Wheels Within Wheels (13 page)

Then the truth came out – or what at that time I imagined to be the truth. ‘Daddy’s so
boring
!’ I exclaimed miserably. ‘I can’t stand it and 
I’m
not
going with him again and anyway I’m
ten
so why should I be forced to go for walks like a little girl?’

Staring at my mother, I was appalled to realise that she, like myself, was close to tears. Then I knew that she saw my point. But her first loyalty was to a man whose vulnerability was not any the less extreme for being so far below the surface. Recovering herself, she reasoned with me gently, tacitly admitting that I had a case but stressing how unkind it would be to rebuff a loving father who so enjoyed our weekly walks. As I listened I knew that she was right, but I didn’t care. Or rather, I was determined to act as though I didn’t care. Deep down I cared so much that the guilt bred by this calculated cruelty remained with me for twenty years.

Why did I feel such an overwhelming compulsion to detach from my father, even though I fully recognised that my doing so would hurt him as perhaps nothing else could? Had our inability to communicate driven me to an extremity of frustration that could only be relieved by meting out the punishment of rejection? For he was the grown-up, the powerful one and it must all be his fault … We might have been basically indifferent to one another, as parents and children quite often are, and then we could have casually sustained an amiable, meaningless relationship. But our bonds were very strong; we understood each other intuitively in a way which to me, on the threshold of adolescence, may have seemed a violation of my spiritual privacy.

I do not know how my mother explained away my decision to my father, or if she even tried to soften the blow. But I never again went for a walk with him and he accepted my defection without a comment, a query or a protest of any sort.

A few months later, while we were all in Dublin, an incident occurred which I now regard, perhaps exaggeratedly, as one of the saddest wasted opportunities of a lifetime. My father had arranged to meet me at an aunt’s house for lunch, but he was late; half-an-hour passed, and an hour, and still he did not come. Then it was lunchtime and we all sat down to our grilled cutlets and creamed carrots. There were meringues for pudding, but by that stage I was in a daze of terror and grief. My father must have been killed in a car-crash – he was a notoriously absent-minded driver and had borrowed my aunt’s Morris. I felt certain 
that I would never see him again and remorse about my cruel aloofness devastated me. But I must not make a fool of myself by fussing and fidgeting in front of all those grown-up cousins who were accepting Uncle Fergus’s non-appearance with what seemed to me heartless placidity.

My father had in fact telephoned at twelve-thirty to explain that he had been delayed, but no one had bothered to inform me. When at last he arrived I nonchalantly said ‘Hello’ before slipping away to the lavatory to be sick. (Even today the mere sight of a meringue makes me feel queasy.) Then I went out to the garden to talk to the dog.

Later, as my father drove me back to Charleston Avenue, I desperately wanted to tell him about all that I had suffered at lunchtime because I thought he was dead. But I could not. Many years passed before I realised that even a slight reference to my ordeal might have significantly altered our relationship at a crucial stage. After that summer, we grew further and further apart on the surface while retaining our indestructible and uncomfortable mutual flair for reading each other’s thoughts.

As my leg muscles grew stronger my cycling ambitions grew bolder and soon I was longing to cycle the twenty-five miles to Helvick Head. But fifty miles in one day sounded a long way. Frighteningly long, for one who had never yet attempted more than thirty. The project began to worry me. I passionately wanted to achieve those fifty miles yet I dreaded failure. It would be so un-live-downable for ever if I could not make the last few miles and had to signal for help. Eventually I mentioned the idea to my mother, very casually, as though it were a matter of no great consequence.

‘Probably I could easily do it,’ I said; and years later she told me that as I spoke I looked at her with an expression of the most pathetic doubt and anxiety.

But she kept the conversation on the casual note I imagined I had sounded. ‘Of course you can do it,’ she said cheerfully, ‘if you want to do it enough.’

Thus encouraged, I left for Helvick at six o’clock on a radiant June morning – a morning all blue and gold and green. The air smelt damp, warm, rich and full of promises. From every tree, bush and hedge came 
the harmonious confusion of bird-song, seeming to celebrate my own joyous excitement. As I turned towards the coast, and settled to the rhythm of pedalling, I experienced an exaltation I have never forgotten. The vigour of my body seemed to merge with the eager abundance all around me and in an almost sacramental way I became totally aware of myself as a part of nature. Unconsciously, I had taken another step away from the faith of my fathers.

On the previous evening the wireless had guaranteed good weather, but my mother pretended not to have heard. Before I went to bed she gave me the first pound note I had ever been in charge of (to be returned if not needed) and remarked that should the weather deteriorate, or my bicycle break down, or some other disaster occur, I could spend the night in a Dungarvan hotel.

