Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  As the librarian’s daughter I did have one priceless perk. When public library books become too battered and disgusting for rebinding or recirculation they are ‘Withdrawn From Circulation’, stamped to that effect and despatched either to fever hospitals or to the pulpers. And among those glorious, revolting heaps of ‘Withdrawn’ books – their pages interlarded with evidence of the diet of the rural reader – I was free to wander and take my pick and carry the noisome volumes home by the armful to be mine forever. (Many of them are still mine; no one ever steals them.)

  I went through one appalling crisis in relation to ‘Withdrawn’ books. At the age of eight or so I had a compulsive secret vice – crossing out the author’s name on the title page of old books and substituting my own. This could be done without fear of detection in unfrequented corners of the library; but then, in bed one ghastly evening, I suddenly realised that some of the books I had been abusing might go, not to the pulpers but to a fever hospital. If this happened both my iniquitous vandalism and my vain ambitions would be exposed to a shocked and derisive public. This hideous possibility so tormented me that I could not sleep. As my parents were listening to the late news I crept downstairs and confessed all to my mother – who remained astonishingly unperturbed. She assured me that the defacement of such books was forgivable and that no fever hospital patient was likely to report on my little weakness to the world press – which would in any case be disinclined to take the matter up. I always enjoyed the irony with which she put things in perspective; curiously enough, it never made me feel foolish.

  By the spring of 1941 most Irish working girls had emigrated to earn good money in English factories and our next five years were dominated by the comings and goings of maidservants. The best were those too young to emigrate, who usually responded well to my mother’s training; but no sooner had she imparted the rudiments of domesticity than they were clutching a ticket for Paddington and saying often tearful farewells. This relay system offered no reward for weeks of hard work. Gone were the days when my mother spent her mornings reading, or listening to concerts on the wireless, or teaching me. Now she was lifted into her bath chair after breakfast and wheeled into the kitchen to supervise the cooking and other household tasks. As a bride she had been unable to cook an egg, but in everything she was a perfectionist and her zealous study of the art of cooking had such sensational results that despite Emergency limitations I have never anywhere eaten better than I did then in my own home.

  Several of our non-treasures had to be dismissed within days for intolerable personal filthiness (there was the celebrated case of the louse on the table-napkin …) or irredeemable incompetence, or both. Some were petty thieves, others were incorrigible ‘borrowers’. One sixteen-year-old was detected by my father returning through the kitchen window from a military hop at four o’clock on a summer morning, clad only in one of my mother’s nightgowns. My father imagined her to have been sleep-walking and apologised profusely for having chanced to observe her in dishabille. My mother assessed the situation more realistically and next day patiently lectured the girl on the hazards of associating, in the small hours of the morning, with the licentious soldiery.

  As Lismore was a garrison town throughout the war our younger maids’ morals were a source of constant anxiety. Those who arrived knowing nothing of the facts of life had to be given sex instruction even before they were taught how to make coffee. And for a few this instruction came too late. These usually stayed longest; when they discovered their condition their bewildered fear was pathetic and whatever their professional defects my mother never had the heart to dismiss them.

  One eighteen-year-old precipitately gave birth under the kitchen table with me in fascinated attendance. When the drama was all over bar the afterbirth I rushed into the sitting-room exclaiming that it was just the way cows did it. Perennially unflappable, my mother said ‘How interesting’ – and now would I please take some blankets to the kitchen and wrap the baby up well before going to the Post Office to telephone for an ambulance.

  It had always been clear that Josie was weak in the head and as her parents now rejected her – an unusual reaction, amongst Irish country folk, to ‘little accidents’ – my mother felt obliged to act in loco parentis. The authorities did everything possible, and more than was ethically allowable, to force her to give up her baby; but under the influence of maternal love, she showed unexpected strength of character. When we visited her in the County Home in Dungarvan my parents were so moved by her determination to keep her child that they entered the argument with a few well-chosen remarks about the legal rights of parents. They also guaranteed to look after both mother and son until Dr White could arrange for their admission to some suitable hostel. I never forgot this example of how the uninformed and inarticulate citizens of a democracy may be bullied and confused by bureaucrats – both clerical and lay.

  Eventually Josie and son departed to a nun-run hostel and we got occasional postcards, laboriously inscribed in capital letters, telling us of George’s progress. (To my father’s disgust the child had been named in honour of the King of England.) A few years later Josie called one afternoon to introduce her husband and month-old second son – who had been born, she happily informed us, during the honeymoon. George was now a fine lad and seemed on excellent terms with his amiable stepfather. Obviously all concerned were going to live happily ever after.

