Dervla Murphy, author of the classic Full Tilt

0:00Today's subject is a great traveller, a cyclist who grew up in Ireland where she was born in 1931. On her 10th birthday, her grandfather gave her an atlas. She drew what was to her the obvious conclusion. Some two decades later, she began her journey with a bike, starting at Dunkirk, an adventure she wrote up in a book called Full Tilt, and it's a classic. There was one thing I wanted to do in the course of my life, and that was cycle to India. and I was ten and I'd just been given a second-hand bicycle for my tenth birthday and an atlas by my grandfather and I discovered, not being very good at geography yet, but I'd just discovered that you could cycle all the way from Europe into India.

0:53What a voice and what determination too. That was the late Dervlo Murphy, today's subject and a previous guest on this programme. She's been picked today by my guest, Hilary Bratt. Tell me, did you know Dervler yourself? I knew her well. I met Dervler in 1979 in what she calls a dos house in Ecuador, in Otavalo. She was coming back from her Peru trip. My husband and I were researching one of our guidebooks about backpacking in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. And I can remember it very well. I emerged from my room to find George talking to this Irish woman. And she was saying where to buy yogurt.

1:40And she was very friendly. And Dervla actually hated tourists. So, you know, she was already lovely. And afterwards, I said to George, do you think that could be Dervla? No, he said to me, do you think that could be Dervla Murphy? I said, no, she's a proper writer. We knew she was in South America. She'd stay in a proper hotel. and we asked her, are you D 'Avola Murphy? And I can remember the look of shock and discomfort on her face of being recognised, but she was pleased and we just, that started it. We had a wonderful conversation about travel and the Andes and that's how it began. You're a great traveller too, Hilary, and the founder by accident, you say by accident anyway, of the Brat Travel Guides, which I think happened when you were backpacking around South America.

2:28back in about 1974, is that right? It was 1974, yes, so 51 years ago now. How did you found a series of travel books by accident? Well, because we didn't mean to write books, and George is dyslexic, so it was never going to be a particularly good career for him. It was because we loved hiking these ancient trails in the Andes, and no one else seemed to be doing it. And we did one from near Cusco to Machu Picchu that was very little known, which is now the Inca Trail. And everyone said, you must write about this because, you know, no one knows about this. Got it published. You had a publisher or you found a publisher?

3:11We sent it to my mother-in-law who rolled her eyes and retyped it because it was filling the States. And she printed the first 2 ,000 while we were traveling. But there are so many great travel writers to pick from. Dervla herself picked Freya Stark. So why are you choosing Dervla today? She was the pioneer woman traveller who inspired ordinary young women to do extraordinary things. A reviewer of her Madagascar book said that Devlin Murphy's appetite for discomfort verges on the gothic. And I love that quote because it really was. That was her eccentricity. It was the pursuit of discomfort. But, you know, hiking boots that she bought in Mexico at a bargain price that had a nail going straight into her foot.

4:03A tent that leaked. Trying to cure hepatitis with rum, which really doesn't work for any of us who've had hepatitis. I mean, she took a train in Cuba, which wasn't for tourists. and she talks about trying to find the bagno, the bathroom, and pushing open the door and finding just a space underneath. The floor had been removed. And as she said, if it hadn't been for the light of the full moon, she would have stepped to her death. And she said a rather silly death. She must have been quite young when you first met her. She was tall and vigorous and she had a very deep voice and so she often got mistook for a man, although she was quite well endowed, actually.

4:45I was quite surprised. In latter years, because I knew her right up to her death, the trials she'd put her body through took their toll and she was very bent. And she sent me an email saying I'm dwindling by the day. But it didn't bother her. You know, she slept sitting up in a chair because she was too bent to be comfortable in a bed. Most of us would think that was a privation. And she'd, oh, no, it's all right. Before introducing my second guest, Let's hear a bit of this. BBC World Service. Intrepid women. In this third programme, it's the traveller by bicycle and mule, Dervla Murphy.

