Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  For relaxation, during those years, I read almost all the works of all the great English novelists, from Defoe to Hardy – only skipping Walter Scott, who to me seemed insupportably dreary, and some of the minor Trollopes which numerically defeated me. For good measure I read translations of the obvious French and Russians, including War and Peace during a lumbago attack. When I look now at those scores of volumes – standing row upon row, fat and formidable – I marvel at my idea of relaxation some twenty-five years ago. Many I have indeed reread with increased appreciation and many others I would like to reread. But not all … And a few I am reluctant to return to, fearing disillusion. Middlemarch, for instance, was amongst the most memorable experiences of my youth. Reading it seemed like watching God creating the world in miniature.

  In 1948 the reopening of Lismore’s Lawn Tennis Club induced me to modify slightly my solitary ways. I became a keen though never skilful member and for the next few years spent a couple of hours on the courts almost every fine summer evening. However, my interest in the club remained exclusively athletic. I got on well with all my fellow members – the majority were several years older than me – but never wished to be involved in any of their peripheral activities. Happily, this allergy to social functions was not mistaken for stand-offishness. I was, I think, accepted with friendly tolerance as the inevitable freakish outcome of my parents’ union.

  The tennis club was our chief centre for the promotion of marriage and I attentively observed the progress of various courtships – but always with a certain detachment, as though I were studying the customs of another race. Even at sixteen, I had a strong premonition that I would never marry. Possibly the predictability of the average married life put me off; it was the antithesis of my ideal unplanned existence – travelling, writing, not knowing what was going to happen next year or next month or even next week. And I have already stated my belief that we are equipped at the start of adult life with a few pieces of basic foreknowledge – whether or not we choose to use them. This is not as fanciful as it may sound. Our lives, after all, are moulded by our temperaments even more than our temperaments are moulded by circumstances. And on the threshold of adulthood it is possible to have enough self-awareness to see the probable outline of one’s future. Already I had noted the qualities needed to make a marriage work and I did not think I either possessed them or wanted, even if that were possible, to acquire them. I saw myself as a person too strong-willed, self-centred and fundamentally – if not obviously – arrogant to make a success of the married state. There is a vast difference between being a good friend – or a good mistress – and being a good wife. As long as people of my sort are free they can seem endlessly patient, understanding, cheerful – even unselfish in a crisis. But deprive them of their freedom and everything turns sour. In my teens I could not have expressed all this: yet I knew it.

  Our household had always included at least one – and often two or three – cats; but to keep a dog was not practical until my return from school. Then, just as my mother and I were debating what breed to get – my father had been badly bitten as a child and feared all breeds – I came upon Bran. A pure-bred Irish terrier, he was tied by a very short rope to the drain-pipe of an isolated cottage and looked half-starved and cowed. He had large bare patches on his back and flanks and when I went nearer I saw that these were red and raw. At first he shrank from my outstretched hand, then he sniffed it nervously, then I rubbed the roots of his ears and he wagged his tail incredulously. I reckoned that he was scarcely two years old. There was no one around the cottage, but early next morning I returned. Bran was still tied in the same spot and trembling all over; what remained of his red-gold coat was sodden and obviously he had been left to lie out on concrete during the previous night’s steady rain. When I rapped sharply on the door it was opened by a shifty-looking man with blood shot eyes, a whiskey-laden breath and a week’s beard. He claimed to have bought Bran from passing tinkers for £5 but offered him to me for £3 because of his ‘bad skin’. This infuriated me; no such man would then spend £5 on a dog. I replied that I was not interested in buying the terrier but that I was very interested in the way he was being kept. And I added that the gardai, too, might be interested. (Privately I doubted this; cruelty to animals is rarely seen as such in countries where most of the inhabitants have for generations been ‘deprived’.) However, on my mentioning the gardai the shifty eyes grew shiftier and their owner hurriedly made me a present of Bran.

