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.
The telegram had half-prepared me, yet I was so dazed with joy that I could hardly speak when I heard that Murrays would like to publish my book. There was no talk of royalties or promotion, no ominous reference to ‘excellent editors’; the book, apparently, was acceptable as I had written it. Then I was invited to stay with the Murrays; like many another Murray author, I had found not only a publisher but a whole family of friends.
That afternoon I first met Jane Boulenger, who was to be my editor in an acceptable sense. Authors are notoriously dangerous animals and Jane must be one of the greatest living author-tamers. In eight years of working together she taught me an immense amount about the art and craft of writing and we never had a cross word.
I left Albemarle Street in such a euphoric state that I very nearly stepped under a bus in Piccadilly; a passing Pakistani pulled me back just in time. Yet there was a sense in which my joy was curiously impersonal. Walking through St James’s Park, I thought of all my father’s rejected novels – all the years of work, hope, disappointment, work, hope, disappointment – a cycle of frustration endured without bitterness. And then the importance of the individual – of myself as an individual – dwindling to nothing. It was chance that in my lifetime – perhaps because of my mother’s contribution to the genetic pool – all the strivings of generations of scribbling Murphys were to push their way above ground into print. And so, on that sunny June day by the duck ponds, the acceptance of my first book seemed less a personal triumph than the fulfilment of an obligation to my parents.
My maternal grandmother (‘Jeff ’) and grandfather with five of their seven children: left to right: Robert, Laurence, Frederick, Leo and Kathleen (my mother)
My paternal grandparents in 1898
My paternal grandfather (‘Pappa’) as I remember him
My mother aged sixteen
My father aged twenty-two
Family snapshots: summer 1934
Myself in Confirmation dress, May 1943
Charles Kerins in 1944, a year before he was hanged
My first continental tour, 1952: in the German countryside
and in Strasbourg
Spain, 1956
County Wicklow, 1959
Turkey, 1963
Copyright
First published in England by John Murray in 1979
First published by Eland Publishing Limited
61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 2010.
This ebook edition first published in 2011
All rights reserved.
© Dervla Murphy, 1979
The right of Dervla Murphy to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms
and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–906011–73–4
Cover Image: Dervla on her bicycle
Wheels Within Wheels Page 27
