Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography. Peter Conradi J.

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      Louisa, whom Iris knew well – she died aged seventy-five, living at 8 Adelaide Avenue in Belfast, in 1947⁶ – is remembered by her grandchildren as a cheerful, always youthful person. She was happy and had the gift of making others so. At twenty-one she had to leave her entire family and known world, to sail across the seas to a wholly strange place, and to live in a house with unknown in-laws. She was to share – contentedly – Ballymullan with her mother-in-law and three sisters-in-law – Margaret, Sarah and Annie.⁷ There is an echo of her journey in Chloe, also a New Zealander, ‘the girl from far-away’ in The Good Apprentice.

      Two aspects of the household Louisa bravely travelled to join are striking. Iris’s father Hughes was brought up on a farm which had been inherited by the brothers Richard and William from their grandfather. Wills, son of the elder brother Richard, chose to leave for the southern hemisphere. Strife or tension between brothers is the main driving force behind the plots of many of Iris’s novels, from A Severed Head to The Green Knight. Shakespeare’s plots provide one model for this; life, another.

      The second aspect, even allowing for the shorter life expectancy of that epoch, is the family’s high death-rate. Richard had, it is true, seven surviving siblings, but Wills’s sister Isabella died in 1868 aged fourteen, his brother Samuel in 1869 aged four, and his brother James in 1889 aged nineteen. As for Uncle William, the other heir to Hillhall, he had lost six children in infancy, and his wife Charlotte died in 1876. William had another four surviving children, three of them girls, one of whom, Charlotte Clark, was married. She and her elder sister Margaret died within a fortnight of each other in March 1893, aged twenty-seven and thirty-two respectively. Wills’s mother Sarah died in 1895, three years after his father. His youngest child Lilian died, aged three, in 1900.

      What might such reminders of mortality do to the Murdoch family’s religious sense? Wills and Louisa’s eldest daughter Sarah, born in 1893, was washed to the wilder shores of Irish Protestantism. Her sister Ella (1894–1990) became a missionary. And Hughes, their only son – perhaps in reaction – probably turned free-thinker. In the following generation Hughes’s only child Iris was to contrive to be both passionately religious by nature and by blood-instinct, yet devoutly sceptical about most traditions in practice. Dominic de Grunne, a tutor at Wadham College in the 1950s, observing her over many decades and working, when they first met, on a doctorate on lay religious feeling among seventeenth-century Britons, soon saw in her the extreme ‘idealistic puritanism’ of her planter-Ulster forebears.⁸ Iris was, especially before her marriage, prone to humourless outrage about social and political issues – the wickedness of apartheid being one theme. Friends would later recount how, eyes flaming and flashing, she ‘took up the cudgels’ and ‘stood on her dignity’. She also inherited from her father’s side an intense radical individualism.

      The Murdoch family burial plot is in the Church of Ireland graveyard at Derriaghy, County Down, not far from Hillhall. The church itself is an ugly Victorian confection. Two family graves, one for each brother – Richard, William – and his descendants, stand side by side like rival siblings within their low railing, opposite the south-facing door. A sum bequeathed around 1868 to keep the gravestones clean had dwindled by the 1920s, so that the grandchildren – who, most summers, included young Iris over from England – had to clean the headstones, scrape the railings, apply paint and keep the weeds in check.

      There are many Richards and Williams in the Murdoch family tree. ‘Hughes’ was one common or standard middle name, ‘Wills’ another – probably emphasising a connexion with the family name of the Marquesses of Downshire, from whom the Murdochs in the nineteenth century rented eleven and a half acres of land. It is one curiosity of these graves that, as in the kind of doubling novelists delight in, two people buried here bear the same name – Wills’s sister Isabella Jane Shaw Murdoch, who was Iris’s great aunt and who died in 1868; and Iris’s formidable aunt Ella Ardili, also born Isabella Jane Shaw Murdoch, who died in 1990. The ‘Shaw’ in Aunt Ella’s name came from her mother Louisa Shaw from New Zealand, who – presumably – also came of Irish stock, and may indeed have been a distant cousin.

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      Louisa loved her first-born, Hughes. She used to carry him, at the age of three and a half, to the small National School in Hillhall, and then cry all the way back home because she could so little bear to leave him. Hughes went on to Brookfield, a Quaker boarding school in Moira, outside Belfast. It was a good school, and Wills’s mother and his Dublin cousins alike were Quakers.⁹ Hughes would send his washing home each week for Louisa to launder, and this became the stuff of family legend: she would cut off all the buttons from the garments before the wash, and sew them all on again afterwards before sending them back, week after week. Probably this was to avoid the buttons being chewed up in an old-fashioned mangle. That the story was handed down suggests that there were other ways of proceeding. ‘Did you ever hear of anything so stupid?’ asked Louisa’s granddaughter Sybil.

      The year before her death in 1895, Louisa’s mother-in-law Sarah wrote to her about the well-being of the next baby, confusingly another Sarah, aunt to-be of Iris. Great-grandmother Sarah writes affectionately to her daughter-in-law in an educated cursive but unpunctuated script. Some words are misspelt.

      Ballymullan House,

       Lisburn, Sep 1st 94

      My dear Lousia

      I can imagine how you will be thinking of Sara it will seem wonderfull to you to hear she never murmured all yesterday nor going to bed nor going asleep and I kept out of the way so Rose got her ready and all was warm she had a lot of little things to amuse her and took her up Annie was here at the time as I did not wish her to begin to fret I sent them early and we stood and lisined not a word Rose told me this morning she went over and over her to she tired and then lay down I called Rose at 5 she went out to milk at once and had milked before she awoke I left my door open that she could come in but she called out MaMa and I called Rose that was the only time she cried not the only time she has said MaMa but that was the only cry she had all the time I hope you are enjoying yourself ever your Afft Mother Sarah Murdoch.

      I will be glad to see Wills home he is very soon missed here Wills had taken Louisa, and probably the four-year-old Hughes, to the smart Dublin Horse Show, a key event in the Irish – and especially the Anglo-Irish – social calendar well into the twentieth century. Hughes was to inherit his father’s love both of horses and of betting on them. Both Sarah and Louisa were clearly anxious about Louisa’s absence from her second baby, yet the fact of her absence might suggest that Hughes had more of her love than did either of his two sisters Sarah and Ella. Ballymullan House was not a large establishment: as Sarah’s letter makes clear, Rose doubled as nursemaid and milkmaid. The family were not well enough off to employ a wet-nurse.

      In the event, Ballymullan House did not pass to Hughes. There were several years of mounting debts, and probably the farm failed. Wills went to a funeral in the rain, developed pneumonia and died, intestate and aged only forty-six, on 1 December 1903. The family address at the time was 3 Craig Fernie Terrace, Lisburn Road, Belfast. The Certificate of Probate on Wills’s estate describes him as a ‘retired farmer’ and tells us that he left £1,274. The farm had been sold the year before.

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