Life at Full Tilt E-Book
Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Between these covers we follow in the slipstream of the indefatigable Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy (1931–2022). Here we find descriptions of her beloved Afghanistan from her 1963 masterpiece Full Tilt, with accounts from the Peruvian Andes, of bicycling in South and East Africa and most recently of the journeys she made in the troubled territories of Palestine and Israel, published when she was eighty-five. Editor Ethel Crowley has dug into the archive to unearth her first published journalism – about her cycle through Spain in 1956 when she was just twenty-four – and has selected extracts from each of the twenty-four books which were to follow. Dervla's style of travel, to go somewhere that interested her and see who she met, made for fresh encounters every day, recorded faithfully each evening in her journal. She read hungrily to prepare for these journeys and folded her learning seamlessly into her books. What shines through is her passionate engagement both with those she encountered and the injustices they faced, and her utter independence of mind.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 492
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
LIFE AT FULL TILT
The Selected Writings of Dervla Murphy
Edited by Ethel Crowley
Foreword by Colin Thubron
Contents
Acknowledgements
This anthology has been a labour of love and I feel very privileged to have been in the position to create it with Eland Publishing.
My heartfelt thanks go first and foremost to Dervla Murphy herself and Rachel Murphy. The open-hearted trust they placed in me will stay with me forever. It was such a terrible shame that Dervla’s health went downhill so fast and she didn’t get to see it coming to fruition. She passed away in the early stages of its production. I had so many questions to ask her, in the process of compiling the book. I really hope she would have been happy with the result.
My thanks also to Rose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson for being so open to this idea and being such a pleasure to deal with in the process. They were always communicative, warm and professional. Thanks also to Stephanie Allen for being so friendly and encouraging along the way, and for her capable input on promoting the book. Thanks to Colin Thubron for his gracious foreword. Finally, thanks to Jim MacLaughlin, mi media naranja, for doing without me for long stretches of time while working on this and for his constant support.
Publisher’sAcknowledgements
For permission to reprint copyright material, grateful acknowledgement is due to Lilliput Press for material from Visiting Rwanda and John Murray for material from Eight Feet in the Andes, Through Siberia by Accident and Silverland.
Foreword
The intoxication of travel can become an end in itself. ‘I travel not to go anywhere, but to go,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. ‘I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’
Among modern adventurers this compulsion was famously exemplified by the intrepid Dervla Murphy. Few people, in any age, can have travelled a wider range of countries so arduously. It is possible to ascribe this passion to her mother’s immobility – crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and grounding her daughter as caregiver for sixteen frustrated years. More likely Dervla Murphy was born with wanderlust.
In her starkly reflective autobiography, Wheels within Wheels, she portrayed herself as a morose and sometimes insolent small girl, whose pleasures were the private ones of the imagination. An only child, she recounted to herself endless fanciful stories, and for years of make-believe the teddy bears inhabiting an elm tree in her parents’ garden developed uncontrollable characters of their own. In one of her earliest memories Murphy raged at other children intruding on the private magic she created.
Then, on her tenth birthday, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and ‘a few days later I decided to cycle to India’. The little girl saw nothing odd in this, but she kept silent about it to avoid the condescension of adults. Later she began obsessively reading a haphazard mélange of writers: Shelley, Fielding, George Eliot, Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Freya Stark.
On her mother’s death her repressed ambition burst into action, and she was off on her bike to India. The subsequent book, Full Tilt, made her name and became something of a template for the dauntless early travelogues that followed: in Nepal, Ethiopia, India, Kashmir, Peru.
In the galaxy of her travel-writing contemporaries, Dervla Murphy was unique. Not for her the literary manipulations or overwrought description (even fictionalising) of some more writerly writers. She wrote in a down-to-earth style, whose graphic poetry arose as if spontaneously from her subject. Her note-taking was done in diary form during her journeys, often in exacting surroundings, sitting on a sack in the Himalayas by candlelight, or sharing a teahouse floor with Afghan tribesmen.
Hardship came easily to her. She even exulted in it. ‘Soon I was discovering for myself that our real material needs are very few,’ she wrote, ‘and that the extras now presented as “needs” not only endanger true contentment but diminish our human dignity.’ Her Spartan travelling placed her beyond the reach of the tourism she hated and drew her closer to the hard lives around her. But solitude was vital. Her preferred transport was by foot, bike or package mule, and she refused guides or escorts. A delight in wilderness – in mountains above all – shines through her writing: ‘seeing only hoof prints in the dust, with all around the healing quiet of wild places’.
Over fifty years of travel the injuries she sustained, and the diseases she contracted, were stupendous. In a humorous passage in her Through Siberia by Accident she wryly listed them: amoebic dysentery, heatstroke, hepatitis, concussion and a fractured coccyx (in a car accident), a triple tooth abscess, a disabling scorpion bite, malaria, brucellosis, mumps, gout (from Madagascan alcohol), tick-bite fever. She survived at least five attempted robberies (two sadly successful), numerous rape attempts (unsuccessful), with multiple broken ribs, torn tendons and a fractured pelvis. Only after she was brutally robbed and lay sleepless in a vermin-infested Ethiopian hovel did she disclose that she crawled out shivering into the starlight, broken in spirit.
Yet within the paradigm that readers imagined there beat a complicated heart. The product of a remote father and a mother she heroine-worshipped, Dervla imagined that she inherited from her father ‘a certain shyness and gaucherie or tendency to self-effacement’. She recoiled from the publicity that attended her books’ publication, and was shy of public speaking. ‘Unwittingly,’ she wrote, ‘my mother gave me an inferiority complex I was never to outgrow.’ In her native Lismore she lived reclusively, eschewing creature comforts, even a television or washing machine, let alone a car.
