For my father the decision involved just as much hardship, of a different sort. In addition to his normal day’s work in the library, he had to care for a complete invalid, shop on the way home, make do with a hurried snack at lunchtime (he had a vast appetite despite his slim build), cook the supper, do the washing-up and then translate demanding tomes until one or two o’clock in the morning.
All this I knew – or would have known had I stopped to think about it – yet throughout that long, cold, Christmas term of 1945 I cannot remember worrying even slightly about my parents. They wrote regularly and cheerfully and I, seeing no reason why they should not martyr themselves for my benefit, continued to enjoy life immensely.
Some of our relatives, viewing the situation from Dublin, thought it odd that my parents received no neighbourly help. They would have expected Mrs A. to run in at eleven o’clock with a cup of coffee, while Mrs B. did the shopping and Mrs C. ran in at four o’clock with a cup of tea, and Mrs D. prepared the vegetables for supper and Mrs E. perhaps took away my father’s socks to wash and darn them. However, I perfectly understood why none of this happened. My parents had never tried very hard to integrate with the local community, simply because the futility of such efforts became apparent to them soon after their arrival in Lismore. They were friendly towards everybody, but in a politely distant way that did not encourage offers of neighbourly help. Both had the sort of pride with which I completely sympathised. Doubtless some people felt that no one with any sort of pride could live amidst the squalor that prevailed chez Murphy while my father was in charge. But my parents valued independence far more than comfort, convenience or ‘respectability’. Having made the decision to send me back to school, they alone would deal with the consequences. Even Miss Knowles, to whom we were all devoted, and who was eager to help, was allowed to do so only in emergencies because it was not the proper function of a Jubilee nurse to care regularly for middle class patients.
Christmas came again. I was now fourteen, physically fully grown and totally self-centred. The home I returned to was in chaos, but I went to no great trouble to remedy this and for the first time my mother and I clashed seriously, as two strong-willed women. She considered it my duty to sort things out, I considered it my entitlement to spend the greater part of the school holidays doing as I pleased. A few hostility pervaded the atmosphere and deeply distressed my father, who looked ten years older after his three-month ordeal. But still it was never suggested that I should remain at home.
Eily appeared on New Year’s Eve. An elderly woman, she had worked for years as housekeeper to a couple who were about to leave Lismore. She agreed to ‘do for us’ six days a week and even volunteered to pack my school trunk and see to my mending. But my mother grimly – and quite rightly – declared that Miss Dervla would be packing her own trunk and seeing to her own mending.
From the first, I thought Eily too good to last – and she was. Having been accustomed to comparatively luxurious working conditions, her health (or morale) broke down after a few weeks with the Murphys. By the beginning of February my parents were again on their own and even I felt shocked by my father’s appearance at the start of the Easter holidays.
I knew then, with certainty, that I would never go back to school. The knowledge was deep down; it had not yet reached a level of consciousness at which I could examine it and decide how I felt about it. But it prepared me for our family conference on Good Friday evening.
My mother had an orderly mind and on occasions like this could give an impression of coldness as she suppressed her feelings to leave the way clear for logical argument. There were, she said, only three possible courses. We could struggle on as we were; we could accept the fact that I must remain formally uneducated; or she and I could rent Uncle Bob’s basement flat at Orwell Park, leaving my father to live alone in Lismore. Some reliable help would surely be available in Dublin and I could attend my mother’s old school in Stephen’s Green as a day pupil.
We had just finished supper and I saw my father’s hand shaking as he lifted his coffee cup to his lips. I stared at a new rat-hole in the wallpaper and wished the conference would end. There was too much tension in the air that I only imperfectly understood and in a muddled way I felt guilty for being the cause of it. At least, this is what I then imagined the source of my guilt to be. More likely it was based on a realisation that I had been brutally insensitive to my parents’ ordeal during the past seven months and had ill-repaid their altruism by idling away my time in Waterford. It suddenly occurred to me that if I were to return to school the June examinations would reveal the extent of my ingratitude. But this was not my main reason for declaring immediately and emphatically that I was in favour of staying at home.
Both my parents looked surprised and my father’s face seemed grey with unhappiness. Then my mother said firmly that while it seemed right for me to make the final decision I should do so only after careful thought. In due course she was to be severely criticised, especially by my father’s family, for having put such a burden on a fourteen-year-old. But she knew me as none of her critics did. Had I been forced to accept the Dublin plan against my better judgement, much destructive turmoil might have followed. Besides, it was my future that was to be most profoundly and permanently affected and ever since I could toddle I had been insisting on the right to self-determination. My mother’s shifting of the responsibility may have been partly inspired by moral cowardice, but it went with the grain of my wood.
‘Go off on your own and think about it,’ said my mother. So I went for a long walk, through the mild spring dusk, though there was really nothing to think about. Or rather, there was a great deal to think about but nothing to be decided. I saw my decision as having been ordained by Fate, so that in fact it was no decision but merely an unavoidable reaction to a given set of circumstances. That Good Friday evening I became sharply aware, for the first time, that – ‘As flies to wanton boys, we are to the gods’. But this awareness was not yet tinged with any alarm or resentment.
