Free Wheels Within Wheels by Dervla Murphy

– Early Christian Ireland – so he spent many evenings in our house, often bringing a half-bottle of claret and staying to supper. His brother was a wine merchant, but he seemed to imagine that a full bottle would give an air of debauchery to the proceedings.
    I much preferred Senator Goulding because he completely ignored me. A bachelor, he was small, slight and energetic, with a calm, precise voice, a dry sense of humour and not a speck of self-importance. Whenin Lismore – he was often in Dublin on senatorial business – he attended Mass and received Communion every morning, and every evening he again went to church, and had there been an afternoon service he would certainly have attended that, too. He was, however, the best sort of devout Irish Catholic, not a craw-thumper but a man who tried to make politics honourable through the practical application of Christian teaching. Having served Ireland for more than half a century he died poorer than he was born.
    Mrs Mansfield was childless and had been widowed young. One got the impression that she had unaccountably married beneath her and regarded Mr Mansfield’s premature death as his one gentlemanly gesture. She lived in a rambling, three-storeyed corner house at the junction of Ferry Lane and the Main Street; and the fact that the ground floor was occupied by a pub – once the property of her late husband – was a circumstance so unfortunate that to have referred to it in her presence would have been like commenting on someone’s club-foot – or wig. She and her brother affected to despise each other and had not exchanged a word, at least publicly, within living memory. They might be observed going to church by pointedly different routes: the senator trotting briskly up the South Mall while his sister sedately paced down the Main Street, tiny, slim and erect, the tapping of her silver-mounted cane being made to sound like heralds’ trumpets through the sheer force of her personality.
    When not going to church Mrs Mansfield was invariably accompanied by San Toy, an irascible Peke with chronic asthma. San Toy once attacked a bull-terrier, in a fit of sheer spleen, and the terrier was so astonished he simply ran away. Having witnessed this scene I always deprecated Mrs Mansfield’s subsequent boastings about San Toy’s gallantry when unjustly set upon.
    Twice a week Mrs Mansfield called to drink tea with my mother and deplore the appalling inroads being made by democracy on good manners. She complained bitterly of being greeted with an ‘Hello!’ – she whispered the word as though it had four letters – by children whose parents she could remember walking in to Lismore on a fair-day with bare feet and scarcely a shirt to their backs. Those children of course knew no better; their elders had waxed too prosperous andbrazen to teach them respect. But I, Dervla – she would swivel round to survey me through her lorgnette – I should know better than to run down the Main Street, endangering in my unseemly haste defenceless babies and feeble old-age pensioners. ‘A lady should never be seen to hurry, my dear.’
    ‘But she’s not quite a lady yet,’ my mother would protest mildly – avoiding my vulgarly winking eye. Then Mrs Mansfield’s expression would convey that if my mother did not act soon and drastically the necessary transmogrification was unlikely ever to take place.
    Before I was old enough to wander alone I often attended Mrs Mansfield and San Toy on their afternoon walks. For one of her apparent fragility and gentility Mrs Mansfield was a stout marcher, not at all deterred – once out of sight of the neighbours – by rough going and the accompanying indignities of climbing over fallen tree trunks or crawling under wire fences. And San Toy availed himself of these occasions to prove that he was no mere effete aristocrat. It was Mrs Mansfield who introduced me to the pleasures of strolling through old graveyards, striving to read weathered