In fact there was no hitch of any kind. By six-thirty I was home, nauseated with exhaustion and bursting with pride. The last twelve miles had been torture, but I would not tarnish the glory of my achievement by admitting this. And even during that terrible final stage part of me had relished the sense of power derived from driving my body beyond what had seemed, at a certain point, to be its limit.

Yet without my mother’s moral support I would never have had the courage to attempt that trip at that age. It was fortunate for me that she was not as possessive as she was dominating. Her influence over me was so strong throughout childhood that had she wished to destroy or stunt me she could certainly have done so. Instead, I was aware of being regarded – and respected – as a separate personality rather than as an incidental appendage to the adults in the household. At the time I took this for granted: now I know what an uncommon attitude it was in the Ireland of my youth.

Some people imagined that my unusual upbringing was a result of being the only child of an invalid. But my mother’s mothering would have been no less odd, I feel certain, had she been in rude health with a family of ten. As a perfectionist, and a woman who saw motherhood as an important career, she approached child-rearing in what I can only call an artistic spirit. Given as raw material a newly conceived child, she saw it as her duty and privilege to form an adult who would be as physically, mentally and morally healthy as intelligent rearing could 
make it. Physically she was completely successful. The other aspects of a child’s health are, alas, less amenable to maternal regulation.

My childhood diet was generally considered freakish. Up to the age of sixteen I drank four pints of milk daily and was allowed no tea, coffee or fizzy drinks. Sweets, chocolate, ice-cream, cakes, sweet biscuits, white bread and white sugar were also forbidden. My ‘treats’ were muscatel raisins and fat, glossy dates in gay boxes. Included in my staple diet were raw beef, raw liver, raw vegetables, wholemeal bread, pinhead porridge and as much fresh fruit and cheese as I could be induced to eat. Naturally I flourished. And one can understand what it must have meant to my mother to look at me as an adolescent and to know that I was capable of enjoying, to the fullest extent, what she had lost. 

Fanciful though this may sound, the Blackwater River was among the chief and best-loved companions of my youth. To me, it has always seemed Lismore’s most tangible link with the saints and sinners and scholars of the past. Many centuries ago it was most appropriately known as
Nem
, an Irish word meaning ‘Heaven’. Much later, Spenser mentioned it in
The Faerie Queene
– ‘Swifte Awnaduff which of the English man is Cal’de Blackewater’. Later still, some enthusiastic Victorian tourist (Thackeray, I think) decided to rename it the Irish Rhine and this inanity – as absurd as calling Swat the Switzerland of the East – has earned him the undying gratitude of the Irish Tourist Board.

The Blackwater – one of Europe’s great salmon rivers – rises near Killarney and flows for seventy miles through the countries of Kerry, Cork and Waterford. In the twelfth century both Dromana House and Lismore Castle were granted charters entitling their owners to extensive fishing rights and even now these charters of King John of England remain good in law, much to the annoyance of certain local rod fishers.

A river shows different aspects to the fisherman, the naturalist, the trader, the artist, the soldier, the boatman and the swimmer. I formed my relationship with the Blackwater as a swimmer. Before I can
remember
, my father regularly immersed me in the cool, dark silkiness of its depths and I swam almost as soon as I could walk. It is a good thing to have had a river among one’s mentors; its strength develops the body, its beauty develops the soul, its agelessness develops the imagination. Also, its moods teach respect for the mindless power of nature. The Blackwater is very moody: it has deep holes, sudden floods, hidden rocks, tricky currents and sly weeds. It claims at least three lives a year and I was not allowed to bathe alone until I was twelve. Although I could easily have broken this rule without being detected, it never occurred to me to do so.

Our shared devotion to the Blackwater had always been important to my father and myself. It was not simply that we were both keen swimmers; our bathing was as much a rite as a pastime and during the
summer, whether the weather was summery or not, we met outside the Library at five-thirty every afternoon and went together to the river. But at the beginning of this summer of 1942, only a few months after I had spurned those Sunday afternoon mobile lectures, what was to become of our traditional bathing-rite? I could not decently imply that I was now prepared to endure my father’s company as a convenience. Yet if the custom were allowed to lapse my swimming season, which normally opened in mid-May, would have to be postponed until Pappa arrived at the beginning of July. My father might have been forgiven had he chosen to leave me excruciatingly impaled on the horns of this dilemma. Instead, he remarked at breakfast-time one fair May morning, as he had been remarking on such mornings for as long as I could remember, ‘I think we’ll need our togs today’. This was much more than I deserved, and I appreciated it.

A new phase of our relationship had begun. I was consciously in control and my father no longer tried to be educational without direct encouragement. Astronomy was then one of my main interests and it pleased me to be lectured on it day after day. Probably an observer would have detected no strain as my father and I considered the solar system. Yet a great sadness underlay our relationship, an awareness that somehow we had failed each other and that what now existed between us was merely a civilised façade to conceal failure.

