Wheels Within Wheels (18 page)

We never went away for Christmas or had anyone to stay and there were no treats like going to the pantomime. At noon on Christmas Day Mrs Mansfield and her brother came by different routes for a drink and sat at opposite ends of the room affecting to be unaware of each other’s presence. Mrs Mansfield always proudly presented us with one of her own plum-puddings and my mother always evinced suspiciously eloquent gratitude. This gift was discreetly passed on to the Wren Boys who called in their droves on St Stephen’s Day. Although those were delicious puddings – I often ate their litter-brothers when visiting Mrs Mansfield – it was common knowledge that San Toy actively participated in his mistress’s washing-up and, as her scullery was ill-lit, my mother
thought it hideously probable that many of the dishes attended to by San Toy never found their way into the sink. I failed to see why that mattered, after eight hours’ boiling, but my mother’s approach to hygiene was more emotional than scientific.

Our Christmasses, then, had always been times of contentment rather than excitement. And when that contentment evaporated for me, after my first term at school, nothing remained to distinguish Christmas beyond a lot of extra hard work in the kitchen. I tried to conceal my new anti-Christmas sentiments and never hinted that I would have preferred to celebrate by going off for a day’s solitary cycling. Just as I had earlier felt obliged to pretend to believe in Santa Claus, lest adult feelings might be hurt, so now I felt obliged to pretend to be enjoying our modest festivities. I knew, however, that my mother sensed and was saddened by my new indifference to the old traditions. And I also knew that her own enjoyment was marred by my having to act as general maid instead of being a schoolgirl on holidays. Yet she tried to conceal this regret, perhaps prompted by some irrational guilt, or feeling that since nothing could be done to improve my lot it would be psychologically unwise to offer sympathy. Now I can see that those three weeks contained the seeds of much that later went wrong between us.

Rather to our surprise, Molly’s ‘youngest sister’ did arrive in the new year carrying all her possessions on her back in a sack smelling strongly of poultry droppings. She never made any secret of the fact that she was Molly’s illegitimate daughter and she looked like a slim edition of her mother. Her name was Brid, which is pronounced ‘Breed’. My mother said ‘I hope she doesn’t’, but in due course she did. After what my parents delicately assumed to have been a spontaneous abortion she developed ‘an affec’ for my mother. This, in mild forms, was not uncommon amongst our adolescent skivvies, but Brid’s devotion was so excessive that she had to be forcibly restrained from spending all her wages (£1 a month) on such votive offerings as bull’s-eyes and liquorice allsorts. But these developments were all in the future when I repacked my suitcase on January 12 and said goodbye to my mother in the kitchen where she was explaining the function of a casserole to an incredulous-looking Brid.

I was glad of Brid’s presence during that brief farewell. My new antagonism towards my mother had in no way diminished my love for her – only my ability to express it. The sadness of this parting was quite unlike my straightforward loneliness of the previous September. Now I was eager to get back to school and I grieved not because the holidays had ended but because they had fallen so far short of expectations. Instead of enjoying a happy reunion I had lived – without then realising it – through the prelude to an eighteen-year conflict.

Even more distressing, at a deeper level, was my new, mute sympathy for my father’s situation. Throughout the holidays I had seen him working hard, in the evenings and at weekends, on the translation of some French theological tome. And I was shattered by the significance of this not unsuccessful attempt to fatten the family purse. For as long as I could remember my father had been writing novels, and paying precious money to have them typed, and sending them to publishers, and bearing up when they were rejected. In recent years I had sometimes thought vaguely that his apprenticeship was being rather long. Yet I had never doubted that one day a typescript would be accepted, putting me in the gratifying position of having as father An Author. (Why I should have assumed his ultimate success, when I felt no such confidence about my own literary future, is not now clear to me.) Therefore his becoming a mere translator was to me a grievous personal disappointment, quite apart from the sorrow I felt on his behalf. And my understanding that he had awakened from a dream was illogically made even more painful by the fact that those hours previously spent on enjoyable if unprofitable novel writing were now being spent on hack-work to pay my
school-fees
. I felt sorry for my mother, too. All her married life she had been encouraging and guiding my father’s endeavours with endless patience and tact: and presumably with a certain amount of hope.

