In November 1936 my father at last found a house to rent at a price we could afford. It was on the South Mall, Lismore’s most respectable street, but the dwelling itself was so irreparably decrepit that no modern squatter would stay there overnight. Short of a leaking roof, it suffered from every defect buildings are heir to and, for the next twenty-one years, it decayed – usually quietly, but occasionally dramatically – about our ears. Dating from the 1820s, it was two-storeyed, semi-detached and covered in Virginia creeper. The fanlight and wooden porch were attractive, a pair of romantic stone urns graced the front garden and overgrown fuchsia-bushes billowed on either side of the hall door. The well-proportioned rooms had good marble mantelpieces and mock-Adam ceilings and the wide hall was tiled in cream and dull red – pleasant, old-fashioned, indestructible tiles. However, some past tenant with execrable taste had left the whole place superficially hideous. The hall was painted a dead laurel green, only relieved by irregular patches of yellow-grey mildew where the plaster had fallen off. (For years I was fascinated by those patches, seeing them as maps of undiscovered countries.) The staircase was covered with cracked red and blue linoleum which ill-matched the magnificent mahogany banisters. Upstairs were five rooms: three large bedrooms, a boxroom which became my playroom and another large room, complete with fireplace, which at some remote period had been converted into a bathroom. The bath stood on four gigantic iron lion’s paws and resembled a modern child’s swimming-pool. It was patriotically stained green and orange and had a shower-device, of considerable antiquarian interest, near the ceiling. This had become viciously perverted and it sprayed, with tremendous force, only onto the opposite wall. When my father had forgotten to warn three successive guests he put up a notice saying ‘Please do not touch’. The lavatory also had its notice, to explain that the chain needed three morse-like pulls: long-short-long. The wash-basin could almost have been used as a bath and was without a plug: apparently none to fit it had been manufactured since the turn of the century. Had my father exerted himself he could, at the cost of a few pence, have remedied this and many other defects. But the idea of personally improvising a washbasin plug – or anything else – would never have entered his mind and he judged our numerous discomforts too trivial to warrant expensive expert attention.
Throughout the house we found peeling beige woodwork and wallpaper that had faded to a uniform grey-brown. Everywhere the paper was coming unstuck and in the dining-room rats had eaten through it at several points, thus demonstrating the fragility of the basic structure. Dry-rot afflicted the floor boards and some other sort of rot caused the ground-floor ceilings to snow gently if anyone walked about too vigorously overhead. This perhaps explains why I have always moved rather lightly for one of my build.
At the end of the hall a semi-glazed door led to a narrow, dark, flagged passage with ominously bulging henna-distempered walls. Having passed a storeroom, a pantry and a larder one entered the kitchen. Here sly draughts sneaked up from damp non-foundations through gaps between ancient flags, and blatant draughts whined through the slits between rotting window frames and rattling panes. The roughly plastered walls were an evil shade of green and a temperamental coal-range stood in an alcove. A row of discoloured pewter bells hung high above the door; in our day these never responded to the relevant buttons being pushed but they emitted ghostly chimes when gales blew. A dozen iron hooks depended from the rafters – ‘The better to hang yourself on, my dear,’ observed my mother as she toured her new home. In one corner a steep ladder-stairs led through a trap-door to an attic where the servants would have slept in the Bad Old Days. An adult could stand upright only in the middle of the attic floor and this retreat soon became one of my Private Paradises.
Behind the house were several collapsing stables and, beyond a wide cobbled yard, stood Lismore’s recently opened cinema, the property of our landlord, who lived next door. It was enormous and no one could tell us what purpose it had originally served; it may have been a series of barns whose internal walls had been demolished. Mercifully our landlord did not prosper as a film-wallah and within a few years the local doctor had built a new ‘Palladium’. Then the old cinema became another of my Private Paradises; in semi-darkness I leapt from row to row of moth-eaten red plush seats, being pursued by imaginary cannibals and collecting swarms of real fleas. These were not found tolerable by my mother, even when identified by me as rare tropical insects picked up while exploring in New Guinea.
Beyond the cinema were our garden and orchard, half an acre of wilderness which, despite consistent neglect, provided us for many years with an abundance of loganberries, gooseberries, apples and pears. At intervals my mother would remark on the advantages of growing one’s own vegetables. Then my father would borrow some implements and might on the following Saturday be observed reclining beside a minute pile of cut brambles reading Plato’s Theaetetus or the latest Dorothy Sayers. Like myself, he lacked the urge to cultivate. Our genes have perhaps resisted change since the Age of the Gatherers.