I have never been easily moved by physical deprivation and pain, yet even as a child I shrank from mental or emotional suffering. Thus, though I had given no thought to the hardships recently endured by my parents, I could not for an instant consider inflicting on them the grief of separation from each other. Even had I longed to move to Dublin, I doubt if I would have hesitated; in this situation, I saw no scope for conflict. But of course I did not long to move to Dublin. Nor did I long to return to school, which considerably surprised myself. It had been good while it lasted and I would miss it: but not too much. Possibly I knew that I had drawn from the experience all it could give me and that the next few years would offer no more than unimportant variations on a theme.
It never occurred to me to speculate about the effects of this decision on myself at the age of eighteen, or twenty-five, or thirty. If I could have foreseen myself after the passing of another fourteen years, I would probably have refused to believe in the truth of my vision. Perhaps few fourteen-year-olds look far ahead, and even now, at forty-six, I feel foolish and futile if I try to do so. The present is enough. Attempts to control the future seem needlessly to limit its possibilities. If this view were general, anarchy would overtake the world. But one hopes there is room for a minority of non-planners.
That evening my immediate future, if far from ideal, looked quite tolerable. I would have ample time to read and write and cycle and swim. I would see Mark regularly – and he meant more to me than any number of school friends. Unlike most of my contemporaries, I had no interest in parties, clothes, films, dances, pop-stars (if such then existed) or boyfriends. In many ways, God had indeed fitted the back for the burden, in my case as well as my father’s.
I returned from that walk at ten o’clock, an hour past my usual bedtime, and announced that my original impulsive decision remained unchanged. I asserted again that, however favourable the domestic conditions, I would never have had either the ability or the will to distinguish mys
elf as a scholar. And then my mother again dutifully went into details about the disadvantageous long-term implications of not at least having my Leaving Certificate, should the day ever come when I needed to earn my own living. But I knew that she was rejoicing in her heart and I hardly listened.
My father’s feelings concerned me much more. I believed that he, too, welcomed my decision; but in the course of explaining it I had ruthlessly demolished his cherished dreams for my academic future. To me those dreams had always seemed absurd, yet suddenly I found them the more touching for that. During the past year he had proved how much they meant to him, how doggedly he was prepared to struggle to make them come true. But throughout that conference I was too constrained by the awkward adolescent barriers between my parents and myself, and too embarrassed by the emotional cross-currents in the atmosphere, to be anything other than belligerent and gruff. As usual, the very keenness of my appreciation of my father’s feelings prevented me from allowing my sympathy even to be glimpsed. Harshly, I told myself that his present disappointment was nothing to do with me, that if anyone should be blamed it was he himself for ever having allowed a possibility to play the part of a certainty in his life.
My mother was no dreamer and had always tried to hold her husband’s dreams in check, even if (or perhaps because) she recognised them for what they surely were – a reaching out towards compensation for a tragically imperfect marriage. Had they come true she would have been as pleased as he. But she argued that one should never have specific ambitions for any child before its potentialities can be gauged. As both my parents were reasonably intelligent, my father was justified in hoping for the best – but not, according to my mother’s view, in staking his happiness on my success as a scholar. By the date of our conference my mother had probably accepted the obvious fact that I was not a budding intellectual and the even more obvious fact that whatever I did with my life I was unlikely to follow an established route. She was also helped to resign herself to the situation by her old-fashioned views on women and education; she saw no reason why the average woman should not become sufficiently cultivated and informed without ever going near a university. She had never been greatly impressed by blue-stockings: to her there was no virtue in being unable to scramble an egg or patch a shirt, even if one could read Russian novelists in the original and discern Tantric influences on the Gnostics.
Lying in bed that evening, too tired to go at once to sleep, I knew as certainly as if he had told me that for my father one dream was already being replaced by another. From now on he would look forward to seeing me succeed as a writer. There had to be a dream. And it comforted me that this was one we shared.
Many years were to pass before I perceived the real conflict inherent in that Good Friday situation. It should have been apparent at the time, but perhaps I dodged it, unconsciously/deliberately, because any attempt to cope with it would have torn me asunder.
How had my father really felt? Had he wholeheartedly welcomed my decision, as I then believed? Or would part of him have preferred me to choose schooling in Dublin, even at the cost of my mother and he being separated for years? Quite likely he himself did not know the answer to that question. And it never even crossed my mind. To me my parents were a unit and their mutual love and interdependence seemed sacred, something to which one instinctively – almost compulsively – made sacrifices. It would have been psychologically impossible for me to desecrate that love by wondering if my father just might half-wish to put his daughter’s welfare before his wife’s. Moreover, I would not have wished either of my parents to put me first; this would have forged between us the sort of bond I dreaded – a bond woven of obligation that might never honourably be broken. As it was, my adolescent urge to detach from them was uninhibited by any feeling that either needed me on more than the practical level. Outwardly I was tied to them, inwardly I was far freer than if my formal education had been continued because to one or both I was the most important person in the world.