Nor would such hope have been unjustified. After my parents’ deaths I found all those typescripts in a tea-chest, under a neat file of kindly rejection slips. I looked through them – feeling ridiculously uncomfortable, as though I were eaves-dropping on a soliloquy – and was amazed equally by the interest of their irrelevant philosophical asides and by their complete lack of basic narrative skill. Had my father not been so single-minded about writing novels he might have made quite
a good essayist – though possibly not a publishable one, in an age when essays are (one hopes temporarily) out of fashion.

As my father and I stood waiting on the station platform, awkwardly exchanging banalities, I felt his inner defeat as keenly as though it had been my own. And I longed to be able to convey, however indirectly, my understanding and sympathy. But we were too aware of each other’s moods and reactions to be of any mutual comfort. We knew that we were uniquely vulnerable to each other’s perceptions and both of us were too proud and too reserved ever to let the barriers go down.

The train was full of children returning to Waterford schools in
self-segregated
groups. I joined the Ursuline coach and remained by the door to wave dutifully to my father. When he was out of sight I felt oddly
released
; yet I did not immediately merge with the rest, much as I had been looking forward to rejoining my friends. Suddenly, for the first time, I was aware of myself as an outsider. Neither at home nor at school did I quite fit in. That is one of the moments I remember with a vividness which has never faded. I was staring fixedly at the Round Hill – an ancient, tree-covered fortification from which Lismore takes its name – and I felt not at all upset by this recognition of my own apartness. Neither did I see it as anything to be smug about; but I was interested in it, because it seemed to presage numerous as yet indefinable threats and promises. Then as the train changed its tune, on the bridge across the Blackwater at Cappoquin, I changed my mood and went swaying up the corridor to join my classmates.

It was true that at school I remained always, though not obviously, an outsider. Yet that interlude away from home was immensely important to me. Lacking it, I would have grown up with my social adaptability untested and my knowledge of human nature derived mainly from books. And, as T. S. Eliot observed, ‘It is simply not true that works … depicting … imaginary human beings
directly
extend our knowledge of life. Direct knowledge of life is knowledge directly in relation to ourselves, it is our knowledge of
how
people behave in general, of
what
they are like in general, in so far as that part of life in which we ourselves have participated gives us material for generalisation.’ What I most appreciated about school was the access it gave me to this ‘direct
knowledge of life’. I revelled in analysing my schoolmates’ characters, observing how they reacted on each other, speculating about why they were as they were – in other words, wondering what made them tick, as Mr Eliot would not have said. To me the works of Pope were as yet a closed book but I arrived independently at one of his most celebrated conclusions:

Academically I was backward because sheer laziness deterred me from using what was in any case a fairly limited intelligence. But my early sharing in adult problems and responsibilities had made me, emotionally, unusually mature and this ‘grownupness’ prompted many of my classmates (all of whom, apart from Sally, were my seniors) to treat me as an older sister. Thus my study of mankind flourished because I received numerous confidences which enabled me to discern the reality behind various elaborate adolescent façades. Having been brought up to regard the breaking of confidences as a gross dishonour I never felt tempted to gossip about other people’s secrets, even with Sally, and eventually I established quite a reputation as a restorer of damaged friendships – no doubt because my amateur psychoanalysing helped me to see where things had gone wrong though neither of those concerned might know exactly why they had quarrelled.

