Wheels Within Wheels E-Book

Dervla Murphy

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 456

Beschreibung

What is it that makes us who we are? In this beautifully written and searingly honest autobiography, the intrepid cyclist and traveller Dervla Murphy remembers her richly unconventional first thirty years. She describes her determined childhood self - strong-willed and beguiled by books from the first - her intermittent formal education and the intense relationship of an only child with her parents, particularly her invalid mother whom she nursed until her death. Here lie the roots of Dervla's gift for friendship, her love of writing, her curiosity, her hatred of cant, her hardiness and her desire to travel. Bicycling fifty miles in a day at the age of eleven, alone, it seems only natural that her first major journey should have been to cycle to India.

Leseprobe

Wheels within Wheels

The Making of a Traveller

DERVLA MURPHY

In Memoriam K. R. D. F. J. M. R. A. L. G. C. K.

Contents

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1

At 7.45 on the morning of November 28, 1931, a young woman in the first stage of labour was handed by her husband into Lismore’s only hackney-car. The couple were slowly driven east to Cappoquin along a narrow road, in those days potholed and muddy. It was a mild, still, moist morning. During the journey a pale dawn spread over the Blackwater valley, a place as lovely in winter as in summer – a good place to be born.

The woman had waist-length chestnut hair, wavy, glossy and thick. Her features were classically regular, her wide-set eyes dark blue, her complexion had never known – or needed – cosmetics. She had an athletic build, with shoulders too broad for feminine grace. On the previous day, impatient because the baby was a week late, she had walked fifteen miles.

At five foot six the husband was no taller than the wife. ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ his mother had observed objectively when the engagement was announced. But this was unfair. He was well proportioned and muscular, with thick black hair, dark brown eyes, a straight nose, an olive complexion – not handsome, yet striking enough in a quiet way. He was earnest though not humourless and firm in his convictions to the edge of intolerance. His manner was difficult and as an essentially lonely introvert he found it easier to listen than to talk. Even at the door of the maternity home he had no ready words of encouragement for his wife. ‘I’ll pray for you,’ he assured her solemnly. Then he retreated into the hackney and asked the driver to drop him off at the County Library headquarters in Lismore. It was a Saturday and if he started work at nine o’clock instead of ten he could, with a clear conscience, knock off at twelve instead of one. Characteristically, he did not consider granting himself any compassionate leave in honour of the occasion.

This was before the Universal Telephone era and at 12.30 Dr White appeared at the library door. An archetypal GP – florid, white-haired, stately, kind – he was accustomed to dealing with son-hungry farmers. ‘Well now,’ he growled, ‘I don’t know if I should congratulate you or not.’ (My father at once visualised some ghastly deformity.) ‘It’s a daughter you have. Came at a quarter to twelve. Strong child.’ (This was also before the days of universal weighing; babies were either strong or weak.)

My father’s reply is not recorded. But as he and my mother had been referring to me as ‘Dervla’ for the past eight months he perhaps felt no great disappointment. At once he set out to walk the four miles to Cappoquin, carrying a bulky parcel which a more practical man would have put in the hackney-car that morning. It contained the nine records of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. By the time we met I had suffered my first misadventure, a badly burned bottom caused by a burst hot-water bottle. (For more than thirty years the scar faithfully registered severe frosts.)

As a child, it delighted me to hear my mother describing the celebrations that followed. When a gramophone had been borrowed she and my father settled down to hold hands in the firelit dusk while Beethoven expressed their feelings about parenthood and I, in a cradle beside them, expressed mine about burnt bottoms. At that time childbirth was considered an illness and occasionally a nurse would look in and remark ineffectually that my mother was a patient and should be resting. Then Dr White himself arrived to end this unseemly gaiety. I had been lulled to sleep: but the moment Beethoven stopped I started. So the Murphys won that round, when my mother indicated that she found the ‘Ode to Joy’ a lot more restful than a howling infant.

Two days later I was christened in Cappoquin’s parish church. At first the priest refused to baptise me, insisting peevishly that ‘Dervla’ was a pagan name and must be changed to something respectably Catholic like Mary or Brigid. My father, however, would not give in. He recalled that a sixth-century St Dervla was reputed to have lived in Co Wexford and that from Ireland the name had spread throughout Europe. Then he carefully explained, to an increasingly impatient curate, that Dearbhail meant True Desire in Gaelic and that the English, French and Latin versions were Dervla, Derval and Dervilla. Finally they compromised; my birth certificate names me as Dervilla Maria.

Although my mother’s recovery was rapid we were not allowed home until December 12. Then my first journey took me through countryside that had scarcely changed since Thackeray described it in 1842: ‘Beyond Cappoquin, the beautiful Blackwater river suddenly opened before us, and driving along it for three miles through some of the most beautiful rich country ever seen, we came to Lismore. Nothing certainly can be more magnificent than this drive. Parks and rocks covered with the grandest foliage; rich handsome seats of gentlemen in the midst of fair lawns and beautiful bright plantations and shrubberies; and at the end, the graceful spire of Lismore church, the prettiest I have seen in or, I think, out of Ireland. Nor in any country that I have visited have I seen a view more noble – it is too rich and peaceful to be what is called romantic, but lofty, large and generous, if the term may be used; the river and banks as fine as the Rhine; the castle not as large but as noble and picturesque as Warwick. As you pass the bridge, the banks stretch away on either side in amazing verdure, and the castle walks remind one somewhat of the dear old terrace of St Germains, with its groves, and long, grave avenues of trees.’

