'I think we over-70s should record our memories'

Writer Dervla Murphy can't understand why the riches bestowed by age aren't more widely acknowledged, while musician Paddy Cole believes experience is helping him get the best out of life. The two ambassadors for this month's Bealtaine Festival talk to SIOBHÁN LONG

PACKING A PISTOL and forwarding spare bicycle tyres to a scattering of your intended destinations mightn’t be the first items on your list when you sit down to plan your next holiday, but traveller and writer Dervla Murphy did just that before she set off on her first cycling expedition back in 1963.

Her plan was to cycle from Paris to Delhi. It was a 4,500-mile jaunt undertaken over 175 days on a budget of $175. This was no two-week siesta in the sun. Lone travellers were few and far between in 1963, and solo women wayfarers were an even rarer sight. Small wonder, then, that Dervla Murphy plotted and planned her expedition with such attention to detail.

Just in the door from her most recent travels – four months in Palestine, where she bunked down in a number of refugee camps and witnessed the full horror of daily life there – Dervla Murphy has lost none of her appetite for exploration. At 77, she might be forgiven for opting for the king-size duvet option, but as anyone who has read her 25 travel books, piquant accounts of her odysseys to Ethiopia, Madagascar, India, South America, Siberia and Cuba (and beyond) will know, Murphy has never been seduced by the lure of 1,000- thread-count sheets. Life is simply too interesting to spend it cosseted in a hotel room, at arm’s length from the action.

“I think that real change happened for me,” Murphy recounts, musing on the way her travels politicised her thinking, “when we were on our way back from a trek in Peru, and happened to be passing Three Mile Island half an hour before it all went wrong. After that, going home through Boston, I was persuaded by an anti-nuclear power lobby to do a book which was anti-nuclear power.”

Murphy published Race to the Finish? The Nuclear Stakesin 1982. "That was a real turning point, I think, and since then, most of my books have been in some way political," she says.

MURPHY HAS WRITTEN compellingly about her encounters with various travellers whom she senses are trying to get away from something rather than travel towards something. Travel as a means of escape is far less interesting than journeying into adventure, towards the unknown, she believes. And maybe it’s this indelible sense of adventure that has led to her taking on a role as ambassador for this year’s month-long Bealtaine Festival.

A celebration of creativity in older people, hosted by Age Opportunity, Bealtaine this year has the luxury of having the support of both Dervla Murphy and musician Paddy Cole.

Murphy’s interweaving of acute observation and social commentary into her travel books has yielded a readership which is evidently hungry for these three-dimensional pen pictures. Writing is central to her life and she believes it has a crucial role to play in many of her contemporaries’ lives too.

“I think for our generation particularly, let’s say the over-70s, it’s really important to record their childhood and adolescent memories of an Ireland that’s completely gone,” she says. “I’ve noticed that I might mention things casually to my grandchildren about my life at their age, and their eyes would be out on stalks. When I think about it, I was born 10 years after the 1921 Treaty was signed. I was born into a very new Ireland, so my generation has sort of grown up with Ireland.

“I think we over-70s should record our memories. I can remember when de Valera was on his election campaign in Lismore, and the crowds who would travel in on donkey carts, on foot and on bicycles, to hear Dev speak, long before television came in.

“Those little snippets of social history that we can remember should be written down. And, of course, everybody will have their own memories and different impressions. I’d love to see an anthology coming out maybe.”

Bealtaine is hosting a three-day memoir-writing workshop with creative writing tutor Irene Graham at the National Library, focusing on many of the skills and intuitions which converge on the act of writing one’s memoirs, from how to think like a writer to structuring narrative. Murphy is an enthusiastic supporter of this initiative, which she sees as a celebration of life experience and the antithesis of our inexorable rush towards all things youthful. The fetishizing of youthfulness and the denial of the riches that ageing brings with it is a great puzzlement to Murphy.

“I think it’s extraordinary,” she says. “And I think it’s really unhealthy mentally not to accept the fact that you’re getting older. People seem so susceptible to all these damned advertisements for pills and potions – which start once you go past 50, for God’s sake! I mean, really!”

Murphy isn’t immune to ageism herself, as her experience of travel has demonstrated repeatedly over the past decade.

“I’ve really noticed how attitudes to me travelling through Europe are so different from, say, Siberia or Africa”, she says wryly.

It’s as if those potions and pills have rendered an individual invisible, she suggests. “You notice that you don’t count somehow. Yet in traditional societies, there is a particular regard for older people who are assumed, rightly or wrongly, to have a certain amount of wisdom they’ve collected over the years, therefore they might be worth listening to or consulting about this and that.”

PADDY COLE, VETERAN of The Capitol Showband, The Big Eight and The Paddy Cole Superstars, is a keen ambassador for Bealtaine too. He’s a man who rarely lets the grass grow under his feet, and undertook this interview by phone while travelling to Co Tipperary for a gig scheduled to finish at 2am, after which he planned to drive directly to Dublin airport for a 6am flight to France for a few days’ golfing.

In recent years, Cole has become heavily involved in Recording Artists and Performers (Raap), a not-for-profit company which collects royalties for Irish recording artists whose work is broadcast.

“I’m a firm believer in keeping active,” he enthuses, “and during the winter I went to evening classes to update myself with the computer, and I did bridge classes too. I try to do the crossword every day and I play golf.” Almost as a postscript, he adds: “And I still play the music.”

Cole also hosts a two-hour radio programme on Sunday mornings on Country Mix 106.8FM. At 69, he jokes that whatever about wearing well, he’s “wearing away”, but there’s scant evidence of this in his conversation. His involvement in jazz may have something to do with his unquenchable energy, Cole believes.

“Playing jazz makes you think”, he says. “You’ve got to try and be creative, to be able to think up new ideas for solos and for improvising, so your mind is active all the time.”

Experience is a great teacher, he insists. It’s what has made him who he is today. “You start to get your priorities right, I think. I really enjoy my grandchildren, and I’m finding that I’m able to spend a lot more time with them than I did with my own children. I don’t have a problem with growing older. I suppose it’s as old as Methuselah that people have tried to keep themselves looking younger, and if you go back to Cleopatra’s day, she was bathing in milk to keep herself young. But milk is so expensive now that I don’t think I’ll start that!”

Bealtaine is a national festival hosted by Age Opportunity, celebrating creativity in older age, which runs throughout the month of May, with a wide range of events. See www.bealtaine.com