During my absence from home Old Brigid had at last retired to her cottage near Cappoquin and been replaced by one Maggie – unenthusiastically described as ‘adequate’, fading to ‘better than nothing’, in my mother’s letters. As we drove towards Lismore I found it hard to imagine life without Old Brigid, but I would have been a good deal more upset in any other circumstances. Having just regained Paradise not even her loss could dilute my joy and on being assured that I might visit her weekly I philosophically accepted the idea of Maggie.
I did not, however, accept the reality of Maggie. She was sharp-boned and purple-hued and her voice rasped and she always looked discontented – with some reason, as a servant chez Murphy. We disliked each other on sight; to me she was an unloving tyrant, to her I was a saucy little puppy. And the chances of our ever coming to terms were much reduced by my having to take to my bed at once and stay there for three weeks, during which time Maggie found herself toiling up and down stairs every few hours with trays of such delicacies as were then available. (I particularly remember dark-brown beef-tea, jars of Calves’-foot jelly and a weird, chewy ginger-based concoction which was alleged to do wonderful things for the bronchial chords.)
Even in our Spartan household bronchitic patients were permitted a fire in their bedroom and it was typical of my mother’s feeling for servants that she always asked my father to take on the consequent chores – which he most willingly did. Old Brigid had greatly appreciated his help, but it quickly became obvious that in Maggie’s estimation such face-losing behaviour on the master’s part drastically lowered our status. For a few weeks after my recovery she and I sparred daily; I was missing Old Brigid dreadfully, resenting Maggie in proportion and making my feelings plain. Then one morning she left without notice to become housekeeper to an elderly, childless couple who lived in a comfortable new house where no one had committed suicide.
Having been born with ‘a weak chest’ I was accustomed to enjoying a few weeks of invalidism each winter and I revelled in being free to read, almost without interruption, for fourteen hours a day seven days a week. Whatever the theologians might say about Heaven being a state of union with God, I knew it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity, about which my parents were wont to argue with amusing vehemence, was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly forever.
The only interruptions I welcomed during these withdrawals from the world were Dr White’s visits. He treated me with the sort of rough affection one bestows on a large dog and gave me delicious syrup from a bottle excavated with difficulty from the depths of his greatcoat pocket and told heart-stopping stories about his soldiering days in India and South Africa. Sometimes he advised me to rest my eyes, but this advice went unheeded as I took no interest whatever in any of the standard children’s games or pastimes. (A serious handicap nowadays, when I have a more versatile child of my own.)
I remember the perfection of my happiness – a perfection not often attained in this life, as I realised even then – when I woke on a dark winter’s morning and switched on the light to see a tower of unread library books by my bed. From them I would look caressingly towards my own books on their shelves around the wall and reflect that now I had time to reread; I could never decide which was the greater pleasure, rereading old favourites or discovering new ones. For a moment I would lie still, ecstatically anticipating the day’s bliss. And sometimes it would cross my mind that only Pappa could fully understand how I felt.
There is a difference between the interest taken in books by normal readers (people like my parents) and the lunatic concern of bibliomaniacs (people like Pappa and myself). Everything to do with books mattered to me and I fretted much more over their wartime deterioration – that squalid gravy-coloured paper! – than I did over butter rationing or inedible bread. (Clothes rationing I of course considered a blessing in disguise.) After a quick glance at any open page I could by the age of nine have told you the publisher of most children’s books – and often the printer and illustrator, too. One of my hobbies was rewriting blurbs which seemed inadequate and I collected publishers’ lists as other children collect stamps. During June and July I often prayed for rain; on fine days I was supposed to be out in the fresh air, but on wet days I could go to the county library headquarters and help unpack the new books that came by the hundred, in tea-chests, at that season. The sight, smell and feel of these books so intoxicated me that I often refused to go home at lunch time. I had an agreement with my parents that when the children’s books came I could always help unpack, regardless of climatic conditions. I would then – to my father’s sensibly silent disgust – seize on the least worthy volumes (Biggles and so forth) and beg to be allowed to borrow them even before they had been initiated into public circulation. But my father did not believe in Privilege so I had to bide my time – very sulkily. It must have exasperated my parents that for so long I preferred exciting stories to good writing. At every stage of childhood I completely rejected all the classical fairy stories, and Lewis Carroll, Captain Marryat, Louisa Alcott, Kipling, E. Nesbit and any volume that I suspected might be intended to improve my mind. But neither, to be fair to myself, would I read Enid Blyton when she began to pollute the literary atmosphere. I was uncompromisingly middlebrow; and so, with minor modifications, I have remained to this day.
