this attempt to enlist sympathy and invite Iris to ‘love what [she] must leave ere long’, and it is hard to disentangle the myth of the poem from what was to happen to Frank. Yet, if the poetry does not only lie in the self-pity, the self-dramatisation is also less boldly absolute than in Frank’s deservedly renowned poem ‘Polliciti Meliora’, written a year or so later, and more memorably poignant.
7
Iris spent the last two glorious August weeks of that final summer of peace with the strolling Magpie Players, exploring a different kind of poetry and a different mode of self-dramatisation. Scatty and likeable Tom Fletcher from Ruskin, who lived on Magpie Lane – ‘ a little king and … no constitutional monarch either’ – organised a dozen or more students into a group reminiscent of J.B. Priestley’s ‘good companions’ to tour the countryside around Oxford, performing mainly set-piece ballads and songs74 (’It Ain’t Gonna Rain no Mo” for the company, and, among others, Samuel Daniel’s ‘Love is a Sickness’ for Iris, which, she wrote, ‘filled me with joy'), and short dramatic or comic interludes – ‘Tam Lin’, ‘The Lay of the Heads’, ‘Auld Witch Wife’, ‘Binnorie’, ‘Green-sleeves’, ‘Clydewater’, the medieval ‘Play of the Weather’, ‘Donna Lombarda’ … Since the group aimed to capitalise on ‘the fascination Oxford holds for the general public’,75 they were enacting the roles of ‘care-free students’, as much as the parts within the sketches. Proceeds went to the Oxford University Refugee Appeal Fund.* They start on 16 August at the Blade Bone pub in Bucklebury, the first time Iris had lived ‘on a genuine farm’. She is bemused to be woken early by roosters and cows, to whom she plays her recorder. Later, seven horses stop to listen. The takings in Bucklebury are £7. They make their own publicity, both stunts and posters, and proceed, with ten stops, to Winchcombe, by which time war has been declared. It is a lyrical, picaresque, hand-to-mouth progress, with daily uncertainty about scenery and props arriving in time for a performance at a new venue, uncertainty about where the next meal or hot bath will come from —'wolfed dinner’ is one leitmotiv – uncertainty about audiences, who vary from the parsons and ‘intelligentsia’, who pay two-and-six to five shillings, to the toughs of Northleach paying a few pennies. They sew their own costumes: ‘Mother of God preserve me from the simple sewing machine’ precedes a comic rant in Iris’s journal about defective tension, needles, bobbins. On Tuesday, 22 August, Fox Photos turn up and take two hundred snaps for Picture Post. One shows a notably attractive Iris prettily sewing, another wolfing food, a third as the emblematic ‘Fairy-tale princess’.
Her hundred-page journal of those two weeks is her first surviving prose narrative. She archaically spells — and was for decades to spell – ‘show’ as ‘shew’. The handwriting is firm and very confident, fluent about what she perceives. The troupe’s antics are juvenile – she had only the previous month reached twenty, after all – but her eye is keen in discerning the painful jocularities of youth, and the agonising fou rires that are really signs of pre-first night nerves. Meeting a group of gypsies, the Magpies note a kinship, leading as both do a wandering existence cut off from the ordinary run of life. Iris expects daily arrest since ‘the number of copyright songs we are singing without permission, & performances we are giving without licences, and cars we are driving without insurances, is really amazing’. She notes: ‘Riding on running boards when the car is going a good forty is most exhilarating sport.’
