Wheels Within Wheels (5 page)

Clearly Pappa enjoyed letter-writing. A midsummer day’s solitary walking and trout-fishing in the familiar Wicklow mountains could spark off a thousand-word lyrical description of the landscape, the birds and the ever-changing Irish sky. And a sunny autumn afternoon spent strolling with Mamma around Lucan and the Leixlip demesne inspired at least another thousand words. Until reading these letters I had not fully appreciated how easy it was for Dubliners of that period to enjoy as much of country life as was desired. For a keen hiker, miles of untouched countryside were within walking distance of Rathgar – as was the sea, for a keen swimmer like Pappa.

In the autumn of 1922 my father left for Paris, to begin his studies at the Sorbonne, and he spent the next seven years in France. Money was so scarce that he only rarely returned home; most of his vacations were spent tutoring the two sons of a Russian émigré duke in the South of France. Unfortunately no correspondence has survived from those years – until 1928, when on July 9 Pappa wrote a long letter, liberally scattered with quotations from Julius Caesar and Shakespeare, in response to my father’s decision to become a Benedictine monk. In the end he expresses no opinion but concludes, tantalisingly, ‘I have a hundred things to say but it is just post-time so I shall wait till tomorrow.’ Reading between the lines, however, one discerns disapproval. And there is an unwonted acidity in the last paragraph – ‘Fondest love from your mother. Send her a little note for herself – why have I to suggest this? Does your love for her not prompt it?’

If Pappa at once doubted the genuineness of his son’s vocation he was 
quite right. The next letter to have survived was written only nine months later, on March 20, 1929, in response to my father’s decision to marry a nineteen-year-old Swedish girl who was studying at the Sorbonne under the eagle eye of an aunt-chaperon. My father appears to have detested this aunt even more than he detested the English – and with good reason. She threatened to call in the police after her niece had spent a day at Versailles – without permission – in the company of a penniless Irishman.

This romance provoked Pappa to write a full-blown Victorian homily:

What happened next? Did the formidable aunt win? (I cannot imagine my father – however much in love – withstanding such a female for long.) Or, when the novelty had worn off, did the nineteen-year-old bombshell lose interest in her Irish suitor – so shy, impractical and
inexperienced in the arts of love? Or did my father take fright, upon reading Pappa’s homily, and decide that the responsibilities of marriage would prove too taxing? Whatever happened, he was home for Christmas that year – unmarried and unemployed – and he never returned to France. In January 1930 he began a six-month Library Diploma course at University College Dublin, in April he met my mother again (they had last met three years previously and had known each other as children), in July he was appointed County Librarian for Waterford and in August he and my mother announced their engagement.

At that time Ireland’s Civil War was not long over and the families of Dublin were still angrily arrayed on either side of an ugly barrier. How ugly may be gauged by a remark made on July 29, 1927, when my father’s brother Conn wrote from Ontario: ‘Congratulations on getting your finals. I am quite enjoying the experience of sailing on the Great Lakes. I saw in the papers here that Kevin O’Higgins has been shot dead – damn near time – the sooner they shoot a few more like him the better. The Canadian papers described him as a martyr but they had to admit he was the best hated man in Ireland.’ Kevin O’Higgins was one of the finest Irishmen of his generation – but he was a Free Stater, and the Murphys were Republicans.

My parents’ engagement therefore represented a considerable
mésalliance
, between the son of a rabidly Republican family and the daughter of a mildly Unionist family. But to give my paternal grandparents their due, they saw the point of the marriage within moments of being
introduced
to my mother. By then she – being totally apolitical – had
cheerfully
adopted a diluted form of Republicanism to meet the situation.

In general, however, the two families were never more than distantly polite. To my father’s family, my mother’s relations were not only politically corrupt but barbarously unlearned, hard-drinking, irreligious, foppish and extravagant. To my mother’s family, my father’s relations were not only politically irresponsible but feckless, bigoted, prudish and riddled with intellectual pretensions that never came to anything. Happily these prejudices left me unaffected. I grew up fond of both families, unquestioningly accepting their covert mutual hostility as a fact of Irish life.