As the librarian’s daughter I did have one priceless perk. When public library books become too battered and disgusting for rebinding or recirculation they are ‘Withdrawn From Circulation’, stamped to that effect and despatched either to fever hospitals or to the pulpers. And among those glorious, revolting heaps of ‘Withdrawn’ books – their pages interlarded with evidence of the diet of the rural reader – I was free to wander and take my pick and carry the noisome volumes home by the armful to be mine forever. (Many of them are still mine; no one ever steals them.)
I went through one appalling crisis in relation to ‘Withdrawn’ books. At the age of eight or so I had a compulsive secret vice – crossing out the author’s name on the title page of old books and substituting my own. This could be done without fear of detection in unfrequented corners of the library; but then, in bed one ghastly evening, I suddenly realised that some of the books I had been abusing might go, not to the pulpers but to a fever hospital. If this happened both my iniquitous vandalism and my vain ambitions would be exposed to a shocked and derisive public. This hideous possibility so tormented me that I could not sleep. As my parents were listening to the late news I crept downstairs and confessed all to my mother – who remained astonishingly unperturbed. She assured me that the defacement of such books was forgivable and that no fever hospital patient was likely to report on my little weakness to the world press – which would in any case be disinclined to take the matter up. I always enjoyed the irony with which she put things in perspective; curiously enough, it never made me feel foolish.
By the spring of 1941 most Irish working girls had emigrated to earn good money in English factories and our next five years were dominated by the comings and goings of maidservants. The best were those too young to emigrate, who usually responded well to my mother’s training; but no sooner had she imparted the rudiments of domesticity than they were clutching a ticket for Paddington and saying often tearful farewells. This relay system offered no reward for weeks of hard work. Gone were the days when my mother spent her mornings reading, or listening to concerts on the wireless, or teaching me. Now she was lifted into her bath chair after breakfast and wheeled into the kitchen to supervise the cooking and other household tasks. As a bride she had been unable to cook an egg, but in everything she was a perfectionist and her zealous study of the art of cooking had such sensational results that despite Emergency limitations I have never anywhere eaten better than I did then in my own home.
Several of our non-treasures had to be dismissed within days for intolerable personal filthiness (there was the celebrated case of the louse on the table-napkin …) or irredeemable incompetence, or both. Some were petty thieves, others were incorrigible ‘borrowers’. One sixteen-year-old was detected by my father returning through the kitchen window from a military hop at four o’clock on a summer morning, clad only in one of my mother’s nightgowns. My father imagined her to have been sleep-walking and apologised profusely for having chanced to observe her in dishabille. My mother assessed the situation more realistically and next day patiently lectured the girl on the hazards of associating, in the small hours of the morning, with the licentious soldiery.
As Lismore was a garrison town throughout the war our younger maids’ morals were a source of constant anxiety. Those who arrived knowing nothing of the facts of life had to be given sex instruction even before they were taught how to make coffee. And for a few this instruction came too late. These usually stayed longest; when they discovered their condition their bewildered fear was pathetic and whatever their professional defects my mother never had the heart to dismiss them.
