The Sunday Times May 29, 2022 7
Travel Profile
T
he facts are
straightforward:
Dervla Murphy
died last Sunday
aged 90. She was
the author of 26 books and
the recipient of several
awards, including the
Christopher Ewart-Biggs
prize for A Place Apart in 1979
and, more recently, a lifetime-
achievement award from the
British Guild of Travel Writers,
the Ness award from the Royal
Geographical Society in 2019,
and the Edward Stanford
award for outstanding
contribution to travel writing
last year. Nothing else about
this extraordinary woman was
straightforward, however.
Dervla left school at 14 and
spent the next 16 years caring
for her arthritic mother. Only
when her mother died was she
able to embark on the bicycle
journey she’d been dreaming
of since the age of ten. In 1963
she pedalled from Ireland to
India, then wrote about it in
her most famous and best-
loved book, Full Tilt.
In the world of travel writing
Dervla was not just unique,
she was off the spectrum. She
never accepted a commission
or advance because it was
the travel that mattered, not
the book. She wrote her
manuscripts on a typewriter,
never a computer. If forced to
do a publicity tour she would
reject the offer of free
accommodation and find her
own place where she would
feel comfortable — by being
uncomfortable. She had a
deeply ingrained dislike of the
tourist industry, preferring to
travel to the least hospitable
corners of little-known
countries at the least pleasant
time of year to avoid the
dreaded “tourists”. In fact she
revelled in hardship. A
reviewer of Muddling Through
in Madagascar remarked that
her “appetite for discomfort
verges on the gothic”.
I first met her in 1979, in
a cheap hotel in Otavalo,
Ecuador, so our friendship
spanned more than 40 years.
My husband, George, and
I were researching a
backpacking guide, and she
and her daughter, Rachel, were
en route home from Peru. “I’ll
get some rum,” she said.
We talked for hours about
travel and politics. After a
chance encounter with an
American, she was on her way
to the US to sniff out the truth
about the nuclear accident at
Three Mile Island. It was a
pivotal year in her writing
career, because she unearthed
enough disturbing facts about
the nuclear industry to put the
Peru book on hold. Instead
she wrote Race to the Finish?
The Nuclear Stakes.
At that point Dervla had
written five travel books, as
well as her autobiography,
Wheels Within Wheels, and
A Place Apart, an exploration
of the two factions in Northern
Ireland. She was blessed with
the perfect publisher, John
Murray. “Jock” and Diana
Murray loved her like adaughter, accommodating her
for weeks at a time at their
Hampstead home. She in turn
called her pack animals after
members of their family
( Jock the mule in Ethiopia,
for example). Diana was her
beloved editor who, according
to Dervla, wrestled even the
most unpromising manuscript
into publishable shape. But
then Dervla was incurably
modest. I have a postcard
— her favourite tool of
communication — reporting:
“Last week corrected the
proofs of my Peru vol. and it
is quite sensationally BAD —A LIFE
LIVED
AT FULL
TILT
DERVLA
MURPHY
Andes because in another
postcard she writes: “As you
say, enough didn’t happen in
the first two months of our
Peruvian trek to hold the
reader’s interest. But I think
there is another and more
deep-seated cause for the
book’s deadness... Rachel’s
half-sister, Deborah... wrote
to me after reading it — ‘After
that trip you did the nuke book
and I think that changed you.
I think... mental adventures
now claim you and make the
physical ones seem less
thrilling.’ ” Dervla agrees: “I
knew when I was writing Peru
that it would be my last
straightforward travel book.”
From then the destinations
that most appealed to her
were those with a rich political
background: Cuba, South
Africa, the Palestinian
territories. Some fans could
find themselves skimming
through the politics to
the Murphyesque
pursuit of
discomfort. They
were always
richly rewarded.
Here is a passage
from The Island
That Dared — her
Cuba book, written
when she was 75 —
describing a train journey
of such unremitting
ghastliness that it’s only
through knowing Dervla that
you can trust its veracity:
“... by the light of a full
moon... I located the baño
[lavatory], seemingly
occupied. Having waited a
reasonable time I tried the
door again, pushing hard.
It swung open revealing a
vacuum: below was MotherEarth... But for the moon I
would have stepped forward
to my death.”
She resorted to peeing
through the open carriage
door. But it got worse: “The
baño at the other end, visited
during the day, had no door —
or loo... one had to relieve
one’s bladder and bowels in
full view of passers-by.”
Dervla was a traveller who
wrote, rather than a writer
who travelled. She had a
genuine fascination for other
cultures, and her equally
genuine enjoyment of
inevitable discomfort enabled
her to happily share the lives
of local people, however
different. She was no linguist,
but a language barrier never
dismayed her. When English
was the common language she
had an exceptional capacity for
really listening, which meant
that she never imposed her
own (strong) views. A
South African friend
said: “When
Dervla listens to
you, you open
up about aspects
of your world
that nobody else
even thinks to
inquire about.”
Dervla recognised
that in her abhorrence of
modern niceties she was going
against the flow. In The Island
That Dared she muses on
whether she had somehow
failed to evolve. “My genes
reject car ownership, TV,
washing machines, mobile
phones, computers, iPods and
other such complex
innovations. Were I a species
rather than an individual I’d
be doomed to extinction as a
creature unable to adapt to its
changing environment.”
Guests at her home in
Lismore, Co Waterford, learnt
to be stoical, but there were
subtle retaliations. She once
found an electric blanket tied
to the gate. “I never did find
out who left it there, but it’s
still in use” — for visitors.
Dervla will have faced death
with the same fearlessness
with which she embraced all
new experiences. I know this
because she told us so in one
of her Christmas(ish) letters.
Describing the misdiagnosis
of a heart attack in 1987 she
wrote: “Probably most
middle-aged people wonder
occasionally about their own
reactions to death, and I’ve
sometimes felt afraid of being
afraid. So on that August night,
when for three hours I felt
certain that I was dying, it
fascinated and reassured me
to discover that death didn’t
matter — tho’ I look forward to
no afterlife. I felt, ‘OK, so this
seems to be it, and I’m lucky
to have been born and
experienced 55 years of life.’ ”Hilary Bradt is the founder of
Bradt Guides; Dervla Murphy
wrote forewords for the 1980
edition of Backpacking and
Trekking in Peru & Bolivia
and three of Bradt’s recent
anthologies of travel writing,
including To Oldly Gosomet
afraid
when
certai
fascin
to disc
matte
no aft
seems
to hav
experHilary
Brad
wrot
editi
Trek
and
an
incShe preferred
to stay in places
where she
would feel
uncomfortable
‘A traveller who wrote rather than a writer who
travelled’ — Hilary Bradt remembers the late
Dervla Murphy, her friend of more than 40 years
Dervla Murphy, top, and
below right with Hilary
Bradt, in 2011; above,
Murphy in Bavaria ; left,
the Cuicocha crater lake,
near Otavalo in EcuadorI 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... ”
Dervla was not impressed by
the unanimously good reviews
— her focus had changed. Too
much had happened between
the journey and the book. Race
to the Finish? had intervened,
published bravely by Murray
though seldom mentioned in
her bibliographies — it was not
what her public wanted. But it
was what Dervla wanted. I
must have shared Dervla’s
criticism of Eight Feet in theSL PHOTOGRAPHY/GETTY IMAGES; DESIGN PICS/ALAMY