Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  A few weeks later I had a letter from a fourteen-year-old cousin, the daughter of my father’s younger sister, which indicated that extreme Republicanism was successfully being passed on to my own generation.*

  10, Charleston Ave.,

  1 January 1945

  Dear Dervla,

  I hope you are well and had a very happy Christmas. Thanks for the letter, I was delighted to get it. I’m glad you are now more used to school. Do you know what G. K. Chesterton says about education? He says that it is being taught by somebody you don’t know about things you don’t want to know. I don’t altogether agree.

  Wasn’t it awful about Charlie? I’ll never forget the day of his death. The night before the people went to say the Rosary outside the prison for him but the police would not let them near it. (By ‘they’ I mean Republicans – in fact some were not but just pitied him.) Then they decided to say the Rosary aloud in procession while walking back to town but in O’Connell St the police baton-charged them and injured two girls!! And this in a Catholic country ruled by an Irish Government!!!! However when the Nuncio heard of it he must have said something because for the first time in four years the government allowed a notice in the newspapers announcing that a Mass would be said for his soul and we all went to it. It was very sad but as he died such a brave death and is nearly sure to be in Heaven it is not so bad. He was laughing and happy up to the very last and the night before he said he would not change his place for any man in the world. He even forgave the CID who always pushed him around and maltreated him. He was so brave that the warders wept and the CID in the Castle said he was the bravest man they ever executed!! And that’s saying something! I was glad to hear he left you a ring. He sent me a signed picture and left me a crucifix. I’d better stop now because if I don’t I’ll go on and on and on. I always do on the subject of Charlie. When you next come to Dublin I’ll tell you all about Charlie, Aunt Kathleen and the raid on our own house. Give my love to Aunt Kitty and Uncle Feargus. I hope you have a very happy new year.

  Lots of love and kisses,

  Constance.

  Had I lived in Dublin I might either have been much more deeply influenced by Murphy Republicanism or reacted earlier and more strongly against it. As it was, I followed exactly in my father’s political footsteps, during this period, and despite the emotionalism aroused by Charlie’s tragic career I reserved for de Valera (Charlie’s ‘murderer’, according to Aunt Kathleen) the sort of devotion expended on less orthodox heroes by my Dublin cousins. To me ‘Dev’ was one of the greatest Irishmen who had ever lived – indeed, one of the greatest MEN – yet like my mother I was apolitical by nature and I cannot recall ever arguing about this with the more extreme of my relatives. Dev was not, in my eyes, a politician. He was an heroic, almost godlike leader of the nation who had never belonged to the dreary world of party politics but ruled us from an immeasurably higher plane. This of course was fantasy on my part, an adolescent’s glorification of a sincere, romantic and very powerful personality. But behind the fantasy there was some truth. Now many of Dev’s ideals seem to me either absurd or distasteful. Yet he did have genuine ideals, he was no mere politician out for personal power, and looking around today one realises that neither in Britain nor in Ireland is there any individual with the leadership qualities of Churchill and de Valera.

  Unlike Pappa, Aunt Kathleen had no inhibitions about dividing my loyalties; she was such a fanatical Republican that she would not have scrupled to subvert anyone by almost any means. In July 1944, when she was in prison following the arrest of Charlie in her home, she wrote me the following letter – carefully designed to steer me towards the mainstream of contemporary Republicanism.

  Mountjoy Prison

  2.7.44

  My dearest Dervla,

  It just struck me that you might like to have a letter from me and to know what life is like here. Well, considering everything, it’s not so bad. The first and most important thing is that everyone here treats me with great kindness and consideration. The ordinary diet is not very appetising – in fact I couldn’t tackle it, but I have been put on hospital diet which means that I get two pints of milk and two eggs a day and beef tea for dinner. Also I can be sent in food from outside. However, I find I’m not at all hungry and I had to ask Isolde not to send me in food because it was a waste of money.