From that bridge it was about a quarter of a mile to my first home on the eastern edge of Lismore. There my parents had rented half a decaying mini-mansion. The other half was occupied by the owner, an obese, elderly, gossipy widow who always smelt of camphorated oil. Her habit of glancing through opened letters, and asking our maid what the Murphys were having for dinner, did not endear her to my mother. At this stage my parents were of enormous interest to the townspeople. And their odd status within the community was greatly to influence my childhood.

Forty years ago the Pale was still a psychological reality and my parents therefore ranked as ‘foreigners’ in Co Waterford. As far back as the genealogical eye could see both their families were of the Dublin bourgeoisie, only rarely diluted by Huguenot, Scots Presbyterian and Italian-Jewish blood. Among their forbears were printers, ironmongers, doctors, linen weavers, civil servants, cabinet-makers, architects, silk-merchants, musicians, soldiers and sailors. There were no priests or nuns on either side that I ever heard of – unusual in Irish families – and the only known deviations from the bourgeoisie were an eighteenth-century Earl (of Belvedere) and a nineteenth-century kitchenmaid (of Rathmines).

Inevitably, then, my parents were without any ready-made social niche when they migrated south. On one side of a deep rural divide were the gentry and aristocracy, mainly Anglo-Irish and Protestant, and on the other were the farmers and tradesmen, mainly native Irish and Catholic. No true middle class had yet evolved – we missed out on the Industrial Revolution – and professional men were usually the sons either of impoverished gentry or of prosperous farmers. Such people tended to retain their inherited attitudes and interests which, on most points, did not coincide with the attitudes and interests of the young couple from Dublin.

When my parents arrived in Lismore on their wedding day – being too poor to afford even a weekend honeymoon – they found a build-up of suspicions resentment. The previous county librarian had been a popular local figure since the 1870s. He had recently reluctantly retired, leaving nine books fit to be circulated, and the townspeople were furious when an aloof young Dubliner was appointed to replace their beloved Mr Mills. A secure job with a salary of £250 a year had slipped from the grasp of some deserving local and they smelt political corruption. It mattered not to them that no local was qualified for the job, and what little they knew of my father they disliked. His family was conspicuously Republican – a black mark, not long after the Civil War, in a predominantly Redmondite town.

During that summer my parents often travelled together around the county setting up embryonic branch libraries in villages and rural schools. Sometimes they slept in the back of the small library motor-van to economise on petrol – thus saving money for the purchase of extra books – and twice the van was stoned after dark by hostile natives. No doubt wisely, my parents chose to ignore these demonstrations.

My father’s temperamental reserve must have exacerbated the situation. It was impossible to entice him into a pub and this fact alone, in a society which quite often confuses virility with a capacity for strong drink, aroused the scorn of many local males. Teetotalism on religious grounds would of course have been understood, and in some circles admired, but it was soon known that at home my parents drank wine on special occasions, as when entertaining friends from outlandish places like France, Germany or Poland. (They had first met as adults in Poland, where my father was on a cycling tour and my mother on a walking tour. It was then almost twenty years since their last meeting at a children’s party in Rathgar.)

As for my mother – she smoked oval Turkish cigarettes specially sent from Dublin, and drank China tea, and preferred her cheese to be smelly. Also, she discussed in mixed company such obscenities as breast-feeding, and walked alone for miles all over the countryside like a farmer’s wife – except that she didn’t have to – and instead of saying ‘good-evening’ like a decent Irishwoman she said ‘good-afternoon’ like the gentry. Worse still, she had had the misfortune innocently to refer to Lismore as a ‘village’ within days of her arrival, and this monstrous faux pas – Lismore has been a cathedral town since the seventh century – was at once misinterpreted as a typical example of urban condescension.

My parents’ poverty rendered their eccentric bourgeois tastes even less acceptable. Many initially saw them as penniless upstarts who just because they came from Dublin thought they could impress Lismore with their high-falutin’ ways. But there was a certain lack of logic here. No newcomers out to impress the natives would have travelled from Dublin on their wedding day in the cab of the lorry that contained all their worldly goods.

Those goods were a large golden collie named Kevin; a solid three-piece chesterfield suite which remains as good as new to this day, apart from superficial damage inflicted by countless generations of cats; a single bed which provoked ribald comments as it was being unloaded but which seems not to have impeded progress since I was born nine and a half months later; two trunks of clothes and blankets; one tea-chest of crockery and saucepans; one cardboard carton of stainless steel cutlery; one tea-chest of records, and a gramophone; twelve tea-chests of books; fourteen handsomely framed Arundel prints and an original surrealistic painting, by a Hindu artist, of the source of the Ganges; one inlaid Benares brass coffee-table and two silver-rimmed Georgian beer tankards; two kitchen chairs and a kitchen table with a loose leg; one round mahogany dining-table and one very heavy black marble clock which suffered internal injuries on the journey and has never gone right since. This last item was a wedding present from our only rich relative, my mother’s grand-aunt Harriet. Unluckily grand-aunt Harriet was mad as well as rich and when she died at the age of ninety-eight she left all her thousands to the Archbishop of Dublin.

On the domestic scene my mother was a cheerfully incompetent bride. Helping my father to pioneer a rural library service was more to her taste than cooking his meals so she engaged an efficient general maid named Nora and, before my birth, devoted most of her energy to working as an unpaid library assistant. Soon the unfriendly natives were being disarmed by the dedication of this young couple to the people of Co Waterford. Also – to be less sentimental – in small communities hostility soon wanes if it cannot be seen to be having an effect. And my parents – deeply in love, enthusiastically absorbed in their new task, willing to be on friendly terms with everybody yet preferring nature-worshipping walks to social gatherings – were not easy targets for those inclined to attempt ostracism.

