Wheels Within Wheels (9 page)

These consisted of my regularly inflicting on myself increasing degrees of pain, until I was capable of such feats as walking three miles with a sharp thorn embedded in the sole of one foot. The imagination is unequal to what my psychologist aunt might have said had she discovered this little idiosyncrasy, but she would have been mistaken had she associated it with either sexuality or childish religiosity. My sexuality was at that stage quiescent and my religious sense never prompted me to go beyond the bounds of duty. I had simply discovered, while being beaten by Sister Andrew, that it was possible to repel certain kinds of pain. This inspired me to see if the same control could be exercised over self-inflicted pain. I struck the back of my hand, harder and harder, with a short, heavy stick; I tied thin twine around my fingers and pulled it tighter and tighter; I immersed my feet in hot water which I made hotter and hotter by adding to the basin from a boiling kettle – and to my astonishment the technique I had used at school always worked. But ‘technique’ is the wrong word and I am not sure what the right one is – perhaps ‘instinct’ would be a little closer to it. The process was as follows: I applied the painful pressure, hot water or whatever, felt the consequences acutely and then somehow contrived to send a message that numbed the pain even while the pressure was being increased. For instance, if I were experimenting with my left hand I could feel this message travelling down my left arm and checking the pain near my wrist.

I have mentioned this activity to only a few friends (one prefers to retain what small reputation one has for sanity) and though it seemed slightly peculiar to them it may well be a common juvenile hobby. At the time, it was to me merely a useful accomplishment, worth cultivating, and many hours that should have been devoted to the twelve-
times-tables
or the rivers of Europe were spent pain-repelling. I became so
proficient that at the age of ten I could probably have earned a good wage as a circus performer. But as yet I had only tested myself through brief ordeals and when I embarked on more prolonged trials I found that my message-sending did not work in quite the same way. Instead, I had to develop an indifference to pain. This entailed practising mental detachment from bodily sensations, whereas I assume my pain-repelling to have had a physiological basis. I can still pain-repel at will; but not, significantly, if the pain is a nerve one such as lumbago or toothache.

An amount of common-sense was used in what sounds like a lunatic campaign. I rarely did anything downright dangerous – my hot-water experiments were the most perilous – nor did I ever attempt to endure any suffering that could objectively be considered excessive. Some
twenty-five
years later, while observing the reactions to pain of less pampered races, I wondered if my endurance tests had been prompted by some atavistic longing to re-acquire a once universal power. They have certainly proved much more useful than the twelve-times-tables. Although the training course lasted scarcely three years I have ever since been almost wholly insensitive to what most Europeans regard as severe discomfort.

The strangest of all my childhood memories dates from this same period, which may not be entirely a coincidence. It concerns levitation; and I am comforted to know that some quite sane people – including Richard Church – have recorded similar memories.

What I recollect, or fancy I recollect, is standing at the head of the stairs, breathing very slowly and deeply for a few moments – and then, while holding my breath, proceeding to the foot of the stairs without touching steps, banisters or wall. Was this a recurring dream that for some reason became fixed in my mind as part of reality? My mother often read and discussed Saint Teresa of Ávila, so the concept of levitation was familiar to me and may have seemed so impressively peculiar that a realistic dream-cycle began. Another explanation, for a memory that is both wildly improbable and extremely vivid, is that one of my more extravagant fantasies became hopelessly entangled with reality. Yet neither of these explanations really satisfies me. The memory has about it a baffling matter-of-factness and coherence which seem to separate it from both dreams and daytime fantasies. I clearly recall making sure, before embarking on one of these trips, that only my
mother was in the house, because I dreaded somebody witnessing what by any standards must have seemed outré behaviour. I also recall taking the practical precaution of keeping my right hand just above the banisters, and my left close to the wall, to save myself from falling should the system break down. And I retain a most vivid memory of the physical effort involved in this breath control – which, if it existed at all, can only have been some yogic talent that by a million to one chance I had hit on, possibly in the course of my pain-defying experiments. I have had an open mind on such subjects ever since my Tibetan friends convinced me that levitation – and other even odder phenomena – are not physically impossible. But if in fact I had acquired this curious skill, why did I so soon cease to practise it? Did I lose the knack as suddenly as I had found it? Or was I afraid? I remember being enthralled by my capacity to do something so extraordinary, but my ‘trips’ also provoked a profound uneasiness, amounting almost to guilt. It is slightly disconcerting to think that I shall never know the truth about this matter. Now, looking at small children, I often wonder what sort of private lives they lead.

