Murphy The Kick

A Life Among Writers
1. Auflage 2003
ISBN: 978-1-84351-343-8
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 390 Seiten

Drawing on five decades of private notebooks, Richard Murphy has created a unique memoir of his life and times. Murphy writes about delicate personal issues as he chronicles the making and unmasking of a writer. He includes amusing and moving accounts of his meetings and friendships, with many prominent writers and actors from the literary milieux of London, Dublin and New York, including C. S. Lewis, Harold Nicholson, J.R. Ackerley, Patrick Kavanagh, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Robert Shaw, Peter O'Toole, John McGahern, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Richard Murphy was born in 1927 at Milford, near Kilmaine, County Mayo, and spent part of his childhood in Ceylon, where his father was the last British Mayor of Colombo. From the age of eight, he attended boarding schools in Ireland and England, winning a scholarship to Oxford at seventeen. After years of displacement, marriage and divorce, he returned to Inishbofin in 1959 and settled for twenty years at Cleggan, writing there, on Omey and alone on High Island. He moved to Dublin in 1980, detaching himself from the beloved country of his past the better to reach it in poetry. He has lived near Kandy in Sri Lanka since 2007.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Murphy, Richard

Leseproben

A year before my mother died on 28 January 1995, at the age of ninety-six, my older sister Mary was driving her across the moors in Northumberland to enjoy the view, when our mother turned to her and said, ‘Darling, I’m afraid you’ll have to get me put down, because I’m never going to die naturally – the trouble is I don’t want to miss anything.’

‘You’re utterly selfish! You always were!’

My mother scowls at me across a tea tray in her sunroom at Highfield, where Mary and her husband, Gerry Cookson, have provided her with a cottage on their estate. A minute ago she was telling me to read aloud from a little black diary begun by her in London on 21 September 1914. This morning I found it in a tea chest of family papers she had gathered in seven countries and preserved through two world wars. She was thrilled to see it again, as I was to look into her heart as a girl of sixteen. But now she is angry because I have not moved my chair in response to her complaint, ‘Your shoulder is touching one of my plants.’

‘Can’t we forget about your plants?’ I ask irritably.

‘But I love my plants, and I don’t want them to get damaged.’

Well she knows that my shoulder could do no harm to a sturdy rubber plant from a garden centre near Hadrian’s Wall. At ninety-five, she still loves giving an order in the form of a courteous question that demands an active response. But at this moment her coercive tone of voice makes me determined not to obey.

‘Nanny spoilt you,’ she taunts. ‘It was my fault for keeping her on till you went to school. I should have got rid of her. Well, if you’re not going to move your chair, I’ll have to move the plant myself?

So the blame will be mine if she falls and breaks her pelvis. Naturally, I rise to catch hold of her arm as she totters and sways across the sunroom. Too late! She shakes off my hand, jerking her arm to her bosom, as if to say she needs no help from a son who isn’t gentleman enough to stand in response to his dying mother’s possibly last request. Defying pain and extreme decrepitude, she moves the large clay pot a few inches, and returns in triumph to her rattan throne. There, she casts on me the fury of her far-apart pale blue eyes and says, in a voice of martyred unselfishness: ‘Do have another of these delicious scones that Mary baked.’

‘No thanks, I’ve had more than enough.’

‘Darling, why do you have to be so difficult?’

Her question reminds me of a Sri Lankan proverb. One crab says to another: ‘My son, why do you have to walk sideways?’ Quoting this now would prolong the row, and defeat my purpose of hearing, and writing down, things she remembers about her childhood and ours, before all her memories are lost. So I ask in a tone of contrition: ‘Was I always a problem?’

‘Quite often.’

‘How, for example?’

‘Well, you surely remember the time I took you to tea with Aunt Bella when you were three years old?’

‘Tell me about Aunt Bella,’ I reply, putting away the diary until we are both in a better mood.

‘She was Daddy’s aunt, his mother’s sister, a very important old lady, Dr Isabella Mulvany. She was headmistress of Alexandra School for forty-seven years and the first woman to get an honorary degree in Ireland, from Trinity College. He was Aunt Bella’s favourite. She was devoted to him, took him to England and France during his school holidays, and educated him. Aunt Bella never really liked me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she wanted you to marry one of her intellectual pupils.’

‘Me? Don’t you mean William, my father?’

‘Of course. My brain’s gone completely.’

‘No, it’s remarkably clear, but sometimes you confuse the generations when we’re talking about the past.’

‘I know. I often think that Mary is my mother, because they are so alike.’

At seventy-one, Mary is her oldest child. Our mother still regards the five of us as children. So young she looked in our childhood that people after church would say, ‘You could be their sister.’

