Read Online Wheels Within Wheels by Dervla Murphy - Free Book Online

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    That elm grew (and mercifully still grows) in the dense, dim wood which rises steeply from the Blackwater just west of Lismore Castle. The path leading down to it was an exciting tunnel through thick undergrowth . All around the other trees were old and tall, though dwarfed by its prodigious girth and height. Long before I had ever heard of pantheists, druids or sacred groves I used to stand at the foot of this elm, pressing with outstretched arms against its vastness, fingering its rough bark and looking up in reverence at the endless ramifications of its mighty branches. I was never to feel anything comparable under the influence of orthodox religious stimulants. But does it matter how we worship, if we worship?
    All this of course took place only after I had been given licence to roam alone, at the age of seven. But long before that my chief amusement was telling myself interminable convoluted stories – if ‘amusement’ is the right word. The longing to be alone with the denizens of my imagination was so intense, and the amount of time I devoted to them so abnormal, that one of my father’s sisters – a child psychologist – became seriously alarmed during a visit to Lismore.
    No doubt there was something neurotic about my elated relief as I escaped to the garden or the attic, and about the anger I felt when interrupted by the necessity to eat, or go for a walk, or learn my lessons. I often looked forward to bedtime. Lying happily taut under the blankets, with my eyes shut and my imaginative throttles wide open, I was at last safe from adult interference. I well remember the physical symptoms of excitement during those sessions: my heart hammering, my fists clenching and unclenching, my face contorted as I rapidly muttered the latest instalment, sotto voce . No wonder my aunt, who had doubtless contrived to spy on a daytime session, felt concerned.
    My mother, however, insisted that I was suffering from nothing more than a lively imagination. On principle she tended not to agree with her sister-in-law, who was very close to my father. And in this case she may have realised that my fantasy-world was a not unhealthy form of escapism. At some level I must have been aware of the domestic stresses and strains; and futile efforts to understand and adjust to them would have done me much more harm than my withdrawal into the company of golden calves, silver goats and arboreal teddy-bears.
     
    As I seem always to have known the facts of life I assume they were simply absorbed from my mother during that phase of obsessional questioning when everything in nature arouses a child’s curiosity. I therefore find it hard to understand the difficulties that even in this explicit age are said to surround basic sex instruction by parents. It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.
    By the age of six I was a proficient and dedicated masturbator and someone – probably Old Brigid – had infected me with an acute guilt complex about this hobby. So I consulted my mother, who said the activity in question was certainly not a matter to worry about. It was a babyish habit and quite soon I would grow out of it – just as I had grown out of wetting my bed. These remarks must have had the intended effect. Guilt evaporated and in time the ‘babyish’ habit was superseded by more cerebral sexual interests centred on scientific investigations of the male anatomy.
    I was about seven when an outraged neighbour complained to my mother that I had been seen, on the public street, removing a little boy’s shorts and examining him from every angle. All I can now remember is the colour and texture of this four-year-old’s shorts. They had been knitted from coarse burgundy-coloured wool and as he wore no underpants I pitied him, reasoning that he must feel miserably scratchy.
    The fact that this scene took place on the Main Street – ‘in