Early in 1932 Hughes and Iris travelled down to Badminton School1 (motto: ‘Pro omnibus quisque, pro Deo omnes’*) in a suburb of Bristol to meet the head, the redoubtable Miss Beatrice May Baker, known as ‘BMB’. In an article in Queen magazine in 1931, Miss Baker had emphasised the school’s ideal of service, the duties of simplicity in dress and living, and the proper use of money. Above all, and admirably, ‘a school can no longer be a self-contained little community … it should be related to the world outside’.
Badminton was not then necessarily the West Country school with the greatest social cachet, but it was likely to appeal to liberal and free-thinking parents such as Rene and Hughes, who did not object to religion in others, but happened not to go in for it much themselves, even at Christmas or Easter. The school was small – 163 girls, of whom ninety-six were boarders – internationally-minded, ‘forward-looking’, tolerant and liberal.2 Though sporty, it was not inhospitable to the arts. The distinguished painter Mary Fedden (Trevelyan) was there, as were the daughters of the sculptor Bernard Leach, painter Stanley Spencer, publisher Victor Gollancz and writer Naomi Mitchison. Indira Gandhi (née Nehru) was briefly there in Iris’s time,3 complaining to her father, imprisoned by the British for many years, about ‘all the stupid rules and regulations’,*and mourning her mother’s recent death. Iris would recall her as ‘very unhappy, very lonely, intensely worried about her father and her country and thoroughly uncertain about the future’.4
On this first visit Iris, only twelve, entered the Northcote drawing-room with Hughes and felt tongue-tied. She looked about and thought how beautiful and calm the room was. Pale sunshine was coming in through the tall windows. She was always to recall Miss Baker in that ‘cool light’.5 BMB was five foot six and lithe, dressed typically in pastel green with a white blouse, had an oval, very sunburnt, leathery and somehow ageless face with flat, centrally-parted silver hair over which she wore a black velvet band. Many a girl feared that BMB could read her innermost thoughts. She had the brightest of blue eyes, a sudden and quick-fading smile, a springy step in flat-heeled and polished shoes. She loved her dogs, probably at this time ‘Major’, a lean, short-haired, leggy Belgian hound, recalled neither as beautiful nor especially affectionate.
Happily, Hughes ‘got on jolly well’ with BMB, said Iris. ‘They respected each other,’ said John Bayley.6 As for Iris, at first she feared BMB. Respect came later, followed by a strong and loyal affection. BMB was eventually to be the first of a long series of authoritative and influential surrogate parent-figures, giving thrust to each of Iris’s tendencies towards other-centredness, puritanism, stoicism and idealism.
Iris was exactly the serious-minded, academic type of girl BMB most loved to bring on, with enough strength of character to resist her desire to dominate, yet enough malleability to undergo some moulding, and she would become BMB’s favourite. BMB lived to be ninety-seven, and Iris stayed in touch.7 When she fell in love with John, Iris sought her old headmistress’s approval before marrying him. And Iris was to be, after Dame Sybil Thorndike and Lord Caradon, Badminton’s official School Visitor from 1992, when she wrote an oratorio for the school choir. She had dreams of BMB in later life, and of her bee garden.8 In 1981, following a formal dinner after she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Bristol University, she alarmed her companion by taking him on an unheralded and uncanny midnight walk inside the school, in term-time, to revisit old haunts.9 It might have been of BMB that Iris was thinking when she wrote of brisk and bleakly sensible Norah Shaddox-Brown, tireless 1930s Fabian warhorse in The Time of the Angels: ‘The clean-cut rational world for which she had campaigned had not materialized, and she had never come to terms with the more bewildering world that really existed.’ Clean-cut rationalism and the League of Nations could not cope with Hitler: ‘Nazism was incredible – that was a part of its strength.’10
It was later to be said of Iris that she was a ‘poor girl who only just made it into a rich girls’ school’.11 She did indeed, with great brio and sparkle,12 win one of the first two available open scholarships to Badminton – the other went to her friend Ann Leech, a doctor’s daughter. It was happily one strength of the school that girls from prosperous homes never dared mention their ponies or foreign holidays – ‘bad form … absolutely out’.13The school secretary Miss Colebrook wrote to Hughes on 29 June 1932 that the announcement of Iris’s scholarship was in The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the local press: ‘It looks very well.’14
Iris arrived at the school on 22 September. She had first to take the ‘never to be forgotten, and dreaded’ Paddington to Badminton train, which always left at 1.15 sharp.15 On her arrival she was put in a house called ‘Badock’, after Badminton’s founder in 1858. She ran round and round the playground with her hair all over her face, weeping,16 then found a cloakroom-basement to cry in.17 She twitched, perhaps with shyness, and put her head down between her knees with her book during the reading hour.18 Margaret Rake, then a prefect, saw Iris looking very timid and washed out, her head on her desk in grief or concentration or both. Extreme cleverness can isolate a child as much as homesickness: neither made her immediately comprehensible to her fellows, and some girls may have been unkind – one friend, witnessing her homesick tears, formed a society called ‘The Prevention of Cruelty to Iris’.19 Iris wrote to Hughes asking him to take her away. He was very upset and probably came again to see BMB. It was Iris’s belief in her father that got her through this misery: ‘I trusted him.’20
BMB’s therapy was garden-work under the care of the fair-haired, short head-gardener Miss Bond, in her mannish breeches. (A male head gardener had been sacked over a sexual indiscretion.) Stout, red-cheeked, blazered, fair and straight-haired Leila Eveleigh, who taught maths, would find Iris quietly and painstakingly pricking out seedlings in the greenhouse. Iris appreciated the less stimulating and calmer atmosphere there – the physical activity too, which took her out of herself – and slowly became less bewildered and homesick. BMB also asked another girl, Margaret Orpen, who was unhappy at Badminton because it was so sporty, to keep an eye on Iris; a skilful move, to allow two unhappy girls to comfort each other. Both hated early-morning drill. ‘Orpen’ (the school had too many Margarets), cousin of the artist Sir William, kept all Iris’s letters from 1932 on: Iris was her greatest friend, her letters ‘special’.21 They wept together during ‘awful moments’ on Paddington station, felt corresponding joy on the return journey, shared jokes. Fifty years later, Iris still recalled Orpen’s gift of strawberries for her birthday.