  This is the routine – the cell door is opened at 7 am and you may get up if you wish to. I stay in bed until breakfast is served and I usually take that in bed. As a rule the cup of tea is all that interests me. The cell is locked then for about an hour while the wardens have their breakfast. At about 10 I have a bath, which I enjoy immensely. After that I potter around – tidy my cell, wash my cup and saucer, etc. I then go out for exercise – I can walk around or sit down and read or just think – and I have plenty to think about! I can also read the paper which is sent in each day. Dinner is at 12.45 – beef-tea and bread and milk. The cell is locked until about 2 after which I may go out into the grounds again. The high light of the day is my visit (usually at 4.0). I can see two people at a time but in the presence of a warder and a detective. The visit usually lasts from 15-30 minutes. The children come to see me in turn. I have not seen Pappa yet as he has been away in Limerick. Sunday is the dullest day here as there can be no bath and no visit. Mass of course is a great consolation. The ten days I was in the Bridewell included two Sundays and there is no possibility of getting Mass there.

  After the visit I have tea, bread and butter and a boiled egg. Then I go out to sit in the grounds and before coming back to my cell at about 8.30 I spend a little time praying in the chapel. Although in the usual way there is no meal between 4.30 pm and 7.0 am I have my own tea and a teapot and I make some tea every evening. My door is locked at 9.30. However, I have the privilege of having the light on for a few hours so I read in bed until the small hours. Although the bed is very comfortable it’s not so easy to sleep – all sorts of things come into your head and keep you awake. This morning I woke at 5 and was thinking of the morning last summer when you and I and Anne went out before sunrise to pick mushrooms. We didn’t get any but I think it was well worth while to see the dawn over the mountains and the stars, that were so bright when we started, fading away one by one.

  Daddy told me that you have all decided that it is best for you to go away to school next September to the Ursulines in Waterford. I’m sure you’ll like them – they are the only nuns I ever really liked. Isolde and Niamh went to the Ursuline Convent at Forest Gate when we lived in London and they loved it. I know, of course, that they were day-pupils and how lonely you will be at first – but I know too that you have plenty of grit and backbone and that you’ll do your best to be happy when you know that the only reason you are being sent away from home is that your wonderful mother is an invalid and that she and Daddy are prepared to give up the joy of having you always with them for the sake of your education.

  Do you remember when I saw you last, and we were looking at Daddy’s Active Service medal, you asked me if I had ever been in jail? When I said no you remarked that I was the only one of my family who hadn’t been – well now I’m no longer a blot on the family escutcheon – in fact I’m more like a skeleton in the cupboard! I can hardly believe that you are only twelve years old when I remember how tall and strong you are – why, you’d make two of me!

  Your affectionate Aunt Kathleen

  When the present round of the Troubles began in Northern Ireland, Aunt Kathleen was soon to be seen in the Republican ghettos of Belfast. Perhaps she merely went north as an ‘observer’, but that seems unlikely. It would not surprise me to discover that although well over seventy, and in poor health,* she was gun-running. Where there are godfathers there can also be godmothers. And to this day the name of ‘Dr Kathleen’ brings an affectionate gleam – and occasionally even a tear – to the eye of many a Provo.

  * A Place Apart (John Murray, 1978).

  * In fact the writer soon out-grew her extremism,
being by temperament tolerant and objective.

  * She died in 1973.

  10

  Molly arrived in May 1944. She was fat and forty and placidly uncritical of our house and its inmates. She baked delicious soda bread, of which she ate immoderate quantities, and could cook two dishes well. (Irish stew and bacon and cabbage.) Her reactions were prodigiously slow; half-an-hour after something had amused her she would disconcert those who did not know her by bursting into apparently unprovoked laughter. Yet she was such an enormous improvement on her immediate forerunners that in June I was measured for my school uniform. Two battered trunks, still bearing French luggage labels of the 1890s, were lowered through the attic trap-door into the kitchen and going away to school became a reality.

  I began mildly to dislike the idea as August dwindled. With Molly in the kitchen and my freedom restored the environs of Lismore seemed to have a lot more to offer than the environs of any convent school. Yet the novelty of the adventure still appealed and I was not seriously fretting.

