Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 24

‘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.