But her sympathies and alertness to injustice grew ever more intense, and midway through her career political concerns brimmed into her books, sometimes replacing their raw adventure. An uncompromising and trenchant book on nuclear power was followed by destinations more immediately controversial than before: Northern Ireland, Romania (after Ceausescu’s execution), Rwanda (soon after the genocide), post-apartheid South Africa, Laos, Cuba, the tragedy-riven Balkans, and above all the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.
Some of her readers regretted her move away from pure adventure. Murphy acknowledged this, but was driven by deeper concerns. Her big-hearted outrage at political corruption and blindness overpowered all else. Even in her earlier books there had been embedded a pressing regard for those among whom she travelled, as well as a distaste for urban life. ‘I am utterly repelled by the luxury of my immediate surroundings, and by the noise, bustle and smells of twentieth-century life,’ she wrote, emerging into Islamabad after months in the Karakoram mountains. ‘I miss the snow-peaks, the silence, the contentment.’ These, in the end, absolved all the travails of the road. ‘It must only be a matter of time before we go back…when we can leave all jeep-tracks behind and follow small paths over high passes.’
Colin Thubron
London 2023
Can it be that as a species we’re on the way to mass-suicide, driven by a combination of unregulated greed and arrogant technological-scientific ingenuity? Our failure to take adequate measures to slow (or halt) climate change suggests that eventually we may become extinct because we’re so stupid. A melodramatic scenario, yet not implausible. For pre-human aeons there was life on Earth and perhaps there will be for post-human aeons. Homo Sapiens is an interesting evolutionary development, as were numerous other creatures no longer with us. Are human beings really necessary? Is there any reason to suppose our planet will sustain for much longer a species that has proved so lethal to most other species?
Silverland,2007
Introduction:AMaverick’sLife
It was 8 a.m. and the phone rang. My immediate thought: who’s dead? On tentatively answering the ‘withheld’ number, I heard, ‘Good morning, is that Ethel? This is Dervla Murphy.’ To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I had been reading her books since I was a teenager; she was ‘one of our own’, the premier Irish travel writer who fuelled my own dreams of travel far beyond my local world.
This was 2013. I had written a book called Your Place or Mine? in which I had included a section on Dervla. Having sent her a copy, I thought no more of it until that phone call. Thankfully, she didn’t mind what I had written and we had a great chat. She then gave me her private phone number and we made a promise to meet before long.
From my first visit to her home in the Old Market in Lismore, we clicked. I was welcomed with warm hospitality, food or drink never far from my elbow. I returned with Jim, my other half, and he was a welcome addition to the party too. She had had friends for forty or fifty years, so we were relative newcomers in her life. It was, however, at a time in her life when the trips and the writing were starting to wind down – as they might when you’re in your eighties – so she had more time for visits and phone calls from newer friends like ourselves. We were also delighted to meet her daughter Rachel and family, as well as some of her beloved friends in Lismore.
I have treasured memories of our visits to Dervla’s place over the last eight years of her life. We would spend three or four hours traversing the whole world, without leaving the study. Each new subject might start with ‘But isn’t it terrible what’s happening in…?’ or ‘Have you read…?’ or ‘I heard an interview on Al Jazeera…’ She loved to keep current and it bored her silly to talk about her past trips. Once they were done and written up, that was it – move on. Her time was precious and she didn’t want to spend it going over old ground with ‘traveller’s tales’, preferring to keep fresh and informed instead.
Dervla was all about books: reading books, writing books, researching books, and reviewing books – dissecting them with a scalpel. This last metaphor is apt because she said that her other chosen profession would have been that of a surgeon, if life’s randomness had led that way. If her father had found work in Dublin rather than moving to a rural town like Lismore, would Dervla have followed a more conventional educational path and aimed to become a surgeon, of which she often dreamed? Then maybe she would have been Professor Murphy, eminent vascular surgeon, instead of travel writer extraordinaire.
Regardless, she applied that precision to her observations of the world – that analytical scalpel always kept sharp. She was genuinely the most open-minded person and best conversationalist I’ve ever known. She never seemed old to me, despite inhabiting the body of a woman in her late eighties with plenty of aches and pains. She was, above all, a survivor.
The idea for this book emerged organically over time. I wrote a newspaper piece to celebrate her 90th birthday in November 2021. It got such a positive response, eliciting such love from readers for her work, that it spurred me to suggest producing an edited collection of her writing. She was initially reluctant due to her modesty – ‘But would anyone be interested?’ – but then, having discussed it with Rachel and her publishers at Eland, we all agreed to proceed. I had offered that she could keep any royalties, but Rachel and herself decided that they would be happier for them to be donated to a charity of their choice. So it was all systems go.
Unfortunately, very shortly afterwards, her health took its ultimate downturn. Right up until the very end of her life, she was enthusiastically discussing the potential contents and structure of this book, as well as her usual detailed analysis of current affairs.
On the last day that we had a good chat about the book – as she said, an ‘editorial meeting’ – I had to borrow a few copies of her books that I didn’t yet own. I retrieved them from the glass-fronted case where she housed her own books, a copy of each edition preserved for her family. I blew literal dust and cobwebs off them, as she never consulted them once published. I opened them up under the overhead skylight in the kitchen. I joked that these actions were an apt metaphor for the aim of the anthology – blowing off dust and shining new light on these books that spanned over fifty years. We had a little giggle about that, clinked glasses and toasted the book.
Choosing the extracts for this collection was not easy. Rather than just foisting my own favourites upon the reader, I developed a set of criteria for inclusion. I tried to ensure that each set of extracts reflected the spirit and essence of each book and Dervla’s own character. These criteria were based on her evocative descriptions of places; examples of her strength, both physical and mental; the numerous illnesses, incidents and accidents that befell her on the road; her long, empathetic conversations with the people she met; her reportage, or objective, detailed reporting of events; her explanations of very different social and cultural practices and her sharp socio-political analysis.
