one of the refugee girls, where she could recuperate from the trauma of her years under the Nazis. Iris commented: ‘We knew about the concentration camps considerably before this idea was taken seriously by the general public.’
Indira Gandhi later recalled groups of senior girls sharing living quarters with a teacher, and having to help look after the housekeeping. On Sunday mornings the Jewish and Indian girls would go for walks in groups of four. Indira would lead one group. On 10 December 1936 a gym session was interrupted and the girls asked to hurry into the next room for some special news, without waiting to get dressed in their smart afternoon wear. Indira recalled their squatting on the floor in their navy-blue gym tunics to listen to Edward VIII’s abdication broadcast. The atmosphere was charged with emotion. Many were in tears.
5
BMB and Iris developed a deep rapport; they ‘got on famously’.48 BMB was at her best with serious, studious girls, and Iris, at least from the sixth form, was quite outstanding. She had ‘an obviously potentially great mind with a humility and a probing determination to know and understand other people and nationalities’.49 Iris took from BMB a strong intuitive sense of – and a missionary zeal about – the distinctions between right and wrong. They would sit and discuss the Good,50 a discussion that was to continue over many decades. At a soirée for sixth-form girls BMB remarked that Iris was not only remarkable but ‘already had a philosophy of life’. Fellow student Pat Zealand, unsure what a philosophy of life was, was nonetheless impressed that Iris had one. The mottoes chosen by BMB for the school magazine presage the adult Iris’s searching moral passion: ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he’ (Proverbs, 23: 7); ‘The essence of religion is that it should inform the whole of one’s daily practical life’ (J. Middleton Murry).
Margaret Rake, the prefect who had observed Iris’s unhappiness in her first year, came back to teach history at Badminton in 1936–37, and she and BMB helped Iris prepare for the alarming General Paper for her Oxford entrance. Set by Iris’s future tutor Isobel Henderson (with help that year from Iris’s future colleague Jenifer Hart), it was notorious for eccentric questions – ‘Describe the workings of a bicycle’, and ‘Here are fifteen rules of grammar for a new language … Now translate the National Anthem into that language’.51 Iris, it soon became clear, knew more history than Margaret; luckily they could laugh about this. Iris, Margaret remembered, looked like a white rabbit, and lowered her head in despair at the human race because it was so stupid, and so frivolous.
Margaret Rake believed that BMB was dedicated to too narrow a conception of Good, and did not see her own frailties. Iris, who saw BMB with considerable objectivity, describes her not merely as a bully but also as a ‘great general’. The atmosphere she created ‘outlawed malice and lying and vulgar snobbery’. BMB nurtured a ‘strong positive innocence’ and a ‘lucid security which inspired faith and … freedom’. One source of her strength may have been that, though thought by some to be an intellectual snob, she was not herself really an intellectual, and was therefore presumably neither a nihilist nor a cynic. Led by BMB the girls were athletes, craftswomen, scholars, practitioners of all the arts. They were introduced, Iris wrote, to ‘the whole of history, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Romans were our familiar friends, and most of all the Greeks. The cool drawing-room light was soon transformed for me into the light of Hellas, the last gleam of a Victorian vision of those brilliant but terrible people.’
In 1983 Iris published a poem about her kind but formidable old headmistress, meditating on much of this, and entitled simply ‘Miss Beatrice May Baker, Headmistress of Badminton School, Bristol, from 1911 to 1946’.
Your genius was a monumental confidence
To which even the word ‘courage’ seems untrue. In your art deco pastel ambience You sat, knowing what to do. Pure idealism was what you had to give, Like no one now tells people how to live.
With your thin silver hair and velvet band
And colourless enthusiastic eyes You waved the passport to a purer land, A sort of universal Ancient Greece, Under whose cool and scrutinizing sun Beauty and Truth and Good were obviously one.
Upon your Everest we were to climb,
At first together, later on alone, To leave our footprints in the snows of time And glimpse of Good the high and airless cone. How could we have considered this ascent
Had not our cynic hearts adjudged you innocent? Politics too seemed innocent at that time When we believed there would be no more war. How shocked we were to learn that a small one Was actually going on somewhere! We lived through the jazz age with golden eyes
Reflecting what we thought was the sunrise.
And yet we knew of Hitler and his hell Before most people did, when all those bright Jewish girls kept arriving; they were well Aware of the beginning of the night, The League of Nations fading in the gloom, And burning lips of first love, cold so soon.
Restlessly you proclaimed the upward way,
Seeing with clarity the awful stairs, While we laddered our lisle stockings on the splintery parquet Kneeling to worship something at morning prayers. But did you really believe in God, Quakerish lady? The question is absurd.
This elegy, partly inspired by Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939', shares with that poem the jazzy collision between a rationalistic optimism and the coming of the night-time of civilisation. Both poems, too, by implication celebrate ‘the just’ who enliven the coming darkness. But Iris’s poem shines with its own light of irony and of yearning, a light ignited, surely, by BMB herself. BMB here is not so much an algebra teacher as a sybil summoning humankind to pursue the mysteries of the path towards love and goodness, a new Diotima from Plato’s Symposium.
6
Leila Eveleigh recalled Iris as good all round – a good hockey player, interested in and gifted at art (painting), not particularly musical, though she ‘had a go’, but excelling at classics and English. Enthusiastic and alive in all her many activities, she was quiet and inward also. It would not be surprising if Iris’s omnicompetence aroused dislike or envy; none has stepped forward to say it did.52
Latin was taught first by rosy, large, countrified Miss Parkin. Then came Marjorie Bird: tall, thin, no make-up, very plainly dressed and a devout Quaker. Known as ‘The Bird’, she taught Iris Latin and Greek from 1934 to 1937. ‘What a help The Bird was,’ Iris later remembered. The only pupil mentioned by name in Miss Bird’s diaries for the thirties is Iris.*In Iris’s last year Miss Jeffery replaced her, a good scholar who should have been a don. She loved esoteric jokes, gave a brilliant lecture to the whole school on medieval Latin poetry, held Roman supper-parties for the out-of-school Classics Club. Teaching a ‘pearl’ like Iris must have cheered her up. Together they read some of Xenophon’s Anabasis, source of the tide for Iris’s Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea, the Greeks’ cry during a war in Persia when they finally sight salt-water; also ‘those evergreen charmers’ Odyssey Books VI and VII. Miss Jeffery remembered Iris as ‘one of the kindest people [she] had ever met’.53 Iris’s excellent teacher of English, Miss Horsfall – known as ‘The Horse’ – tall, very thin and a little ungainly, wore pince-nez at the end of her nose, her hair in a bun, and was a devout Anglo-Catholic. She often read Iris’s exemplary essays out to the class. An atmosphere of emotionality surrounded her.
Successive issues of the Badminton School Magazine point to Iris’s impact on the school. In the autumn of 1933 she wrote up the new Architecture Club’s expedition to Bradford-on-Avon, describing