5:30Dervla, over the last 17 years, has seen most kinds of terrain. She's bicycled on her own from Ireland to India, being attacked by wolves in Yugoslavia. She's walked through Mexico and the Andes of South America, and she's trekked with a mule over those precipitous highlands of Ethiopia. And during all her journeying, that was the only place where she felt the slightest fear, in Ethiopia, when she found herself captured by bandits. On the one hand, at that moment, I did know that my life literally was in danger. But on the other hand, I felt that somehow this wasn't the moment when I was destined to die so that it would be all right.

6:12I mean, it was a security situation. Yikes. Hopefully we'll find out how she got away later on. Also here in the studio, we have Rose Baring, a travel writer herself, who edited Dervler's last three publications at Elon Books. Wow, what's editing Dervler Murphy like? Up for a fight over anything that one wanted to remove. I came on the scene when she was thinking of grappling with a computer. moving bits of text around on a computer screen completely through her. So in the end, we just had to go back to her old method, which was to cut bits out and stick them on. She used to use a stapler. She stapled them into different positions.

6:57What, you sort of cut bits of paper and stapled them together? Yes, exactly. She simply couldn't, she just couldn't see it. That's so derbler. She couldn't work it out. Yeah. But she sounds as if she had the gift of the gab. That was one of her great qualities, and it's one of the things that makes her travel writing so extraordinary is that she would talk to anybody and that's what she did. She went somewhere, she sat down and she waited for people to come to her. And a listener. I think that was a really important travel characteristic. She was insatiably curious. I mean, that's what makes her a great life because she would listen so carefully to anyone and she kept her own views to herself.

7:36She used to come and stay with us when my children were 10, 11, 12, 13, and she would always want to hear what they thought about things. She was so generous and kind. I visited her after my first pony died when I did a long-distance ride round Ireland, and I stayed with her for a couple of weeks then. What was her house like? I think Rose and I have a similar experience here. It was an old market, so all the rooms were old cow sheds or whatever, round a central courtyard. She had no central heating. I don't think she had hot water. Did you ever experience... She did have... She had a tiny shower, which had a gas...

8:18I never experienced. No, an electric shower, which produced some hot water. But there was no hot water in the kitchen, for example. And the first time I stayed with her, it was a very cold April, and the room was unheated, of course. The sheets were damp. And I remember curling up in a fetal position and just trying to contain the body heat I had. And I just got to sleep at about 4am. 5am, Dervla was up, shirt sleeves. She was building a rockery and so she was heaving child-sized rocks around and there was a bit of a clatter. But she would be unaware of any discomfort for her visitors until someone tied an electric blanket to her gate.

8:59They didn't dare give it to her for obvious reasons. She would have rejected it. So I think some visitors had that electric blanket. I did, but there was a problem with the electric blanket, which was that it just somehow made the damp worse because it just produced all this fog of wetness around you. And I asked her the first time if it might be possible to have a bath because I thought that would warm me up. I mean, stupid idea. She just said, the river's down there. She used to wash her bedsheets in the bath with a broomstick. That's why they were done, because it rains in Ireland. They never got dry.

9:34She had no washing machine, ever. She never had a television. One of the remarkable things about her, one of her great live characteristics, was her real dedication to the natural world. And that meant as light a footprint as possible. She was an early environmentalist. Very, yeah. And very, very more serious than anyone I know. She didn't just talk at all. She really walked the walk. She'd never owned a car. I mean, for someone who's famous for travelling, her CO2 footprint must have been the lowest of anybody. And actually that translates into her writing because she was avid about saving paper, because she would write on the back of old manuscripts.

10:18You know, she could never have a blank piece of paper that wasn't used. And so her editor would be reading a thing, turn it over. That doesn't quite make sense. But, you know, they plug on. Then they realise it was a completely different book. And she was reusing that. and her typewriter didn't have a bell and so at the end of a line she would often go on typing onto the roller of the typewriter and her editor had to guess what the words might have been and put them in. So, you know, I think for both editors she was quite a challenge. Yes, quite a challenge. Here she is on Excess Baggage on Radio 4 talking about travelling slowly by the BAM train across Siberia in 2007.

