Dervla Murphy, woman of the future

Our own travels with children - Risenga, our children
and their grandmother, end of
the continent, South Africa, 1994

This morning the cat chirruped me awake at 5.30 so I reached over for the last pages of The Island That Dared, Dervla Murphy's account of three journeys to Cuba with her daughter and grandchildren and alone. It's a big book - more than 400 pages - but also creatively and intellectually. I found it in Saltdean, and Cuba's been on my mind - Risenga planned to go this summer but the musicians he was planning to meet recommended he put his trip off. 

I first encountered Murphy's writing when I was teaching for the Open University and although I haven't read loads of her work, she captivated me in two of her African books, Cameroon with Egbert (John Murray 1990) and South from the Limpopo: travels through South Africa (John Murray 1997). It's the time of year to read about planting but at night I sleep most often to fiction. On the floor outside my bedroom sit Djuna Barnes, Tolstoy, Doris Lessing, Thomas Lynch, Anita Desai, Fadia Faquir, Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Drabble. 

After a lifetime, Murphy's a superb storyteller - 90 in November this year, her intellect, capacity for interpreting and understanding, shimmer in the pages of The Island That Dared. She feels like one of the last public figures to stand up for a way of life that is anti-consumerist, anti-corporation, pro-people. In her rare interviews she celebrates ordinary people, isolation, self-sufficiency. She's compassionate and different - a woman whose creative independence has to be essential to a viable human future. 

When I read a while ago that she admired Freya Stark, I read Stark's The Minaret of Djam: An Excursion into Afghanistan (John Murray 1970). It was from Stark I learned about Churchill calling for the use of chemical weapons in the region. Murphy covers the use of chemical warfare in Cuba via dengue fever and swine fever. I find it almost impossible to imagine the isolation and courage of these women, travelling alone. 

As I've come to the end of Murphy's three trips to Cuba, I've wondered about coincidences of thought, my interest in symbiotic relationships in the natural world. One of Murphy's themes in her Cuban journeys is how the country's poverty, self-sufficiency and emphasis on education and research has primed it to be a leader in sustainable living. As I read and later talked with Jane, I felt a deep grief for the future we are falling to - drugged by retail and hospitality we are allowing moneymen, loathsome and morally corrupt corporations to destroy its achievements. 

I've been driving my writing towards optimism but struggle with how deeply embedded the absurdly monied have become to our thinking.  Murphy reveals the lengths Cuba's opponents went to to undermine socialism. But otherwise, in a rare Guardian interview in 2009, her advice to anyone wanting to travel becomes advice for life. While she's in no doubt travel of the kind she's done is long gone, she urges travellers to immerse themselves in the journey.  

"Abandon your mobile phone, laptop, i-Pod and all such links to family, friends and work colleagues. Concentrate on where you are, deriving your entertainment from immediate stimuli, the tangible world around you," she advises.