Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 9

One day in 1888, on the North Island of New Zealand, a runaway horse with an alarmed and excited girl on its back galloped into Wills Hughes Murdoch’s view. He was twenty-seven years old,¹ and had been quietly tending his sheep. He managed to race after the horse, to jump out and grab the reins, calm and finally stop it. The girl, Louisa Shaw, who was on her way to school, was that November to be his bride. She was only seventeen when they married.²

This mode of meeting and instantly falling in love sounds like something invented by his future granddaughter. Her novels test to the point of self-parody the literary convention of the coup de foudre, or love at first sight: the chance meeting between kindred souls that changes lives for ever. It was as much a family tradition. Wills and Louisa’s eldest child Hughes was to meet and fall for his nineteen-year-old future bride on a Dublin tram in 1918, towards the end of the First World War. And John Bayley was first to sight Wills’s granddaughter Iris bicycling past his Oxford college window in 1953. In three successive generations the girl at least is on the move, while the man – and twice also the girl – is love-struck, and nothing again is quite as it was.

The Murdochs are a staunchly Protestant Scots-Irish family who crossed the Irish Sea to Ulster from their native Galloway in Scotland in the seventeenth century. The name ‘Murdoch’ is essentially Scots Gaelic – from Mhuirchaidh, though an Irish Gaelic version, O’Muircheartaigh, meaning navigator, sometimes written Murtagh, is also common. They farmed modestly in County Down, where they prided themselves on having been for seven generations. In the 1880s Wills John Murdoch left the family farm for his spell in New Zealand, to learn about sheep-rearing, and probably also to make good on his own. It was a period of agricultural unrest and depression, and of Irish emigration generally.³ Family tradition suggests that Wills’s uncle had left for Indiana twenty-five years earlier, while his elder brother Richard was also in New Zealand, working as a teacher, and died there, unmarried, not long before the First World War.

Wills and Louisa’s first baby, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, was born in Thames, seventy miles south-east of Auckland, on 26 April 1890. When Hughes was a year and a half old, on 9 January 1892, Wills’s father died, and Wills came back to help run the family farm in County Down. Legend has it that on the journey home baby Hughes was nearly washed overboard in a storm, but was saved by a vigilant sailor.