Peter Conradi J.

Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography


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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.

      4

      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