My adolescent memories are of abrupt changes in outlook and unpredictable moods which must have made me more than usually trying; yet nobody seems to have regarded these developments as ‘a problem’. Somehow my parents made me feel that certain of their standards were as immutable as the laws of nature and could never be abandoned without shame. But they always clearly differentiated between standards and opinions – or tastes. One had to tell the truth, pay bills promptly, consider servants (if any), avoid harmful gossip, respect confidences and remember that politeness has to do primarily with other people’s feelings. However, should one chance, by some lamentable disorientation of the sensibilities, to prefer Mendelssohn to Bach, or Rupert Brooke to Milton, that was nobody’s business or misfortune but one’s own. This allowed ample scope for scorn and revolution, without any threat to law and order, and for many of the parental preferences I cultivated, at various stages, a vehement though seldom lasting contempt.
Perhaps the extent to which today’s teenagers baffle me is partly a result of the abnormal circumstances of my own adolescence. Despite having adult responsibilities, my material dependence on my parents remained total and seemed unlikely to lessen in the foreseeable future. By the standards of most modern youngsters my activities were pathetically circumscribed, and to outsiders – like the Dublin Murphys – my whole way of life looked uneventful and dull to a degree.
Yet it was nothing of the sort. Were I asked to pin-point the most exciting period of a life that latterly has been more eventful than most, I would say – ‘The years from fourteen to seventeen’. But I must be careful here. How much do we romanticise youth and hope and energy, so that only their glory is remembered? Perhaps all I should say is that in retrospect those years seem to have contained much happiness and little unhappiness, despite a constant underlying irritation at having to waste so much time every day on tedious domestic chores. And despite occasional brief – but intense – moods of depression caused by personality clashes with my mother.
Yet ‘happiness’ is not the right word; it implies a lack of complications and a tranquillity which are uncharacteristic of adolescence. Elation would be more accurate, the elation of discovering literature and music, combined with the sheer animal pleasure of being young and healthy and very vigorous. Adolescence is supremely a time of discovery. To me Shakespeare represented not an aspect of the examination tyrant but a stimulating expanse of beauty. And music was a shared joy which drew the three of us very close, in a sort of truce-atmosphere, even when parent-child relations were at their worst. Then there was the natural beauty of West Waterford. At any season a walk or a cycle aroused almost unbearable delight. Apparently I was missing a lot; yet I desired, during those years, no more than I had.
For three months after leaving school I was unwontedly abstemious and wrote nothing; the long-drawn-out family quarrel was unnerving me more than I realised. Then an idea for a boys’ adventure story came to me and I began to write frenziedly, sitting up in bed until the small hours, covering sheet after sheet of foolscap. And I discovered that my approach to writing had changed. No longer was I satisfied with verbal bulk and a hair’s-breadth escape per paragraph. The hero of that story became to me a real person, instead of remaining an inhumanly tough yet sentimentally gallant Biggles/Bulldog Drummond hybrid. He still had ‘keen fearless grey eyes and a firm mouth’ (I quote from the typescript, recently accidentally disinterred), but his speech was credible though he retained an unfortunate tendency to strangle people with one swift movement. More important, however, was the fact that I now began to rewrite, and to find pleasure in seeing sentences improve, even if I had had to sacrifice three words of six syllables each to achieve that improvement. There is a control of language, a sense of rhythm, an intimation of style in that story – though I wrote and rewrote all 43,000 words of it in exactly three weeks.
Not until it was finished did I think of secretly sending it to a publisher – secretly because I wished to avoid parental sympathy when it was rejected. I felt very adult and earnest as I withdrew all my meagre savings from the post office, looked up the address of a suitable typist on the last but one page of the TLS and took down a list of possible publishers from The Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book in my father’s office. I was now actively engaged in the literary world, not just daydreaming about it. The most I really hoped for were some constructive words of advice to a fourteen-year-old from kindly publishers’ editors. And that is exactly what I got. I cannot remember how often that typescript was posted to England – at least half-a-dozen times – but it never came home without a positively encouraging letter accompanying the rejection slip. These letters at least confirmed that my ambition was not built on self-delusion. The literary world had taken me seriously enough to urge me on; and that, for the moment, satisfied me. I had never visualised myself as an adolescent prodigy and I came of a breed used to taking rejection slips – as it were – on the chin.