A cataclysmic row, between my mother and my father’s family, followed on that momentous occasion. This devastated my father, who was devoted to his family but felt bound to oppose them in defence of his wife. They, of course, were acting for the best, reckoning that my father needed support against an autocratic woman who had always been too strong for him and was now proposing to blight an innocent child’s life to suit herself. This dramatic misinterpretation camouflaged certain complex truths that were not to become apparent to me for many years. At fourteen, I only saw my mother – whom I still adored, from behind the adolescent barriers – being unjustly attacked by people who disregarded all that she had recently gone through for my sake, misunderstood the intricacies of our family scene and had no knowledge of my personal inclinations. So I entered the arena armed with the armour of righteousness and attacked my affectionate, caring relatives in long, smug, stupid letters which my mother would never have allowed me to post had she read them.
As a result of our tribal warfare I never saw Pappa again. He and I had not quarrelled, but we were prevented from meeting by the animosity that persisted for years between the Dublin and Lismore Murphys. However, this sad and unnecessary ending to a lifetime (on my part) of love had one good effect. It taught me that quarrelling – with anybody about anything – is hideously wasteful. Argument, controversy and disagreement can be productive. But quarrelling in a bitter, negative, unforgiving way is a miserable admission of one’s failure to cope with other people’s viewpoints – and with oneself.
Mercifully the tie between Pappa and myself had in any case been gradually loosening. Essentially this was a childhood relationship and as I emerged from childhood Pappa’s magic waned. By the time I went away to school he had ceased to be a central figure in my life though my affection for him never lessened. His death, at the end of December 1947, was my first experience of bereavement and it shattered me. The whole town mourned with us and many were the expressions of dismay because none of us was able to attend the funeral. On Christmas Eve my father had been immobilised by another attack of sciatica and I was looking after two invalids. This circumstance may have been a kindly gesture on Fate’s part. My father, who had met none of his family since May 1946, would have been anguished by that reunion. He had no stomach for quarrels and only loyalty to his wife could ever have involved him in one.
Several years later I discovered that Mark, too, had opposed my parents at this time. He attached no great importance to formal schooling (for me) but felt that our domestic affairs could and should be arranged to suit my future as much as anyone else’s. Also, he foresaw how hopelessly I could become trapped in the domestic cage once my mother – whose health was slowly but inexorably deteriorating – grew accustomed to my style of nursing.
On that Easter Monday Mark confronted my parents, while I was out cycling, and criticised them bluntly. For such a man to interfere in another family’s affairs required enormous courage – generated, in this case, by powerful feelings of foreboding on my behalf. As I have already mentioned, there had never been any casual come-and-go between the Ryans and my parents, and Mark’s occasional visits to our home had been very brief. This particular visit was still briefer. My parents – rigidly polite – at once made it clear that they were unprepared to discuss their plans for my future with anyone, however well disposed. ‘I came away with two fleas in each ear,’ Mark recalled cheerfully, ten years later. He never again met my mother, and when he and my father chanced to pass in the street they acknowledged each other’s existence with a formality as pointed and cold as an icicle. However, this apparently uncomfortable situation suited me perfectly; to have had to share even a fraction of Mark’s friendship with my parents would have deeply upset me. Although not normally possessive about people, I had always felt compelled to try to insulate this relationship from parental influences. And, as I realised much later, Mark felt exactly the same about insulating it from his own family.
We may have had this protective attitude towar
ds our bond because it was such a curious one – of a kind that makes some people believe in reincarnation. It is, after all, not quite usual, or even proper, for a Roman Catholic priest to have as his closest friend a female, twenty-seven years his junior, who visits him in his secluded home in the country at all hours of the day and night. (As happened eventually, during various Murphy crises.) Had either of us cared about what the neighbours – or the parish priest, or the bishop – said or thought, we would probably have allowed our friendship to fade gently when I reached young womanhood. But of course we didn’t care. And besides, such friendships have their own momentum and their own purpose, which is not always fully evident to the friends themselves.
Mark was a natural outsider; not for him the hearty greetings along the Main Street, the breezy first-name chatting-up of parishioners, the earnest discussions about hurling, coursing and the price of store-cattle. Some thought him too aloof, for he tried to hide an abnormal shyness behind a curt manner that could be disconcerting. Others, as the years passed, expressed surprise at the failure of so able a man to advance in his profession. But Mark’s idea of clerical advancement had nothing to do with rising in the ranks. He was so devoid of respect for any Establishment, clerical or lay, that he might almost be described as a Christian anarchist. The letter of the law meant nothing to him, the spirit everything. He stealthily gave away every surplus penny he possessed and his generosity became a legend among the poor of three counties. When he died, beggars and tinkers and cattle drovers and lonely old age pensioners crowded into a remote country graveyard for his burial service.
Wheels Within Wheels Page 18