Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  Instead, I continued to be hypocritical/protective by leaving the house at Mass time and going for a walk. Never having been a ‘Sunday best’ person, this seemed an easy deception. The neighbours would assume that I had been to an earlier Mass, or was going to a later one, and they had so few contacts with my parents that my subterfuge was unlikely to be detected. Or so I reckoned, not quite appreciating the extent of the neighbours’ interest in my movements. In fact it was detected within a year, both by my parents and the neighbours – and, presumably, by the local clergy. But nobody commented on it. Concerning the clerical reaction – or lack of it – I have written elsewhere, ‘When I ‘lapsed’ a quarter of a century ago – long before such an event could be spoken about above a whisper in rural Ireland – no priest ever attempted to ‘get me back’; the local clergy knew perfectly well that I was not, and never had been within their disciplinary reach. I am still living in that same little town, on good terms with the clergy of all denominations and with the nuns in the convent next door to my house. No doubt prayers are wistfully said for my salvation but nobody, clergy or lay, has ever tried to make me feel ill at ease because of my defection.’ My parents were equally restrained. I was then twenty-one and though my mother sought to dominate me in other ways both she and my father had too much respect for me (and perhaps too much experience of my obstinacy) even to attempt to influence me on such a matter. This restraint must have cost them something. According to their beliefs it was a parental duty to try to persuade me to rethink, to pray for faith and repent the error of my ways. Their neglect of this duty is perhaps an indication that both had more in common with Luther than either would have cared to admit. As for the neighbours, scandalised and disapproving as they must have been, there is in the Irish an innate delicacy (or is it a form of laissez-faire?) which generally prevents them from ostracising those who have left the herd; unless of course the deserter flagrantly defies convention in other ways that directly offend local sensibilities.

  At that time the only people with whom I discussed religion were Mark and Godfrey. Naturally it distressed Mark to realise that I was no longer doubting or wondering but had unequivocally ceased to be a Christian. Yet he was too wise a man and too genuine a priest to argue with me. And his distress was less than I had feared it might be. It now seems to me that he appreciated my real feelings about religion some fifteen years before I myself did. We referred to the matter only briefly and infrequently; in this as in other respects our understanding needed few words.

  With Godfrey it was otherwise; during our first few years together religion provided the area in which we drew closest. For us both it was important, but whereas I remained undisturbed by my discovery that I could never be a sincere Christian, Godfrey needed his faith and was frightened to think of ever losing it. Characteristically, he often blamed himself for having voiced his own doubts to me, lest these might have helped to undermine my faith. Such moods of confiding in me, followed by scruples because he had confided, were typical of the dual nature of our relationship. Sometimes he treated me as a person of equal experience and maturity, sometimes his attitude was almost autocratically paternal. The first mood I regarded as an undeserved compliment, the second I meekly accepted as inevitable. To me someone approaching forty was elderly and my inherent respect for age checked any resentment I might have felt when Godfrey was at his most peremptory. Indeed, I thought his paternal moods more authentic than his ‘equality’ moods. These I diagnosed as symptoms of a loneliness so profound that it sometimes made my youth seem irrelevant – a diagnosis not quite fair to myself. In some ways I was of course absurdly naive. But in other ways – the ways that mattered to Godfrey – I was more percipient and tactful than many an older person. My own domestic stresses and strains had equipped me to understand the very different but no less wearing stresses and strains of Godfrey’s life. He was – though I did not then see him as such – an extremely neurotic man who needed to be treated with consistent gentleness, sympathy and patience. Because I loved him, he brought these qualities out in me; and because this was so, he came to return my love.

  At the end of August 1952 it was three years since our first drive to Goat Island, yet we had never once expressed our affection by even the most tentative physical contact. Then suddenly – we were sitting beside Bayl Lough, on an afternoon of sparkling water and white clouds hurrying above the hills – suddenly Godfrey turned and looked into my eyes. And then he kissed me and we made love.

