Backlisted - Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy was first published in 1965 and is the first of Dervla Murphy’s twenty-six books. It's a journal she kept on the 3,500 mile, six-month journey she made by bicycle from her home in Lismore, Ireland to Delhi in India in 1963, Ireland, traversing Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan on her trusty bike, Ros. Joining us to discuss the book are Felicity Cloake, food writer and the award-winning author of the Guardian’s long-running ‘How to Make the Perfect’ series and Caroline Eden, author and journalist, whose latest book, Red Sands is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point to explore Central Asia. This episode also features Andy reading from Craig Brown's new collected works, Haywire, while John has been enjoying In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s disappearing birds and the people trying to save them by Patrick Galbraith. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 07:25 - Haywire by Craig Brown 14:41 - One Last Song by Patrick Galbraith. 20:48 - Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm * If you'd like to support the show, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it.

Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Caroline where are you uh where are you calling from today hello there I. I'm in sunny Edinburgh, lovely blue skies.

So I'm a few miles north, perhaps from everybody else. That's nice. Andy, I'm guessing you're in Whitstable today. I'm not revealing where I am. That's my private business, damn you. Damn you, John, I keep telling you. 170 times you've asked me, leave me my privacy. Caroline, where in Edinburghabouts are you? Are you in a lovely bit? Well, I'm in the Newtown, but I'm at the scruffy end of things.

So what we say is one of the entry-level streets. But, yeah, that's fine. OK. Felicity, are you still in your very small flat? I'm still in my very small bit of a North London townhouse. I am part of the anti-growth coalition of North London, I'm afraid. Sorry, everyone. It's my fault. Felicity, we always like to have a representative on this show.

And yet no one sent me a cab. That's what I'm annoyed about. I have a question for Felicity. I know this is a books podcast and all that, but Felicity, I noticed from your Instagram that you do many travels. Where is your latest bike trip been? Oh, well, the latest one actually was an actual holiday to Shetland

and we cycled the length of Shetland and it was amazing. Relentless rain. When it wasn't raining, there were mid-gees. Very little to eat, but just extraordinarily good fun. I would like to ask everyone on this panel before the main show starts, because this bit never goes out, does it, Nicky? I would like you to tell me one by one.

So, Felicity Cloak, how recently were you on a bicycle? This morning, probably about six hours ago. Thank you very much. Caroline, when would you most recently ride a bicycle? Oh, actually, it was very recently. Two weeks ago, I was in Riga and I cycled to Yamala to the Baltic Sea and cycled on sand.

I've been there. Yeah, it's wonderful. Oh God, it's beautiful. I played in the European Miniature Golf Championship Finals in Riga. That's very cool. That's true. It's a great city to cycle in. That's amazing.

It was a lovely, lovely bike ride along the train tracks down to the sea. Yeah, silvery Baltic Sea. It was lovely. All right. So, Nicky Birch, when were you most recently upon a bicycle? Yesterday. I cycled along the canal from my house up to chesant little little wander up there and then came back for the sheer hell of it it'd be easier

to ask you when were you last not on a bicycle to be honest with you but john mitchinson when did you last ride your penny farthing through the streets of your village? I honestly can't remember, Andy. It's terrible. I just can't remember. I mean, it's possibly, I mean, not within the last 12 months, that's for sure. I haven't got a bike for a start. My 13-year-old son did actually, in all seriousness,

ask me if I used to ride a penny farthing. I mean, come to East London. Can I ask you, Andy, can I throw it back to you? When were you last on a... Certainly. Well, I've got a bike. Excellent. I used to ride my bike around the streets of my mystery location. But I got a puncture about five years ago and I couldn't be arsed to fix it.

So it's not. So I haven't. About five years ago, maybe since I've been on a bike. I haven't been on a bike in my 50s. There you go. That's pretty good. That was something of my carefree 40s that I did. John, take us in. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.

And today we're joined by two guests, one returning and one debutante. Welcome back, Felicity Cloak. And welcome for the first time time Caroline Eden. Hello. Felicity Cloak is a food writer and the award-winning author of the Guardian's long-running How to Make the Perfect series as well as five cookbooks including the Andre Simon Award shortlisted The A to Z of Eating, her first culinary travelogue, One More Croissant for the Road, was shortlisted. Was that a Dylan-inspired title? Vaguely.

Not officially endorsed. Don't come after me with bricks. All titles are vaguely Dylan-inspired, Felicity, but sure. One more croissant for the road. Or to the valley below. I'm going to see Bob Dylan next week. I'm excited.

Don't tell him. Don't tell him. Okay, yeah, fine. Anyway, that definitely entirely separate from Bob Dylan-inspired book was shortlisted for a Fortnum & Mason Award. And her second, Red Sauce, Brown Sauce, again not inspired by Bob Dylan, a British breakfast odyssey was recently eulogized by john on our episode about paul theroux's the kingdom by the sea both books are published by the mudlark imprint at harper collins this is felicity's second appearance on backlisted

having previously appeared on episode 116 on mfk fisher's How to Cook a Wolf. She shares a fierce love of slow travel, strong drink, and small dogs that make her heart sing with the subject of today's podcast. Our other guest, Caroline Eden, is an author and journalist, occasionally contributing to The Guardian, BBC, Financial Times, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her latest book, Red Sands, published by Quadril in 2020, is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping off point to explore Central Asia.

It was a book of the year for the Financial Times, Sunday Times and the New Yorker. Swank. It also won the Andre Simon... Oh, we've got Battle of the Andre Simon Award for Best Food Book. That's good. Is it Andre Simon? Is it Andre Simon?

Simon, yeah. I apologise to Andre. She is currently writing a memoir set in Edinburgh, but which opens in Uzbekistan and ends in Ukraine. Yes. When were you last in Ukraine? Just last November, actually, in Lviv, out in the. Yes. When were you last in Ukraine? Just last November, actually, in Lviv, out in the far west. So I had big plans to go back, which is now obviously kiboshed.

Wow. And were you on a bike then? I sadly was not on a bike. Okay, right. Just reestablishing our bona fides on the bike front. And this book is coming out? It's not for a while. I think it's spring 2024.

Well, thank you both for coming and thank you for choosing this book. Thank you. Yes, the book we're here to discuss is Full Tilt, Ireland to India with a Bicycle by the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy, first published by John Murray in 1965. But before we hitch on our panniers and don our ankle-length underpants, Andy, what have you been reading this week?

Well, I was at a different literary festival this weekend. I was at Henley on Thames, and I was there to interview the satirist, although he prefers to be known as humorist, Craig Brown. Now, we have talked about Craig Brown several times on this podcast. He wrote a book I absolutely love called Mam Darling, which came out about four or five years ago. He wrote a book about the Beatles, which has been a huge bestseller called 1, 2, 3, 4. Both of those books won awards.