Each morning began with a cold bath at 7.15. BMB had one herself, and if the bottom of the bath was warm to her feet, the last bather would be brought to justice. Then the girls had to turn their mattresses, and once a week run down the long drive (drill) carrying their laundry. Skipping was permitted as an alternative to running. Iris was cheered to learn that Dulcibel Broderick turned her mattress only once a week, and had made up a rhyme about it. The food – generally – was good, although BMB, housemistress Miss Rendali ('LJR') and school secretary Miss Colebrook were all vegetarians, BMB probably subsisting on raw vegetables. Twice a week the girls’ food was vegetarian. But twice a week also there were hot rolls for breakfast (spoiled for some by the raspberry jam from the Co-op with wooden ‘pits’ that got into your teeth) with fruit, and coffee on Sundays. Iris had a favourite chocolate blancmange pudding, known as ‘Avon mud’ in honour of the local river. The girls hid cake in their shoe baskets: kneeling for prayers, portions could be eaten clandestinely.22 Iris kept a photograph of the very good school cook, Miss Valentine ('Val') – short, plain, very pale with black hair cut in a fringe, spectacled, an army cook in France during the Great War, who made a famous shepherd’s pie.
In class Iris would ask clever questions that others might not have asked, eliciting interesting answers. This propitiated some of her contemporaries.23 Not that all classes were taxing. Engagingly short, fat, brown-haired Ida Hinde taught singing lessons and elocution part-time. Her recitation of Browning’s ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ joined the stock of well-worn Bayley family jokes. She would exhort them, ‘Now girls, you must put expression into it,’ and, starting very quietly, recite:
Whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware
That the lowest boughs, and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole [dramatic crescendo]
ARE IN TINY LEAF.
In summer they swam each day in the narrow open-air pool, played tennis, slept out in sleeping bags on the flat roof, had marvellous outings and picnics.24
Iris gradually settled in, and, it slowly became clear, was good at almost everything. At the end of her first term the school magazine contains her ballad ‘The Fate of the Daisy Lee’.25 She had cheered up enough to write a pleasant melodrama in which Sir John blows a lighthouse to pieces and years later is aptly killed, driven onto the rocks where the lighthouse might have saved him. Its slender interest lies in its location, the Irish Sea and its Oedipal drama: Sir John destroys the lighthouse because his daughter (who dies too) has married its keeper. ‘Orpen’ had also to read out her own ballad, which ran: ‘A knight rode on his horse/A damsel to find./Together they went riding/Through the wind./The knight fell off his horse/Alas, poor maid/He broke his legs and arms/And was dead.’ When Orpen was given only three out of ten for this, Iris defended her publicly and staunchly: ‘It is full of action, short, and has a courtly subject.’ All her life, Iris’s literary criticism of her friends’ work owed as much to enthusiasm as to accuracy. Fierce loyalty made her quixotic.
Badminton, both in its real virtues and its undoubted priggishness, left its mark upon her. In her adult world-view education takes an absolutely central place: ‘Teaching children, teaching attention, accuracy, getting this right, respect, truth, a love of learning: those years are so profoundly important.’26 Two of her novels feature first-person male narrators whose egomania has been tempered only by the patient goodness of one outstanding schoolteacher,27 and the career she chose for the one non-allegorical ‘saint’ of her novels was schoolmastering.28 Her shifts of adult political allegiance were mainly caused by revulsion at some aspect of the party in power’s education policy.
Iris did not need the first part of BMB’s officious advice for the holidays: ‘Be kind to your mother and go for a walk every day.’ She and her mother were like sisters, with Iris seeming increasingly to many observers the elder. ‘How did I do it, will you tell me that now?’ Rene would ask, amazed at having produced so brilliant a child. For a while Iris detested having to go back to school at the start of each term. As the holidays came to an end, every moment was the more passionately enjoyed because the more fraught with the anticipated shock of the changes that were to come: ‘Two more meals, one more meal, then it’s coming up.’ Hughes would take her to the horror of the special school train, leaving from Paddington. Iris would shed tears, and her father was probably very gallant. Cleaver recalls a story of Hughes, Irene and Iris, at the start of Iris’s second term, walking up the long drive to Badminton, each of them crying at the forthcoming separation.
Hughes’s letters to his daughter were loving and pedantic, ‘rather like a legal document, with many phrases like “having due regard to"’.29 A journal entry of Iris’s reads: ‘My father visiting at half term at Badminton. We go to Avonmouth Docks – men are shooting down pigeons who tumble off the roofs near our feet – I am crying terribly, for the pigeons, and because I must soon part from my father. My father of course also very upset. After that I asked my parents not to come to visit me at school.’30 She would put the Bristol pigeon-shooters into The Black Prince: ‘the poor flopping bundle upon the ground, trying helplessly, desperately, vainly to rise again. Through tears I saw the stricken birds tumbling over and over down the sloping roofs of the warehouse.’
