which drama school she had attended, as she had been such ‘a delight to look upon’. This was not necessarily sycophancy. Three fellow-Magpies – Moira Dunbar, Denys Becher and Frances Podmore – wrote unprompted sixty years later about Iris’s ‘marvellous way with the old ballads’. Moira Dunbar could still hear Iris’s low mellow voice reciting lines from ‘Tam Lin’, and could recall many verses verbatim. As could Iris; she declaimed from ‘Tam Lin’ for years:
Then up spake the Queen of the Fairies
Out of a bush of Broom – She that has gotten the young Tam Lin Has gotten a stately groom.
Denys Becher, who had arrived ‘looking more than ever like some unutterably wronged and tragic lad out of Housman’,79 played Tam Lin ('perfect – wild and intense and unearthly'), who falls tragically in love both with Janet, played by Iris, and with the Queen of the Fairies. (Only nineteen, he was in fact smitten with Iris, who never guessed.80 He first sighted her standing in Bucklebury stream, rapt in silent contemplation, and thought her ‘the most beautiful woman he had ever seen’.) When they gave a (successful) free matinee to a Basque refugee children’s camp on 28 August, near Shipton-under-Wychwood, ‘to crown our joy three real bushes of broom were in flower behind the “stage"’.
As well as enjoying her own proficiency, Iris takes delight in others too, notably Hugh fencing with Cecil Quentin (not the ‘lofty conceited and utterly snobbish young swine’ she first took him for); and quietly persuades Tom Fletcher to allow her to give up a coveted part in ‘Clydewater’ to a weeping fellow-actress,81 whose career depends upon the tour as she wants a job as an actress with a repertory company.
8
‘Is there any better way of spending the eve of war?’ asked Tom Fletcher at Filkins early in the tour. The interest of the Magpies interlude lies in the confluence of the dramatic international events with a pastoral living-for-the-moment world so soon to be threatened and destroyed: acting out Auden’s ‘A Summer Night’ itself. The Nazis were readying for their invasion of Poland, with their own wicked amateur-theatrical feint of dressing up German convicts in Polish uniforms at the wireless station at Gleiwitz (Gliwice) on 31 August – the convicts were then shot, so that German newspapers could claim a Polish ‘invasion’ of the Reich.
Uncertainty about the international situation fills Iris’s journal, as do the problems of apprehending it as real without over-dramatising it. In Bucklebury on 23 August, the day the Ribben-trop-Molotov non-aggression pact is signed – ‘Over which,’ she writes, ‘much unnecessary fuss is being made’, and ‘Curious how many intelligent people are getting the Soviet Union wrong over this business’ – she notes that ‘the papers seem scared and I suppose a grave crisis is on but I cant seem to feel any emotion about it whatsoever. This is a such a strange, new, different, existence I’m leading & so entirely cut-off from the world.’ The following day at Buscot ‘there is more trouble over Danzig.* But all the people we meet seem very upset, & it must be a great storm to ripple these placid waters.’ That afternoon the performance is interrupted by a speech on the wireless by the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. On Friday, 25 August, on the way between Wallingford and Brightwell, Iris tries to argue Tom out of doing Auden’s ‘Soldiers Coming': ‘with things as they are’ Auden’s melodramatic ballad, with its haunting sense of imminent and anarchic male soldierly violence, ‘comes far too close to the bone’.
On Sunday, 27 August Iris and Joyce Taylor, having lost their cases, stay with a hearty old couple, about whom Iris comments with brisk condescension, ‘good working class stock, but unintelligent’. They are ‘the sort of people who are nice to you when you come canvassing, but who will not buy a copy of the Daily Worker, as they “already get the Herald, thank you very much".’ On Monday, 28 August ‘a worried letter from home’ and the Daily Worker sounding desperate both cause Iris to ponder, ‘Maybe things are worse than I thought … I wonder if this is the end of everything at last? Anyhow, if it is, I am having a very grand finale.’ Michael Foot is called up and writes to make Iris his literary executor ‘with instructions what to publish should Anything Happen to him. But Michael always did take life melodramatically.’ The following day after lunch, the group ‘walked down to the lake and admired the beauty of the place & wondered if we were to die young & what it all meant anyway’. In the churchyard – ‘God, but it’s beautiful’ – Iris lay across one of the graves and ‘thought how quiet it would be to be dead’. On 30 August: ‘The Territorials were called up, today.’ Iris feels ‘strangely unmoved’ and sends a postcard home, self-consciously nonchalant: ‘Bibury has unexpectedly cancelled our performance – Crisis I suppose. We are most wonderfully oblivious of the international situation.’ On 31 August the horrible Gliwice farce was staged, and almost at once the brave, doomed Poles at Westerplatte on the North Sea were attacked by the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein. Since they were in civilian dress when they returned fire, they were subsequently shot without mercy after capture. In the small hours of 1 September the German invasion of Poland began, and by 6 a.m. Warsaw was being bombed. The first evacuation of women and children from London and other major centres began the same day.
The Magpies spent 1 September at an agricultural cooperative set up in Gloucestershire by a German refugee group, the Brüderhof, who in the circumstances preferred to skip the performance. The men sat on one side of the table, the women on the other, while their leader spoke emotionally to his followers of their precarious position in the event of war. The heavy atmosphere was almost too much for Moria Dunbar. She thought, ‘God, if war is going to be like this I might as well slit my throat now.’82 After the war, Tom Fletcher promised, the Magpies would tour again. But, he added sadly, ‘our show will be frightfully pre-war, I’m afraid.’83
Much against the will of the company ('Do you realise there’s a pretty good chance of London being bombed tonight? Don’t be a little fool') Iris resolved, the day war was declared,84 to return to London. She and Hugh travelled in the dicky of the Magpie business-manager Jack Trotman’s grand, buff-yellow, Renault sports-car de luxe, as it roared over the Berkshire Downs to Oxford station. It was intensely exhilarating. Grey-blue clouds and streaks of green and pink sky wreathed the horizon. Hugh put his arm round Iris and they sighed at their luck. A long wait at Reading, the place deserted and troop trains packed with ‘singing canon fodder’ passing every ten minutes, and she chatted in the carriage to two half-drunk reservists who had just been called up. At Paddington she caught the last train, after 1 a.m, but at Hammersmith waited vainly for either Tube or trolley-bus. Somehow she got home.85 The epoch she was later aptly to describe to Frank as ‘the playtime of the ‘30s, when we were all conscience-ridden spectators’,86 was coming to an end.
* Directed by Frances Podmore, it was the first play at Oxford in which male and female students were allowed to act together. Prior to that dons’ wives acted the women’s parts in college performances; West End actresses were called upon for the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS).
* Denis Healey recounts the fury caused in the OULC by Tom Harrisson, founder of Mass Observation and then at Cambridge, with his savage essay on what he called ‘Oxsex’, which Healey thought ‘not unfair’ (The Time of my Life).
* This included the Earl Baldwin Refugee Fund, the China Relief Committee and the National Joint Spanish Relief Committee.