Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography

At first Iris’s mother took her to school – a contemporary recalled Rene as very pretty and smart, intimidatingly attractive and stylish.15 Later, after the move, Hughes would sometimes accompany her on the Tube on his way to work, Iris getting out and walking the last two minutes from Barons Court station by herself. She used to buy sweets on the way. Another contemporary recalls the general taste for ‘sudden-death boiled sweets’, the Wall’s ice cream man who would drive along the road in front of the school with his van marked ‘Stop Me and Buy One’, the excitement of the children clustering round and buying a cold, hard, sharpish-flavoured triangular water-ice on a stick, good value at about a penny, roast chestnuts in winter, when Hammersmith was enlivened by barrows lit up with paraffin flares.16 Some little schoolfriend, to tease Iris, suggested as a joke that she go into the sweet-shop and order ‘one quarter of a pound of Gleedale Munchums’. Gleedale toffees existed, but not Gleedale Munchums. ('Gleedale Munchums’ became a lifelong Bayley family joke.)

Iris’s first day at school was ‘momentous and gratifying’. She had been placed in the kindergarten in the one-storeyed building which had been the original school in 1893, under either Miss Ilse Williams or the capable and imaginative Miss Gladys Short, who died from a bee sting twenty years later. Both the term ‘kindergarten’ and the concept of learning through creative play and adventures had been coined by the German educationalist Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852). Hughes’s excellent tuition of Iris ‘told’, and she was promptly moved up to the Transition group. She exchanged the simple shantung ‘overall’ – kindergarten uniform – for the green serge pinafore dress – gingham in summer – worn over a cream shantung blouse by the older girls, and a leaf-green jacket bearing the Froebel badge of that time, a reversed swastika within a circle, embroidered with a black outline and filled in with white embroidery thread. Called a Greek cross symbol or ‘fylfot’, the full version bore the legends ‘Outworld – Facts and Acts’ on the upper plane, and on the lower ‘Inworld — Memories and Plans’. After 1939, for reasons not hard to discern, this quaint school symbol was changed to a Michaelis daisy. The school motto – ‘Vincit qui se vincit’ – suggests the humanism which the adult Iris would passionately defend: ‘He conquers who conquers himself.’

There were boys up to the age of eleven – another symptom of the school’s progressivism – dressed in grey shirts, shorts and blazers. Some daring girl taught Iris, almost at once, to slide across the parquet floor. And she learnt to write, with a relief nib with a hard square tip, what was termed ‘script’. It replaced the old copperplate with a larger font. The first sentence she copied, in noble plain ‘script’ letters, was: ‘The snowdrop hangs its head down. Why?’ ‘Why indeed!’ she later wrote. ‘A thought-provoking question, a good introduction to a world which is full of mysteries.’ Recalling Froebel evoked reverence and gratitude: ‘A spirit of courtesy, of dignity, of standards, of care for others, was painlessly induced. Relations between boys and girls … were happy and orderly and innocent. We were all remarkably good children.’ Learning was ‘both rigorous and painless’. Her images of those schooldays were ‘of light, of freedom and happiness, the great greedy pleasures of learning, the calm kindly authority of teachers, the mutual amiability of children’.17

Competition, ‘essential to education’, existed in variety. Of teachers she singled out Miss Burdett, who taught the girls Latin from the age of eleven, thereby opening the way to Greek later; and ‘magisterial and warm-hearted’ Miss Bain, the headmistress. There was cricket too, taught by Mr Keegan, wont to call out ‘Stop picking a daisy, sir,’ to some little girl who found the wildflowers more interesting than the cricket ball. Not Iris; she, like her father,18 loved cricket all her life.

The school had been pacifist during the Great War, when instead of the standard version of ‘God Save the King’, this verse was bravely sung:

God bless our native land

May Heaven’s protective hand

Still guard her shore.

May peace her power extend,

Foe be transformed to friend

And Britain’s might depend

On war no more.19

This suggests republicanism as well as pacifism.

