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8

The bond between Iris and Hughes was very great. He played both father and, to some degree, mother. It was said to be Hughes who bought her elaborate school outfits at Bourne & Hollingsworth on Oxford Street, when she went away to Badminton in 1932, and he shared the task of taking her to Froebel in the mornings. Redeeming himself after his schooldays, it was he who often did the laundry. Rene was no more a housekeeper than Iris turned out to be. She was ‘not a housekeeper at all’, much to grandmother Louisa’s distress. Louisa was certainly, says Sybil, horrified that her son should have to do so many of the things women were then expected to do. Cleaver, more directly, says that Aunt Ella thought of Rene as having ‘sluttish ways’, a wife who could not even cook for her husband or keep a tidy house. Sybil also remembers Hughes doing the gardening, housekeeping, laundry, much of the shopping and organising, for example, the travel arrangements for the annual Irish trip. He cooked and washed up while Rene sat back and looked pretty. No one did much cleaning. Once Cleaver was staying in Chiswick and he and Hughes came in late. ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ asked Rene, and on learning that they had not, went off to the kitchen to cook, ‘with an expression on her face’ at having to do so. Bayley takes another view. The Belfast ethos, from which Hughes was in lifelong flight, militated against Rene’s domestic virtues being fairly appraised.⁴³ He remembers Irene cooking and washing up, smoking a cigarette, and believes she was competent without being house-proud, taking her housekeeping duties lightly. Cleaver does not recall Chiswick being very untidy. There was no home-help, no car, and no wine at home: the family could not afford it.

Hughes is remembered by John Bayley as asking either Rene or Iris or both, in his mild Ulster brogue, ‘Have you no sense at all, woman?’ The question was good-humoured and rhetorical, and there is a danger of making Hughes sound like Nora’s husband Torvald in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. A biographer wishing to fuel such a comparison would make much of the only facial expression of her father’s Iris recorded, a look of ‘impatient nervous irritation’ which she feared she inherited;⁴⁴ and of Rene’s lost singing career, a loss that probably caused Iris more grief than it did easy-going Irene. Hughes did ‘baby’ Rene, who would simply say sweetly in her Dublin brogue, ‘If that makes him happy … There’s no point in fighting over a thing like that'; ‘Well, if he wants to do that, let him get on with it.’ Rene got her hair seen to, sang in a choir, joined a swimming club (a photo of young Iris and Irene there survives), played bridge.⁴⁵ There was a piano at Eastbourne Road. When Hughes died in 1958 the family were very concerned about how Rene would cope. But, as the Belfast cousins wryly put it, ‘it’s wonderful what you can do when you’ve got to’.⁴⁶ She turned out to be perfectly well able to look after herself, until old age and illness supervened.

Unlike Nora and Torvald, Rene and Hughes were clearly extremely happy together. Rene increasingly saw herself as a ‘duckling that had hatched a swan’ – she didn’t know what Iris was doing, quite, but was all in favour of it anyway.⁴⁷ Cleaver remembers Rene’s physical and inner beauty alike: ‘welcoming, cheerful, charming … lovely’. She was very pretty and good fun, with a happy temperament, vivacious, often laughing or smiling, a jolly and welcoming and open-hearted person. In early photographs Irene is dark-haired. Later on she dyed it blonde. Once, when Louisa, Irene and Sybil were waiting for a bus, coming home from shopping, both Louisa and Irene burdened with parcels, a gallant young man sprang to Irene’s rescue, taking her parcels for her. Poor elderly Louisa had to fend for herself. ‘Now you see what blonde hair can do for you,’ Irene quipped: if capable of being a vamp, she could also be witty.

Hughes, formal, dignified, interested in everything that was going on in the world, was more serious than Irene but seemed contented, at peace with himself. Elias Canetti would later recall him as ‘thoughtful, tremendously engaging’.⁴⁸ One of his fingernails was broken and grew in a horny, claw-like shape, in evidence when he counted his cigarettes. Probably he had injured it during the war. He would speak of the long Tube journey into work, where, at a later period, he was known as ‘Old Murdoch’,⁴⁹ seeming self-contained to the point of isolation, an ‘odd bird’ working on the census with a personal grade of Assistant Registrar General at Somerset House in 1950 when he retired. He did not light any fires, but worked quietly, unassumingly, ably, treating everyone with great courtesy.⁵⁰ He had a sense of humour, told jokes against himself.⁵¹