  We went straight to the vet, who prescribed train-oil and sulphur for Bran’s eczema – a completely effective cure, though messy and protracted. After six months he had regained top condition and was acknowledged to be the most handsome dog for miles around. He slept in a corner of my bedroom – he was just too large to be a comfortable on-the-bed dog – and was respectful towards the cats who patronised him from my eiderdown. Unlike most of his breed he had a timid nature, perhaps because of puppyhood traumas. But he had no vices and despite his age proved easy to train. Eventually he could be trusted alone in a room with a shopping-basket of meat on the floor, if he had been told not to touch it. Even my father grew to love him.

  Bran accompanied me on short cycles, of up to fifteen miles or so, but this meant my having to pedal slowly lest his heart might be strained. His loyalty was such that had I cycled to Dublin at eighteen miles an hour he would have tried to keep up. One of our favourite runs was to the foot of the Knockmealdowns, where I would leave my bicycle by the roadside and walk Bran over the heather and bogs. During the summer we sometimes swam in Bayl Lough, a wide lake – semi-encircled by almost sheer mountain – which always looks black and according to local legend is bottomless.

  On one such walk, near the spot where I had got lost as a ten-year-old, Bran was set upon without warning by a large black and white mongrel who appeared out of nowhere. In those days one rarely saw other people or dogs on the Knockmealdowns and I felt mildly curious when a very tall, thin man with a slight limp and a shooting stick emerged from a dip in the ground. He called angrily to the mongrel, whose name was William, but was too far away to intervene. So I had to rescue Bran when it became clear that William was having much the best of it.

  As William’s owner approached us I saw that he had a conspicuously scarred face. He seemed genuinely distressed about Bran, who was crouching behind my legs, shivering. Meanwhile William stood a few yards away gazing at the horizon with a self-satisfied air, ignoring his master’s scolding. I made polite, forgiving noises and then, as Bran had in fact been quite badly bitten on a hind-leg, I turned to accompany William’s owner back to the road. At seventeen I was abnormally shy, but my companion seemed even shyer. Yet he was in his mid-thirties, I judged. For once I felt at an advantage and talked almost eloquently during that half-hour walk through the bright, windy April afternoon. But we exchanged no personal information and when we parted I did not expect ever to see William’s owner again.

  At that time my father occasionally took over my nursing and domestic duties for a day, which left me free to enjoy a serious cycle of sixty or seventy miles. (Otherwise, I was never off duty for more than four hours at a stretch – usually from 6.00 to 10.00 pm.) So it was that I left Lismore one sunny morning towards the end of August, intending to do a round trip over the mountains and return through Cappoquin. At the Vee I paused for a swim in Bayl Lough and afterwards, as I walked up the track from the lake to the road, I saw a vaguely familiar figure strolling near my bicycle. It took me a few moments to recognise William’s owner; in the four months since our first meeting I had almost forgotten him. This time he had no dog and he told me in an expressionless voice that William had been poisoned two days previously. Before I could say anything he added, very stiffly, ‘Would you care to motor to the sea with me?’

  I hesitated, not for any conventional reason but because my few opportunities for long-distance cycling were so precious. Then I realised that a refusal would be misinterpreted – and would hurt. I also realised that though I
had scarcely thought about William’s owner since April we had in fact established an embryonic relationship during our first meeting. The opinions I had then formed were only now crystallising in my mind; and the chief impression was of loneliness.

  When my companion held open the passenger door of the A40 I noticed a flicker of alarm in his eyes as though he were slightly taken aback by the situation our joint impetuosity had created; yet neither of us was really disconcerted by the behaviour of the other. Not until we were both in the car did he introduce himself. Then, as I was about to reciprocate that belated civility, he explained apologetically that he already knew who I was.

  By the time we reached the coast, twenty-five miles away, we had exchanged potted biographies. Information that one might expect to gather from a new friend over weeks or months was given by Godfrey in moments. His need to communicate was not disguised by the precise, impersonal formality with which he told his story – almost as though he were filling in a form for Who’s Who, carefully giving all the dates while ignoring the emotions.