And this is a selection of his humorous writing over the last 15 to 20 years so it features pieces from publications as diverse as Private Eye, The Oldie, The New Statesman, Reader's Digest, New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Daily Mail etc etc and it's a kind of smorgasbord of different type the different types of thing that Craig writes. So there are book reviews which sort of bleed into profiles. There are satirical pieces, but there are also the diaries that he writes with Private Eye. We had a really interesting conversation about the financial merits of each of these disciplines,

that it's far more financially rewarding to write a private eye diary than it is to write a book review because of the the amount of due diligence that goes into one and the total lack that goes into the other so this book features parodies of everyone from mary berry to mary beard from Robert McFarlane to Jacob Rees-Mogg. I can tell you that Craig read out several of these pieces to the audience, a sold out crowd, and every single one of them absolutely killed. They were brilliant. But I'm just going to read the introduction to Haywire, which he read because it's funny. And it also raises an important topic

that we all here have to deal with every day of our lives. So for one lucky backlisted listener Opportunity Knox, Craig Brown I am featuring. Yes he listens to Backlisted everyone and he'll probably hear this so Craig thank you ever so much. Here is the introduction to his book Haywire. What is James Bond's middle name? While I was compiling a Christmas quiz, I hit upon the idea of a section devoted to the first names of famous characters in fiction. What, for instance, was Jeeves's first name? What was Captain Hook's? My thoughts strayed then towards middle names. Did James Bond have a middle name? Like Captain Hook, he was an old Etonian.

Precociously so, both were expelled. Etonians tend to have fancy middle names. Boris Johnson's is de Pfeffel. Ian Fleming's was Lancaster. And it seemed likely that Fleming had come up with something similarly off-centre for Bond. So, I did what all researchers do these days. I typed James Bond middle name into Google. This gave me 2,020,000 results.

It first directed me to a website called Quora, which confidently informed me James Bond's middle name is Herbert. He is James Herbert Bond. Ever the martyr to accuracy, I thought I'd better double check, so I clicked on the next site, which was Yahoo Answers. Here, to the question, what is James Bond's middle name, came the answer, Bond's middle name was Herbert, brackets, on Her Majesty's Secret Service. By now, I was feeling confident that I could offer Herbert as the answer to my Christmas quiz question,

but just to make absolutely sure, I clicked on another site called Theory of Names, which boasts of having been set up with the laudable aim of, quote, giving parents inspiration and options when making the most important and happiest decision of their adult lives. We asked ourselves, does the most famous name in British spy history have a middle name, they announced, before going on to confirm the seemingly universal opinion that yes, Bond's middle name was indeed Herbert. Readers were then directed to the original source of the information, so I clicked on the link just to be sure. To my surprise, the source was given as Craig Brown.

I have a terrible memory, not least for my own writing, so I couldn't remember ever having stated that James Bond's middle name was Herbert. But here it was, reprinted in full from an article I'd written ten years before called 13 Things You Didn't Know About James Bond. Number one was, James Bond's middle name is revealed only once in the entire canon.

In On Her Majesty's Secret Service 1963, Bond is being held in a raffia work cage suspended over a pool of piranha fish while the villain, Dr Peevish, taunts him by saying, Have it! Have it! Have it! over and over again. Finally, Bond can bear it no longer.

Go on, kill me! kill me kill me please he screams but at that very moment he spots dr peavish's christian name on the laundry mark attached to the raffia work cage and shouts do your worst dibbed in while peavish is blocking his ears in anguish bond makes good his escape i double checked all the other sites, and sure enough, the Herbert Trail always led back to me. Somewhere along the way, a joke had been transformed into a fact, and now, like the prankster who balances a bucket of water on the top of a door and then forgets it is there, I had stepped into a trap of my own making.

I still find it hard to believe that anyone who read my original article could have taken it seriously, particularly as all the other claims I made about Bond were equally preposterous. One read, for the past 40 years, James Bond's older brother, Basildon, has been a leading figure in the stationery business. Another was, James Bond's sister, Jenny, was the BBC's royal correspondent from 1989 to 2003 and later proved her family metal on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. The first full-length Jenny Bond movie, scheduled for release in early 2007,

is rumoured to be less stridently manly than the usual Bond films and features the all-action heroine grappling with the Earl and Countess of Wessex in a six-inch deep pool of ornamental goldfish. So this is the last paragraph. In the glare of the internet, the border has been blurred between true and false, authentic and concocted, nutcase and expert. Ignorance is now an accepted form of omniscience. On social media, anyone can rule the world, free to say what's what, unshackled by the constraints of knowledge or expertise. Of course, this makes my job all the easier. A world gone haywire has long been the satirist's guiding star, hence the mix of scorn and delight with which

Thomas Middleton titled his 1605 comedy, A Mad World, My Masters. donald trump can be president and boris johnson can be prime minister then why shouldn't james bond's middle name be herbert so there you go and that's just the introduction that's haywire by the craig brown fourth estate 25 pounds wonderful book john mitchinson what have you been reading this week? Yeah, never go on after the comedian. I've been reading a book called In Search of One Last Song by Patrick Galbraith, published by William Collins, subtitled Britain's Disappearing Birds and the People Trying to Save Them. And it is, as you can imagine, a somewhat elegiac book. The book concerns 10 birds, all of which are heading for extinction in Britain. The black grouse, the hen harrier, the lapwing, the lovely lapwing, which is on the cover.

So Patrick Galbraith is a young writer and he is interesting in that he writes for both sides of the fence. He writes for the shooting times, but he also is in touch with activists. The book opens with a conversation between him and Chris Packham, who is, as you probably know, despised by the shooting lobby. So he's an interesting middle ground writer and thinker. What I really like about the book is that he goes and talks to people who actually work in the countryside, like coppers and reed cutters and farmers and game keepers. But he also talks to musicians and poets and folklorists. And he talks to farmers and he talks to landowners. It's an incredibly balanced and I think rather beautifully constructed book. He takes each of these 10 birds.

