February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Her name is Maura Murphy and her story is told in a somewhat cryptically entitled biography entitled “Don’t Wake Me at Doyles.”
Murphy is a mother of nine, grandmother of 11, great grandmother of one and soon, all things going well, two.
She is 76 years old and not a widow. She lives in Birmingham, England, and her husband lives in County Offaly.
And that’s the way Maura Murphy prefers it. She’s traditionally Catholic enough to stop short of a divorce, but not so religious that she’s going to cling until for all her days to a husband her husband of fifty years.
You could call Maura Murphy a liberated woman. Yet she stood back in horror at the sight of the excesses of the 1960s.
Her liberating moment was never going to be a tossed bra. It came when she was 70 and was diagnosed with cancer. And it took hold with the realization that however long Maura Murphy had left in this world, was going to be herself, express herself and, yes, even enjoy herself.
And to make sure nobody misunderstood her when she gave her husband, John Murphy, his marching orders, Murphy decided to write an account of her life from start to new beginning.
“Don’t Wake Me at Doyle’s” is Murphy’s statement to the world, her epistle for those who follow in her unlikely, well, wake.
That she is a most unlikely chronicler pales against the fact that most other women of her generation trapped in bad marriages soldiered on in silence and anonymity.
No matter where she is someday waked — the title of the book refers to a wake in a pub — Maura Murphy has made sure that her legacy will not be defined for all time with, as she puts it, “a few curly sandwiches washed down with oceans of porter.”
Murphy has taken control of her own life. And she’s delighted with herself.
“John lives in the cottage in Offaly. He keeps in touch every day of the week, but I don’t stay with him,” she said.
“John never had a clue how to care for me. He was never sick in his life except for an odd flu at Christmas. He was too egotistical, but he is delighted for me now.
“We’re not separated or divorced,” Murphy continued. “We’re just separated by the Irish Sea and that’s the best way to cope with it.”
Maura McNamee was raised in the small village of Clonmore near Edenderry, Co. Offaly. From her earliest days she felt the urge to write down her thoughts on paper. And though she was had little more than a rudimentary education, Murphy found that she had the ability to store and later recall facts and events.
“I always had a great memory,” she said.
The path of Murphy’s life followed a route that most Irish women of her generation would instantly recognize.
Murphy might be stretching credulity a bit when she describes herself as born “chronically ugly and as cross as a briar.” One local charmer saw far more in the young Maura McNamee than that.
And so John and Maura were joined in blissful matrimony on their wedding day in 1953.
“And then the children came along,” Murphy said.
They came along rapidly. By the end of the 1950s, the Murphys had five hungry mouths to feed and very little money to pay for the feeding.
“There was very little for the working class in Ireland at that time,” Murphy said. “After paying 12 shillings a week for the rent of our cottage, there wasn’t much left for food.”
Indeed, dinner in the Murphy household some days didn’t get much beyond bread, margarine and a few scallions.
John Murphy moved to England ahead of his wife and the five kids. He got a job at a tire factory in Birmingham. Murphy and the children soon followed.
“We were economic migrants,” Murphy said.
That’s putting a gloss on it. The Murphys were an impoverished Irish family in a big English city where some of the locals took a dim view of Irish immigrants no matter what their economic circumstances.
“We were faced with a lot of hostility,” Murphy said. “We were poor Irish and seen as just that.”
All the poorer for the fact that, as Murphy recounts in her book, the rent money all too often went to satisfy her husband’s drink bill.
But Maura managed, at least most of the time. The family was evicted from their home at one point and the children went into foster care when Murphy was ill. But she recovered and got them back.
“Women in those days had to give up the use of their minds, their bodies and limbs, but nobody questioned it,” she said.
Despite their difficulties, the Murphys had four more English-born children. There were now six girls and three boys to raise.
“When the youngest was 5, I started getting part-time jobs, but I was always at home when the kids came home from school,” Murphy said. “I wouldn’t have them coming into an empty house.”
She had suspected for a long time that as well as drinking too much, her husband, John, was “carrying on” with other women. She hoped fervently that he would grow out of his philandering.
“But the leopard never changes his spots,” she said. “He was a charmer and highly intelligent. I was devastated. And as a married Catholic woman, there was very little I could do.
“Nobody listened to me. When you want to a priest, he would preach to you rather than listen to you. You were a non-entity, a number in a book and you were expected to just soldier on.”
And that she did. The years went by and the children grew up. To escape from the daily grind, Murphy kept diaries. Her private thoughts written down on paper became the nearest thing to a sense of true self. Her diary pages became like a mirror.
“I started to see myself as a distinct person,” she said.
In 1989, with her children grown, Murphy, still with John, returned to a small cottage in Offaly. This was to be their retirement. John wasn’t done with his wilder ways, but at least there no hungry babies to worry over.
And then came the news, at age 70, that Murphy had lung cancer.
“I was stunned,” she said. “I couldn’t speak. Time stopped for me. I thought to myself, Hadn’t I gone through enough?”
The answer was no. But Murphy recovered. Still, her illness had been a turning point.
“I knew John wouldn’t be able to care for me in the future,” she said. “The children urged me to move back to England, where I would be close them.”
Murphy moved but also decided that she wanted to do so alone. John stayed behind in Offaly.
She bought a computer, learned how to use it and began to read her diaries and delve into her memories.
“I was pleased with myself, just writing down my memories. But then someone suggested I write a book. I laughed. ‘Sure who would want to read it?’ I asked.”
Then she asked herself why not. Murphy’s life story would take four years to write and edit. A major publisher snapped it up for the Irish and British market and before Murphy knew what was going on “Wake Me at Doyle’s” had crossed the Atlantic.
It’s being published in the U.S. this month by New York-based St. Martin’s Press.
“My one ambition throughout all the years was to see my children get an education, and they did,” Murphy said. “God almighty, I thought life would never turn out like this. But it did.”