Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  I was now at an age when most juvenile bookworms have voluntarily turned towards Dickens and the Brontës, but my literary tastes remained woefully undeveloped: William and Biggles were being betrayed only for the sake of Lord Peter or Sherlock Holmes. Nor was this, as might be expected, a reaction against parental expectations. No pressure was ever directly put on me to read the ‘right’ books; even my rather idealising father had to recognise that mentally I was slower than average and that pressure could only be counter-productive. But meanwhile my mother continued to tutor me in her own unorthodox way. By the time I was ten she had aroused my interest in many of the great writers, musicians and painters – as people. She had a gift for discussing their characters as though she were gossiping about the neighbours and years before I approached their work I had strong views about them as individuals. To some extent this must have subsequently influenced my literary judgements. It may be no coincidence that I have never greatly cared for the works of Richardson, Balzac or Dickens – none of whom I could warm to, as men – while I became passionately addicted to Fielding, Shelley, George Eliot and Wilde, all of whom I had admired and loved from early childhood. On the other hand, though I found Sterne, Meredith and Ruskin personally unsympathetic, Tristram Shandy and The Egoist remain to this day among my favourite novels and for years I had an irrational reverence for every word written by Ruskin on any subject; there can be few of my generation who had read the entire Collected Works from cover to cover by the age of twenty. (I cannot even remember now why I became so addicted to him.) As for Dr Johnson – Boswell’s Life was my mother’s other bible, and the doctor with his Mrs Thrale and his Hodge, and all his oddities and kindnesses and pomposities and aggressions and profundities, seemed almost to belong to our own household.

  My mother’s immersion in the lives of the great was obviously a form of escapism from the narrowness and dullness of Lismore’s social circle. Unlike my father and myself – both essentially of recluse material – she enjoyed the art of conversation and must have felt acutely her lack of congenial company. Her other great consolation was music, but that did not provide the stimulus of such psychological puzzles as ‘Why did Ruskin marry?’ or ‘Was Tolstoy technically a sadist?’ or ‘Is T. S. Eliot jealous of Hardy or just too limited to appreciate him?’ Yet it is probably true that music was her greatest, as it proved to be her most enduring, consolation.

  My own awakening to music was an experience only comparable to first falling in love. From the age of a few hours, as the reader may remember, I had been exposed to music. Yet for eleven years it remained to me no more than a noise – neither pleasant nor unpleasant but so important to my parents that it must never be interrupted unless the house itself was demonstrably on fire. (I had once spoken during a wireless concert, to announce that a chimney was on fire, and had curtly been told not to mention such trivia until the interval.)

  Then came that unforgettable moment. It was on a stormy January evening and from my bedroom window I was gazing at a flaring sunset of crimson and gold and purple and orange. As I watched my mother began to sing in the room below – something she was apt to do at any moment for no apparent reason. But on this evening an unfamiliar excitement possessed me. My heart began to race and I felt as though I had moved into another world – a world where the human spirit enjoyed a freedom I had never before been able to imagine, a world of infinite mystery and yet of infinite clarity and simplicity. That my musical awakening should have come through my mother’s voice rather than through the gramophone or the wireless was scarcely a coincidence.

  My first appearance in print came a few months later. Mark had drawn my attention to a children’s essay competition in a weekly provincial paper. Prizes of seven-and-sixpence, five shillings and half-a-crown were being offered for the three best essays submitted weekly. Competitors must be under sixteen and were free to choose their own subject. I had at once protested that I could not possibly win. ‘Rubbish!’ said Mark. ‘Go home and try.’ So I wrote five hundred words on ‘Picking Blackberries’, in prose as purple as blackberry juice.

  The Cork Weekly Examiner came out on Fridays and I counted the days and then at last was standing in the newsagent’s shop unfolding the paper with trembling hands. Looking down the pages I felt the nausea of suspense and could scarcely focus. Then I found the competition corner. My heart leaped like a salmon at a weir. The unbelievable had to be believed; Dervla Murphy had won first prize (aged twelve). And to crown her glory the other winners were aged fourteen and fifteen.

