Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  I was such an unsatisfactory scholar that a school dedicated to self-glorification through examination results would have had little use for me. It must have been plain that even at the end of six years I would pass no examination since I applied my mind to only two subjects, English and history. And even during English classes I was selective, regarding grammatical sessions as needless because one knew most of it anyway by instinct. To this day I cannot tell the difference between parsing and analysis. By the end of the first month I had dropped domestic science, art and music, all subjects for which I had no aptitude whatever. Secretly I longed to be a really good pianist like my mother, who had all sorts of impressive awards from the Royal Academy rolled up at the back of a drawer, but my music mistress believed that I suffered from some sort of musical dyslexia and would never be able to master any instrument. So I had at my disposal, almost every day, two and a half hours more freedom than my classmates. And naturally my division mistress wanted to know how I proposed to spend all this spare time.

  ‘Writing books,’ I replied succinctly.

  ‘I see,’ said Mother Ambrose. ‘Well, in that case I think you’d better work in one of the empty music rooms. Anywhere else you’ll be constantly interrupted. And I imagine you need peace and quiet for writing books?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ said I. ‘Silence is essential. And no interruptions.’

  ‘I thought as much,’ said Mother Ambrose. ‘Though of course’ – she added reflectively – ‘Jane Austen managed to write quite a few rather good books in between receiving visitors and doing the household chores. But I expect she was different. May I read your book when it’s finished?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ I said apologetically. ‘It won’t be good enough for anyone to read. It’s not that sort of book. It’s only practice.’

  Each term I produced at least one full-length, lurid adventure story set in nameless Foreign Parts where the political crises were even more ambiguous than in Ireland and led to a profusion of warm sticky blood, choking emotions and gallant last-minute rescues. No doubt this ‘practice’ was a development of my teddy-bear-tree fantasies and I often became so involved that I had to continue writing during prep-time and on Saturday afternoons when I should have been mending my clothes. Mother Ambrose can hardly have remained unaware of these irregularities, but she made no serious attempt to check them. Just occasionally – pandering to my passion for long words – she would comment on the ‘unarrested disintegration’ of my underwear.

  For other reasons, however, I was constantly in trouble. Such rules as were specifically designed to transform us into young ladies aroused my most profound contempt and I rarely bothered to conceal the fact that I had broken them. Yet I soon developed a fierce loyalty to the school and however I might defy its traditions within the precincts I took care to behave impeccably on the rare occasions when I emerged into the big world wearing school uniform. Both my defiance and my loyalty were uncalculated, which may explain the nuns’ tolerance; perhaps they saw that although I was never going to fit into their particular mould I had a certain objective regard for it.

  Thirty-five years ago not even the most senior girls at an Irish convent boarding-school were allowed out during term time, with or without supervision, to pursue either entertainment or instruction. Entering the school grounds on the first day of term, one knew that unless something extraordinary happened one would not leave them for the next two or three months. Nor did we have visitors, because of wartime travelling restrictions, and our half-term merely meant no lessons on a Friday and lots of sticky cakes for tea three days running. Being averse to such confections this was no treat for me. Raising my plate I would say ‘Whizz?’ and whoever first replied ‘Echo!’ won the prize. This corrupt Latin greatly offended me and I aroused much derision by allowing the pedantic paternal genes to take over and attempting to restore ‘Quis?’ and ‘Ego!’ As Sally pointed out, with her usual brusque logic, this was a damn silly attitude considering so many respectable English words are corrupt Latin or corrupt something else.

