Wheels Within Wheels (22 page)

My parents knew nothing of this new relationship. With them I had by then reached a fiercely secretive stage – the beginning of my futile rebellion against that trap foreseen by Mark when I left school. He of course was given a detailed account of the friendship with Godfrey. He listened sympathetically and wisely refrained from pointing out how improbable it was that a man of thirty-seven would remain interested only in my views on Shakespeare.

Characteristically, I never paused to wonder where this impractical love was leading me. To some those three years may seem arid, unfulfilling and wasted, but they did not seem so to me then – nor do they now. My own summing-up of the situation was ridiculously defective, yet the relationship between Godfrey and me was neither unreal nor – in any but the narrowest sense – unfulfilling. Despite the apparent artificiality of its framework, it developed and matured and grew richer as the months and the years passed. And for me it had – as I see it in retrospect – a most precious and irrecoverable beauty. For it was the fairest flower in the garden of youth: love without passion.  

At the beginning of 1951 my mother announced that something must soon be done to get me out of Lismore, however briefly. She had always maintained – and not only, I believe, because it was a convenient conscience-soother – that for girls travel is the best form of education. Yet I was no less astonished than elated by this announcement. Gradually, over the years, my liberty had been whittled away as my mother became more dependent on my nursing. So how did she propose to organise things in my absence? I felt touched and grateful when she declared briskly that she could easily manage again for a few weeks as she had done for months while I was at school. The less obvious implications of that declaration did not strike me then, or for many years afterwards. I was much too close to what was happening to look at it.

Even now it is hard to estimate how far my mother’s health had deteriorated by this time. But undoubtedly her demands for attention were already unconsciously prompted by a determination to dominate me. I might argue against scrubbing the hall floor every day and cleaning the windows every week – and indeed I flatly refused to do such chores more than once a quarter, when even by my standards they had become necessary. But I could not argue if my mother requested some attention. I could not tell her that she didn’t really need to use the bedpan, or to have her position changed, or her room made warmer or cooler, or her thirst quenched. So as I became more mulish about housework and cooking she became more demanding of nursing attention.

My mulishness was not caused only by an inherent dislike for domestic chores. It is natural to be still dependent on and living with one’s parents at fifteen or sixteen, but to be in exactly the same situation at nineteen felt very unnatural to me. When I compared my own situation with that of other youngsters, even factory-hands or shop-assistants seemed enviable. They were leading their own lives and earning a weekly wage – and they had whole weekends off. More freedom was what I longed for. My lack of money mattered only because it symbolised being unfree; every necessity was provided by my parents and my pocket-money was
adequate for the few luxuries I craved – such as
Collected Commentaries
on ‘
Hamlet’: 1650–1950.

However, despite my bondage I was still enjoying life too much to feel more than occasional spasms of discontent. By temperament I was inclined to count my advantages rather than my disadvantages and envy of factory-hands never went far enough to make me wish that I had been born one. Possibly, without Godfrey, I might have been less resigned; at that time our relationship mattered to me more than
anything
else. But of course it is also possible, if one is prepared to look back with cold objectivity, that this relationship developed under adverse conditions, and assumed such importance, simply because my life was so restricted. I needed the emotional excitement of being in love. And it would be rash to pretend to know whether we create what we need or whether our needs are supplied by a benevolent Fate. If, at nineteen, I had been free to travel for a year in Asia, would I have chosen instead to remain at home within reach of Godfrey? I doubt if I would.

I left Lismore on April 15, 1951, to spend three weeks cycling through Wales and Southern England – including, inevitably, five days in Stratford-upon-Avon. Some of the neighbours were aghast when they heard that I had taken off, alone, on a bicycle, to travel through what was little better than a pagan land. And they were even more aghast when they realised that my parents had encouraged me to commit this outrage.

At nineteen I had never before left Ireland, apart from one Triple Crown excursion to Twickenham. (Where, having just finished
Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third
, I deserted my fellow-fans, after the match, to search unsuccessfully for Strawberry Hill.) I was fervently nationalist and anti-partitionist and therefore, in theory, anti-British. Honour required me to see Britain as a foreign country because my school history books had taught that the British were solely responsible for all Ireland’s past woes and present handicaps. Thus I was shocked to discover, as I cycled through Wales and England, that it was impossible to feel ‘abroad’. Half of me seemed ‘to belong’ in Britain. Having been in love with a quintessential Englishman for two years may have contributed to this. Much more important, however, was the fact that I had grown up by the light of Eng. Lit. To me the
British were comprehensible and congenial (to my great annoyance) because their history and literature were mine, too, with modifications and additions. At times I found them as exasperating as they can find us; but they were never baffling, as we so often are to them. One knew what made them tick. Of course the Welsh and the English differed from me, but no more than a Welshman differs from a Scotsman or a Kerryman from a Dubliner. What we had in common went deeper than what divided us. Thomas Davis made many bigoted and stupid remarks, but he was right when he said, ‘A people without a language of its own is only half a nation. A nation should guard its language more than its territories – ’tis a surer barrier, and more important frontier than fortress or river … To lose your native tongue, and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest – it is the chain on the soul. To have lost entirely the national language is death; the fetter has worn through.’ In 1951, however, I was not yet ready to admit that an Ireland in every way independent of Britain could only be a mirage. It was too soon for me to analyse detachedly the Republican ideals and prejudices acquired from generations of militant Murphys. I therefore developed a form of cultural schizophrenia, with my nationalistic half resolutely remembering that Britain was ‘the ancient enemy’ (though already Mark and Godfrey had seen that eventually my ‘literary’ rather than my ‘political’ half would win). Indeed, the fact that the implacable nationalism inherited from my father was being threatened by the apolitical liberalism inherited from my mother made me even more aggressively Irish and proud of it. Not for many years would I be willing to recognise that Ireland’s uniquely close relationship with Britain is impervious to ‘constitutional re-arrangements’ – and that to admit this is not to be a shoneen (i.e. pro-British) but a realist.