A romantic approach to nature was one of the strongest bonds linking a couple who in most ways were utterly unlike. Few Dubliners would then have taken happily to life in the country. Now it is ‘trendy’ to move out of the city, but fashionable migrants are never completely divorced from urban life; they can and usually do select which amenities they wish to take with them. It was different in the ’30s. Lismore is some 140 miles from Dublin and during the early years of their marriage my parents could not afford to run a car or even to pay train fares. There was no electricity in the town and of course there were no television or telephone links with the outside world. There were no theatres, cinemas, concert halls or restaurants within reach. Until they had saved enough to buy a wireless – one which I still use every day – they were dependent for entertainment on their modest record collection. And they had no congenial companionship, apart from occasional guests who never stayed long and went away marvelling at the Murphys’ capacity for enjoying life against such gruesome odds. But to my parents the odds were not at all gruesome. As Thackeray appreciated, West Waterford is extraordinarily beautiful – and that made up for all that they had left behind.

Two miles south of Lismore a wooded ridge – Ballinaspic – forms the watershed between the Bride and the Blackwater valleys. Standing on a certain gatepost on Ballinaspic’s crest one can survey the whole sweep of West Waterford, and always I feel an intoxication of joy as my eye travels from the coast near Dungarvan to the Cork border near Macollop. There are profound differences between one’s responses to familiar and unfamiliar landscapes. The incomparable grandeur of the Himalayas fills me with a mixture of exaltation and humility. But the beauty of the Blackwater valley is so much a part of me that it inspires an absurd pride – almost as though I had helped to make it, instead of the other way round.

Looking across that fertile valley from Ballinaspic one sees three mountain ranges. The Comeraghs, above the sea to the north-east, seem like the long, casual strokes of some dreamy painter’s brush. The Knockmealdowns, directly overlooking Lismore, are gently curved and oddly symmetrical and display as many shades of blue-brown-purple as there are days in the year. And the Galtees – more distant, to the north-west – rise angular and stern above the lonely moors of Araglen. Opposite Ballinaspic, another long, heavily wooded ridge separates the lower slopes of the Knockmealdowns from the lushness at river-level and is marked by several deep glens, each contributing a noisy stream to the quiet width of the Blackwater. And south-east of Ballinaspic, amidst a calm glory of ancient woods and irregular little fields, one can glimpse the marriage of the Bride and the Blackwater – after the latter has abruptly turned south at Cappoquin.

Due north of Lismore a mountain pass forms the letter V against the sky and is known, with un-Irish prosaicness, as the Vee. Less than three hundred years ago wolves were hunted hereabouts and not much more than one hundred years ago evicted peasants were forced to settle on the barren uplands of Ballysaggart. More fortunate settlers arrived in 1832, a group of Cistercian monks who were presented with a mountainside by Sir Richard Keane of Cappoquin. Ten years later Thackeray observed that ‘the brethren have cultivated their barren mountain most successfully’, and now the grey Abbey of Mount Mellery stands solitary and conspicuous against its background of blue hills – an echo of those ancient monasteries which once made known, throughout civilised Europe, the name of Lismore.

In the seventh century St Carthage founded a cathedral and college in Lismore and by the eighth century the place had become a university city where in time both King Alfred the Great and King John (while still Earl of Morton) were to study. In 1173 the ‘famous and holy city’ was ransacked by Raymond le Gros; and when King John replaced the razed college with a castle it, too, was destroyed. Soon, however, the local bishops had built another castle, which Sir Walter Raleigh eventually acquired. But Sir Walter was not a very competent landowner and in 1602 he gladly sold his castle, surrounded by a little property of 42,000 acres, to Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork. Some two hundred years later an heiress of the Earl of Cork married a Cavendish and Lismore Castle is still owned by the Devonshire family. Thackeray observed: ‘You hear praises of the Duke of Devonshire as a landlord wherever you go among his vast estates: it is a pity that, with such a noble residence as this, and with such a wonderful country round about it, his Grace should not inhabit it more.’

Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries West Waterford had to endure less than its share of Ireland’s woes. The Villiers-Stuarts of Dromana and the Keanes of Cappoquin always lived on their estates and generally were compassionate landlords – while the Devonshires, though absentees, were not more than usually unscrupulous. Moreover, a local historian, Canon Power, noted that the region ‘seems to have been largely cleared of its original Celtic stock on the conclusion of the Desmond wars and … the first earl of Cork was able to boast that he had “no Irishe tenant on his land”.’

This successful mini-plantation may partly explain a scarcity of Republicans in the area. Many local families had not been settled in West Waterford for as long as the main land-owning clans; and in the absence of inherited resentments – based on racial memories of conquest and land confiscation – unusually harmonious relations developed between landlords and tenants. But one has to grow up in a place to be aware of these nuances. My parents, looking in from outside, recognised none of the benefits that for centuries had been made available to both sides by West Waterford’s feudal system. Judging the rural social scene by urban standards, they saw only arrogance and profiteering on the one side and spineless servility on the other. And nowhere a slot for themselves.