As Wordsworth noted, the whole person is plain to be seen in the child, though unformed and unrefined. But in many cases the individual’s true nature is radically modified by the pressures of his environment and the expectations of his family. It is sad to think that a generous, frank child may become a tight-fisted, shifty businessman if the pressures and expectations are so directed. But equally, as in my own case, a selfish, stubborn, sulky child may become quite an amiable adult.

Stubborness and sulkiness were the weapons I used against my mother as she diligently laboured to eradicate – or at least suppress – my more anti-social vices. Even now it shames me to recollect certain scenes. Myself, aged nine or thereabouts, reading one damp July afternoon in the round, thatched, earwiggy summer-house; my mother asking me to post a letter, some fifty yards down the road; my snapped reply – ‘No! I’m reading – I won’t go – I’m busy.’ Then the verbal battle and my mother’s inevitable victory and my return from the post-office to sulk for the rest of the afternoon. Why did I so often start battles which I 
knew very well I was certain to lose? What devil prevented me from being normally helpful about everyday domestic chores?

In all circumstances my mother insisted on obedience, yet in spite of my surface sulks I never really resented her disciplining. She was almost always just – and capable of apologising if she had been unjust – so resentment would have been irrational.

My childhood relationship with my mother was relatively
straightforward
, but I still find it hard to understand my relationship, at any age, with my father. In a sense, nothing ever grew between us from the seed of child-parent love; it lived on through the years but remained
underground
; there was no blossoming to affirm its existence to the outside world – or even, for long periods, to ourselves. One of the conditions that hindered its growth was my father’s inability to communicate with the young. He lacked any means of expressing his affection in an acceptable form and his rare attempts to get onto my level and be playful caused me acute embarrassment. Desperately well meant but blatantly phoney, these – I felt – were just making us both look foolish while widening the gulf between us. I much preferred his natural approach when he treated me as a pupil rather than a daughter. His own idea of fun was a fact-packed lecture thinly disguised as a long walk. With the random questioning of small children he had no patience; this was an untidy, unscholarly way of going about learning – a bad habit, to be eradicated without delay. Significantly, I could never imagine him as anything but a tiresomely erudite grown-up, though I could easily picture my mother as a little girl.

For me, our regular Sunday afternoon walks were both physical and intellectual marathons. Week by week I would be tidily instructed about birds, or moral theology, or electricity, or Irish history, or geology, or English literature, or astronomy, or music, or agriculture, or the Renaissance. Often I wished that I were alone beneath my teddy-bear tree and then I would vindictively insulate myself against my father’s voice; though to give him his due he presented all his information in carefully simple terms. Of course some of it fascinated me, despite myself, as several of his enthusiasms were by heredity my own – especially history and astronomy. On the whole, however, these didactic perambulations provided the wrong sort of fertiliser for the seed of love.

Just occasionally the barrier was lifted and we drew very close. My father had an unexpected flair for composing Learish nonsense rhymes and these charmed me utterly; when he was in one of his rare frivolous moods I would gladly have walked with him to the Giant’s Causeway. Then I discovered that I had a similar flair – long since atrophied – and we enjoyed the harmony of collaboration or the stimulus of competition, each striving to outdo the other in dottiness and euphony. But the barrier always came down again at the end of these sessions, leaving us uneasily antagonistic for no discernible reason.