  Miss Knowles, the Jubilee district nurse, had by this time become a valued family friend and I was overjoyed when she offered to escort me to school, in loco parentis. We were to travel to Waterford by train and this, oddly enough, was the first train journey of my life.

  The carriages and corridors were gay with the scarlet and dove-grey of the school uniform and long before we got to Waterford I had begun, unexpectedly, to enjoy the sensation of belonging to a distinctive community.

  This says a good deal for my schoolmates. Of course they ignored me; as a new girl I was officially beneath contempt. Yet there was no antagonism in the atmosphere; clearly I was not unwelcome. The school stood isolated on a height beyond the city, behind smooth high walls. Its grey stone buildings, solid and dignified, spread themselves in spacious, well-kept grounds that were brilliantly patterned and richly scented by September’s flowering of roses. A not unpleasing air of monastic austerity and formality prevailed. One was aware of entering a world of orderliness and precision, certainty and calm, where the unpredictable could not happen, unless by some act of God. And even an act of God, one felt, would soon be made to conform to the relevant rule or regulation.

  Yet there was no aura of dour oppression. In the wide, bright hallway we joined a dejected group of obviously new girls who were waiting with their parents to be received by the headmistress. All around us the golden parquet floor shone like a lake at sunset and the walls had been freshly painted cream, with pale green woodwork, and opposite the handsome oak hall-door was an alcove holding a gaudy life-size plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The broad staircase swept upward to the left of the door as one entered and when my eye followed its stately curve I saw, whizzing down the banisters, a wiry girl with frizzy ginger hair and a demoniacal grin. As she slowed slightly to negotiate a bend she glanced down the corridor that ran at right angles to the hall, saw a nun approaching, promptly swung outwards off the banisters, hung for a moment by her hands, dropped six feet into the hall and lurked behind a pillar looking blasé.

  I held my breath. What grisly punishment would be meted out to her? The nun could not have failed to notice … But it had all happened in such a way that the nun could pretend not to have noticed, without any loss of face, and as she passed the pillar she simply paused to say a suave ‘Welcome back!’ to the ginger acrobat. This little scene neatly epitomised the whole spirit of a school where the pupils had enough respect for the staff not to defy them openly and the staff had enough respect for the pupils not to repress them.

  By then it was my turn to be presented to the headmistress – traditionally known as The Hat. She was small and thin and red, like a carrot. As we shook hands I wondered if her toes were as red as her fingers. Perhaps she was a secret drinker, I thought, noting the ruby nose and remembering Jeff. All in all, she looked one of Nature’s less agreeable blunders. And I felt she was coming to an identical conclusion about me. However, our instant mutual antipathy worried me not at all. A liking for The Hat might indeed have inhibited my rule-breaking; that we had at once recognised each other as Natural Enemies was much more satisfactory.

  In the second-floor junior dormitory Miss Knowles helped me to unpack and another new girl, having read my luggage labels, introduced herself as Sally Dowling. Our fathers had done time together in Wormwood Scrubs (the Irish equivalent of having been in the same house at Eton) and she, too, was the only child of comparatively poor parents – and her mother was a semi-invalid. With her raven-black hair, aquiline nose, deep-set grey-green eyes and almost copper-coloured skin she looked not unlike a Red Indian. She was eighteen months younger than I, but we were to be in the same form for she was very clever. She also had a lot of quiet self-assurance and when Miss Knowles had said goodbye she appointed herself – gently, not bossily – as my guide and mentor. It was hard to believe that she, too, was a new girl. That very evening she and I established the foundations of a comfortable, easygoing, dependable friendship. Our devotion to each other was deep, but undemanding, undemonstrative, unsentimental, almost masculine; and throughout the next two years we never once even came near to quarrelling.