One eighteen-year-old precipitately gave birth under the kitchen table with me in fascinated attendance. When the drama was all over bar the afterbirth I rushed into the sitting-room exclaiming that it was just the way cows did it. Perennially unflappable, my mother said ‘How interesting’ – and now would I please take some blankets to the kitchen and wrap the baby up well before going to the Post Office to telephone for an ambulance.
It had always been clear that Josie was weak in the head and as her parents now rejected her – an unusual reaction, amongst Irish country folk, to ‘little accidents’ – my mother felt obliged to act in loco parentis. The authorities did everything possible, and more than was ethically allowable, to force her to give up her baby; but under the influence of maternal love, she showed unexpected strength of character. When we visited her in the County Home in Dungarvan my parents were so moved by her determination to keep her child that they entered the argument with a few well-chosen remarks about the legal rights of parents. They also guaranteed to look after both mother and son until Dr White could arrange for their admission to some suitable hostel. I never forgot this example of how the uninformed and inarticulate citizens of a democracy may be bullied and confused by bureaucrats – both clerical and lay.
Eventually Josie and son departed to a nun-run hostel and we got occasional postcards, laboriously inscribed in capital letters, telling us of George’s progress. (To my father’s disgust the child had been named in honour of the King of England.) A few years later Josie called one afternoon to introduce her husband and month-old second son – who had been born, she happily informed us, during the honeymoon. George was now a fine lad and seemed on excellent terms with his amiable stepfather. Obviously all concerned were going to live happily ever after.
The Josie drama had provoked much comment throughout the neighbourhood, yet not even she could compete with Cattie. Cattie arrived the day after my father had been immobilised by sciatica. She looked middle-aged but claimed to be twenty-two. She was tall and gaunt and grey-haired and never removed her Wellington boots; when my mother hinted that she might find another form of footwear more comfortable indoors, she snapped enigmatically, ‘I has me notions!’ A few days later she acquired another notion and took to carrying everywhere, under her arm, a sweeping-brush. Even while bearing laden trays into my parents’ bedroom she stuck to her brush; and when my mother – speaking timidly, at this stage – suggested that she might find it more convenient occasionally to lay it aside, she snapped, ‘It’s a need!’
That night sounds as of tap-dancing came from Cattie’s room and large quantities of plaster fell from the dining-room ceiling. Next morning, before dawn, weird rhythmic wails, as of an oriental widow keening, became increasingly audible from the direction of the kitchen. I was thrilled. Indisputably we had a fully fledged lunatic on the premises. But when we held a council of war after breakfast it disconcerted me slightly to realise that my parents took Cattie’s overnight deterioration quite seriously. The district nurse was due at ten o’clock to minister to the two invalids – my father was temporarily almost as incapacitated as my mother – and we decided to ask her to telephone Dr White.
At that very moment a shrieking Cattie came storming up the hall and burst into my parents’ room brandishing the sweeping-brush. Her face was distorted and she was yelling – ‘I’ll fork ye! I’ll fork ye!’ By any standards she was an alarming sight. It soon transpired that she believed my parents to be two fried eggs and the brush a fork. Afterwards I saw the joke, but not then. I rushed to my mother and clung to her and she whispered – ‘Fetch the guards!’ But such crises prove the strength of the herd instinct. My mother’s order made sense, yet I could not leave that room while Cattie was darting about with contorted face poking her fork towards the two defenceless fried eggs. If murder were about to be done, let us all die together. Only when Cattie’s expression relaxed, and she began again to tap-dance and to chant quite cheerfully, did I flee onto the street and beg a passer-by to fetch the garda sergeant. Then the nurse arrived and said, ‘I told you so!’ because for days she had been warning us of our peril. Within an hour the unfortunate Cattie had been removed, under sedation, to the nearest lunatic asylum – from which she had been discharged, we then discovered, only two months previously.