She muses to herself of the company: ‘They’re a wonderful collection to be sure, & it’s devilish fond I am of them': Irishness was her stock-in-trade. Cherwell had recently published her satirical ‘The Irish – Are they Human?’ – an answering polemic pointed out that she was obviously Scots-Irish76 – and Denis Healey, part-Irish, two years older, and not knowing her well, believed for the following sixty years that Iris had come straight to Oxford from Dublin. Iris writes of Virginia Woolf as ‘the darling, dangerous woman’77 and is given to the imprecation ‘Holy Mother of God’. After big, unshaven and, to Iris, very attractive Hugh Vaughan James finally arrives – a link with the Labour Club and the Communist Party – ‘with all the dust of Kerry on him and the same old devil in his extraordinarily blue eyes’, having hitch-hiked from the west of Ireland on cars and a tramp steamer, missing two nights’ sleep, she soon notes that his brogue is ‘better than mine’, a phrase that suggests Irishness as a matter of identification and impersonation as well as inheritance. Hugh was mistaken for a member of the IRA in Valencia. Tom Fletcher’s indifferent Irish accent, and worse jigs, by contrast, grate. It is no accident that Iris’s writing persona, in her first published novel, was to have an Irish voice.
She talks about Communism and the international situation with Hugh, for whom she felt a tendresse to which they briefly give expression, Iris imagining him an old Bolshevik and amazed to find he has been ‘in’ (i.e. the Party) only a few months. He fills the scene-shifting intervals with ‘brilliant’ songs and patter, does Cossack dances on the running-board travelling at sixty. At fifteen stone and with a three-day growth of beard he resembles a Viking chieftain or some ancient Celtic hero. Indeed he pleases Iris by believing in the little people; he is, after all, himself a ‘giant’.
Low points of the tour, for opposite reasons, were Buscot and Northleach. At glorious Buscot Park, seat of Lord Faringdon, Iris approves the rows and rows of Left Book Club covers, of Marx and of Engels in the library, and even frescos of the Socialist ‘Lord Faringdon addressing the Labour Party’. Moreover there is a magnificent theatre with every conceivable gadget except the blackout facility needed for ‘Tam Lin’. But the twenty noble lords and ladies who arrive in their Rolls-Royces are ‘as dead as doornails’ and not to be pleased. Each turn misfires or falls flat. ‘Well-bred. God! but they were well-bred,’ comments Iris. ‘The devil take them, they were neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring – we didn’t know where to have them. If they had been less genteel they’d have liked the broader things, & if they’d been more cultured they’d have liked the ballads – but they were merely gentry & so got no fun.’ She has nice and democratic social instincts, and values them in others. In Faringdon’s library the company behaved badly, talking loudly amongst themselves about the performance. Only she and Hugh took pains to speak to Faringdon’s secretary Captain Bourne, whom both had noticed looking ill at ease.
Worse was to come two days later at Northleach, the town covered in ‘recruiting bills and adjurations to young men to join the Territorials and defend their homes’. The place is ‘scared stiff & in an appalling state of nerves. Never having seen or heard of gas masks before, they are now in a panic & imagining slaughter & sudden death.’ A great mob of toughs barracked, laughed and cat-called. The intelligentsia shushed them, to no avail. Iris was ‘mad with rage’, nearly weeping with fury. Tom Fletcher lost his head and offended the rest of the cast by guying the ‘Play of the Weather’. They were saved when all the lights failed: air raid precautions? ‘Northleach hospitality’ received its final blow when the company arrived at an immense Elizabethan manor and found no food prepared.
By contrast, the high point on 29 August was Tusmore Park, abode of Lady Bicester – not merely the ‘wide tall tawnily-weathered 18th C building with mile-long terraces & a most beautiful lake to double it all in reflection’, but also ‘lamb both hot and cold to eat, sauces and vegetables, veal, ham, apple pie & cream & peaches, washed down with cider or beer and barley-water, & apologies for an impromptu meal’, off silver plate, to boot. Iris’s acting is admired by Irish Lady Bicester,78 who likes ‘Tam Lin’ best. Iris records throughout an innocent hunger for praise. She had been instantly enslaved to fellow-Magpie Ruth Kingsbury (who recalled Iris’s publicly declared willingness to deploy her charm on Hugh Vaughan James) when Ruth had praised her Cherwell poems. Iris notes happily that ‘Joyce [Taylor] said my arm movements reminded her of Peggy Ashcroft,’ embraces the Magpie harpist