  The kind of love we shared from that day on would have been impossible, I believe, had physical passion always been an element in our relationship; for three years we had been laying foundations and they were deep and strong.

  On our way up the rough track to the road we conversed stiltedly, like the strangers we were in these new roles. Most vividly I remember my exultant sense of kinship with everything I saw – with the sheep and the crows and the stream by the track and the rocks and the heather and the clouds in the sky. I felt that until this day I had been only half-alive, half-aware; now I had a new relationship not just with Godfrey but with all of nature. And then there was a wondering incredulity, a sensation of the impossible having become reality. And also, inevitably, there was a triumphant relishing of power – at the time unrecognised, in my romantic delirium, but already operating. For so long I had been in Godfrey’s power: now at last he was equally in mine. As we stood by his car and my bicycle, at the very spot where our first drive to Goat Island had begun, I looked at him, with a strong awareness of possessing him, and asked, for the first time, ‘When do we meet again?’

  Godfrey turned away and got into the car. ‘Never would be best’, he said. Then he switched on the engine and added, ‘Tomorrow, by the river.’

  Free-wheeling home, I felt indifferent to Godfrey’s unhappy remorse. A woman’s love can be as ruthless as a man’s.

  Now I had exchanged innocence for understanding and that night my own aroused body told me what a marathon of self-control had ended for Godfrey by Bayl Lough. My respect for him increased accordingly – and I felt gratitude, too. Any earlier would have been too soon. As it was, that day had not been marred by any confusion, uncertainty, regret or doubt. I vaguely wished we could marry, but it mattered little that we could not. The formality of marriage seemed a mere dusty document beside the fiery jewel of our love. Godfrey of course would feel otherwise and already I was prepared to be sacrificed on the altar of his scruples. But now I felt capable of coping with any number of complex Godfrey reactions. And intuitively he must have known that at last I was ready to take the hardships as well as the joys of an adult liaison.

  The following evening he first said ‘I love you’ as we stood, towards sunset, on the river bank. Then my armour of selfishness was penetrated by the sadness behind those words. He added that really we should discuss things sensibly; but there was nothing to discuss. He meant, I knew, that we should face up to the impracticality of the situation, say goodbye and get on with life separately and rationally. Yet the idea was too preposterous even to be mentioned. To my relief he never questioned the durability of our love. This had been my only fear – that he might retreat behind a barrier of cynicism and dismiss my feelings as transient youthful emotionalism. Predictably he condemned himself, at length and bitterly, for having cultivated a friendship that was bound at some stage to complicate my future. I replied that as a woman of nearly twenty-one I could look after my own future. Godfrey well knew my views on marriage and though he disagreed with them they were now conveniently reassuring. However, he did dutifully point out that it was too soon for me to withdraw from the matrimonial stakes – if I could ever have been described as an entry – and that if I detached from him I might eventually fall for some eligible man of an appropriate age. But his tone lacked conviction; we were both conscious of an inexorability about our relationship. It didn’t make sense yet it seemed to exist almost as an outside force, independent of our decisions.

  Because of Godfrey’s s
cruples about extra-marital sex I now had to exercise my share of self-control – admittedly a less difficult task for a woman, yet not easy when one’s passions have just been awakened. To me these scruples were absurd, but recognising their sincerity I loyally deferred to them. It often seemed a black joke that in this relationship with a Protestant Englishman I was up against precisely the sort of inhibitions that are chiefly associated with Catholic Irishmen. Fortunately Godfrey’s scruples ceased to be effective at fairly regular intervals, but my primitive delight in love-making was always overshadowed by an uneasy and faintly unflattering awareness of Godfrey’s sense of sin. Had the physical bond been our strongest, this relationship would have rapidly disintegrated.

  On the surface it looks like very hard luck when a woman always falls in love with ‘the wrong man’. Yet in my case this apparent hard luck may be linked to that strong adolescent premonition about never marrying. Perhaps we unconsciously avoid situations for which we are ill-equipped, even if avoiding them entails an amount of immediate suffering.