There were other problems, too – parents who didn’t get on, delinquent brothers, family debts. (Thus I learned that the price of a yacht could be peace of mind.) And early one summer morning another thirteen-
year-old
came creeping into my cubicle and stood, trembling all over, by my bed. ‘I think I’m bleeding to death,’ she whispered. ‘My sheets are all soaked in blood – will you tell the dormitory sister? Will they put me in hospital? Will Daddy and Mummy come?’ Visiting each other’s cubicles was so strictly forbidden that even I had never broken this rule, but now I was too angry – with Eileen’s mother – to care. I gave the semihysterical child a few sanitary towels and a brief lecture on menstruation and led her back to her bloody bed. She was the eighth child of a Dublin doctor and it appalled me that she should have been sent off to school unaware of the facts of puberty. I pitied her all the more when I recalled
my own experience – rushing into my parents’ bedroom early one morning waving a pair of bloody pyjama-trousers and yelling triumphantly, ‘Look! I’m a woman now!’

At least amongst my age group, sex was not in those days a popular topic. Twice I was questioned, tentatively, about my theory of the origins of babies, and on both occasions I replied shortly, ‘Ask your mother.’ This instinctive reluctance to discuss the subject marked my own growing-up. Two years earlier I would gaily have described what I knew of the whole process, from conception to delivery, to anyone who showed an interest. But now I felt – I could not have said why – that it was a special subject, needing to be treated with reticence and reverence and not suitable for schoolgirlish chatterings. Today there can be few thirteen-year-olds unaware of the facts of life; but I find it sad that this knowledge is being spread in ways that erode reticence and reverence. However wisely or foolishly modern parents treat
sex-education
, the sort of innocence my generation knew has by now become an emotional impossibility. This realisation disturbs me when I look at my own daughter. A time of innocence is surely a prerequisite for the total experience, in young adulthood, of the ecstasy of erotic love. What has never been possessed can never be gloriously lost.

Despite her little misadventure in April, Brid coped unexpectedly well with the Murphy ménage. When the holidays began in mid-June she was still worshipping my mother and had even become quite a passable cook.

Pappa’s health was now causing some concern and to our sorrow he cancelled his Lismore vacation for the first time. It was then decided that I should spend July in Dublin, staying with relatives and visiting him regularly. This pleased me immensely – and not only because taking the train for Dublin alone, with my bicycle in the luggage-van, made me feel splendidly emancipated. Attached as I was to Lismore, I was very aware of being a Dubliner by heredity. Before the Emergency we had gone to Dublin every month for a long weekend and always, as we approached the city, one part of me felt that it was coming home. As an individual I belonged to Lismore, but as a social unit I belonged – and perhaps still belong – to Dublin. My relatives and their friends saw me as the cousin up from the country, a gauche and rather curious creature who dressed abominably and knew nothing about the theatre or the latest films or the feuding and gossiping of the literary world. Yet as I cycled about the city I felt completely at home. I was moving among familiar ghosts – not only those of my biological ancestors, but also those of my cultural forbears. That was what was missing in Lismore; there the ghosts were unfamiliar.

The contemporary Dublin scene never greatly interested me. What I enjoyed was cycling down Dorset Street and remembering that Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born at No. 12 – and thinking of him again as I cycled up Grafton Street, where he attended ‘The Seminary for the Instruction of Youth’ run by Samuel Whyte, the natural son of his grand-uncle. Pedalling through the Liberties I would wonder if Swift had really been born at 7 Hoey’s Court. And in Fishamble Street I remembered that James Clarence Mangan had lived there above his father’s grocery-shop, just as Tom Moore lived above
his
father’s grocery-shop in Aungier Street. Then there was 21 Westland Row, where Oscar Wilde – my mother’s most beloved, if not most admired, writer –
was born; his father and my mother’s grandfather had been close friends. And Lower Sackville Street I associated with Shelley, who once lodged at No. 7 and tossed from the balcony to the street below numerous copies of his pamphlet, ‘An Address to the Irish People’. At Templeogue I thought of Thackeray being entertained by Charles Lever, to whom
The Irish Sketch Book
was dedicated. And when I stayed at 3 Orwell Park, Rathgar, with my mother’s eldest brother, I was living in a house very familiar to Synge; his maternal grandmother, Mrs Traill, had lived there, and when his father died of smallpox his mother moved to No. 4 with her infant son. Then, when I went on to stay with my mother’s only sister, at 25 Coulson Avenue, Rathgar, I was conscious of the friendly ghost of George William Russell (A. E.). For some years after his marriage, A. E. lived in that cosy little redbrick house. And in August 1902, late one night, he came walking home to find a tall young man leaning against the railings of No. 25, waiting for him. He had never before met James Joyce, yet he at once invited him into the square, low-ceilinged sitting-room where I spent so many childhood hours; and there they talked until 4.00 am – a conversation that sparked off
Dubliners
.

