Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  During this spring I was being prepared for my First Confession and First Holy Communion. These ceremonies represent an initiation rite of immense solemnity. According to Roman Catholic theology, a child attains the use of reason at the age of seven and from then on is capable of committing sins, both mortal and venial. Mortal sins, which ‘kill’ the soul by depriving it of sanctifying grace – a sort of spiritual oxygen – must be confessed to a priest before God will forgive them. The seven-year-old is also considered responsible enough to take Holy Communion, even though this sacrament is believed to involve actually absorbing into one’s own body the flesh and blood of God himself. Confession and Communion go together – it is sacrilegious to receive Communion with a mortal sin on one’s soul – and the preparations for the two ceremonies are designed to make an ineradicable impression on young minds.

  The impression they made on mine seemed at the time comparatively slight though later events were to prove its force. I never doubted what I was being taught and I took the whole thing seriously enough to get ninety marks out of a hundred in the preparatory religious doctrine examination. Yet I just could not feel the emotions presented as appropriate when one is soon to receive Holy Communion. Perhaps my rationality was affronted by the doctrine of Transubstantiation – which provided my parents with one of their favourite theological bones – and as the weeks passed I became more and more aware of the inadequacies of my spirituality.

  I was also troubled by a desire to ask inconvenient questions. The atmosphere at school naturally precluded these and I hesitated to ask my mother lest such irreverent wondering might upset her. I therefore continued to speculate secretly, feeling increasingly guilty, until it seemed to me that my impulse to ask such questions could only lead to my being flung into Hell’s hottest fires to writhe in torment throughout eternity.

  Clearly the time had come to consult my mother, whatever her reactions, and on the eve of my First Confession I asked the most worrying question of all: what happened to the Sacred Host when one swallowed it? Did it continue to be God’s body? If so, was it not grossly disrespectful to subject it to the routine processes of the human digestive system? And if it did not continue to be God’s body, at what stage did it revert to being the piece of unleavened bread it was before the priest changed its nature at the Consecration of the Mass? (Not for nothing had I been exposed since birth to theological debate.) I was immensely relieved when my mother, instead of being upset by all this, looked positively pleased. But in reply to my question she only said that God, as the inventor of the human digestive system, could have no objection to being involved in its everyday workings. She added that many books, which I could study when I was older, had been written on this doctrine. Her reaction soothed my fears about hell-fire yet her actual answer did not satisfy me. I never doubted the Host’s being God and I was made deeply uneasy by the essential irreverence involved in eating him. If I lacked the kind of superstitious awe my teachers were trying to inculcate, I did not lack reverence – described by Alexander Skutch as ‘the chief of the religious emotions’. An instinctive reverence is, I believe, a part of every child’s nature. But it needs to be carefully cultivated and this is why I have never regretted my Catholic upbringing; for all its peculiarities it encouraged my natural reverence to grow into something capable of surviving without the protective netting of formal religion.

  Despite the build-up, my recollections of First Holy Communion Day are hazy. I chiefly remember acquiring an unprecedented amount of money, through sixpenny and shilling tips from the neighbours, and feeling very important and adult and conscious of having begun an entirely new phase in my life. The Roman Catholic Church is often accused of retarding the mental and moral development of its members – and so it does, in many cases. But the First Confession/First Holy Communion initiation rite, with its emphasis on the seven-year-old as a responsible person, probably hastens, at this stage, the maturing process. Or at least can hasten it, if those in charge of religious instruction are not themselves superstition-sodden autocrats.

  Being mainly dependent on my parents for such instruction, I soon became familiar with the neat logic that underpins Catholic moral theology. To change the metaphor, this system of stylised thought can be enjoyed as a sort of intellectual ballet, full of harmony, grace, disciplined energy and calculated flexibility. But it never allows for the unplanned movement, the sudden burst of individual initiative, the leap of a solitary imagination. Just as ballet is only remotely related to how people move in everyday life, so this system is only remotely related to how they think and feel. It is an heroic attempt to strengthen the weak, reassure the fearful and give form to the formless. As such, it has been of inestimable value to Europeans for almost two thousand years. But now European man is growing up, as Bonhoeffer saw not long before my First Holy Communion Day.