Froebel was certainly a highly original and an engagingly dotty place, ‘modern’ for its time, with a friendly and relaxed discipline and no strong religious bias. Two exact contemporaries remembered Iris vividly. The father of Barbara Denny (née Roberts, and later to write a fictionalised life of Friedrich Froebel20) had heard that this was the school ‘where the children did nothing but play’. His meeting with the headmistress, Ethel M. Bain, changed his mind. She was a small, frail-looking Scotswoman with considerable strength of character, with neat, spry, sparrowish features, thin but equally neatly moulded lips, greying hair drawn back in properly prim fashion, and a quiet way of talking which was attended to respectfully. Miss Bain would appear to have been both imaginative and sympathetic: a carefully scripted card from her to Iris showing the bunsen burners in the school science room, dated 24 January 1930, reads: ‘I am so sorry that you have got such a horrid cough. Get well as quickly as you can and come back to school. The Irish girl is here. Love from E.M. Bain.’

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Many aspects of the school that then seemed ‘modern’ have since become standard: the garden area where each form tended its own flowerbed, the two ponds providing instruction and delight in the form of frogs, newts and tadpoles. Play areas, well stocked with trees and shrubs, contained an ancient wooden summer-house and hutches for rabbits and guinea pigs.

Other aspects now look quaint. A child could choose on his or her birthday a story to be read by Miss Bain – often, in that decade, by A.A. Milne, The first form introduced the children to the strange glories of ‘Knights and Ladies’, entailing remarkable dressings-up and an ‘omnipresent form of chivalry that was more than a game’, probably Miss Bain’s inspiration, since it departed with her in 1933. It was an imaginative version of the house and prefect system used in more conventional schools. The boys and girls in the top form – known as Squires and Dames – each had a household of about ten younger children down the school to whom they acted as mother – or father-figure in both work and play. A Dame sewed her banner – becoming a Dame preceded being dubbed a ‘Lady’ – with an appropriate device; her Squire built himself a shield in the woodwork class.* At least once a term the whole school would assemble at the ‘King’s Court’ in the larger College Hall, the Dames and Squires in two lines, their households lined up behind them in order of age. King Bain would enter, walking down the aisle in a velvet cloak and cardboard crown, the boys bowing and the girls curtseying. The Old Froebelian’s News Letter of 1934 recalled the scene: ‘Oyez! Oyez!! Know ye that this day … the King holds high revel and would welcome all his Court, Knights and Ladies, Squires and Dames, Pages (&tc …) to a joust and a feast. Thus ran the message and right merrily did the Lands assent thereto.'* King Bain would first address the assembly on some important matter. Courtesy was a strong point:

Of Courtesy … it is much less

Than courage of heart, or holiness

But in my walks, it seems to me

That the grace of God is in courtesy

(Hilaire Belloc)

At this point jousting with King Bain, that tiny, frail and grey-haired little lady, began. Barbara Denny remembered her challenging her squires to battle with quarterstaffs of rolled-up brown paper. Miriam Allott recalls a wooden sword. Might the wooden sword have belonged to King Bain, while the squires jousted with mere rolled-up brown paper? A discourteous thought.† In any case, King Bain would fight with one or other of the squires or knights in turn, jousting with him up and down the hall between the ranks of the households, and signifying when a bout was to end. For this she wore, besides a copper-coloured crown, a knee-length blue tunic and grey stockings, not wool but the fine lisle or faux-silk common at that time.

Once a year at Christmas there was a special occasion described by Miss Bain as a ‘coloured picture’. The children dressed up in party clothes with veils for the girls, paper helmets and silver-painted dishcloth or possibly papier-mâché armour for the boys. Staff wore tights and tunics, velvet hats or wimples and medieval gowns, with various badge devices for the few male teachers. Miss Short, wearing a wimple, one year sang ‘I’m off with the raggletaggle gypsies, oh’.

As well as special dressing-up, this was also a time for special recognition. It was a rare honour on such a day to be ‘dubbed’ a knight or lady. The chosen person would kneel before King Bain, a boy to be dubbed with the sword, a girl to receive a tall wimple with a muslin veil, and the gift of a roll of bread (for sustenance) and a bunch of violets (for beauty and gentleness). Barbara Denny found the occasion one of the most moving of her young life, and Miss Bain would address her in letters for the next fifty or so years (she lived well into her nineties) as ‘My Lady Barbara’. Denny recalled Iris being made a lady and receiving her bouquet. Highlight of the banquet was a Boar’s Head made by the local bakery – Hamilton’s – chocolate-iced sponge with a lemon in its mouth, and banana tusks. This was borne in on a tray held high by four members of staff dressed as ‘pages’, to the singing of the medieval carol:

The Boar’s Head in hand bear I,

Bedecked with mace and rosemary.

