Wheels Within Wheels (27 page)

I resisted this plan strenuously, and not only for the sake of the house. I knew that I could not possibly cope if uprooted from Lismore and deprived of my friends’ support. But I lost the first round and early in July we moved to Dublin, leaving Clairvaux on an estate agent’s books.

Our poverty notwithstanding, my mother was too proud to put any relative to the inconvenience of entertaining an invalid. She settled into a nursing home, moderating her nocturnal demands to avoid having to engage a private night nurse. I stayed nearby with an aunt and did duty from 7.00 am until 11.00 pm. At intervals I was despatched to inspect flats – a task which I mitched, having made up my mind that under no circumstances would I agree to settle in Dublin.

Our unfortunate relatives, suddenly drawn into the Murphy inferno, were altogether at a loss. They gave us much well-meant, conflicting and usually irrelevant advice, which we ignored. Only in opposing my decision to take a holiday abroad were they unanimous, seeing this as no way to treat a recently bereaved invalid mother. But I was impervious to their criticisms. I knew that I must now assert myself, once and for all, as an adult whose reasonable demands had to be met if my mother and I were to have any future together. Our relatives, however, being unaware of these undercurrents, could not be blamed for condemning my plans as pure selfishness. (My mother and I habitually closed ranks in the presence of outsiders and never allowed them to see just how strained was our relationship.)

Now it was my turn to blackmail. In mid-July I told my mother that I had resigned myself to the sale of Clairvaux but would never agree to leaving the Blackwater Valley. If she would return to Lismore, we could go home after my holiday and set about searching for a suitable cottage. Otherwise, I would remain abroad. Without a moment’s hesitation, my mother called my bluff by refusing even to consider a return to Lismore. A few hours later, my bicycle Roz and I took the night boat from Dun Laoghaire.

This time I was not being swept away from Ireland on a wave of demented fantasy; I intended to return as soon as my mother could adjust herself to the realities of our situation. Yet this flight from duty distressed me even more than my 1959 escape. My actions were not out of control, as they had been two years previously, and I knew that my ostensibly final departure was a calculated measure designed to break the will of someone who had already had to suffer far more than her share. Therefore during the internal dialogues that took place between the two halves of myself I found it necessary to emphasise how relentlessly my mother had followed a course that must drive me away – almost, indeed, as though a part of her wished to do so, thus unloading from her conscience the burden of being my millstone.

I landed at Calais with £10 in my money-belt – enough to take me to the Hilckmanns, in Mainz. There I could be sure of a warm welcome; they had stayed with us for six weeks during the previous summer while Anton was being taught Irish – his twenty-second language – by my father. I slept out in my flea-bag each night – the weather was almost too hot for long-distance cycling – and had unwound considerably by the time I reached Mainz. There I relaxed for a week before getting work as a farm-hand in the village of Ober Saulheim, some fourteen miles further down the Rhine. I spent the next six weeks hoeing vines, scouring churns, harvesting straw, mucking out cow byres, grading eggs and corking wine. My working hours were not much shorter than at home – 5.0 am to 11.0 pm with a half-day on Sundays – but I welcomed being (by Irish standards) slave-driven. It was exactly what I needed at that time.
Ceaseless
labour, with only four half-hour breaks for vast meals – two of them picnic-style, eaten on the job-site – left me without the energy to fret. At the centre of me a hard little knot of guilty misery remained untied and I dared not think about the future. But meanwhile constant exertion in the open air, good food, few cigarettes and unbroken nights of deep sleep were rapidly restoring my health.

