Rachel had her fifth birthday in Kodagu (then called Coorg), south-west India, on the first of her journeys with her mother they later went to Baltistan, Peru, Madagascar and Cameroon. Her daughter, Rachel, deliberately conceived with Terence de Vere White, the literary editor of the Irish Times, was born in 1968, and her mother raised her alone, never naming the father publicly until after his death in 1994. She never intended to marry, but once able to support herself through writing, did want a child. She was sure of her own life’s direction, if uncertain of its meanderings. Tall, deep-voiced, muscled, practical and with a decisiveness accrued from constant solo choices, she was often taken for a man by other societies, and occasionally romanticised the restricted roles of those societies’ womenfolk, which she would never have put up with herself. Murphy’s attitude to gender and social norms was also uncommon at the time. Coming fast down a mountain road always thrilled her touring the Balkans in her 70s, she was clocked descending at 65mph by a military patrol and reproved for not applying her brakes. Aged 10, she had realised on riding her first bike that simple pedal power might one day take her to India, and on the way there she discovered how each day’s whizz of the wheels of her Armstrong Cadet cycle, Roz (short for Rozinante, Don Quixote’s horse), carried her forward to kind strangers’ hospitality.
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