11:03Well, it's very slow and you start off in Moscow, of course, but there's a junction where the BAM goes off north through, you know, the most beautiful areas of Siberia, now that I've been all over Siberia. But from what I've read, I think probably the BAM takes you through the best of it. and of course you get to know all the people travelling with perhaps six or seven days from Moscow. Your coach on the train becomes a little village really. And how does it work? Is there a buffet? Are there people looking after you? People providing teas and coffees? How does it work? People on the whole bring their own food.

11:48There is a samovar in each coach and you have your mug and your tea or coffee wherever you want. I mean, there is a restaurant car, so-called, but the food is dire. And do you deliberately look for people to talk to when you're travelling? I presume that's part of a way of getting to know the place that you're going to. Yes, very much so. But, of course, nowadays almost everybody has their ears plugged with whatever you call it. iPod, is it? I mean, something dire. And they're not communicating with the people around them as they used to do. And this severely reduces my pool of raw material. Oh, I could listen to her forever.

12:31Couldn't you, Rose? I could. And actually, I was thinking about a piece that she wrote in a part of Full Tilt when she is very unusually flying across the Himalayas, having done a lot of bicycling. She gets into a plane for a short period of time because she needs to get to Gilgit and it's the only way she can get there. As she looks down on the Himalayas, she says, the more I see of unmechanised places and people, the more convinced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between man and nature. I think that she hated machinery. She hated the way that iPods, as she called them, got in the way of communication.

13:10Let's go back to the beginning, Hilary Rose. Who was Dervla Murphy? Where was she born? Where did she come from? What happened in her childhood to make her want to travel? She was born in 1931 in Lismore in County Waterford. Her father was the county librarian and her mother became disabled with rheumatoid arthritis when Dervler was very young. Shortly after her birth, she was diagnosed with it. And by the time Dervler was two, she was confined to a chair. They were an introverted family, very concentrated in on themselves, and they had very close, close relationships. But the relationship with her mother became more and more complicated as the mother required more and more help.

13:55And actually Dervla hardly went to school. It was an extraordinary childhood, actually, because she was an only child because her mother, who wanted other children, couldn't because of the rheumatoid arthritis. And her mother became more and more difficult. She was a huge disciplinarian, except in what Dervler did physically. And there's a story in her, really her most enjoyable book, I think, which is Wheels Within Wheels, which is her autobiography. At the age of 10, she was lost. She went cycling. She was lost in the mountains and spent the night out in January in the mountains. She survived.

14:31Her parents survived the anxiety. but she would cycle, she cycled 50 miles as an early teenager. Yeah, 12 year old I think. So there was no restriction physically but intense discipline which got more and more... Self-discipline? No, discipline from her mother. Ah, yes. In this hygiene requirement or cleanliness requirement she had to scrub the floors once a week, she had to boil the whatever you boil once a week and this got worse and worse and she left school at 14. And I think this is extraordinary for a writer who is as erudite as Dervler was in order to look after her mother. And until her mother died, she was chained to Lismore and hardly ever left the house.

15:19She was in her 30s when she went to India and while she made other small trips before, that journey must have been a massive relief from not just the practical dependence on staying, looking after her mother, but also the emotional dependence of someone who is suffering all the time. But it had become such a battle of wills. Her mother was so controlling of how Dervler should behave. And Dervler felt nothing but relief when her mother died. You know, she says this, that there was no grief. She wasn't an emotional woman, was she? because when her father died, you know, Dervla didn't cry. But the mother, you can see, it was just relief.

16:01The next week, I think, she goes to stay with some friends by the sea and she talks about lying in the sand dunes and just planning the trip in her mind, planning the trip to India. It's like the catapult had been pulled very, very far back and then the moment the mother died, she went. Rosa, something I'd like you to read. Let me hand you this. Ah, yes. Yes, this is extraordinary. My childhood diet was generally considered freakish. Up to the age of 16, I drank four pints of milk daily and was allowed no tea, coffee or fizzy drinks. Sweets, chocolate, ice cream, cakes, sweet biscuits, white bread and white sugar were also forbidden.