In November 1936 my father at last found a house to rent at a price we could afford. It was on the South Mall, Lismore’s most respectable street, but the dwelling itself was so irreparably decrepit that no modern squatter would stay there overnight. Short of a leaking roof, it suffered from every defect buildings are heir to and, for the next twenty-one years, it decayed – usually quietly, but occasionally dramatically – about our ears. Dating from the 1820s, it was two-storeyed, semi-detached and covered in Virginia creeper. The fanlight and wooden porch were attractive, a pair of romantic stone urns graced the front garden and overgrown fuchsia-bushes billowed on either side of the hall door. The well-proportioned rooms had good marble mantelpieces and mock-Adam ceilings and the wide hall was tiled in cream and dull red – pleasant, old-fashioned, indestructible tiles. However, some past tenant with execrable taste had left the whole place superficially hideous. The hall was painted a dead laurel green, only relieved by irregular patches of yellow-grey mildew where the plaster had fallen off. (For years I was fascinated by those patches, seeing them as maps of undiscovered countries.) The staircase was covered with cracked red and blue
linoleum
which ill-matched the magnificent mahogany banisters. Upstairs were five rooms: three large bedrooms, a boxroom which became my playroom and another large room, complete with fireplace, which at some remote period had been converted into a bathroom. The bath stood on four gigantic iron lion’s paws and resembled a modern child’s swimming-pool. It was patriotically stained green and orange and had a shower-device, of considerable antiquarian interest, near the ceiling. This had become viciously perverted and it sprayed, with tremendous force, only onto the opposite wall. When my father had forgotten to warn three successive guests he put up a notice saying ‘Please do not touch’. The lavatory also had its notice, to explain that the chain needed three morse-like pulls: long-short-long. The wash-basin could almost have been used as a bath and was without a plug: apparently none to fit it had been manufactured since the turn of the century. Had my father
exerted himself he could, at the cost of a few pence, have remedied this and many other defects. But the idea of personally improvising a
washbasin
plug – or anything else – would never have entered his mind and he judged our numerous discomforts too trivial to warrant expensive expert attention.

Throughout the house we found peeling beige woodwork and
wallpaper
that had faded to a uniform grey-brown. Everywhere the paper was coming unstuck and in the dining-room rats had eaten through it at  several points, thus demonstrating the fragility of the basic structure. Dry-rot afflicted the floor boards and some other sort of rot caused the ground-floor ceilings to snow gently if anyone walked about too vigorously overhead. This perhaps explains why I have always moved rather lightly for one of my build.

At the end of the hall a semi-glazed door led to a narrow, dark, flagged passage with ominously bulging henna-distempered walls. Having passed a storeroom, a pantry and a larder one entered the kitchen. Here sly draughts sneaked up from damp non-foundations through gaps between ancient flags, and blatant draughts whined through the slits between rotting window frames and rattling panes. The roughly plastered walls were an evil shade of green and a temperamental coal-range stood in an alcove. A row of discoloured pewter bells hung high above the door; in our day these never responded to the relevant buttons being pushed but they emitted ghostly chimes when gales blew. A dozen iron hooks depended from the rafters – ‘The better to hang yourself on, my dear,’ observed my mother as she toured her new home. In one corner a steep ladder-stairs led through a trap-door to an attic where the servants would have slept in the Bad Old Days. An adult could stand upright only in the middle of the attic floor and this retreat soon became one of my Private Paradises.

Behind the house were several collapsing stables and, beyond a wide cobbled yard, stood Lismore’s recently opened cinema, the property of our landlord, who lived next door. It was enormous and no one could tell us what purpose it had originally served; it may have been a series of barns whose internal walls had been demolished. Mercifully our landlord did not prosper as a film-wallah and within a few years the local doctor had built a new ‘Palladium’. Then the old cinema became another of my
Private Paradises; in semi-darkness I leapt from row to row of moth-eaten red plush seats, being pursued by imaginary cannibals and collecting swarms of real fleas. These were not found tolerable by my mother, even when identified by me as rare tropical insects picked up while exploring in New Guinea.