He lays out what needs to happen, most of it along the lines of sort of restorative, regenerative farming and better communication between the various interest groups. But like a lot of good nature writing, where he's at his best, I think, is writing direct observation of nature. I'm going to read a little bit because you don't expect to bump into the northern poet Tom Pickard in the book. He does. Here he bumps poet Tom Pickard in the book. He does. Here he bumps into Tom Pickard. In 1964, long-haired, 18 years old, and just married for the first time,

Tom Pickard knocked on Basil Bunting's front door, saying he'd come because he'd heard that Bunting was the greatest living poet. The old Quaker modernist looked at Tom's notebooks and told him to leave the short stories and drama and to focus on the poetry. The meeting was an essential moment in the British poetry revival and in time Alan Ginsberg, the visionary mind of the beat generation, would call Tom one of the most live and true poetic voices in Great Britain. I only really

came though to hear about the black grouse and Tom in his slippers standing at the door with the toast. He sits and I eat. Yesterday, he tells me, looking around at the boxes, he spent some time trying to find the pictures of that lonely bird. But he still hasn't unpacked everything and he had no luck. He's been visited by this one solitary black grouse, which is the last black grouse in the area. I think he was just getting blown off course and he'd land outside the window. He was very curious in the way black grouse are. And we stare at each other forlornly.

Then he'd let me take his picture. Tom says he knows fuck all about birds and that the person I want to speak to is his old friend, Colin Sims, another poet. But they are a presence in much of his writing, from the wren perched on a hawthorn singing a scalpel song in his erotic epic Larkin Merlin, to the rooks and ravens riding the wind in the Fiends Fell journals. Fiends Fell charts the struggles of bankruptcy above the cafe and the wonder and

brutality of the hills out beyond. He points to my toast. You get on and eat your scran. I'll talk. Part of the reason Tom thinks his time on Hartside Moor was the most prolific of his life was the vulnerability. You could walk all day and never see another soul and certainly you could die out there. Just the sheer startling overwhelming beauty and the terrifying cold in that house. In winter, apart from the black grouse, there were no birds around, but I had the companionship of the wind. Tom looks up and stands and walks to the heater in the corner.

He grunts as he twists the dial and then shuffles back across the rug and sits. I used to go out towards the end of January every year, he continues. I would hear golden plovers. They tended to nest in the same place and the curlews came at a particular time. Everything returned, he pauses as I finish my last piece of toast and then adds, they were the thing that sort of brought the fels back to life. Despite saying that he knows fuck all about them, Tom believes his poetry would be totally bereft without birds

and knowing fuck all might be the point. I hate these words like soul. I mean, something, like the moment with the black grouse, it sort of triggers something, and I'm not quite sure. It's not knowing what it is, but it gets you into a frame of mind. It enables you to realise something that's going on, and you want to be attuned to it. There's an almost cold coffee left in the pot on his desk

and Tom pours me the last of it then sits back and pushes his hands down into his coat. On the table beyond the window two coal tits are pecking at some seeds. There are moments in Tom's poetry when he transliterates birdsong, drawing up words and sounds unknown to him before that encounter. In New Year's Day, when he looks alone over the sun-white hill, a grouking raven groaks. And in Valentine, written years later when he was living on the Solway at Maryport, a returning curlew cries, I'm here, I hear. Leaning forwards in his chair, Tom says he doesn't really theorise. But with birds, there's a suddenness and a spontaneity. An encounter might suggest a line or a phrase or an image which allows me to compose.

It's immense joy, and I think birds allow you to meditate on the impossible. Beautiful. There you go. In Search of One Last Song, Patrick Galbraith. It really is a beautiful book, and it's kind of, as I say, oddly hopeful. Also, the second time Basil Bunting has been mentioned

on consecutive episodes of Backlisted because Basil provided... Never enough Basil. He provided the epigraph to Jesse Greengrass's The High House, which we talked about last time. He did indeed. There he was there. Yeah, well, it's the North.

Anyway, in search of one last song, Britain's disappearing birds and the people trying to save them, Patrick Galbraith, 1899 from William Collins. Today, you find us in the Swat district of northwestern Pakistan in late May 1963. It's 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, and there's very little shade. We're in the mountain passes above Peshawar, about 7,000 feet above sea level, and the air is thick with the scent of pine resin. In front of us, a young woman on a bicycle pulls off the dusty

road and comes to a stop under a weeping willow. She unpacks a large water bottle from her pannier and begins drinking thirstily. Full Tilt is the first of Dervla Murphy's 26 books and it consists of a journal she kept on the three and a half thousand miles, six month long journey she made by bicycle from her home in Lismore Island to Delhi in India in 1963, traversing Yugoslavia, Island to Delhi in India in 1963, traversing Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan on her trusty bike, Rosinanti, known throughout as Ros. So as you say, you set off for India to fulfil this childhood ambition. The problem was it was the coldest winter, 62, 63. I know, that was a very unfortunate coincidence. How cold was it? Describe it to me. unfortunate coincidence. How cold was it? Describe it to me. Well, I can remember cycling into Rouen with an icicle, a very long icicle hanging off the end of my nose. I mean, maybe that says enough.

Age 31 when she sets off, Intrepid doesn't begin to describe her approach to travel. Knowing no language other than English and being born seemingly without fear, she suffers at various times from frostbite, broken ribs, heat stroke and violent assaults from animals and humans, but somehow manages to fulfil her childhood dream of cycling to India and never loses her belief in the basic goodness of people. Full Tilt's mix of spontaneity and unselfconscious humour have made it a much-loved classic and one that regularly appears on lists of both people's favourite travel and cycling books. As Michael Palin has observed, it began the career of one of the very best chroniclers of life on Earth. And we should say, shouldn't we, that effectively this is a somewhat belated tribute episode to Durban Murphy,

because she only died at the age of 90 a few months ago. She died in May this year, 2022. So it's an absolute delight to be talking about this book and about her. I'm going to ask Felicity, I think, first, when did you first read Full Tilt? I remember being given it for christmas the year before i went to india just after leaving school and looking back it was a very odd choice of book for my parents to give me because i'm pretty sure they wouldn't have been happy for me to take off my bike with a gun um but i just you know it made the trip that we were planning which was going around sort of India by third class train look very tame indeed and it sort of gave me a bit of FOMO before we'd even set off and then I didn't read it again for quite a while until I got into travel writing myself and I rediscovered it and when I rediscovered it then I wanted to read everything she'd ever written and