Although our new home was very nearly a ruin we tolerated it for the next twenty-one years. My mother must have abhorred these slum-like surroundings but she refrained, as always, from complaining about the inevitable. For a rent of ten shillings a week one couldn’t, even in Lismore in the 1930s, expect very much.
The rent was so low not only because of the house’s dilapidation but because of the previous tenant’s suicide in the dining-room. This snag considerably influenced my destiny since it made it far harder to engage local maidservants, or to persuade those who came from a distance to remain in residence. It was not that any ghost operated – at least to our knowledge – but the neighbourhood vociferously believed that a suicide without a consequent haunting was against nature.
As a child I always knew there was nothing to spare for non-essentials. But I was never hungry or cold so it did not occur to me to interpret this condition as poverty. Nor did I ever long for the unobtainable, with one spectacular exception – a pony of my own. And since that desire so clearly belonged to the realm of fantasy it caused me no discontent. In Dublin I enjoyed the luxury toys of my cousins – rocking-horses, tricycles, pedal motor cars and the like – yet I never asked or even wished for such things. They belonged to another sort of person who lived in another sort of world. And it was not a world I should have cared to inhabit permanently. It had no rivers, fields, woods, moors and mountains.
When we moved to the South Mall Nora was replaced by Old Brigid, a formidable character who for the next three years – scornful of ghosts – impassively controlled the whole peculiar Murphy establishment. It cannot have been easy to contend with a disintegrating house, an invalid mistress, a chronically vague master and a nasty child. Old Brigid, however, took the lot in her slow, purposeful stride. When the foul-looking sink came adrift from the wall she said nothing to my mother but fetched the plumber, a man who normally took weeks to answer any summons but who meekly accompanied Old Brigid to the scene of the disaster. When my mother needed some attention as lunch was being prepared the attention was promptly provided but the meal was never late or ill-cooked. When my father wandered off to the Library one morning wearing his dressing-gown and slippers Old Brigid pursued him, looking reproving but resigned, and handed him his jacket and shoes halfway down the Main Street. When I staged a tantrum because I could not have everything exactly as and when I wanted it Old Brigid said, ‘Now, Miss Dervla, I’ll have no more of that nonsense – if you please!’ And the tantrum stopped.
Despite her surface severity – or because of it? – I loved Old Brigid dearly. She always wore an ankle-length blue and white check cotton dress and a large starched white linen apron, without spot or stain. Every afternoon, while boiling the tea kettle, she also heated a ponderous iron on the hot coals, carefully placed it on its tin tray and ironed the next day’s aprons. She was small and stout, with grey hair in a neat bun and shiny red cheeks and sharp bristles on her chin. In 1936 she was sixty-five and had been fifty-three years in the service of a Tipperary family whose last representative had left her an adequate annuity; but she found idleness uncongenial. Since we paid her two pounds a month she must have regarded the Murphys as a hobby.
Every morning Old Brigid bathed me at seven o’clock because the range idiosyncratically refused to provide hot water in the evening. Then she took me into the dark airing cupboard, which was considerably larger than the average modern bathroom, and told me fairy stories while drying me beside the gurgling, gleaming bulk of a gigantic copper boiler. I listened politely, concealing my bored disbelief. I had faith in only one fairy, Mr Dumbly-Doo, who was exactly my own height and wore silver boots and red leather breeches and a green silk shirt and a black velvet jacket and a gold brocade tricorn hat. A creation of my father – with acknowledgements to the leprechaun industry – Mr Dumbly-Doo occasionally left a mint-new penny under a certain stone beside a certain stile along a certain laneway. (I cherished these coins for their red-gold rather than for their purchasing power – though in those days that was considerable.) He did none of the exasperating things common to fairies in stories and since my father did not elaborate on his life style I was free to do so myself without feeling the victim of adult condescension.
This wary attitude towards fairy tales was part of my unremitting struggle against grown-up power. Despite the affectionate understanding provided by my parents, in their very different ways, I tensely suspected the adult world of some sinister conspiracy to make me conform. I could not have felt more fiercely about this had my parents been models of conservatism instead of the individualists they were.