Beyond the cinema were our garden and orchard, half an acre of wilderness which, despite consistent neglect, provided us for many years with an abundance of loganberries, gooseberries, apples and pears. At intervals my mother would remark on the advantages of growing one’s own vegetables. Then my father would borrow some implements and might on the following Saturday be observed reclining beside a minute pile of cut brambles reading Plato’s
Theaetetus
or the latest Dorothy Sayers. Like myself, he lacked the urge to cultivate. Our genes have perhaps resisted change since the Age of the Gatherers.

Although our new home was very nearly a ruin we tolerated it for the next twenty-one years. My mother must have abhorred these slum-like surroundings but she refrained, as always, from complaining about the inevitable. For a rent of ten shillings a week one couldn’t, even in Lismore in the 1930s, expect very much.

The rent was so low not only because of the house’s dilapidation but because of the previous tenant’s suicide in the dining-room. This snag considerably influenced my destiny since it made it far harder to engage local maidservants, or to persuade those who came from a distance to remain in residence. It was not that any ghost operated – at least to our knowledge – but the neighbourhood vociferously believed that a suicide without a consequent haunting was against nature.

As a child I always knew there was nothing to spare for non-essentials. But I was never hungry or cold so it did not occur to me to interpret this condition as poverty. Nor did I ever long for the unobtainable, with one spectacular exception – a pony of my own. And since that desire so clearly belonged to the realm of fantasy it caused me no discontent. In Dublin I enjoyed the luxury toys of my cousins – rocking-horses, tricycles, pedal motor cars and the like – yet I never asked or even wished for such things. They belonged to another sort of person who lived in another sort of world. And it was not a world I should have cared to inhabit permanently. It had no rivers, fields, woods, moors and mountains.

When we moved to the South Mall Nora was replaced by Old Brigid, a formidable character who for the next three years – scornful of ghosts – impassively controlled the whole peculiar Murphy establishment. It cannot have been easy to contend with a disintegrating house, an invalid mistress, a chronically vague master and a nasty child. Old Brigid,
however
, took the lot in her slow, purposeful stride. When the foul-looking sink came adrift from the wall she said nothing to my mother but fetched the plumber, a man who normally took weeks to answer any summons but who meekly accompanied Old Brigid to the scene of the disaster. When my mother needed some attention as lunch was being prepared the attention was promptly provided but the meal was never late or
ill-cooked
. When my father wandered off to the Library one morning wearing his dressing-gown and slippers Old Brigid pursued him, looking reproving but resigned, and handed him his jacket and shoes halfway down the Main Street. When I staged a tantrum because I could not have everything exactly as and when I wanted it Old Brigid said, ‘Now, Miss Dervla, I’ll have no more of that nonsense –
if
you please!’ And the tantrum stopped.

Despite her surface severity – or because of it? – I loved Old Brigid dearly. She always wore an ankle-length blue and white check cotton dress and a large starched white linen apron, without spot or stain. Every afternoon, while boiling the tea kettle, she also heated a ponderous iron on the hot coals, carefully placed it on its tin tray and ironed the next day’s aprons. She was small and stout, with grey hair in a neat bun and shiny red cheeks and sharp bristles on her chin. In 1936 she was sixty-five and had been fifty-three years in the service of a Tipperary family whose last representative had left her an adequate annuity; but she found idleness uncongenial. Since we paid her two pounds a month she must have regarded the Murphys as a hobby.