  I moved out of the shop and stood on the Main Street, dazed with triumph, reading myself in print. Then, sickeningly, disappointment came. Three words and the structure of a sentence should have been changed before I posted my entry. It might have won first prize, but it was feeble – very feeble. Even had those changes been made, it would have been only mediocre. I resolved to forget ‘Picking Blackberries’ and do something better. I had yet to learn that one never writes anything of which one does not feel ashamed on seeing it in print.

  But of course ‘Picking Blackberries’ could not be forgotten just like that. However mediocre, it was in print and had earned me seven shillings and sixpence, the largest amount of money I had ever acquired in one day – even more than the price of a new Arthur Ransome, because my father could get books at trade rates. Eager to share my victory with my parents, I pedalled quickly up the morbidly named Gallows’ Hill to the County Library.

  Not until I sat down to write this chapter did I see the significance of that action. The newsagent’s shop was equidistant from our house and the Library, and I might have been expected to hurry home to tell my mother first – she with whom I habitually discussed my literary endeavours. Given the seriousness of my approach to writing, this tiny achievement was to me of enormous importance. And my impulsively choosing to share it first with my father must, I think, be interpreted as a salute to our special closeness – if not actually as an indirect gesture of atonement.

  My parents were suitably impressed by my breaking out in print, but when I went on to win this competition five weeks running they became uneasy. Finally my father decreed that I must compete no more. I saw the point and reluctantly agreed to retire – but not before using the situation as a lever to raise my pocket-money from three to four (old) pence a week.

  As a precaution against what Mark called ‘swollen-headery’ my mother reminded me that despite having taken the Cork Weekly Examiner literary world by storm my apprenticeship was going to be a long one. She need not have worried. I was well able to assess for myself the quality of my rivals’ work.

  9

  The year 1944 was marked by some strange experiences. These I have already described elsewhere,* but their significance was such that they cannot be omitted from any account of my childhood.

  One harsh, dark March afternoon a squealing hinge made me look through the kitchen window. A young man was entering the cobbled yard from the abandoned cinema, which meant that he had climbed our eight-foot garden wall. Yet I felt not at all alarmed, possibly because I was never prone to be made uneasy by the unconventional. Or it may simply have been because the young man looked so amiable and vulnerable. As he stood at the back door I noticed that he seemed rather apprehensive and very tired. He was tall, broad-shouldered and handsome, and I marked a Kerry brogue when he gave his name as Pat Carney and asked, diffidently, if he might see one or both of my parents.

  In the living-room my mother’s bath chair was close to the sulky wartime fire of wet turf. She seemed oddly unsurprised by our visitor’s original approach route and my curiosity was further sharpened when she asked me to leave her alone with Pat. Ten minutes later Pat was back in the kitchen. He said that he had been invited to stay for a few days and that my mother would like to speak to me. Then, pausing inside the living-room door, I did begin to feel alarmed. Never before had I seen my mother looking so distraught. Mrs Mansfield and San Toy were coming to tea so there was no time to waste on euphemisms.
In a couple of sentences I had been told that Pat was on the run, wanted for the murder of a Dublin detective-sergeant. He had come to us as a protégé of my father’s elder sister who, never having recognised the validity of the post-Treaty Irish government, was an active member of the illegal IRA. On no account must any caller be allowed to see our guest or any trace of his presence. As I continued to stand by the door, paralysed with astonishment, my mother made a gallant preliminary bid to sort out the ethics of the situation. ‘This young man is a criminal though he regards himself as a patriot. No doubt his elders are chiefly to blame. They are using his muddled, foolish idealism. But we can talk about it later. Now please show him his room and give him a meal.’