  Significantly, he began by explaining that he had acquired his limp and his scars in a Japanese prison camp. That he should have referred at all to those disabilities seemed to me a tremendous compliment. And it was. He never again referred to them, or to his war experiences. I longed to question him about the latter – I had never before met an ex-POW – but plainly to do so was not on. As for his scars, they were not of the romantic sort that make a man look more manly. They were horrible. One needed the minimum of imagination to understand why he had chosen a solitary life.

  Since 1947 Godfrey had been living on his army pension in an enlarged cottage not far from the Vee; the enlarging had been necessary to accommodate his books. A manservant looked after him. During the war his wife had found someone else; she was ten years his senior and he had married her while still an undergraduate. In 1947 the divorce had gone through, but it was of no use to Godfrey. As a High Anglican he did not consider himself free to remarry; his attitude here was identical to the most orthodox Irish Catholic’s. To me this sad though hardly unusual story seemed a tragedy on the grand scale. I could have wept for Godfrey – especially because he had explained things so austerely, with no taint of self-pity.

  I remember our getting out of the car at Goat Island – an isolated cove, even today – and facing each other for a moment in silence. Then Godfrey said, ‘Let’s bathe!’ and as he turned away my heart did something odd and I thought, ‘This is absurd! I must be falling in love!’ It did not, however, occur to me that Godfrey might be guilty of the same absurdity.

  We separated to undress chastely behind rocks that were far apart and after our bathe – Godfrey was an excellent swimmer, I noted approvingly – we dressed equally chastely and sat on the grassy cliff top to share the picnic lunch that I had brought from home. It was meagre fare for two, but this did not matter as falling in love had quite taken away my appetite.

  When we parted on the road above Bayl Lough Godfrey thanked me for a very pleasant day and I thanked him for a very pleasant day and we said goodbye without mentioning the possibility of any future meeting. But as I free-wheeled home – euphorically taking hairpin bends with my hands behind my back – I assumed that future meetings would somehow happen. First love at seventeen soars above the practical details of time and place.

  A fortnight passed without my seeing or hearing anything more of Godfrey, yet my certainty that we would meet again never wavered. I considered myself a most fortunate person and impatiently to demand more than the inner bliss I already enjoyed would have seemed greedy. In my daydreams I tried to imagine our future conversations, but I never imagined Godfrey falling in love with me. To think of being loved by this noble – almost godlike – figure would have seemed so unreasonable that it was not a fit subject even for daydreams. To love was enough. By any standards, I was an almost unbelievably naive seventeen-year-old.

  Then, on a misty September evening, as I was swimming in the Blackwater a few miles upstream from Lismore, Godfrey appeared on the bank above me. He waved casually and tactfully sauntered off into the next field. I scrambled out of the water, dressed without drying and followed him. We walked until it was dusk through the dense woods on the ridge above the river. Godfrey, I now discovered, had studied archaeology and also knew a lot about Shakespeare. We had been two hours together when we came to the track where his car was parked and said goodbye. But this time Godfrey added in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘I expect we’ll meet again quite soon.’ ‘I expect so,’ I agreed, dizzy with joy. And I cycled home to pursue my Shakespearian studies extra-diligently.

  Even I realised that Godfrey must have deliberately sought me out by the river – a hard task, for someone unfamiliar with the countryside around Lismore. Yet still I did not think it possible that he might be interested in me as a woman. No doubt his emphasis on his permanently married state had a lot to do with this. Clearly he was not the sort of man to womanise indiscriminately and if he could not marry he would not fall in love. To me it was as simple as that. So I believed that he regarded me as a congenial friend – a nonconformist like himself – with whom he could for some reason overcome his self-consciousness about his appearance. I prided myself on my ability to conceal my own emotions and play it his way. To do otherwise, I reflected melodramatically, would be to wreck a friendship that he needed as much as I needed the hidden joy of being in love. And so I continued to think and feel for three years, during which we met perhaps once a fortnight – occasionally for a day, more usually for a few hours and always where we were unlikely to be observed.

  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.

  13

  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 coo
ler, 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.