  Apart from its religious significance, the First Holy Communion rite in a small Irish town was, during my childhood, a provocation to rampant one-up-womanship amongst the mothers of little girls. Who would have the longest veil, the most striking wreath, the most becoming frock, the prettiest shoes and knee-socks, the smallest rosary-beads, the most lavishly illustrated prayer-book? Mothers who could never afford a square meal for their children spent absurd sums on outfits which were totally impractical since it was considered both irreverent and déclassé to wear them on social occasions. Once I heard my father muttering in his ascetic way that the clergy should condemn such inappropriate ostentation. But my mother defended it, arguing that by spending so apparently foolishly, people were expressing an awareness of the solemnity of sacramental rites – that for them extravagance was a part of worshipping. Many years later, when listening to criticisms of the lavish wedding-feasts of poor Hindus, I remembered her words. Had my father noticed the circumstance, he would certainly have deplored the fact that his daughter – attired in a Parisian outfit donated by her godfather – won this sartorial competition at a canter. But then my mother counteracted our status-improving victory by thriftily insisting on my wearing the frock ‘for best’ during that summer of 1939.

  At the beginning of June my parents were more grieved than surprised to get a letter from Switzerland announcing Anton’s ‘disappearance’. (For several years he had been an outspoken opponent of Nazism.) As my father translated the news the sun was shining brilliantly across the breakfast-table, making the pot of marmalade glow amber. Then, precisely folding up the thin sheet of writing-paper, he replaced it in its envelope and said, ‘So, by August war will have come’. He was not far out. But I cared nothing for the fate of a to me unknown German professor, or for the shadow of an unimaginable war; I mourned only the loss of Real Travel.

  A few months later, I went one morning to fetch the newspaper and learned that war had been declared. Hurrying home, I relished the sense of crisis in the atmosphere and expectantly scanned a cloudless sky for the first bombers. But when I realised that Ireland was not going to be involved I lost interest in the whole distant drama. For me, its chief effect was to intensify the boredom of grown-up conversation; I regarded literature and theology as lesser evils than military tactics. Occasionally, however, I was diverted by Hitler’s interminable monologues on the wireless. These I found irresistibly funny and I remember rolling under the dining-room table one day in an uncontrollable paroxysm of mirth. My parents, who both understood German, reacted otherwise.

  Yet for my father the war was a source of considerable inner conflict; much as he detested Nazism he was psychologically incapable of desiring a British victory. (Very likely his secret wish was that Germany and Britain should do a Kilkenny cat act.) He temporarily resolved his conflict – to my mother’s unvoiced, ironic amusement – by refusing to remember Anton and persuading himself that the evils of Nazism were a creation of British propaganda. This illusion he cherished until Anton, unrecognisable after six years in Dachau, reappeared among us to dispel it. Not indeed by his words, for he never mentioned his experiences, but by th
e brand-marks on his arms and torso and by certain personality changes which moved to pity and horror his closest friends.

  Throughout the war I myself was straightforwardly pro-Germany in a light-hearted sort of way, as one might be pro-Scotland or pro-France at a rugger match. While reading such patriotic English stories as the Biggles books I automatically transposed names in my mind, to make the British the baddies and the Germans the goodies. And this was the extent of my emotional involvement. It is rather disquieting to remember how little the war meant to an Irish family without relatives or friends in Britain. While most of the world suffered, and millions of people died, we complacently pursued our almost-normal lives. At no time were we more than mildly affected by what was known to all but shoneens as ‘the Emergency’. In most Irish minds of the period, our own mini-civil-war of the 1920s, in which some 700 died, remained The War. Eventually cigarettes were rationed, and as my father’s conscience forbade him to use the black market his temper became uncertain towards the end of each month. I can see him now, carefully saving his cigarette ends in a flat, navy-blue Player’s tin and rolling extra rations from them when threatened by nicotine starvation. It concerned me more that new books dwindled in number and became hard on the eyes when one was reading under the blankets by the light of a failing torch. Tea, sugar, butter and clothes were rationed; bread became virtually inedible and motor cars disappeared – never to be replaced, in our case, since after the war we seemed to be even poorer than before. But most important of all, to me, was the fact that parcels could no longer come from Paris.