  I walked down the hall in a joyous daze. This was the stuff of which fantasies are made, yet now it had become part of the reality of my own life. I was to prepare a meal for a man on the run who would be hanged if caught. My mother might have saved her breath. Of course Pat was not a criminal, or muddled or foolish. He was a most glorious patriot, heroically dedicated to the reunification of Ireland. No one had ever suggested that my grandfather and father were criminals because they belonged to the Old IRA. One had to be logical. I was badly jolted when I discovered how strongly my father disapproved of Pat. But then I reflected that he (my father) was very old (forty-three). And I made allowances for the fact that at that age some people just can’t have the right reactions any more.

  Listening to my parents, I gathered that for some days they had been half-expecting Pat without knowing exactly why he was on the run. Now they were disagreeing vigorously about how they should deal with him and it gave me a certain sardonic satisfaction to observe them both being inconsistent; at twelve, one likes the feet of clay to appear occasionally. My father should have been the one to welcome – or at least tolerate – Pat, while my mother (given her ancestry) should have been the one to reject him. Instead, my father coldly argued that it would be sinful to shelter someone who had deliberately killed an innocent man in the course of a seditious campaign against a lawfully established government. And my mother warmly argued that it was unthinkable, sinful or no, to betray someone whose coming to our home was an act of faith in our humanity. She insisted that allowances must be made for Pat’s sick idealism. To which my father, sprung from generations of rebels, replied austerely that it would prove impossible to govern the state if hectic emotionalism were to be accepted as an excuse for murder. My mother then suggested that he should go at once to the gardai barracks and report on Pat’s whereabouts. But he didn’t.

  My parents seem never to have debated the ethics of capital punishment; presumably they accepted it, in theory, as the appropriate penalty for murder. Yet had it not been employed in Ireland during the Forties, as part of the government’s anti-IRA campaign, they might well have refused to succour Pat. When such a decision can lead directly to a death sentence it requires more moral courage, or moral arrogance, than either of my parents possessed.

  From their point of view an awkward situation was being compounded by the need to impress on me that giving refuge to Pat did not mean condoning his crime. In the end they gave up pretending to unravel this tangled skein for my benefit, which was sensible of them since I well knew that they were incapable of unravelling it for their own. I had in any case already come to my own conclusions and was only listening to their dutiful dissertations out of politeness. Yet I vaguely sympathised with their discomfiture; though they repudiated Pat as a violent man their consciences compelled them to allow for the fact that he saw himself as a soldier fighting a just war – a dilemma that in present-day Northern Ireland has again become familiar to many.

  Pat stayed with us for a fortnight, but he and I never referred directly to his peculiar status and he made no attempt to influence me politically. We played round after round of rummy and he gave me lessons in map-reading and taught me how to whistle through my fingers so piercingly that I can be heard two miles away. To me this marvellous companion seemed a magic sort of person, an intelligent grown-up who had retained all the wondering enthusiasms of childhood. And my intuition was right. It was Pat’s tragedy that he had never outgrown either the innocence or the ruthlessness of youth.

  My parents also became very fond of Pat and deeply concerned about him. Night after night they argued patiently in futile attempts to make him see the error of his ways. Soon he seemed a member of the family – quite an achievement, in view of the strains imposed on all the adults concerned by his presence in the house. Had he been detected under our roof, my father would not have perjured himself by denying any knowledge of his identity and so would certainly have been imprisoned – as his sister was soon to be, on Pat’s account.

  Our guest was careful never to go too near a window and any knock at the door sent him rushing upstairs. Remembering how I relished all this melodrama, I wonder now if I fully understood that we were truly dicing with death. But my light-hearted approach may well have helped by easing the tension generated between the three adults. Pat knew that I took the game seriously enough to keep all the rules, and I was made deliriously proud by his entrusting to me the addressing and posting of his letters. One morning I went into his room to leave fresh linen on the bed and saw an automatic by the pillow. For years this was to rank as the most thrilling moment in my life. I tingled all over at the romance of that weapon – symbol of Adventure! – gleaming black and lethal on the white sheet. It never occurred to me that in certain circumstances it could be used to kill the local gardai, the fathers of my playmates. But then it was impossible to associate the gentle, considerate Pat with any form of violence or cruelty.