  Had Godfrey been free to marry, it would still have been difficult for me to leave home; so his being unfree spared me a major crisis of conscience. As things were, I took care to conceal our relationship from my parents, knowing that it would have needlessly upset them even to suspect that I was involved with a man who was still married, both by his own and their reckoning. Looking back, I doubt if my mother can have remained blind to my in-love bliss. But she never tried to pry.

  Neither of my parents ever questioned me about how I spent my free time; they must have speculated, but their tact was supreme. Outwardly they got no reward for this, only an increasingly uncommunicative daughter. But indirectly they were repaid. Having been allowed, from the age of fourteen, to follow as independent a path as circumstances permitted, I carefully shielded them from all unnecessary worry on my behalf. Never once, during this period, did I even consider adding to their difficulties by staking my claim to a normal life. But to write thus gives a false impression of an heroically self-sacrificing daughter. It was not like that. I did not consider and choose and put my parents first; to do so was not in my nature. Indeed, by temperament I was peculiarly incapable of being a comfort to them. But always I was conscious of our three lives being in one sense a unit on the scales of Fate and at least I could refrain from deliberately adding to their misfortunes. I had youth and health and hope and love and an enormous capacity for enjoyment – even against the odds. To break them, in quest of further advantages, was, literally, unthinkable.

  Yet there was a certain remorseless brutality in the way I went about constructing my aloof adult relationship with both parents. However useful I may have been as a daughter around the house (and I wasn’t very), my failure to grow into a friend must have grieved them deeply. But I had to isolate myself mentally if I were to continue to live at home. At the time I did not weigh and calculate in this fashion; my withdrawal was instinctive though I knew what I was doing and that I was being cruel. Now I realise that by turning away from my parents at an age when exchanges of opinions could have been most rewarding, and by assuming that they would react to a given situation in a certain way, without ever testing them, I was both impoverishing myself and doing an injustice to two remarkable people. But I cannot have regrets. It was as it had to be.

  14

  One result of my new relationship with Godfrey was a return to ‘marathon’ writing, which I had sensibly abandoned for a few years to devote more time to reading. During the winter of 1952-53 I attempted my first novel. The heroine only slightly resembled myself because this was not the semi-autobiographical first effort of many aspiring novelists. Instead, it had a curiously prophetic theme – the growing-up of an illegitimate girl in a small Irish town.

  It will be remembered that illegitimacy and its problems had come early to my notice. As a child I had often heard my mother arguing that the socially crippling effects of unmarried motherhood constituted an altogether disproportionate punishment for a momentary loss of self-control. At the same time it was emphasised – for my benefit – that only the ‘less fortunate’ sort of girl lost her self-control in this context. ‘Less fortunate’ was my mother’s favourite euphemism when she wished to make class distinctions. Although perhaps euphemism is unfair; she was a practical Christian who used that phrase with compassion.

  The illegitimate birthrate has always been high in Ireland, among the ‘less fortunate’, yet until very recently the conventions demanded elaborate pretences that deceived nobody but maintained a façade of ‘decent Catholic living’. Many much-loved bastards were brought up as their mother’s youngest sibling (as in Brid’s case) or, if this seemed biologically unconvincing, as her nephew or niece. Among the more fortunate, however, things were different – always far less civilised and frequently inhumane. A Co Cork case shocked my parents and me in 1952. The only daughter of a middle-class family – my exact contemporary – became pregnant by a married man while a student at University College Cork and was banished ‘for ever’ from her parents’ home. Her father even discontinued her allowance and forbade her mother to contact her. In due course we heard that the wretched girl had had a nervous breakdown as a result of being forced to give up her son for adoption. And this was the too familiar tragedy behind my novel.

  Despite having my own study at home, I usually worked, during my evening off-duty hours, in my father’s office in the empty County Library Headquarters. Then, as now, I preferred while writing to be completely alone and beyond reach of any interruption. Besides, the domestic atmosphere was gradually becoming less conducive to concentration. Often my mother and I quarrelled during the day about some trivial point of household management and by six o’clock I was longing to escape from the very unpleasant vibes we had created between us.