As well as the book extracts, I include a small sample of newspaper articles from the Irish Times and Irish Independent, spanning six decades. These also deserve new light shone upon them, such is the quality of the writing.
*
Dervla Murphy defied convention throughout her life. Life is about playing the hand you are dealt as best you can; both the cards she was given and the way she chose to play them were unconventional. I aim to contextualise her life in the Ireland that produced her. She was such an individual, though, that her character cannot be attributed to any one factor. She was very complex, a true maverick who existed outside of social and cultural expectations. The origin of the word ‘maverick’ is an unbranded animal on a cattle farm, the stray one at the edge of the herd who escapes the branding iron: that’s Dervla.
When most of us consult a world map, we might be able to point to certain places to which we have flown – the cities where we land and maybe a couple of other spots. Dervla’s exploration of her countries of choice was much more thorough. She liked to cycle or walk if possible rather than use any other type of transport. She will have made friends along the way, and she would know the details of the physical terrain, the cultural mores and how much a beer cost in each place. While she has known many, many such routes throughout the world, her roots are in Lismore, Co. Waterford, in the genteel hills of the south-east of Ireland. Dervla shared the details of her early life in Wheels within Wheels, so there is no need to repeat too many biographical details.
However, for the duration of her life, her connection to Lismore’s surrounding landscape was closer than to any of its inhabitants. She largely kept to herself – at the edge of social life. When asked to write about her place for the Irish Times in 2011, at the age of eighty, she chose to write a beautiful elegy to the River Blackwater and her love of swimming in its depths. This piece is included here. Throughout her life, she was a keen wild swimmer. This early discovery clearly laid the foundation for her lifelong ecological worldview. Lismore was her springboard, the spot from which she projected herself out into the wider world. But she always returned home, to settle herself into her writing and reading – until the next trip.
Dervla grew up alongside the emergent Irish state itself. The Irish constitution was ratified in 1937, when she was six years old. But the monolithic, authoritarian Catholic Ireland that its leaders envisaged didn’t leave much room for free spirits like her. Most women who had a combination of adventurous spirits and religious faith joined a missionary order of nuns in order to get away; this was a socially legitimate means of escape.
Young people (especially women) often had to try to find ways to flourish despite, rather than with the help of, the adults in their lives. As Dervla reached adulthood in the 1950s, this often meant emigration and getting out of Ireland completely. The poverty, desolation and social oppression drove young people out in their thousands, in search of new and better lives in Britain, the US, Australia and elsewhere. It was on the one hand a social safety valve and on the other, a terrible loss of youthful potential – a ‘brain drain’. In 1957 alone, 1.8 per cent of the population left the country. Cattle boats in Dublin doubled as emigration vehicles. As Fintan O’Toole says, ‘The export of live people and live animals in the same vessels epitomized the economic backwardness of the country.’ Working class and small farming people didn’t have much choice but to go abroad in search of ‘the start’, planting new roots in London, New York and the rest. Two uncles of mine left by ship for Chicago from Cobh (not far from Dervla’s home in Lismore) and rebuilt their lives there. Two others moved to London. This multi-generational story is replicated in most Irish families; our collective emotional cartography has been stretched to incorporate distant locations. This was travel as well, but the type of travel taken by the economic migrant, forging themselves anew permanently.
This was the decade that saw Dervla locked into caring for her mother as she got more and more infirm, so emigration in the traditional sense was an impossibility for her, even if she had wanted to try it. Her personal goal was to go on interesting journeys and see what they would bring, especially in terms of writing material. She took several cycling trips to mainland Europe – notably to Germany in 1949, aged only eighteen, and to Spain in 1954 and in 1956. She did write a Spanish travel book, but it eluded her to find a willing publisher at that time. The bigger, ultimate dream of cycling to India had to wait until early 1963.
Dervla lived in a kind of parallel universe to the intensely conservative Ireland in which she happened to have been born. This was a place where everyday life for the majority was scheduled around the Catholic calendar – Christmas, Easter, Mass, holy communions, confirmations – and woe betide anybody who didn’t fall into line ideologically. In this context, it was a challenge to exercise individual agency, but Dervla seemed to sidestep it all quietly. She had her bicycle as her trusty partner along the way, taking her places both near and far and enabling as much personal liberty as possible in the circumstances. She seemed to manage by not angrily resisting but by blithely ignoring the power structures around her. I’m sure other people did the same, flying below the radar and getting away with it.
The Catholic Church, culturally dominant throughout the 20th century, was obsessed with controlling sex and inculcating shame and guilt in the populace. The sexual act was for procreation only, to produce the next generation of believers. The idea that it could be a source of pleasure or fun was repressed and condemned. Sex was equated with sin and sin equated with sex. The Church didn’t show too much interest in any other kind of sin – morality was located below the belt only. Despite their avowed concern with the purity of their flock, we now know that hypocrisy was the order of the day. The so-called moral guardians of the Irish people were often not so moral behind closed doors. A culture of denial, secrecy and fear ensured that the clergy got away with widespread sexual abuse of children, which only came to light in recent years. Even those who weren’t actually doing it themselves certainly knew about others who were; stories are still emerging even now.
This obsession with the evils of sex was especially obvious in the mind of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who was Primate of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin for over three decades, from 1940 to 1972. He operated his fiefdom hand in glove with the very conservative Eamon de Valera, who was either Taoiseach or President for most of the time from the 1930s through to the early 1970s. After Independence, the structures of Church and state were rigid and inflexible, to say the least. Historian Maria Luddy says that women’s sexuality and even their bodies were seen as ‘suspect and in need of restraint’. This state-sponsored misogynistic ideology was needed in order to ensure that women stayed in the home and out of public life.