  One evening Pat said goodbye instead of good-night and when we got up next morning he was gone. We heard nothing of him for several months, but his luck did not hold. He was eventually captured in my aunt’s house, while asleep, and tried in Dublin before the Military Tribunal. Then he was hanged by the neck until he died, at eight o’clock in the morning on December 1, 1944. His real name was Charles Kerins.

  In Waterford city, where I was by then at school, December 1, 1944, was a morning of violent wind and slashing rain. Just before eight o’clock I was queuing for my breakfast. I knew of Pat’s attitude towards his sentence and at the moment of his hanging, when the gong in the hall was signalling us to enter the refectory, I experienced an almost hysterical elation. Then, curiously enough, I ate my usual hearty meal. It was against the nationalist tradition in my blood to mourn such deaths, for that would have been to imply that the sacrifice was not worth while.

  Our mail was distributed during the mid-morning break and two worlds met when I stood amongst my classmates and – while they chattered of hockey and drank their milk – read a letter from a friend who had been hanged three hours earlier. With his letter Pat had enclosed a silver ring made on the prison ship in Belfast by a comrade of his, ‘Rocky’ Burns, who was later shot dead in Belfast by the RUC – or perhaps the B specials. I wore the ring constantly from that moment until my fingers and my ideals outgrew it – developments which conveniently occurred at about the same time. But I have it still and I would not part with it.

  A few days later I had a letter from the aunt in whose house Pat had been arrested. She wrote:

  My dearest Dervla,

  There is no need to tell you that Charlie Kerins met his death with the greatest possible courage and bravery. I was allowed to visit him on Wednesday and Thursday last and he gave me courage, too. I am more than sorry that you could not have seen him – he was so proud and happy to die for Ireland that one could not feel depressed – sad indeed – heartbroken – but not depressed.

  I spoke to the priest who heard his confession and he told me that it was a privilege to meet him and that he had no doubt whatever he had gone straight to Heaven. He offered his life with Our Lord for all the people of Ireland. He had no bitterness against his enemies. For the week before his execution he heard Mass and received Holy Communion every morning. On the very morning he was h
anged he sang two songs for the wardens, ‘Kevin Barry’ and ‘Kelly the Boy from Killane’. As one of the warders said, ‘he was the only happy man in the prison’ during the terrible week before he was hanged. The following is a copy of his last letter written to me.

  Mountjoy Jail

  December 1st 1944

  6.30 a.m.

  ‘Dear Dr.,

  ‘In case I haven’t left a souvenir to some person I should have, please explain that the number at my disposal were limited.

  ‘I haven’t time to say much but I’m sure there’s no necessity. All I ask is that the ideals and principles for which I’m about to die will be kept alive until the Irish Republic is finally enthroned. This I feel sure will be accomplished before very long despite all the labours of traitors and hypocrits as right will prevail.

  ‘Thank everyone who has done anything on my behalf, goodbye and good luck in the future.

  Charlie.’

  Ireland has another martyr and we must all feel proud to have known him and to have been his friends. I’m sure he doesn’t need our prayers but I will ask you to pray for your sorrowful

  Aunt Kathleen.

  At this stage I realised that Pappa, too, had been closely involved with Charlie and held more extreme political views than I had ever suspected. By 1944 he no longer agreed with my father that the twenty-six county government of the Irish Free State (since 1937 known as Eire) was legitimate and should be whole-heartedly supported. To him, then, de Valera was a traitor who had thrown in the sponge before the thirty-two counties had been freed from British rule, and he considered it his duty as a patriot and an honourable man to oppose the Dublin government. But he had never preached sedition to me, no doubt because to have done so would have been to risk confusing my young mind and dividing my loyalties between father and grandfather.