Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 20

Around Iris’s sixth birthday memorable things started to happen. Rene got her a little wind-up man on a tricycle – ‘I see him so clearly, and her.’¹⁴ She went to her first school. And, not long after, the family moved from Brook Green to Chiswick. Hughes must have had an adventurous streak as well as being a homebody, since around 1926 he bought a small, newly built, semidetached gabled house in Chiswick. His annual salary was well under £400 per year, so he took out a mortgage. There was a newly planted chestnut tree outside, and the house, at 4 Eastbourne Road, was tucked away off what was soon to become the Great West Road. The family took walks in the grounds of nearby Chiswick House.

On 15 January 1925, aged five and a half, Iris had entered the Froebel Demonstration School at Colet Gardens, a very good, quite expensive day-school, a fifteen-minute walk across Brook Green from the Caithness Road flat, presumably chosen partly because of proximity. It was the ‘demonstration school’ for Froebel College at Grove House in Roehampton, and had just over a hundred pupils. Iris flourished there. The new house must also have been bought with proximity in mind. Eastbourne Road was five short stops from Froebel on the District Line, close enough to be walkable in summer.

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.’