BMB had arrived at Badminton in 1911, aged thirty-five,31 with her great friend Lucy Rendali who taught P.T. (physical training), both of them from Cardiff High School. ‘Look at them – early Victorians!’ BMB had said, watching the school tennis-players in their frilly petticoats. She herself wore the free-flowing clothes associated with advocates of female suffrage, and, to the horror of some ‘early Victorian’ mamas, soon abolished both ‘Sunday hats’ and ‘stays’ alike. Like Miss Buss and Miss Beale at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, BMB was a pioneering and dedicated educationalist of great moral courage and probity who had to fight her corner in a man’s world, and of course risked becoming crabbed in the process.32
She was a tough disciplinarian, a feminist, a Socialist and a fellow-travelling Quaker. In 1919 she appointed Mr Harris, newly released from prison as a conscientious objector, head of the Junior School, and imported, looked after and educated two small, starving Austrian boys. She admitted girls from India, Burma, West Africa and the West Indies, believed in teaching birth-control and hoped to make the school fully co-educational.33 She set up a country holiday home for Bristol slum children, which the girls tended.
Over forty years later, Iris would recall in her journal: ‘Evening prayers at school, on dark cold winter evenings, kneeling on the parquet floor in the rather ill-lit hall.’34 BMB was a pioneer also in her insistence on freedom of expression in regard to religious matters. She did not rate the established Church highly, and in 1928 had dedicated a combined chapel and hall as a ‘Peace Memorial’. Morning Assembly was non-denominational.35 Every second Sunday, attendance was required at a church chosen by the child’s parents. (Iris is remembered by one friend as first attending the Congregational church, by another as Anglican.36 Around 1936 Iris and Orpen tried Quaker Meeting. It made them laugh that, though ‘the spirit’ moved the Friends at any time, it always stopped moving them punctually at midday, just in time for lunch.) The Sundays in between one could either visit a church of one’s own choice or go on a walk, and that evening BMB would take an idiosyncratic fortnightly service during which she might, for example, discourse on the saintliness of Mahatma Gandhi or Sir Stafford Cripps.37
Inspiring mottoes, a new one every term, were printed and pinned up in each form-room: from the Epistles, Browning, Rabindranath Tagore, the Rig Veda. John Bayley does not believe that BMB, even after 1932, was a ‘believing’ Quaker (a question Iris addresses in her poem to BMB, see below). If this was so, she kept her rationalistic opinions to herself, being very much in the nineteenth-century tradition of free-thinking, rather like George Eliot, and believing passionately, for example, in goodness.
Orpen and Iris did not discuss religion, Iris then appearing not greatly interested. They did debate the difference between Right and Wrong. Which was worse: to run from Northcote Buildings to Schoolhouse, or to tell a lie? Probably in late November 1934 Iris was confirmed into the Anglican Church:38 that year R.K. Pagett at St Peter’s Henleaze, the Anglican church used by Badmintonians, gave her The King’s Daughters: A Book of Devotion for Girls. She would speak of having had ‘a religious experience of the kind that many people have at that age’ although she never specified the experience.
Badminton’s uniforms were modern for the time, even ‘art deco’.39 On weekday mornings the girls wore a navy-blue serge gym tunic, with pleats only at the top, which had to touch the floor when they knelt down, and a white Viyella blouse. Their navy-blue blazers had ‘BS’ stitched in white on the pocket. After exercise each afternoon they changed – real little ladies – into sleeveless fawn corduroy ‘sack’ garments and fawn Shetland cardigans worn over tussore silk blouses. There were ‘jolly’ navy-blue Tam o’shanters for ordinary days, for Sundays round blue velour hats with a navy-blue-and-white band, again with ‘BS’ stitched on them. Seasonal variations dictated navy-blue serge overcoats in winter and blue gingham frocks in summer, not always warm enough in an English June – Bourne & Hollingworth came and measured you for these. On summer Sundays grand natural white tussore silk dresses and coats, with a panama hat. The strict dress-code was later relaxed, as the school photograph for 1937 demonstrates, with Iris in a print frock, a happy and beautiful free spirit. As for the mistresses, none dressed very becomingly. To worry too much about one’s appearance might not have counted as what BMB called a ‘worthwhile activity’. Yet the ‘Powers’ (BMB, LJR and the skilful music mistress ‘Ski’ Webb-Johnson) did dress in semi-evening wear, such as long skirts and velvet jackets, for dinner.
BMB’s possible unbelief did not stop her from laying down the law about how others should live. She was not an easy woman, and Iris notes that she was too impatient and frightening to be a really good teacher: she could be a ‘blunt instrument’. A ‘powerful domineering brave woman’, she could make mistakes, and there were casualties. Mary Fedden hated BMB and thought her wicked: BMB, she felt, despised her as a mere day-girl, and Mary would hide and weep with fear on seeing her approach. Others could not stand the unremitting idealism of this ‘high-minded bully’. Iris would write: ‘Nietzsche would have been interested in BMB: a case of a huge unselfconscious totally non-cynical will to power.’ BMB so bullied the gifted Maud Wills that her friend Margaret Rake (later Vintner) recalled each algebra lesson as a nightmare. When Margaret found the courage to protest, BMB first took it on the chin, then summoned Maud and told her about the complaint, breaking the girls’ friendship and isolating Margaret.
The quaint practice of all the girls walking the length of the room after eight o’clock evening prayers and shaking the headmistress’s hand (before the First World War, curtseying) while saying goodnight, provided an opportunity for BMB to tick off those who had talked in prep or run down the corridor. She liked to organise and control the staff as well as the pupils: ‘Brace up!’ she would say, and Till your lives!’ One vexed staff member was heard to murmur, ‘If I fill my life any more I shall go mad.’ BMB did not accept anything at face value but judged it by her own exacting, eccentric standards, often finding it wanting. She was critical, analytical and not to be put upon, sometimes perverse in her opinions. She believed she was using a Socratic method, trying to make the girls think for themselves, and was never more pleased than when told by an Old Girl how ‘shaken up’ she had been at Badminton by her. Behind her somewhat forbidding appearance was great joie de vivre and sardonic humour.
