Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  My independence of Youth Hostels also contributed to the success of this journey. None then existed in Spain, but the village posadas were even cheaper and got me involved with the sort of Spaniards I most wanted to meet. Occasionally, as the weather improved, I slept out in my flea-bag – once unwittingly in a graveyard which was the only level spot I could find on a pitch black night in the mountains of Aragon; I got quite a shock on waking next morning. At twenty-two I had reached my physical peak and could effortlessly cycle 120 miles a day through mountainous country on a heavy roadster laden with large panniers which were quite unnecessary for such a short trip. (It takes time to learn that a medium-sized rucksack can hold all one needs for six months.)

  In Spain I kept a detailed diary for the first time, writing it up every evening, however tired I felt, and posting it to Godfrey once a week. On my return home he encouraged me to use this material and I sold a series of twelve articles to the Irish Independent, Irelands’ most popular daily newspaper. Heartened by this success – I had for the first time earned a considerable sum of money, by Murphy standards – I began work on a travel book, writing into the small hours every night for five months. Most of my earnings were willingly spent on the typing of those 100,000 words. This book seemed to me no worse than many recently published volumes of a similar type – and better than some – so I felt very hard-done-by when four publishers rejected it. All the skill, knowledge, energy and concentration I then possessed had gone into it and I suspected that its failure was due to the subject matter rather than to technical deficiencies. An equally well-or ill-written book on somewhere more exotic would probably have proved acceptable. To write successfully on Spain, I reckoned, one would need the ability of a V. S. Pritchett or an Arland Ussher – authors with whom I knew I could never compete. Recently I skimmed through this typescript and could find no reason to change my earlier opinion. In some ways it is more polished than my first published book and its chief defect – verbosity – could have been remedied by any competent publisher’s editor.

  By the beginning of May 1955 I had decided to waste no more postage on my Spanish typescript. And it was at about this time that I experienced my first mood of desperation. It was only a mood – a sunny evening of agony – but its intensity frightened me. I remember lying on smooth turf near the river, beneath the new leaves of a beech tree, and looking up at the blue sky between the leaves, and feeling the torture of my seething discontent and resentment being accentuated – instead of soothed, as always before – by the beauty of the evening. The immediate cause of this desperation was my being unable to get back to Spain until the following year. At twenty-three I felt increasingly conscious of the passage of time, of my own thwarted potentialities and of being trapped in a situation from which there could be no possible escape in the foreseeable future. My ambition to cycle to India now came more often to the surface of my mind and I tormented myself with thoughts of Afghanistan and the Himalayas. It had been established that I was physically equal to such a journey; all I needed was freedom. Yet had my mother permitted another Spanish holiday that year I would have philosophically forgotten India. I was not craving the unattainable – complete freedom. My demands were reasonable and my willingness to compromise was always there had my mother chosen to take advantage of it.

  However, this obvious grievance was but one of the causes of my new unhappiness. No less important was my recent literary disappointment – the first of my career, since I had never before seriously expected a typescript to be accepted. Had I been asked to choose between returning at once to Spain for three months and having my book published there is no doubt what my choice would have been. And having proved to my own satisfaction that I could write a moderately good travel book, the circumstances that prevented me from gathering saleable raw material chafed all the more.

  Loyalty to Godfrey inhibited me from acknowledging – even to myself, at the time – another factor that was compounding the tension in my life. For me the constraint which he struggled to impose on our physical relationship was becoming more and more trying as the novelty of being loved wore off and the flesh ached for its due. This constraint was prompted not only by his personal code of sexual morality but by an absurd theory that the more celibate we were the more likely I would be to detach from him, emotionally. Such an attitude says a lot for his nobility of mind but very little for his perspicacity. Even had we been entirely celibate I would have loved him no less. Faithfulness is not a virtue but a trait natural to some people. Its semblance may be cultivated – and this no doubt often is a virtue – but the converse is not true. Faithfulness cannot be quenched, except by the total and final disappearance from one person’s life of another.

  Godfrey’s notion that sexual deprivation might eventually wither my love could be misinterpreted as a measure of how little he understood me. Yet he never really doubted my constancy; at intervals, when his constraint-system broke down, he admitted this. And then he would explain that to placate his convoluted conscience he sometimes had to pretend to himself that our bond was fragile enough to be easily snapped should my future happiness seem to require this. During such introspections I used to reflect privately that a greater concern for my present happiness would be more to the point. Yet despite my no-holds-barred approach when Godfrey did let us off his moral leash, pride would never allow me deliberately to provoke him to make love. Also, his guilty aftermath was so grim, and so unnaturally prolonged, that I could not have all that mental suffering on my conscience.