  Our lives were as enclosed and almost as sheltered as the nuns’. Yet within its own boundaries, both physical and mental, this school world was full and rich – if somewhat unreal to outsiders. It was made separate, distinct, self-sufficient and unassailable by the underlying strength and esotericism of its own traditions. And though it is argued that modern educational methods provide a better preparation for adult life, I still feel that there was an instinctive wisdom behind the fuddy-duddyism of the old system. A variety of ’ologists insist that the physiological and psychological changes of adolescence impose severe strains on the whole personality. Yet, as a society, we react most strangely to our new awareness of adolescent ‘problems’. Are we trying to dodge them by forcing the maturing pace? My happy, limited school provided youngsters with as tranquil an environment as possible in which to come to terms with adulthood at the pace nature intended. The reassuring atmosphere of security and stability may well have helped us more than sophisticated insights into current affairs, cultural trips to the continent, ‘projects’ here, there and everywhere, and illustrated lectures on every conceivable subject including contraception.

  I was now for the first time in a situation where relative poverty might have been felt as a disadvantage. During the holidays most of my classmates did all sorts of exciting things like hunting and sailing and competing in swimming galas and tennis tournaments and gymkhanas. Had I longed to enter this alien world I might soon have become miserable. But I continued to accept the fact that other people led other sorts of lives and no change in my own way of life seemed either possible or desirable. Perhaps it did not seem desirable simply because I knew it to be impossible; while one half of me thrived on fantasy, the other was cheerfully pragmatic. So it rarely occurred to me that my apparently humdrum background was in any way defective. Books, after all, were my only real concern – the reading, collecting and possible writing of them – and other interests, however keenly pursued, were essentially peripheral. Anyway the idea of sailing did not greatly appeal to me; by all accounts it involved sharing a small space with far too many people for much too long and I preferred to enjoy it only vicariously in Arthur Ransome’s world. Riding of course was another matter. One of my first memories is of being run away with by an allegedly angelic pony belonging to a horsy godmother in Co Kildare. A glorious mixture of terror and elation surged through me as I clung to the creature’s mane. (I was to feel nothing comparable for the next quarter of a century, until I found myself galloping by mistake up a valley in the Western Himalaya on an Afghan stallion.) To everyone’s astonishment I remained in situ while the pony took me twice round the paddock. But then he decided to show off at the jumps …

  I fell with five-year-old animal expertness and my mother, who had witnessed all this from her bath chair, was too shocked to utter. My godmother, on the other hand, was so delighted by the whole performance that she promptly offered to give me a pony for my next birthday. But this generous gesture was decisively checked. To my parents, at the best of times, there was little if any difference between the Bengal tiger and the common cob. For years I believed that we could not possibly afford to keep a pony; now I suspect that this was one of the few areas in which my mother allowed herself to be overprotective. And so when listening to horsy classmates discussing their ponies I occasionally felt a wistful envy.

  In one respect, however, I did for a time suffer acutely at school as a result of being ‘different’. Children take even the most bizarre situations for granted, if these have always been a part of daily life, and easily form the habit of not thinking about certain matters that might be distressing to dwell upon. At intervals throughout my childhood I had registered receiving the neighbours’ sympathy because my mother was an invalid – and this had puzzled me. My own unthinking acceptance of her invalidism was so complete that I could not understand why anyone should make emotional comments. This acceptance was encouraged by her own determi
nation to lead as normal a life as possible. To be a good housewife and mother from a bath chair is not easy, but in so far as it could be done she did it. In my eyes she had no aura of ‘differentness’ and her high spirits and capacity for enjoying simple things made her exceptionally congenial to a small child.

  Yet she was not as other mothers were. And this realisation, when at last it came, had a disproportionately upsetting effect on me. It was as though a dam had burst, freeing my long-restrained awareness of her difference which then inundated my stability. Suddenly, I couldn’t take it. My frantic craving to be, in this respect, like everyone else compelled me to lie. Impulsively I would say, ‘When my mother and I were coming home from a long walk …’ or, ‘My mother is such a fast walker it’s hard to keep up.’ Being naturally truthful, like Alice, these aberrations troubled me. My mother and I did indeed go for long walks together – but I was pushing her in her bath chair. Also, she had been a fast walker, and I tried to convince myself that to change a tense was to tell no more than a half-lie. But I was too well grounded in moral theology for this to work, even temporarily. My intention was totally to mislead and therefore my lies were full-blooded and shameful. Here were the makings of another ‘scruples crisis’, in a different key, but mercifully it did not develop. As the shock of my objective appreciation of my mother’s invalidism wore off, I lost the compulsion to mislead. But it left me with an embarrassing residue of false information imparted, which throughout the rest of my schooldays occasionally rose up to confound me.

