Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 27

Summer holidays were usually spent in Ireland, ‘a very romantic land, a land I always wanted to get to … and discover’.⁵² Iris had seven first cousins, three in Ulster, four in Dublin, and doubtless sometimes felt, like Andrew in The Red and the Green, that these Irish cousins

served [her] in those long hated and yet loved holidays of childhood as sibling-substitutes, temporary trial brothers and sisters, for whom [her] uncertain affection took the form of an irritated rivalry. [She] felt [herself] indubitably superior to this heterogeneous, and, it seemed … uncultivated and provincial gang of young persons, always noisier, gayer and more athletic than [herself].⁵³

They disembarked from the Holyhead boat-train in Dun Laoghaire harbour, and a two-minute walk got them to Mellifont Avenue, where at number 16 was the nursing home run and owned by Mrs Walton, Belfast-born foster-mother to Iris’s cousin Eva Robinson, seven years Iris’s senior, and closer to her than Rene’s sister Gertie’s four sons. Eva, who had polio as a child and wore a leg-brace, was protective and kind to the younger Iris. Mrs Walton’s new address at Mellifont Avenue – she had previously had a stationery shop – was convenient, too, for the salt-water baths at the end of the road, where they all swam. Eva and Iris shared a love of ‘stories’, and as they sat on the rocks on Dun Laoghaire beach Eva would make up enthralling tales.⁵⁴ After marriage in 1941 Eva and her husband Billy Lee shared 34 Monkstown Road with Iris’s grandmother Elizabeth Jane ('Bessie') Richardson and Mrs Walton, until the deaths of the two older women in 1941 and 1944 respectively. Iris used Eva as a model in her only published short story, ‘Something Special’.⁵⁵ Mrs Walton and Eva worshipped at the neighbouring Anglican Mariner’s Church (now closed), and Iris and her parents almost certainly attended Revivalist meetings run by the ‘Crusaders’

there.* After Dublin there would be a longer stay in the North, whose ‘black Protestantism’ Rene did not always look forward to, but met with good grace. Hughes’s sister Sarah and her husband Willy from Belfast rented a different house for one month each summer for themselves and their three children, Cleaver, Muriel and Sybil, in the seaside town of Portrush. There the Murdochs joined them. William Chapman, from a farming community near Lisburn, had gone to the Boer War with the Medical Corps on the strength of knowing a little pharmacy, and won a stripe there. On his return he taught himself dentistry and, though without professional qualification, did very well. When he was about fifty he contracted multiple sclerosis.

Family prayers featured during these holidays. Swimming in the Atlantic breakers off Portstewart strand was one source of fun,⁵⁶ board games in the evening, which Iris enjoyed if she won, another. (Presumably, since the Chapmans were Brethren, games with ‘court’ playing cards were excluded.) Iris is not recalled as always a good loser, though she could be even-tempered too. On one occasion she was painting, which she loved. After she broke off cousin Sybil thought she would help by tidying up all her paints. When Iris came back to continue, the special colours she had prepared had been cleaned away. She calmly set about mixing similar ones. The Chapmans recall Iris’s goodness, kind-heartedness, strangeness, strong will and shyness. Self-effacing cousin Muriel, to whom Iris was always closest, a closeness later strengthened when Muriel taught in Reigate during the war, protected her. Saying goodbye, Iris would occasionally ‘fill up’ and be tearful: she cried without difficulty. Sybil never saw this emotionalism in Irene, who was far more happy-go-lucky.

Goethe said, in a little rhyme, that from his father, who was from north Germany, he got his gravitas, his sense of reason, order and logic; from his mother, who came from the south, he got his ‘Lust zum fabulieren’, his love of telling tales. Rene adored the cinema, adored reading novels, liked stories, had the sense of a story. Perhaps Iris distantly echoes Goethe’s mixed inheritance. She had been writing since she was at least nine. An early confident talent for turning life into narrative drama shows in a letter written to a friend from 15 Mellifont Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, on 29 August 1934, when Iris was fifteen.⁵⁷ It is prefaced by a drawing of two mackintoshed girls walking in the Dublin rain.