BMB would pounce on girls after lunch and ask what they were reading. A register was kept, four hours reading per week being thought exemplary.40 (Most films, by contrast, as Indira Gandhi remembered, were seen as ‘mental dope’.) BMB used repeatedly to ask: ‘Are you engaged in worthwhile activities? One of Iris’s school friends was once asked what she was reading, and replied, with a strong, distinctive lisp, ‘Detection, Mystewy, and Howwor, Miss Baker.’ Though the reading of such an omnibus would scarcely have passed for a ‘worthwhile activity’, the answer was given in so prim a tone that BMB was floored, and passed on.
One Lent she gave a stirring sermon on the decadent wickedness of hot-water bottles. The dormitories were unheated – Iris noted, ‘We were Athenians but we were Spartans too.’ Girls were allowed exactly four sweets a week, and were not encouraged to sit next to their friends either in class or in the house.41 BMB hated – and perhaps feared – illness. ‘Weak fool!’ one Old Girl imagined BMB, by then ninety-four, saying under her breath at the news that another of her contemporaries had succumbed and proven mortal. In Iris’s time Hazel Earle was rusticated for washing her hair and then going to bed with it wet; and Orpen, when she caught a cold was falsely accused of ‘going out without your galoshes’. Moreover the vegetarian food gave Orpen a headache. Headaches and colds did not count as ‘worthwhile activities’.
BMB displayed a mixture of ‘ruthless’ practical idealism and an imagination with strict limits. On the one hand she would take pains to buy presents for the foreign children who would otherwise have received none. On the other, BMB was legal guardian to Inge, a Jewish refugee-child who had suffered the deportation and death in Poland of her parents and brother, and whenever she or any other ‘foreign friend’ – they would far rather have been known as ‘refugees’ – failed to volunteer for some irksome task, like gardening in the bitter mid-winter, they were called to BMB’s study and reminded that, ‘being in receipt of charity’, the least they could do was volunteer for unpopular chores. BMB, though wishing to inspire it, seemed to this girl ‘totally incapable of affection’. When, on her last night at school, BMB leaned forward to kiss her for the first time ever, she drew back. ‘Don’t you love me, Inge?’ asked BMB. Having been taught ‘uprightness’ by BMB, Inge truthfully replied, ‘I respect and admire you, but I could never, never love you.’ BMB was deeply hurt.
BMB lived in Iris’s house with her housemistress LJR, in a close liaison. This, in the days of inter-war innocence, was not considered odd, even though the two shared a bedroom. Happily BMB’s idealistic ruthlessness was tempered both by LJR’s calmer pragmatism and by ‘Ski’ Webb-Johnson’s kindness. ‘She’s right, of course, but you can’t go straight for it, like that!’ LJR would comment. Together they made an indivisible couple, mutually supporting, happy and immensely positive. LJR was the ‘jolly and practical one’ – the doer – while BMB had the visionary edge. Both were keen walkers and cyclists.
Around 1935 they built, on the site of a farm, a showpiece art deco house for themselves which they called Little Grange.42 Iris was to be a lifelong visitor and guest. A very spacious lounge with french windows, designed for concerts and talks, gave onto the charming garden, where a paved courtyard had replaced a cow-byre. There was a grand piano, hundreds of books, and BMB’s favourite paintings (Italian masters) on the walls. Iris saw this house, in which BMB was to stay for many years after her retirement – to the occasional discomfiture of her successors – effectively BMB’s own dower-house, as ‘a creation of her will … a masterpiece of art deco … BMB belongs in an art deco world, evidence that that mode could be guileless without being insipid’. Iris gave the name ‘Little Grange’ to one of the winning horses on which Jake gambles for high stakes in Under the Net.
At a Christmas fancy-dress party soon after the First World War, BMB arrived disguised as the League of Nations. This might suggest an unusual depth of identification. The League played a great part in the Badminton girls’ lives, BMB arguing that it guaranteed both democracy and peace. Many girls delivered leaflets on disarmament and talked to local residents about such matters, collecting signatures for petitions. Membership of the Junior League cost one shilling a term. One girl, Annette Petter, was asked by BMB why she alone did not belong. ‘Because, Miss Baker,’ she replied with brave good humour, greatly encouraged by BMB’s belief in free speech, ‘my father manufactures aeroplane engines.’43 This did not go down too well.
Each girl carried a copy of the article dealing with sanctions from the covenant of the League of Nations in her pocket; and bevies of students went to the annual League Summer School in Geneva. In August 1935 Iris went for ten days44 with a party of seven. It was her first trip abroad. They had a calm Channel crossing, and Iris was too excited to sleep more than two hours on the subsequent train journey. She sent enthusiastic postcards home of the Mer-de-Glace on Mont Blanc, the monument to heroes of the Reformation, and – in colour – the Palace of Nations itself. The group was received by the acting Secretary-General, shown round old Geneva, climbed both the Mer-de-Glace and Mont Salève ('exhausting'), and bathed often in the lake, as ‘blue-as-blue’.
Ice-creams cost them 1/6d each. They stayed in a luxurious hotel – their room had a balcony, private bathroom and telephone – talking to the femme de chambre every night to improve their French.45 There were high-minded lectures, and they were impressed by the Assembly’s facilities for instantaneous translation. Iris sent home peremptory instructions: ‘You needn’t write again after answering this.’ And Hughes and Rene were ‘not to be late’ in meeting her train back ‘at 6.06 the following Monday’.