  After my thirteenth birthday I began joyously to tick off, on the calendar in my cubicle, the days of December, and my heart seemed to swell with sheer happiness at the thought of being home again. Yet when I stepped off the train at Lismore, not having seen my parents for three months and ten days, a feeling of anticlimax and an oddly demoralising shyness overcame me. Although my parents meant no less to me than they had done in September they did mean something different. My attitudes to them had changed and I confusedly imagined it necessary to conceal this natural process as though it were some hurtful form of disloyalty. I had unconsciously transferred part of my allegiance to a world I valued all the more because parents were excluded from it. Most children who are happy at boarding-school revel in the secret-society aspect of school life. The cryptic slang, the apparently illogical customs, the usually logical rules and regulations laid down not by Authority but by generations of pupils – for me all this added up to a thoroughly satisfying existence in which grown-ups seemed insignificant and children taught each other as much as – or more than – they learned from their elders.

  Inevitably this existence weakened the bonds between my mother and myself. I no longer confided everything to her or idealised her as the perfect companion. Instead, I became absurdly secretive about the most trivial details and went out of my way to try to break the links created by our mutual interests. As for my father, I now comprehended in a more adult way the strains and stresses of his life and felt correspondingly more guilty about our atrophied relationship. But this made it seem even less possible than before to take any remedial action.

  Only one relationship remained unchanged. With Mark I could still discuss anything, to him I could reveal any idiocy or inconsistency, in his company I never felt it necessary to pretend to be other than myself as I was at that moment. Then, and for many years afterwards, I took my good fortune for granted, not realising how rare it is to be always totally at ease with another human being.

  At the start of those Christmas holidays my father greeted me at the railway station with the news that Molly had just left, but had promised to send her youngest sister as a replacement in the new year. She had pronounced that in winter our kitchen would ‘perish a brass monkey’ so it seemed to us that this promise betrayed a certain lack of sisterly concern. The Emergency fuel shortage was by then acute and no doubt sub-zero temperatures had accelerated her departure. But when I viewed the situation with that new detachment gained at school it occurred to me, for the first time, that our servant problem was perhaps being aggravated by my mother’s archaic expectations. She had her standards and was incapable of compromising if those she employed could not or would not accept them. Unlike my father and myself, she understood whatever weird impulse makes the Englishman dress for dinner in the jungle. ‘We may be poor, but we needn’t live like cavemen’ was her battle-cry. A table had to be laid with the correct multiplicity of instruments placed in their correct positions, though the plates came from Woolworths and the forks and spoons were of aluminium. The maid’s uniform had to be immaculate and she had to know, or quickly learn, how to wait at table. (Her lessons were frequently a rich mine of comedy.) The kitchen might be falling around our ears, but every corner of every cupboard had to be kept spotless, and the outsides of saucepans scoured no less thoroughly than the insides, and the tea-towels boiled daily. Naturally enough, simple girls off the side of a mountain, who had never before seen a vegetable dish, never mind a napkin-ring, were confused if not positively intimidated by all this nonsense. Nor could I approve of it and in my more rebellious moments I mentally and unjustly labelled it ‘side’. (‘He has no side to him’ means, in Ireland, ‘he is a simple man, without affectation or pretension’.) To me this formality seemed both incongruous and irritating against the background of our ramshackle and poverty-stricken home; to my mother it symbolised something profoundly important. Now I can understand that she needed to uphold order and dignity as props to her own morale. But for many years no such explanation occurred to me and our divergence on this point was to become a running sore within the family.