After this débâcle my mother observed dryly that our neighbours probably regarded it as a ‘judgement’ on the Murphys. My parents’ attitude towards unmarried mothers was condemned by many as a scandalous condoning of immorality. Like middle-class communities everywhere, our neighbours abhorred and feared illegitimacy. And being Irish Christians, their abhorrence was compounded by the uniquely nasty odour they could detect emanating from sexual licence. A few managed to pay lip-service to Christian charity, but not one would have encouraged an unmarried mother to keep her baby. To rear one’s bastard was considered far worse than merely having it furtively and quickly giving it away for adoption; allowing the maternal instinct to take over branded one as a brazen hussy. Therefore middle-class girls never did keep their babies. I often heard my parents denouncing this vicious hypocrisy – one could feel the viciousness vibrating through the anti-Josie vituperations of some of our neighbours. Their moral code was of the primitive sort that seeks confirmation and reinforcement in the merciless punishing of delinquents. A century earlier they would have formed part of the grimly gleeful crowd around the scaffold at a public hanging.
Josie was the cause of my historic argument with Mr Ryan – ‘the Boss’. I say historic because it was unheard of for anyone – never mind a child – to defy this formidable patriarch.
The scene was the Ryans’ living-room. The Boss was sitting in his symbolically uncomfortable wooden armchair by the fire; I was lying on the hearthrug at his feet reading a book about (appropriately) volcanoes; Mrs Ryan was rolling a skein of knitting wool into a ball and Mark – the eldest son, home for the weekend because he was then Diocesan Inspector of Schools – was changing the batteries in the wireless.
Suddenly the Boss began to criticise people who encouraged shameless young girls to display their wickedness in public. Immediately I got the reference though by Ryan standards no child should have known what was being discussed. Thus I was provoked to defiance both by loyalty to my parents and by compassion for Fallen Women in general and Josie in particular. Sitting upright on the hearthrug, I accused the Boss of hypocrisy. This word was a recent addition to my vocabulary and it pleased me to use it, despite what I knew must be the cataclysmic result.
There was a shattering silence. The Boss and I stared at each other fixedly like belligerent tom-cats. Those ice-blue eyes seemed unnervingly expressionless: years later it struck me that at that moment the Boss may well have been trying not to laugh. But of course he had to fight his autocratic corner and as the argument developed I became very angry indeed. No doubt my opponent was deliberately egging me on – that would have been characteristic – and though the words exchanged have been forgotten I perfectly remember the unfamiliar adult quality of the anger that consumed me. It was unlike anything I had ever felt during my tantrums; now I was being angry on someone else’s behalf. But unfortunately I was also being outrageously and uncharacteristically impertinent – which indicates that this incident released much long-repressed hostility to certain aspects of the Ryan ethos.
The Boss always kept by his side a heavy walking-stick which somehow had the appearance of a weapon, though it may never have been so used, and suddenly he picked this up, shook it at me and said – ‘Get out!’ Seizing my book I fled, meaning to go straight home. Neither Mrs Ryan nor Mark had taken any part in the argument, but now Mark quietly hurried after me. He laid a hand on my arm and said that he needed help in the orchard. We understood each other so well that the most important things could always be left unsaid. Without even glancing at him I knew that he had approved of my stand against the Boss – at least in principle, though he would have wished me to use more self-restraint in what I actually said.
It was a golden October afternoon, following the first of the season’s gales. Autumn’s cosy/melancholy tang was spicing the air and the leaves were turning on the neat beech hedge, with an arch at either end, which divided garden from orchard. Under the trees the long grass was still wet, though all day the sun had shone while a romping wind chased white clouds. We collected windfalls in oval wicker clothes-baskets; when full these were carried down to the back gate and from there the ‘eaters’ would be given away to the children of the town and the ‘cookers’ to a certain clique known unambiguously as ‘the poor women’.