I sort of jumped about and read her more recent things and as an old, you know, an older woman and etc. And I admired her so much that I sent her a long letter along with a copy of my latest book, which is also a cycling adventure of much more modest proportions. And I'm so sad that I don't think it ever would have got to her. I'm not suggesting that's what finished her off, my letter, but I admired her so hugely. Caroline, can you remember when you first read one of her books or became aware of her as a person? I do remember. And it was a paperback. Flamingo published a series of paperbacks with quite nice sort of watercoloury type covers. And it was the one on Ethiopia, in Ethiopia with a mule, and I was an A-level student. And I only remember fragments of what the book was about. But what I do remember is kind of how

it made me feel, because she was just so good at travelling alone, which is something I've done for years now. But in, you know, sort of travelling in remote areas and how character building it is. now, but in, in, you know, sort of traveling in remote areas and how character building it is. And it was quite formative for me, this book that I remember. And she, she just seems so fearless and she's an only child like I am. And I think that sort of somehow resonated with me as well. I think what she did with me was she instilled a confidence. And then a bit later as a bookseller, I was a bookseller for about six years. ran the the floor which had the travel section in it and I would just cherry pick paragraphs and I was basically working behind the counter and I started to travel back and forth to India about that time as well and that was when I read Full Tilt I think

and then much later when I was living in North Yorkshire I started to collect hardback travel books as a sort of hobby buying them in that bookshop in Sedba, Westwood Books in Cumbria. And I've discovered just recently, I have more of her books than any other travel writer, just I think because she's so prolific. I would like to say to the managers of bookshops who try to prevent their staff reading at the tills, what a mistake you're making. Culture, you're suppressing cultural development many decades later i love that caroline i i love the idea that you know you could sneak in 20 minutes of durver on a quiet afternoon um and then act upon it years later

yeah mitch do you did you ever meet durver murphy and no i never did and i it's weird i i you know through the late 80s and into the early 90s when i was also a book selling she was the most prominent living female travel writer i think and we used to sell durvler murphy books hand over fist in waterstones back back in back in the day but curiously i'd never read full tilt until we werely, I'd never read Full Tilt until we were preparing for this. I'd never read the first one. And I really wish I had, because I really liked the couple of books of hers I've read. I've read the Northern Irish book, A Place Apart,

which is a very different kind of book. Again, her fearlessness of going in and not really kind of caring about who she's talking to, just listening. And then I think she did, in the end, have to leave Northern Ireland, slightly kind of under certain sort of threats of... I'm sure that she would have...

If any woman would have stand up to threats, it would be Dirk Le Boeuf. But I think the thing that really struck me about reading Full Tilt was understanding where her urge to travel came from. The thing that Full Tilt showed me where the urge to travel, her urge to travel came from. The thing that Full Tilt showed me is she's much more interesting psychologically than I was expecting this, the story of her, which I'm sure will come on to the story of her childhood, why she didn't go traveling on a bike until she was 31 years old. Well, I'd never read Full Tilt before

and it made me very nostalgic it gave me three hits of nostalgia it made me nostalgic for the world she describes within the book the a world which is unto me it seemed even as i was listening to it has turned for the worse in all sorts of ways the country she's described which since she wrote about them have been ruined by various wars or catastrophes it made me nostalgic for a world which was so undiscovered that it could be such fresh material for a writer of this sort, writing a book that probably wasn't called travel writing when it was published. And it made me nostalgic for travel writing this good.

It made me remember what travel writing this good. It made me remember what travel writing was like and everything I've just said is contained in the very first sentence. This is the only bit of this book I'm going to read on this. I'm going to let everybody else do it today but the very first sentence of this book is, on my 10th birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents. And a few days later, I decided to cycle to India. Now that's one of the greatest first sentences of any book we've ever featured on Backlisted, folks. I have to give you an insight. I'm going to read it again. On my 10th birthday, a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents. And a few days later, I decided to cycle to India. There's no bit of that sentence that isn't doing some heavy lifting,

as people would say nowadays. It's an absolutely magnificent book. In terms of the clarity of observation and then expression, which is what you want from just not just travel writing, I suppose. It's what you want from writing, just travel writing I suppose it's what you want from writing good writing of any kind I'd just like to ask Nikki as our resident cycling expert had you read this book before there's other cycling experts in the room just let it be known well our resident one you are our resident one to be fair that is true um I hadn't read the book before and I haven't read that many cycling travel books.

I tend to read cycling biographies, but not travel books. Right. And no, and I was really taken by it. And it made me feel I'm the worst. That's what I took away. I am such a wuss. She is the hardest woman I've ever come across in my entire life nicky did you like the fact that she actually had the gears taken off her bike i mean literally that is the clip that is the clip i've got to play i only realized that i only realized that after she'd gone over the himalaya i'm not a cyclist but even I was a little shocked at that.

Yeah, this is her talking in 1993 about her bicycle, Roz, on Desert Island Discs. The bicycle, well, certainly the bicycle you went out with in the first place to India is a very ordinary affair. No gears? No gears. No, it had originally three gears, but I had them removed because in those days they were quite fragile, easily upset. And they would have been more trouble than they were worth. I mean, the roads then weren't as they are now.

She had a name. You called her Ross. It seems to me, reading about the journey, that you carried her as often as she carried you. Well, not quite. But you did carry her across raging rivers and up mountains. Well, yes, now and again. Caroline, let me ask you a question then from the writing point of view. I think Della Murphy does a brilliant impression of seeming not to pedal while pedalling furiously. How does she achieve the effects that she achieves within the books?

How much is she throwing away of the experience to get what's on the page? And do you believe her what she says at the beginning, which is, I just kind of transferred what I wrote in my notebooks into this? That's a really good question and I'm glad that you asked it because I do believe her and I don't generally. It's because it's in the diary format. So the diary format that she uses these entries, I think they inspire a belief. You believe that she's being honest. It's not like with lots of travel writers of her era where, you know, 20 years later, they're recalling a massive conversation they had on a train somewhere. And you think, well, that's interesting, but I don't believe it. But with Dervla, you know, it was written down at the time.

And she's just she's so honest. You know, she admits it's not encyclopedic. She admits she doesn't know what this shrub is she admits you know the nameless the nameless meal we had last night you know she mentioned she doesn't try to sort of impress you and I think that's what is her great appeal to me anyway as a travel writer she is the woman I would like to see coming around the mountain because yes she was hard as nails but you know you're going to have a good drink with Dervla and she's she's she's going to tell you how it was and I just think it's believable and I think that with a lot of travel writing

you know we know it people have admitted to it Bruce Chapman, Sybil Bedford great writers but you can't believe it all and there's something with Dervla I do believe it I think I think it is true and Felicity does one read her for what she's seeing or for how she's telling you what she's seeing oh it's interesting because for many travel writers I would say that it's their vision of what what they you know how how the spin that they're putting on it and i do find she expresses some very interesting and contradictory opinions in this book but i think that she also writes in a beautifully straightforward way as caroline said it does feel very honest and she sort of she reserves her more sort of literary turns of phrase, almost exclusively for landscapes and sort of flora and fauna.

