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