  During that summer Mark realised how close I was to crisis-point and how much I needed moral support of the astringent sort that does not encourage brooding. In June he urged me to confront my mother, announce that I must have a break and request her to go away to a nursing home for a month, or employ a private nurse to look after her at home in my absence. But both those ploys had been considered and rejected two years earlier. My mother argued that we could not afford either alternative; no nursing home would accept her unless she engaged special day and night nurses and no nurse would look after her at home unless we could provide someone to dance attendance on the nurse. This I knew to be true: hence my trapped feeling. I could not yet see that my mother had become alarmingly over-dependent on my father and myself and that she would have resisted such an arrangement however much money was available.

  Life might have been easier for all of us had my mother allowed herself to complain openly about her sufferings. But I had no such thoughts at the time. Even after our bickering had become an almost daily event I never ceased inwardly to admire and feel proud of her stiff upper lip. There was something at once pathetic and heroic about her indestructible gaiety, her boundless enjoyment of books and music, her acute interest in politics and social problems and her indomitable dignity. It was natural that I should not think of her as an invalid, but neither did anybody else. All her life she retained her beauty and the glow of health on her cheeks. When she sat ready to receive visitors, with her chestnut hair falling in glossy waves over an embroidered silken shawl, only her motionless, unhumanly twisted hands reminded one that for half a lifetime she had been crippled. But now, behind the gallantry, the gaiety and the dignity, something was going very wrong. The tolerance and balance that had so enriched my childhood were being eroded as twenty-two years of rigorously controlled frustration took their toll.

  Our domestic framework must have seemed stereotyped enough to outsiders. In Ireland daughters are traditionally expected to be self-sacrificing and mothers are traditionally allowed to be selfish, and families endure the consequent overt or covert hostility for barren decades. But the personalities of my mother and myself made for unusually explosive complications. I did not accept that a young adult’s only consideration should be his or her parents; and my mother, I can see now, was being demoralised by a growing realisation that her misfortune had cast a cold shadow upon my youth. Yet she knew that if she released me in the only way possible at this stage of her disease – by
banishing herself permanently to a nursing home – anxious guilt about my separated parents’ misery would have made my freedom worthless. Unhappily, however, I was now incapable of acting – as well as feeling – humanely. When I should have been striving to hide my discontent from my mother I flaunted it, savagely, knowing that to do so could achieve only a slight relaxation of my own tension at the expense of an increase in her suffering. Things might have been easier had she ever directly expressed some sympathy with my situation, but instead she tried to behave as though I were doing no more than my duty – and that not very well. By 1955 we were both losing our emotional grip and looking back I can see how a grim spiral developed as she sought to punish me for adding to her sufferings by exposing my own.

  We had never agreed on the subject of housekeeping and it infuriated me when my mother began to try to regulate every tiny detail, though I had then been doing the job for nine years – not efficiently, I so loathed it, but adequately. This sort of thing sounds petty – even comical, in a sick sort of way – when put on paper. To me, however, it soon became a major issue. The furniture was to be waxed on Tuesdays, the silver polished on Wednesdays, the hearths blacked on Thursdays, the shopping done at this hour and the ironing at that … There was nothing intrinsically unreasonable about the general outline – probably many housewives operate such systems – but it was not my way of running a home. I had my own slap-dash methods which incorporated such ingenious labour-saving devices as never cleaning a soup saucepan before using it for a stew. Therefore I violently resented my mother’s humiliating post-wash-up inspections; she was treating me now as though I were a fifteen-year-old skivvy.

  Yet – improbable as this may sound – we were still capable, during those two years between my Spanish tours, of genuinely enjoying each other’s company. Despite the extent to which I had long since isolated myself from my parents, mentally and emotionally, and the growing mother/daughter antagonism I have just described, our strong mutual love was still there – settled, as it were, like a sediment on the bottom of our relationship, and apparent whenever it was stirred up by something that amused us. We shared an identical sense of humour which for a time preserved what remained of our sanity. And we both instinctively recognised humour’s therapeutic value. At times we must have seemed strangely flippant for we used jokes to try to solve problems which, if taken seriously, might have brought us on to a collision course. My mother liked to quote Horace, as translated by Milton – ‘Joking decides great things / Stronger and better oft than earnest can.’ My return to Spain in 1956 was not the anticlimax it might have been. I postponed my holiday to September, to enjoy the grape harvest, and in many ways found this tour even more satisfying than the first. Writing a personal travel book about a country brings one very close to it, for reasons that even now I do not quite understand.

  In England I had first learned to beware of generalisations about national characteristics (‘The English are so reserved – no one will talk to you over there!’) and in Spain this lesson was repeated. Despite the Spaniards’ reputation for excluding foreigners from their homes, I was thrice invited to stay with families to whom I was a total stranger. And though all these families – in Ronda, in a village near Valencia and in Barcelona – were either very peasant or very bourgeois, the unreasonable strait-lacedness so often associated with Spain was never apparent. The young men of the household took me sight-seeing without a chaperon and with their mothers’ approval. And their attitude towards me was neither salacious nor stilted.