Even as late as 1961, in technological Germany, one could, as a
farm-labourer
, feel closely in touch with the past – with the many generations of villagers who had lived in those same houses, cultivating those same hectares. The almost universal farm village is unknown in Ireland and I enjoyed the novelty of sharing in Ober Saulheim’s rhythmical 
community life. Early each morning lines of oxcarts creaked off to the cornfields in a cloud of yellowish dust, and files of vineyard workers made for the sunny slopes above the river with hoes over their shoulders, and groups of hausfraus gathered by the communal deep-freeze in the village centre to take out great hunks of meat and containers of fruit and vegetables. At that season Ober Saulheim smelt pleasantly of fresh
cow-dung
and sweet hay and new milk and fermenting wine, with only an occasional discordant whiff of diesel oil from a passing tractor. The nearest autobahn was only a kilometre away, but as far as the villagers were concerned it might have been on another planet.

Although my employer’s vineyard was well known, and his son and heir was a forward-looking twenty-one-year-old, the Landgraf family – like their neighbours – used few labour-saving devices. They had all the basic bits of agricultural machinery, and a simple hand-machine for milking their ten cows, but the house, outbuildings and cellars – and most of their work methods – remained exactly as they had always been. This disdain for gadgetry and the symbols of affluence greatly appealed to me, as did the whole village atmosphere. There must have been jealousies, squabbles and gossip, as in every such community, but the general feeling was of uncomplicated serenity.

Yet that holiday confirmed what I had suspected on my first visit to Germany: that the Germans and the Irish have remarkably little in common. The Landgrafs could not have been kinder to me and I became especially fond of Frau Landgraf, who treated me like an adopted daughter. But whether in the farming world of Ober Saulheim or in the academic world of Mainz – where I spent most Sunday afternoons with the Hilckmanns – I found it impossible to establish that rapport which had come about so effortlessly in Spain. No doubt the Germans are as well able to enjoy themselves as anyone else; it was probably mere chance that in both those circles nobody seemed to have the slightest interest in anything but unsmiling hard work.

At least twice a week relatives wrote to report on my mother’s state. Physically she was no worse than usual and was being well cared for by the nursing-home staff – though she herself did not think so. Mentally, however, she was suffering intensely as a result of my desertion. Then, in 
mid-September, came a letter saying that she was longing to return to Lismore and enclosing a Frankfurt-Dublin air-ticket. On compassionate grounds, a dismantled Roz was allowed to travel with me as baggage.

I could detect no reproach in my mother’s manner when we were reunited. And I wondered then, as I had for the same reason in 1959, if, with the residue of her ‘real’ self, she understood all and so could forgive all.

On our first evening at home in Lismore my mother suddenly said, ‘I want you to take Clairvaux off the books tomorrow. All my worrying about money is silly – not necessary. You’ll have your freedom quite soon.’ She had spoken very matter-of-factly and I thought she was probably right; with my father she had wanted to live, without him she wanted to die. But her tone had been accusing – and there is a unique horror about being accused of wishing someone to die when the
accusation
is true. Momentarily I was tempted to make some insincere, dutiful remark; but I chose silence. Any false protest could only degrade our relationship still further. As it was, that brief exchange of words, glances and silences had had a paradoxically companionable undercurrent.

During the following days, I noticed how much my mother had changed in my absence. My struggle to break her grip on me had been only too successful. Not merely had she lost the will to dominate me, she seemed also to have lost the will to live. If I wished to lacerate myself I could argue, plausibly, that I killed her by deserting her that August. But if this is so, I did it under the guidance of my own instinct of
self-preservation
. Jungle law operated. One of us had to be sacrificed and the fittest survived.

The eleven months that followed were the saddest of my life. At times I even looked back nostalgically to the era of my mother’s domination; that, at least, had been an expression of her personality – however distorted. Now her dulled mind and passivity and compliance were my punishment for having so implacably opposed her in the past. She still listened to music, but she did not read, or listen to discussions on the wireless, or wish to hear what was in the
Irish Times
, or proffer any opinion about the running of the household. Only when visitors called did some ember of pride flicker into flame and she would receive them 
with a poignantly recognisable shadow of her old graciousness and cheerfulness. I was no longer in her consciously exercised power, yet never before had she had such power to move me.