  My earliest Christmas memories are associated with Old Brigid, who ritually opened the season on November 1 by making the plum-puddings while grumbling obliquely about not being allowed to make a cake. Pappa sent a Christmas cake from Bewleys every year, but Old Brigid, who had never in her life been to Dublin, despised ‘them shop things’. Each year she declined cake with an offended air, explaining darkly – ‘I wouldn’t trust meself to it.’

  Annually another layer of plaster fell off the kitchen walls because of over-exposure to plum-pudding steam. Yet my memory, practising romantic selectivity, presents that kitchen as a cosy place during (prewar) midwinter. Pools of golden lamplight were fringed by friendly shadows, in December a ham hung from the rafters and while the oven was being ‘got up’ the huge shiny black range roared and glowed, all amiable and animated.

  While Old Brigid went through her plum-pudding routine – unhurried yet superbly efficient – I knelt on a chair at one end of the massive, scrubbed-white kitchen table and slightly opened the deep drawer. Then, every time the range needed stoking, I swiftly hid a fistful of fruit. And at the end of the day, while Old Brigid was intent on settling the pudding basins into their giant oval iron pot, I transferred my loot to the nearby guichet and rushed into the dining-room to conceal it in the sideboard. This operation was inspired not by greed but by my predilection for outwitting authority. Most of the loot went to Tommy, whose parents couldn’t afford plum-pudding. (Childhood was less complicated before the consumer society had begun its evil hypnosis of the young. It would never have occurred to me to pity Tommy because his family was even poorer than my own and it would never have occurred to Tommy to envy me.)

  The two unique features of Christmas Eve were the repeated appearances of unfamiliar postmen at unpredictable hours – up to 11.00 pm – and the plucking, gutting and de-sinewing of the turkey. In those pre-supermarket days one bought one’s turkey in a state of nature and to remove the sinews, without taking most of the leg-meat with them, was an art not everyone possessed. Old Brigid knew the theory of it but found my father a singularly inept collaborator. And for me the joy of watching those two struggling with the bird – one on either side of the pantry door – far outweighed the pleasure I got next day from eating it. This was the one occasion during the year when my father might be heard using bad language. If the struggle had gone on for half-an-hour or
more, and then a pound of meat came away with a sinew, he was capable of saying ‘Damn!’ under his breath. Whereupon Old Brigid would cough loudly in an attempt to save my ears from pollution.

  I had a circle of well-trained relatives and friends and from the age of six onwards the shape of my Christmas presents never varied – only the size. For me the glory of Christmas morning was the sight and smell and feel of new books. I don’t remember book-tokens – perhaps they hadn’t been invented – and occasionally there were duplicate volumes. But that was an advantage rather than a problem; in my privileged position I could exchange unwanted volumes for something long coveted, on our next visit to the Dublin bookshops.

  Our Christmas ritual never varied. On Christmas Eve we listened to the carol service from King’s College Chapel and afterwards we broached the Christmas cake and I was allowed to drink lemon cordial instead of milk. At midnight my parents listened to Mass from the Vatican and I – from the age of nine – went to the parish church. At ten o’clock on Christmas morning – after present opening – we sat down purposefully to a gargantuan mixed grill. Normally my parents were very light breakfasters and my mother in any case strongly disapproved of fries; but this meal was designed to keep us going until four o’clock when – true to Dublin tradition – we dined by candlelight as dusk became darkness.

  To me, who habitually went to bed at seven thirty, Midnight Mass was among the most exciting events of the year. That walk through the dark, expectant night, its silence broken only by other hurrying footsteps and cheerful greetings; the packed church clumsily decorated with holly; the quivering, golden blaze of votive candles around the crib; the familiar carols being sung so badly they frequently seemed unfamiliar; the platitudinous Christmas sermon that allowed one to play at keeping a sentence in advance of the preacher without often dropping a point. Then the walk home through a night that seems always to have been frosty and tingling and starry and glittering – though I dare say this is an illusion – and so to bed, after mince-pies and a hot lemon-drink, in a stupor of happy exhaustion.