Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 30

BMB had arrived at Badminton in 1911, aged thirty-five,³¹ with her great friend Lucy Rendali who taught P.T. (physical training), both of them from Cardiff High School. ‘Look at them – early Victorians!’ BMB had said, watching the school tennis-players in their frilly petticoats. She herself wore the free-flowing clothes associated with advocates of female suffrage, and, to the horror of some ‘early Victorian’ mamas, soon abolished both ‘Sunday hats’ and ‘stays’ alike. Like Miss Buss and Miss Beale at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, BMB was a pioneering and dedicated educationalist of great moral courage and probity who had to fight her corner in a man’s world, and of course risked becoming crabbed in the process.³²

She was a tough disciplinarian, a feminist, a Socialist and a fellow-travelling Quaker. In 1919 she appointed Mr Harris, newly released from prison as a conscientious objector, head of the Junior School, and imported, looked after and educated two small, starving Austrian boys. She admitted girls from India, Burma, West Africa and the West Indies, believed in teaching birth-control and hoped to make the school fully co-educational.³³ She set up a country holiday home for Bristol slum children, which the girls tended.

Over forty years later, Iris would recall in her journal: ‘Evening prayers at school, on dark cold winter evenings, kneeling on the parquet floor in the rather ill-lit hall.’³⁴ BMB was a pioneer also in her insistence on freedom of expression in regard to religious matters. She did not rate the established Church highly, and in 1928 had dedicated a combined chapel and hall as a ‘Peace Memorial’. Morning Assembly was non-denominational.³⁵ Every second Sunday, attendance was required at a church chosen by the child’s parents. (Iris is remembered by one friend as first attending the Congregational church, by another as Anglican.³⁶ Around 1936 Iris and Orpen tried Quaker Meeting. It made them laugh that, though ‘the spirit’ moved the Friends at any time, it always stopped moving them punctually at midday, just in time for lunch.) The Sundays in between one could either visit a church of one’s own choice or go on a walk, and that evening BMB would take an idiosyncratic fortnightly service during which she might, for example, discourse on the saintliness of Mahatma Gandhi or Sir Stafford Cripps.³⁷

Inspiring mottoes, a new one every term, were printed and pinned up in each form-room: from the Epistles, Browning, Rabindranath Tagore, the Rig Veda. John Bayley does not believe that BMB, even after 1932, was a ‘believing’ Quaker (a question Iris addresses in her poem to BMB, see below). If this was so, she kept her rationalistic opinions to herself, being very much in the nineteenth-century tradition of free-thinking, rather like George Eliot, and believing passionately, for example, in goodness.

Orpen and Iris did not discuss religion, Iris then appearing not greatly interested. They did debate the difference between Right and Wrong. Which was worse: to run from Northcote Buildings to Schoolhouse, or to tell a lie? Probably in late November 1934 Iris was confirmed into the Anglican Church:³⁸ that year R.K. Pagett at St Peter’s Henleaze, the Anglican church used by Badmintonians, gave her The King’s Daughters: A Book of Devotion for Girls. She would speak of having had ‘a religious experience of the kind that many people have at that age’ although she never specified the experience.

Badminton’s uniforms were modern for the time, even ‘art deco’.³⁹ On weekday mornings the girls wore a navy-blue serge gym tunic, with pleats only at the top, which had to touch the floor when they knelt down, and a white Viyella blouse. Their navy-blue blazers had ‘BS’ stitched in white on the pocket. After exercise each afternoon they changed – real little ladies – into sleeveless fawn corduroy ‘sack’ garments and fawn Shetland cardigans worn over tussore silk blouses. There were ‘jolly’ navy-blue Tam o’shanters for ordinary days, for Sundays round blue velour hats with a navy-blue-and-white band, again with ‘BS’ stitched on them. Seasonal variations dictated navy-blue serge overcoats in winter and blue gingham frocks in summer, not always warm enough in an English June – Bourne & Hollingworth came and measured you for these. On summer Sundays grand natural white tussore silk dresses and coats, with a panama hat. The strict dress-code was later relaxed, as the school photograph for 1937 demonstrates, with Iris in a print frock, a happy and beautiful free spirit. As for the mistresses, none dressed very becomingly. To worry too much about one’s appearance might not have counted as what BMB called a ‘worthwhile activity’. Yet the ‘Powers’ (BMB, LJR and the skilful music mistress ‘Ski’ Webb-Johnson) did dress in semi-evening wear, such as long skirts and velvet jackets, for dinner.

BMB’s possible unbelief did not stop her from laying down the law about how others should live. She was not an easy woman, and Iris notes that she was too impatient and frightening to be a really good teacher: she could be a ‘blunt instrument’. A ‘powerful domineering brave woman’, she could make mistakes, and there were casualties. Mary Fedden hated BMB and thought her wicked: BMB, she felt, despised her as a mere day-girl, and Mary would hide and weep with fear on seeing her approach. Others could not stand the unremitting idealism of this ‘high-minded bully’. Iris would write: ‘Nietzsche would have been interested in BMB: a case of a huge unselfconscious totally non-cynical will to power.’ BMB so bullied the gifted Maud Wills that her friend Margaret Rake (later Vintner) recalled each algebra lesson as a nightmare. When Margaret found the courage to protest, BMB first took it on the chin, then summoned Maud and told her about the complaint, breaking the girls’ friendship and isolating Margaret.