‘Who was that pupil Aunt Bella wanted William to marry instead of you?’ I ask.

‘I can’t remember, but I think the man she may have married was a planter in Ceylon who lost all his money after the war, and drowned himself in a rain-water tank in Devon. No, it can’t have been. Wasn’t there someone in the colonial service who did rather well, becoming Governor of Hong Kong, until he was put in prison by the Japs? Are you writing all this down? I do wish you’d stop. Do have another cup of tea.’

‘What did you think of Aunt Bella?’ I ask, when there’s a pause in her picking up and putting down pieces of the Ormsby silver inherited from her five maiden aunts, including a jug in the form of a cow that gives milk out of its mouth.

‘I was deeply in awe of her, everyone was. She was rather terrifying, but she had a heart of gold. Put that notebook down, or I can’t go on. Let me see what you’ve written.’

‘Sorry. I’m taking notes because I want your own words to survive. Don’t you want me to write about you?’

‘I’m not sure. I’d like to read what you’re going to publish before I die. Don’t write anything nasty about us! Can’t you hurry up and finish the book?’

‘If it were to contain only things you consider nice, who would believe it?’

‘No one, I suppose. Finish up these scones!’

‘I’m full, thank you very much. Was Aunt Bella a martinet, as one of her pupils, nearly as old as you, recently said?’

‘She was good to me, but awesome. Of course, Aunt Bella never forgave you for what you did to her at the Royal Hibernian Hotel, where she lived rather grandly in her retirement. Surely you remember.’

‘No, I was too young. I was often teased about it by Mary and Chris. Tell me what really happened.’

‘I can’t remember. You’re wearing me out with your questions. My brain’s gone. Have some more tea.’

‘No, thank you.’

The back door opens, and triggers an alarm that sounds like the high-pitched yelp of a dog. It makes us jump, but they say it’s good for security; not that it would stop an intruder or prevent a robbery or save our mother from an assault. Mary joins us, having placed in our mother’s kitchen some dishes for supper she has cooked in her own house across the garden.

‘Mary, tell him about Aunt Bella’s tea party!’

‘Do we have to keep raking up the past for Richard?’

‘He’s doing a wonderful job on my papers.’

‘I know. He’s the only member of the family who’s exactly like you. He won’t throw anything away, and he’s a writer; so he can write about you if you let him have your papers. Nobody else is going to do so.’

‘I suppose not,’ our mother says, rather sadly, as if she would like to think we’d all spend the rest of our lives writing about her.

‘Will you tell me,’ I ask Mary, ‘what you remember of Aunt Bella on that occasion?’

‘I remember sitting in a rattan chair on a green carpet under a broad conservatory roof, looking around, and thinking how lucky Aunt Bella was to be living in a grand hotel. I wished we could all live in a hotel and order whatever we wanted at any time. She was the centre of attention, a very big woman, very plump, in a long black dress down to her shoes, with a high collar. That’s all. Mummy will tell you the rest.’

‘We were standing up, just about to leave. Aunt Bella remained in her chair. You see, she was almost eighty, and everyone respected her. Christopher, aged five, had said goodbye like an angel. You both were dressed to match in embroidered smocks with brown leather gaiters buttoned on hooks over your walking shoes. Nanny must have been off duty that afternoon. I whispered to you to go up nicely and say Thank you very much Aunt Bella for the lovely tea party, but you ran across the room and kicked her.’

‘Why?’

‘Just because you liked to be naughty.’

‘How did Aunt Bella react?’

‘She told you to say you were sorry, and you yelled ‘I won’t!’ So she caught you by the arm, and said she wasn’t used to children yelling ‘I won’t!’ and you kicked her again. She never forgot it. I felt quite dreadful.’

‘And she cut you out of her will.’ Mary remembers, laughing.

*

‘She’s an absolute communist,’ my mother says in a tone of angry disapproval of my brother Chris’s daughter, Fiona Murphy, who writes for the Guardian.

‘Why do you say that?’ I ask.

‘Because she picked up the newspaper and wouldn’t look at the Queen.’

The Queen was giving her speech at the opening of Parliament, on television.

This reminds me of a warm dry afternoon in the summer of 1940 after the evacuation of the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. All five of us children were at home with our mother at Milford, prepared to face a German parachute invasion of the west of Ireland and defend our grandfather’s old demesne on the Mayo–Galway border to the last of his twelve-bore cartridges. We were ashamed of de Valera’s neutrality. But that was no reason not to go riding, I felt, except that King George VI was to speak to the empire on the wireless and we had all been told to listen.

A few minutes late I rode into the Pleasure Ground, ducking my head through the doorway, and dismounted, as a sign of respect, at the drawing-room window. A slow voice with a suppressed stammer was coming from our...