Every morning Old Brigid bathed me at seven o’clock because the range idiosyncratically refused to provide hot water in the evening. Then she took me into the dark airing cupboard, which was considerably larger than the average modern bathroom, and told me fairy stories while drying me beside the gurgling, gleaming bulk of a gigantic copper boiler. I listened politely, concealing my bored disbelief. I had faith in only one fairy, Mr Dumbly-Doo, who was exactly my own 
height and wore silver boots and red leather breeches and a green silk shirt and a black velvet jacket and a gold brocade tricorn hat. A creation of my father – with acknowledgements to the leprechaun industry – Mr Dumbly-Doo occasionally left a mint-new penny under a certain stone beside a certain stile along a certain laneway. (I cherished these coins for their red-gold rather than for their purchasing power – though in those days that was considerable.) He did none of the exasperating things common to fairies in stories and since my father did not elaborate on his life style I was free to do so myself without feeling the victim of adult condescension.

This wary attitude towards fairy tales was part of my unremitting struggle against grown-up power. Despite the affectionate understanding provided by my parents, in their very different ways, I tensely suspected the adult world of some sinister conspiracy to make me conform. I could not have felt more fiercely about this had my parents been models of conservatism instead of the individualists they were.

Yet for all my rejection of the standard fairy tales I needed a fantasy escape hatch even more than most children do. So I created my own intricate world of magic animals and omnipotent teddy-bears. A family of the latter, comprising four generations, lived in the branches of my favourite tree – a superb elm, some 120 feet tall and reckoned to be more than 400 years old. Under that tree I spent countless hours, at all seasons, totally absorbed in the bears’ doings and in their dramatic personality clashes. Each one had a clearly defined character and in time they came to seem quite independent of my controlling
imagination
. For a few years they – and their tree – meant more to me than any human friend.

That elm grew (and mercifully still grows) in the dense, dim wood which rises steeply from the Blackwater just west of Lismore Castle. The path leading down to it was an exciting tunnel through thick
undergrowth
. All around the other trees were old and tall, though dwarfed by its prodigious girth and height. Long before I had ever heard of pantheists, druids or sacred groves I used to stand at the foot of this elm, pressing with outstretched arms against its vastness, fingering its rough bark and looking up in reverence at the endless ramifications of its mighty branches. I was never to feel anything comparable under the 
influence of orthodox religious stimulants. But does it matter how we worship, if we worship?

All this of course took place only after I had been given licence to roam alone, at the age of seven. But long before that my chief amusement was telling myself interminable convoluted stories – if ‘amusement’ is the right word. The longing to be alone with the denizens of my imagination was so intense, and the amount of time I devoted to them so abnormal, that one of my father’s sisters – a child psychologist – became seriously alarmed during a visit to Lismore.

No doubt there was something neurotic about my elated relief as I escaped to the garden or the attic, and about the anger I felt when interrupted by the necessity to eat, or go for a walk, or learn my lessons. I often looked forward to bedtime. Lying happily taut under the blankets, with my eyes shut and my imaginative throttles wide open, I was at last safe from adult interference. I well remember the physical symptoms of excitement during those sessions: my heart hammering, my fists clenching and unclenching, my face contorted as I rapidly muttered the latest instalment,
sotto voce
. No wonder my aunt, who had doubtless contrived to spy on a daytime session, felt concerned.

My mother, however, insisted that I was suffering from nothing more than a lively imagination. On principle she tended
not
to agree with her sister-in-law, who was very close to my father. And in this case she may have realised that my fantasy-world was a not unhealthy form of escapism. At some level I must have been aware of the domestic stresses and strains; and futile efforts to understand and adjust to them would have done me much more harm than my withdrawal into the company of golden calves, silver goats and arboreal teddy-bears.

As I seem always to have known the facts of life I assume they were simply absorbed from my mother during that phase of obsessional questioning when everything in nature arouses a child’s curiosity. I therefore find it hard to understand the difficulties that even in this explicit age are said to surround basic sex instruction by parents. It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.

By the age of six I was a proficient and dedicated masturbator and 
someone – probably Old Brigid – had infected me with an acute guilt complex about this hobby. So I consulted my mother, who said the activity in question was certainly not a matter to
worry
about. It was a babyish habit and quite soon I would grow out of it – just as I had grown out of wetting my bed. These remarks must have had the intended effect. Guilt evaporated and in time the ‘babyish’ habit was superseded by more cerebral sexual interests centred on scientific investigations of the male anatomy.