I pray ye my masters be merrie …

Caput apri defero ridens Laudis Domino.*

On one such splendid Christmas occasion, with King Bain presiding in androgynous style, young Miriam Allott overheard her father murmur sotto voce to her mother, ‘We shall have to take that girl away …’

Around 1927 two inspired teachers, Miss Dorothy Coates and Miss Joan Armitage (rather handsome, dark straight hair drawn back into the customary plaited bun, no make-up, simple straight Liberty dresses, a ‘cared-for Pond’s cold cream look, et c’est tout’21), introduced the school to Hiawatha and Red Indians. Chief Oskenonton, star of the Hiawatha performances then acted by large casts at the Albert Hall, was heralded by Miss Armitage, standing with folded arms and impassive expression, a squaw’s headband with its tall feather at the back of her hopsack tunic. The Chief had come to visit his young brother – and sister-braves at Froebel. Miss Armitage joined in the Indian chant he taught, one hand rising and falling with the rhythm: ‘Wah kon dah di doo/Wah kon din ah tonnee’.22 Pupils made beaded and feathered head-dresses, mothers sewed up cotton tunics and trousers, wampum, moccasins and peace-pipes were improvised. A powwow took place in the long grass in Kew Gardens, the girls following Miss Armitage’s tunic-covered rear as they tracked her through the long grass on hands and knees. Miriam Allott does not think her father would have been reassured.

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French was taught by Mme Barbier, a mild little elderly Frenchwoman with her hair in a ‘bird’s nest’ bun on top of her head, wearing the purple ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur. History began as stories, starting with Blakie’s Britain and her Neigbours, and moving on to Marten and Carter’s (1930).23 Greek and Roman history were taught with a merging of history and literature. There were also lessons on the Greek myths and Nordic folklore. Grammar lessons were formal, so was spelling. Miss Burdett would read poetry soulfully –? filigree petal!’24 Miss Bain’s lessons to older pupils, known as ‘Affairs’, brought them into contact with the League of Nations Union, with at least one (boring) lecture by a founder, Dr Gooch. Iris’s next school, Badminton, was to deepen this connexion, and her first trip abroad, in 1935, would be to the League’s Summer School in Geneva. Economics involved making ‘cheque-books’, running a ‘bank’, buying and selling ‘shares’. In September 1931 there was a talk about going off the Gold Standard. The pupils also joined ‘The Men of the Trees’, founded by Richard St Barbe Baker, the earliest ‘green movement’.

There were imaginative visits. The children were taken to the Surrey Docks to visit the SS Alaunia, a P & O ship on the Australia line. When it sailed they followed its progress through the ‘Shipping News’ which then appeared daily in the newspapers, receiving a lesson on each port of call, then inventing a letter home as if they had been passengers calling at Gibraltar, Port Said, Colombo. They visited the Bryant & May match factory at Silvertown in the East End, saw fir trees reduced to matchwood by huge screaming saws, were awed by the vats of bubbling chemicals. They visited Walter de la Mare, in Bayswater, and met the tiny poet, who told them a story about a fly.25

A girl who did well amassed a cluster of red stars, each denoting an ‘excellent’ mark. Some stuck these on the timetable pinned to the inside lid of their desk.26 By 1931–32 Iris was doing so well as to be head girl – ‘a Botticelli angel’ with straight bobbed blonde hair.27 Barbara Denny was in awe of Iris: she was ‘so good, so beautiful, and so intelligent and so nice’ that Barbara, who was to succeed her as head girl, did not dare speak to her. Iris had the job of ringing the bell in the corridor for everyone to calm down and progress into the Main Hall for prayers.28

‘Prayers’ were idiosyncratic. ‘Jesus: my first (and last?) Jewish boy,’ Iris was to note later,29 but it is not clear how much Froebel was responsible for introducing her to that first Jewish boy. The children took their places not in conventional class rows but in concentric circles, referred to by Miss Bain as ‘a symbol of our one-ness’,30 the oldest against the walls on fixed benches, the others sitting cross-legged in diminishing circles to the babies in the centre who were supposed to be holding hands, though some waved to watching Mamas in the gallery above. There was a hymn, perhaps a psalm, finally a doxology such as ‘God be in my Head’, ‘Glad that I live am I’, ‘Lord God in Paradise look upon our Sowing’, ‘Lead me’ and ‘The Year’s at the Spring’. Entering and leaving the hall was accompanied by the music mistress Miss Catherine Tosh to tunes such as Grieg’s Homage March. The choice of hymns, probably from a hymnal called Laudate, may have reflected Miss Bain’s Unitarianism, with hymns orientated towards God the Father rather than the Son.