Ireland was a misogynistic prison under the cosh of McQuaid and de Valera. In the Magdalene asylums, unmarried girls who got pregnant were hidden away, treated as ‘fallen women’ and were not deemed fit to live in normal society. There were 945 women incarcerated in these hate-filled institutions in 1956 alone. The repressive state apparatus imprisoned young girls and women for ‘moral’ misdemeanours and bullied their parents into toeing the Church line.
McQuaid, with his omnipotent power, attempted to render Ireland a blinkered theocracy in all but name. The culture of censorship seems unbelievable to us now. Any media images showing even a glimpse of a female thigh or bellybutton were swiftly censored. Lots of Irish writers’ work came under his censorious eye. This had serious repercussions for some. The writer John McGahern had his book The Dark banned in 1965 and was subsequently fired from his job as a teacher, thereby losing his livelihood. The audacious McQuaid actually even considered it his business to endeavour to have tampons banned in 1944.
The very characteristics we associate with Dervla were exactly those that the mid-twentieth-century Irish Catholic Church despised in young women: an independent mind, an adventurous spirit and a dismissive attitude to structures of authority. Dervla was about as far from their ideal of womanhood as it was possible to get. They specialised in keeping a tight lid on women’s potential for greatness. Not everybody obeyed, of course. There is always a big difference between official discourse and everyday reality. Resistance is almost always possible, especially if you didn’t rock the boat too much.
There have been many other pioneering Irish women in the fields of science, medicine, law, business, journalism, sport, the arts and literature. Glass ceilings have been shattered left, right and centre during Dervla’s lifetime. However, most of these have depended upon the existence of a university course and access to it. This provided a structure to join, to be as good as the boys or better. As well as those who got educated, there were also the women who were the everyday heroes. These were the wives and mothers who lived hard lives, caring for husbands and children and stretching too little money as far as they could. I’m sure a lot of them would have loved to be able to take off on a bicycle too, given half a chance. They mightn’t have reached India, though, as they’d have had to be home by tea-time. They were heroes simply by surviving.
Dervla didn’t fit into any of these groups of women. Her achievements were completely individual – self-taught, self-motivated, self-propelled, self-employed. In a way, she existed outside of society and was to a large extent unaffected by social changes. The same summer that her mother died – 1962 – saw the early months of the first Irish television station, Telefís Éireann, and the first episodes of the iconic Late Late Show that was a beacon of change at the time. While this was a key defining moment in modern Irish history, Dervla would have been oblivious to it, as she never watched television throughout her life.
When discussing Irish society since the 1950s, the dominant trope is liberalisation – albeit achieved kicking and screaming. The women’s movement has played a huge role in fighting for women’s rights. However, changes in women’s educational achievements, employment patterns, political participation and community engagement are really irrelevant to understanding the ‘making’ of Dervla Murphy. She had no part in it; she was not a ‘joiner’. In fact, she expressed criticism of the women’s movement for downgrading and undervaluing the work of mothers and housewives. She was flippant about the struggle for equal pay and issues around the inheritance of property. This is possibly because she was so divorced from conventional society; she was an only child who was never paid to work at anything except her writing, over which she exercised near total autonomy.
Like some other women travellers, she ‘shifted uncomfortably when the mantle of feminism was laid upon them’, as observed by Mary Russell. Yet while she didn’t call herself a feminist per se, she was still always tuned into life as seen through local women’s eyes. In Afghanistan in the early sixties, she observed, ‘two women were travelling on the roof [of the bus] amidst everyone’s goods and chattels – very symbolic!’ These women were very unwell and to see them treated so badly upset her deeply. Many years later in Rumania, she was also very distressed by the numerous gynaecological horror stories she heard from women there.
*
Dervla existed in a sort of liminal zone between Ireland and England. Dervla’s father was an Irish Republican, as was his father before him. They both had joined the old IRA in the struggle for Irish independence. She said he was ‘sprung from generations of rebels’ and he served time in English prisons for his activities. However, despite this family history, she worked mainly with British publishers. London, rather than Dublin, was the capital of her personal republic. In conversation, London often came up, while Dublin never did except to refer to her early family origins. She saw it as natural to incorporate England into her mental map, simply seeing it as a place of culture and of opportunities to publish her work, as did so many Irish writers, before and since. She thought nothing of hopping on the bus near her home and getting the ferry from Rosslare in the south east of Ireland and the bus across to London. On exploring it as a girl, she mused, ‘Half of me seemed to belong in Britain.’ I can’t help but wonder if she had lived in a more inaccessible part of Ireland, would that have changed her outlook? Knowing her, probably not. Her fate was to travel, in a highly intrepid manner, and to put words on pages, writing great books. Her geographical location would hardly have thwarted her.
She never compromised on her Irishness though; she made it clear wherever she went. But despite her Irish passport, she occasionally sought help from the British Council in times of trouble on the road. She earned two major awards in the UK for her travel writing: the 2021 Stanford’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2019 Ness Award for the popularisation of geography from the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), of which she was also a Life Fellow. Historically, the RGS was at the heart of the British establishment. Throughout the nineteenth century, travellers and explorers were published in its Geographical Journal, which became a major source of information about far-flung places. It was a highly prestigious publication, whose pages were filled by the likes of Burton and Speke, whose crucial travel reports were then used for military and colonial purposes; it underpinned imperial geography during the Victorian era. The irony of this ethical mismatch would not have been lost on her.
Within this world, those with whom she identified were also on the margins of any kind of convention. Dervla takes her place in the pantheon of brave women travellers like Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley and Freya Stark. All of these great travellers and writers inspired her as a child and she carried them in her heart throughout her life. There have been many others, of course, including some historical Irish women who have led adventurous and often philanthropic lives, such as Beatrice Grimshaw, Flora Shaw and May Crommelin. However, we only have room to briefly mention three of Dervla’s major influences here.