And she's, there's a lovely description of the massive ranges of the southern Hindu Kush burning against the sky like a white fire. And just that's beautiful and it stands out because mostly it does feel like the kind of diary that you would keep when you were writing a book or, you know, or just writing to friends as she clearly did. She had such a sort of fresh, a fresh enthusiasm for everywhere she went. I mean, very occasionally, it stands out that she sort of is grumpy with people or doesn't take to people. But a modern writer, I don't think, and Caroline will probably have opinions on this, a modern writer wouldn't put those things in because you would be thinking gosh well that's my perspective and I should acknowledge my privilege or my bias or whatever

it is Dervla puts it in and it sometimes can feel what would be described as problematic today but it's beautifully honest and refreshing in another way and I would agree I love reading that even if her opinions and my opinions don't always coincide. She does an incredible thing, I think, from a, you know, from a nonfiction writer or a memoirist point of view. She manages to fill the book with her personality. And yet you can still see everything crystal clear. And she's almost like Orwell. She writes nothing like Orwell, but you feel you know her, but she's not getting in the way of what she's writing about.

And that's a good trick if you can pull it off. And very few writers can, I think. How did she describe herself? Or is it John Murray, her publisher, who described her as interviewing her as trying to open an oyster with a damp bus ticket? I love that. She gives sort of only so much of herself.

And yet I find that enough to get a sense of her as an enormously entertaining travel companion. It's also fascinating to me that what she does is she doesn't give you the flora and the fauna. She doesn't give you in flora and the fauna. She doesn't give you, in that Robert Byron kind of, possibly even Paul Theroux, here's what Daniel Defoe said about, here's what Marco Polo said about this landscape.

It's this extraordinary sequence of memorable details. Her sunburnt arm and the guy pouring motor oil on her sunburnt arm. Or there's a little bit later on where she just says she finds a dead body. And it's the most brilliant. We might even read it later. It's just the most brilliant bit of kind of prose. Oh, yes, that's right.

She doesn't even waste the whole paragraph on the dead body. And the smells. She captures the smells of the travel. You know, she obviously chooses to sleep in kind of tea shops, as she keeps calling them. And the heat, you know, the sense of heat and equally the sense of cold, it's really refreshing when you, a narrative to read, when you realise how much kind of learning often gets kind of accreted around travel narratives. And this is, there's something really,

there's just something incredibly direct and strong about the way she writes. We should read some, shouldn't we? I'm going to ask Felicity in a minute if she'll read us an extract. But Caroline, I noticed on this internet call that you are in possession of if not quite a first edition a very early edition of Full Tilt and it's in the tradition of this show that we like to read the blurb or the jacket copy and the earlier we go the happier we are so I don't have this to hand but I wonder whether

you would treat us to the the jacket copy on an early edition of full tilt happily um so this is this is a 1966 edition um durvler murphy was given a bicycle and an atlas for her 10th birthday but it was not i've heard this before i know where they got that idea and an atlas for her 10th birthday. But it was not until 21 years later that she was able to realise her secret ambition to bicycle to India. In January 1963, one of the worst winters in memory, she started off from Dunkirk. And in an introductory chapter, she tells us of her arduous progress across frozen Europe. us of her arduous progress across frozen Europe. This vivid account of her extraordinary journey is based on the day-to-day diary she kept while riding through Europe, Persia, Afghanistan, and over the Himalayas into Pakistan and onto India. Throughout the journey, her approach and reactions to many different people she met were based on a belief in the natural and instinctive

friendliness of even the most outlandish characters, and her descriptions of the people she encountered and the countries through which she peddled reflects her humanity and perception. Dervla Murphy often went hungry, suffered from heat exhaustion and extreme cold, but she never failed in resourcefulness and spirit, and from the pages of this original book, she emerges as a highly individual intelligent

like it and amusing human being i think that's such a nice that's pretty great yeah i think that sort of sums her up well done john murray yeah i like that there's a reference isn't there john murray the john murray who was the publisher of john Murray at that time, he said there was no question in his mind from the first moment they met that she was a quote-unquote John Murray author. Articulate and eccentric are the two things that seem to endear her to him. Felicity, could you read us a bit so we can hear how that translates into prose? I would be delighted. So this is when she's in afghanistan which is her

absolute favorite country i think she is in love with afghanistan um we left carbel at 7 a.m in perfect cycling weather with a brilliant warm sun a cool breeze behind us and the air crisp and clear beyond a doubt today's run up the gorband Valley was the most wonderful cycle ride of my life. Surely this must have been the Garden of Eden. It's so beautiful that I was too excited to eat the lunch my hostess had packed for me, and spent the day in a sort of enchanted trance. High hills looked down on paddy fields and vivid patches of young wheat and neat vineyards, on orchards of apricot, peach, almond, apple and cherry trees smothered in blossom and on woods of willows, ash, birch and synget, their new leaves shivering and glistening in wind and sun. Lean alert youths, their clothes all rags and their bearing all pride, guard herds of cattle

and nervous handsome horses and donkeys with woolly delicately tripping foals and fat-tailed sheep with hundreds of bounding lambs and long-haired goats whose kids are amongst the most delightful of young animals. At intervals there are breaks in the walls of sheer rock on either side and then one sees the more distant peaks of the Hindu Kush riding to 18,000 feet. Their snow is so brilliant that they are like light itself, miraculously solidified and immobilised. Little mud villages remain invisible until you reach them, so perfectly do they blend with their background, and the occasional huge square mud fortresses, traveling hilltops, recall the cruel valor of this region's past and have the same rigid,

proud beauty as the men who built them. The road, narrow and rough, alternately runs level with the flashing river and leaps up mountainsides to give unimpeded views for miles and miles along the valley. This is the part of Afghanistan I was most eager to see, but in my wildest imaginings, I never thought any landscape could be so magnificent. If I am murdered en route, it will have been well worthwhile. But the writing! writing is so great come on the writing is so plain but great yeah

oh and that's me that comic that comic beat she's just she just she's so matter of fact about everything it just takes it all in her stride i have to say it's it reminds me it's the ability to sleep anywhere as well this Oh, it's incredible. I kept putting exclamation marks throughout the book. You know, in the corner of a chaikana where, you know, where the tribesmen have left their rifles stacked in the corner and there's only men, but, you know, she sort of curls up and has a nap. And then here she says, it's very, very hot,

and it's the chapter Jewel with the Sun. And she says, then saying, to hell with snakes, I curled up on the deep soft sand and slept soundly from 12 to 3.30. And I just think this is the greatest traveller's gift, to be able to just sleep anywhere, because this is what makes the person want more than anything. That's what I mean. You know, she has a wonderful talent as well as a humorist

for what I would describe as a sentence which turns the reader, the end of which the reader does a screeching double take. The first sentence I've read from the beginning of the book is a good example of that. And Caroline, that example you just said about the snakes there, you know, to hell with snakes and I slept for three hours. There's so much packed into the phrase to hell with snakes. It's very pacy.