‘Are your family interested in politics? Are they right or left wing?’ BMB asked one teacher who was being interviewed for a post. ‘We’re all left wing here, you know.’ Another teacher, asked by a first former, ‘What are politics?’, riposted, ‘Why do you want to know?’ ‘I am going to sit by Miss Baker at lunch … Miss Baker is interested in politics, but I don’t know what they are.’ BMB, who liked to tell this story, talked to the girl about her favourite pudding instead – the intensity was sometimes relaxed. But some members of the staff were reluctant to sit next to BMB if they had not read the Times leader that day. BMB subscribed to the Left Book Club, took students on field trips to the local Wills’ cigarette factory; there were weekly current-events discussions on the international situation; refugees from the Spanish Civil War were invited to speak.46
The political scene at the time was indeed dramatic. On 7 March 1936 Hitler invaded the Rhineland. Iris heard the newspaper-sellers on the main road calling out the ominous news in the late evening, and saw BMB, aged sixty, running down the drive to buy a paper. Those of left-wing tendencies commonly regarded the Soviet Union as a place of hope and wished for closer ties with it – Iris later wrote: ‘Jesus, as teacher, shared the stage in morning prayers with a large variety of other mentors, including Lenin.’ Indeed staff sometimes addressed each other as ‘Com’, for Comrade, to indicate friendliness. One observer even compared the school to the USSR: ‘a democracy with a very strong leader’. This is doubly ironic. BMB was no Stalin. Nor was either institution precisely a democracy. This illuminates Iris’s own later Communist Party membership. She once remarked that she was a Communist by the age of thirteen.47
BMB started by getting three refugee girls into the school, then rented a house nearby where she placed ten more refugees, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, mostly children of mixed marriages. Christians and Jews, she explained, were aided by their co-religionists, while children of mixed marriages had no such advocates. The Badminton girls were proud of their ‘foreign friends’, and treated them more kindly than they did their own compatriots. Soon the school bulged at every seam. BMB once asked the Jewish girls to organise a seder, which she attended, and was deeply moved. And she found a rest-home for the mother of Margot Slade (Friedland), one of the refugee girls, where she could recuperate from the trauma of her years under the Nazis. Iris commented: ‘We knew about the concentration camps considerably before this idea was taken seriously by the general public.’
Indira Gandhi later recalled groups of senior girls sharing living quarters with a teacher, and having to help look after the housekeeping. On Sunday mornings the Jewish and Indian girls would go for walks in groups of four. Indira would lead one group. On 10 December 1936 a gym session was interrupted and the girls asked to hurry into the next room for some special news, without waiting to get dressed in their smart afternoon wear. Indira recalled their squatting on the floor in their navy-blue gym tunics to listen to Edward VIII’s abdication broadcast. The atmosphere was charged with emotion. Many were in tears.
BMB and Iris developed a deep rapport; they ‘got on famously’.48 BMB was at her best with serious, studious girls, and Iris, at least from the sixth form, was quite outstanding. She had ‘an obviously potentially great mind with a humility and a probing determination to know and understand other people and nationalities’.49 Iris took from BMB a strong intuitive sense of – and a missionary zeal about – the distinctions between right and wrong. They would sit and discuss the Good,50 a discussion that was to continue over many decades. At a soirée for sixth-form girls BMB remarked that Iris was not only remarkable but ‘already had a philosophy of life’. Fellow student Pat Zealand, unsure what a philosophy of life was, was nonetheless impressed that Iris had one. The mottoes chosen by BMB for the school magazine presage the adult Iris’s searching moral passion: ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he’ (Proverbs, 23: 7); ‘The essence of religion is that it should inform the whole of one’s daily practical life’ (J. Middleton Murry).
Margaret Rake, the prefect who had observed Iris’s unhappiness in her first year, came back to teach history at Badminton in 1936–37, and she and BMB helped Iris prepare for the alarming General Paper for her Oxford entrance. Set by Iris’s future tutor Isobel Henderson (with help that year from Iris’s future colleague Jenifer Hart), it was notorious for eccentric questions – ‘Describe the workings of a bicycle’, and ‘Here are fifteen rules of grammar for a new language … Now translate the National Anthem into that language’.51 Iris, it soon became clear, knew more history than Margaret; luckily they could laugh about this. Iris, Margaret remembered, looked like a white rabbit, and lowered her head in despair at the human race because it was so stupid, and so frivolous.
Margaret Rake believed that BMB was dedicated to too narrow a conception of Good, and did not see her own frailties. Iris, who saw BMB with considerable objectivity, describes her not merely as a bully but also as a ‘great general’. The atmosphere she created ‘outlawed malice and lying and vulgar snobbery’. BMB nurtured a ‘strong positive innocence’ and a ‘lucid security which inspired faith and … freedom’. One source of her strength may have been that, though thought by some to be an intellectual snob, she was not herself really an intellectual, and was therefore presumably neither a nihilist nor a cynic. Led by BMB the girls were athletes, craftswomen, scholars, practitioners of all the arts. They were introduced, Iris wrote, to ‘the whole of history, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Romans were our familiar friends, and most of all the Greeks. The cool drawing-room light was soon transformed for me into the light of Hellas, the last gleam of a Victorian vision of those brilliant but terrible people.’
In 1983 Iris published a poem about her kind but formidable old headmistress, meditating on much of this, and entitled simply ‘Miss Beatrice May Baker, Headmistress of Badminton School, Bristol, from 1911 to 1946’.
Your genius was a monumental confidence
To which even the word ‘courage’ seems untrue.
In your art deco pastel ambience
You sat, knowing what to do.
Pure idealism was what you had to give,
Like no one now tells people how to live.
