Wheels Within Wheels Read Free Page B

in love, could have devoted their wedding night exclusively to sleep. But perhaps they were not exceptional among their breed and generation. My mother had been curtly informed by her mother – who had brone seven children and endured countless miscarriages – that sexual intercourse was at all times painful and distasteful. And my father would certainly have considered any investigation of the subject, even in theory, to be grossly improper before marriage.
    Sex apart, an inability to have more children was agonising for someone as intensely maternal as my mother. It also put me, at once, in danger. All the emotion and interest that should have been shared among half- a-dozen became mine only. By the time I was five most people considered me a peculiarly nasty child and mistook the reason why. In fact my mother was such a strict disciplinarian that throughout childhood and adolescence I remained healthily afraid of arousing her anger. But what she could not avoid – my being the sole object of her maternal concern – was the encouragement of a ruthless egotism. However, this trait was no doubt useful at the time as insulation against the adult suffering around me. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote, ‘Perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.’ My mother – reading Bowen’s Court – once drew my attention to that remark. She did not comment on it, but I have since wondered if she meant it to comfort me. During childhood, I never stopped to sympathise with my parents’ situation. Indeed, only when I became a mother myself did I appreciate how my own mother must have felt when she found herself unable to pick me up and hug me, and brush my hair, and tuck me up in bed.
    After my parents’ deaths I came upon the letters they had written to each other, almost daily, during their six-month engagement. On the whole these might have been written by any happy young couple to whom marriage promised nothing but fulfilment. My father hoped to found a model county library service and write novels; with my mother to inspire him he felt certain these must be masterpieces. For relaxation he looked forward to some deep-sea fishing and an expanding record collection. My mother hoped to have six children at two-year intervals (three of each, if possible, though she conceded this might be difficult to arrange) and to use them – one gathered, reading between the lines – as guinea-pigs on which to test her various theories about physical and mental health. She also hoped to find time to study in depth, under my father’s guidance, the early schisms within the Christian Church – a subject of ineffable tedium to which she remained addicted all her life. She felt, too, that in her role as county librarian’s wife she should initiate a Literary Debating Society (she had not yet visited the town) and perhaps a Music Society. For relaxation she looked forward to walking tours in West Cork and Kerry, presumably on her own while my father deep-sea fished and their systematically increasing offspring were being looked after by some capable Treasure. This correspondence had just one surprising feature. Neither of my penniless parents ever mentioned money, or promotion, or buying a house or a motor car, or in any way planning financially for the future. Both seemed to assume that they would spend the rest of their lives in Lismore – my father wrote ecstatic descriptions of the surrounding countryside – and judging by these letters they were utterly without material ambition.
    The few personal memories I retain from my first five years are mostly painful. Our house – or half-house – was separated from the road by a six-foot stone wall, sprouting valerian. When attempting to pick a bouquet for my mother at the age of three I fell and broke my nose. A few months later, driving with my father in the library van, I broke it again when he had to brake suddenly because