What sort of person would I now be had I grown up a typical Dubliner, regarding the countryside as something to be enjoyed in literature and avoided in life? But I simply cannot imagine myself as an urban animal. To me, city-dwellers are The Dispossessed, unfortunates who have been deprived of every creature’s right to territory. There is a sense in which country folk, however impoverished, own their birthplace and all the land around it that can be covered in a long day’s tramp – the natural, immemorial limit to the territory of a human being. Or perhaps it is that each region owns its people, exacting a special, subtle loyalty, a primitive devotion that antedates by tens of thousands of years the more contrived emotion of nationalism. Either way, there exists an element of belonging such as surely cannot be replaced or imitated by any relationship, however intense, between the city-dweller and his man-made surroundings. 

2

During the first year of my life the steep climb up to Ballinaspic was among my mother’s favourite walks. (‘Sure the creature must be mad entirely to be pushin’ a pram up there!’) Yet by November 1932 she could push me no further than the Main Street. Suddenly she had been attacked again by that rheumatoid arthritis which had first threatened her at the age of twenty. By my first birthday she could no longer walk without the aid of a stick and by my second she could no longer walk at all. On the 29th of that December she was twenty-six.

There was of course no cure. But doctors in various countries were doggedly experimenting and, escorted by her favourite brother, my mother went to England, Italy and Czechoslovakia for six months, pretending to hope yet sure, inwardly, that she would never walk again. She spent the whole of 1934 either abroad or in Dublin, leaving me to be looked after by Nora under the vague supervision of my father. In theory this abrupt and inexplicable disappearance of an adored mother, when I was at the crucial age of two years, should have damaged me for life. Perhaps it has, but I am never troubled by the scars. I was by nature adaptable, my routine was unbroken, Nora was devoted and sensible and my father was attentive in his didactic way. (A family legend, possibly apocryphal but very revealing, tells of his bewildered grief when I failed, at the age of two and a half, to assimilate the rules governing the solar system.)

In December 1934 my mother returned to Lismore as a complete cripple, unable even to walk from the sitting-room to the downstairs lavatory, or to wash or dress herself, or to brush her hair. Between them, my father and the steadfast Nora cared for her and for me.

Now there were major money worries. My mother’s search for a cure had cost a great deal and my father was heavily in debt to numerous relatives. Both my parents found this deeply humiliating, innocent though they were of any imprudence or extravagance. My father was almost panic-stricken and it was my mother who calmly took up the challenge. Probably a practical crisis, and the discovery of her own unsuspected ability to manage money, helped her at this stage. She soon began to enjoy pound-stretching; I still have some of the little account books in which she neatly entered every penny spent on food, fuel, clothes, rent and so on. My father then happily returned to his natural money-ignoring state and for the rest of their married life my mother held the purse-strings.

By this time my parents had realised that they could have no more children, which for devout Roman Catholics meant resigning themselves to an unnaturally restricted marriage. In our sex-centred world, this may seem like the setting for a life-long nightmare. Having been thoroughly addled by popular pseudo-Freudian theories about libidos, repressions and fixations, we tend to forget that human beings are not animals. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the ending of their sexual relationship imposed no strain on my parents, but they certainly found it a lighter burden than we might think. Religious beliefs strong enough to make sexual taboos seem acceptable, as ‘God’s will’, do not have to be merely negative; faith of that quality can generate the fortitude necessary for the contented observance of such taboos. Restrictions of personal liberty are destructive if accepted only through superstitious fear, but to both my parents the obeying of God’s laws, as interpreted by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, was part of a rich and vigorous spiritual life. This area of their experience – I felt later on – put them in a mental and emotional world remote from my own, where they were equipped with an altogether different set of strengths and weaknesses.

Not long before her death, my mother told me that after getting into bed on their wedding night neither of my parents had known quite what to do next. So they went to sleep. In the 1970s it is hard to believe that two healthy, intelligent human beings, who were very much in love, could have devoted their wedding night exclusively to sleep. But perhaps they were not exceptional among their breed and generation. My mother had been curtly informed by her mother – who had brone seven children and endured countless miscarriages – that sexual intercourse was at all times painful and distasteful. And my father would certainly have considered any investigation of the subject, even in theory, to be grossly improper before marriage.

Sex apart, an inability to have more children was agonising for someone as intensely maternal as my mother. It also put me, at once, in danger. All the emotion and interest that should have been shared among half-a-dozen became mine only. By the time I was five most people considered me a peculiarly nasty child and mistook the reason why. In fact my mother was such a strict disciplinarian that throughout childhood and adolescence I remained healthily afraid of arousing her anger. But what she could not avoid – my being the sole object of her maternal concern – was the encouragement of a ruthless egotism. However, this trait was no doubt useful at the time as insulation against the adult suffering around me. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote, ‘Perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.’ My mother – reading Bowen’s Court – once drew my attention to that remark. She did not comment on it, but I have since wondered if she meant it to comfort me. During childhood, I never stopped to sympathise with my parents’ situation. Indeed, only when I became a mother myself did I appreciate how my own mother must have felt when she found herself unable to pick me up and hug me, and brush my hair, and tuck me up in bed.