Nietzsche may have proclaimed ‘the death of God’ a century ago, but it took time for the news to spread and in my generation most Europeans grew up under the influence of firmly held religious beliefs, not necessarily orthodox, but involving an adherence to moral standards based on Christian ethics. Thus we are unique, for our adult world became a place where, as John Wren-Lewis has put it, ‘for the first time in human history, the general climate of educated opinion has lost the religious assumptions that have hitherto been almost universal’. So we are in a position to enjoy the best of both worlds. From the old world we have inherited, if we wish to claim the legacy, a certain stability; we have something specific to move away from – and to refer back to, albeit selectively, in moments of crisis. Of course a traditional religious upbringing can also lead to innumerable irrational conflicts such as our juniors, who were ‘born free’, will never have to resolve. But I still feel that we are a fortunate group.
Yet for many the loss of ‘religious assumptions’ has – only too obviously – been demoralising and frightening. Even to consider such a loss impersonally could frighten people like my parents whose own faith was, apparently, impregnable. I remember, when I was seventeen, hearing my father gloomily quoting to my mother a prediction from Belloc – ‘What I think will spring out of the new filth is a new religion. I think that there will arise in whatever parts of Christendom remain, say, 200 years hence … a new religion, because human society cannot live on air … This conception of a new religion (and, therefore, an evil one) fantastic and unpleasant. Unpleasant I admit it is; fantastic I do not believe it to be.’ My parents of course shared Belloc’s view, but by then I found the notion of a new religion exhilarating.
About two years previously, however, I too would have agreed with Belloc. I had then gone through a phase of intense orthodox fervour which was altogether inconsistent with my general attitude towards religion, either before or since. This, I believe, is a common adolescent stage; and in Ireland, even today, a disquieting number of people seem to develop no further. Suddenly I began to enjoy going to church – for me a hitherto rather boring routine accepted only because it was so rigorously prescribed by one’s home, school and social environment. No longer content with Sunday Mass, I now went to the convent chapel every morning at seven-thirty; and if there was an evening service (known as ‘devotions’) I went to that too; and I rejoiced on the first Friday of each month because then the service lasted for an hour instead of half-an-hour. I also went to confession once a week though I cannot recall committing any notable sins during this period. Emotionally I seemed to need the various rituals and to thrive, most improbably, on Irish Catholicism’s unwholesome mush of sentimentality and superstition. But it was also important to feel that through personal prayer I was in direct touch with Christ. (The Father and the Holy Ghost introduced unnecessary complications so I left them out of it.) Had I ‘got religion’ a decade later, that would have been understandable enough. But by the time ritual and prayer might have served as an escape or a comfort they had ceased to have meaning for me.
My fervour lasted a year or so and then quite quickly evaporated. Meanwhile I had begun to read a little about other religions, an interest kindled by my pen-friendship with a Sikh girl. Mahn Kaur was four years my senior and lived in Kuala Lumpur, where her family had settled before she was born. Her enquiring mind and lucid, indefatigable pen did a great deal for me. Having been educated by Irish nuns, she wanted to find out as much as she could about Ireland and Europe and the various Christian Churches. In return, she told me about the Sikh religion, which inevitably made me curious about Islam and Hinduism, which eventually led on to Buddhism.
Mahn Kaur was naturally much concerned about contemporary events in India. We had begun our correspondence in September 1946, when Mark noticed a letter from Mahn Kaur in a Catholic newspaper appealing for a pen-friend ‘interested in history and religion’. And this personal link with the subcontinent, slight though it was, made me feel deeply involved, emotionally, in the terrible events of 1947. These were not just another distant disaster reported in the newspapers. All Mahn Kaur’s relatives lived in the Punjab.