16:42Included in my staple diet were raw beef, raw liver, raw vegetables, wholemeal bread, pinhead porridge and as much fresh fruit and cheese as I could be induced to eat. Naturally, I flourished. You're listening to The Great Life of Dervla Murphy, author of Full Tilt and In Ethiopia With a Mule. Here she is explaining in 2007 that she'd always been interested in travelling and in writing too. Yes, for as long as I can remember. But not actually linking them up until I had failed to become a novelist because that was the original literary ambition to write novels and tried about four when I was in my 20s, none of which was worth typing, never mind sending to a publisher.

17:35But not, I feel, a waste of time because it was all practice and putting words on paper. So then when I cycled to India, obviously my mind turned to writing about travel. Been at it ever since. And here's another writer who knew her in later life, Antonia Quirk. One of the most brilliant pages in Full Tilt, which is the book about the trip, she itemises what she took with her. So it's a notebook, pens, one pair of long johns, one pair of gloves. She said you must be able to put six months of your life into one medium-sized rucksack. She packed so light. But amongst all of that was a 25 automatic pistol and some extra rounds.

18:24One of the most striking things about that book is what she had at the end of it all. Hardly anything. There's no gun. She'd had to sell it. No pages left of the notebook. I mean, she sent back quarter of a million words to friends. She'd write it at the end of the day and send them back almost as letters. And the friends would compile them. And that's what became the book. Why did she choose India to go to? Was there a destination, a person, any particular reason? It was because of the Atlas, wasn't it? When she got the Atlas on the bike at the age of 10, she looked at the Atlas and saw that you can go overland to India.

19:01She had developed a Sikh pen friend, I think. Is that right? The Sikh pen friend actually lived in Malaya. Oh. But I think she had a sense of the culture of other places, and one of the places that she had more of a sense of the culture of was through this Sikh pen friend. So India would have felt a little bit more familiar to her than other places. Did she have any kind of a private life during this time? She did. She had quite a long relationship with a man. Yes, with a much older man. Much older man, 20 years older than hers. Was that Godfrey? Yeah. I think that helped her sanity. Her parents never knew anything about him.

19:40And it was a long friendship before it was consummated. And so, you know, she really developed the relationship with him. It's a bit vague. He died, but I couldn't quite understand in Wheels Within Wheels what happens to him. But anyway, he died. I think he becomes ill. He becomes ill. He'd been a Japanese prisoner of war during the Second World War. And so he wasn't entirely healthy, I don't think. And she had a daughter. She had a daughter. That was later on. So not with Godfrey? Not with Godfrey, no. She always said she never wanted to get married. She was absolutely sure about that. Anyway, she loved having a daughter, and she said how much easier it was having a daughter than having a son would have been, and I think that's true.

20:27She did later travel, both with her daughter Rachel and then with her three granddaughters too, all when they were quite small. Take a listen. Here she is on Woman's Hour in 2008. Yes, I'm very snuffly, I'm afraid, but I hope people will be able to hear me through the snuffles. I think they can hear you loud and clear, don't worry. Now, this is a book about your journey through Cuba. You went on your own, but before that, you went with your daughter and your three granddaughters. Now, you are used to travel, but to lumber yourself with three very small children. Why, Dervla, why? Well, I didn't feel at all lumbered.

21:04And, well, the idea came originally, as far as I can recall, from Andrew, from the daddy. And he thought it would be a rather nice idea for the three generations of females to go off and do a little trip on their own. At that time, I had actually been thinking of a journey in North Korea. But Andrew didn't take kindly to the idea of his three beloved little things. I've got some sympathy with Andrew there. But anyway, gone. So we decided Cuba. Cuba, North Korea. Rose, her interests seem to be becoming a little political. Am I wrong? Certainly. From the sort of late 1970s, she moved from writing simply about journeys to being interested in places which had had a difficult recent past.

