One fine spring morning, when I was six and a half, my father escorted me to the local national school and my formal education began. I remember lying on the chalk-smelling floor boards of a huge, bright classroom, kicking in a tantrum and feeling tears running into my ears and noticing the chalk dust gyrating through a sunbeam. My father was standing over me looking helpless and worried and being assured by a little group of nuns that I would settle down the moment he left me.
I had not any objection, in theory, to starting school, but the moment I entered that classroom I panicked at the prospect of being confined within alien walls until some unknown nun gave me permission to leave. At home I chose to spend hours alone every day, yet if at any moment I suddenly wanted to be with my mother she was always accessible. Here, however, I was trapped in a situation where it would be impossible to reach her no matter how desperate my need. So I screamed and kicked frantically while the other children, who had all started school at the age of four, regarded me with amused scorn, and the nuns, raising their voices above my howls, repeated firmly that I would soon settle down and tried to edge my father tactfully towards the door.
Luckily I could not express my desolate sense of betrayal. Had my father realised that this was not just another bout of nastiness he might well have taken me home again, thereby setting a disastrous precedent. As it was I did settle down surprisingly soon after his reluctant departure, having discovered that I liked the nun who was to be my teacher. She explained that if ever I needed my mother very badly I could at once be sent home in the charge of an older girl. Whereupon I discounted the possibility of ever again needing my mother very badly, either in or out of school hours, and by lunchtime being a scholar seemed a good idea.
Yet I did not mean to profit in the accepted manner by my educational opportunities. Indeed, having learned to read at home I felt that the essential part of my education had already been completed. The world was full of books and I intended to read as many as possible before I died. What I did not intend was to waste the best years of my life – the only years of my youth – studying inexpressibly boring things like French and arithmetic. I knew by then of my parents’ plans: at ten I would be sent away to school, at eighteen I would be sent to the Sorbonne, at twenty-two or twenty-three I would return home with a degree in something or other and be welcomed as a complete, civilised human being. This programme might have fired many children with worthy ambitions, but I neither wished it to be carried out nor believed that it would be. We are born – I am convinced – with a certain basic foreknowledge about the pattern of our lives and I always regarded those parental plans as pipe-dreams.
My teachers found me an awkward, lazy pupil and the educational methods of the day did nothing to help. Another discouragement, for a child without any linguistic ability, was the compulsory use of Irish as the language through which all subjects were taught in free primary schools – except, significantly, religious instruction. By the 1930s most Irish families had been English-speaking for generations and only a tiny minority were interested in reviving their own language. So this lunatic law was extremely unpopular. It produced millions of Irish citizens who were, as one wit sourly observed, ‘illiterate in two languages’. The situation would be paralleled in Britain if Wales reconquered England and compelled all state-school pupils to study in Welsh.
Even as a character-forming influence, Lismore school did me very little good. My classmates, instead of forcing me into the sort of rough and tumble I needed to remove my corners, generally deferred to me and expected me to be their leader – an expectation which was disappointed, for it was not in my nature either to lead or be led. Also, most of the nuns were too lenient towards me and too openly appreciative of intellectual attainments which would not have seemed at all remarkable in another academic setting.
Fortunately there was one exception to this, whose class I joined when I was eight. Sister Andrew was a tall twenty-year-old with a pale long face, straight black brows and eyes that seemed to give off blue forked lightning during her rages. Verbally she flayed me and physically she battered me – often across the back, with a stout wooden pointer. If it is true that corporal punishment is inflicted only by the insecure, then Sister Andrew repeatedly betrayed her own uncertainty and inexperience. We were in fact using each other at this stage: she to prove that she could control even such a resolutely self-willed and obliquely insolent child as myself, and I to prove that I could and would withstand the adult world, however painful the consequences.