  This restriction ended an era of acute misery. Before the war my generous French godfather had regularly sent me the current juvenile equivalent of Dior outfits and every Sunday morning I was forced into these detested garments and dragged off to Mass by my father to be exposed to the derision of the entire congregation. Those ordeals were as agonising as anything I have ever experienced. My Parisian ensembles would have been conspicuous anywhere; in Lismore I felt they made me look like a cross between a damn silly doll and a circus clown. On this one issue my mother refused to consider my point of view. Having longed for an elegant daughter to share in her own enjoyment of beautiful clothes, she had produced an uncouth little savage who only felt happy in shorts and shirts. So perhaps her insistence on making a fool of me once a week was a forgivable form of self-indulgence. Also, she may have hoped that one day I would begin to take an interest in the art of dressing, if exposed for long enough to pleasing fabrics and designs. But inevitably her determination to see me looking civilised once a week had the opposite effect. I came to hate even my normal quota of new clothes, until they had been so broken in that I was no longer aware of them – a phobia which persists to this day.

  Looking back, it seems odd that my inherent unconventionality did not allow me to accept these Sunday ordeals as distasteful but unimportant. Thirty-five years ago, in an Irish provincial town, shorts were considered immoral on small girls – so in fact my everyday wear was as conspicuous as any of my Parisian excesses. Evidently, then, my aversion to the latter was based on something more than embarrassment at seeming different. Of course I loathed looking ridiculous as I slunk to our accustomed pew near the altar-rails, but I was made equally – if not more – uncomfortable by the element of artificiality introduced into my life by these pretty clothes. They and I did not belong together and though I could not then have articulated the sentiment, they made me feel vaguely dishonest. When we heard that my godfather had been killed while fighting with the Resistance forces I was quite incapable of the correct reaction.

  That September I happily resumed my personal war with Sister Andrew. Beneath the tumultuous antagonisms which raged over the surface of our relationship, we were genuinely fond of each other. Yet we remained implacable enemies, outwardly, for another few years; and it was during this period that I invented my secret endurance tests.

  These consisted of my regularly inflicting on myself increasing degrees of pain, until I was capable of such feats as walking three miles with a sharp thorn embedded in the sole of one foot. The imagination is unequal to what my psychologist aunt might have said had she discovered this little idiosyncrasy, but she would have been mistaken had she associated it with either sexuality or childish religiosity. My sexuality was at that stage quiescent and my religious sense never prompted me to go beyond the bounds of duty. I had simply discovered, while being beaten by Sister Andrew, that it was possible to repel certain kinds of pain. This inspired me to see if the same control could be exercised over self-inflicted pain. I struck the back of my hand, harder and harder, with a short, heavy stick; I tied thin twine around my fingers and pulled it tighter and tighter; I immersed my feet in hot water which I made hotter and hotter by adding to the basin from a boiling kettle – and to my astonishment the technique I had used at school always worked. But ‘technique’ is the wrong word and I am not sure what the right one is – perhaps ‘instinct’ would be a little closer to it. The process was as follows: I applied the painful pressure, hot water or whatever, felt the consequences acutely and then somehow contrived to send a message that numbed the pain even while the pressure was being increased. For instance, if I were experimenting with my left hand I could feel this message travelling down my left arm and checking the pain near my wrist.

