Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  Scientific interest was not of course the only motive for my graveyard prowlings. Children are enthralled by mortality and unlike many who have felt the touch of Time, are able to contemplate it detachedly. As a child with no personal experience of bereavement I was thrilled by the dramatic finality of death and fascinated by the mystery of what follows after. Many an hour did I spend sitting on old tombstones cheerfully reviewing eschatological possibilities.

  I had long since rejected the harps, angels, massed choirs and other such tedious impedimenta which furnish the Heaven of Christian folklore. My parents had carefully explained that this picture of Heaven must not be despised since it represented the honest endeavour of simple people mentally to conceive the inconceivable. The real bliss of Heaven, they went on – and they obviously believed this – was in spiritual union with God. And the real pain of purgatory was in spiritual separation from God. But when I considered the matter, as I relaxed on a tombstone or peered hopefully into an open grave, it seemed to me a good deal easier, and no less consoling, to believe in union with Nature rather than with God. One could see it happening – ‘dust to dust’ – on the physical plane. And when one thought, for instance, of wireless waves, it appeared there were enough odd things going on in the natural world for it to accommodate also the immortality of the soul. This immortality always made sense to me, but at no age did I find it necessary, despite my basic arrogance, to think of my own soul maintaining its existence for ever as a separate unit indelibly marked ‘Dervla Murphy’. Physical extinction was an unpleasant thought and one saw the need for a comforting belief in an after-life. Yet death was made no more acceptable, to me, by the traditional Christian strivings to bring within our comprehension what is simultaneously admitted to be incomprehensible. When I eventually came upon it, that school of Buddhist philosophy which suggests that after death the individual soul can dissolve, to continue its existence by forming parts of other souls, suited me much better. And not many years ago, in The Golden Core of Religion by Alexander Skutch, I found perfectly expressed what I was beginning to grope towards as a ten-year-old: ‘If immortality is, or will become, attainable by the human soul, it must be within the possibilities of that great, all-embracing, infinitely varied, and still imperfectly explored system of orderly, interrelated events which we know as nature. Only by regarding spiritual survival as natural, in the same sense that our birth, our thought, our aspiration, and our body’s final dissolution are natural, can we who have been nurtured on science and philosophy hold faith in it. If the spirit survives its body in the course of nature, as in the course of nature the light from a beacon on a hilltop goes coursing through outer space long after the fire has died, then it is reasonable to believe that its survival depends upon such intrinsic qualities as the intensity of its love, the unity of its aspirations, its coherence and the absence of passions that tear it asunder.’

  As for Hell – which Irish Catholics are so regularly reminded of as a possible destination – having put behind me the terrors induced by Sister X, I ceased to take it seriously. I agreed with my parents that one cannot accept the paradox inherent in the concept of a God who is infinitely merciful and just and yet condemns countless unfortunates to an eternity of suffering.

  A few weeks before my eleventh birthday I was cured of grave-robbing by a somewhat macabre experience. It was one of those still, moist, dull November afternoons when the countryside can be felt drifting into winter sleep. Cycling by the edge of a thick wood, I suddenly got a strong scent of badger. For years I had been longing to find a set, so I climbed a low stone wall and, sniffing like a terrier, forced my way through the dense tangle of rhododendrons, holly and briars that flourished beneath the trees. But soon I lost the scent and as my clothes had already been much damaged I decided to return to the road by a less destructive though longer route.

  Zig-zagging between the trees, looking out for squirrels, I moved slowly uphill towards the track that I knew bisected this wood. Then I came unexpectedly on an odd little building, standing in a small clearing but half-hidden by briars and laurels. It had a vaguely ecclesiastical appearance and I felt both puzzled and uneasy; there was something faintly sinister about this inexplicable edifice lurking in the depths of a dense, deserted wood. Approaching closer, I noticed that the door had been forced open – quite recently, for the wood around the lock bore fresh scars. Advancing to the threshold, I peered into the gloom. As my eyes adjusted I saw big shelves and big, long boxes. Coffins, in fact. They had been hacked open, stripped of their lead and left in disarray. Then I saw the corpse, lying almost at my feet. It was dark-skinned and shrunken but very plainly a woman. Here at last was my yearned-for chance to make a close study of decomposition. I turned and fled.

  Terror seemed to suffocate me as I tripped over brambles and slipped on the dank leaf-mould. The whole wood became an Arthur Rackham thicket and I was afraid to raise my eyes lest I might see discoloured corpses enmeshed in its thorny shadows. Only when I reached the road did I realise that my face as well as my clothes had been ripped by briars. Blood was trickling onto the collar of my gaberdine and I wondered frantically how I could explain away those scratches. I decided to fabricate a fall off my bicycle to cover both the scratches and my shaken condition.