That you're past it before you think, wait a minute, what? Or the episode where she's in, I think she's in Iran at this point and she has to use her gun on a chap who makes an attack on her virtue overnight. And that is dispensed in, I think, a sentence. It is. He's lit up by the moonlight. She says there's a man lit up by the moonlight and she sees him.

And then she says something disparaging about how a man you know such a man as him should have been easily able to overpower her but hasn't and i just thought okay so that was presumably a rape attempt that you've just sort of swept on oh well there we are just what i mean that's the funny thing isn't it is that you were not even funny at any there are so many points in this book where a whole book could have been written around one incident a rape attempt a knife attempt a dead body like there's so many of these things and they are all just kind of thrown away so can we just talk a bit if she goes into much more detail about the bus rides yeah she has to go on. And the terrible thing. Well, you know, famously, she travelled with a gun for many years. She travels with a gun in full tilt.

But in later years, she may have modified her view towards it. Let's hear what she said. This is from about five, six years ago, I think. Two of my friends had said to me, you really had better bring your gun. And, I mean was it was pretty useful when the when the wolves appeared I mean it wouldn't have occurred to me to be afraid of meeting wolves then when you do meet them I mean you're absolutely scared and I've never

never carried a gun since I decided it, though it had been useful on two occasions. I sold it in Afghanistan. So I became an arms dealer. I decided that probably on balance, it was more dangerous because it could so easily be taken from and used against you. So now I carry a knife. Oh, the timing. The comic timing on that.

It's absolutely perfect, isn't it? So I've got a question for Lister. You said, for you, that you said earlier on that you felt maybe there were little bits that were problematic, as I suppose there often are in books that are 60 years old. What struck me about this is I can imagine Full Tilt, had it been written by somebody else, being much worse than it is.

You know, she's very open-minded and accepting for 1963 stroke 65 when the book was written I and I think that's one of the things that has traveled very well no pun intended you know it has it is far more humane than I not than I was expecting but then then then I was taken aback by how modern she felt in her sensibility. I think that there are some bits which I suspect might be edited out of modern editions just because of linguistic change. I think her opinions I found interesting. I listened to a few more recent interviews with her

and I think we'll probably come on to talk about how her sort of attraction towards what she described as I think she would describe as the traditional and some people might call the simple life and that sometimes gives her a sort of a split an attraction towards the idea of the way that things have always been done in these countries. But of course, her own knowledge of the value of sort of freedom and democracy and literacy. And sometimes she there's a time in Pakistan, I think, where she's staying with a middle class family, and the daughter is desperate to train to be a doctor and the mother is keen that the doctor the daughter should be able to do this and the father who she very much respects and

says you know is a very wise and kindly man does not want his daughter to do that wants her to go and get married and derver sort of seems to be drawn towards this idea of a sort of benevolent benevolent dictatorship um in a lot of instances in the book, which is very interesting because she seems to be completely honest about her opinions. And she later does say, you know, we don't appreciate the equality that women have in the West, which, you know, in 1960, I wouldn't say it was complete equality, but she seems to believe is. So she's very happy to contradict herself in a way that feels very honest and fresh and it is interesting to see someone's unvarnished opinions as opposed to her thinking maybe this isn't the

right thing to write maybe I'll just leave that out and the diary format contributes to that you see her sort of workings and her you know her the fact that she is torn on these questions yeah because she's there's a passage where she leaves, she says that she's feeling miserable because she's left the Hindu Kush behind. Yet the past weeks have given me, this is obviously Afghanistan she's talking about, have given me something that I know will prove permanent. It may sound ridiculous,

but I feel I've been privileged to see man at his best, still in position of the sort of liberty and dignity that we've exchanged for what it pleases us to call progress. Even a brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to help understand where we are. Living in the West, it's now impossible for most of us to envisage our own past by a mere exercise of the imagination. So we're rather like adults who've forgotten the childhood that shaped them. And that increases the unnaturalness of our lives. I mean, let's be honest, it feels like a

bit of a prelapsarian world, although there's poverty, that the fact that the countries, you know, what happens, the Russians are already in Afghanistan at the time she's writing, she goes through Iran, you know, she goes through Pakistan, Kashmir, all of these regions that have become now for us some of the most contested and devastated countries in the world, even Yugoslavia. She's making this journey in the year that I was born. And in the space of my lifetime, the change is just terrifying. Caroline, I feel that she, you know, in this book, she travels hopefully, you know. Is that true of the later books?

You know, does her tone change as she grows older? Does she lose that optimism? I don't think she does because I think that she's just, I think I just wanted to go back to what Felicity was saying about how she's different. I think it's got a lot to do with where she's just i think i just wanted to go back to what felicity was saying about where how she's different i think it's got a lot to do with where she's come from so other travelers in the 60s who were going there were coming from quite privileged backgrounds and from very different family backgrounds and educational backgrounds to do i'm going slightly

off piece it but i think this is quite key to her so you know bruce chatwin was there in the 60s eric newby was there just before leslie blanche went there on a commission for the sunday times eric newby kind of dropped a rolex in a pot of you know bubbling goats stew or something chatwin was tracing byron he was yeah yeah yeah and like derv He was doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, Dervla was doing none of this. She's, you know,

she's not public school. She's from a very different background. She's sort of, that's why she's so good. That's why she's so interesting. And I think that she can't shake

any of that off. So, of course, that goes through her work coming forward. And, you know, later on when she's writing about Palestine, you know, she digs for the underdog always.

And I think that she definitely hangs on to that. And that's in this book. And it's just so depressing in a way to read it because what's happening in Afghanistan now, you know, she was very, so depressing. She was very lucky to be there in the 60s where there was this very brief period of relative peace. You know, when Leslie Blanche goes,

she has this massive feast with the king and stuff. I mean, people are doing very interesting things there, not just on the hippie trail, you know, the people who are writing about it. And I think, you know, she's completely different to most other travellers who were there at that time. Completely agree. This is not the hippie traveller.