  I have mentioned this activity to only a few friends (one prefers to retain what small reputation one has for sanity) and though it seemed slightly peculiar to them it may well be a common juvenile hobby. At the time, it was to me merely a useful accomplishment, worth cultivating, and many hours that should have been devoted to the twelve-times-tables or the rivers of Europe were spent pain-repelling. I became so proficient that at the age of ten I could probably have earned a good wage as a circus performer. But as yet I had only tested myself through brief ordeals and when I embarked on more prolonged trials I found that my message-sending did not work in quite the same way. Instead, I had to develop an indifference to pain. This entailed practising mental detachment from bodily sensations, whereas I assume my pain-repelling to have had a physiological basis. I can still pain-repel at will; but not, significantly, if the pain is a nerve one such as lumbago or toothache.

  An amount of common-sense was used in what sounds like a lunatic campaign. I rarely did anything downright dangerous – my hot-water experiments were the most perilous – nor did I ever attempt to endure any suffering that could objectively be considered excessive. Some twenty-five years later, while observing the reactions to pain of less pampered races, I wondered if my endurance tests had been prompted by some atavistic longing to re-acquire a once universal power. They have certainly proved much more useful than the twelve-times-tables. Although the training course lasted scarcely three years I have ever since been almost wholly insensitive to what most Europeans regard as severe discomfort.

  The strangest of all my childhood memories dates from this same period, which may not be entirely a coincidence. It concerns levitation; and I am comforted to know that some quite sane people – including Richard Church – have recorded similar memories.

  What I recollect, or fancy I recollect, is standing at the head of the stairs, breathing very slowly and deeply for a few moments – and then, while holding my breath, proceeding to the foot of the stairs without touching steps, banisters or wall. Was this a recurring dream that for some reason became fixed in my mind as part of reality? My mother often read and discussed Saint Teresa of Ávila, so the concept of levitation was familiar to me and may have seemed so impressively peculiar that a realistic dream-cycle began. Another explanation, for a memory that is both wildly improbable and extremely vivid, is that one of my more extravagant fantasies became hopelessly entangled with reality. Yet neither of these explanations really satisfies me. The memory has about it a baffling matter-of-factness and coherence which seem to separate it from both dreams and daytime fantasies. I clearly recall making sure, before embarking on one of these trips, that only my mother was in t
he house, because I dreaded somebody witnessing what by any standards must have seemed outré behaviour. I also recall taking the practical precaution of keeping my right hand just above the banisters, and my left close to the wall, to save myself from falling should the system break down. And I retain a most vivid memory of the physical effort involved in this breath control – which, if it existed at all, can only have been some yogic talent that by a million to one chance I had hit on, possibly in the course of my pain-defying experiments. I have had an open mind on such subjects ever since my Tibetan friends convinced me that levitation – and other even odder phenomena – are not physically impossible. But if in fact I had acquired this curious skill, why did I so soon cease to practise it? Did I lose the knack as suddenly as I had found it? Or was I afraid? I remember being enthralled by my capacity to do something so extraordinary, but my ‘trips’ also provoked a profound uneasiness, amounting almost to guilt. It is slightly disconcerting to think that I shall never know the truth about this matter. Now, looking at small children, I often wonder what sort of private lives they lead.

  * * *

  As Wordsworth noted, the whole person is plain to be seen in the child, though unformed and unrefined. But in many cases the individual’s true nature is radically modified by the pressures of his environment and the expectations of his family. It is sad to think that a generous, frank child may become a tight-fisted, shifty businessman if the pressures and expectations are so directed. But equally, as in my own case, a selfish, stubborn, sulky child may become quite an amiable adult.

  Stubborness and sulkiness were the weapons I used against my mother as she diligently laboured to eradicate – or at least suppress – my more anti-social vices. Even now it shames me to recollect certain scenes. Myself, aged nine or thereabouts, reading one damp July afternoon in the round, thatched, earwiggy summer-house; my mother asking me to post a letter, some fifty yards down the road; my snapped reply – ‘No! I’m reading – I won’t go – I’m busy.’ Then the verbal battle and my mother’s inevitable victory and my return from the post-office to sulk for the rest of the afternoon. Why did I so often start battles which I knew very well I was certain to lose? What devil prevented me from being normally helpful about everyday domestic chores?