I remember sitting upright at my heavy wooden desk, with its cracked, brass-lidded inkwell and countless carved initials and the splinter under the left side of the seat on which I was wont unobtrusively to clean my finger-nails. Sister Andrew was bending over me, whitely angry, ordering me to write the letter ‘h’ in the approved manner. I knew quite well how to write a standard ‘h’ but I was determined not to do it according to the specifications; I had my own method, which I naturally preferred. And so, under Sister Andrew’s flashing gaze, I deliberately rewrote ‘h’ as I thought fit. Meanwhile the rest of the class, who always relished our duels, watched with bated breath. Several emotions simultaneously possessed me in that instant: a spiteful sense of triumph, regret that our duel could not take place in dignified seclusion instead of in the middle of a classroom, fear of the physical pain that I knew was imminent and a sharp stab of shame because I could not but recognise the futility and stupidity of my own behaviour. This was one of the occasions when the pointer left bruises on my back. Since I was able to write a perfectly legible ‘h’ it might be argued that Sister Andrew should have ignored my method of achieving it; but then it might also be argued that I did not mean my defiant originality to be ignored.
For a year or so we were sporadically at war. Many were the afternoons when I hurried home, trembling with resentful fury, affronted, humiliated and longing for the balm of maternal sympathy. But these rages usually cooled on the way and I rarely mentioned Sister Andrew. The verbal flayings hurt me far more than the beatings, but I was shrewd enough to realise that if I repeated those criticisms verbatim my mother would simply add, ‘Hear! Hear!’ Besides, complaints about the school authorities were discouraged at home and many years passed before I discovered how much worry my bruised back had caused on one particular occasion. From the ’70s such violence looks primitive and uncouth. But in the ’30s even doting parents, themselves too sensitive to hurt a fly, did not really object to having the hell beaten out of their wicked brats by somebody else. (N.B. – for the past thirty-five years Sister Andrew and I have been very good friends.)
An interesting aspect of childhood is the democracy of those who have not yet been trained to think or feel undemocratically. And one of the oddest functions of middle-class parents – which seems inconsistent with the civilising parental mission – is to destroy this democratic instinct for the sake of maintaining standards often of far less value to society than the attitude being sacrificed. At the age of seven or eight my classmates and I were not prepared to accept the operation of chance as a valid foundation for either superiority or inferiority complexes. The barriers built within the adult social world were unknown to us and differences in speech, manners, attitudes and interests neither embarrassed nor amused us; we simply ignored social frontier posts.
During this period my few school friends were wild and ragged. Tommy particularly attracted me because he hated wearing shoes and in all seasons removed his footwear outside the school gate before going home. To me running barefooted symbolised the very quintessence of liberty and I soon became Tommy’s only female intimate. With his gang I raided many orchards – including our own, which was stealthily approached from an adjacent field. I had been admitted to this all-male gang by virtue of my muscle-power. If necessary I could bear any two of these ill-nourished little boys on my shoulders to assist them over an orchard wall.
On Saturday afternoons I often went to Tommy’s home for tea. He lived with his foster-parents in a tiny cottage and we were given hunks of hot, butter-sodden bastable-cake, its crisp crust delicately flavoured with the wood-ash beneath which it had been baked, and huge chipped enamel mugs of very sweet cocoa. This soon became my favourite meal of the week and I was desolated when my mother one day announced that in future Tommy and I must take it in turns to entertain each other. Cocoa made with milk instead of water, egg and cheese and tomatoes instead of bastable-cake … I pleaded desperately, but in vain. ‘You must return Tommy’s hospitality,’ said my mother in her that’s-the-end-of-the-matter voice. ‘But you may have tea in the kitchen because Tommy might feel shy in the dining-room.’
