Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 11

Louisa loved her first-born, Hughes. She used to carry him, at the age of three and a half, to the small National School in Hillhall, and then cry all the way back home because she could so little bear to leave him. Hughes went on to Brookfield, a Quaker boarding school in Moira, outside Belfast. It was a good school, and Wills’s mother and his Dublin cousins alike were Quakers.⁹ Hughes would send his washing home each week for Louisa to launder, and this became the stuff of family legend: she would cut off all the buttons from the garments before the wash, and sew them all on again afterwards before sending them back, week after week. Probably this was to avoid the buttons being chewed up in an old-fashioned mangle. That the story was handed down suggests that there were other ways of proceeding. ‘Did you ever hear of anything so stupid?’ asked Louisa’s granddaughter Sybil.

The year before her death in 1895, Louisa’s mother-in-law Sarah wrote to her about the well-being of the next baby, confusingly another Sarah, aunt to-be of Iris. Great-grandmother Sarah writes affectionately to her daughter-in-law in an educated cursive but unpunctuated script. Some words are misspelt.

Ballymullan House,

Lisburn, Sep 1st 94

My dear Lousia

I can imagine how you will be thinking of Sara it will seem wonderfull to you to hear she never murmured all yesterday nor going to bed nor going asleep and I kept out of the way so Rose got her ready and all was warm she had a lot of little things to amuse her and took her up Annie was here at the time as I did not wish her to begin to fret I sent them early and we stood and lisined not a word Rose told me this morning she went over and over her to she tired and then lay down I called Rose at 5 she went out to milk at once and had milked before she awoke I left my door open that she could come in but she called out MaMa and I called Rose that was the only time she cried not the only time she has said MaMa but that was the only cry she had all the time I hope you are enjoying yourself ever your Afft Mother Sarah Murdoch.

I will be glad to see Wills home he is very soon missed here Wills had taken Louisa, and probably the four-year-old Hughes, to the smart Dublin Horse Show, a key event in the Irish – and especially the Anglo-Irish – social calendar well into the twentieth century. Hughes was to inherit his father’s love both of horses and of betting on them. Both Sarah and Louisa were clearly anxious about Louisa’s absence from her second baby, yet the fact of her absence might suggest that Hughes had more of her love than did either of his two sisters Sarah and Ella. Ballymullan House was not a large establishment: as Sarah’s letter makes clear, Rose doubled as nursemaid and milkmaid. The family were not well enough off to employ a wet-nurse.

In the event, Ballymullan House did not pass to Hughes. There were several years of mounting debts, and probably the farm failed. Wills went to a funeral in the rain, developed pneumonia and died, intestate and aged only forty-six, on 1 December 1903. The family address at the time was 3 Craig Fernie Terrace, Lisburn Road, Belfast. The Certificate of Probate on Wills’s estate describes him as a ‘retired farmer’ and tells us that he left £1,274. The farm had been sold the year before.