After my parents’ deaths I came upon the letters they had written to each other, almost daily, during their six-month engagement. On the whole these might have been written by any happy young couple to whom marriage promised nothing but fulfilment. My father hoped to found a model county library service and write novels; with my mother to inspire him he felt certain these must be masterpieces. For relaxation he looked forward to some deep-sea fishing and an expanding record collection. My mother hoped to have six children at two-year intervals (three of each, if possible, though she conceded this might be difficult to arrange) and to use them – one gathered, reading between the lines – as guinea-pigs on which to test her various theories about physical and mental health. She also hoped to find time to study in depth, under my father’s guidance, the early schisms within the Christian Church – a subject of ineffable tedium to which she remained addicted all her life. She felt, too, that in her role as county librarian’s wife she should initiate a Literary Debating Society (she had not yet visited the town) and perhaps a Music Society. For relaxation she looked forward to walking tours in West Cork and Kerry, presumably on her own while my father deep-sea fished and their systematically increasing offspring were being looked after by some capable Treasure. This correspondence had just one surprising feature. Neither of my penniless parents ever mentioned money, or promotion, or buying a house or a motor car, or in any way planning financially for the future. Both seemed to assume that they would spend the rest of their lives in Lismore – my father wrote ecstatic descriptions of the surrounding countryside – and judging by these letters they were utterly without material ambition.

The few personal memories I retain from my first five years are mostly painful. Our house – or half-house – was separated from the road by a six-foot stone wall, sprouting valerian. When attempting to pick a bouquet for my mother at the age of three I fell and broke my nose. A few months later, driving with my father in the library van, I broke it again when he had to brake suddenly because of wandering cattle. I also remember being excited by the exotic springtime glory of the giant rhododendron tree which overshadowed our unkempt lawn. (I have seen none finer in Europe outside Kew, yet it was felled in 1972 because it took up too much space …) Behind the house were a small yard, a large garden and an enormous orchard securely enclosed by ten-foot stone walls. Here my movements were unrestricted and my chief companion was Billy, a rotund black pony who grazed the orchard, gave me rides and pulled us around the countryside in a trap. (At this stage we had no dog; my mother’s beloved Kevin had been stolen a few weeks after my birth.)

In the spring of 1935 it was decided that for character forming purposes I needed ‘young friends’. My mother therefore arranged various juvenile social occasions and my most vivid memory from this period is a feeling of fury when other children disrupted the elaborate fantasy-world I had created in the orchard.

For my fourth birthday party cousins and an imposing cake were imported from Dublin. But at three o’clock, when the local guests began to assemble, I was missing. Nora quickly traced me to a derelict shed, overgrown with briars, at the end of the garden. My detested beribboned party dress of salmon-pink silk – I can see it still – was torn and streaked with green mould stains, and my back, in every sense, was to the wall. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ fumed Nora. ‘Stuck out here all mucked up with that gorgeous dress rooned an’ your visitors waitin’ inside an’ even your blood relations down from Dublin!’

My reply was to become a clan slogan. ‘I don’t want any bloody relations,’ I replied succinctly. ‘I’m staying here.’

Nora, it seems, was familiar with this impasse. Compromising desperately, she assured me that if I consented to grace the party with my presence I need not wear ‘party clothes’; whereupon I meekly trotted indoors. One changes very little. I still dislike ‘party clothes’.

In March 1936 our obese landlady died and my mother and I moved to Dublin for six months while my father was house-hunting. I stayed in turn with my mother and maternal grandmother and with my father’s parents.

My mother’s mother was known as Jeff to her face, for some entirely obscure reason, and as The Battle-axe behind her back for reasons not at all obscure. She was an exceedingly disagreeable women who spoiled me methodically by way of tormenting my mother. As I was not allowed sweets she offered me sweets at every hour of the day and night and was piqued when I spat them out because they felt and tasted unfamiliar. As my normal bedtime was six o’clock she reorganised the household to prevent my getting to bed before eight o’clock. As comics were frowned upon, lest they might impair my tender literary taste-buds (a paternal directive, this), she bought me a daily comic. And so it went on, a spiteful campaign in which I was the unwitting weapon and her daughter the helpless victim.

My mother dealt with the situation by telling me, ‘Different people have different views. While we are staying here we must respect your grandmother’s views.’ Thus she evaded direct condemnation while making it clear that on our return home the usual disciplines would be reimposed. For a parent who values consistency there is nothing more provoking than the deliberate undermining of a child’s régime. Yet my mother’s self-control never cracked. No doubt this restraint further incensed Jeff, who enjoyed nothing more than a good fish-wifely brawl.

Much as I relished Jeff’s spoiling I was never quite at ease in that semi-detached red-brick Victorian house. My mother’s parents had lived in it all their troubled married life and it had bad vibes. Family opinion blamed Jeff for the fact that her husband – handsome, charming and warm-hearted – was an alcoholic; but this may have been unfair. She can have done nothing to help him control his drinking, but it is doubtful if even the happiest marriage could have saved him from the bottle.

There was an amount of instability in my grandfather’s background. His own father – the son of a senior civil servant at Dublin Castle – had fallen in love with the kitchenmaid, got a chamber pot thrown at his head when the betrothal was announced and soon after emigrated to America with his unacceptable bride and the statutory shilling. Three years and three children later the young couple returned to Dublin, my great-grandfather having found the American way of life insufficiently civilised. For the rest of his life he practised civilisation by drinking too much port and collecting coins while his wife – an energetic and courageous woman – ran an Academy for (very) Young Ladies. As she had been illiterate on her wedding day her husband perhaps deserves some credit for having taken the trouble to teach her how to read and write. Mercifully, Providence spared her any more children after the return to Dublin.

At the age of fourteen my grandfather had to find a job and with wild illogic his father objected to his working as a messenger-boy for a firm of silk importers. It was perfectly in order for a wife to work eighteen hours a day to support an idle husband, but for a son and heir to run errands – no! Unthinkable! This son and heir, however, did not intend to run errands for long. On his twenty-first birthday, after a two-year training course in Lyons, he was made assistant-manager of the Dublin branch of his firm. And three years later he was managing-director – a good catch, then, for my unendowed grandmother.

