Wheels Within Wheels (12 page)

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.’