Whatever the theologians might say about heaven being in a state of union with God, I knew that it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly for ever.

Dervla Murphy, 28 November 1931 to 22 May 2022

My wife (Rose) was aware that we had not visited Dervla throughout the lockdown, so this spring, despite not being completely clear of long-covid herself, she decided that we must get ourselves to County Waterford and pay a visit to Dervla. And then with some added insistence, she decided it must be before Easter. As far as I could see, there seemed nothing to especially fear about Dervla’s health. As a lifelong atheist I also knew that the less emphasis we placed on any calendar of religious festivals the better. Dervla had been on good enough form to recently have lunch with a writer from the FT Saturday supplement (helping generate the lowest expense form ever submitted to that glittering column) for Dervla had served up her customary homemade meal of lentil broth and bread. We had also hatched a plan for her to entertain a pair of journalists from the World Service – one of the few organisations that Dervla whole-heartedly approved of. So despite being ninety, all seemed good enough.

The minute Dervla suggested that we stay elsewhere, I knew that Rose’s intuition had been right. This was a new situation. Dervla despises hotels and restaurants and every artifice of the worldwide travel industry, separating people from reality and pocketing the difference. In this she is unique. I know dozens of travel writers and there is not one of us who is immune to the subtle corruption of an upgraded flight or accepting the Presidential suite furnished with complementary bowls of fruit and something chilled. Dervla has never touched this world, never accepted anything free unless it was the use of a park bench or a mug of tea. When she stayed with us in London, it was with a sleeping bag on our sofa, carefully folding up the clean sheet for someone who needed such a thing. We were not quite so tough, so when we stayed with her in Lismore, County Waterford, we accepted and needed everything that was offered (extra and electric blankets) to cope with her house – a series of unheated sheds within the high walls of an old cattle market. In a like manner, she has never accepted an advance from a publisher, so never needed a literary agent, but just got on with her own style of travel off her own back, and if and when a book came out of it, only then did she take the finished typescript along to a publisher. Instead of complaining about distractions she put a padlock around her front gate for as long as was needed for the first draft, and after breakfast was over unplugged the telephone. In this she is again, a one off. Put more than one writer at a table with a bottle and you can be certain that a similar-sized table of bankers will generate a lot more cultured conversation, while writers will gossip for hours about agents, publishers, fees, writers retreats and advances. Once again Dervla was the exception. She rose at dawn, eat one hearty meal for the whole day (breakfast) while carefully listening to world news. So when you stayed with her, or vice versa, her conversation was compassionate, empathetic, but incredibly well-informed and wide-ranging. It was inspiring but also demanding. I ended up by cheating, swotting up on foreign affairs before any visit. I don’t think I ever discussed money with her, unless it was about the rich dodging their tax obligations.

Quite early on in our professional relationship, Dervla told me that she could read anything accept a contract and would sign anything I put before her. Perhaps she should not have told a publisher this, but in fact it worked well, for I was delighted by her trust and now knew that we would not be bargaining and so could type out our best offer right from the start. But in all other matters she was never vague about money but incredibly careful, for she knew what was due to her and when, and though frugal about her own comforts, this was a matter of principal rather than need. Money was reserved, like a cautious treasury minister, for education and health which were the two absolutes, and if you were fortunate enough for some beer and a roof over your head, but otherwise money could become a barrier, protecting you from full engagement with life, the one life, the only life, which should be lived well enough that you aspired to no other. Her books are full of trust, not only into where she is going to eat and sleep that night, but her random way of engagement. She never called upon government ministers, for she found that truth could be found more easily while you were waiting to catch a bus.

When we settled down in her home and opened the first of many bottles, it was instantly clear that Dervla was unchanged in all her opinions and her mental state, but that her physical strength was fast dissolving and her astonishing life force must soon drain away. She allowed us to prepare meals, make coffee, freshen the teapot and open bottles – things quite unheard of on any previous visit, and after two hours of chatter would ask us to leave so that she could rest, on the strict condition that we would return to the conversation in four hours time. When we came back, it was clear that she had never made it to a bed, but was resting in her own way, propped up against a small radiator. There looked nowhere that was free of pain.