Dervla wrote to Bill Colegrave: ‘I think of long dead authors as my friends. Among the dearest is Isabella Bird, a clergyman’s daughter, born exactly a century before me in 1831.’ Isabella Bird (1831–1904) was an English explorer, naturalist, photographer and writer, who defied all conservative Victorian convention to head off into the unknown. In 1892 she became the first female Fellow of the RGS (followed much later by Dervla herself). She set off on three major world trips in her life. The first was to the New World, through Nova Scotia and down to the Great Lakes. The second was to Australia and New Zealand and on to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). On that trip, she sailed into San Francisco, starting the trip that led eventually to her best known work, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. This famous travelogue was based on a four-month-long, 800-mile trek on horseback across America in 1873. In her introduction to the 1988 edition of it, Dervla wrote, ‘It is hard to think of any other travel book, of any period, that so spontaneously conveys the author’s sheer delight in travelling.’ This book was comprised of her letters home to her sister. (Indeed, Dervla’s own first book was also based on letters sent home to a friend in Ireland.) Her third expedition was to Japan, China and Malaya. After her husband died (after only five years of marriage), she travelled extensively in Asia, returning to China and Korea where she founded several hospitals. She died after her final trip, trekking across Morocco at the age of seventy-two.
Dervla opined that Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) was ‘the best writer and wittiest commentator’ of the Victorian women travel writers. There were major parallels between Kingsley and Dervla herself. Firstly, she was also self-taught, using the library of her scholarly father and later becoming his amanuensis. Secondly, Kingsley was a dutiful Victorian daughter who cared for ailing parents until their deaths in 1892. Soon afterwards, she went to West Africa for six months, hitching a ride on a cargo ship. She was the first European to visit several parts of the region. Her classic Travels in West Africa resulted from a long trip there. She is well known as a great defender of African cultures against what she termed ‘the thin veneer of rubbishy white culture’ that British officials and some missionaries were attempting to impose. On her third African trip, she volunteered as a nurse during the Boer War, where she sadly caught typhoid. She died prematurely at the age of thirty-eight and was buried at sea.
Dervla’s third role model, Freya Stark (1893-1993), specialised in travel in the Arab world. Fluent in Arabic, she became an expert on Arabic dialects and worked for the British Ministry of Information in Aden and Cairo. She travelled extensively in Persia and Arabia. Her most famous work, written in her lyrically descriptive style, is The Valley of the Assassins. For the Great Lives series on BBC Radio 4 in 2009, Dervla chose Stark as her subject. She said that she was a considerable influence on her as a child when she was deciding where and how she wanted to travel. Her mother was a big fan of Stark and read her books to her when she was very small. They were excited when they saw that ‘there was a new Freya coming out on the John Murray list’ and she used to save her pocket money as a teenager so that she could buy her own copies. Stark didn’t go to school, but read a great deal on her own – a pattern more or less copied by Dervla herself. Stark’s chosen area was the Middle East and Arabia. In that radio interview, Dervla said, ‘Even Freya, devoted as I was to her writing, couldn’t attract me to the desert. I hate heat. I go for the mountains and cold places.’ She met Stark three times, the last time when a newspaper sent her to interview her on her 90th birthday. She said that her memory had gone and she was impossibly vague, but she autographed her first editions for her in Arabic, so she loved that. Like Dervla herself, Stark stayed travelling and writing well into her twilight years.
We can spot parallels between each of these with Dervla’s own life, naturally enough. However, each woman’s story stands on its own, the product of a unique life trajectory. Spirited individuals like these are destined to carve out interesting lives for themselves, leaving a path for others to follow. They’re not called trailblazers for nothing. One big difference, however, is that Dervla was Irish.
*
Dervla had a very learned but idiosyncratic upbringing. Her father’s job as county librarian was an esteemed position but not particularly well paid. There certainly wasn’t much money floating around and she was reared modestly and frugally, creating the habits of a lifetime. In terms of education, she left school at fourteen to care for her disabled mother at home. Her reading material from the home library was highly elevated, conferring upon her a random kind of cultural capital. She had no programme of study as such, but was more or less an autodidact who made the best of her very unconventional personal situation. Her parents were both solidly upper middle-class and it was the norm to have complex philosophical debates at the dinner table, while listening to Beethoven on the wireless. Indeed, many years later, when she was interviewed for BBC Radio 4’s programme Desert Island Discs, two out of her eight choices of music were composed by Beethoven, along with Haydn, Monteverdi and some world music from Ethiopia and Madagascar.
Classical literature also featured strongly in the household and her parents always encouraged her love of reading and writing. For Christmas or birthday presents, they’d ask her for a short story or an essay she had written. Eventually, her writing talent grew to fit the space created by that praise. How lovely to have such encouragement, especially considering this was the 1930s and 1940s, not known as an enlightened era in Ireland. Writing became as essential to Dervla’s existence as breathing itself.
Dervla’s formal schooling fell by the wayside, like so many others of her generation. Her education didn’t follow a conventional path and her prodigious reading was not converted into educational credentials to be used in the job marketplace. Sometimes people can also get on in life with symbolic capital, or social connections with a prestigious social milieu – a word in someone’s ear at a race meeting or golf game. Dervla had to do without this too; there was nobody pulling any strings for her. She was very much on her own in life – an independent girl who was happy to entertain herself in her local landscape. Her wealth lay in her reading, which opened up the world to her. She told me, ‘I wasn’t just a bibliophile, I was a bibliomaniac.’ However, her personal circumstances prevented her from straying too far from home and experiencing the world in reality – yet. There was an internal dilemma that was waiting to be solved by freedom.