Gloom enveloped me at the thought of Old Brigid scrutinising our hands, vigilantly observing our table-manners and perhaps – I shuddered at the very possibility – perhaps even being brutal enough to tell Tommy not to lick his knife. As supervisor of a tea-party she seemed a poor substitute indeed for Tommy’s foster-mother, who always reminded us to wipe our filthy hands on our backsides before we sat down and made gloriously comic slurping noises as she drank her tea from her saucer. Then I hit on a brilliant compromise: Tommy and I should have tea in the attic, where adults feared to tread because of dry-rot. My mother – always ready to view a situation from my angle – approved of this idea; and since Tommy would have nothing to do with my body-building menu we were given white bread and jam – for me a very special treat.
At my eighth birthday party Tommy looked miserable in shiny shoes and his First Holy Communion suit, now giving at the seams. The other guests were South Mall children – in whom I had very little interest, but they always asked me to their parties – and years afterwards I heard of the repercussions of Tommy’s attendance. A few days later it was conveyed to my mother – through Mrs Mansfield – that if the Lynch boy were invited to my Christmas party the rest could be counted out. Of course my mother didn’t realise it – how could she, poor thing, stuck in a wheelchair all day? – but no one even knew who Tommy’s parents were, and he ran barefooted like a tinker, and blew his nose in the gutter, and stole from people! Stole apples, and sold them on fair days to the poor mountainy farmers’ wives!
My mother’s reply was that she found Tommy a most attractive, spirited, intelligent little boy. Soon afterwards came Christmas and to my astonished joy I found that this year, for some mysterious reason, I was to be spared party-going and party-giving. But Tommy spent St Stephen’s Day with us; he had long since lost his shyness and graduated to the dining-room where he delighted my father by showing a lively interest in astronomy.
The Lynches left Lismore a few months later, to my great though transient grief. And eventually Tommy, having won a series of scholarships – a more difficult feat then than now – went on to become a chemical engineer with a top job in ICI.
The neighbours quite often found Murphy standards unacceptable. I was seven when three small girls – sisters – were forbidden to play with me because I had assured them that every night a lion slunk across the rooftops of Lismore, hunting the crows which nested in the chimneys, roaring at the stars just to show he was very fierce and fighting with an orang-utan who lived in the cathedral belfry. Nightmares resulted and the parish priest received a formal complaint about my pernicious untruthfulness. When Father Power relayed this complaint to my parents they made no attempt to conceal their amusement. But my mother cautioned me against further terrorising of my contemporaries and advised me to write such stories down in future instead of telling them, as it were, in the marketplace.
Thus began an enduring custom; every year I wrote long stories for my parents’ birthday and Christmas presents. Only one of these survives, written when I was eight. In about three thousand misspelt words it describes the adventures of two boys in a jungle that, judging by the available fauna, extended from Peru to Siberia. Having throttled a sabre-toothed tiger with their bare hands, rescued a shepherd’s baby from a condor and killed an anaconda with a poisoned dart my heroes returned to Ireland by an unspecified route and lived happily ever after.
In a letter to her father-in-law my mother reported that when I was four – not yet able to read – I picked up a Little Grey Rabbit book and pointing to the author’s name on the title-page said, ‘When I’m grown up I’m going to write books and have my name there.’ My mother commented, ‘I think she means it. She is a very decided and determined child.’ This comment was probably regarded as the typical effusion of a doting mother, but it was correct. I did mean it. And I went on meaning it though none of my literary efforts, during childhood or adolescence, showed any trace of promise.
I preferred not to discuss my ambition with anyone – it was tacitly understood between my parents and myself – and from the age of about twelve I was well aware that I might follow in my father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and be a failed writer. But this did not deter me. I was not thinking in terms of success or failure, prosperity or poverty, fame or obscurity. To me writing was not a career but a necessity. And so it remains, though I am now, technically, a professional writer. The strength of this inborn desire to write has always baffled me. It is understandable that the really gifted should feel an overwhelming urge to use their gift; but a strong urge with only a slight gift seems almost a genetic mistake.