But this time, it was noticeable that instead of devoting ourselves to a review of global problems, always made fascinating by her intimate knowledge of most of the worlds trouble spots, we homed into a much closer focus. I feared that this might be the last time to check facts, and so without apology, I started to write things down.

Dervla’s immediate family were always our first and foremost conversation: her only daughter Rachel and her three beloved granddaughters, but this time I was treated to a loving sketch of her son-in-law, Andrew Hunt who sang and taught languages. Our two daughters are roughly the same age as Dervla’s grandchildren, and so there has long been a useful interweave of the issues that animate this fresh generation. I also wanted to learn more about Dervla’s father and his Republican family, and fortunately she had also been working her memory in this direction, trying to sort things out from his perspective. Certainly, compared to her crippled but passionately engaged mother he comes across as a distant figure, rather dry and removed in the pages of her autobiography, Wheels within Wheels. But now I heard that as an eighteen-year-old he had been arrested by the British for burying a rifle in a Dublin garden and then spent ten days within the Curragh barracks before he was formally charged. Dervla was convinced that this period, almost certainly brutal, may have been traumatic enough to affect her father’s entire life. The three years behind bars in English prisons, followed by two university degrees in Paris, then a life of absolute duty (and some imagination) as a County Librarian, whilst he also wrote a series of dense novels that would never see the light of day. Was this professional carapace stretched over an ancient hurt, made ever tauter by the long drawn-out suffering of the love of his life, who had been made an invalid when she gave birth to their only child, just eighteen months after their marriage.

The other family that Dervla has always cherished in conversation with us are very British. She fell into their lap quite by chance, when two bicycles passed in a narrow alleyway of old Delhi but then found the way blocked, for one was rather overloaded with firewood. A laugh and a cup of tea later and the two women cyclists became firm friends. Penelope Chetwode (a writer in her own right as well as the wife of John Betjeman) would catch a glimpse of Dervla’s journal and heard some of the stories that came out of it, and so she provided the personal letter of introduction that would eventually lead Dervla to knock on the doors of John Murray Publishers, Mayfair, London. Jock Murray would not only publish Dervla’s first book, Full Tilt, and make a very great success of it, but the many that came after it. He and his wife, Diana, became the bedrock of Dervla’s literary life, having her to stay for months at a time in their home in Hampstead, while they edited her books. Jock on structure, Diana on language. Jock would become godfather to Dervla’s only daughter, while Diana was the much-cherished editorial midwife to all of Dervla’s great travel books. With a chuckle Dervla agreed the most challenging of all her journeys was across Ethiopia, that Rachel had loved the Madagascar journey the most, and where, not for the first time, she had saved her mother’s life. In terms of her writing, the only wasted journey had been across south-eastern Turkey, when she had been pregnant and in too much of a hurry. Jock had advised her to leave that one in the bottom draw.

So despite her pain, her eyes brightened with interest, whenever the chat circled back to the Murrays, for any news of John and Hallam, or of Stephanie Allen (John’s trusted P.A.) who after the sale of the company, first introduced us to Dervla. As a writer she told me she had only trusted the advice of two men, her publisher Jock Murray and Colin Thubron, whose early talent she first spotted as a book reviewer for the Irish Times. In other ways the works of Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley and Mary Wortley Montagu were her role models: how the real purpose of a journey was the search for chance friendships on the road. Dervla always travelled light but carried with her an immediate sympathy for the oppressed, as well as hostility to nationalist generals and their secretive allies within the international corporations. With one or two exceptions, as experienced on the road, she had an innate suspicion that Western Charities were just a new form of neo-colonialism. To balance this, Dervla’s ear was always primed to meet genuine patriots, aspiring towards self-sufficiency not just in sustainable resources but in governance. Although she would never agree with my suggestion that Tibet and The Republic were her two role models, of nations that at a terrible cost had tried to remain true to their own cultures and maintain a self-sufficiency divorced from great trading Empires, I yet stand my ground.

It is not often that you get to talk with a beer-drinking prophet, so when I am asked if Eland will ever make a serious profit, I can tell them we have already banked our greatest dividend, talking the world with Dervla Murphy.

Back to Articles page