Dervla’s imagination, stoked into life by her copious reading, lured her eastwards towards India. During those years, most of her generation dreamed of going to America, where the streets were paved with gold, and all that jazz. One of her oft-quoted rules of travel was to find out where most people were going and then go in the opposite direction. So she obeyed her own rule on the grandest of scales from the outset. She went east – long before the hippy trail was even heard of. The adventurous version of herself had hitherto only been allowed alluringly short European cycle trips. After both her parents had died, she was off – like a rocket, couldn’t wait another second – to make up for lost time. She has said that the feeling of liberty she experienced then ran through her body like an electric shock. This time, she didn’t have to come back for a long time. How was she to finally explore her potential except to follow that dream, hit the road and see what happened?
Her fate was to become a freelance traveller and writer – not an easy one, but this independent life suited Dervla. The sheer scale of the achievement of that first big trip and the quality of the writing was recognised when it got into Jock Murray’s hands. He was exactly the right person to set her on her way towards becoming a world-renowned travel writer. It is well-known that it was Penelope Chetwode, whom she met in Delhi, who encouraged her to approach the prestigious John Murray publishing house but she reiterated with me that she really never would have had the nerve otherwise, as she had tried three or four other publishers to no avail. This was certainly a fortuitous meeting – she was on the right path now. No doubt, she would have found other publishers, but perhaps none who connected deeply with her and appreciated her like Murray in the earlier years, and Eland later on.
*
Dervla’s travel choices defied the gender expectations of mid-twentieth century Ireland. Fortified by the example of the likes of Freya Stark as well as the confidence imbued in her by her parents, she felt there was nothing she couldn’t do. The physical stamina she showed defies description – almost superhuman at times. Her books are peppered with stories of being mistaken for a man on her trips, to the extent that it has become one of the standard clichés about her. She regularly unbuttoned her shirt on African trips to establish her feminine credentials. In Uganda, she had to ditch her combat pants because there was a very real danger that she could have been mistaken for a mercenary and shot dead. Historical women travel writers actually disguised themselves as men sometimes to accord themselves more freedom. When women were corseted and skirted, it was seen as scandalous for women to wear trousers, sitting astride a bicycle or horse. Dervla just wore functional, practical clothing – roomy shirts, trousers, jackets – standard practice now.
The threat of violence is always a possibility for travellers of any gender, but for women, it is the ever-present threat of sexual violence that looms large. Dervla was no exception. However, she said there was no point in worrying about things until they actually happened, so she didn’t let this put a stop to her gallop. In Full Tilt alone, she told of averting one attempted rape with a warning shot from her pistol and another by engaging a strategic knee. She trekked in Bulgaria and Turkey in 1968 while pregnant. She told Mary Russell, ‘While hitch-hiking from Ankara to Van, I had to fight off eight would-be rapists in eleven days. This marathon was garnished by two lesbian invitations to bed – providence perhaps felt that I risked being bored by all those over-excited males.’
She took risks with her personal safety that most of us would never dream of, tackling the world with gusto. Reckless? Probably. She had near-death experiences on many occasions – risk was grist to her mill. However, she got annoyed if you called her brave. She told Hilary Bradt, ‘It’s being afraid when something actually happens but not being afraid that something might happen. That’s the difference.’ So the anticipation of disaster didn’t stop her. When I raised this issue with her, she said, ‘If you’re fearless, you don’t need courage. It’s only if you’re fearful that you need courage to overcome your fears.’ I persisted, ‘Ah, come on, Dervla.’ ‘Well, over so many decades of travel, there was very little to alarm me. I might have been shaken at times, but not enough to affect future plans.’ She developed this fearlessness when very young indeed, under her parents’ tutelage. ‘At the age of 16, in 1947, it was my mother who suggested that I cycle through the Continent alone – not many mothers did that!’
Dervla was not remotely interested in the arguably more macho reason to travel: breaking records or accomplishing ‘feats’. It was for others to ‘collect’ the highest mountains or the longest rivers, or to be the first in particular spots. She would laugh at the idea of ticking items off on a ‘must do’ or ‘must see’ list. However, she can actually be termed an explorer; she accomplished some major feats, quietly and modestly. During the years that Dervla was branching out, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first to reach the summit of Everest in 1953, for example. Men like these ‘conquered’ mountains. Just a decade or two later, Dervla hiked and biked over them and enjoyed them (many times), revelled in them, wondered at them, was rendered breathless by them. Not one to join mountaineering expeditions, she climbed many serious mountains on her own and later, with Rachel, in Pakistan and Peru. Rachel has also been a brave traveller since her childhood and was an enormous help to Dervla on the trips they shared, even when very young. Dervla called her ‘a compass in human form’. Dervla did things her own way – no strict plan, no team, no bearers, just with a little help from some friends sometimes. She was in competition only with herself. And she survived.
Dervla chose to set off using the simplest possible mode of transport that wasn’t simply walking (which of course she also did, later). She loved cycling, which allowed her to be part of her surroundings as she travelled, as well as making it easier to meet people along the way. When she had to travel in a car, bus or train, she often felt wistful because she couldn’t get out and walk. Cycling or walking also allowed her to maintain control over her trips, determining her own schedule. Her preferred, low-tech modes of transport kept things simple. Her bicycle, Roz, was her only partner of choice in the early days. On a good day, cycling is the closest thing to flying while still on terra firma. For Dervla, work and play were really one and the same.
