We loved her fiercely
On Wednesday, family and friends of Iris Goldsmith gathered to say goodbye to the 15-year-old who died in an accident
THE last film Ben Goldsmith made of his daughter Iris was on holiday in Bequia, Saint Vincent, at Easter. She’s there with her brothers and a friend, face pink and freckled from the sun, damp blonde hair pulled into an unselfconscious ponytail, denim miniskirt slightly off-centre. She’s walking down to the wild beach in the way teen
agers do, a note of defiance in her step, exhaling casually on her Juul vape. Then she looks around, at the sea grass and palm trees, and sees plastic washed up on the shore, and she turns and says to her father, “We should come down here and do a clean up.”
In that simple 34-second clip, it’s clear that this vibrant, beautiful child has the environmental conscience that marks her generation — and her family. On the way to the beach that day her father remembers coming across feral horses, and that Iris had coaxed one to sniff her hand. Later, she had knelt to pick up a tortoise, “so gently. It was like she was seven again.” She was a child in love with nature, he says. A child who, “if she lifted a piece of corrugated iron and saw a grass snake,” would be fascinated, not scared. “She was courageous.”
Iris Goldsmith died aged 15-and-a-half on Monday, July 8, in a Somerset field after an accident on a 4x4 off-road farm vehicle. It was the start of the summer holidays. At her funeral at St Mary’s Church, Barnes, on Wednesday, Ben and her brother Frankie, 13, were bearers of her wicker coffin — small, covered with irises and roses. They were joined by her cousins Sulaiman and Kasim Khan, and her uncles, James Rothschild and Zac Goldsmith. Her mother Kate Rothschild and her brother Isaac, 11, walked slowly down the central aisle, followed by aunts, grandparents, cousins, while the rolling notes of Heartbeats by José González played through speakers.
On all sides the church was filled. At the back people stood five deep. They sat in the nave two to a chair. Children, mostly. Hundreds of teenagers came to say goodbye to their beloved friend. And family, a sprawling family, and many of Ben and Kate’s friends who had known Iris since she was born. Kate, who works in music at Roc Nation, was already pregnant when they married — young at 20 and 22 — and little Iris went with them everywhere. She had, says Ben, an environmentalist, her mother’s Bohemian charm, her mother’s extraordinary emotional intelligence and her playfulness. “But she was also extroverted, like me.” And popular: a teenager with more than 4,000 followers on Instagram.
“She cared so much about all of you,” Kate told the young heads bowed in church. “She worried about you. She wanted you to be safe and happy, thriving and not hurting. She had an endless capacity for love and she loved you all so much. And I have seen in the last week how much you loved her back. How much she meant to you.”
On Barnes Common last Saturday, her friends held a memorial near her home. They’d created “Iris’s tree”, decorating it with photos, flowers, leaves painted gold, poems, candles spelling out her name, heart-shaped sunglasses, name necklaces, her favourite drink (AriZona green tea), her favourite scent and the tiara she wore for a laugh. Some friends sat crosslegged, some signed the remembrance book, others graffitied the path with messages of love: “Iris, we will never forget you; Rest well in heaven; You are an angel; We love you; Iris 4 ever; Our guardian angel.” Later, they released sky lanterns.
Her friends were from everywhere: local London kids she knew from dog walks, kids from school, clubs, holidays. They were inspired by her light. One turned to Ben, and said: “I am going to save the world, like Iris was going to.”
In the church, Emeli Sandé performed, and in her address the Chaplain of Wycombe Abbey spoke of Iris’s academic brilliance, of her kindness, her spiritual depth. She was unmissable, even in a crowd. “She was going to be an attorney, a barrister, a judge,” says her father. “Perhaps she could have gone into politics, such was the force of her personality and drive.”
It was always there, the determination. As a seven-year-old she sought to prove to her parents that she had the capacity to care for a chinchilla by making an illustrated encyclopedia with chapter headings: “1. Taming; 2. Diet; 3. Scared chinchilla; 4. Playtime; 5. Fun facts.”
She always studied hard, taking on Latin in her own time, committing sometimes seven hours of a free day to school work. In her bedroom her parents found spider diagrams of her plans on A4 lined notepads: universities to aim for — Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard; work experience she’d like to do — including Client Earth, the charity of environmental lawyers. She wanted to join the debating society, to visit more art galleries, to read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, to play more tennis. “She was preparing for a full life and she was going to shine,” says her father.
The permutations of grief are unending. Sometimes Ben thinks about the obituary Iris should’ve had in her 80s when she had achieved all she was determined to do. “How much she would have bettered the world. We’ve lost that. The world has lost that.” Less painful is the knowledge that she crammed so much into those 15 and-a-half years. “Theywere filled with such good things: joy, love,” says Ben. “Another comforting line of thought is that maybe on some level she knew. And that was why she was in such a hurry to enjoy life. There seemed purpose to her drive.”
In t h e e u l o g y, h e r mo t h e r K a t e explained to the hundreds gathered that she couldn’t “possibly begin to explain the ocean of grief we find ourselves in, or the feeling of being shattered into a thousand unfindable pieces.” It was harder still, “to explain [Iris], to really do her justice. She was simply spectacular; her light was brighter than any I’ve ever
Iris was a bright light. No one knew her background, they saw someone who made an outsized impression