9

Summer holidays were usually spent in Ireland, ‘a very romantic land, a land I always wanted to get to … and discover’.⁵² Iris had seven first cousins, three in Ulster, four in Dublin, and doubtless sometimes felt, like Andrew in The Red and the Green, that these Irish cousins

served [her] in those long hated and yet loved holidays of childhood as sibling-substitutes, temporary trial brothers and sisters, for whom [her] uncertain affection took the form of an irritated rivalry. [She] felt [herself] indubitably superior to this heterogeneous, and, it seemed … uncultivated and provincial gang of young persons, always noisier, gayer and more athletic than [herself].⁵³

They disembarked from the Holyhead boat-train in Dun Laoghaire harbour, and a two-minute walk got them to Mellifont Avenue, where at number 16 was the nursing home run and owned by Mrs Walton, Belfast-born foster-mother to Iris’s cousin Eva Robinson, seven years Iris’s senior, and closer to her than Rene’s sister Gertie’s four sons. Eva, who had polio as a child and wore a leg-brace, was protective and kind to the younger Iris. Mrs Walton’s new address at Mellifont Avenue – she had previously had a stationery shop – was convenient, too, for the salt-water baths at the end of the road, where they all swam. Eva and Iris shared a love of ‘stories’, and as they sat on the rocks on Dun Laoghaire beach Eva would make up enthralling tales.⁵⁴ After marriage in 1941 Eva and her husband Billy Lee shared 34 Monkstown Road with Iris’s grandmother Elizabeth Jane ('Bessie') Richardson and Mrs Walton, until the deaths of the two older women in 1941 and 1944 respectively. Iris used Eva as a model in her only published short story, ‘Something Special’.⁵⁵ Mrs Walton and Eva worshipped at the neighbouring Anglican Mariner’s Church (now closed), and Iris and her parents almost certainly attended Revivalist meetings run by the ‘Crusaders’

there.* After Dublin there would be a longer stay in the North, whose ‘black Protestantism’ Rene did not always look forward to, but met with good grace. Hughes’s sister Sarah and her husband Willy from Belfast rented a different house for one month each summer for themselves and their three children, Cleaver, Muriel and Sybil, in the seaside town of Portrush. There the Murdochs joined them. William Chapman, from a farming community near Lisburn, had gone to the Boer War with the Medical Corps on the strength of knowing a little pharmacy, and won a stripe there. On his return he taught himself dentistry and, though without professional qualification, did very well. When he was about fifty he contracted multiple sclerosis.

Family prayers featured during these holidays. Swimming in the Atlantic breakers off Portstewart strand was one source of fun,⁵⁶ board games in the evening, which Iris enjoyed if she won, another. (Presumably, since the Chapmans were Brethren, games with ‘court’ playing cards were excluded.) Iris is not recalled as always a good loser, though she could be even-tempered too. On one occasion she was painting, which she loved. After she broke off cousin Sybil thought she would help by tidying up all her paints. When Iris came back to continue, the special colours she had prepared had been cleaned away. She calmly set about mixing similar ones. The Chapmans recall Iris’s goodness, kind-heartedness, strangeness, strong will and shyness. Self-effacing cousin Muriel, to whom Iris was always closest, a closeness later strengthened when Muriel taught in Reigate during the war, protected her. Saying goodbye, Iris would occasionally ‘fill up’ and be tearful: she cried without difficulty. Sybil never saw this emotionalism in Irene, who was far more happy-go-lucky.

Goethe said, in a little rhyme, that from his father, who was from north Germany, he got his gravitas, his sense of reason, order and logic; from his mother, who came from the south, he got his ‘Lust zum fabulieren’, his love of telling tales. Rene adored the cinema, adored reading novels, liked stories, had the sense of a story. Perhaps Iris distantly echoes Goethe’s mixed inheritance. She had been writing since she was at least nine. An early confident talent for turning life into narrative drama shows in a letter written to a friend from 15 Mellifont Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, on 29 August 1934, when Iris was fifteen.⁵⁷ It is prefaced by a drawing of two mackintoshed girls walking in the Dublin rain.