  On my way home I crossed the Pyrenees with twelve large bottles of Spanish brandy (bought for the equivalent of 25 pence each) rolled up in my sleeping bag and carefully roped to the carrier. This feat possibly constitutes a world record of some sort. But shortly afterwards Babieca’s back wheel buckled irreparably so the effort may not have been the economy it seemed.

  I arrived home on October 6 to find that five days previously my mother had been taken to a Cork hospital suffering from severe kidney-stones. But Mark assured me that there was no cause for alarm; she had responded well to treatment and was due home next day. My father was staying in a boarding-house near the hospital and when I telephoned him that evening he had a message from my mother: I was to have the house thoroughly spring-cleaned by the time they arrived back on the following afternoon. At which point I shocked myself by wishing vehemently that it had been necessary for my mother to spend at least one more week in hospital.

  Not for an instant did I consider obeying the maternal order and devoting those uniquely precious hours of freedom to housework. Instead, I went to Godfrey’s cottage for the night – the first night we had ever spent together in seven years. Even Godfrey felt that it was not an occasion for constraint. Or perhaps he was so startled by my totally unexpected arrival that he just didn’t have time to put his constraint-mechanism into gear. Lying beside him after he had gone to sleep, I wondered why I did not more often ignore my mother’s less reasonable commands. Then I saw that I had been able to defy her on this point only because I was beyond reach of whatever psychic – almost hypnotic – power she had over me when we were together. And having been away, leading a normal life for five weeks, also helped. As soon as I was back into the rhythm of the treadmill I would again become impotent to assert myself. For a mad moment I thought of cycling away in the morning to take a boat to England and there finding a job – any job – and freedom. But of course it would not be freedom. While my mother lived I could nowhere find freedom.

  Loyalty prevented me from discussing the sordid details of our family life with anyone but Mark. Even to Godfrey I would not admit how difficult my mother made things, though it was impossible to conceal the fact that I was living under an increasing strain. Besides, he had enough problems and tensions of his own without being expected to participate in mine. And it was good for me to forget the domestic scene, in so far as I could, while we were together.

  Cycling home over the heathery Vee early next morning, through crisp, bright autumn light, I wondered – ‘When will I again be able to enjoy the mountains in the morning?’ Then my heart seemed to twist in my chest with angry despair. For years – probably – to come I would be housebound at all times, apart from my four-hour evening break, and throughout the winter months ahead I would never be out-of-doors in daylight. This deprivation I felt more acutely and continuously than any other. It truly was a form of mental torture, to be denied the most simple, and yet for me most exhilarating pleasure of roaming the countryside in all weathers, during all seasons and at all hours of the day and night. I realised then – free-wheeling down towards the silver serpent of mist that marked the Blackwater – how little emotional stamina I had left. After my earlier tours I had for a few months felt cheerfully equal to anything. But this time it was not so.

  The doctors had advised my mother to maintain a regular daily intake of four pints of home-made barley-water and this gave her a semi-valid excuse for making still greater demands on me; soon my off-duty hours had been reduced to three. Hitherto my father’s nursing had been acceptable in a crisis, but by the end of that year my mother had decreed that only I could cope effectively. Mark tersely condemned this as a form of moral blackmail. Yet even at the time I – perhaps unfortunately – could see the invalid’s point of view. Apart from the kidney-stones, which caused considerable extra pain and discomfort, her arthritis had recently entered a new phase. She was no longer able to write, or to feed herself, and turning the pages of a book demanded much dogged patience. To make her comfortable in bed or bath chair required a combination of skill, strength and gentleness that I, after a decade of almost daily practice, naturally possessed to a greater degree than anyone else. We formed a perfect team and mine was the only touch she did not dread. Indeed, she was hardly aware of it, so smooth was our teamwork, and we often became absorbed in a wireless concert while going through the daily routine of washing and dressing. But the very ease with which I could accomplish these tasks – every day
of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year – increased their suffocating monotony. As a civilised human being I should have rejoiced at my ability to ease my mother’s burden. But I detested nursing even more than housekeeping – and detested myself for being so devoid of proper feeling – and then I came to detest my mother because her physical helplessness gave her such power over me. Undeniably she abused that power, as Mark said. But had my own attitudes and reactions been less barbarous she might not have done so – or at least not to the same extent. Yet now I can reproach neither of us for our behaviour. Even at the time I had frequent brief moments of total detachment when I seemed to be observing the Murphys, as a family, from outside. Then I saw that we were all equally to be pitied and that none of us was to be blamed. We were enmeshed in a hideous, unbreakable net, each having to play a part that denied his or her nature, each knowing that to struggle was futile and yet each incapable of not struggling.