Wheels Within Wheels (14 page)

At the age of eleven my bedtime was still seven-thirty, bizarre as this may sound to modern children, and usually I had been asleep for a few hours when my father wheeled my mother’s bath chair across the hall. (My parents’ bedroom would normally have been the sitting-room and the dining-room had to serve as our general living-room.) With the maid’s help my mother was lifted onto her bed; she had lately become so heavy that no one could lift her unaided. Then, after the maid’s departure, my father gently undressed his wife, gave her the bed-pan and made her comfortable – as they say in hospitals – for the night. Once she had been placed in a lying position she could move only her head so it was essential that she should be left completely relaxed. To achieve this, with the aid of strategically placed cushions under her locked knee-joints and ankles, involved much patient effort on my father’s part – and much fortitude on my mother’s, since at this stage of her disease every movement was painful. To me, of course, the whole thing was routine; if I chanced to waken I remarked neither my father’s patience nor my mother’s fortitude.

One night, not long before Christmas, loud sobs came from my mother instead of the usual subdued chit-chat about Thomas Aquinas or Balzac or whoever. Confusedly I diagnosed another nightmare; then I woke fully and accepted that this was reality. After a moment my mother began to talk fast, in an unfamiliar, blurred voice, and very cautiously I peeped out from beneath the blankets. She was virtually unrecognisable: flushed, incoherent and – this was the dreadful thing, unimaginable yet true – not in control of herself.

It was as though the mountains had toppled into the valley or the sun fallen out of the sky. I must somewhere have seen somebody drunk; at all events, I knew what was wrong. But this did not help. How could my own mother, the very epitome of composure, have been reduced to such ignominy within the few hours since I had kissed her good-night?

My first positive reaction, after those worse-than-nightmare moments of fear, bewilderment and grief, was a determination that my mother must never know that I had witnessed what seemed to me her degradation. I could see no meaning in such hideous chaos. But I was convinced that for her to know that I knew would compound the degradation. And though I abhorred this travesty of what I honoured, I did most keenly feel compassion.

At first my compassion was perhaps no more than a reflection of what I had seen on my father’s face as he bent over his wife that night. But it soon became a great deal more. My mother drunk was a goddess with feet of clay, and viewing her as a demoted deity ultimately strengthened both my love and my respect. Inflexibly stiff upper lips can stunt sympathy within a family. Had I never glimpsed my mother with her defences down I might never have been able to measure the demands made hourly on her courage.

Next morning all seemed as usual though my unfortunate mother must have been feeling very unusual. My father knew that I had been awake and no doubt considered discussing the psychology of what had so disturbed me. He could easily have made me understand that what I had seen was not in the circumstances abnormal, however regrettable. Yet more than our personal barrier prevented any such discussion. We would both have felt disloyal and thus, for me, one tension would have replaced another. Probably my father appreciated this; and the avoidance 
of a subject which distressed us both came to form between us one more subtly strong bond of unacknowledged intimacy.

I never again – during childhood – saw my mother drunk; but throughout the following weeks I waited uneasily, night after night, for the horror to recur. Even after my return to my own bedroom in February I remained on the alert and every few months, over the next year or so, I knew the horror was happening. By the end of that time it had become a grief rather than a horror because pity had replaced incomprehension and disillusion. Then gradually I realised that a battle had been won and that I need not be anxious any more.

What was the battle? What combination of stresses forced my mother to seek a release incompatible with her character if not with her heredity? The greater part of her life was of course one unending battle and of its phases and inner agonies I know almost nothing; I never had that insight into her nature which I had into my father’s. Only her husband knew and this was as it should have been. But now, looking back and guessing as one might guess about some figure in history, I would say that at this time my mother was feeling especially acutely her inability to have another child.

Also, what had by then become the problem of my education was beginning to cause a rift – if that is not too strong a word – between my parents. I was to have gone away to school in September 1942; for as long as I could remember that date had been fixed in my mind. Yet in December 1943 I was still at home – aged twelve – because the servant crisis had become chronic. This grievously worried my father. My mother also was concerned, as she was soon to prove, but by temperament she was not a worrier. Moreover, she attached less importance than my father did to the academic education of girls; and she had already assessed my potential accurately enough to know that I would never shine very brightly in the intellectual firmament, whatever opportunities were given me. Thus my parents were no longer in perfect agreement, as parents, and this, added to the strains of our everyday life at the time, must have affected their whole relationship.

By Christmas 1943 my own feelings about the situation were mixed. I dreaded another bout of homesickness yet had come to regard
boarding-school
not only as a glamorous adventure but as an escape from my 
domestic duties. For almost two years I had been acting as general servant, under my mother’s direction, during the – lengthening – intervals between maids; and it had been conclusively proved that I was devoid of whatever virtues and talents go to make a good housewife. My duties were of course limited: I shopped, cooked, washed up and lit the fires. Nobody cleaned, except at weekends, when my father abstractedly pushed an Electrolux over the more obvious floor surfaces. Luckily he enjoyed cooking and was good at it, even under Emergency conditions, so we had edible meals at weekends. But from everyone’s point of view these maidless interludes were trying.

As fuel and power were strictly limited all our cooking had to be done on two tiny electric rings in a damp kitchen that throughout the winter felt colder than out-of-doors. If both rings were used simultaneously livid blue flames leaped from the wall and the whole house was used. As electric elements could not be replaced, my father improvised repairs of which he was very proud. Inordinately proud, my mother thought, since his ingenuity had rendered our rings potentially lethal. We then had to emulate Cattie by always wearing Wellington boots while cooking.

Why do certain utterly insignificant moments stick in the memory? For some reason I distinctly remember standing in the kitchen wearing Wellingtons and a heavy brown tweed overcoat and stirring a pot of chicken soup while reading
Clouds of Witness
. Household chores were not allowed to encroach unduly on the real business of life. By then I had long since perfected the art of peeling apples, scraping carrots or tailing sprouts without ever lifting my eyes from the page. But during very cold spells my mother insisted on my doing all ‘portable’ jobs, such as preparing vegetables, beside the feeble fire of damp turf that smouldered in the dining-room. This meant having improving books read to me while I scraped, peeled or chopped. I still associate the smell of celery with the storm that broke over Messalonghi – as described by André Maurois – a few moments before Byron’s death.

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.