My parents naturally approved of these literary ambitions. Yet to have encouraged me too enthusiastically, in the absence of any discernible talent, would have been irresponsible. Fortunately my mother enjoyed nothing more than being a literary critic. Everything she read was dissected and an ill-written book, endured for the sake of the subject matter, made her look quite haggard. An aspiring writer could ask for no more suitable mother and after a tactful interval – never look a gift story in the syntax – my parents’ Christmas and birthday presents would reappear to be torn phrase from phrase. During these sessions I sat beside my mother like the most docile of Victorian daughters, attentively absorbing her every suggestion. This was the one area in which I did not spurn adult advice.
In May 1938 we acquired a motor car. I cannot imagine by what financial conjuring feat my mother managed that, but somehow a brand-new, dark green, four-door Ford Ten appeared – having been paid for before delivery, eccentric as that may seem to a generation reared on hire-purchase systems. Motor cars were then a rarity in Lismore, yet ours was no extravagance; for my mother train-travel would have been intolerably troublesome and painful.
Almost every Saturday and Sunday, in all seasons, we motored to the sea. (‘Driving’ seems to have replaced ‘motoring’ only after the second war.) My mother loved to sit in the car for hours with the windows wide open, parked if possible within reach of the flying spray; she was especially partial to midwinter gales. Meanwhile my father would march briskly along beaches or cliff-tops while I did my own thing among rock-pools or sand-dunes. While Tommy was around he usually came with us.
On Saturdays we often paused in Dungarvan, a market-town on the coast, to shop at Miller’s old-fashioned Select Family Grocers. Mr Miller, beaming and bowing, would hurry out to the car to discuss with my mother cheeses and rices and teas and coffees while an assistant, wearing a half-moon leather apron, hovered in the background ceremoniously bearing samples on a round brass tray. These my mother would closely examine before committing herself to the expenditure of ten or twelve shillings. I sometimes think of this scene as I push my sweaty way through a seething supermarket crowd, beneath the glare of strip-lighting, between cliffs of gaudy packages.
Occasionally Mrs Mansfield accompanied us to Dungarvan, but she never shopped at Miller’s and I soon realised that she disapproved of our doing so. When I questioned my mother about this she looked embarrassed – an uncharacteristic reaction to any question of mine – and at once I knew that I had touched on one of the more sordid areas of adult misbehaviour. But she would, I was confident, tell me the truth. Then she said, ‘Mrs Mansfield doesn’t believe in supporting Protestant shops.’
Momentarily I suspected a red herring. ‘But that’s daft!’ I objected. ‘What does a shop’s religion matter?’
‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ said my mother, ‘but many Irish people think it does.’
Suddenly various pennies began to drop; now I understood obscure remarks that had been made in my presence by the Ryans, or by the nuns at school, or by Old Brigid or Tommy’s foster-mother. I felt an overwhelming, angry disgust – perhaps my first step away from orthodox religion. There was no logical reason why I should have recoiled so violently, at the age of eight, from an attitude that had long been accepted as normal by the majority of my compatriots, both Catholic and Protestant. Obviously I comprehended none of the practical or philosophical implications. I only knew that this was something contemptible, which should be opposed.
Next morning I reopened the subject at breakfast-time. I was sitting on a stool by the fire in my parents’ bedroom, eating grapefruit, and my mother was still in bed, propped against a pile of pillows, her heavy, glossy, chestnut braids coiled on a pale green bed-jacket and the bible open on her bookrest. (She began each day with a chapter from the New Testament.) Overnight my agitation about religious bigotry in general had been aggravated by my particular grief about the Ryans and Mrs Mansfield and Old Brigid – people to whom I was deeply attached – being guilty of this evil. I felt threatened. What to make of a world in which some of my most respected adults had been suddenly revealed as wrong-doers? So I asked my mother, ‘Why can’t somebody teach people not to be bigots?’