With your thin silver hair and velvet band
And colourless enthusiastic eyes
You waved the passport to a purer land,
A sort of universal Ancient Greece,
Under whose cool and scrutinizing sun
Beauty and Truth and Good were obviously one.
Upon your Everest we were to climb,
At first together, later on alone,
To leave our footprints in the snows of time
And glimpse of Good the high and airless cone.
How could we have considered this ascent
Had not our cynic hearts adjudged you innocent?
Politics too seemed innocent at that time
When we believed there would be no more war.
How shocked we were to learn that a small one
Was actually going on somewhere!
We lived through the jazz age with golden eyes
Reflecting what we thought was the sunrise.
And yet we knew of Hitler and his hell
Before most people did, when all those bright
Jewish girls kept arriving; they were well
Aware of the beginning of the night,
The League of Nations fading in the gloom,
And burning lips of first love, cold so soon.
Restlessly you proclaimed the upward way,
Seeing with clarity the awful stairs,
While we laddered our lisle stockings on the splintery parquet
Kneeling to worship something at morning prayers.
But did you really believe in God,
Quakerish lady? The question is absurd.
This elegy, partly inspired by Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939', shares with that poem the jazzy collision between a rationalistic optimism and the coming of the night-time of civilisation. Both poems, too, by implication celebrate ‘the just’ who enliven the coming darkness. But Iris’s poem shines with its own light of irony and of yearning, a light ignited, surely, by BMB herself. BMB here is not so much an algebra teacher as a sybil summoning humankind to pursue the mysteries of the path towards love and goodness, a new Diotima from Plato’s Symposium.
Leila Eveleigh recalled Iris as good all round – a good hockey player, interested in and gifted at art (painting), not particularly musical, though she ‘had a go’, but excelling at classics and English. Enthusiastic and alive in all her many activities, she was quiet and inward also. It would not be surprising if Iris’s omnicompetence aroused dislike or envy; none has stepped forward to say it did.52
Latin was taught first by rosy, large, countrified Miss Parkin. Then came Marjorie Bird: tall, thin, no make-up, very plainly dressed and a devout Quaker. Known as ‘The Bird’, she taught Iris Latin and Greek from 1934 to 1937. ‘What a help The Bird was,’ Iris later remembered. The only pupil mentioned by name in Miss Bird’s diaries for the thirties is Iris.*In Iris’s last year Miss Jeffery replaced her, a good scholar who should have been a don. She loved esoteric jokes, gave a brilliant lecture to the whole school on medieval Latin poetry, held Roman supper-parties for the out-of-school Classics Club. Teaching a ‘pearl’ like Iris must have cheered her up. Together they read some of Xenophon’s Anabasis, source of the tide for Iris’s Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea, the Greeks’ cry during a war in Persia when they finally sight salt-water; also ‘those evergreen charmers’ Odyssey Books VI and VII. Miss Jeffery remembered Iris as ‘one of the kindest people [she] had ever met’.53 Iris’s excellent teacher of English, Miss Horsfall – known as ‘The Horse’ – tall, very thin and a little ungainly, wore pince-nez at the end of her nose, her hair in a bun, and was a devout Anglo-Catholic. She often read Iris’s exemplary essays out to the class. An atmosphere of emotionality surrounded her.
Successive issues of the Badminton School Magazine point to Iris’s impact on the school. In the autumn of 1933 she wrote up the new Architecture Club’s expedition to Bradford-on-Avon, describing the Tithe Barn and the ‘oldest existing’ Saxon Church of Saint Aldhelm, which the girls sketched. The following term she contributes to ‘Contrasting Views of Highbrows and Lowbrows’, a subject then exercising Virginia Woolf.54 Iris’s lowbrows follow Arsenal and go to the music-hall. Her highbrows read Dickens and Shakespeare and follow ‘the situation in Germany’ – suggesting how politically aware Badmintonians were. How many other English fourteen-year-olds were then preoccupied by Hitler, who had risen to power only a year before? Iris proposed tolerant understanding through a mutual expansion of pleasure-sources. The lowbrows should read Walter Scott and try Horowitz on the wireless; the highbrows should listen to dance-tunes. She was later to call the songs of the thirties ‘the best pop-tunes of the century’,55 and to regret that Badminton had so much Greek dancing, classical music, quickstep and Viennese waltz, and not enough jazz:56 ‘The most interesting kind of man is the one who knows something about everything.’ This looks forward to the kind of novel she would later hope to write, with, as she expressed it later, ‘something for everyone';57 ‘like Shakespeare’, John Bayley observed.
In the magazine in 1934 Iris celebrated the value of ‘Unimportant Persons’, amongst whom she includes herself. In 1935, as well as taking her School Certificate, she wrote ‘How I Would Govern the Country’, defending constitutional monarchy, criticising imperialism and totalitarianism alike; and after her trip to Geneva attended the League of Nations Junior Branch, published a piece on ‘Leonardo da Vinci as a Man of Science’, telling of his drainage schemes, canal-making machines, devices for measuring distance and wind-force, and for flying; acted as First Citizen in Laurence Housman’s The Peace Makers, played right half at hockey, won fifteen votes as Socialist candidate in a mock election for the Debating Society (Orpen for the National Conservatives won with twenty-two votes: the girls were less left-wing than their teachers*), and published a competent translation of Horace’s ode ‘Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa’.† 1936 sees Iris vice-captain of her house, involved in League activities, the Debating Society, the 2nd XI hockey team, and writing a poem entitled ‘The Diver’ which recalls the 1930s fashion for the aviator as culture-hero but, in true Murdoch fashion, substitutes water for air and celebrates swimming instead. She writes up the activities of the Literary and Architecture Clubs (Lady Precious Stream,≠ Francis Bacon, Chesterton, an exhibition of Everyday Things in Bristol); acts in a parody of Euripides’ Alcestis ('Al’s Sisters') where, arrayed as a butler bearing cocktails, she is noted as ‘among the stars of the cast’, and also plays Hank Eisenbaum in ‘Hollywood Rehearses Shakespeare’. Her dramatic activities at Froebel and Badminton, and later at Oxford, are interesting. Although the adult and puritan Iris disliked theatre, young Iris enjoyed acting and was famous at Oxford for her talent.