The trouble on her side was religion. Her mother, the daughter of a Scots Presbyterian cotton magnate, had come to Dublin on a holiday, fallen in love with a dashing Roman Catholic cabinet-maker – presumably when he was working in her host’s house as they would scarcely have been moving in the same social circle – and urged him to emigrate to Edinburgh. This he devotedly did and a clandestine courtship ended with an elopement – in a snowstorm, it is said, but I suspect this of being a period embellishment.

My great-grandmother’s dowry would have been substantial had she married suitably and no doubt adequate had she married a cabinet-maker of her own faith. As it was, the statutory shilling again had to suffice though she did not herself become a Catholic. Sadly, her disinterested love was ill-rewarded; at the age of thirty-four she was left a widow with seven young children. When she despairingly contacted her family they offered financial help on condition that her four Catholic sons be brought up as Presbyterians. She herself must have been a convinced Presbyterian or she would have adopted her beloved husband’s faith. But on their wedding day they had agreed, as was then the custom, to bring up their sons as Catholics and their daughters as Presbyterians. She therefore declined her family’s offer of help and set up as a sempstress to provide for her children.

Despite their aura of smelling-salts, Victorian women were a gallant lot – often widowed young, never helped by the state, without formal training yet indomitably resourceful when obliged to support innumerable children. In this case three boys and a girl died young of the tuberculosis that had killed their father. But my great-grandmother survived into her eighties and was affectionately remembered by my mother as a tall, thin, gracious old lady with an ineradicable Scottish accent. Regularly on Sunday afternoons she read the bible to her restive Catholic grandchildren before providing lavish teas at which they could eat their fill of home-made shortbread and oatcakes and honey.

My mother and her siblings were not often allowed to eat their fill. Even when my grandfather was earning £3,000 a year – which in those far days meant affluence – my grandmother obsessively rationed the children’s food. Avaricious and covetous by nature, she could not forgive her own mother for having put honour before wealth. (I have always uncharitably suspected her of becoming a Catholic simply to spite my loyally Presbyterian great-grandmother.) And her sadistic withholding of plentiful food from hungry children was probably a way of taking her revenge on her husband for his generosity (admittedly not always prudent) towards less well-off friends and relatives.

Jeff had a tight-lipped aversion to gaiety and pleasure, however innocent. As a very small child I became aware of her total lack of humour though I could not then have defined what so often made me uncomfortable in her presence. I also became aware of the animosity she felt towards my mother, which possibly explains an odd little incident which occurred in the autumn of 1936.

Jeff wore a wig, having been afflicted by total baldness as a girl, and though it was a most superior wig it did not deceive me. Sitting on her lap one afternoon I looked into the garden and saw her black Persian cat – strangely named Zog, after the King of Albania – stalking a bird under an apple tree. Then suddenly I knew that I was about to be very wicked. I remember thinking that there should be a choice – surely I need not be wicked – yet the compulsion to hurt Jeff was so overwhelming that it seemed to leave no choice. I turned and touched the wig and observed, ‘That’s not real hair.’ And as I spoke I was so appalled by my cruelty that I began to shake all over.

Both my parents were present, sitting side by side in the background, and at once I glanced towards them. Yes, they had heard. My father looked grieved and my mother wrathful as she murmured something in his ear. Obediently he stood up, carried me out to the hall, reprimanded me sorrowfully and smacked me once very gently on the bottom. This was my first and last domestic experience of corporal punishment – if that is the right term for a chastisement that was virtually indistinguishable from a caress.

When we returned to the sitting-room Zog had caught his prey and was devouring it on the window-sill. Jeff cuddled and consoled me exaggeratedly while upbraiding my parents for treating their little innocent so harshly. I had never before heard grown-ups disagreeing openly about child-control and was fascinated by the new vistas of adult fallibility thus opened up.

Not long after this I nearly joined the angels by drinking half a bottle of neat whiskey. Had I gone on a similar binge in Lismore I would almost certainly have died. As it was, an ambulance rushed me to hospital where I recovered with a speed that ominously foreshadowed an infinite capacity for strong liquor. But the most significant aspect of my adventure was lost on me at the time. I had come upon this half-bottle not in the sideboard, amongst the genteel decanters of sherry and port, but at the bottom of my grandmother’s wardrobe.

Given Jeff’s views on sex, as transmitted to my mother, she must have been an insipid bed-mate. It is therefore not surprising that my grandfather  quietly maintained a second establishment in Paris, where his business took him with convenient regularity. Not long before his death he told my mother that five children had been born of this union – obviously his true marriage, in every sense but the legal.

At the age of forty-nine my grandfather was ‘requested to resign’ because of his hard drinking. My mother then had to return from Munich, where she had just begun to train as a singer. Her two elder brothers had already completed their education, but the younger boys had to be transferred from their Jesuit college to a free day-school. Then the Ford had to be sold, the servants dismissed, the telephone disconnected and the silver pawned. My grandfather could afford to go to Paris only very occasionally – when his mistress sent him the fare – and he was continually exposed to his wife’s contempt. A proud man, he felt his degradation keenly. No one then thought of alcoholism as a disease and he was very conscious of being despised. He drank even harder and borrowed more and more frantically. Meanwhile the family was being kept by his port-sodden father, who had recently inherited a comfortable income from one of the sisters amongst whom his patrimony had been divided when he embraced his kitchenmaid.