‘It’s difficult,’ she explained, ‘because bigotry is self-perpetuating.’ (She never believed in tempering her vocabulary to the unlearned lamb.) ‘Bigots are so sure they’re right they don’t even try to see any other point of view. But it’s wrong to blame individuals for being bigoted – that’s just another form of bigotry and sometimes it’s worse because it’s so self-righteous while pretending not to be. Usually people inherit bigotry – it’s a sort of communal disease. So if you hear other children repeating nonsense about all Protestants going to hell, and so forth, don’t lose your temper. Just try to make them realise that such beliefs are unchristian and stupid. Then at least – even if they don’t believe you – they’ll be aware there’s another point of view.’
I have never forgotten this conversation. My mother’s response to my first serious querying of a widely accepted attitude had shown that in certain circumstances nonconformism was not merely allowable but desirable. At once my anxiety evaporated and I was full of happy self-importance, seeing my parents and myself as crusaders against the forces of evil.
I cannot recall many conversations or scenes from my first decade, but the few memories I have are very vivid, possibly because they mark emotional or mental advances.
One raw November noon, not long after my discovery of bigotry, I stood waiting for my grandfather outside Trinity College and as I watched the crowds hurrying across College Green I wondered, ‘How important are all those people? Soon they will all be dead. And I’ll be dead. What is a person? Do we really matter? Or do we only think we do? Why are we alive?’ As they formed in my mind I was aware of the enormity of these questions. And I remember a detached, fatalistic acceptance of the fact that even as an adult I was unlikely to find coherent answers. But I was also aware that merely by asking such questions I had acknowledged the mystery at the centre of things and so perhaps had already found as much of the truth as was necessary for me. Oddly, I made no attempt to try to relate these speculations to the formal religion which was so much a part of my life at that time. They belonged to a category labelled ‘Private Important Thoughts’ – Pits for short – and nothing would have induced me to discuss them with any grown-up. Does every child have, as I had, an image of what adults expect children to be? And do they all courteously preserve this image, outwardly, lest their adults might be discomfited, while inwardly they are becoming something quite different, full of Pits that have nothing to do with Dr Dolittle or stringing conkers? But perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood. A personality is forming, and loving adults are eager to help mould it – while the child is determined to remain in control of his own evolution. Also, nothing is ready to be exposed. Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling. And all this is going on long before puberty, at an age when many children are expected still to believe in Santa Claus.
Not long after my ninth birthday my grandfather and I had a brief, curiously moving encounter in the sitting-room at Charleston Avenue. My grandmother had died of cancer the year before, but the battleground of the bridge warriors still reeked nostalgically of cigarette smoke, coffee grounds and sherry fumes. It was cluttered with an assortment of very bad and very good furniture, severely ravaged by moth, woodworm and dust, and over the mantelpiece hung the arms of the Leinster Murphys – four Lions Rampant and three Sheaves of Corn. The blue, scarlet and gold had been dimmed by wood-smoke from the inefficient grate, but the motto was still legible: Fortis et Hospitalis. Pappa came upon me one day when I was standing on the hearth in the empty sitting-room gazing up at those lions. And he asked me, ‘Do you know what the motto means?’
‘That we should be Strong and Hospitable,’ I replied.
‘Yes – but physical strength and material generosity are easy. To have strength and generosity of the mind and the spirit is what matters. We must all have our faults – but never be weak or mean.’ Then suddenly Pappa looked comically startled; he was too humble and humorous to be able to lecture even a grandchild unselfconsciously. For a moment he stood staring through the window, twirling an end of his moustache and humming a snatch from The Gondoliers. Before I could think of anything to say he had left the room.
On our monthly weekend visits to Dublin we usually left for home after Sunday tea. In those days the journey took six hours – it now takes three – and being prone to car-sickness I preferred night travel which allowed me to cheat my disability by sleeping. Often I woke only next morning, to find myself in my own bed.
