At home with Dervla Murphy
DERVLA MURPHY looks good for 82 — a bit stooped maybe — but she’s spent a large portion of her life sleeping in huts, on mud floors, in her 50-odd years of travel. She’s had her hip and shoulder done too recently but there’s nothing wrong with her mind — this is an intellect sharp as a knife and an emotional intelligence that’s utterly consummate — she probably had my number the minute I walked in the gate.
The location is her home in Lismore, Co Waterford, and the reason is the relaunch of her book, On a Shoestring to Coorg: An Experience of Southern India, the story of her first trip away with her four-year-old daughter Rachel — her only child.
Famously averse to interviews, or so I’m told, I was pleasantly surprised by the no-nonsense voice on the phone and the warm, polite invitation to call. A day or so later, I’m in her courtyard of buildings in Lismore and finding a spot in her writing room in which to settle.
There’s a very professional ease with Dervla Murphy — very few interviewees will have as much experience of this kind of journalistic dance as she does — she is a master of the subtle shift of direction and the glancing response and could probably teach political types a thing or two.
Her chair sits in a shaft of clear sunlight, the only deference to comfort in the book-lined room, where an army-style stove stands unlit. Dervla will probably sit here all day to write. A tough old girl. But, hers is a generation brought up on the notion of frugality and more importantly on concept of honour, self reliance, character and justice — all themes in her work.
It’s what I bring away from the interview — a sense of someone who has carefully and consistently strengthened her character over the years, in the same way that an artist will finesse his skills — but perhaps that’s a poor comparison, because character isn’t a talent, it’s not God-given and it’s not only forged in adversity — it’s an honesty of being in the world and in yourself. An individual journey.
And all the way through the interview, I’m given a glimpse of her clarity in how she is and how lives, she doesn’t dissemble as such, but she is adept at avoiding analysis — an Irish habit.
For that reason I don’t go over the old story about her being a single mother at a time when many other single mothers gave their children up for adoption. Suffice to say that having a child then, when unwed, was seismic, but Murphy not only had the courage to fly in the face of convention, she also had the economic independence to back it up, thanks to the books, the lack of any attraction to ‘the wheel of karma’, and an inheritance, probably.
As an only child, she must have been the beneficiary of careful management. Her parents were typical of the new Irelanders, by all accounts, intellectual Republicans from Dublin who moved to Lismore when Murphy’s father was appointed librarian. Not surprisingly, she was hot-housed on books and had a very individual childhood — the curiosity and isolation of her upbringing creating the adult seeker of other worlds. An orthodox, Irish childhood would not have bred a stout, unbending oak like Dervla Murphy. Difference in a small Irish town is not for the faint-hearted.
In an earlier interview, Murphy said her mother was told by a Romany gypsy that she would be laid low by serious illness, would have just one child, but that she would be famous. Predictions are strange things — could the power of auto-suggestion have worked it’s strange magic on mother and child?
A newcomer to her work should read Wheels within Wheels (1979), her autobiography in which she describes her early life at home in Lismore and the diet imposed by her mother.
“Ah the diet,” she chuckles, “long before there were any of these fad foods I was fed on raw beef, raw liver, no sweets, no sugar.” The regime was in direct counterpoint to her mother’s illness and when you look at the woman today, you can see the diet has stood to her.
As a young woman who cycled all the way to India on her bike and thereby changed her life, she must have had incredible stamina. Contrast that with a bed-ridden mother — that’s the kind of thing that makes a writer.
She wrote Wheels Within Wheels when she was a stay-at-home mother with Rachel and couldn’t travel — it stands with the best and is one of the books she’s proudest off, she said in a 2006 intervew:
“I wrote it for Rachel, really, as I had a strange childhood that I wanted her to understand. I never expected it to be published — and I couldn’t have written it if I’d thought it would be.
“But years later Jock Murray was rooting around and came across the old manuscript, and, in the way that publishers do, persuaded me we should put it out.”
The story goes that she met her publisher, John Murray, through Penelope Betjeman, wife of poet, John Betjeman. Penelope was in Delhi when Murphy arrived pushing her bike through the thronged city. Murray commissioned her first book and remained her publisher until he died. She’s never used a literary agent.
So how many books is that now, I ask her:
“Twenty six now and it gets harder all the time — I’m dealing with much more complicated things than I was with the early travel books.”
Like what?
“Well like the situation in Palestine — it takes much, much longer, there’s more research to be done, it takes longer to write and it’s a different ball game really.”
We are on the foothills of a discussion on the Palestinian cause, which she fervently espouses, but not in usual left-wing way, she doesn’t believe a two-state solution is any longer viable. As usual Dervla Murphy takes her own journey around the topic — but Palestine has figured hugely in her life, and works, for the past decade.
Does the gravity of a given political situation mean she has to be more careful about what she writes now?
“Of course, yes because when you’re younger it’s your own personal excitement about the journey.
“I think it was in Peru I began to take them more seriously. And then of course it was immediately after that I postponed writing the Peru book and wrote the book against nuclear energy.
“And that marked the real turning point from pure travel writing for fun, to something more serious.
“The nuclear power thing happened because half-way through our journey back from Peru, Rachel and I happened to be half a mile from Three Mile Island as it started to melt down. I began to put my personal political views into travel books but inevitably it would change the nature of the books to some extent, it would never again be as light-hearted as before.”
We discuss her need to travel, where did it come from in the first place? How does a girl from Co Waterford get on a bike and conquer the world.
“I was just born like that — I never wanted to do anything else.
“It was my mother who suggested it in the first place when I was 16, she said, ‘Why don’t you get on your bike and go to the continent and educate yourself?’”
Weren’t you a little afraid I ask?
“Why?” she asks. Because it’s scary, I say.
“Why should you be scared to go off on your own?”
Because it’s inculcated from the moment of being born a woman, I say, that you should be afraid.
“And that’s the problem obviously, because my mother was the reverse. I was really, really lucky without realising it at the time.”
Does she see herself writing another autobiography?
“Not really, there wouldn’t be any point — because of all the other books — of course.
“But I really think my generation have a sort of duty to record what they remember of their childhood as far back as they can go because there have been so many important changes and our grandchildren, they will really need to understand their own world.
“They need to understand where granny and grandad are coming from — and I hope that this will get through to people — just, you know they don’t have to write a book about it, but just to record, on a little gadget, for their children and grandchildren, what they remember from their particular area you know and their neighbourhood.”
There was an expectation that Dervla would go to university when she left school.
“My parents took it for granted that I’d go... because my aunts did — I had absolutely no interest in studying what other people were directing.”
Ah, the core of the person, finally, focused and self-directing — utterly independent — all traits that combine to make the great travel writer.
“I never accepted a commission for a a book or an advance — I’d feel I was indebted.
“That’s the way I was brought up — whatever happens you don’t get into debt.”
And it’s that combination of her self-directedness and incredible strength of character that’s maybe the key to her success.
And she’s off to Palestine later this year, and has a book to finish on the West Bank. Dervla Murphy shows no sign of stopping.
Dervla Murphy On A Shoestring To Coorg: An Experience of Southern India is re-published by Eland Press (first published 1976).