Hello! A grey and relentless sky has been pouring rain on us for the last week, and the sun has forgotten how to shine … Great excitement here! Last Sunday week night (that sounds queer) a terrible storm got up, and on Monday morning about 8 a.m. the first maroon went for the lifeboat. I was in the bathroom at the time. I never got washed so quick as I did then. I was dressed & doing my hair when the second maroon went. Then I flew out of the house. Doors were banging all the way down the street, and the entire population of Dun Laoghaire seemed to be running to the harbour. Doodle (Daddy) & my cousin [Eva Robinson] had already left … The lifeboat was in the harbour mouth when I arrived. I asked a man what was up. A yacht had evidently broken its moorings and drifted out of the harbour or something, anyway we could just see it on the horizon. A high sea was running and I was glad to have my mackintosh with me. I dashed down the pier – which by the way is a mile long – and was drenched by the spray and the waves breaking over the pier. The sand whipped up by the wind, drove in clouds and I got some in my eye, which hurt like anything. The lifeboat had an awful job, it was pitching and tossing, and once we thought it was going down but it got to the yacht, which turned out to be empty, and towed it back amid the enthusiastic cheers of the populace. Three other yachts broke their moorings in the harbour, of these, two went down, and the other was saved and towed to calmer waters just as it was dashing itself to pieces against the pier. That was a great thrill. The next excitement was a huge German liner – three times as big as the mailboat – that anchored in the bay …

On the mail-boat to Dublin in summer 1936, the Hammond and Murdoch families met. Annie Hammond had been witness at Rene and Hughes’s wedding, and her son Richard asked the seventeen-year-old Iris what she wished to do in life. ‘Write,’ she replied.⁵⁸

* Miriam Allott’s Squire was Garth Underwood, whose sculptor-father Leon provided inspiration for A.P. Herbert in The Water-Gypsies (1930). His names being Garth Lionel, his emblem was a golden lion rampant cut out of a yellow duster, with an embroidered flame issuing from its mouth. Miriam’s Egyptian maiden name, Farris, meant ‘knight’, so surrounding the lion they had two silver knight’s spurs made from balloon cloth, plus seven stars, for ‘Miriam’ (= Mary). They were known as the household of the Silver Knight and the Golden Lion.

* ‘Thereafter all the Court all joined with merriment in the strange game of “Ye Knight he chased ye dragon up ye hickoree tree!” Truly terrible was the advance of the nobel Baron Dane …’ etc., etc. Account of the final Knights and Ladies, Old Froebelians’ News Letter, 1934, pp.3–4.

† Miriam Allott, however, is sure that the wooden sword was at Miss Bain’s belt, and that when jousting it was either wooden swords for all, or rolled-up paper for all.

* ‘Laughing I bear the boar’s head in to the Lord of Praise.’

* Iris invited Allott, if she ever had time, to visit Rene in Barons Court; partly, Allott now (2001) believes, to get straight her understanding of the Murdoch family.

* Eva Robinson (later, Lee) was always close to Iris, while her exact relationship remained unclear. A 1984 letter from Eva to Iris suggests that Eva believed her mother to be sister to Iris’s grandmother Bessie (Elizabeth Jane), making her first cousin to Rene, and first cousin once removed to Iris. She possessed a birth certificate showing that the woman she referred to as ‘Mummie’, who had died in 1912 when Eva was born, was one Annie Nolan, child to Anna Kidd and William Nolan. Recently discovered evidence suggests that this Annie Nolan was one and the same as Annie Walton, who always presented Eva publicly as her foster-daughter. Annie Nolan, a nurse living at 59 Blessington Street, married the saddler George Henry Walton on 19 February 1919, when her ‘foster’ daughter Eva would have been about seven years old. The Murdochs thus had every reason in their own terms to regard the Richardsons – and hence Irene – with some distaste: no fewer than three Richardson marriages between December 1918 and February 1919 seem to have legitimised irregular unions. The capacity of ‘nice’ Irish families to air-brush the past should not be underestimated. Billy Lee, whom Eva married in 1941, believed her father to have been a prosperous Colonel Berry, from a big house near Newcastle in County Down, who looked after Eva’s finances.

* Before the war, and for a time at least after it, the Crusaders were ‘an organisation designed to attract middle – and upper-class children – boys chiefly, I fancy – to evangelical Christianity. There was a badge, possibly some minimal uniforms relating to those of crusading orders, and meetings combined Bible study and religious instruction with activities of a more Boy Scout-ish kind’ (Dennis Nineham, letter to author). Chapter 4 of The Red and the Green starts with such a meeting, and Iris’s journals abound in memories of hymns, some evangelical.

3 The Clean-Cut Rational World 1932—1938

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

2

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.’