Yet for all my rejection of the standard fairy tales I needed a fantasy escape hatch even more than most children do. So I created my own intricate world of magic animals and omnipotent teddy-bears. A family of the latter, comprising four generations, lived in the branches of my favourite tree – a superb elm, some 120 feet tall and reckoned to be more than 400 years old. Under that tree I spent countless hours, at all seasons, totally absorbed in the bears’ doings and in their dramatic personality clashes. Each one had a clearly defined character and in time they came to seem quite independent of my controlling imagination. For a few years they – and their tree – meant more to me than any human friend.
That elm grew (and mercifully still grows) in the dense, dim wood which rises steeply from the Blackwater just west of Lismore Castle. The path leading down to it was an exciting tunnel through thick undergrowth. All around the other trees were old and tall, though dwarfed by its prodigious girth and height. Long before I had ever heard of pantheists, druids or sacred groves I used to stand at the foot of this elm, pressing with outstretched arms against its vastness, fingering its rough bark and looking up in reverence at the endless ramifications of its mighty branches. I was never to feel anything comparable under the influence of orthodox religious stimulants. But does it matter how we worship, if we worship?
All this of course took place only after I had been given licence to roam alone, at the age of seven. But long before that my chief amusement was telling myself interminable convoluted stories – if ‘amusement’ is the right word. The longing to be alone with the denizens of my imagination was so intense, and the amount of time I devoted to them so abnormal, that one of my father’s sisters – a child psychologist – became seriously alarmed during a visit to Lismore.
No doubt there was something neurotic about my elated relief as I escaped to the garden or the attic, and about the anger I felt when interrupted by the necessity to eat, or go for a walk, or learn my lessons. I often looked forward to bedtime. Lying happily taut under the blankets, with my eyes shut and my imaginative throttles wide open, I was at last safe from adult interference. I well remember the physical symptoms of excitement during those sessions: my heart hammering, my fists clenching and unclenching, my face contorted as I rapidly muttered the latest instalment, sotto voce. No wonder my aunt, who had doubtless contrived to spy on a daytime session, felt concerned.
My mother, however, insisted that I was suffering from nothing more than a lively imagination. On principle she tended not to agree with her sister-in-law, who was very close to my father. And in this case she may have realised that my fantasy-world was a not unhealthy form of escapism. At some level I must have been aware of the domestic stresses and strains; and futile efforts to understand and adjust to them would have done me much more harm than my withdrawal into the company of golden calves, silver goats and arboreal teddy-bears.
As I seem always to have known the facts of life I assume they were simply absorbed from my mother during that phase of obsessional questioning when everything in nature arouses a child’s curiosity. I therefore find it hard to understand the difficulties that even in this explicit age are said to surround basic sex instruction by parents. It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.
By the age of six I was a proficient and dedicated masturbator and someone – probably Old Brigid – had infected me with an acute guilt complex about this hobby. So I consulted my mother, who said the activity in question was certainly not a matter to worry about. It was a babyish habit and quite soon I would grow out of it – just as I had grown out of wetting my bed. These remarks must have had the intended effect. Guilt evaporated and in time the ‘babyish’ habit was superseded by more cerebral sexual interests centred on scientific investigations of the male anatomy.
I was about seven when an outraged neighbour complained to my mother that I had been seen, on the public street, removing a little boy’s shorts and examining him from every angle. All I can now remember is the colour and texture of this four-year-old’s shorts. They had been knitted from coarse burgundy-coloured wool and as he wore no underpants I pitied him, reasoning that he must feel miserably scratchy.
The fact that this scene took place on the Main Street – ‘in broad daylight’, as our neighbour several times emphasised, unconsciously implying that had it taken place in a dark corner it would have been less culpable – the fact that this could have happened shows how well my parents had thus far protected me from Irish puritanism. But there are limits. The time had come to risk unhealthy repression and my mother told me that never again must I do such a thing because little boys are very sensitive to the cold around that area, and could get a bad chill if stripped in the open air. I was not, of course, deceived. I had got the message that the relevant area merited special treatment and indeed was, for some utterly incomprehensible reason, Taboo. This new awareness gave the physiological differences between boys and girls an extra fascination; but my investigations, from now on, were more discreet.
Soon Providence favoured me; newcomers took the house opposite and within hours it became apparent that their eight-year-old son was a professional exhibitionist. He had perfected a variety of ingenious urinating techniques and his penis was public property. We were an ideally suited couple. He performed, I admired, and it occurred to neither of us that his penis could be put to other uses. Almost certainly he was ignorant of the mechanics of reproduction, as he was without curiosity about the female anatomy (he had five sisters). And it would no more have occurred to me to initiate an experiment than to smoke a cigarette. In my mind a clear line was drawn between the activities of grown-ups and children, and for all my defiance I was never tempted to cross this line prematurely. The world was organised in a certain way. There was a pattern and one felt no impulse to disarrange it.