Hello! A grey and relentless sky has been pouring rain on us for the last week, and the sun has forgotten how to shine … Great excitement here! Last Sunday week night (that sounds queer) a terrible storm got up, and on Monday morning about 8 a.m. the first maroon went for the lifeboat. I was in the bathroom at the time. I never got washed so quick as I did then. I was dressed & doing my hair when the second maroon went. Then I flew out of the house. Doors were banging all the way down the street, and the entire population of Dun Laoghaire seemed to be running to the harbour. Doodle (Daddy) & my cousin [Eva Robinson] had already left … The lifeboat was in the harbour mouth when I arrived. I asked a man what was up. A yacht had evidently broken its moorings and drifted out of the harbour or something, anyway we could just see it on the horizon. A high sea was running and I was glad to have my mackintosh with me. I dashed down the pier – which by the way is a mile long – and was drenched by the spray and the waves breaking over the pier. The sand whipped up by the wind, drove in clouds and I got some in my eye, which hurt like anything. The lifeboat had an awful job, it was pitching and tossing, and once we thought it was going down but it got to the yacht, which turned out to be empty, and towed it back amid the enthusiastic cheers of the populace. Three other yachts broke their moorings in the harbour, of these, two went down, and the other was saved and towed to calmer waters just as it was dashing itself to pieces against the pier. That was a great thrill. The next excitement was a huge German liner – three times as big as the mailboat – that anchored in the bay …

On the mail-boat to Dublin in summer 1936, the Hammond and Murdoch families met. Annie Hammond had been witness at Rene and Hughes’s wedding, and her son Richard asked the seventeen-year-old Iris what she wished to do in life. ‘Write,’ she replied.⁵⁸

* Miriam Allott’s Squire was Garth Underwood, whose sculptor-father Leon provided inspiration for A.P. Herbert in The Water-Gypsies (1930). His names being Garth Lionel, his emblem was a golden lion rampant cut out of a yellow duster, with an embroidered flame issuing from its mouth. Miriam’s Egyptian maiden name, Farris, meant ‘knight’, so surrounding the lion they had two silver knight’s spurs made from balloon cloth, plus seven stars, for ‘Miriam’ (= Mary). They were known as the household of the Silver Knight and the Golden Lion.

* ‘Thereafter all the Court all joined with merriment in the strange game of “Ye Knight he chased ye dragon up ye hickoree tree!” Truly terrible was the advance of the nobel Baron Dane …’ etc., etc. Account of the final Knights and Ladies, Old Froebelians’ News Letter, 1934, pp.3–4.

† Miriam Allott, however, is sure that the wooden sword was at Miss Bain’s belt, and that when jousting it was either wooden swords for all, or rolled-up paper for all.

* ‘Laughing I bear the boar’s head in to the Lord of Praise.’

* Iris invited Allott, if she ever had time, to visit Rene in Barons Court; partly, Allott now (2001) believes, to get straight her understanding of the Murdoch family.

* Eva Robinson (later, Lee) was always close to Iris, while her exact relationship remained unclear. A 1984 letter from Eva to Iris suggests that Eva believed her mother to be sister to Iris’s grandmother Bessie (Elizabeth Jane), making her first cousin to Rene, and first cousin once removed to Iris. She possessed a birth certificate showing that the woman she referred to as ‘Mummie’, who had died in 1912 when Eva was born, was one Annie Nolan, child to Anna Kidd and William Nolan. Recently discovered evidence suggests that this Annie Nolan was one and the same as Annie Walton, who always presented Eva publicly as her foster-daughter. Annie Nolan, a nurse living at 59 Blessington Street, married the saddler George Henry Walton on 19 February 1919, when her ‘foster’ daughter Eva would have been about seven years old. The Murdochs thus had every reason in their own terms to regard the Richardsons – and hence Irene – with some distaste: no fewer than three Richardson marriages between December 1918 and February 1919 seem to have legitimised irregular unions. The capacity of ‘nice’ Irish families to air-brush the past should not be underestimated. Billy Lee, whom Eva married in 1941, believed her father to have been a prosperous Colonel Berry, from a big house near Newcastle in County Down, who looked after Eva’s finances.

* Before the war, and for a time at least after it, the Crusaders were ‘an organisation designed to attract middle – and upper-class children – boys chiefly, I fancy – to evangelical Christianity. There was a badge, possibly some minimal uniforms relating to those of crusading orders, and meetings combined Bible study and religious instruction with activities of a more Boy Scout-ish kind’ (Dennis Nineham, letter to author). Chapter 4 of The Red and the Green starts with such a meeting, and Iris’s journals abound in memories of hymns, some evangelical.