By the beginning of August 1962 it was clear that soon my mother would die; she who had never accepted painkillers or tranquillisers was now permanently under heavy sedation. I moved about the house in a daze. Sorrow contributed nothing to it – or nothing that I could perceive. Relief predominated, but there was also a primitive reaction of horror – altogether absent during my father’s last illness – to the physical
dissolution
of the body that for so long I had tended. In thirty years of invalidism my mother had never once developed a bedsore, but now her body began to decompose while she still lived. I could cope no longer and the Jubilee Nurse came twice a day.

On the evening of August 24 Daphne came to sit with me through the night and at twenty-five past one in the morning my mother died – as peacefully, in the end, as had my father. She had survived him by exactly eighteen months.

As my mother drew her last breath, peace enfolded me. It was profound and healing, untinged by grief, or remorse, or guilt, or loneliness. I thought of it as a gift from my mother’s spirit – and then mocked my fancy, without quite discrediting it. For long I had suffered with her, and made her suffer, and been made to suffer by her; and of late I had mourned for her. Now I could only rejoice – and in Daphne’s company I did not have to disguise my joy. A great burden was gone, the double burden of another’s tragedy and my own inadequacy. I stood at the threshold of an independent life and I felt, that night, my parents’ blessing on it.

After a moment I left the room – my mother had not yet assumed the aspect of the dead – and in defiance of local custom I never looked on her face again. Twelve years passed before a letter from a friend, on the subject of her own mother’s death, allowed me to see why I had so obstinately stayed in the sitting-room when I should have been
pretending
to pray with the neighbours beside my mother’s corpse. I knew, without permitting the knowledge to register on my conscious mind, what the undertaker would have to do to accommodate a malformed
body in a conventional coffin. And I could not bring myself to look upon that body in a normal lying posture.

It is difficult to convey my feelings when I woke next morning and realised that I was responsible to and for no one but myself – that I was free to do what I liked, when I liked, as I liked. For more than sixteen years every day had been lived in the shadow of my mother’s need. Even on holidays, my movements had had to be exactly regulated so that I would unfailingly arrive home on a certain date. I remember sitting in hot sunshine in the back garden with Daphne – surrounded by that untrammelled growth of nettles and thistles which proved me to be my father’s daughter – and feeling currents of an appreciation of liberty running through my body like mild electric shocks. I was exalted by the realisation of freedom. When callers came to offer sympathy, Daphne received them and gave the necessary convention-soothing impression that I was too distrait to appear.

Afterwards, I discovered that some of my friends had dreaded my reaction to my mother’s death; when at last the almost intolerable pressure was removed, anything, they felt, might happen. They had overlooked the fact that for months the pressure had been gradually easing, giving me an opportunity to readjust.

Again I stood between Daphne and Brian at the graveside, as my mother’s coffin was lowered to lie beside my father’s. Then I returned with them to Monatrim and next morning visited Clairvaux for a few hours and was alone for the first time in my own home. Unexpectedly I found myself revelling in the novel sensation of ownership; possession of a house and all it contained seemed to symbolise Freedom and Independence. It never occurred to me that I had no means of
maintaining
the place: possession was all. At the age of thirty I had not yet possessed anything but the minimum of clothes, the maximum of books and a bicycle.

I wandered happily from room to room. The ghosts were friendly; the misunderstandings and antagonisms and furies and resentments of the past had left no stain. I decided to convert my mother’s bedroom into my study, a simple change that needed only the replacing of her bed by the dining-room table. All the other furnishings of the room were left
unchanged – it had been designed as a sitting room rather than a bedroom – and unchanged they remain to this day. I write on the spot where she died.

Love leaves calm. Even when circumstances have given it the semblance of hate, this is so. In the tangled relationships between my parents and myself love was often abused, denied, misdirected, thwarted, exploited and outwardly debased. But it existed, and it left calm.