My grandfather was declared bankrupt two years after his dismissal – or ‘resignation’, as the nicer members of his family chose to call it. A year later his father died and on the way back from the funeral he paused to light his pipe, sat unsteadily on a wall by the Royal Canal, toppled over, struck his head on a stone and was drowned in eighteen inches of water. Very strangely, for the spot was nowhere near their home, my mother chanced to be passing and witnessed his body being lifted onto the pavement. He was already dead. But for the first ghastly, absurd moment what most upset her was the stench of the slimy weeds that clung to the corpse’s impeccable morning-suit. Even when bankrupt her father had remained something of a dandy.

My mother and he had been exceptionally close – hence Jeff ’s dislike of her daughter – and I heard him spoken of so often during my childhood that I now find it hard to believe I never knew him. Obviously father and daughter were very alike though luckily my mother’s penchant for gracious living was tempered by an awareness that one cannot live both honestly and graciously on a few hundred pounds a year. 

For both our sakes, my mother preferred me to spend more time with my paternal grandparents than with herself and Jeff. A fifteen-minute tram-ride took me from Kenilworth Park to Charleston Avenue so I could still see my mother almost daily. But though the spatial distance between the two households was slight the spiritual distance was vast.

At Charleston Avenue there was poverty, too, but it was happy-go-lucky rather than gloomy and self-pitying. The house was shabby, dark, damp and cramped – yet comfortable. It might have seemed less cramped had there been fewer tottering piles of books on every flat surface. The uninitiated sometimes hinted that a week spent tidily arranging these volumes would make life less inconvenient – not to say perilous – for all concerned. But the initiated knew that the volumes were already arranged to my grandfather’s satisfaction and that from amidst the seeming chaos he could at a moment’s notice produce any required work, whether on the Birds of Patagonia, the History of Printing in North Africa or the Bogotrid Sect of tenth-century Bulgaria. I remember that all ornithological tomes were stacked high on the first four steps of the second flight of stairs. Lord Brougham (Collected Works of) towered beside the lavatory and countless volumes of scriptural commentary had to be removed from the bed in the spare room before I could lie down.

I loved that spare room. Narrow corridors between piles of desiccated books led to the two beds and even before I could read I got high on the pungent mustiness of ancient volumes. On summer evenings I used to slip out of bed and move cautiously about the room, picking up and stroking and glancing through volume after volume, pleased if I found illustrations but not bored if I didn’t. To see and touch and smell those books filled me with content, with feelings of joy and security and richness. And also – even at four and a half – with ambition.

I perfectly understood my grandfather’s triumph when, at the end of a long day in the second-hand bookshops on the quays, he came trudging home hidden behind a pile of bargains. This, as far as he and I were concerned, was what life was all about. Therefore I have always relished The Tale of Pappa’s Trousers.

Once upon a time Granny gave her spouse enough cash to buy himself a very necessary pair of everyday trousers. (For obvious reasons he was not normally entrusted with such large sums of money.) Wearing his Sunday suit, because he had nothing else fit to wear, he set off for wherever the cheapest men’s clothing was to be had. But unluckily his route took him onto the quays and there he chanced to notice the ten-volume 1840 edition of Sismondi’s Histoire des Républiques Italiennes, elegantly bound and without a blemish. It cost considerably more than he had in his pocket, but he judged it to be a bargain and acted with a decisiveness that had it been otherwise directed might have made him a rich man. Nearby was a second-hand clothes shop where he quickly flogged his Sunday suit and bought threadbare trousers for a few shillings. The substantial balance, added to his original allowance, just about paid for Sismondi and his tram fare home. He arrived at Charleston Avenue in a state of advanced euphoria. But as he was also in his shirt-sleeves, and very nearly indecently exposed, it is not surprising that his wife failed to appreciate the Histoire des Républiques Italiennes in ten vols.

Not that my grandmother could afford to criticise Pappa’s obsession: her own was no less uncontrollable and, at least to me, a good deal less understandable. She played bridge, almost literally without ceasing. Naturally I found this a bore, yet I do not remember regarding as abnormal the fact that she and her cronies ate, drank and slept according to the fall of the cards. They might be retiring as I crept downstairs at 7 a.m. to play beneath the overgrown laurel bushes in the back garden. Or they might be in full cry at lunchtime, in which case Pappa and I would quietly settle down to a snack of bread and very ripe Stilton. (So ripe that it had been bought at half-price.) It was not uncommon for the cronies to sleep on divans in the sitting-room, lest their departures and returns might waste time.

Who cooked and washed up? (it was evident that nobody cleaned). I can recall no maid or daily, yet neither do I remember ever going hungry. However, the permanent state of the dining-table proved the subordinate rôle played by food in this household. It was a large table and my memory is of one sordid, crumby corner grudgingly left clear of books and journals and sheaves of notes written in Pappa’s tiny, precise hand.

Pappa – when not delivering philosophy lectures at University College Dublin – was generally understood to be writing A Book. Its subject, however, was never disclosed. My guess would be that he started several books on diverse subjects and finished none of them for lack of mental stamina – or possibly for lack of physical stamina. As a captured Old IRA volunteer, he had been on hunger strike in England for six weeks during 1918, in a bid to have his status as a political prisoner recognised, and this effort at the age of forty-eight had permanently damaged his health. During the same period his wife had also been ‘inside’, as a leader of the women volunteers, Cumann na mBan, and a boundless nationalistic fervour was the couple’s only obvious common trait. Yet they were very happy together, each amiably tolerating the other’s foibles, and they gave my mother a taste of easy-going affection such as she had never enjoyed in her own home.