  Why did this desecrated family vault so unnerve someone who hitherto had revelled in the gruesome? Was I so shocked and terrified simply because I had been taken unawares? Would I have reacted differently had I entered the wood not to track a badger but to seek out the vault? Or was I undone by the considerable difference between a skeleton and a corpse? There is always a temptation to try to unravel one’s own inconsistencies and I still find this incident baffling.

  It took me months to regain my nerve fully. I slept soundly that night – no doubt exhausted by emotion – but as I opened my eyes next morning the memory came back and I groped for my light switch in panic.

  Nightmares started that evening; these were, according to my mother, the first from which I had ever suffered. When I awoke screaming my parents were listening to the gramophone and no one heard me. Realising where I was, I switched on the light and felt glad that my silly yells had not been noticed. But then I was afraid to switch off the light or to sleep again. I tried to read but was too tired and tense. Soon afterwards my father came upstairs, saw my light and looked into demand sternly what I meant by reading at half-past ten? He switched off my light without waiting for a reply and left me sweating and shaking in the dark. When I turned on my illicit torch it didn’t really help. I needed the full glare of the ceiling light which left no corner shadowy. My nightmare had been of shadows, and vilely coloured objects – brownish-grey, yellowish-green, yellowish-brown, greyish-green, yellowish-grey – a kaleidoscope of unearthly, corrupt tinges and indistinct forms moving slightly. And yet surely not moving, because they were dead … (Ever since, most of my few nightmares have been in this ghastly Technicolor.)

  When I knew that my parents would be in bed I switched on the light again but, being used to a dark room, was unable to sleep for what felt like hours. Then I dreamt that my mother was dead and that I was searching for her body in a cave where at the far end corpses were dancing in a circle. I knew they would not let me pass though my mother was waiting for me beyond them and, if I reached her soon enough, could be brought back to life. I awoke, calling her hysterically, to find that it was past my usual getting-up time. As I dressed I was already dreading that night. Half of me longed to confide in my mother, but the other half forbade me to ask for help.

  However, unlike my earlier fear of darkness, these horrors were altogether outside my control. Only by forcing myself to stay awake could I escape them. My symptoms of strain and exhaustion soon prompted my mother to investigate and when all had been revealed we decided that until my nerve had mended there was no alternative but for my father and me to exchange beds. Part of me rejoiced then to be free of those lonely terrors, while another part resented this admission of dependence and the
consequent loss of privacy. My own room was important to me beyond calculation. The rest of the house – indeed, the rest of the world – seemed in a sense alien territory where adult writ ran; only in my own room could I freely expand. (Of course when I began to cherish decomposing rabbits under the bed my expansion had to be curtailed; but such crises were rare.) Thus, sleeping in my parents’ room felt like the worst sort of indignity, with overtones of serfdom. I remember resolving one night, as I lay discontentedly curled up in my father’s bed, that even should I happen to acquire a husband, by some unlikely chance, I would never share a room with him. Naturally we would share a bed for procreative purposes, but clearly there must be a clause in the marriage contract stipulating separate rooms. It did not then occur to me that post-procreation I might feel disinclined to trek to an Inner Sanctum.

  At the age of eleven my bedtime was still seven-thirty, bizarre as this may sound to modern children, and usually I had been asleep for a few hours when my father wheeled my mother’s bath chair across the hall. (My parents’ bedroom would normally have been the sitting-room and the dining-room had to serve as our general living-room.) With the maid’s help my mother was lifted onto her bed; she had lately become so heavy that no one could lift her unaided. Then, after the maid’s departure, my father gently undressed his wife, gave her the bed-pan and made her comfortable – as they say in hospitals – for the night. Once she had been placed in a lying position she could move only her head so it was essential that she should be left completely relaxed. To achieve this, with the aid of strategically placed cushions under her locked knee-joints and ankles, involved much patient effort on my father’s part – and much fortitude on my mother’s, since at this stage of her disease every movement was painful. To me, of course, the whole thing was routine; if I chanced to waken I remarked neither my father’s patience nor my mother’s fortitude.

  One night, not long before Christmas, loud sobs came from my mother instead of the usual subdued chit-chat about Thomas Aquinas or Balzac or whoever. Confusedly I diagnosed another nightmare; then I woke fully and accepted that this was reality. After a moment my mother began to talk fast, in an unfamiliar, blurred voice, and very cautiously I peeped out from beneath the blankets. She was virtually unrecognisable: flushed, incoherent and – this was the dreadful thing, unimaginable yet true – not in control of herself.

  It was as though the mountains had toppled into the valley or the sun fallen out of the sky. I must somewhere have seen somebody drunk; at all events, I knew what was wrong. But this did not help. How could my own mother, the very epitome of composure, have been reduced to such ignominy within the few hours since I had kissed her good-night?