In mid-January 1937 Iris won joint first prize (£2.125.6d) for an essay on lectures organised at Regent Street Polytechnic by the Education Department of the League of Nations Union. She watched the German (and Nazi) lecturer fatuously explaining that persecution of the Jews was designed merely ‘to make an independent people of them’, and wrote of how the choice between democracy and dictatorship was made urgent by Spain. She is engaged with the Literary Club, and wins her hockey colours. She is now in her eighteenth year, and her political judgements must be thought of as those of an adult, albeit a very young one. She finds space in a piece praising community singing – ‘Music was everywhere,’ she was later to write – to commend ‘that courageous and much maligned country, Soviet Russia’. On the verso page of this eulogy appears, with dramatic irony, one of Iris’s lino-cuts, entitled ‘The Prisoner’, of a man evidently suffering in solitary confinement – but not, of course, in the USSR, which Iris believes ‘is now becoming more and more democratic’. This was a view, horribly wrong-headed as it now appears, that Iris and BMB were scarcely alone in holding.
In 1936–37 alone, we now know, two million died in Stalin’s purges.58 Nor was such knowledge hidden at the time. Two years later George Orwell famously wrote that to English intellectuals ‘such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, &tc &tc are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.’59 The appeal of the Communist Party – which Iris joined the following year – at the time of the Spanish Civil War is well attested, and not just by Orwell. Yet it is remarkable that Iris, who praised the Communist Party as late as spring 1943 to Ruth Kingsbury, a graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, rarely expressed misgivings about the USSR. She thought Russia on the whole misunderstood over the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and even after the Russian invasion of Finland in November 1939 she stayed On the Stalinist line’. Badminton, she later pointed out, had caused her, like many others, to ‘live in a sort of dream world’ politically: they really believed that politics was a much simpler matter than it later turned out to be, and that ‘the Soviet Union was a good state, rather than a thoroughly bad state’.60
By 1945 her view of the USSR had shifted, and in the 1970s she would help campaign for the release of the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, of course seeing Stalinism as a great evil. That she had no such understanding before 1943 may attest a political naïveté some friends61 felt long accompanied her. Tenderheartedness, in politics as in love, may be accompanied by unsettling blindness.
By spring term 1937 Iris is head girl, mediating on at least one committee between staff and girls, reporting on the League of Nations Union, determined ‘not to falter in our search for peace’, recording a visit to the home of the millionaire marmalade manufacturer and amateur archaeologist Alexander Keiller, whose taste and Druidic megaliths alike leave her ‘dazed’, playing lacrosse, publishing an untitled poem in which her love of London is apparent: ‘And I watch for the bended bow of the Milky Way/Over London asleep’. In July she wins a distinction in English for her Higher School Certificate, plays a home cricket game against a neighbouring school – probably the match at which Rene made a rare appearance and a great impression. Iris seemed, to Dulcibel Broderick as she did to others, more like Rene’s elder sister than her daughter.
She published an eighteen-line translation from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonos – her Greek was coming on stream. W.H. Auden visited the school and read part of a new play he and Christopher Isherwood were writing – presumably On the Frontier. Iris sat next to Auden, finding him ‘young and beautiful with his golden hair’.62 She soon enlisted his help in writing a foreword to Poet Venturers, her own brainchild, a collection of poems by Bristol schoolchildren published by Gollancz at a price of ‘only one Shilling’ – the proceeds to be given to the Chinese Medical Aid Fund. Iris’s poem, ‘The Phoenix-Hearted’, lyrically hymns China’s powers of recuperation from the invading Japanese ‘hosts of glittering dragon-flies’. She wins an Open Exhibition of £40 a year for three years at Somerville College, Oxford.
For the second year running she won a prize for a League of Nations essay competition, this time entitled ‘If I were Foreign Secretary’ (the second prize of one guinea went to the future critic Raymond Williams, of King Henry VII School, Abergavenny). Apart from advocating, among other measures, recognition of the legality of the Spanish government, her essay is of greatest interest for its pious belief that the Fascist countries can be brought to heel through sanctions alone, after which ‘the world would be calmed and reassured and the menace of war would gradually disappear’. After she joined the Communist Party the following year, Iris’s pacifism would strengthen. ‘Looking back we see the thirties as a time of dangerously unrealistic political dreams,’ she later commented, dreams embodied above all in the statutes of the League of Nations, based on the optimistic premise that all nations were already, or could by persuasion soon become, freedom-loving, peace-loving democracies. Iris renounced her own advocacy of peace at all costs only in 1941.
It could be said that all her fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth, when she thought that setting people free was easy, that ‘socialism (of which we had no very clear idea) would bring freedom and justice to all countries, and the world would get better’.63 This optimism entailed a belief in the imminent birth of a ‘clean-cut rational world’ within the century dominated by Hitler and Stalin. Her work explores, among other matters, those ‘irrational’ psychic forces within the individual which make Hitlers possible, and freedom problematic.