Once, however, I woke as we crossed the Vee – and experienced pure terror for the first time. Directly above the car a dancing wall of orange and scarlet flame was obviously about to engulf us. This gorse-fire had of course been deliberately started and was not even remotely dangerous. But as we chugged up the steep slope the flames spread swiftly, filling with their terrible beauty the blackness of the night. Fear paralysed me, until a turn in the road made it seem that we were about to plunge into the crackling, glowing, writhing heart of the inferno. Then I shrieked and clutched my father’s shoulder – thus putting us in real danger. Even when my mother had calmed me a residue of fear remained and on future crossings of the Vee I both dreaded and longed for the superb fury of a burning mountain.
That same winter I inconsistently failed to panic even slightly when there was ample excuse for hysteria. During a very frosty spell my father had put a rug under the car bonnet – and then, typically, forgotten to remove it. Halfway up the Vee I happened to notice, through a gap in the floor beside the foot-brake, an ominously flickering brightness. I stared at it for a moment, fully aware of the implications, and then said in a carefully calm voice, ‘I think we’d better stop. The engine seems to be on fire.’
My parents, who were no doubt discussing some medieval heresy or other, took no immediate notice. Then, ‘What did you say?’ asked my mother.
‘I said the engine seems to be on fire.’ And I remember adding sourly, ‘So we’ll all be blown up if you don’t stop talking about religion and put it out.’
An instant later my father was hurling the burning rug onto the roadside. For the next five hours he and my mother hardly exchanged a word on any subject, which I well knew presaged a monumental row as soon as I was out of earshot.
At about this time I was suddenly afflicted by an irrational terror of darkness. Electricity had not yet come to Lismore; at dusk the lamplighter went up and down the South Mall and Old Brigid lit the oil lamps and closed and barred the shutters and drew the curtains and, when I had been put to bed at seven o’clock, darkness was, officially, final. However, for reading illicitly I had a secret supply of candles and matches and my new terror was revealed to myself when I forgot, one evening, to smuggle these in from my playroom. The playroom door was a mere three steps away, across the landing, yet I felt sick with fear at the thought of venturing out into the total, silent blackness. Inevitably I then saw myself as a most despicable coward, a craven sissy, a lily-livered, weak-kneed, spineless rotter.
This terror quickly became a phobia that dominated all my waking hours. Sometimes I was tempted to confide in my mother, but pride inhibited me. As the days passed my dread of bedtime increased; this had become my regular test of courage and always I failed it. At breakfast-time I might have successfully persuaded myself that, that very evening, I would do what had to be done. Yet when the moment came, when Old Brigid and my father had said good-night and kissed me and gone, I simply lay listening to the mealtime noises in the dining-room below while little shivers of shame ran through my body. Night after night, I told myself that within minutes this torment could be ended – if I found the necessary courage.
Then one very cold evening I did find it. I slipped out of bed, tip-toed to the door and began a deliberately slow tour of the whole of the first floor – including the airing cupboard and attic, which to many seemed quite spooky even by daylight. I moved silently through the dense blackness, my hands outstretched to guide me, and the thudding of my heart seemed to hurt my ribs. Something odd happened to my sense of time and the ordeal seemed to be taking place outside the normal framework of hours and minutes. But it was worth it. When I got back to my bedroom my self-respect was restored and all fear of darkness exorcised forever.
On most issues, at this period, I did confide in my mother. Yet already my attitude towards her was habitually guarded; while half of me needed comfort and guidance the other half was suspicious of interference. From my father I had inherited a certain shyness or gaucherie or tendency towards self-effacement – to this day I am not sure of the exact nature of the trait – and this was aggravated by observation of a woman who always seemed at ease in every sort of situation. Unwittingly, my mother gave me an inferiority complex I was never to outgrow. I recognised and took for granted the fact that in looks, intelligence and poise she set a standard I could never hope to reach and for years I heroine-worshipped her. Yet I may also have unconsciously envied her capacity to inspire such devotion – not only in myself but in many others. ‘A magnetic personality’ is the stock phrase. And as a child I expended a disproportionate amount of energy on testing myself against the power of that magnet.