“Anthony Nolan is the the charity that makes lifesaving connections between patients in need and incredible strangers ready to donate their stem cells.”
This was a such a wonderful, uplifting service despite the desperate urgency to so much of the work this charity does to save lives. We cried, we laughed we sang.
The service was in St Pancras Church in Euston Road, and the choir leading us through the evening was the B Positive Choir, whose singers, all connected with sickle cell disease, sing to raise awareness of the disease and the importance of blood donation. Their song, Rise Up, was so energising.
And it was not the only great pleasure of the evening. The service was rich with performers, all brilliantly entertaining, but most moving of all was the account of everything Fin and his family had had to go through. His mother described the race to find the donors and cures they needed to help the suddenly, desperately ill four-year old survive. It sounded such an exhausting, stressful time but there at the end of all those years was Fin, taking his mother’s place at the podium to read a story about snowmen, his voice as strong as a young oak … and all of us speechless with emotion and applause.
It was bright and sunny and cold today as I drove through London. Thinking back over the drive, two pauses in particular have stayed with me. Both were at the ends of bridges. The first was at the pedestrian crossing, by the roundabout at the end of Lambeth Bridge.
A week earlier, on a freezing evening, I’d seen the roundabout and its occupant, a magnificent date palm, surrounded in cranes and flashing lights. A few days later the roundabout was still surrounded by barricades and lights, but in addition there’d been the sad sight of the palm on its side, ready to be taken away to who knew where. This afternoon those flashing lights and barricades had gone – so had the palm. The roundabout stood empty, with no sign of the breezy fronds that I often saw from a distance, flying beneath the Union Jack on the Houses of Parliament behind. The sight of that emptiness felt as though a friend had been taken away, with no time to say goodbye.
A slow crawl down the Embankment followed, with updates on the Covid enquiry for company. There were light clouds in the sky, and on the radio Boris Johnson was saying that at first sight the incoming Covid storm had looked nothing more than a cloud the size of a man’s hand.
As the traffic inched forward the news had moved on, stopping at the turmoil in Gaza. By Millennium Bridge we too halted, this time to allow a lengthy crocodile of young school children to cross at the lights. The red changed to green, and the green to red, and then back to green as we sat and waited for the smiling line to skip and dawdle its way over the road. As it did so, the cars and the bikes and the lorries watched. There was no hooting, no shouting, no revving of engines – all were as patient as angels, acknowledging and protecting the children of strangers, whose crocodile made the damage to their contemporaries in the Middle East scream more loudly still.
At last the school had crossed, and the traffic inched on through the winter greys of London.
Edited by Ethel Crowley – Foreword by Colin Thubron ( Published by Eland)
“Few people, in any age, can have travelled a wider range of countries so arduously.”Colin Thubron, London 2023
The first book of Dervla Murphy’s that I read was her autobiography Wheels with Wheels. From the start I was gripped by her courage. An only child, born in 1931 in Lismore, Ireland, she had to leave school at the age of 14 to look after her invalid mother. She continued that duty until her mother died in 1962, and then she began to travel.
In this book Ethel Crowley has selected extracts from 24 of Dervla Murphy’s books, arranging them in decades dating from the 1930s to 2015, when she travelled to the Middle East.
Dervla Murphy went just about everywhere, and she never took the easy route anywhere, often preferring to travel by bicycle, or on foot, or with a mule. There was real hardship and there were unenviable lodgings. There were perilous crossings of mountains and rivers. There was danger and isolation, but somehow she just kept going, kept trusting that people would look after her and that all would be well.
“Attempts to control the future seem needlessly to limit its possibilities. If this view were general, anarchy would overtake the world. But one hopes there is room for a minority of non-planners.”
In an extract selected for this book from Wheels within Wheels by Dervla Murphy
Thankfully all was well, or became so, and despite suffering everything from attempted robberies and rapes, to many bone breaks, including a fractured pelvis, and any number of illnesses, she did return from her travels with her notebooks full of observations and conversations to then pass on through her books – the books and her body bearing witness to all that she did.
The privilege of reading Life at Full Tilt is that it selects extracts from each of her books. Until reading this selection I had no idea that Dervla Murphy had travelled to, and written about, places such as Northern Ireland, and Bradford and Birmingham, as well as Cameroon, and Cuba, Afghanistan, Siberia and beyond. I found it fascinating to hear her voice in each, and to see the places through her eyes.
For me, the other pleasure of Life at Full Tilt, are the pages at the beginning and end, all written by those who knew Dervla Murphy well. I loved hearing more about her life and who she was.
Now I have finished reading I am sad to have to put the book down. I shall miss being in the company of such a truly extraordinary traveller, researcher, writer, survivor and genuine voice. The good news is that all the books I have caught glimpses of are out there waiting to be read.
My thanks to Eland for sending me this copy of Life at Full Tilt.
The Phraser 