This is a young woman whose father was the county librarian for Wexford. So she grew up, he died when she was a teenager. And her mother was an invalid for all, effectively all Dervis's life. So she then looked after her invalided mother. all effectively all Derva's life so she then looked after her invalided mother the other the other book that I I mean people haven't read Wheels Within Wheels the story of her childhood and looking after her mother is what is one of the best things I've read about dealing with a sick parent and again brutally honest about how much her mother annoys her and how and how I mean but in the end it's full of

tenderness and love both towards the loss of her father but also ultimately the loss of her mother but what you need to sort of understand i think when you pick full tilt up which i didn't until is that she's been like forced to do that thing of giving up her 20s to look after an invalided parent and now suddenly she can go back to the bike get on the bike and ride to it and even though it's the 1963 the worst winter on record and she gets frostbite and she has bicycles hanging off her nose and she gets terrible why does she leave in winter because she can't wait to get away that's it isn't it she can't wait to get away. That's it, isn't it? She can't. She's got to go, man. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it now.

31. Time to go. We should ask you, Felicity, when you get off your bike, as you must occasionally, surely do. Sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. Do you make notes every day? Actually, I found this revisiting of Dörbler quite inspirational because genuinely I did think this is what I must do.

I would be a better writer if I sat down at the end of the day and instead of sort of, you know, planning. She's got a lovely sense of calm about her. I think she said there's some delay somewhere and she said I'd set out to enjoy myself by seeing the world not to make any or break any record and I just love the fact that she really you do get the sense that she's there to enjoy herself she's never in a rush if someone says you know come and stay with me on my farm for six weeks she thinks oh why not that'll be an adventure or go on a camel ride or whatever she's endlessly enthusiastic

and curious and happy to sort of shelve her plans for something but I think that certainly when I do books I am always in a rush there's always a deadline you can never quite you're always sort of playing sort of catching chasing your own tail with logistics and I thought I must do this instead of sitting down and doing logistics or social media in the evenings I am going to sit down and properly write a diary because I do it sometimes and then sometimes events overtake you and etc etc and you're too tired Devla is going to make me a better writer I love that Caroline I've got a question for you so do you find that when you are travelling, that you have to watch out for looking for things that you think will make good copy? Because one of the things I like about Full Tilt

is there is a sense of a lovely tension between simply recording anything quotidian that happens and then occasionally dropping in something that, as we've said, someone else would milk, right? So there's a series of entries which are quite boring for pace reasons, I hasten to add. They're clearly deliberately quite neutral, so that then the

mention of the dead body lands in a huge bang, right? And then it's moved on from it's all about pace. It's totally fascinating to me. So when you're researching, when you're travelling, is it easy to kind of think, okay, that's useful, or I can push that away, or I can use that? It's funny with her pacing, isn't it? Because there's one section where she's got the broken ribs, and then she's bitten by a scorpion and then stung by a hornet. And this all happens really quickly. But again, she's then on to the next thing. It's remarkable. I don't know. I mean, I travel in countries like Tajikistan and Kazakhstan and these sorts of places, which are still, there is the opportunity to go to places where you won't meet another Western traveler. And great stories do present themselves.

But I'm quite journalistic in that I'm always, I don't want to put myself front and center in the books too much and i want to profile the people that i'm traveling with um meaning on a train or you know seeking somebody out in their home to talk about something they're cooking or whatever but i i think it's you have to have a mixture don't you and she does that in this book often it's colonels because they're the people who speak english that she sort of she's she's um profiling but she does that and i i think that's the important thing is getting the balance and nowadays it's quite unfashionable isn't it you know to use i too much and you know you've got to make sure you're profiling and i think that's what makes an interesting book as other people not not you caroline could you read us something from full tilt yes you particularly

enjoy well i just admire i am a light packer, but I'm not like Dervla. So this, I underlined this section because it is quite remarkable. She's setting off from Kabul on the 9th of May. And she says, when I set off for Jalalabad in the morning, I'm leaving behind the two pannier bags and knapsack and all kit that would be superfluous during the next few months.

I'll collect it on the return journey, at which point I was like, oh, my God, she's coming back in November. My friends here are paralysed with horror at the thought of anyone going on a five-month trip with only a saddlebag of luggage. But the fact is that the further you travel, the less you find you need. And I see no sense in frolicking around the Himalayas with a load of inessentials. So I'm down to,

and she's got her packing list at the back of the book in full. But at this point she says, I'm down to two pens, writing paper, Blake's poems. Yes. Blake's poems. I love that. that oh that was good blake's poems come before map and passport blake's poem yeah map passport camera comb toothbrush good and then which is what really shocks me one spare pair of nylon pants and

nylon shirts and there's plenty of room left over for food. One pair of pants and one shirt. I mean, that is... She stank. It was nylon. Exactly. You only have to go on one run. I mean, she says there's plenty of room left over for food as required from day to day. It's a good life that teaches you how little you need to be healthy and happy, if not particularly clean, exclamation mark.

The thing is, Caroline, when you're having to push your bicycle up the Himalayas using a head strap, you need to make sure you do not carry those exclamation marks. So it's all very important. You don't want it, do you? I mean, it's just remarkable. And underneath that, I've put perfection in very light pencil.

Yeah, yeah, beautiful. I love, one of the things i loved about this book is how she to me she totally underplays the physical effort required in doing this yeah she's not asking for sponsorship you know what i mean she's not kind of doing what people would do these days not like us listeners people do these sort of marathon endurance things now probably akin to what she did you know some people do these horrendous kind of marathon endurance yeah iron man stuff but she was of that kind of post-war generation which um you know we don't like we don't like to talk about these things it's not a big deal and i'll just brush it under the carpet and that's shown isn't it by all the sort of horrendous things she sees that she doesn't. She just flings off because that's not important and that doesn't affect who I am.

And I think her kind of the whole endurance feat is part of that same thing as brushing apart the kind of, you know, the death and the and the kind of the rape or near rape incidents, which we don't hear very much of. Yes. And speaking of brushing things away, could we hear from her daughter? We should give the background is that she has a daughter. She has a child, which she brings up on her own. And the daughter is not allowed to know who the daughter knows who the father is, but she's not allowed to tell anyone. It was an issue, definitely. Not so much the being, quote-unquote, illegitimate,

but the fact that nobody knew who my father, supposedly knew who my father was. Yeah, that was not pleasant. And it was not something I forgive my mother easily for either, actually, because I think it was outrageous to have a child in those circumstances because I was not allowed to tell anybody. a child in those circumstances because I was not allowed to tell anybody. They go on to travel together and she takes five years off to bring her up and then they go travelling together.

And then takes her to southern India. I guess, but I think the thing about that clip, which is so interesting, is that for all the seeming lightheartedness, for the effortlessness, for the disguising of the physical labour required to get to the point to throw away all mentions of it, bar one or two, she has that steely-eyed, icy-hearted, She has that steely-eyed, icy-hearted, artistic desire to be the artist rather than be the nice person. And there's a detail I absolutely loved in the documentary that's up on Vimeo, which was made about maybe 10 years ago. Maybe 2016.