Another of my hobbies at that time was the Black Death and related subjects. For a few years past I had been fascinated by diseases, epidemics, surgery, new medical discoveries and the like. Had I not been so
committed
to the writing life I would have wished to be a surgeon. My interest in corpses and skeletons was profound. I had never actually seen a human corpse, but I longed to observe closely the phenomenon of putrefaction. For this purpose I installed a dead rabbit in my bedroom. My observations, however, were unsympathetically terminated when the rabbit reached an interesting and therefore perceptible state. In the same cause, I cultivated the society of an aged British Army pensioner and begged him to describe in detail all the corpses with which he had become acquainted during the First World War. But he was tiresomely evasive, plainly considering me mad and morbid. So I had to make do with disintegrated skeletons, which could not even be brought home
for study. At the beginning of my osseous phase I had pranced into the dining-room one lunchtime brandishing a skull and expecting my parents to greet it rapturously. But my father had declared the appropriation of human bones to be unseemly, irreverent and possibly unhygienic and I was made to return my trophy to its source without delay. Fortunately – because I was hungry at the time – its source was nearby. In those days the ancient graveyard surrounding St Carthage’s Cathedral was a wilderness, full of briars and romantic melancholy, and by visiting it shortly before a burial one might find, beside the newly dug grave, a femur, a few ribs, a length of spine or even, on very good days, a skull. My ambition was eventually to assemble a whole skeleton by hiding my bits of bones in the furthest corner of the graveyard and adding to them from other ancient graveyards in the area, when the local paper informed me a burial was about to take place. But it was all too difficult and in the end my Identikit skeleton came to nothing. Or rather, it came to an embarrassingly large heap of bones which, belatedly inspired by some flicker of respect for the mortal remains of various people, I surreptitiously transferred to an open grave on a wet December afternoon when no one was likely to be about.

Scientific interest was not of course the only motive for my graveyard prowlings. Children are enthralled by mortality and unlike many who have felt the touch of Time, are able to contemplate it detachedly. As a child with no personal experience of bereavement I was thrilled by the dramatic finality of death and fascinated by the mystery of what follows after. Many an hour did I spend sitting on old tombstones cheerfully reviewing eschatological possibilities.

I had long since rejected the harps, angels, massed choirs and other such tedious impedimenta which furnish the Heaven of Christian
folklore
. My parents had carefully explained that this picture of Heaven must not be despised since it represented the honest endeavour of simple people mentally to conceive the inconceivable. The real bliss of Heaven, they went on – and they obviously believed this – was in spiritual union with God. And the real pain of purgatory was in spiritual separation from God. But when I considered the matter, as I relaxed on a tombstone or peered hopefully into an open grave, it seemed to me a good deal easier, and no less consoling, to believe in union with Nature rather than
with God. One could see it happening – ‘dust to dust’ – on the physical plane. And when one thought, for instance, of wireless waves, it appeared there were enough odd things going on in the natural world for it to accommodate also the immortality of the soul. This immortality always made sense to me, but at no age did I find it necessary, despite my basic arrogance, to think of my own soul maintaining its existence for ever as a separate unit indelibly marked ‘Dervla Murphy’. Physical extinction was an unpleasant thought and one saw the need for a comforting belief in an after-life. Yet death was made no more acceptable, to me, by the traditional Christian strivings to bring within our comprehension what is simultaneously admitted to be incomprehensible. When I eventually came upon it, that school of Buddhist philosophy which suggests that after death the individual soul can dissolve, to continue its existence by forming parts of other souls, suited me much better. And not many years ago, in
The Golden Core of Religion
by Alexander Skutch, I found perfectly expressed what I was beginning to grope towards as a ten-
year-old
: ‘If immortality is, or will become, attainable by the human soul, it must be within the possibilities of that great, all-embracing, infinitely varied, and still imperfectly explored system of orderly, interrelated events which we know as nature. Only by regarding spiritual survival as natural, in the same sense that our birth, our thought, our aspiration, and our body’s final dissolution are natural, can we who have been nurtured on science and philosophy hold faith in it. If the spirit survives its body in the course of nature, as in the course of nature the light from a beacon on a hilltop goes coursing through outer space long after the fire has died, then it is reasonable to believe that its survival depends upon such intrinsic qualities as the intensity of its love, the unity of its aspirations, its coherence and the absence of passions that tear it asunder.’

As for Hell – which Irish Catholics are so regularly reminded of as a possible destination – having put behind me the terrors induced by Sister X, I ceased to take it seriously. I agreed with my parents that one cannot accept the paradox inherent in the concept of a God who is infinitely merciful and just and yet condemns countless unfortunates to an eternity of suffering.

