Wheels Within Wheels (23 page)

From Flanders I cycled to Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels, Luxemburg, Maastricht, Aachen, Bonn and so up the Rhine – which greatly
disappointed
me – to Mainz. There I spent a weekend with the
Hilckmanns
, whom we were to have visited in August 1939. Then on to Heidelberg, Rothenburg, Biberach, Regensburg, Creglingen (where Riemenschneider’s Marienaltar excited me more than anything else on this trip), Munich, the Black Forest, Strasbourg and across central France. In Paris I spent four days feeling euphoric, except when I was kidnapped one night by White Slavers in the Place de la Concorde on my way back from the Opera to my left-bank doss-house.

It was midnight as I crossed the Place de la Concorde and when a large car pulled up just ahead of me I ignored it, assuming that some lustful male was in search of willing prey. Then a pleasant-looking woman beckoned me and, speaking in English with only a slight accent, warned me that it is very dangerous for girls to walk alone in Paris after midnight. ‘Where are you staying?’ she asked. ‘You are taking a terrible risk. My husband and I would like to take you to your hotel.’ I was too touched by this solicitude to point out that I
enjoyed
walking around Paris in the middle of the night. And because it would have seemed churlish to refuse such a kind offer I slipped into the back seat, explaining that I was lodging just off the Rue St Jacques.

It struck me as rather odd that my protectress left the front seat to sit beside me, but I became suspicious only as we passed Notre Dame. As I began to protest that we had missed our turning my companion switched on an electric torch and opened a large photograph album which she laid on my knee. ‘Look at those, my dear,’ she said. ‘We’re just going to take you home for a little fun and a drink – some 
champagne, you would like? And then within an hour you shall be safely home in bed.’

While she was speaking I had been staring at the album with a mixture of horror, terror and nausea. I had never before seen pornographic photographs – or, indeed, even heard of them. Noticing my expression, the woman’s voice changed. ‘Look at me!’ she said sharply. I looked up at her and she ordered, ‘Keep on looking – don’t move!’ Terrified, I kept on looking; she was pointing one finger directly at my eyes and gazing fixedly at me by torchlight. When I realised that she was trying to hypnotise me I swung away and groped for the door-handle – though we had crossed the river and were travelling at some 40 mph up the Boulevard de la Bastille. Her voice changed again. ‘You mustn’t be afraid,’ she soothed. ‘We are going to have a nice party for only a little while. We are so fond of young people and we have no children for ourselves.’

I sat for a moment, calculating fast. If I tried to escape at this speed I would probably be killed. If I waited for the car to stop at its destination I would certainly be overpowered by both my captors. How often had I put the hero of an adventure story into just such a dilemma! But always I provided someone to rescue him – or at least staged an earthquake for the purpose – and there was no one to rescue me, nor any likelihood of an earthquake in Paris.

There were, however, two policemen standing in the Place de la République refereeing an argument between a taximan and his fare. As I reached again for the door-handle my ‘protectress’ grabbed me by the wrists. But at that age I had the strength of a young ox and very few women could have restrained me. Here we had to slow down almost to walking pace – traffic was streaming from the nearby railway stations – and when I had made it clear that I intended to escape the car stopped. As I scrambled out it half-turned and raced away down the Avenue de la République.

Had I been able to afford it I would have taken a taxi back to the Rue St Jacques because my legs felt extraordinarily wobbly. But I had just enough money left to keep me in food until I got home. So I walked, only pausing to buy a bottle of plonk for my nerves in an all-night
lorry-drivers
’ restaurant.

My landlady – whose mother had been for three years my father’s landlady – did not believe that the kidnappers were professional White Slavers. Had they been, she said, they would not have shown me ‘dirty pix’ – at least at that stage – and would have drugged me as soon as I entered the car. In her view they were one of the amateur gangs who had recently begun to operate to supply brothels in – of all places – Soviet Central Asia.

This was the first time I became aware of a curious personal inhibition which I have never been able to overcome. When we reached the Place de la République and I saw the policemen it would have been simpler to yell for help than to struggle to open the car door. But even had my situation been much more desperate I could not have done so. And in various other awkward situations I have experienced the same difficulty. Something very deeply rooted and stupid – I have no idea what it is – prevents me from calling out for help.

Paris inspired another long article, also published in
Hibernia
, which omitted the White Slavers but vainly tried to convey the enchantment of that city – an enchantment not at all dependent, it seemed to me, on the way its citizens treated visitors, yet potent enough to make one feel drunk on fresh air. (Which was just as well, because by the time I had got that far I could afford little else.)

This journey amazed our neighbours – mine was not a venturesome generation, as are the young of today – and it temporarily assuaged my wanderlust. Short trips to the continent were the most that could be expected of life so I derived the maximum satisfaction from the attainable and rarely, at this time, dwelt upon the unattainable. Yet down in the unconscious frustration and resentment must have been accumulating like pus. My lack of freedom inevitably galled more because I had proved how easy it was to travel very cheaply by bicycle, how little it mattered not being a linguist, how ready most people were to befriend a stranger and, above all, how well suited to wandering was my own temperament. Only domestic responsibilities stood between me and India.

While in Britain and abroad I had, out of curiosity, attended various non-Catholic services instead of going to Sunday Mass. This may not
seem world-shattering, but in an Irish Catholic context it is – even now, never mind a quarter of a century ago. My omission, if known
throughout
Lismore, would have revealed that I was at best Losing the Faith and probably had already lost it. As of course I had, without going through any phase of violent, scornful hostility towards Christianity, even in its Irish Catholic aspect. It was then, as it still is, my instinct to respect all religions and deprecate insults to any. But from the age of eighteen or nineteen I felt no further urge to solve the insoluble, or to belong to a community with common beliefs, or to worship in traditional ways. The untroubled conscience with which I ‘lost the faith’ perhaps explains my lack of hostility. It was an amicable arrangement, as far as God (or whatever) and I were concerned – for me a peaceful, natural and, in a sense, unimportant development. Irish Christianity is a peculiarly hypnotising and powerful force which can make many ‘deserters’ feel guilty, deep down, for a lifetime. But my parents had shielded me from the Church’s weapon of superstition and so, when the time came, I was free to ‘desert’ unscathed.

There was, however, a certain irony here. My parents, who had unwittingly shown me the easiest route out of the Church, would have been shattered to realise that I had taken it. So for a few years I continued to attend Sunday Mass in Lismore, this being the only positive action necessary to deceive – and protect – them. Going to Mass bored me but did not then represent any betrayal of my principles, as it might have done had I become a militant atheist. I would have preferred to avoid such hypocrisy, but as my motive was good my conscience for a time remained clear. Then – while in Germany, discussing Bonhoeffer in the Hilckmanns’ garden – this attitude changed. I came home convinced that it was wrong to use any religious service merely as a convenience, however worthy one’s motives, and I never again went to Mass in Lismore.

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?’