Happily my cultural schizophrenia detracted nothing from my
enjoyment
of Britain. I proved that I could cycle 100 miles a day without undue effort and I cut back on food to spend wildly in second-hand bookshops, sending a postcard home almost daily to announce that another parcel of ‘wonderful finds’ had been despatched. Every evening I met in my Youth Hostel congenial representatives of the Great British Public and a stimulating cross-section of early fellow-tourists from Europe and America. At Stratford I actually
spoke
to Professor Dover
Wilson for ten minutes after a lecture on
Richard II
– undoubtedly the highlight of the whole trip. And there too I met four undergraduates who invited me to contact them when I got to Oxford and gave me an illicit glimpse of Balliol night life. In London I rivalled the most gluttonous of American culture-vultures and packed an improbable number of concerts, ballets, operas, museums and galleries into eight days. And everywhere I found the allegedly reserved English spontaneously kind and helpful – even talkative, if the stranger was prepared to initiate the conversation.

My father never commented on the long article I wrote about Oxford on my return home, but it must have alarmed him, as a symptom of my drift away from the true-blue (or true-green) Republican tradition. In the course of it I wrote:

There was an underlying sadness about my reaction to Oxford, though at the time I firmly refused to dwell upon this. I had never regretted leaving school at fourteen, but now, suddenly, I saw that university was another matter. During those few days and nights of innocent though often rule-breaking fun with my young Balliol men and their girlfriends – it was during the Eights Week – I found myself in a world where I naturally belonged. Or could have belonged, in other circumstances; as my article reveals, it would have been too late, in 1951, for me to adapt to that world even had I then been free to do so. I was only nineteen – younger than all my new friends – yet I felt considerably older than they were. I wholeheartedly enjoyed their companionship, as I still would, but they made me realise that, having never known what it was to be without adult responsibilities, I had skipped a whole stage of youthfulness.

For someone who had spent most of their nineteen years within a
thirtymile
radius of Lismore, those were three seminal weeks. They also
provided material for my first published writing, apart from childhood competition essays. I sold three long articles, on my impressions of Stratford, London and Oxford, to the old monthly
Hibernia
– which had nothing in common with the present-day journal of that name. Each earned me two guineas and it was most gratifying to see my work in print and to be paid sixteen weeks’ pocket-money for enjoying myself. Yet the thrill was less than might have been expected. I had never wanted to be a journalist, freelance or otherwise. I was not a 100-metre, or even a 1,500-metre, writer; the marathon was my distance. And in the foreseeable future there was no possibility of my being free to do a
book-length
journey.

A year later I set out on a five-week continental tour, taking time-saving trains from Fishguard to Dover,
en route
for Belgium. And next day, in a First World War cemetery, on a vibrant spring afternoon, I passed one of those unforgettable hours which in retrospect are seen to have been milestones in one’s development.

I was alone in the April sunshine among all those small, neat, green graves – British graves. And the sadness of that waste utterly
overwhelmed
me. Most had been my age, give or take a few years. Had they lived they would have been little older than my parents. But they had died – for what? For King and Country, for the defence of small nations, for the end of all warring, for a lot of platitudes. If this was nationalism in action, did it make sense? German nationalism, British nationalism, French nationalism, Irish nationalism – all decked out in flowery phrases, glorifying death, urging young men on to slaughter each other. The occupants of these graves should since have enjoyed some thirty-five years of life, as I was even then enjoying the sun and the breeze and the few white clouds in the wide blue sky above Flanders. And it didn’t matter to me that they were British; I could only think of them as humanity squandered. At twenty I was tough and my blood was the blood of fighters. Yet I wept that afternoon. I could see no point in the waste and the grief and the pseudo-heroism cultivated by each country’s leaders. How could any nation that claimed to be civilised fight such a war? I decided then that nationalism (as distinct from patriotism) is an affliction which humanity needs to be cured of as soon as possible.

Walking back to my bicycle, I felt a sudden anguished embarrassment on my father’s behalf; and a contempt for him that humiliated me because it reeked of disloyalty. He could not have reacted as I was doing to all those graves. I had grown up, but he hadn’t. I was too young to understand that ‘growing up’, in this sense, was immeasurably harder for his generation, whatever their nationality, than for mine. At eighteen he had entered an English jail to spend three years sewing sacks for the post office, wretchedly fed and crawling with lice. And now I wonder how soon I would have ‘grown up’ had I endured a similar experience.