She freely admitted that she was no technical whizz; she was actually a self-confessed Luddite. Other women travellers have used cars, boats, airplanes or parachutes to get places, but not her. She had no affinity with mechanics, to put it mildly. She usually had to rely on help, of varying levels of competence, to maintain her bicycles on her trips. She was a mass of contradictions. Surprisingly, she also disliked flying and had a phobic fear of spiders. She had little problem with rats (while I shudder to even write the word), mice and other vermin, but spiders… I unsuccessfully stifled a chuckle when she told me this and she said, a little indignantly, ‘Well it is a well-documented condition – it’s called arachnophobia!’
It goes without saying that many of the places she travelled to were beyond the limits of conventional tourism. But also within each country, the more remote and challenging the destination, the better she liked it. She travelled on the edge of the edge itself.
*
Towards the latter part of Dervla’s life, she constantly pushed the envelope regarding social expectations for older women. She continued travelling into her eighties, and researching, writing and reading up until very shortly before she died. She had written some years earlier, at the age of seventy-six, ‘It seems odd that the wanderlust, unlike other lusts, does not diminish with age. As departure date [for Laos] approached my excitement level rose as uncontrollably as though I had never before left Ireland.’ The unquenchable spark of her curiosity could be ignited by a conversation with a friend or just a feature on a radio programme.
She had been witness to enormous historical events. She remembered hearing Hitler’s broadcasts on the radio as a child; she cycled through Germany after WWII and witnessed it being rebuilt; she cycled through Franco’s Spain in the 1950s; she met the Dalai Lama (twice); she attended Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as President of the new South Africa. She avoided trouble (mostly) in such hotspots as Northern Ireland, Rwanda, the Balkans and Palestine. In terms of longevity, she is comparable only to her great contemporary travel writer, Jan Morris. However, the comparison ends there. The rough conditions she was willing to endure are absolutely unparalleled – she stayed in a basic concrete structure in a Palestinian refugee camp in her eighties.
She dedicated her last decade and a half to getting under the skin of the Palestinian issue. She made several trips to Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, resulting in two impressive books, published in 2013 and 2015 at the ages of eighty-two and eighty-four, respectively. Her last major trip was to Amman in Jordan in January 2016, after she had turned eighty-five. She had an incident there which caused her to fracture her pelvis, prompting an early return home. She told journalist Isabel Conway that ‘it wasn’t a fall but a silly way of slipping as I was sitting down’. The manuscript of this trip remained unfinished, as she didn’t feel able to continue with her customary copious research and writing at that point.
During her later travels, she could no longer carry her normal rucksack and had to resort to a wheelie suitcase, which as any traveller knows, is not the same at all. However, she felt that the disadvantages of ageing were offset by the major advantage of needing so much less sleep, adding several hours to her day for reading and writing. Books were her constant companion, right up to the end.
*
Travel writing is an amorphous genre that can slip between the cracks and does not always garner the respect or fame it deserves. Dervla is better known for being a tough traveller than a great writer. People only have room for one version of a writer. They remember dramatic incidents with guns and robbers rather than the sometimes sublime writing that she produced, illuminating worlds beyond most of our limits. If she had been a fiction writer, she would have been placed closer to the heart of the Irish literary canon. A comparison can be made here with her exact contemporary, Edna O’ Brien, who is very famous and universally lauded.
Travel writing can contain just about anything. Hers is old-school, though, and all the better for it. It contains history, geography, adventure, witty anecdotes and some beautifully lyrical literary tracts that bring us to far-flung places in our heads. As Freya Stark put it in Riding to the Tigris, ‘One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one’s own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.’
Dervla certainly did let herself go on her trips; she thrived on producing an honest and entertaining report on each one. She had a very keen eye and ear for minutiae. She told us exactly what happened when she boarded a train in snowy Siberia, entered an African village at dusk or rode her bike onto a South African white farmer’s yard. She reported her encounters in a clear-eyed fashion and her empathetic nature sought out the essence of each person, whether a missionary or a mercenary. Maintaining the integrity of the writing was her priority, surpassing any quest for popularity.
The instinctual and individual approach of the intelligent, independent traveller differs greatly from the rule-bound writing of the academic. In academia, one’s authority is founded upon using established, respectable research methods, following the line of a school of thought. Validation from peers is essential for success. In travel writing like Dervla’s her ‘authority’ came from having such challenging trips, talking to people in little-known places, and hearing their views and stories first hand. She bore witness. She could say ‘I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.’ In academia, this is akin to an ethnographic approach within social science, prioritising the details of the everyday life. Dervla wasn’t an academic, so she didn’t have to worry about the validity of her research methodology as such. However, she could have gone down this road, as she had the intellectual ability to do anything she liked. While she didn’t write for an academic audience, her work was highly respected in that arena too.
In terms of her own reading, it is hard to over-state the enormous amount of research behind each of the books. As well as the physical toll the trips took on her body and mind, the academic work behind the scenes was massively impressive. We can see this in the substantial bibliographies they contain. When I got to know her in her own environment, I saw the evidence of this. She lived in a library of well-used books, organised by geographical region. She estimated the number to be 8,000 but I would say more, and the piles just kept growing higher. She also had a strong interest in military technology and sometimes read the specialised military magazine Jane’s Defence Weekly. She felt duty-bound to learn about it having seen, for example, the gruesome effects of cluster bombs in Laos and phosphorus gas in Gaza. Having an academic past, I can testify that each of her books took as much research as a Masters Degree, at the very least, and in some cases – like her books on race relations in England, on South Africa and on Israel/Palestine – a PhD. And she kept doing it over and over again. Relentless research, travelling and writing became her unique way of life, the mountain paths and roads of new countries constantly calling her.