For four or five years we wrote to each other at least once a fortnight. This correspondence, and the ripples it spread, became one of my main interests. Mahn Kaur was my only contact with an inaccessible world which I longed to experience for myself and it consoled me to feel that Fate was indirectly catering for this longing. More important, the reading she stimulated heightened my inborn awareness that all the religions of mankind are equally valid. As some modern Hindus express it, they are all fingers pointing at the moon. And it is the moon that matters. My parents would have condemned this attitude as the vague evasiveness of a lazy thinker. But to me it was the truth and having seen it I could not worry about my own religious label – or the lack of one. If certain individuals felt that they did not belong, naturally, to any religious group, what did it matter? The moon was there anyway. And worship or contemplation does not have to be restricted to churches or monasteries.
I remember one very cold January morning standing in the kitchen by the turf-range (a wartime innovation) while eagerly opening a letter from Malaya. As I slit the envelope I saw, just for an instant, the closeness of my mental relationship with Mahn Kaur as a measure of my closeness to Asia; and our whole correspondence seemed very much a preparation. Those rare moments when we apparently get a signal from the future do not effect the conduct of one’s daily life. But they have their value below the level on which one feels impatient or thwarted – or even hopeless.
A few weeks later came Gandhi’s assassination. I was in bed with tonsillitis and I shall never forget switching on the wireless to hear that news. During those years I was mesmerised by the writings of Gandhi and I regarded him with a rapture which has since been considerably modified. Shakespeare, another adolescent obsession, has worn better. At school I had detested The Merchant of Venice, not being yet ready for Elizabethan English. (How many thirteen-year-olds are thus given an enduring distaste for great literature?) But three years later I was ‘saved’ when Anew McMaster’s famous touring company came to Lismore. They played Hamlet in a huge draughty building known as the Hippodrome, which soon after fell down of its own volition. The place was packed to the door – as it would never be now, with a television set in 95 per cent of Irish homes. Most of the townsfolk were there and, tethered along the sides of the road, in both directions, stood the horses, ponies, jennets and donkeys who had provided transport for Shakespeare’s rural fans. The response was tremendous at the end of every scene; in several places the floor boards collapsed beneath the hob-nailed boots of enthusiastic farm lads. It is sometimes argued that television has a unifying effect on a nation or a community because so many people watch the same programmes. But that is a very spurious unity compared to the delighted converging on the Hippodrome of most of Lismore.
I had never read Hamlet – or any Shakespeare, after my delivery from The Merchant of Venice – and presumably neither had the majority around me. Yet we were completely carried away by that performance. At the end I emerged in a fever of delight, feeling very disinclined to go home to bed. It was a wild October night. Clouds were flying before a south wind so that the full moon seemed herself in flight. Possibly that moon had something to do with my mood. I cycled up to the Vee – ten miles above Lismore – and looking down onto the silvered plain of Tipperary felt a passion of gratitude, directed towards no one in particular, because I had been born. I got home at five-fifteen – not realising, then, how lucky I was to have parents who registered no alarm at breakfast-time when their sixteen-year-old daughter explained that she had been out all night. Both regarded cycling to the Vee by moonlight as a perfectly natural reaction to one’s first Hamlet.
Within a year of that initiation ceremony, I was not only reading and enjoying Shakespeare but studying him, seriously. All my pocket-money was being spent on esoteric volumes of Shakespeariana which my father refused to buy for the public library because they would only have a readership of one. By this time a spare room had been converted into my study, with bookshelves around two walls from floor to ceiling. It occurred to me now that I might after all have taken to university life; but I wasted no time on regrets. In my private Shakespearian studies I was at least free to please myself while flexing whatever rudimentary scholarly muscles were then demanding exercise. I had never before concentrated on anything other than writing stories. Now, though my studies sometimes became tedious, I would not allow their tedium to deter me. While writing several learned (as I supposed) essays on various Shakespearian controversies, I discovered how essential self-discipline is in any activity of this sort. It was all great fun – very much the sort of thing to which Pappa had devoted half a lifetime, though I did not then see this – and it gratified me to find that I was capable of becoming slightly knowledgeable about something.