Two days after my mother’s funeral I left Lismore to visit my Co Wicklow friends. By then I realised that despite my basic calm I was, inevitably, suffering from shock. A total lack of physical energy betrayed this condition. Feeling too exhausted to cycle the 130 miles to Wicklow, I hitch-hiked.

My friends’ house was near a private beach to which they and their guests had access. There, during the first week of September, I spent long, sunny, solitary days lying on the slopes of curving sand-dunes, gazing at the blue sky through tall clumps of green-gold grass and hearing nothing but the hiss of a lazy sea on the beach below. Swiftly my strength and energy returned. And then, towards the end of the week, something odd happened to my sense of time.

So stark was the contrast between my previous bondage and my present liberty that I could scarcely conceive of them as belonging to the same existence, and the few days since my mother’s death seemed as long as the many years that had gone before. Yet counterbalancing this was a powerful sense of continuity. I had briefly experienced something similar after Godfrey’s death and my father’s; from now on I was to be aware of it as a permanent undercurrent. For however long my new life lasted, it would be subtly conditioned, in every detail, by a past which already seemed so remote that I saw myself moving through it as a stranger. And with no part of myself could I regret that past. This was not because of any deliberate effort to accept, in retrospect, what I had so often rejected when it was a present torment. In fact, I had never quite rejected it. Usually I had been half aware, and occasionally fully aware, of the potential value to any human being of a certain degree of suffering. Had mine continued much longer, it would have destroyed me. As it was, I could feel, at the end of the ordeal, wholly without resentment.

What had so often seemed wasted years, in my many moods of bitterness, now seemed otherwise. During those September days I could not have given any reason for feeling thus. But I have since realised that events and emotions which at the time of their happening
were apparently destructive and enfeebling, in their enduring results were constructive and tempering. I had learned a lesson in humility that could not have been taught to anybody of my arrogant nature by less violent means. Without my friends I could not possibly have survived; their love had borne me to safety. And I recognised that, because of my prolonged emotional dependence on them, the person I had become over the past decade was partly their creation. Had I left home at eighteen and made a successful career for myself, I would probably have gone through life as an intolerant, unsympathetic bitch – a rôle for which I had as a youngster all the necessary qualifications. But years of being confronted by my personal weaknesses, and striving to comprehend our family weaknesses, had to some extent modified these traits. At thirty, I could ignore neither my own flaws nor the endless variety of causes that can lie behind the flaws of others. The school was hard, but the knowledge was priceless.

Many hours on the sand-dunes had been spent methodically planning my journey to India. Having for the past twenty years intended to make this journey, it did not strike me as in any way an odd idea. I thought then, as I still do, that if someone enjoys cycling and wishes to go to India, the obvious thing is to cycle there. Soon, however, I realised that most people were regarding me either as a lunatic or an embryonic heroine; in 1962 Western youth’s mass trek to the East had not yet begun. When I went into a cycle shop to have Roz’s derailleur gears removed, and explained that I was going to India and felt they would not be suitable for Asian roads, the mechanic looked at me very strangely indeed. After that I became a trifle inhibited about discussing my plans.

Several people suggested that the trip should be sponsored, perhaps by the makers of my bicycle – or by Guinness, since their product so habitually nourished the body that was to undertake this alleged marathon. Or even by a newspaper, to which I could send back dramatic stories from improbable places. But these suggestions appalled me. Any sponsor would have made of my private journey a public stunt and the very thought of the resultant limelight made me sweat with terror. Also, sponsorship would have given a dishonest twist to the whole experience. By this stage I had had to concede that there was, objectively, something
slightly peculiar about the notion of cycling to India; to have persisted in denying this would have been to argue that the rest of the world was out of step. Yet subjectively it remained true that I saw nothing peculiar in it and to have the project presented to the public as something exotic and daring would have falsified it utterly. Of course I saw it as an adventure – that had been its attraction, since my tenth birthday – but I knew it required no unusual courage or stamina. It was planned as, and it proved to be, a happy-go-lucky private voyage to enjoy some of the world in the way that best suited my temperament. And, if the publishing trade winds were blowing my way, to provide material for a book.