Okay, so six, seven years ago. Where the current John Murray, her publisher, says that she was like the late Scott Walker, the singer, in that she would have her phone on in order to get a book finished. She would just get rid of everything, every distraction, everyone, everyone. And Scott Walker famously used to have his phone on for an hour a week from like 5 p.m. till 6 p.m. And if you wanted to speak to him, you had to get in there. And the rest of the time he was off, you know,

thinking about European decay or whatever Scott Walker liked to think about. Dervla, even better, her publisher says, well, you know, it was one thing. The phone would be on and she'd tell you, well, you can get me at 5am until 5.30am. You used to ring and think, what am I doing at five in the morning up trying to wait for Dervla?

But I can only say myself as somebody trying to land a book at the moment that I envy her the strength of character to be able to go, why don't you all sod off for three months? Just go away and leave me alone. I'm not available. Ever harder in the world, you know. Felicity, I don't know how you feel near the end of a book. Is that is that your experience? I really envy her that and that refusal. She never got a computer. She did everything.

She wrote it longhand and then she typed it up and corrected it. That is just the dream for me. So, yeah, very envious. And I think that it must have been, it also must have been more in the way she travelled because I don't know how Caroline feels about this, but when you're away, you're never quite away. There's sort of, there's's always you should check your email for work related reasons you know and people have got opinions online about where you go where you're going what you should be doing etc the idea of just going just sodding off somewhere is incredibly

effective greatly appealing let me ask you john you might you'll have a view on this i'm sure where does she stand in relation to i I mean, we're all relatively senior. We can remember the heyday of travel writing in the probably the 80s into the 90s. Several names have come up while we've been talking chat went through, you know, the Rabin, I guess, from the same period. We featured Kingdom by the Sea on Backlisted a few months ago. from the same period we featured Kingdom by the Sea on, that listed a few months ago. Is Dervla doing what they were doing in the 80s or is she doing something different?

Is it journalism that we would have called travel writing 20 years later or is it travel writing or what is it? Is it memoir? That's really interesting. That's a very interesting question i i think it it i have to say i reading reading this reading full tilt uh i was quite surprised by just how um single-minded it was i don't think she feel that you don't feel that she's doing what she wants to do there's a wonderful moment in one of the interviews i've read recently where she said why what was motivating she said

desire for solitude she said and she sort of then qualifies that she said well not you know not to be away from people but to be i think to be on my own and to and to be able to take on things at my own pace and in my own way and on my own terms sort of a almost like an agency thing that she wants control over over stuff and the getting on a bike and doing that gave her that freedom it kind of has to be travel writing because you're you know she's going to different countries and writing about them and you're learning a little bit about the everyday life she's very good the everyday life she's very good on everyday life she's very good on how people what they eat for their evening meals

it's not put into this historical perspective it is quite solipsistic it is definitely yes i agree she has an absolute belief in herself and i guess that's what she's sort of in those years of tending her mother and she writes about this this, I guess, in Wheels Within Wheels, that she becomes a person ready to go out into the world. But, you know, she decides to have a child. She doesn't really think about the consequences for the child of having a child under those circumstances. And I guess she doesn't really think about the consequences in the end of her traveling. But when she does write about them as felicity said she writes about them in a really conflicted way she's not clear about what she feels i mean felicity it seems to me that

she is this is a silly thing to say because we don't have to put one in front of the other but she's a writer first and a traveler second the travel The travel is the wood she throws on the fire to burn for the writing. Yeah, I think that she, when you read interviews with her and you read her autobiography, the thing that has always impelled her from the earliest ages, storytelling and sort of even before she could write was this sort of narrative about, I think it was teddy bears that lived in a tree and et cetera. And I mean,

that ran true to me because I wrote some terrible novels as a, quite a small child on an Amstrad word processor. And she said, quite honestly, she had all of this. Evocative detail. Very similar to what Devla used in her later years, probably.

Yeah. She just felt the need to write. And she also had, as I said, this boundless curiosity to write and she also had as i said this boundless curiosity about the world around her as you said that was fuel for that fire but i think even if she'd been stuck if her mother had lived for you know 20 more years and she'd been stuck in lismore i think she probably would have written i think she just had that burning fire inside her that's the the old old argument i'm always having people say it's i'm courageous

it doesn't come into it because i mean you're only courageous if you do something you're afraid of i am fearless when it comes to physical and that is a totally different thing i mean you could say courage is a virtue in a sense you're overcoming fear if you're fearless there's nothing to overcome I mean you're just built actually I'm afraid with that we must leave Dervla and indeed Ros behind and offer a huge thank you to Felicity and Caroline

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And this week's new patrons include Philip Hill. Thank you, Philip. Marty Ray. Thank you. Peter Carr. you, Philip. Marty Ray. Thank you. Peter Carr. John Tunster. Mark Field.

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Let's come back to that next time. So I would like to ask Caroline, before we go, is there anything you would like to say about Full Tilt or Dervla Murphy that we have not been able to feature in this episode? Is there any last message you would like to give our listeners as to why they should read this book or read her? Goodness, that's so difficult. But I think you have to relish unpredictability like Dervla. I think that's what comes across in this book so strongly. The world's unpredictable. And if you're going to somewhere, you know, in the 1960s, she did like uh the hindu kush then it will be unpredictable but you have to relish it perfect felicity uh

should should people read this yes please read it she takes a plane into the uh himalayas at one point and she feels guilty she feels that she hasn't earned that altitude and i think the idea the why i love cycling so much is that you just, you feel like you've earned every sort of landscape, every view, every tea house stop with your rancid ghee and your, you know, fried eggs. I just think that's, you know, think more about the mode of travel as opposed to the destination. Yes, very good.

Very good. Hear, hear. Okay, so listen, thanks, everybody. Thank you, Caroline. Thank you, Felicity. yes very good very good here okay so listen thanks everybody uh thank you carol thank you felicity this has just been another delightful delightful episode thank you so much we're going to leave you now you might keep listening to the very end maybe you'll hear a voice you recognize johnny any last message the joyousness of this whole trip having cost she puts at the end, the total expenditure from 14th of January 1963 to the 8th of July 1963, £64, 7 shillings and 10 pence. She didn't claim that back.

Anyway, thanks very much, everybody. This has been wonderful. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much. Bye. Bye-bye. I think that D'Urvula will be seen as one of the most honest chroniclers of life on the planet. There's absolutely no chance that someone's going to suddenly say, well,

she wasn't as good as we all thought she was. I think it's going to go the other way. I think a lot of people are going to say she's much better than we thought she was.