  The Josie drama had provoked much comment throughout the neighbourhood, yet not even she could compete with Cattie. Cattie arrived the day after my father had been immobilised by sciatica. She looked middle-aged but claimed to be twenty-two. She was tall and gaunt and grey-haired and never removed her Wellington boots; when my mother hinted that she might find another form of footwear more comfortable indoors, she snapped enigmatically, ‘I has me notions!’ A few days later she acquired another notion and took to carrying everywhere, under her arm, a sweeping-brush. Even while bearing laden trays into my parents’ bedroom she stuck to her brush; and when my mother – speaking timidly, at this stage – suggested that she might find it more convenient occasionally to lay it aside, she snapped, ‘It’s a need!’

  That night sounds as of tap-dancing came from Cattie’s room and large quantities of plaster fell from the dining-room ceiling. Next morning, before dawn, weird rhythmic wails, as of an oriental widow keening, became increasingly audible from the direction of the kitchen. I was thrilled. Indisputably we had a fully fledged lunatic on the premises. But when we held a council of war after breakfast it disconcerted me slightly to realise that my parents took Cattie’s overnight deterioration quite seriously. The district nurse was due at ten o’clock to minister to the two invalids – my father was temporarily almost as incapacitated as my mother – and we decided to ask her to telephone Dr White.

  At that very moment a shrieking Cattie came storming up the hall and burst into my parents’ room brandishing the sweeping-brush. Her face was distorted and she was yelling – ‘I’ll fork ye! I’ll fork ye!’ By any standards she was an alarming sight. It soon transpired that she believed my parents to be two fried eggs and the brush a fork. Afterwards I saw the joke, but not then. I rushed to my mother and clung to her and she whispered – ‘Fetch the guards!’ But such crises prove the strength of the herd instinct. My mother’s order made sense, yet I could not leave that room while Cattie was darting about with contorted face poking her fork towards the two defenceless fried eggs. If murder were about to be done, let us all die together. Only when Cattie’s expression relaxed, and she began again to tap-dance and to chant quite cheerfully, did I flee onto the street and beg a passer-by to fetch the garda sergeant. Then the nurse arrived and said, ‘I told you so!’ because for days she had been warning us of our peril. Within an hour the unfortunate Cattie had been removed, under sedation, to the nearest lunatic asylum – from which she had been discharged, we then discovered, only two months previously.

  After this débâcle my mother observed dryly that our neighbours probab
ly regarded it as a ‘judgement’ on the Murphys. My parents’ attitude towards unmarried mothers was condemned by many as a scandalous condoning of immorality. Like middle-class communities everywhere, our neighbours abhorred and feared illegitimacy. And being Irish Christians, their abhorrence was compounded by the uniquely nasty odour they could detect emanating from sexual licence. A few managed to pay lip-service to Christian charity, but not one would have encouraged an unmarried mother to keep her baby. To rear one’s bastard was considered far worse than merely having it furtively and quickly giving it away for adoption; allowing the maternal instinct to take over branded one as a brazen hussy. Therefore middle-class girls never did keep their babies. I often heard my parents denouncing this vicious hypocrisy – one could feel the viciousness vibrating through the anti-Josie vituperations of some of our neighbours. Their moral code was of the primitive sort that seeks confirmation and reinforcement in the merciless punishing of delinquents. A century earlier they would have formed part of the grimly gleeful crowd around the scaffold at a public hanging.

  Josie was the cause of my historic argument with Mr Ryan – ‘the Boss’. I say historic because it was unheard of for anyone – never mind a child – to defy this formidable patriarch.

  The scene was the Ryans’ living-room. The Boss was sitting in his symbolically uncomfortable wooden armchair by the fire; I was lying on the hearthrug at his feet reading a book about (appropriately) volcanoes; Mrs Ryan was rolling a skein of knitting wool into a ball and Mark – the eldest son, home for the weekend because he was then Diocesan Inspector of Schools – was changing the batteries in the wireless.

  Suddenly the Boss began to criticise people who encouraged shameless young girls to display their wickedness in public. Immediately I got the reference though by Ryan standards no child should have known what was being discussed. Thus I was provoked to defiance both by loyalty to my parents and by compassion for Fallen Women in general and Josie in particular. Sitting upright on the hearthrug, I accused the Boss of hypocrisy. This word was a recent addition to my vocabulary and it pleased me to use it, despite what I knew must be the cataclysmic result.

  There was a shattering silence. The Boss and I stared at each other fixedly like belligerent tom-cats. Those ice-blue eyes seemed unnervingly expressionless: years later it struck me that at that moment the Boss may well have been trying not to laugh. But of course he had to fight his autocratic corner and as the argument developed I became very angry indeed. No doubt my opponent was deliberately egging me on – that would have been characteristic – and though the words exchanged have been forgotten I perfectly remember the unfamiliar adult quality of the anger that consumed me. It was unlike anything I had ever felt during my tantrums; now I was being angry on someone else’s behalf. But unfortunately I was also being outrageously and uncharacteristically impertinent – which indicates that this incident released much long-repressed hostility to certain aspects of the Ryan ethos.