For relaxation, during those years, I read almost all the works of all the great English novelists, from Defoe to Hardy – only skipping Walter Scott, who to me seemed insupportably dreary, and some of the minor Trollopes which numerically defeated me. For good measure I read translations of the obvious French and Russians, including War and Peace during a lumbago attack. When I look now at those scores of volumes – standing row upon row, fat and formidable – I marvel at my idea of relaxation some twenty-five years ago. Many I have indeed reread with increased appreciation and many others I would like to reread. But not all … And a few I am reluctant to return to, fearing disillusion. Middlemarch, for instance, was amongst the most memorable experiences of my youth. Reading it seemed like watching God creating the world in miniature.
In 1948 the reopening of Lismore’s Lawn Tennis Club induced me to modify slightly my solitary ways. I became a keen though never skilful member and for the next few years spent a couple of hours on the courts almost every fine summer evening. However, my interest in the club remained exclusively athletic. I got on well with all my fellow members – the majority were several years older than me – but never wished to be involved in any of their peripheral activities. Happily, this allergy to social functions was not mistaken for stand-offishness. I was, I think, accepted with friendly tolerance as the inevitable freakish outcome of my parents’ union.
The tennis club was our chief centre for the promotion of marriage and I attentively observed the progress of various courtships – but always with a certain detachment, as though I were studying the customs of another race. Even at sixteen, I had a strong premonition that I would never marry. Possibly the predictability of the average married life put me off; it was the antithesis of my ideal unplanned existence – travelling, writing, not knowing what was going to happen next year or next month or even next week. And I have already stated my belief that we are equipped at the start of adult life with a few pieces of basic foreknowledge – whether or not we choose to use them. This is not as fanciful as it may sound. Our lives, after all, are moulded by our temperaments even more than our temperaments are moulded by circumstances. And on the threshold of adulthood it is possible to have enough self-awareness to see the probable outline of one’s future. Already I had noted the qualities needed to make a marriage work and I did not think I either possessed them or wanted, even if that were possible, to acquire them. I saw myself as a person too strong-willed, self-centred and fundamentally – if not obviously – arrogant to make a success of the married state. There is a vast difference between being a good friend – or a good mistress – and being a good wife. As long as people of my sort are free they can seem endlessly patient, understanding, cheerful – even unselfish in a crisis. But deprive them of their freedom and everything turns sour. In my teens I could not have expressed all this: yet I knew it.
Our household had always included at least one – and often two or three – cats; but to keep a dog was not practical until my return from school. Then, just as my mother and I were debating what breed to get – my father had been badly bitten as a child and feared all breeds – I came upon Bran. A pure-bred Irish terrier, he was tied by a very short rope to the drain-pipe of an isolated cottage and looked half-starved and cowed. He had large bare patches on his back and flanks and when I went nearer I saw that these were red and raw. At first he shrank from my outstretched hand, then he sniffed it nervously, then I rubbed the roots of his ears and he wagged his tail incredulously. I reckoned that he was scarcely two years old. There was no one around the cottage, but early next morning I returned. Bran was still tied in the same spot and trembling all over; what remained of his red-gold coat was sodden and obviously he had been left to lie out on concrete during the previous night’s steady rain. When I rapped sharply on the door it was opened by a shifty-looking man with blood shot eyes, a whiskey-laden breath and a week’s beard. He claimed to have bought Bran from passing tinkers for £5 but offered him to me for £3 because of his ‘bad skin’. This infuriated me; no such man would then spend £5 on a dog. I replied that I was not interested in buying the terrier but that I was very interested in the way he was being kept. And I added that the gardai, too, might be interested. (Privately I doubted this; cruelty to animals is rarely seen as such in countries where most of the inhabitants have for generations been ‘deprived’.) However, on my mentioning the gardai the shifty eyes grew shiftier and their owner hurriedly made me a present of Bran.
We went straight to the vet, who prescribed train-oil and sulphur for Bran’s eczema – a completely effective cure, though messy and protracted. After six months he had regained top condition and was acknowledged to be the most handsome dog for miles around. He slept in a corner of my bedroom – he was just too large to be a comfortable on-the-bed dog – and was respectful towards the cats who patronised him from my eiderdown. Unlike most of his breed he had a timid nature, perhaps because of puppyhood traumas. But he had no vices and despite his age proved easy to train. Eventually he could be trusted alone in a room with a shopping-basket of meat on the floor, if he had been told not to touch it. Even my father grew to love him.