The flavour of that affection is well conveyed by the letter which Pappa wrote to my father for his twenty-first birthday, which was celebrated in Bedford jail. (My father had been sentenced to three years for concealing weapons and ammunition in his back garden.) 

18 Garville Ave.Rathgar, Dublin 15 Dec. 1921

A Fearguis, a Mic mo Croide – Many very happy returns of your birthday, my darling boy! Fondest love and congratulations and thousands of kisses from your mother. May God bless and protect and inspire you: may he fill your heart with his wisdom, his love and his comfort. Connie, Kathleen, Conn and Auntie join with us, your loving parents, in wishing you joy on your coming of age and hoping you will have a long and happy life.

I can scarcely realise that on tomorrow it will be twenty-one years from that joyous Sunday noon when I first heard your infant voice and held you as a tender babe in my arms – my first little son! Well, thank God, your conduct and character since that happy morning have never caused me a moment’s anxiety – on the contrary, my love and trust and hope and pride in you have increased from year to year and today these thoughts and feelings are a source of the greatest joy and thankfulness. I think it right to tell you this, so that you may read it on the day when you are standing on the threshold of young manhood.

As I write this, An Dail is sitting to determine the most momentous question which had ever been considered by an assembly of Irishmen – shall the Treaty be ratified or not. I tried to put the best face on it for you in my last letter, but we cannot conceal the fact that it was a profound disappointment to most of us; and the more we look at it, the less we like it. It has one very big advantage and two very decided drawbacks. In the first place it provides for the withdrawal of the army of occupation from four-fifths of Ireland and enables us to set up our own army of defence, at least 40,000 strong, in the district thus evacuated – all this is to the good. But, we have not got a Republic and an absolutely sovereign state for four-fifths of Ireland – and we have got nothing at all for Ireland as a whole. We have not got a united Ireland – the Treaty recognises and sanctions partition. The President, Cathal Brugha and Austin Stack are opposed to ratification and many regard the Treaty as tantamount to a betrayal.

It is uncertain therefore whether it will be ratified or not; or whether there will be an appeal to the country. Until ratification takes place, it is unlikely that the sentenced political prisoners will be released and consequently you may have to eat your Christmas dinner yet again in an English prison. But keep a stout heart. No matter what happens our position is greatly improved. It is difficult to know which to pray for – rejection or ratification; there is so much to be said both ways now. You must, accordingly, abate the ardour of your first enthusiasm: mine has cooled very rapidly.

Perhaps you had best spend a week in London and have a look round. You may not get the chance again for a long time. It will be interesting in the future to look back upon what London was like when it was the capital of a big empire. Time is sure to bring many changes and in a few decades London may be a very different place.

You might let me have a list of the things supplied to you by Wallace as I want to check the account he has sent in. Order from him whatever you want – food, tobacco or cigarettes: it is much quicker and handier than sending them by parcel post. Don’t hesitate to send for whatever you require. The books you requested last month are being sent today; your letter asking for them arrived after I had left for Rome. I hope that you will not have much time to read them in prison. God knows you must be heartsick of prison life, and with the prospect of a fourth consecutive Christmas in prison before you you cannot feel too cheerful. However, Nil Desperandum!

We expect Connie home tomorrow or Thursday; she didn’t like her latest prison at all. We have a friend of hers staying with us now who was her cell-mate for a long time in the NDU. We had a letter from Conn yesterday, dated 3 Dec. and quite cheery. He seems to be in good form and is confidently awaiting his release before Xmas. He says he enjoyed your last letter.

I got a pretty bad cold on my return from sunny Italy* but I am now recovered. I can arrange, later on, to meet you in Holyhead on your return journey.

With fondest love and heartiest wishes for a Happy Birthday, Your affectionate

Pappa.

The earlier letter about the Treaty, in which Pappa had ‘tried to put the best face on it’, was written on December 8, 1921, and began:

May God save and prosper the Free State of Ireland! You have no doubt heard the good news that a settlement has been agreed to between the English and Irish nations. It is not quite all that we had hoped it would be, but it is very good indeed and very much better than anything which seemed within the bounds of possibility a few years ago. And we have to thank you and the comrades with whom you fought for the magnitude of the victory. We have not succeeded in establishing an Irish Republic for a united Ireland, it is true. But we have got the real substance and can afford to wait a bit for the name. The sovereign independent Free State of Ireland will be in actual existence within a month and you will be coming back to live in that Free State which your courage and sacrifices have helped to create. So rejoice and be exceedingly glad. Let no disappointment cloud your joy or diminish your legitimate pride in what has been accomplished. On your return I shall explain fully to you the real value – as distinct from the paper value – of what we have won. I believe that the convicts will be released as soon as the Treaty has been ratified by An Dail and the English Parliament and that will be, probably, within a week.

I have asked Mamma to send you on the biggest portmanteau in the house. Cord up all your books, make sure they are fastened securely and bring them all home safely.

What had caused Pappa to change his attitude towards the Treaty so radically within exactly one week? ‘Putting the best face on it’ for a son in jail is not a sufficient explanation. Did the real ‘substance’ referred to on December 8 prove after all insubstantial? And was it in some way connected with the negotiations which Pappa had been conducting with the Vatican on behalf of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic? I have been able to find no answer to this question in the vast accumulation of letters and papers now in my possession.

The convicts were not released before Christmas and on December 23 Pappa wrote to his ‘beloved son’: