and occasional flamboyant emotionalism, a superstitious bent towards occultism and magic,* an inability to grow up, an obsession with the hauntings of history and a disturbed love-hate relation with Ireland itself – can be found in Iris as in Bowen and Yeats. Bowen’s Protestant Irishness made of her a ‘naturally separated person': so did Iris’s. Yeats, coming from ‘an insecure middle-class with a race memory of elitism’,90 conquered the inhabitants of great houses such as Coole Park through unique ‘charm and the social power of art’,91 rather as Iris later visited Clandeboye and Bowen’s Court. Both Yeats and Iris elevated themselves socially ‘by a sort of moral effort and a historical sleight-of-hand’.92 Each was, differently, an audacious fabulator, in life as in art.
In the confusion of her latter years when much was to be forgotten, the words ‘Irish’ and ‘Ireland’ were unfailing reminders of Iris’s own otherness. Both struck deep chords, and she would perk up and show particular interest. In Provence in June 1997 she remarked emphatically, ‘I’m nothing if not Irish.’ The following winter, sitting at the small deal kitchen table after a bracing walk on the Radnorshire hills, she disconcerted her hearers by asking, ‘Who am I?’, to which she almost at once soothed herself by musing, ‘Well I’m Irish anyway, that’s something.’ A lifetime’s investment in Irishness, visible in every decade of her life, was then, as it had always been, a source of reassurance, a reference-point, a credential, somewhere to start out from and return to.
10
Iris’s early memories were of swimming, singing and being sung to, of animals, and of wonderment at the workings of the adult world. She sat at the age of about seven under the table while her parents played bridge – either reading a favourite childhood book or, as she put it, ‘simply sitting in quietness’93 and listening in astonishment to the altercations and mutual reproaches of the adults at the end of each rubber. Wonderment, imaginative identification with a fantastic range of creature-kind, capacity to feel strong emotions, secretiveness, and also Irishness: these are recurrent and related themes within her story.
Early photographs show her a blonde, plump, exceedingly pretty baby, flirting in a straw Kate Greenaway bonnet with her mother, and even more with her photographer-father, in Dalkey in August 1921. If the family was by then already based in London, neither this nor the Black and Tans, who had that year raided ‘rebel’ houses in Blessington Street itself,94 prevented the annual Irish summer holiday. The truce of 11 July that year would have offered holidaymakers, among others, reassurance.
Hughes, Rene and baby Iris lived first of all in a flat at 12 Caithness Road, Brook Green, Hammersmith. Hughes was fairly low down on the civil service ladder but had a permanent position as a second class clerk in the Ministry of Health, a ministry he was to stay at until 1942. He kept a pocketbook in which he noted the day’s expenditures, no matter how minor.95 This same meticulousness shows itself in the young Iris’s carefully managed stamp collection. She tucked away in the back both a small ‘duplicate book’, in case of losses, and an envelope marked emphatically ‘valuable stamps: King Edward’, referring, of course, to stamps pertaining to the short reign of Edward VIII.
What exactly constitutes a ‘first’ memory? Surely later imaginative significance as much as strict chronological primacy. Iris gave as her ‘first’ memory not ‘My mother flying up above me like a white bird’,96 but herself swimming in the salt-water baths near Dun Laoghaire when she was three or four years old.97 Her father got quickly to the further side, where he sat and called out encouragement. In 1997 she could still enact the excitement, fear, sense of challenge, and deep love entailed in her infant efforts slowly to swim to the other side and regain her father’s protection – a powerful enough proto-image in itself of her continuing life-quest for the authority of the Father. Another version has Hughes first of all persuading her to jump in, and into his arms.
Swimming was the secret family religion. It is not merely that Hughes liked to swim in the Forty-Foot: swimming is mentioned on postcard after postcard, in letter after letter, from and to Iris over many decades, and the word order of one particular card from Sandycove, Dun Laoghaire, from her mother to Iris makes clear which activity carried the greater weight: ‘Had a bathe this morning – after church.”98 Churchgoing is likely to have occurred mainly because Rene was still singing in the choir.
In her journals Iris would recollect, especially latterly, many songs her mother taught her. In January 1990 she records:
Recalling Rene. A prayer she must have taught me when
I was a small child. I remember it as phrased –
Jesus teacher: shepherd hear me:
bless thy little: lamb tonight:
in the darkness: be thou near me:
keep me safe till: morning light.
She must have taught it to me word for word as soon as I could talk.99”
Rene also sang to Iris ‘Tell me the old, old story of Jesus and His Love’. But who exactly was Jesus’s love? The infant Iris, misconstruing this sentence as small children are apt to, used to wonder …
Grown-up Iris knew the words of the combative ‘Old Orange Flute’, probably from her father, who could also recite Percy French’s ‘Abdul the Bulbul Ameer’. Rene sang, as well as works such as Handel’s Messiah in a choir, light ballads, French’s among others. Percy French songs suggest the comfortable synthetic Irishness Tracy later made fun of in her books. Rene took pride, too, in singing Nationalist or ‘rebel’ songs:
Here’s to De Valera,
The hero of the right,
We’ll follow him to battle,
With orange green and white.
We’ll fight against old England
And we’ll give her hell’s delight.
And we’ll make De Valera King of Ireland.
After the shootings that followed the Easter Rising, when Rene was seventeen, some Protestant Richardsons were pro-independence;100 Rene was pro-Michael Collins and against De Valera in 1922, when the two found themselves on opposing sides in the civil war. She took delight, when she learnt it later, in the song ‘Johnson’s Motor-Car’. The Nationalist ‘rebels’ borrow Constable Johnson’s car for urgent use, and promise to return it in this fashion:
We’ll give you a receipt for it, all signed by Captain Barr.
And when Ireland gets her freedom, boy, ye’ll get your motor-car.
Grandma Louisa, after a visit to London in the twenties, would often recount Iris sitting on the pavement and weeping inconsolably about a dog which had been hit by a car. Iris was to give the death of a pet dog as a first memory, and first trauma, to characters in successive books.* The dog might have been hers: a photograph of Hughes with a mongrel (possibly containing some smooth-haired terrier) survives, and a smaller third hand must belong to the child Iris, otherwise wholly hidden behind the animal. Another shows Iris proudly stroking the same beast on her own.
There were cats also, Tabby and Danny-Boy. Danny-Boy uttered memorable growling noises on sighting birds from the windowsill. Seventy years later Iris recalled her father wishing the cats goodnight before putting out the lights.101