Bran accompanied me on short cycles, of up to fifteen miles or so, but this meant my having to pedal slowly lest his heart might be strained. His loyalty was such that had I cycled to Dublin at eighteen miles an hour he would have tried to keep up. One of our favourite runs was to the foot of the Knockmealdowns, where I would leave my bicycle by the roadside and walk Bran over the heather and bogs. During the summer we sometimes swam in Bayl Lough, a wide lake – semi-encircled by almost sheer mountain – which always looks black and according to local legend is bottomless.
On one such walk, near the spot where I had got lost as a ten-year-old, Bran was set upon without warning by a large black and white mongrel who appeared out of nowhere. In those days one rarely saw other people or dogs on the Knockmealdowns and I felt mildly curious when a very tall, thin man with a slight limp and a shooting stick emerged from a dip in the ground. He called angrily to the mongrel, whose name was William, but was too far away to intervene. So I had to rescue Bran when it became clear that William was having much the best of it.
As William’s owner approached us I saw that he had a conspicuously scarred face. He seemed genuinely distressed about Bran, who was crouching behind my legs, shivering. Meanwhile William stood a few yards away gazing at the horizon with a self-satisfied air, ignoring his master’s scolding. I made polite, forgiving noises and then, as Bran had in fact been quite badly bitten on a hind-leg, I turned to accompany William’s owner back to the road. At seventeen I was abnormally shy, but my companion seemed even shyer. Yet he was in his mid-thirties, I judged. For once I felt at an advantage and talked almost eloquently during that half-hour walk through the bright, windy April afternoon. But we exchanged no personal information and when we parted I did not expect ever to see William’s owner again.
At that time my father occasionally took over my nursing and domestic duties for a day, which left me free to enjoy a serious cycle of sixty or seventy miles. (Otherwise, I was never off duty for more than four hours at a stretch – usually from 6.00 to 10.00 pm.) So it was that I left Lismore one sunny morning towards the end of August, intending to do a round trip over the mountains and return through Cappoquin. At the Vee I paused for a swim in Bayl Lough and afterwards, as I walked up the track from the lake to the road, I saw a vaguely familiar figure strolling near my bicycle. It took me a few moments to recognise William’s owner; in the four months since our first meeting I had almost forgotten him. This time he had no dog and he told me in an expressionless voice that William had been poisoned two days previously. Before I could say anything he added, very stiffly, ‘Would you care to motor to the sea with me?’
I hesitated, not for any conventional reason but because my few opportunities for long-distance cycling were so precious. Then I realised that a refusal would be misinterpreted – and would hurt. I also realised that though I had scarcely thought about William’s owner since April we had in fact established an embryonic relationship during our first meeting. The opinions I had then formed were only now crystallising in my mind; and the chief impression was of loneliness.
When my companion held open the passenger door of the A40 I noticed a flicker of alarm in his eyes as though he were slightly taken aback by the situation our joint impetuosity had created; yet neither of us was really disconcerted by the behaviour of the other. Not until we were both in the car did he introduce himself. Then, as I was about to reciprocate that belated civility, he explained apologetically that he already knew who I was.
By the time we reached the coast, twenty-five miles away, we had exchanged potted biographies. Information that one might expect to gather from a new friend over weeks or months was given by Godfrey in moments. His need to communicate was not disguised by the precise, impersonal formality with which he told his story – almost as though he were filling in a form for Who’s Who, carefully giving all the dates while ignoring the emotions.
Significantly, he began by explaining that he had acquired his limp and his scars in a Japanese prison camp. That he should have referred at all to those disabilities seemed to me a tremendous compliment. And it was. He never again referred to them, or to his war experiences. I longed to question him about the latter – I had never before met an ex-POW – but plainly to do so was not on. As for his scars, they were not of the romantic sort that make a man look more manly. They were horrible. One needed the minimum of imagination to understand why he had chosen a solitary life.
