the invasion of Poland.
5 Madonna Bolshevicka 1939–1942
Wartime Oxford was different. Iris later elegised to Frank the passing of
the Oxford of our first year – utterly Bohemian & fantastic – when everyone was master of their fate and captain of their soul in a way that I have not met since. Those people just didn’t care a damn – and they lived vividly, individually, wildly, beautifully. Now we are all more earnest and more timid and no more careless rapture.1
In October 1939 Frank came up from Larkhill Officer Cadet Training Unit on Salisbury Plain to take his Pass Mods (exam). He was in Oxford one week, and spent ‘a very placid evening with a Bolshevicka of my acquaintance’ – certainly Iris.2 Though under-age, having just turned nineteen, he had already volunteered, on 2 September, one crucial symbolic day before the formal outbreak of hostilities. He ‘simply wanted to fight’, Frank’s act created a stir because it ignored government regulations safeguarding undergraduates from being called up before their twentieth birthday. His parents tried to have his enlistment rescinded on the grounds of his age, but that made him the more determined. There was also the question of the Party line. On the outbreak of war the Communist Party, after one week of supporting a war on two fronts – i.e. against Fascism and Imperialism – finally declared it an Imperialist war ‘waged between Hitlerite Fascism and British and French Imperialism for profit and domination’, and thus to be opposed. Some Spectator readers wanted University Labour Federation scholarships withdrawn.3 Leo Pliatzky quipped: ‘Dulce et Decorum est/?? die for Vested Interest’, and ‘Here dead we lie/For F.B.I’.4 The Oxford CP, Iris told Mary, spent a week sorting out their line, and two unpublished poems suggest that Iris battled with her own doubts.* Two months before the outbreak of war Frank had probably participated with Michael Foot in a deputation to the House of Commons against conscription: a Prime Minister as bad as Chamberlain might use powers to conscript to break strikes instead of to fight Nazis.5 This deputation paradoxically included many progressive and idealistic souls who were willing voluntarily to join up despite the statistic their fathers never let them forget – that the expectation of life of an infantry subaltern on the Western Front in the First World War had been three weeks.6 In the intervening months Frank had been upset by the USSR-German non-aggression pact, and ‘hit in the kidneys’ by the Soviet aggression against Finland. On the outbreak of that ‘Winter War’, on 30 November 1939, Frank burst into Leo’s rooms in Corpus, very distressed. Leo found some way of rationalising and justifying the conflict; Iris, too, despite her signs of hesitation, continued to support the USSR. Yet, if only momentarily, Frank’s trust in the Russians was shaken.7 He was well able to be independent-minded. Iris never had cause to doubt that in 1944, on trial for his life, Frank bravely and defiantly declared himself a Communist. Yet he also appears attractively indifferent to the heresies of ‘democratic centralism’ and ‘factionalism’ alike.8 The ‘placidity’ of the evening suggests that his emotional turmoil of May and June may by now have lessened. Iris’s could be a soothing as well as a stimulating presence. But he was still in love, and stayed so.
‘MADONNA BOLSHEVICKA’9
Sure, lady, I know the party line is better.
I know what Marx would have said. I know you’re right. When this is over we’ll fight for the things that matter. Somehow, today, I simply want to fight. That’s heresy? Okay. But I’m past caring. There’s blood about my eyes, and mist and hate. I know the things we’re fighting now and loathe them. Now’s not the time you say? But I can’t wait.
Maybe I’m not so wrong. Maybe tomorrow
We’ll meet again. You’ll smile and you’ll agree. And then we’ll raise revolt and blast the heavens. But now there’s only one course left for me.
Across this autumn 1939 poem Frank wrote ‘BILGE‘, rejecting the poor poetry more than the political line. Iris – like Frank, having spent a week in Surrey that June at a CP student summer school – had evidently questioned his having volunteered. She stayed pacifist until June 1941, three months after he sailed from England. He had elected her to be muse, soul-mate, keeper of his conscience, and she was often capable of the ‘passionate intensity’ Yeats feared. Small wonder Denis Healey identified Iris at that time with the epithet ‘this latter-day Joan-of-Arc’.10
Frank’s poem, if a gesture of independence, proposes a more equal relationship between them. He and Iris must have discussed the war and his motives in enlisting as they processed, near Magdalen Bridge, through the moonlit Oxford blackout. A whimsical writer had commented on the vision of Oxford lit only by moonlight as ‘almost worth a war':11 against such callow aestheticism, Frank wryly notes that ‘somehow most of us could do without a war even so.’
Over the succeeding months other friends were called up, degrees interrupted or compressed. Noel Martin would leave Corpus in June 1940, with mounting debts and the certainty of being called up that August, to work at Holton Manor Farm, Wheatley, as a farm labourer for forty shillings a week.* Before leaving Oxford, he telephoned Iris from the kiosk near the Gothic martyrs’ memorial, proposing marriage. She gently declined. Refugees, many of them learned, flooded the Oxford streets. Iris wrote: ‘East London & East Europe jostle for Lebensraum on the pavements of the High & Corn … A thousand people sleep & live in unimaginable conditions in the Majestic Cinema. The main stream seems to have been diverted into our backwater.’12 Britain’s internment of refugees who had been fighting Fascism, some suicidal, drove her ‘frantic’. Undergraduates and dons alike who were left in Oxford included the aged, ordinands, the unfit, and those awaiting active service. ‘Youthful dons & adult male undergraduates,’ wrote Iris, ‘are as rare as butterflies in March.’13
Part of Somerville having been requisitioned by the Radcliffe Infirmary, she was living in her second year in considerable freedom at 43 Park Town in North Oxford with Anne Cloake, Lindsay Patterson and Jean Courts. The others soon married, Anne to the left-wing economist Teddy Jackson, Jean to the philosopher John Austin, of whose lectures Iris was appreciative.14 Elderly refugees from the London Blitz on occasion joined the household; they all huddled together in the basement during the few air raids. Their landlady Miss Lepper kept a benign eye on them, and they were glad to get away from college cooking. Iris and Jean subsisted for a while on sardines, bread and as yet unrationed oranges.15 Iris was painting a lot; many of her paintings of the time had ladders in them. One survives: of a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses – the first UK edition came out in 1936 – lying by a blue pottery jar of coltsfoot.16
In November 1939 Iris published an untitled poem, ‘You take life tiptoe':17
… Cry
In salute of life – not in dread Of dizzy cross-sections of being – relating All things to all. The