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