She treated the writing as a serious job; she was extremely disciplined. She took copious notes each night, even after devastatingly hard days on the road. Each conversation was recorded verbatim. She very rarely took out a notebook during a ‘chat-show’ (her term for a conversation/interview) but wrote her notes afterwards. Many of these were very long indeed. While she often had fun along the way, of course, with a beer or three consumed, her sense of purpose was deadly serious. She spent her time well – she was so observant that she could get more out of one encounter than another writer could glean in a week. This shows in her lifelong prolific output. If she didn’t get enough material on one trip, she would return for others. Her research for the books on Cuba, South Africa, Russia and Israel/Palestine all involved two, three or more fact-finding trips. These weren’t dreamy enterprises. She was also a jobbing writer (and book reviewer) throughout her life; she produced a massive amount of material. She always loved to come back home to Lismore to finish the books, never hankering to go to live in another country. Her work is very different to other writers who have gone to live abroad, even for a while. She approached her travel writing as a job, as work to be completed at home on her return, so one wouldn’t call her a nomad. The travelling and writing was her work. And unlike many travel writers, Dervla was never, ever – ever – sponsored by anybody.
It is possible that Dervla’s relentless work ethic actually did her writing career no favours. Would her reputation have been stronger if she had been less driven throughout her long life? She wrote twenty-four travel books, as well as numerous other pieces. Perhaps each new book distracted readers’ attention from the previous ones, so she unwittingly became a victim of the sheer volume of material she produced. If she had written four instead of twenty-four books, people might have focused on each one better and the release of each might have been a bigger event. If Laurie Lee had written twenty-three more books as well as As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, would people still talk about that one in particular? Dervla could have ‘dined out’ on many, many fewer trips and books, picking a particular country or region and focusing on it, thereby becoming a recognised expert. Neither was she very fond of media interviews or being in the public eye. Her innate adventurousness and insatiable curiosity kept propelling her off to new places. The trapped air from one place was still in the pockets of her backpack when she set off for the next.
Most readers are more familiar with the earlier works, especially Full Tilt, than the later books, though, at the latter end of her career, the media was attracted to her two topical books on Israel/Palestine. Between these two ‘bookends’ are many that have been undervalued, like those on the Balkans, South Africa or Siberia. This collection includes them all, celebrating the long, full life that she lived and her oeuvre in its entirety.
Like others of her travelling predecessors, domestic life – with all that that entailed – was never going to be a priority because the siren calls of the next book and the next trip always beckoned. Her goal was always to uncover more about social and political change and to experience life from the perspective of the poorest people living in the most remote locations. She did this by choice, of course, because she loved travelling so much, rather than the involuntary movement of displaced persons and refugees. She was very self-aware about this, always stressing: ‘But I just enjoyed myself!’
*
Dervla was a unique thinker, a true original who could never tolerate an uncritical, preconceived philosophical formula. We can see influences from socialism and environmentalism, of course, but each empirical situation was viewed anew, without bias. For example, while a huge admirer of the achievements of Castro’s Cuba, she admitted that had she been born there, she would have sorely resented the curbs on her freedom to write and travel.
As Dervla cycled through Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1963, the leftist criticisms she made of the Western modernisation project were ahead of their time. Her ideas were prototypical for what became Dependency theory, the radical critique of the mainstream capitalist development model that emerged in the 1970s. She knew that imposing crude Western culture was wrong because it was destructive of local cultures and therefore ultimately unsustainable.
She had a strong anti-materialist ethic and put into practice what she believed. Throughout her life, she did without any modern conveniences and lived in a spartan fashion. She mused – tongue firmly in cheek – as to whether she lacked a gene for liking anything technical. In 2008 she said, ‘My genes reject car ownership, TV, washing-machines, cell phones, computers, iPods and other such complex innovations. Were I a species rather than an individual I’d be doomed to extinction as a creature unable to adapt to its changing environment.’ In fact she did adapt somewhat in later years, getting quite attached to her computer despite herself. She began each day with news from BBC Radio 4, Al Jazeera and online newspapers like Haaretz. She told me that ‘the Internet is a huge advantage for me now, when I’m so restricted in my movements. I can see the world through Al Jazeera’s eyes’. She was open-minded enough to change when she saw the need to renew her approach.
She was at her happiest in the midst of unspoiled nature wherever she went – the wilder the better. She despised cities. Paul Theroux shares her opinion, calling them ‘snake pits’, full of people who want to part you from your money in one way or another. This was unlike her contemporary, Jan Morris, however, who wrote so vividly about them and whose paeans to Trieste and Venice are modern classics. Dervla couldn’t wait to leave cities as dawn broke and get out into the open countryside. Not for her were strolling on city streets, sipping coffee in cafés or ambling in manicured parks. Cities were of use mainly for finding people to interview; she was always in the hunter-gatherer mode of the inveterate writer. Two cities that she found attractive despite herself, however, were Havana and St Petersburg.
Her worldview was based on an intense love of nature and animals. She was the deepest of Green in her orientation to the world. She had a profound sense that humans were just one type of creature among others, albeit with the enhanced ability to do harm to other species and the global environment. She often carried binoculars for bird-watching on her trips. The case, which sat under an arm, was sometimes mistaken for a gun holster. Her deep love of animals was shown in the huge number of pets she had – mostly dogs and cats – throughout her long life. She even brought a puppy called Tashi home from Nepal in the sixties, who lived with her for almost twenty years. She said she was a ‘very special dog’. She appreciated the individual personalities of all her animals. We joked about trying to come up with a list of all their names, but time ran out.
She discussed spiritual and religious matters in many of the books. She was interested in what they meant to other people but never practised any faith herself. Her gentle approach to the world around her was akin to Buddhism in some ways, but she didn’t need to practise it. She told me that the closest she would come to a label was a ‘humanist’. She said, ‘People are in control of the world and they need to behave responsibly when exercising that control.’ She rejected the idea that she was an atheist: ‘That’s too aggressive a term. I’m not anti any religion. I just never felt the need to adhere to any. I don’t condemn any religion; I only condemn extremism of any kind.’