I can see now that this journey seemed extraordinary to many simply because I provided my own energy. When the overland trek to Asia became popular among the young, a few years later, the vast majority hitch-hiked or used local transport – though they were half a generation my juniors and should have had that much more personal energy available. This dependence on motor transport I find very disquieting, when adventure and enjoyment are the objects of the exercise and
time-saving
is not a consideration. It indicates that we have become more dependent on
things
than rational beings should be. In some societies this dependence is already causing people to degenerate physically. Men and women who live all their lives in centrally heated homes and offices, and go in the car to post a letter and collect the children from school, and have labour-saving devices for every conceivable purpose (including electric tooth-brushes and carving-knives) – such people have become so sensually unaware and so unresponsive to physical challenges that they are only half-alive. If they cannot soon escape from Affluence and Technology some very odd biological mutations seem likely within the next few generations. The urge to effect this escape of course underlay what was vaguely known as the Hippy Movement. But few hippies realised that their routine of quitting the rat-race, seeking a guru, going vegetarian and growing a lot of hair was no substitute for training their bodies to do what in previous generations any healthy young body could do.

The winter of 1962–63 was Europe’s most severe for eighty years and I shall never forget the agonising cold of that dark January morning when I began to cycle east from Dunkirk on an ice-bound road. As I wrote to
Daphne a few days later, ‘To have the fulfilment of a twenty-one-
year-old
ambition within one’s grasp is quite disconcerting. I had thought about this moment so often that when I actually found myself living through it I felt as though some favourite scene from a novel had come, incredibly, to life.’

The hardships and poverty of my youth had been a good
apprenticeship
for this form of travel. I had been brought up to understand that material possessions and physical comfort should never be confused with success, achievement and security. And soon I was discovering for myself that our real material needs are very few and that the extras now presented as ‘needs’ not only endanger true contentment but diminish our human dignity. None of the privations, hazards or unforeseen difficulties of that journey bothered me. To be able unrestrainedly to gratify my wanderlust, after so many years of frustration, was all that mattered.

Soon after my arrival in New Delhi, I volunteered for work in a Tibetan refugee camp in the Himalayan foothills. Some of my friends then imagined that the miseries of Asia had so moved me that I felt compelled to contribute my mite towards their alleviation. But this was too simple an explanation, as was the reason I gave myself at the time – that it was too hot to travel any further. I now suspect that I took this unpaid job, and again immersed myself in grinding hard work amidst extreme physical suffering, because some absurd puritan streak made me feel that it was my duty to do so, after six months of unrelieved
self-indulgence
. Of course I very soon became deeply involved, emotionally, in the whole Tibetan refugee problem. But that is another story.

While I was still with the Tibetans, I received a puzzling letter from a well-known English publishing house expressing interest in my ‘feat’ and saying that should I happen to write a book about it they would be very interested to see the typescript. The book was in fact already written, as I had kept a detailed daily diary on the way to India. I explained this, promising to send the typescript in due course. It later transpired that a garbled account of ‘Miraculous Overland Cycle by Lone Irishwoman’ had appeared in an Indian paper and been spotted by that publisher’s New Delhi agent.

Then, shortly before my return home in March 1964, I met Penelope 
Betjeman in Delhi. She had come to India to collect material for a book and when I confessed to literary ambitions she said, ‘Of course! Marvellous journey! Marvellous book! You must send it to Jock Murray.’

We were cycling together through a crowded Old Delhi bazaar – Penelope with an accident-inviting load of firewood tied to her carrier – and I yelled above the blare of rickshaw horns, ‘To
whom
?’