The South Mall had been skilfully planned. Looking due north from our hall door one saw, scarcely six miles away, the 2,900-foot main peak of the Knockmealdowns, its smooth blue curve rising directly above one of Ireland’s loveliest churches. A double line of stately lime trees led up to St Carthage’s Cathedral and the broad, grassy sweep between them, known as The Mall, made a safe children’s playground.
Four doors down from us, on the same side of the wide street, was a house rather like our own – but detached and in perfect condition – which had recently been bought by a family of outsiders who seemed no better than ourselves at integration with the natives. They were, however, devoted to children and during the spring of 1937 they regularly invited me into their garden to play with an exuberant young Airedale named Bran and a sentimental black cocker spaniel named Roddy. The garden covered two acres and almost every afternoon a few members of the Ryan family were to be found working enthusiastically beside the gardener. (Here I first discovered what fun it is to watch other people digging and pruning, mowing and raking.) For a month or so I could not be induced to enter the house, possibly because I was afraid of the hypochondriacal Mr Ryan, who never ventured out before midsummer but could occasionally be glimpsed peering unsmilingly through an upstairs window. Everyone, including his wife, called him ‘The Boss’ and regarded him with an unwholesome mixture of deference, resentment, concern and scorn.
Mr Ryan was a retired country schoolmaster, gruff, autocratic, keen-minded and at this time already in his seventies. Mrs Ryan – his second wife, much younger than himself – was gentle and placid with a subtle sense of humour. Beneath her placidity one could detect more positive qualities which if not repressed might, in the circumstances, have led to domestic disharmony. She, too, had been a schoolteacher and the eight children of their union had been brought up mainly by her unmarried sister, who never seemed in the least like a frustrated maiden aunt but had a permanent twinkle in her eye. She smoked secretly – in the summer-house, to be well out of nose-shot of the Boss – and gave me all her cigarette cards.
Of the four Ryan sons two* were then curates, one was studying for the priesthood in Rome and the youngest was an army cadet whose buttons I loved to polish. Of the four daughters two were missionary nuns – educational pioneers in the remoter parts of Nigeria – and two lived at home. It was taken for granted that the Misses Ryan, though young, attractive and intelligent, would remain unmarried. Their ageing parents needed them and, having given five children to the Church, deserved them. They were never allowed enough freedom to be noticed by eligible men – though a father who had sired, in all, eleven children, and who could provide little financial security, might have been expected to consider both their emotional and economic needs. But in rural Ireland forty years ago Mr Ryan’s despotism was not rare; and it was encouraged by Irish Catholicism, which has always given to involuntary celibacy the status of a virtue.
The Ryan family had produced several distinguished Gaelic poets and I much preferred their spontaneous ‘Irishness’ to the Murphys’ turgid and embittered nationalism. Yet this comparison was unfair; for generations no Ryan had been directly involved in Irish politics and it is less easy to avoid bitterness when you have spent some of the best years of your life in jail, being treated as a common criminal. But perhaps what really appealed to me about the Ryans’ tradition was its genuineness. They had a cultural integrity not often found, for historical reasons, in Dublin families. When my father and his brother were sent to Saint Enda’s – the school founded by Patrick Pearse – and when the family went to the Donegal Gaeltacht for their summer holidays, to learn Irish, they were searching for something the Ryans had never lost.
In other ways, however, the Ryans’ simplicity irritated me, even at the age of six. Everything was good and bad, right and wrong, black and white; and children who suggested the possible existence of grey areas were just being impertinent. I soon learned to hold my tongue, partly because it seemed right to conform to the standards of the household and partly because The Boss shared with my mother – for very different reasons – the unusual distinction of being able to frighten me. To an extent I probably found the Ryans’ authoritarianism reassuring, but sometimes I was driven to secret tears when my rudimentary intellectual probings evoked an altogether unmerited sarcastic reprimand. To this day I remain puzzled by my emotional ‘adoption’ into this outwardly unyielding family. Clearly the Ryans liked having me about the place to soften the harshness of daily life; I was impulsively affectionate and as a family they conspicuously lacked demonstrativeness. But why did they not cultivate a child less liable to outrage their various susceptibilities and generally more tractable? Perhaps they furtively relished the stimulus of being outraged, or they may simply have enjoyed trying to raise my moral tone.