Despite BMB’s hostility to most films as ‘mental dope’, a school cinema was opened, and Iris gave a speech thanking the Governors. The first film shown was Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. She published two promising poems.64 In spring 1938 she was one of four soloists in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater,65 and she records an expedition to see the Severn bore. She recalled both its strange noise, and the equally strange local pride in it, thirty years later.66 The paper she read to the Literary Club on Modern Poetry is described as ‘exceptionally interesting’. Iris kept her schoolmistress Ida Hinde’s 1937 gift of a book of her own poems, At the Edge of a Dream, inscribed ‘with love’ from its author, with its pièce-de-résistance, ‘Sapphics’. Yet exclusive friendships were closely monitored and frowned upon, and seating arrangements at meals periodically altered, which helped pre-empt them.
‘One sound way of preventing complete forgetfulness of school … and its ideals is to become a Life Member of the O.B.A.’ – the Old Badmintonians’ Association – BMB advised the departing Iris and others, and Iris became a ‘Life Member Without Magazine’. BMB’s advice about choosing a husband had her usual gruff good sense: ‘Try to remember that this is the person to whom you will have to pass the marmalade 365 days a year until one of you dies.’ She gave pride of place to a picture by Iris of Lynmouth harbour painted when the school moved there in 1941, and there was an old-girl reunion.67 BMB, who asked Ann Leech to ‘keep an eye’ on Iris at Oxford, may have feared, Leech later thought, that Iris might be ‘wild’ there.68
Iris began her first romance, by correspondence, around 1937. When a letter came to tell of his death in 1970, she noted, ‘James is dead. First event of my adult life. Such a good man. And a good influence (on me, then),’ and wrote to his widow that he had been a ‘great awakener’. She gives no surname, but her Belfast cousins remember James Henderson Scott, who would facetiously identify himself as ‘Scott of Belfast’, born in 1913, and a good friend of cousin Cleaver.69 Scott finished his dentistry studies at Queen’s in 1937, medicine in 1942. Born into Methodism, he converted to Catholicism, was gifted and literary, and an enthusiast for that earlier convert Cardinal Newman. When he later became Professor of Dental Anatomy at Queen’s, he gave his inaugural lecture in blank verse.
Cleaver suggested that clever, bookish, ‘romantic’ James, who wrote and loved poetry, write to Cleaver’s highly intelligent, bookish cousin Iris, who also loved and wrote poetry. Both were Irish and loved Ireland. A correspondence started – ‘an elusive something drew [them] together’. Both had a feeling for Virgil’s ‘tears of things’, something sad and deep that belonged to ‘the very structure of the universe’ – though Iris’s apprehension was then more political, James’s religious. He fell for Iris – at least the dream-Iris he encountered in her imaginative, responsive letters – and then for the being he first met, his journals suggest, at the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens just after noon on Saturday, 2 April 1938. ‘Something snapped’ inside him, he noted a year later, ‘which has never been repaired’. A romantic interest on Iris’s side did not survive this meeting, and she was able slowly to get James to accept this. ‘I want and I need your friendship over and above even that of the girl I marry,’ James noted. They sailed to Belfast on the Duke of Lancaster together on 5 April 1939, and spent time with Iris’s cousins and other friends. Iris and James climbed the tower of Queen’s University, tying a friend’s pyjamas to the flagpost. She witnessed her first operation at the Royal Victoria Hospital, James noting that she ‘would have made a wonderful medical student’, and had a fierce quarrel about Christianity and Communism. Friendship survived: Iris was good at this feat. She was later famous for a complicated private life in which she found it hard to disencumber herself of any of her many admirers. James then fell in unrequited love with cousin Sybil, and married Olive Marron in 1945.
Summer Irish holidays belong elsewhere in her story. Glimpses of London holidays are given by Margaret Orpen: she and Iris visited each other. Once they were to give a joint lecture to the school Architecture Club, for which they visited London’s Wren churches. On another occasion they went together to the Caledonian market in Islington, where Iris bought a necklace for sixpence. On Wednesday, 28 September 1938, after both had left school, Orpen and Iris found themselves standing in the gods at Covent Garden – they could not afford seats – watching a ballet, probably the de Basil company. It was exceptionally hot and stuffy. It was also the eve of Chamberlain and Hitler’s Munich agreement, the most critical moment of that ‘strange year full of anxiety and fear’.70 The letter Iris wrote Orpen afterwards ended with, ‘If we should meet again, why then we’ll smile,’ from Julius Caesar, a quotation that would resonate with deeper meaning six years later.
*‘Each for all, all for God.’
*Regulations posted in the entrance hall began: ‘1. Stockings must always be worn with Wellingtons for all walks. 2. During term time girls must never wear mufti unless they are in their own rooms. Mufti must never be worn in Bristol. 3. No girl is to bring talcum powder back to school …’ See Katherine Frank, Indira: The Life of Indira Gandhi (London, 2001), p. 117.
*e.g. 12 December 1934: ‘Pleasant lesson with I. Murdoch – asked her what she wanted to do next year – vague, but wants to go on with Greek.’ After Miss Bird had left the school in July 1937 and was settled in Cambridge, about to marry Maurice Howard, she noted, ‘H.C. [Higher Certificate]. Iris didn’t get distinction in Latin, though she did in English. So she hasn’t got a State Scholarship’ – no mention of a Greek result, though in those days students normally offered three main subjects and a subsidiary.
*( Indira Gandhi commented that ‘despite a terribly anti-Fascist and pacifist’ atmosphere, ‘imperialism seems to be inherent in the bones of the girls’ at Badminton, ‘… [though] they hate to hear you say so’. Frank, Indira, p.119.
† ‘What slim youngster (soaked in perfumes) is hugging you now, Pyrrha, on a bed of roses?’ (David West’s translation). Iris’s translation: ‘What graceful boy in fragrant odours steeped,/'Mid crimson roses in a cavern dim,/Worships your smile …’
≠ S.I. Hsiung’s old Chinese play had been translated into English in 1935.