We scarcely spoke as we moved about under the trees, watchful least we tread on our harvest, bent double, parting the long grass with our hands, then straightening up to remove from an apple its cargo of snails or slugs or earwigs or beetles and to decide whether or not it was still worth saving. We often spent almost silent hours together in the garden, Mark working steadily, I helping enthusiastically if the job appealed and desultorily if it didn’t.
Towards teatime Mark suddenly said, ‘I think you must apologise to the Boss before you go home.’
Holding a hard, dark green Bramley I looked up at my companion with a mixture of resentment and resignation. It was one of my more disagreeable traits that I usually resisted having to admit a mistake or make an apology. But Mark had a power over me unequalled by – and never to be equalled by – anyone else’s. Furiously I dug my finger-nails into the apple: they were sore for days afterwards. Then silently I followed Mark down the path and meekly I trotted into the living-room to offer my apologies to the Boss – who received them with a non-committal growl.
As I passed through the kitchen, on my way home, Mark handed me a chunk of home-made fudge – in 1942 a rare treat.
For my tenth birthday my parents gave me a second-hand bicycle and Pappa sent me a second-hand atlas. Already I was an enthusiastic cyclist, though I had never before owned a bicycle, and soon after my birthday I resolved to cycle to India one day. I have never forgotten the exact spot, on a steep hill near Lismore, where this decision was made. Halfway up I rather proudly looked at my legs, slowly pushing the pedals round, and the thought came – ‘If I went on doing this for long enough I could get to India.’ The simplicity of the idea enchanted me. I had been poring over my new atlas every evening travelling in fancy. Now I saw how I could travel in reality – alone, independent and needing very little money.
This was a significant moment in my life, and not only because of the consequences in the far future. A ten-year-old’s decision to cycle to India might have seemed to many adults an amusing childish whim. But by giving me material for dreaming about something that I knew could be attained, it offered a healthier outlet for my imaginings than my usual escapist fantasies. It also gave me a purpose that was, or seemed to be, quite separate from my obsessional desire to write – which diversification of ambitions was an excellent thing. Naturally I never discussed my plan with anyone; I well knew how it would be regarded by my elders. Nor did I feel any particular urge to talk about it; it had enough substance not to need the reinforcement of conversation. Oddly, it never developed into an obsession: as I grew older months could pass without my consciously thinking of it. Cycling to India simply became part of the pattern of my future. In the same matter-of-fact way many youngsters think of the remote but inevitable day when they will graduate from university or join their father’s firm or inherit the farm.
Clearly ten-year-olds are not interested in Hindu sculpture or Brahminical philosophy or Sanskrit literature; at that age even the Jungle Books bored me. My only personal links with India were Dr White’s nostalgic bedside tales of the North-west Frontier Province and a weirdly impressive painting by a Hindu of the mythical source of the Ganges. This extraordinary picture – a wedding present to my parents from a friend of the artist – had fascinated me (so my mother said) since I began to focus in my cradle. Yet one doubts if it had any influence on my cycling plans. I merely wished to travel far beyond Europe for travelling’s sake, and taking all geographical and political factors into consideration New Delhi seemed the most interesting Asian capital that could conveniently be approached by bicycle.
Apart from future plans, owning a bicycle gave me freedom to roam much more widely than I had ever done before. And within a week of my birthday I had very nearly roamed into the Elysian fields.
One sunny, frosty December morning I set out to cycle to the foot of the Knockmealdown Mountains, some eight miles north of Lismore. I took a picnic, and ate it by a lively brown stream, and then thought it would be fun to climb to the top of Knockmealdown – an easy little mountain of just under 3,000 feet.
I had been up several times before, with my father and Pappa and sundry guests, and was familiar with the easiest route. But somehow the climb took longer than expected and as I approached the top the weather began to change. The air lost its crispness and the Galtees to the north-west disappeared as clouds came rolling south over the plain of Tipperary. Before I was halfway down both the clouds and the dusk had over-taken me. But I was too inexperienced to be immediately afraid. For ten or fifteen minutes it all seemed a glorious adventure and I never doubted that I would soon hear the stream and feel the road beneath my feet. Not until darkness came, and the mist turned to rain, and a wind began to moan, did panic threaten. Then I stumbled into an old turf-cutting that should not have been on my route and burst into tears.