The Ryans and my parents never fraternised; whatever they might have in common, their differences far outweighed their similarities. So the relationship stuck at meteorological comment, though for years I spent as much time in the Ryans’ house as in my own. Moving daily between two households whose attitudes, opinions and standards were often opposed might have led to some confusion had I been more pliable. But for me this tension was healthy, part of the process of learning to accept other people as they are.
During the ’30s my parents’ only local friends were a Catholic curate, a Fianna Fail senator and the senator’s elderly widowed sister, Mrs Mansfield.
Father Power was pompous, smug and plump; though a good deal more intelligent than Jane Austen’s Mr Collins there were prominent affinities, including a weakness for titled nobility. Few people in the parish were prepared to talk interminably about his obsession – Early Christian Ireland – so he spent many evenings in our house, often bringing a half-bottle of claret and staying to supper. His brother was a wine merchant, but he seemed to imagine that a full bottle would give an air of debauchery to the proceedings.
I much preferred Senator Goulding because he completely ignored me. A bachelor, he was small, slight and energetic, with a calm, precise voice, a dry sense of humour and not a speck of self-importance. When in Lismore – he was often in Dublin on senatorial business – he attended Mass and received Communion every morning, and every evening he again went to church, and had there been an afternoon service he would certainly have attended that, too. He was, however, the best sort of devout Irish Catholic, not a craw-thumper but a man who tried to make politics honourable through the practical application of Christian teaching. Having served Ireland for more than half a century he died poorer than he was born.
Mrs Mansfield was childless and had been widowed young. One got the impression that she had unaccountably married beneath her and regarded Mr Mansfield’s premature death as his one gentlemanly gesture. She lived in a rambling, three-storeyed corner house at the junction of Ferry Lane and the Main Street; and the fact that the ground floor was occupied by a pub – once the property of her late husband – was a circumstance so unfortunate that to have referred to it in her presence would have been like commenting on someone’s club-foot – or wig. She and her brother affected to despise each other and had not exchanged a word, at least publicly, within living memory. They might be observed going to church by pointedly different routes: the senator trotting briskly up the South Mall while his sister sedately paced down the Main Street, tiny, slim and erect, the tapping of her silver-mounted cane being made to sound like heralds’ trumpets through the sheer force of her personality.
When not going to church Mrs Mansfield was invariably accompanied by San Toy, an irascible Peke with chronic asthma. San Toy once attacked a bull-terrier, in a fit of sheer spleen, and the terrier was so astonished he simply ran away. Having witnessed this scene I always deprecated Mrs Mansfield’s subsequent boastings about San Toy’s gallantry when unjustly set upon.
Twice a week Mrs Mansfield called to drink tea with my mother and deplore the appalling inroads being made by democracy on good manners. She complained bitterly of being greeted with an ‘Hello!’ – she whispered the word as though it had four letters – by children whose parents she could remember walking in to Lismore on a fair-day with bare feet and scarcely a shirt to their backs. Those children of course knew no better; their elders had waxed too prosperous and brazen to teach them respect. But I, Dervla – she would swivel round to survey me through her lorgnette – I should know better than to run down the Main Street, endangering in my unseemly haste defenceless babies and feeble old-age pensioners. ‘A lady should never be seen to hurry, my dear.’
‘But she’s not quite a lady yet,’ my mother would protest mildly – avoiding my vulgarly winking eye. Then Mrs Mansfield’s expression would convey that if my mother did not act soon and drastically the necessary transmogrification was unlikely ever to take place.
Before I was old enough to wander alone I often attended Mrs Mansfield and San Toy on their afternoon walks. For one of her apparent fragility and gentility Mrs Mansfield was a stout marcher, not at all deterred – once out of sight of the neighbours – by rough going and the accompanying indignities of climbing over fallen tree trunks or crawling under wire fences. And San Toy availed himself of these occasions to prove that he was no mere effete aristocrat. It was Mrs Mansfield who introduced me to the pleasures of strolling through old graveyards, striving to read weathered inscriptions and speculating about the fate of such as John Carney who, in 1811, at the age of fifteen, ‘loved peace but died violently’. Of the consequences of this addiction there will be more anon.
* One of those two was Mark, of whom there will be much more anon.