All my savings were spent in the intoxicating second-hand bookshops along the quays, to which I had been introduced by Pappa even before I could read. But what gave Dublin its special significance were the scores of tiny family links, stretching back for generations, with almost every district of the South Side. (One rarely penetrated very far into the North Side, which was understood to be alien territory.) Yet Dublin was never necessary to me, as Lismore has always been. It seemed a pleasant diversion – a place where for short periods one could enjoy feeling nostalgic – but its urban attractions never exercised any magnetism. Now I rarely visit the city, which has been so degraded by developers that I could weep at every corner. But my dependence on Lismore has increased with the years. Something inside me would wither and die should circumstances ever compel me to uproot from the Blackwater Valley.

During that sunny July – it must have rained sometimes, but I recall only sunshine – I cycled out to Seapoint every day, with a covey of
cousins, to bathe and play water-polo. I also saw a lot of Sally, who lived within walking distance of all my relatives’ homes, and I was deeply disappointed when – ostensibly because of her mother’s ill-health – she declined my invitation to spend August in Lismore. Years later she confessed that she hadn’t really wanted to accept. Being an orthodox Dubliner – not a maverick like my parents – she dreaded moving too far away from the city.

For a fortnight I imagined myself to be everlastingly in love with a tall, dark, handsome cousin who claimed to be writing an epic poem and went into appropriate trances at mealtimes. The fact that he was about to enter a Jesuit seminary surrounded my passion with an aura of poignant tragedy. But I was not really made of languishing material and within days of my returning home he had been virtually forgotten.

The first three weeks of August passed very agreeably. I had dozens of newly acquired books to read and Mark was spending his vacation at home. Then Fate hit us below the belt. Suddenly the reason for Brid’s mysterious contentment was revealed; she had been furtively (and fruitfully) walking out with the butcher’s boy and on September 1 they were to marry. Consternation ensued. On September 10 I was to return to school, and what to do?

My parents soon came to their decision. Back to school I must go and they – always hoping for another Brid, if possible not quite so fruitful – would manage somehow. It was a brave decision, though many thought a foolish one. For my mother it involved remaining alone in the house, in bed, from 9.45 am until 1.15 pm and from 2.15 until 5.45. And she could not even switch the wireless on and off, or reach out to pick up a glass of water, or blow her nose. Moreover, she had a phobia about fire – a result of a nursery accident when she was three and a half which badly burned her eighteen-months-old brother. Since becoming an invalid she had fussed about only one thing – never being alone in the house for more than ten or fifteen minutes. Yet now, for my sake (or was it really for my father’s sake?), she was prepared to overcome even this terror; and she approached the overcoming of it with characteristic common sense and resolution. No fire would be lit in her room until the evening and no heating would be left on anywhere in the house. Instead, she would sit up in bed, wrapped in layers of woollen shawls and surrounded
by hot-water bottles, with only her tiny, deformed hands exposed so that by patiently manipulating two knitting needles she could turn the pages of the book poised above her knees on its specially made
book-rest
. Her window would be left open, whatever the weather, so that in case of fire – for instance, if one of the household’s many rats gnawed through an electric wire – she could attempt to summon help. And her liquid intake would be carefully controlled in accordance with the hours when a bedpan would be available.

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.