Pulling myself out of the icy water – I was soaked through – I recognised the extent of my stupidity. Plainly I was lost for the night and, though I never doubted that I would get home eventually, my parents could not be expected to think so. It is far from clear to me now why I assumed that I would survive a midwinter night on an exposed mountain without food or shelter. It is precisely this irrational faith in one’s own durability which can earn an undeserved reputation for courage.
Having accepted that I was lost, and that no rescue party would dramatically save me because no one knew in which direction I had cycled, I kept moving for what felt like hours, still desperately hoping to find the road. I tried not to think of what my parents must be suffering. Even at ten, mental or emotional suffering had the power to move me as physical suffering could never do. I was now feeling for them a great deal more than if they had, for instance, been seriously injured in a motor-smash.
Already I felt weak with hunger, my leg muscles were throbbing and my sodden clothes seemed heavy as lead. At this point my secret endurance tests were justified. I had never inflicted on myself anything comparable to my present trial, yet I believe that by using the techniques I had so often light-heartedly practised I kept moving for longer than would otherwise have been possible.
I was close to collapse when I came on a low stone wall. Knowing my mountain, I realised that I must now be on its east or north side; had I still been on the south side I would have had to cross a road to reach such a wall. From its existence I deduced a cottage at no great distance and felt a resurgence of hope and energy. I groped on eagerly through the darkness, following the wall, and then came not on a cottage but on an unoccupied animal shelter, built of stone and roofed with turf. Inside were great mounds of cut bracken. I stripped naked and buried myself in a mound and not even the thought of my parents’ distress could keep me awake.
When I opened my eyes the sun was rising and the wind was tidying the clouds away. As I struggled to put on my sodden clothes I felt not only stiff and weak but very ill. Stumbling out of the shelter, I saw a cottage some hundred yards away: but it was deserted. A boreen led down to a narrow road and there I realised I was above Newcastle. Now, in daylight, with my safety assured, I ceased to worry about my parents and felt only a considerable fear of their reaction to my escapade. I sat by the roadside to await rescue and in my debilitated condition the imminence of my mother’s just wrath was too much for me. I was weeping dismally when an astonished farmer came along on his donkey-cart and picked me up.
The rest is a blur. For some reason I was taken to a priest’s house – perhaps there was no local gardai barracks – and fed and put to bed by the housekeeper. When I came to I was in my own bed, running a high temperature and feeling too terrible even to want to read. And I had to stay in bed for the next fortnight while there were mutterings in the background about pleurisy.
My parents never once reproached me for having put them through eighteen hours of hell; possibly they considered the experience itself sufficient punishment. It must also have been obvious that I had learned my lesson and would never again embark on such a reckless adventure. I willingly promised to tell my mother, in future, exactly where I was going when I left home for a day’s cycling; and this satisfied her, though both Mrs Mansfield and Father Power urged her to put me on a much tighter rein. Curiously, I felt during those years that she molly-coddled me to humiliation by closely watching my diet, making me change my clothes if they got damp and sending me to bed at seven-thirty. Yet short of throwing me into the middle of the Irish Sea in January, and telling me to swim for the shore, she could scarcely have been less fussy about my physical safety.
Years later my mother admitted that despite being frantically worried throughout that long night she had known I was safe. My father, on the other hand, had decided by six-thirty that I had been killed. But apart from notifying the gardai and checking nearby roadsides there was nothing immediate to be done and my mother had discouraged the formation of what could only have been an ineffectual search-party. Father Power and Mrs Mansfield had both spent the night at our house, providing moral support, and by breakfast-time even Mrs Mansfield was not entirely sober. (On Christmas Day, and during periods of extreme nervous tension, she coyly accepted the addition of a little whiskey to her tea. Two teaspoonfuls made her quite merry and three induced a degree of hilarity she would normally have considered most reprehensible.)