A few weeks before my eleventh birthday I was cured of grave-robbing
by a somewhat macabre experience. It was one of those still, moist, dull November afternoons when the countryside can be felt drifting into winter sleep. Cycling by the edge of a thick wood, I suddenly got a strong scent of badger. For years I had been longing to find a set, so I climbed a low stone wall and, sniffing like a terrier, forced my way through the dense tangle of rhododendrons, holly and briars that flourished beneath the trees. But soon I lost the scent and as my clothes had already been much damaged I decided to return to the road by a less destructive though longer route.

Zig-zagging between the trees, looking out for squirrels, I moved slowly uphill towards the track that I knew bisected this wood. Then I came unexpectedly on an odd little building, standing in a small clearing but half-hidden by briars and laurels. It had a vaguely ecclesiastical appearance and I felt both puzzled and uneasy; there was something faintly sinister about this inexplicable edifice lurking in the depths of a dense, deserted wood. Approaching closer, I noticed that the door had been forced open – quite recently, for the wood around the lock bore fresh scars. Advancing to the threshold, I peered into the gloom. As my eyes adjusted I saw big shelves and big, long boxes. Coffins, in fact. They had been hacked open, stripped of their lead and left in disarray. Then I saw the corpse, lying almost at my feet. It was dark-skinned and shrunken but very plainly a woman. Here at last was my yearned-for chance to make a close study of decomposition. I turned and fled.

Terror seemed to suffocate me as I tripped over brambles and slipped on the dank leaf-mould. The whole wood became an Arthur Rackham thicket and I was afraid to raise my eyes lest I might see discoloured corpses enmeshed in its thorny shadows. Only when I reached the road did I realise that my face as well as my clothes had been ripped by briars. Blood was trickling onto the collar of my gaberdine and I wondered frantically how I could explain away those scratches. I decided to fabricate a fall off my bicycle to cover both the scratches and my shaken condition.

Why did this desecrated family vault so unnerve someone who hitherto had revelled in the gruesome? Was I so shocked and terrified simply because I had been taken unawares? Would I have reacted differently had I entered the wood not to track a badger but to seek out the vault? Or was I undone by the considerable difference between a skeleton and 
a corpse? There is always a temptation to try to unravel one’s own inconsistencies and I still find this incident baffling.

It took me months to regain my nerve fully. I slept soundly that night – no doubt exhausted by emotion – but as I opened my eyes next morning the memory came back and I groped for my light switch in panic.

Nightmares started that evening; these were, according to my mother, the first from which I had ever suffered. When I awoke screaming my parents were listening to the gramophone and no one heard me. Realising where I was, I switched on the light and felt glad that my silly yells had not been noticed. But then I was afraid to switch off the light or to sleep again. I tried to read but was too tired and tense. Soon afterwards my father came upstairs, saw my light and looked into demand sternly what I meant by reading at half-past ten? He switched off my light without waiting for a reply and left me sweating and shaking in the dark. When I turned on my illicit torch it didn’t really help. I needed the full glare of the ceiling light which left no corner shadowy. My nightmare had been of shadows, and vilely coloured objects – brownish-grey, yellowish-green, yellowish-brown,
greyish-green
, yellowish-grey – a kaleidoscope of unearthly, corrupt tinges and indistinct forms moving slightly. And yet surely
not
moving, because they were dead … (Ever since, most of my few nightmares have been in this ghastly Technicolor.)

When I knew that my parents would be in bed I switched on the light again but, being used to a dark room, was unable to sleep for what felt like hours. Then I dreamt that my mother was dead and that I was searching for her body in a cave where at the far end corpses were dancing in a circle. I knew they would not let me pass though my mother was waiting for me beyond them and, if I reached her soon enough, could be brought back to life. I awoke, calling her hysterically, to find that it was past my usual getting-up time. As I dressed I was already dreading that night. Half of me longed to confide in my mother, but the other half forbade me to ask for help.

However, unlike my earlier fear of darkness, these horrors were altogether outside my control. Only by forcing myself to stay awake could I escape them. My symptoms of strain and exhaustion soon
prompted my mother to investigate and when all had been revealed we decided that until my nerve had mended there was no alternative but for my father and me to exchange beds. Part of me rejoiced then to be free of those lonely terrors, while another part resented this admission of dependence and the consequent loss of privacy. My own room was important to me beyond calculation. The rest of the house – indeed, the rest of the world – seemed in a sense alien territory where adult writ ran; only in my own room could I freely expand. (Of course when I began to cherish decomposing rabbits under the bed my expansion had to be curtailed; but such crises were rare.) Thus, sleeping in my parents’ room felt like the worst sort of indignity, with overtones of serfdom. I remember resolving one night, as I lay discontentedly curled up in my father’s bed, that even should I happen to acquire a husband, by some unlikely chance, I would never share a room with him. Naturally we would share a bed for procreative purposes, but clearly there must be a clause in the marriage contract stipulating separate rooms. It did not then occur to me that post-procreation I might feel disinclined to trek to an Inner Sanctum.