The reason could have been jealousy, an emotion one would expect to find in some rather virulent form in such an introverted family. Perhaps, being so worshipful of my mother, I resented my parents’ mutual devotion. (Although according to pop psychology I should at that age have been so devoted to my father that I regarded my mother as a rival.) Yet I am pretty sure – as sure as one can be on such matters – that jealousy did not then influence any of our relationships. I was certainly given no cause for it. Together my parents lived their own separate child-excluding life, but I accepted this as natural and was never made to
feel
excluded in any unfair way. From an early age I took part in serious family conferences, and was admitted to the cupboard where the skeletons were kept, and generally was treated as a responsible, dependable individual. Years later I discovered that Pappa disapproved of my being consulted before family decisions were taken; he held that it is unkind to implicate children in adult affairs with which they are too inexperienced to cope.

Every summer Pappa spent July and August with us. I would guess that my father was his favourite child though apart from their common bibliomania the two were alike in no obvious way. Pappa was not merely ‘good with children’; he truly enjoyed them and his annual arrival by train drew not only myself but a score of other children to the railway station. Yet he never gave pennies or sweets or treats to me or to any of his young friends. Instead he played with us endlessly – our own games in our own favourite haunts. And always he brought from Dublin a battered suitcase tied with rope and bulging with dog-eared children’s books bought for twopence a dozen on the quays. No one – not even my mother – could read aloud as Pappa did. He involved us until we were 
transported beyond anything we knew of into other worlds that seemed to be suffused with a special Pappa magic, whatever the theme of the story or the author’s style. Even the more restless of the smaller children – and those who were not accustomed to being read to and normally had no interest in books – even they would sit motionless for as long as Pappa chose to read.

Punctuality was the only subject on which I used to query Pappa’s wisdom. He argued cheerfully that a capacity for ignoring time marks the truly free in spirit and that over-organised Western man has only himself to blame for the fact that our society would collapse if this freedom were widely enjoyed. His own indifference to time no doubt formed part of his attraction for children. But it made him another of Old Brigid’s crosses. She, too, adored him, and considered it her duty and privilege to ‘feed him up’ during his holidays, and so if he had not appeared by 12.55 she felt obliged to go forth to quarter the back streets and lanes of the town in search of ‘Dr Conn’. Luckily this did not happen too often since I shared my father’s obsessional punctuality – which was perhaps a result of the havoc frequently wrought in his own life by parents who never knew or cared whether it was morning or evening.

There was a Franciscan quality about Pappa’s affection for children and animals and the poor of all ages. It was without any element of paternalism or do-gooding; behind the gaiety which charmed us all lay a deep awareness of suffering and a love based on compassion and respect. For some reason he was always known locally as Dr Conn and he was a particular favourite of the old country folk whose dying traditions he collected for one of his unwritten – or half-written – books.

On a hot summer evening in 1939 an old woman from the mountain hamlet of Ballysaggart called to ask for Dr Conn’s help and I answered the door. Explaining that Pappa was out, I offered to give him a message. The old woman hitched her black woollen shawl higher to protect her head from the midges around the fuchsia bushes. ‘When he comes back, could y’ever ask yer father to drive him out t’see me poor husband? He have a crool pain in his chest wit de past tree weeks. He can’t even raise himself in de bed wit it. An’ the docthur above on’y gev him on oul cough-bottle dat med him sick to his stummick.’

I looked at the old woman in silence and felt wretchedly guilty, as
though the family had been caught playing some nasty confidence trick on the entire district. Then I admitted miserably, ‘But Pappa isn’t a real doctor. He’s only a doctor of philosophy!’

The old woman shrugged. ‘Shure isn’t that good enough? Isn’t he a kind man wit brains? What more d’ye want?’

I tried to explain. ‘But you see it’s not the right sort of brains – he wouldn’t know what medicine you need. Philosophy has nothing to do with being ill. At least, I don’t think it has,’ I added, suddenly wondering just what it did have to do with.