Since 1947 Godfrey had been living on his army pension in an enlarged cottage not far from the Vee; the enlarging had been necessary to accommodate his books. A manservant looked after him. During the war his wife had found someone else; she was ten years his senior and he had married her while still an undergraduate. In 1947 the divorce had gone through, but it was of no use to Godfrey. As a High Anglican he did not consider himself free to remarry; his attitude here was identical to the most orthodox Irish Catholic’s. To me this sad though hardly unusual story seemed a tragedy on the grand scale. I could have wept for Godfrey – especially because he had explained things so austerely, with no taint of self-pity.
I remember our getting out of the car at Goat Island – an isolated cove, even today – and facing each other for a moment in silence. Then Godfrey said, ‘Let’s bathe!’ and as he turned away my heart did something odd and I thought, ‘This is absurd! I must be falling in love!’ It did not, however, occur to me that Godfrey might be guilty of the same absurdity.
We separated to undress chastely behind rocks that were far apart and after our bathe – Godfrey was an excellent swimmer, I noted approvingly – we dressed equally chastely and sat on the grassy cliff top to share the picnic lunch that I had brought from home. It was meagre fare for two, but this did not matter as falling in love had quite taken away my appetite.
When we parted on the road above Bayl Lough Godfrey thanked me for a very pleasant day and I thanked him for a very pleasant day and we said goodbye without mentioning the possibility of any future meeting. But as I free-wheeled home – euphorically taking hairpin bends with my hands behind my back – I assumed that future meetings would somehow happen. First love at seventeen soars above the practical details of time and place.
A fortnight passed without my seeing or hearing anything more of Godfrey, yet my certainty that we would meet again never wavered. I considered myself a most fortunate person and impatiently to demand more than the inner bliss I already enjoyed would have seemed greedy. In my daydreams I tried to imagine our future conversations, but I never imagined Godfrey falling in love with me. To think of being loved by this noble – almost godlike – figure would have seemed so unreasonable that it was not a fit subject even for daydreams. To love was enough. By any standards, I was an almost unbelievably naive seventeen-year-old.
Then, on a misty September evening, as I was swimming in the Blackwater a few miles upstream from Lismore, Godfrey appeared on the bank above me. He waved casually and tactfully sauntered off into the next field. I scrambled out of the water, dressed without drying and followed him. We walked until it was dusk through the dense woods on the ridge above the river. Godfrey, I now discovered, had studied archaeology and also knew a lot about Shakespeare. We had been two hours together when we came to the track where his car was parked and said goodbye. But this time Godfrey added in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘I expect we’ll meet again quite soon.’ ‘I expect so,’ I agreed, dizzy with joy. And I cycled home to pursue my Shakespearian studies extra-diligently.
Even I realised that Godfrey must have deliberately sought me out by the river – a hard task, for someone unfamiliar with the countryside around Lismore. Yet still I did not think it possible that he might be interested in me as a woman. No doubt his emphasis on his permanently married state had a lot to do with this. Clearly he was not the sort of man to womanise indiscriminately and if he could not marry he would not fall in love. To me it was as simple as that. So I believed that he regarded me as a congenial friend – a nonconformist like himself – with whom he could for some reason overcome his self-consciousness about his appearance. I prided myself on my ability to conceal my own emotions and play it his way. To do otherwise, I reflected melodramatically, would be to wreck a friendship that he needed as much as I needed the hidden joy of being in love. And so I continued to think and feel for three years, during which we met perhaps once a fortnight – occasionally for a day, more usually for a few hours and always where we were unlikely to be observed.
My parents knew nothing of this new relationship. With them I had by then reached a fiercely secretive stage – the beginning of my futile rebellion against that trap foreseen by Mark when I left school. He of course was given a detailed account of the friendship with Godfrey. He listened sympathetically and wisely refrained from pointing out how improbable it was that a man of thirty-seven would remain interested only in my views on Shakespeare.
Characteristically, I never paused to wonder where this impractical love was leading me. To some those three years may seem arid, unfulfilling and wasted, but they did not seem so to me then – nor do they now. My own summing-up of the situation was ridiculously defective, yet the relationship between Godfrey and me was neither unreal nor – in any but the narrowest sense – unfulfilling. Despite the apparent artificiality of its framework, it developed and matured and grew richer as the months and the years passed. And for me it had – as I see it in retrospect – a most precious and irrecoverable beauty. For it was the fairest flower in the garden of youth: love without passion.