‘To Jock Murray,’ Penelope yelled back. ‘You’ll adore Jock – everybody adores Jock.’

‘Do you mean John Murray in Albemarle Street?’ I asked
disbelievingly
.

‘Yes of course,’ said Penelope. ‘Jock will love it – just his sort of thing.’

I was so profoundly shocked by this irreverent suggestion that I almost ran into a sacred cow. To someone reared on the lives and works of nineteenth-century English writers the very thought of submitting a Murphy typescript to John Murray seemed blasphemous. Jane Austen, Byron, Darwin, Borrow, Livingstone, Isabella Bird, Younghusband, even Queen Victoria – these and a score of other names flashed through my mind, dazzling me. I pedalled faster to draw level with Penelope and said, ‘You must be mad!’

‘No more than usual,’ she retorted. ‘Don’t forget – do as I say.’

The immediate sequel to my journey was exceedingly unpleasant. In India I had been working under the Save the Children Fund umbrella and on visiting their London headquarters I found myself seized upon as invaluable material for a fund-raising campaign. I was to be exposed to everything I most detested: a press conference, photographers, wireless interviews and – the ultimate hell – television interviews. Obviously I could not say no; I had witnessed too much suffering in the refugee camps not to co-operate. Miserably I went through the hoops, revolted by the spurious ‘heroine image’ being presented to a gullible public.

Before leaving London I called on the enterprising publishers who had already written to me. Their brand-new building was
many-storeyed
and many-corridored; it contained an army of whizz-kids and reminded me of a factory. I was received by three of the army in a large gleaming room with angular metal furniture and not a book in sight. There was much talk of royalties and promotion and a contract lay on 
an ugly table awaiting my signature. After my recent experiences the word ‘promotion’ brought me out in goose-flesh. I edged away from the contract and said I couldn’t think of signing it until they had seen the typescript. What if they didn’t like it? The
three
closed in, effusive and reassuring. I needn’t worry – I had a fascinating story to tell – they had excellent editors – all would be well if I signed just there. ‘Excellent editors …’ My hackles rose. I did not intend to have my ‘fascinating story’ told in the words of any editor, however excellent. Besides, I intensely disliked the thought of any book being processed in this aseptic wilderness. Muttering vague half-promises, I withdrew.

Meanwhile another publisher was eagerly pursuing me but, being in no mood for further premature bargaining about my first-born brainchild, I hurried home to go through the final stages of parturition. I had had little time to consider what form my book might take, but the four friends for whose benefit it had been written were unanimous that I must rewrite nothing, transpose nothing, add nothing. I must simply delete, reducing a quarter of a million words to 80,000.

Towards the end of this five-week task another publisher arrived on the scene by post and I felt rather disheartened; clearly the publishing world coveted my book for its supposedly sensational theme. However, when the manuscript had been typed I sent a copy off to each of the interested houses and circulated the third carbon copy among my friends. Then came a letter from Penelope: ‘Have you sent your book to Jock Murray? If not, why not’ – or words to that effect. To me the idea still seemed preposterous, but I was in a mood to try any alternative to high-powered modern publishing – even at the risk of committing sacrilege. I parcelled up my faint, dog-eared fourth copy and sent it off to 50 Albemarle Street.

A few days later a telegram signed ‘Murray’ asked me to call when I was next in London. Was it possible …? Could it be …? I packed my saddle-bag, leaped on Roz and cycled to Cork to catch the boat.

Next day, quite unmanned by suspense and awe, I turned into
Albemarle
Street and approached the spot where, fifteen years earlier, during my first visit to London, I had stood on the pavement gazing respectfully at the door I was now so improbably about to enter. But in reality No. 50 was not at all overwhelming. No efficient army appeared to organise me, 
the place smelt suitably of books, old and new, and Jock Murray’s office was cramped, chaotic and almost as dusty as Clairvaux. At once I knew that I had arrived at the predestined end to a much longer journey than my cycle to India.