The quaint practice of all the girls walking the length of the room after eight o’clock evening prayers and shaking the headmistress’s hand (before the First World War, curtseying) while saying goodnight, provided an opportunity for BMB to tick off those who had talked in prep or run down the corridor. She liked to organise and control the staff as well as the pupils: ‘Brace up!’ she would say, and Till your lives!’ One vexed staff member was heard to murmur, ‘If I fill my life any more I shall go mad.’ BMB did not accept anything at face value but judged it by her own exacting, eccentric standards, often finding it wanting. She was critical, analytical and not to be put upon, sometimes perverse in her opinions. She believed she was using a Socratic method, trying to make the girls think for themselves, and was never more pleased than when told by an Old Girl how ‘shaken up’ she had been at Badminton by her. Behind her somewhat forbidding appearance was great joie de vivre and sardonic humour.

BMB would pounce on girls after lunch and ask what they were reading. A register was kept, four hours reading per week being thought exemplary.⁴⁰ (Most films, by contrast, as Indira Gandhi remembered, were seen as ‘mental dope’.) BMB used repeatedly to ask: ‘Are you engaged in worthwhile activities? One of Iris’s school friends was once asked what she was reading, and replied, with a strong, distinctive lisp, ‘Detection, Mystewy, and Howwor, Miss Baker.’ Though the reading of such an omnibus would scarcely have passed for a ‘worthwhile activity’, the answer was given in so prim a tone that BMB was floored, and passed on.

One Lent she gave a stirring sermon on the decadent wickedness of hot-water bottles. The dormitories were unheated – Iris noted, ‘We were Athenians but we were Spartans too.’ Girls were allowed exactly four sweets a week, and were not encouraged to sit next to their friends either in class or in the house.⁴¹ BMB hated – and perhaps feared – illness. ‘Weak fool!’ one Old Girl imagined BMB, by then ninety-four, saying under her breath at the news that another of her contemporaries had succumbed and proven mortal. In Iris’s time Hazel Earle was rusticated for washing her hair and then going to bed with it wet; and Orpen, when she caught a cold was falsely accused of ‘going out without your galoshes’. Moreover the vegetarian food gave Orpen a headache. Headaches and colds did not count as ‘worthwhile activities’.

BMB displayed a mixture of ‘ruthless’ practical idealism and an imagination with strict limits. On the one hand she would take pains to buy presents for the foreign children who would otherwise have received none. On the other, BMB was legal guardian to Inge, a Jewish refugee-child who had suffered the deportation and death in Poland of her parents and brother, and whenever she or any other ‘foreign friend’ – they would far rather have been known as ‘refugees’ – failed to volunteer for some irksome task, like gardening in the bitter mid-winter, they were called to BMB’s study and reminded that, ‘being in receipt of charity’, the least they could do was volunteer for unpopular chores. BMB, though wishing to inspire it, seemed to this girl ‘totally incapable of affection’. When, on her last night at school, BMB leaned forward to kiss her for the first time ever, she drew back. ‘Don’t you love me, Inge?’ asked BMB. Having been taught ‘uprightness’ by BMB, Inge truthfully replied, ‘I respect and admire you, but I could never, never love you.’ BMB was deeply hurt.

BMB lived in Iris’s house with her housemistress LJR, in a close liaison. This, in the days of inter-war innocence, was not considered odd, even though the two shared a bedroom. Happily BMB’s idealistic ruthlessness was tempered both by LJR’s calmer pragmatism and by ‘Ski’ Webb-Johnson’s kindness. ‘She’s right, of course, but you can’t go straight for it, like that!’ LJR would comment. Together they made an indivisible couple, mutually supporting, happy and immensely positive. LJR was the ‘jolly and practical one’ – the doer – while BMB had the visionary edge. Both were keen walkers and cyclists.

Around 1935 they built, on the site of a farm, a showpiece art deco house for themselves which they called Little Grange.⁴² Iris was to be a lifelong visitor and guest. A very spacious lounge with french windows, designed for concerts and talks, gave onto the charming garden, where a paved courtyard had replaced a cow-byre. There was a grand piano, hundreds of books, and BMB’s favourite paintings (Italian masters) on the walls. Iris saw this house, in which BMB was to stay for many years after her retirement – to the occasional discomfiture of her successors – effectively BMB’s own dower-house, as ‘a creation of her will … a masterpiece of art deco … BMB belongs in an art deco world, evidence that that mode could be guileless without being insipid’. Iris gave the name ‘Little Grange’ to one of the winning horses on which Jake gambles for high stakes in Under the Net.