Peter Conradi - Iris Murdoch - A Life - The Authorized Biography

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. 57It 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.

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