The English teacher Miss Burdett – rather formal: tailored silk blouses, hair drawn back, careful manner – enjoined pupils to become members of the Bible Club and to read a portion of the Holy Book, printed off onto cards, each day. But the religious mood was non-doctrinal and non-dogmatic, uncontroversial if not indeed ‘virtually secular’. Iris recalled, ‘When I was 5 or 6 years old I remember a girl at school saying: “God can do that. He can do anything because he’s magic.” A teacher said “No, he is not magic. He is wonderful.” The odd thing is that, I think, I understood the point at once!’31

The school library saw much quiet work and study. Projects began early, and research involved cutting up old copies – unsupervised – of the Illustrated London News to make ‘books’ on ancient Greece, medieval England or Egypt. Punishment was almost non-existent,32 and so were serious misdemeanours.

There were theatricals. Among Iris’s first writings was a fairy play with a chorus for rabbits, probably put on during a school concert. Barbara Denny remembered her mother around 1926 making her a rabbit’s bonnet from white velvet, with ears with pale pink lining, which stayed in her dressing-up box for many years. In 1930, inspired by Miss Tosh who, clad in a green Grecian tunic, taught the newly fashionable Dalcroze eurhythmics on the lawn, the pupils mimed a version of Eros and Psyche which Iris, later to explore Plato’s Eros in her own philosophy, recalled in 1982.33 When Psyche said goodbye to her parents, the children had to look very sad. Photographs survive, and include a sweet-faced June Duprez, who in 1942 would impress Iris’s future husband John Bayley when she starred in the early Technicolor Thief of Baghdad. They also dressed up in black sack-like garments, learning dull blank verse to impersonate the chorus of mourning women for a well-received production of Euripedes’ Alcestis at Grove House.

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After her arrival at Froebel in 1927, Miriam Allott (née Farris), sat next to Iris.

The prime image: Iris in profile on my right – sitting together on the same bench? Or two desks close together? This strong image is a kind of close-up: head bent forward but not far enough to hide outline of the features – slightly snub nose, slightly retroussé, high cheek bones, high colour there … I can hear the strong Irish brogue, firm clear voice, forceful, authoritative enunciation (possibly countering shyness) … Round her neck a thin cord suspending a money purse which disappeared under the protective tunic – I didn’t wear such a purse but many did.

It was this image which darted into Allott’s head when, thirty years later and a literary critic, she saw an Observer profile on Iris and realised for the first time that the novelist whose works she had begun to teach at university, and to publish on, was her fellow Old Froebelian.34 Miriam’s mother may have been uneasy about Iris, possibly in case she were a bit of a tomboy, possibly because she was Irish. Miriam had two imaginary and genderless friends, known as Chelsea and Battersea, while Iris for her part invented a brother, her references to whom always ‘express[ed] some special feeling for him’. He was a rounded character who developed over time. Miriam Allott wrote to Iris in the 1960s that she wondered ‘whether the character of Toby in The Bell had been inspired by Iris’s brother’.35 Iris’s reply could not have touched on this subject, since Allott was stunned to learn only in 1998 that he never existed.* It is hard to know how much to make of this. The invention of an imaginary or magical friend or sibling is not uncommon among children. It can assuage loneliness by providing fantasy company, but in another sense increase it because of the complications involved in inviting friends home, leading to possible discovery. Living within a fictional world can replace the satisfactions of real friendship. It can also augment the intimacy of the family unit.

Iris herself said that she began writing stories at nine in order to provide herself with imaginary siblings. So writing was an extension of inventing companions. She ‘loved words, sentences, paragraphs'; learning Latin at Froebel made a deep impression also.36 All this suggests some qualification of the purely ‘idyllic’ picture of her childhood, and a compensatory process that started early. There are few clues. One comes in a 1945 letter in which Iris described her childhood as a time when she sometimes felt ‘weak at the knees’, and, presumably remembering her anxieties as a child, goes on, ‘What a fantastic frightening irrational world one lives in.’37 Writing as a strategy for assuaging anxiety or loneliness is certainly common: witness, for example, Beatrix Potter or Elizabeth Bowen.