  The Boss always kept by his side a heavy walking-stick which somehow had the appearance of a weapon, though it may never have been so used, and suddenly he picked this up, shook it at me and said – ‘Get out!’ Seizing my book I fled, meaning to go straight home. Neither Mrs Ryan nor Mark had taken any part in the argument, but now Mark quietly hurried after me. He laid a hand on my arm and said that he needed help in the orchard. We understood each other so well that the most important things could always be left unsaid. Without even glancing at him I knew that he had approved of my stand against the Boss – at least in principle, though he would have wished me to use more self-restraint in what I actually said.

  It was a golden October afternoon, following the first of the season’s gales. Autumn’s cosy/melancholy tang was spicing the air and the leaves were turning on the neat beech hedge, with an arch at either end, which divided garden from orchard. Under the trees the long grass was still wet, though all day the sun had shone while a romping wind chased white clouds. We collected windfalls in oval wicker clothes-baskets; when full these were carried down to the back gate and from there the ‘eaters’ would be given away to the children of the town and the ‘cookers’ to a certain clique known unambiguously as ‘the poor women’.

  We scarcely spoke as we moved about under the trees, watchful least we tread on our harvest, bent double, parting the long grass with our hands, then straightening up to remove from an apple its cargo of snails or slugs or earwigs or beetles and to decide whether or not it was still worth saving. We often spent almost silent hours together in the garden, Mark working steadily, I helping enthusiastically if the job appealed and desultorily if it didn’t.

  Towards teatime Mark suddenly said, ‘I think you must apologise to the Boss before you go home.’

  Holding a hard, dark green Bramley I looked up at my companion with a mixture of resentment and resignation. It was one of my more disagreeable traits that I usually resisted having to admit a mistake or make an apology. But Mark had a power over me unequalled by – and never to be equalled by – anyone else’s. Furiously I dug my finger-nails into the apple: they were sore for days afterwards. Then silently I followed Mark down the path and meekly I trotted into the living-room to offer my apologies to the Boss – who received them with a non-committal growl.

  As I passed through the kitchen, on my way home, Mark handed me a chunk of home-made fudge – in 1942 a rare treat.

  For my tenth birthday my parents gave me a second-hand bicycle and Pappa sent me a second-hand atlas. Already I was an enthusiastic cyclist, though I had never before owned a bicycle, and soon after my birthday I resolved to cycle to India one day. I have never forgotten the exact spot, on a steep hill near Lismore, where this decision was made. Halfway up I rather proudly looked at my legs, slowly pushing the pedals round, and the thought came – ‘If I went on doing this for long enough I could get to India.’ The simplicity of the idea enchanted me. I had been poring over my new atlas every evening travelling in fancy. Now I saw how I could travel in reality – alone, independent and needing very little money.

  This was a significant moment in my life, and not only because of the consequences in the far future. A ten-year-old’s decision to cycle to India might have seemed to many adults an amusing childish whim. But by giving me material for dreaming about something that I knew could be attained, it offered a healthier outlet for my imaginings than my usual escapist fantasies. It also gave me a purpose that was, or seemed to be, quite separate from my obsessional desire to write – which diversification of ambitions was an excellent thing. Naturally I never discussed my plan with anyone; I well knew how it would be regarded by my elders. Nor did I feel any particular urge to talk about it; it had enough substance not to need the reinforcement of conversation. Oddly, it never developed into an obsession: as I grew older months could pass without my consciously thinking of it. Cycling to India simply became part of the pattern of my future. In the same matter-of-fact way many youngsters think of the remote but inevitable day when they will graduate from university or join their father’s firm or inherit the farm.

  Clearly ten-year-olds are not interested in Hindu sculpture or Brahminical philosophy or Sanskrit literature; at that age even the Jungle Books bored me. My only personal links with India were Dr White’s nostalgic bedside tales of the North-west Frontier Province and a weirdly impressive painting by a Hindu of the mythical source of the Ganges. This extraordinary picture – a wedding present to my parents from a friend of the artist – had fascinated me (so my mother said) since I began to focus in my cradle. Yet one doubts if it had any influence on my cycling plans. I merely wished to travel far beyond Europe for travelling’s sake, and taking all geographical and political factors into consideration New Delhi seemed the most interesting Asian capital that could conveniently be approached by bicycle.

  Apart from future plans, owning a bicycle gave me freedom to roam much more widely than I had ever done before. And within a week of my birthday I had very nearly roamed into the Elysian fie
lds.

  One sunny, frosty December morning I set out to cycle to the foot of the Knockmealdown Mountains, some eight miles north of Lismore. I took a picnic, and ate it by a lively brown stream, and then thought it would be fun to climb to the top of Knockmealdown – an easy little mountain of just under 3,000 feet.