When the good news was brought from Newcastle, Father Power drove my father to collect me; our own car had been put on blocks by this date. Surprisingly few of the neighbours ever heard of my misadventure and I was grateful to my parents for not publicising it; to have become the laughing stock of the whole town would have been intolerable. Now I feel that in such ways they were over-protective and that it was wrong to spare me this part of my punishment. It would have done my bumptious ten-year-old pride no harm at all to be wounded in such a fashion. I did of course voluntarily confide in Mark, from whom I hid nothing. With him I felt no need, either then or later, to project an image of myself that was an improvement on reality.
By 1942 I had come to detest those educational Sunday walks so much enjoyed by my father; and one day I decided to use cycling as an excuse to break with tradition.
My mother looked stricken when I defiantly announced that I would not be going for any more long walks with Daddy because Sundays must henceforth be left free to practise long-distance cycling. This transparent excuse did not for a moment deceive her and after a tiny, tense silence she said quietly. ‘But that’s absurd. You have plenty of time for cycling during the week.’
Then the truth came out – or what at that time I imagined to be the truth. ‘Daddy’s so boring!’ I exclaimed miserably. ‘I can’t stand it and I’m not going with him again and anyway I’m ten so why should I be forced to go for walks like a little girl?’
Staring at my mother, I was appalled to realise that she, like myself, was close to tears. Then I knew that she saw my point. But her first loyalty was to a man whose vulnerability was not any the less extreme for being so far below the surface. Recovering herself, she reasoned with me gently, tacitly admitting that I had a case but stressing how unkind it would be to rebuff a loving father who so enjoyed our weekly walks. As I listened I knew that she was right, but I didn’t care. Or rather, I was determined to act as though I didn’t care. Deep down I cared so much that the guilt bred by this calculated cruelty remained with me for twenty years.
Why did I feel such an overwhelming compulsion to detach from my father, even though I fully recognised that my doing so would hurt him as perhaps nothing else could? Had our inability to communicate driven me to an extremity of frustration that could only be relieved by meting out the punishment of rejection? For he was the grown-up, the powerful one and it must all be his fault … We might have been basically indifferent to one another, as parents and children quite often are, and then we could have casually sustained an amiable, meaningless relationship. But our bonds were very strong; we understood each other intuitively in a way which to me, on the threshold of adolescence, may have seemed a violation of my spiritual privacy.
I do not know how my mother explained away my decision to my father, or if she even tried to soften the blow. But I never again went for a walk with him and he accepted my defection without a comment, a query or a protest of any sort.
A few months later, while we were all in Dublin, an incident occurred which I now regard, perhaps exaggeratedly, as one of the saddest wasted opportunities of a lifetime. My father had arranged to meet me at an aunt’s house for lunch, but he was late; half-an-hour passed, and an hour, and still he did not come. Then it was lunchtime and we all sat down to our grilled cutlets and creamed carrots. There were meringues for pudding, but by that stage I was in a daze of terror and grief. My father must have been killed in a car-crash – he was a notoriously absent-minded driver and had borrowed my aunt’s Morris. I felt certain that I would never see him again and remorse about my cruel aloofness devastated me. But I must not make a fool of myself by fussing and fidgeting in front of all those grown-up cousins who were accepting Uncle Fergus’s non-appearance with what seemed to me heartless placidity.
My father had in fact telephoned at twelve-thirty to explain that he had been delayed, but no one had bothered to inform me. When at last he arrived I nonchalantly said ‘Hello’ before slipping away to the lavatory to be sick. (Even today the mere sight of a meringue makes me feel queasy.) Then I went out to the garden to talk to the dog.
