Wheels within Wheels

Beginning on her birth day November 28th, 1931 this wonderful memoir covers the first 30 years of Dervla Murphy’s unusual life. Her parents Fergus and Kathleen Murphy had arrived in Lismore, County Waterford on their wedding day with all their possessions and a golden haired collie called Kevin in the cab of a lorry. They rented half a decaying mini-mansion and Fergus became the county librarian. As Dubliners the locals were already suspicious, that they were penniless and displayed eccentric bourgeois tastes the reception was hostile and resentful. But that doesn’t seem to have mattered a jot, Fergus and Kathleen travelled together around the county setting up branch libraries, sleeping in the small mobile library van to save money needed to buy more books. When the Doctor arrives at the library to tell Fergus he has a baby daughter, Fergus wraps up the 9 records of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and walks 4 miles to the hospital in Cappoquin, where with a borrowed gramophone they start family life.

The essence of this memoir is answering the question ‘who makes us what we are?’ what is the series of intricately connected events, plots and circumstances that influence each other and decide who we become? The countryside around her, her insatiable love of books, her richly unconventional home and her republican relations, all gather in her determined, strong-willed self.

‘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. Half-way 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 pouring 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 isn’t always an easy read. Kathleen Murphy has a rare form of rheumatoid arthritis and gradually becomes more disabled until she is bed bound, unable to write or feed herself. Dervla has the skill, strength and gentleness to take care of her and has the only touch that Kathleen doesn’t dread, so that at 14 she leaves formal education and becomes her mothers main carer for the next 16 years. The intensity of her relationship with both parents’ but especially her mother is never shied away from. And while she is loving and sympathetic towards her mothers condition, the suffocating monotony of her young life is miserable. But her stoicism always sees her through, she has an indefatigable curiosity and love of life that reminded me of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who I also discovered this year. She says:

‘all my life I had felt grateful (to whom I knew not) for the gift of existence, and I felt no less so now. I discovered that one does not have to be happy, successful or fulfilled to enjoy living. Even the bitterest despair and frustration can at a deep level be relished as part of the human experience.’

The outdoors and cycling are her respite and her intention to read as many books as possible before she died! She and her paternal grandfather, ‘Pappa’, share ‘the lunatic concerns of bibliomaniacs’ and her time spent with him and her extended family give a wonderfully vivid picture of contemporary life in Dublin at the turn of the 20th century. Like her father, he’s a writer longing to be published and a fierce Republican. The letters from Pappa to Dervla’s father, a political prisoner in an English jail in 1921 are both moving and fascinating. The warmth and humour between them all is just lovely. And her literary tours of Dublin are a dream!

It would be 20 years until Dervla could finally set off for India and that’s where this finishes, with her trusty bike Roz and a publishing contract with John Murray. Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle is definitely on my list to read.

November 28th 1931 – May 22nd 2022

“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 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”