  However, my new friend was of no help when I woke for the first time in my cubicle. I had slept well, but as I opened my eyes homesickness engulfed me. It was almost a physical sensation, like being knocked down and rolled over and over by a wave. And it was all the more devastating for being unexpected. When saying goodbye to my parents I had felt just a little wistful, yet now my loneliness seemed to be even more acute than three years earlier. Then homesickness had been mitigated by the sheer horror of the place and its denizens, much as lumbago takes one’s mind off tonsillitis. But here my personal anguish was unadulterated and I lived through the next week in a stupor of misery. Even to think about those seven days, thirty-five years later, is painful.

  Then one morning I woke and something had slipped into place and I felt happy all through. There had been no gradual recovery; on the seventh day I had felt no less miserable than on the second or fourth. So it was with a sense of incredulous relief that I lay in bed on that eighth – Wednesday – morning, looking at the early sunlight streaming onto my pale gold cubicle curtains and realising that I was happy.

  This happiness lasted for the rest of my schooldays. Undoubtedly it was in part a result of freedom from those incongruous domestic responsibilities which I had had to shoulder, for much of the time, during the past few years. At school I was leading a life appropriate to my age and I enjoyed every moment of it. I also enjoyed not being the only pebble on the beach. My parents tried to avoid spoiling me, but any only child – particularly with a strong-willed, perfectionist mother – inevitably receives an unwholesome amount of attention. At home everything to do with me was of prime importance and in itself this constant exposure to parental concern was an infringement of privacy, though never so intended. At school I missed my own room and my long, solitary hours out-of-doors, yet in a sense I had greater liberty to be myself. I was no more or less important than some hundred and twenty other girls and this anonymity pleased me. My parents were agreeably surprised by my enthusiastic letters home. They had expected me to resent the lack of physical freedom, at least during my first term. But I was a more adaptable animal than they knew. And they had been clever in their choice of school.

  A grimly authoritarian régime would either have broken my spirit or provoked me to run away – probably the latter. But Waterford’s Ursuline Convent allowed enough scope for me to lead my own kind of life without inviting disaster. (The Hat threatened to expel me three times; but this, I now feel, was because of my private feud with her rather than because I had unforgivably challenged The System.) The atmosphere was relaxed without being permissive – to this extent, a replica of home – and I liked most of my schoolmates and all my teachers. Also, I greatly enjoyed disliking The Hat.

  I soon developed a passion for a senior girl and became weak at the knees if she smiled graciously at me when we cha
nced to pass in the corridors. This was known as ‘having an affec’ for so-and-so, the so-and-so in question being described as one’s ‘affec’. My affec was an amiable sixteen-year-old to whom I wrote countless sonnets in praise of her beauty – an attribute which existed chiefly in my beholding eye. Most of these sonnets were seething with subliminal sexuality, as I was fascinated to discover when I came upon them recently in a rusty tin box. Frances also caused me to expend much mental energy on devising schemes which would lead to our meeting more frequently in the corridors. Not that one ever actually talked to one’s affec; that would have been a major breach of both school regulations (the age groups were rigidly segregated) and school tradition. It is interesting that we schoolgirls voluntarily reinforced this particular school rule with our own code, almost as though we were unconsciously aware of the need for protection from our burgeoning sexuality. By immemorial custom, everyday communication was restricted to the humbly adoring look and the regal smile of acknowledgement. However, school dances were held twice a year, on the feasts of St Angela and St Ursula, and then each affec asked her admirer, or admirers, for one dance (no more), during which verbal exchanges were permitted. But these occasions seldom or never generated immortal repartee.

  I was a keen but undistinguished player of netball, hockey and tennis, and I founded a clandestine rugger club for those whose athletic tastes were more robust. We played in an out-of-bounds ploughed field and had two seven-a-side teams called Clongowes and Castleknock. Most of our fathers had been to one or other of those colleges and during the Leinster Senior Cup competition the whole school became hysterically involved. As we had no wireless at our disposal illicit telephone calls were made to Dublin to find out who had won each round. When I boasted of an uncle who in prehistoric times had once, during an influenza epidemic, been selected as a substitute for the Irish team my stock soared and even the seniors looked at me with respect.