  I wrote this novel only because it was kicking to get out – but Godfrey, to my gratified surprise, urged me to have it typed. It was sent to some half-dozen publishers and one cautiously hinted that if I made the tragic ending a happy one they might reconsider it. But this I was not prepared to do. Although I knew that it was mediocre and mawkish it had a certain integrity and the ending, however crudely melodramatic, was – to me – inevitable and right and so could not be changed to suit the market. This failure to get into print between hard covers did not at all depress me. I had expected it and – as on my first excursion into the literary world – I considered the ‘try again’ remarks of various publishers a fair reward for my labours. During the following winter I wrote another novel – just for fun – but this time had enough sense not to listen to Godfrey and waste more money on typing fees.

  In 1952 my father had spent his annual month’s holiday at home, while I was abroad, because he no longer felt able to cope simultaneously with library and domestic duties. My mother therefore decided that in 1953 I must do a month on solo duty while my father deep-sea-fished. To this equitable arrangement I could scarcely object. Yet incipient panic threatened if I allowed myself to think about spending two years in Lismore without even an occasional day off.

  When the time came I found that month an almost intolerable strain. For me my mother would make none of those concessions which she gladly made to spare my father. On his departure for West Cork in June 1953 I was condemned to a month’s virtual imprisonment. My mother insisted on never being left alone in the house for more than an hour a day, which just gave me time to rush down to the Blackwater for a swim, doing the shopping on the way home. I could not go far enough afield to meet Godfrey in the sort of seclusion he demanded and Mark’s daily visits to our house afforded me my only safety-valve. He always brought a bottle of dry sherry to cheer me up and we would sit drinking in the kitchen while he told me the latest dirty jokes about the Vatican. But even his visits were a qualified form of relaxation; although my mother never commented on them I knew how much she resented Mark and after each visit she obliquely punished me. Fortunately I was still very resilient and the day my father returned I rec
overed my equilibrium.

  Soon I was eagerly planning and reading in preparation for a Spanish tour in the following spring and it was on this journey that I first fell in love with a country. My earlier tours had been immensely enjoyable and rewarding, but none of the countries visited had had the particular ingredients needed to spark me off as a travel writer. In Spain, at that time, there was an exciting sense of remoteness, both spatial and temporal. I pedalled as far off the beaten track as possible – encountering no hostility anywhere – and never before had I experienced anything like the Spanish quality of solitude and silence. The landscape, too, was dramatic – as was the climate, for in April blizzards were still blowing over the vastness of the Castilian plateau. Burgos was snowbound and glittering under an ice-blue sky and a northerly gale made it unnecessary to pedal on the way to Salamanca.

  Significantly, perhaps, two of my mother’s favourite heroines were Isabella of Castile and Teresa of Avila; I had been reared on their life-stories, with Ferdinand and John of the Cross standing slightly in the background. Many small-town names therefore sounded both cosily familiar and gloriously romantic. Again, Pappa had been a Cervantes addict – not surprisingly, given the resemblance between himself and the man from La Mancha – and his special children’s copy of Don Quixote, from which he often read to us on those summer days in Lismore, had been edited by himself with a pencil to avert juvenile boredom. (His other, 1796 four-volume edition, published in Dublin by John Chambers ‘As an Endeavour to Improve the art of Printing in Ireland’, and with ‘Some Account of the Author’s Life by T. Smollett, MD’, was among his most cherished possessions – and is now among mine.) However, George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain and Walter Starkie’s Spanish Raggle-Taggle were the books which directly inspired me to cycle around Spain. And the fact that I had done my homework so thoroughly – reading volumes of history, biography and travel, balanced by novels, plays and poems in translation – perhaps partly explains my feeling of instant affinity with the Spaniards. They seemed at once more comprehensible and more ‘foreign’ than the Germans or the French and I even found myself speaking a version of Spanish despite my notorious inability to learn foreign languages.