21:58So her first sort of book that tackles something like that was her book about Northern Ireland, A Place Apart, which is an extraordinarily courageous book, actually. A riveting book. Riveting, marvellous portrait of both sides of the conflict at the height of the Troubles. But I think the thing about her political writing, and it is significant, when I met her in Ecuador, she was supposedly going back, she should have been going back to Ireland to write Eight Feet in the Andes, but in fact she'd met a young American and it was just the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. She became obsessed with the evils of nuclear power and it really was an obsession.

22:42And she wrote this book called Race to the Finish. I don't know if it's even in print, is it, Rose? I'm not sure it is. I doubt if it had many sales. And it tilted her into political writing, which infected her books. And she says this in a postcard to me that her half-sister had said, Deborah, had said, I think after that book you were a political writer and you no longer wanted to write about adventures. And Deborah said to me, yes, you know, that changed me. And I didn't. I knew that the Peru book was the last book I would write that was a pure travel book. And I think it was difficult for her readers.

23:22I found her increasingly political writings harder to enjoy. I do. And the same with Cuba. I mean, you know, it was the discomforts and things like that, train journey, that's riveting. But one tends to skip through the politics. And she researched so much. You know, I think Cuba, she had something like 34 books in the bibliography at the end. Six, seven pages of bibliography in many of her books towards the end. Now, you're both publishers as well as writers. I don't think she's actually a very good writer it's what she writes about that's so extraordinary a bit like Wilfred Thessageau who's a terrible writer really but does the most extraordinary things She's not a huge stylist but it's the immediacy of the experience that she, you know, every night even after the most punishing 45 kilometres or carrying Ros up over some enormous pass on the Himalayas Ros is the name of her bicycle Yes, the name of her bicycle She would always write the day's events up.

24:30She published 26 books in 50 years. And sometimes she was publishing one book a year for four years. So she almost wrote on the hoof. She wrote as she went along. It reads like that. Yeah. But I think you're spot on. I think, you know, there are better travel writers. You know, she never wrote a lyrical style. She could turn a good phrase. But it was how she travelled and, you know, the discomfort she put herself through that is so riveting. And I think this is why she was so popular. But also, she was very modest because she communicated with postcards. And I've got a great bundle of postcards here.

25:13Oh, gosh. Yes. Yes. I mean, you know, they were typed and so I could read them. Can I have a look at one? Yes. Typed postcard. A typed postcard. And they came regularly because she always had something to say. But I love this one. Last week, corrected the proofs of my Peru volume. And it is quite sensationally bad. I mean, worse than you could imagine or believe. Cannot think why Jock is publishing it. It will destroy my reputation, what there is of it. That was chosen as, you know, one of the best travel books of the year by the Book Marketing Council. And it was all, you know, Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy and that particular book.

25:51Could you have been, Hilary, a Dervla Murphy if your work and your career hadn't gone into publishing? No. Why not? What do you miss? What don't you have that she had? Actually, I did make my own tent, but it was better than her£15 tent that leaked. It didn't leak. Yeah, I would never pursue discomfort the way she did. I also admire enormously her ability she had to talk to local people. I find that a challenge. It's part of writing well and you need to. But for Dörfler, it was absolutely natural. And that's actually, as you pointed out, she wasn't the greatest travel writer, but she really was an excellent traveler because, as we've said, of her desire to really get under the skin of the country and talk to the local people.

26:44So I think in Europe on the whole, the older you get, the more disposable you are. I mean, you know, people can't be bothered with you really. But in Africa and I found in Siberia, there's a certain respect for older people. But I think our Western or consumer society cult of youth means that by the time you get to 76, well, I mean, you are, you're ready for the skip. I'm not sure if I agree with her, Hilary, do you?

27:26You ready for the skip? Not for a little while. My thanks to you, Hilary, and to you, Rose, for that mind-broadening episode of Great Lives. Goodbye.