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‘The child is innocent, the man is not,’ an Iris character was to proclaim.38 Did Iris idealise Froebel? Miriam Allott thinks this possible, since her own memories of Miss Bain are of a figure less than ‘magisterial’ (Iris’s word). ‘Innocence’ among the children was probably not as widespread as Iris recorded in 1992. Allott recalls that there was competitiveness among the squires and knights when jockeying for their dames and ladies, and some pronounced pre-adolescent passion, occasionally even some odd and tentative, if innocuous, pre-sexual behaviour. Allott thinks Froebel’s insistence on script writing for everyday use, which Iris admired, led to difficulties when pupils began ‘joined-up’ fast writing, which often descended into a scrawl. ‘[Iris’s] own grown-up handwriting was appalling [a judgement at which others demur] and so generally was mine.’

What was the reason for the winter and summer games, the medieval and the Native American Indian? Presumably they were thought of as inculcating a certain spiritual and moral nobility, and respect for the shared nobility of different cultures. Might the general system reflected in the ‘Knights and Ladies’ game have unwittingly encouraged a certain kind of moral snobbery – and possibly on reflection some social distinctions too?39 Titles came into Iris’s life, she remarked, easily and early.

The rituals associated with being Knighted and Lady-ed (kneeling before the King, accolades, the violets &tc), together with the accompanying kudos and sense of being somehow specially endowed with grace, have something in common with less edifying aspects of the Honours system … It was never clear whether the elevations were based on being clever and good, or being somehow ‘elect’, and if so, how determined and by whom?

Both Allott and Iris are reminiscing ‘through’ the Second World War. One exercise touches Allott deeply to remember. Selected children were invited to come to the front of the form and speak about how they would like things to turn out in life, what they would like to do when they grew up, what they planned for themselves, and what they would like to achieve. Edward Meyer, small, fair-haired, the son of a doctor or dentist, perhaps partly central European, stood at the front and gestured to indicate some kind of physical activity – travel, or was it sport? Whatever it was he wished to do with his life, he had little more than ten years ahead of him. He was to be killed in the war, like the red-haired and freckled John Clements.

Barbara Denny wept copiously when she had to leave Froebel for Putney High School in 1934. Miriam Allott also ‘grieved’ to have to leave, in her case for Egypt in the spring of 1932. She missed the bizarre pageant of Froebel life, bright days in Kensington Gardens, Peter Pan and the Serpentine, so wretchedly that she wrote to Miss Bain. Miss Bain replied kindly and conventionally, but ‘happened by’ Cairo later with Miss Armitage, a friend of Miriam’s mother, and tried to cheer her up on the tram between Heliopolis and Cairo. And Iris? ‘Dame is such a nice concept, so old-fashioned and romantic,’ she commented after becoming DBE in 1987. ‘Knights and Ladies’ casts a fresh light on The Unicorn and The Green Knight, on her taste for Gothic, her explorations of courtly love, her invention of a fictional universe simultaneously contemporary and yet mythical and timeless, where the young wear ‘tunics and tabards’ and the boys have a ‘raffish Renaissance look’.40

Around 1933 it seems there was a palace coup at Froebel. Miss Bain left, and since Mr Dane, Miss Bosley and Miss Short left too, parental protest or controversy were probably involved. The touchingly absurd, idealistic school ethos was conscripted into the humdrum twentieth century. When Quaker Miss Barbara Priestman became headmistress in 1934, ‘Knights and Ladies’ (too martial?) was replaced by ‘Guilds’, more appropriate for the socially engaged 1930s, but less enthusiastically received by the children. After wartime evacuation in Buckinghamshire, the Demonstration School moved to its current position in Roehampton; and soon the buildings in Colet Gardens were taken over by the Royal Ballet School and extensively altered. In the hall where the strange concentric prayer-meetings had been held, young girls in tutus now exercised.

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Iris once told her friend from Somerville College, Oxford, Vera Hoar that she had been ‘brought up on love’. ‘She was a denizen of no mean city,’ says Crane. If Froebel was not entirely idyllic, how was life at home in Eastbourne Road? Because Iris was an only child, of very loving parents, and she a loving child, they got on together as if they were all equals.