Later, as my father drove me back to Charleston Avenue, I desperately wanted to tell him about all that I had suffered at lunchtime because I thought he was dead. But I could not. Many years passed before I realised that even a slight reference to my ordeal might have significantly altered our relationship at a crucial stage. After that summer, we grew further and further apart on the surface while retaining our indestructible and uncomfortable mutual flair for reading each other’s thoughts.
As my leg muscles grew stronger my cycling ambitions grew bolder and soon I was longing to cycle the twenty-five miles to Helvick Head. But fifty miles in one day sounded a long way. Frighteningly long, for one who had never yet attempted more than thirty. The project began to worry me. I passionately wanted to achieve those fifty miles yet I dreaded failure. It would be so un-live-downable for ever if I could not make the last few miles and had to signal for help. Eventually I mentioned the idea to my mother, very casually, as though it were a matter of no great consequence.
‘Probably I could easily do it,’ I said; and years later she told me that as I spoke I looked at her with an expression of the most pathetic doubt and anxiety.
But she kept the conversation on the casual note I imagined I had sounded. ‘Of course you can do it,’ she said cheerfully, ‘if you want to do it enough.’
Thus encouraged, I left for Helvick at six o’clock on a radiant June morning – a morning all blue and gold and green. The air smelt damp, warm, rich and full of promises. From every tree, bush and hedge came the harmonious confusion of bird-song, seeming to celebrate my own joyous excitement. As I turned towards the coast, and settled to the rhythm of pedalling, I experienced an exaltation I have never forgotten. The vigour of my body seemed to merge with the eager abundance all around me and in an almost sacramental way I became totally aware of myself as a part of nature. Unconsciously, I had taken another step away from the faith of my fathers.
On the previous evening the wireless had guaranteed good weather, but my mother pretended not to have heard. Before I went to bed she gave me the first pound note I had ever been in charge of (to be returned if not needed) and remarked that should the weather deteriorate, or my bicycle break down, or some other disaster occur, I could spend the night in a Dungarvan hotel.
In fact there was no hitch of any kind. By six-thirty I was home, nauseated with exhaustion and bursting with pride. The last twelve miles had been torture, but I would not tarnish the glory of my achievement by admitting this. And even during that terrible final stage part of me had relished the sense of power derived from driving my body beyond what had seemed, at a certain point, to be its limit.
Yet without my mother’s moral support I would never have had the courage to attempt that trip at that age. It was fortunate for me that she was not as possessive as she was dominating. Her influence over me was so strong throughout childhood that had she wished to destroy or stunt me she could certainly have done so. Instead, I was aware of being regarded – and respected – as a separate personality rather than as an incidental appendage to the adults in the household. At the time I took this for granted: now I know what an uncommon attitude it was in the Ireland of my youth.
Some people imagined that my unusual upbringing was a result of being the only child of an invalid. But my mother’s mothering would have been no less odd, I feel certain, had she been in rude health with a family of ten. As a perfectionist, and a woman who saw motherhood as an important career, she approached child-rearing in what I can only call an artistic spirit. Given as raw material a newly conceived child, she saw it as her duty and privilege to form an adult who would be as physically, mentally and morally healthy as intelligent rearing could make it. Physically she was completely successful. The other aspects of a child’s health are, alas, less amenable to maternal regulation.
My childhood diet was generally considered freakish. Up to the age of sixteen I drank four pints of milk daily and was allowed no tea, coffee or fizzy drinks. Sweets, chocolate, ice-cream, cakes, sweet biscuits, white bread and white sugar were also forbidden. My ‘treats’ were muscatel raisins and fat, glossy dates in gay boxes. Included in my staple diet were raw beef, raw liver, raw vegetables, wholemeal bread, pinhead porridge and as much fresh fruit and cheese as I could be induced to eat. Naturally I flourished. And one can understand what it must have meant to my mother to look at me as an adolescent and to know that I was capable of enjoying, to the fullest extent, what she had lost.