and ragged. Tommy particularly attracted me because he hated wearing shoes and in all seasons removed his footwear outside the school gate before going home. To me running barefooted symbolised the very quintessence of liberty and I soon became Tommy’s only female intimate. With his gang I raided many orchards – including our own, which was stealthily approached from an adjacent field. I had been admitted to this all-male gang by virtue of my muscle-power. If necessary I could bear any two of these ill-nourished little boys on my shoulders to assist them over an orchard wall.

  On Saturday afternoons I often went to Tommy’s home for tea. He lived with his foster-parents in a tiny cottage and we were given hunks of hot, butter-sodden bastable-cake, its crisp crust delicately flavoured with the wood-ash beneath which it had been baked, and huge chipped enamel mugs of very sweet cocoa. This soon became my favourite meal of the week and I was desolated when my mother one day announced that in future Tommy and I must take it in turns to entertain each other. Cocoa made with milk instead of water, egg and cheese and tomatoes instead of bastable-cake … I pleaded desperately, but in vain. ‘You must return Tommy’s hospitality,’ said my mother in her that’s-the-end-of-the-matter voice. ‘But you may have tea in the kitchen because Tommy might feel shy in the dining-room.’

  Gloom enveloped me at the thought of Old Brigid scrutinising our hands, vigilantly observing our table-manners and perhaps – I shuddered at the very possibility – perhaps even being brutal enough to tell Tommy not to lick his knife. As supervisor of a tea-party she seemed a poor substitute indeed for Tommy’s foster-mother, who always reminded us to wipe our filthy hands on our backsides before we sat down and made gloriously comic slurping noises as she drank her tea from her saucer. Then I hit on a brilliant compromise: Tommy and I should have tea in the attic, where adults feared to tread because of dry-rot. My mother – always ready to view a situation from my angle – approved of this idea; and since Tommy
would have nothing to do with my body-building menu we were given white bread and jam – for me a very special treat.

  At my eighth birthday party Tommy looked miserable in shiny shoes and his First Holy Communion suit, now giving at the seams. The other guests were South Mall children – in whom I had very little interest, but they always asked me to their parties – and years afterwards I heard of the repercussions of Tommy’s attendance. A few days later it was conveyed to my mother – through Mrs Mansfield – that if the Lynch boy were invited to my Christmas party the rest could be counted out. Of course my mother didn’t realise it – how could she, poor thing, stuck in a wheelchair all day? – but no one even knew who Tommy’s parents were, and he ran barefooted like a tinker, and blew his nose in the gutter, and stole from people! Stole apples, and sold them on fair days to the poor mountainy farmers’ wives!

  My mother’s reply was that she found Tommy a most attractive, spirited, intelligent little boy. Soon afterwards came Christmas and to my astonished joy I found that this year, for some mysterious reason, I was to be spared party-going and party-giving. But Tommy spent St Stephen’s Day with us; he had long since lost his shyness and graduated to the dining-room where he delighted my father by showing a lively interest in astronomy.

  The Lynches left Lismore a few months later, to my great though transient grief. And eventually Tommy, having won a series of scholarships – a more difficult feat then than now – went on to become a chemical engineer with a top job in ICI.