  My first positive reaction, after those worse-than-nightmare moments of fear, bewilderment and grief, was a determination that my mother must never know that I had witnessed what seemed to me her degradation. I could see no meaning in such hideous chaos. But I was convinced that for her to know that I knew would compound the degradation. And though I abhorred this travesty of what I honoured, I did most keenly feel compassion.

  At first my compassion was perhaps no more than a reflection of what I had seen on my father’s face as he bent over his wife that night. But it soon became a great deal more. My mother drunk was a goddess with feet of clay, and viewing her as a demoted deity ultimately strengthened both my love and my respect. Inflexibly stiff upper lips can stunt sympathy within a family. Had I never glimpsed my mother with her defences down I might never have been able to measure the demands made hourly on her courage.

  Next morning all seemed as usual though my unfortunate mother must have been feeling very unusual. My father knew that I had been awake and no doubt considered discussing the psychology of what had so disturbed me. He could easily have made me understand that what I had seen was not in the circumstances abnormal, however regrettable. Yet more than our personal barrier prevented any such discussion. We would both have felt disloyal and thus, for me, one tension would have replaced another. Probably my father appreciated this; and the avoidance of a subject which distressed us both came to form between us one more subtly strong bond of unacknowledged intimacy.

  I never again – during childhood – saw my mother drunk; but throughout the following weeks I waited uneasily, night after night, for the horror to recur. Even after my return to my own bedroom in February I remained on the alert and every few months, over the next year or so, I knew the horror was happening. By the end of that time it had become a grief rather than a horror because pity had replaced incomprehension and disillusion. Then gradually I realised that a battle had been won and that I need not be anxious any more.

  What was the battle? What combination of stresses forced my mother to seek a release incompatible with her character if not with her heredity? The greater part of her life was of course one unending battle and of its phases and inner agonies I know almost nothing; I never had that insight into her nature which I had into my father’s. Only her husband knew and this was as it should have been. But now, looking back and guessing as one might guess about some figure in history, I would say that at this time my mother was feeling especially acutely her inability to have another child.

  Also, what had by then become the problem of my education was beginning to cause a rift – if that is not too strong a word – between my parents. I was to have gone away to school in September 1942; for as long as I could remember that date had been fixed in my mind. Yet in December 1943 I was still at home – aged twelve – because the servant crisis had become chronic. This grievously worried my father. My mother also was concerned, as she was soon to prove, but by temperament she was not a worrier. Moreover, she attached less importance than my father did to the academic education of girls; and she had already assessed my potential accurately enough to know that I would never shine very brightly in the intellectual firmament, whatever opportunities were given me. Thus my parents were no longer in perfect agreement, as parents, and this, added to the strains of our everyday life at the time, must have affected their whole relationship.

  By Christmas 1943 my own feelings about the situation were mixed. I dreaded another bout of homesickness yet had come to regard boarding-school not only as a glamorous adventure but as an escape from my domestic duties. For almost two years I had been acting as general servant, under my mother’s direction, during the – lengthening – intervals between maids; and it had been conclusively proved that I was devoid of whatever virtues and talents go to make a good housewife. My duties were of course limited: I shopped, cooked, washed up and lit the fires. Nobody cleaned, except at weekends, when my father abstractedly pushed an Electrolux over the more obvious floor surfaces. Luckily he enjoyed cooking and was good at it, even under Emergency conditions, so we had edible meals at weekends. But from everyone’s point of view these maidless interludes were trying.

  As fuel and power were strictly limited all our cooking had to be done on two tiny electric rings in a damp kitchen that throughout the winter felt colder than out-of-doors. If both rings were used simultaneously livid blue flames leaped from the wall and the whole house was used. As electric elements could not be replaced, my father improvised repairs of which he was very proud. Inordinately proud, my mother thought, since his ingenuity had rendered our rings potentially lethal. We then had to emulate Cattie by always wearing Wellington boots while cooking.

  Why do certain utterly insignificant moments stick in the memory? For some reason I distinctly remember standing in the kitchen wearing Wellingtons and a heavy brown tweed overcoat and stirring a pot of chicken soup while reading Clouds of Witness. Household chores were not allowed to encroach unduly on the real business of life. By then I had long since perfected the art of peeling apples, scraping carrots or tailing sprouts without ever lifting my eyes from the page. But during very cold spells my mother insisted on my doing all ‘portable’ jobs, such as preparing vegetables, beside the feeble fire of damp turf that smouldered in the dining-room. This meant having
improving books read to me while I scraped, peeled or chopped. I still associate the smell of celery with the storm that broke over Messalonghi – as described by André Maurois – a few moments before Byron’s death.