The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  His name was Henry Torrens Anstruther, and his love for his only daughter, and hers for him, was of the unspoken kind which must find outlets for expression in mutual unembarrassing delights such as heraldry, etymology and punctuation.

  Things Harry taught me:

  Knots and splices

  Carpentry

  Grammar

  Love of reference books, maps, luggage, stationery

  Handwriting

  Love of Scotland

  Not to dog-ear books

  A Scot, he was Chief Liberal Whip and Member of Parliament for St Andrews, Fife until 1903 when he resigned on taking up the post of government representative on the Administrative Council of the Suez Canal Company. He was also a Justice of the Peace, an Alderman of the London County Council and a director of the North British Railway Company. But he could have earned his living, Joyce later wrote, and would have led a far happier life, as a jobbing carpenter.

  When Eva married him, he was a promising Member of Parliament who seemed destined for the Cabinet. She was the pretty, witty Eva Hanbury-Tracy, aged twenty, brought up amid great wealth in London and at two large and grand country houses, Toddington in Gloucestershire and Gregynog in Wales. She could have made any match she chose.

  ‘My mother had visions of herself,’ Joyce wrote, ‘as a hostess of some famous London house, standing at the head of a long staircase, welcoming Cabinet Ministers and their wives to epoch-making parties and influencing the destiny of the nation by a diplomatic nod or the quick tap of a fan on a crucial forearm. When this plan went agley, she was terribly disappointed, and she just couldn’t take it.’

  In 1893, a year before Eva and Harry’s first child Douglas was born, Lloyd’s Bank filed a bankruptcy petition against Eva’s father, and Lord Sudeley was virtually ruined. Though asset-rich, he suffered from what would now be called a cash-flow problem. ‘To put it briefly,’ Joyce wrote, glossing over the true complications of the affair, ‘my grandfather Sudeley, who was incurably optimistic, embarked on a tremendous scheme of fruit-growing but failed to grasp the elementary botanical truth that the trees he had planted would take seven years to mature.’

  Queen Victoria wept on hearing of the bankruptcy. Lord Sudeley’s great-grandson, the present seventh Baron, has spent most of his life demonstrating, inside and outside Parliament, the unfairness of the treatment of the fourth Baron, and how he was cheated of his estate.

  Eva’s parents moved to Ormeley Lodge in Ham, which many would now consider one of the most covetable houses in Greater London: Queen Anne red brick with wings, high white gates, and topiary garden at the back. Lady Sudeley considered it ‘a villa’. But she carried on living quite grandly. Joyce remembered her grandmother Sudeley at Ormeley Lodge:

  ‘If the unthinkable occurred, and Lizzie Haycock [the head-housemaid] happened to meet my grandmother in a passage, with no nearby doorway in which to take cover, she would flatten herself against the wall, concealing her dustpan and brush behind her back as though they were a jemmy and a blowlamp. My grandmother would nod and smile and Lizzie would murmur something inaudibly apologetic, ending in “… m’lady”, and stand with lowered eyes until Her Ladyship had passed by. They all did it. It was the way things were.’

  Eva found her own finances considerably reduced. She was still comfortably well-off, but no longer a notable heiress. After 1903 her husband wasn’t even an MP or Government minister any more. ‘My father was a methodical hard-working man,’ Joyce wrote, ‘with a great eye for detail; he could draft a memorandum with meticulous care and he never composed an ambiguous sentence, but he was sometimes tactless – not out of any lack of consideration for other people’s feelings but rather because he hadn’t the sense of finesse which makes some people weigh all the subtleties of a situation before they open their lips. Moreover, he hated intrigue, which to my mother was like oxygen.’

  Joyce had only one memory of her parents being nice to each other. Her father came home with a bad toothache one evening, and her mother got a bottle of Bunter’s Nervine from the medicine cupboard and took it up to him. Joyce was tremendously pleased. ‘Perhaps things are going to be better from now on,’ she thought. But they were not.

  One day she went to tea with her friend Kathleen Gascoigne, and witnessed another episode she never forgot. ‘Kathleen’s mother was in the schoolroom with us; her father came in, had a mock quarrel with her (how different in undertones and overtones from a real one, and how gentle the ring of tin swords after the clang of genuine steel!) and ended up by picking her up in his arms and carrying her out of the room, talking and laughing. I was almost speechless with wonder, and made a mental note: other people’s parents actually talk to each other, and make each other laugh.’

  * * *

  In the Housekeeper’s Room at Ormeley Lodge, a book called ‘Confessions: an Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c’ was filled in one afternoon when Joyce was there. Favourite Qualities in a Man: ‘A jolly good-tempered old drunkard,’ wrote Lizzie Haycock, the head housemaid. Pet Aversion: ‘Sunday in on a fine day,’ wrote Alice Rivers, another housemaid. Which Characters in History do you Most Dislike? ‘Gentry,’ wrote a between-maid called Annie McLeod. Here are Joyce’s entries, at the age of seven:

  Your favourite qualities in a man: conjuror

  Your favourite occupation: reading

  Idea of happiness: rolling down a muddy bank with your best dress on

  Idea of misery: when Douglas is away

  Pet aversion: meat and eating my dinner

  If not yourself, who would you be? A boy

  Favourite motto: Make hay while the sun shines and no rose without a thorn

  That last motto was to prove apposite. The rose and the thorn were inextricably joined in her life.

  Joyce played on her own for hours, under and in trees. She had prehensile toes, and she could whistle with two fingers. She invented an imaginary country of which she was king, and drew maps and plans of its coastlines and castles. Every now and then she asked Lala to play the extra pirate, or the Sheriff of Nottingham, or to be a weight on the other end of a see-saw. If Lala didn’t feel like it she said ‘Oh, no, I’ve got a bone in my leg.’

  One day, when Joyce was seven, she was sitting on the floor in the drawing-room when Lala was brought in to say goodbye. Joyce was absorbed in a jigsaw puzzle and gave her an absentminded hug. ‘Durnie’, a former parlour-maid, was put in charge of her for a few weeks, and the weeks extended into months, and it dawned on her very gradually that Lala had retired, and was not coming back. ‘I was spared a deep wound,’ Joyce wrote, ‘but I acquired an infection of uncertainty which took me many years to get over. My mother was spared a heartrending scene, but she never afterwards had my wholehearted trust.’

  Sleeplessness, which afflicted Joyce throughout her life, began now. She also started to develop many of the symptoms of the physically undernourished. ‘I was what was known as delicate and nervy, and I had mild St Vitus’s Dance. The grownups called it, quite kindly, Joyce’s “tricks”, and it consisted of things like jerking my head, twitching my eyes and making clicking noises in my throat. I also had the habit of developing unexplained blotches and spots all over my body.’ Joyce realized, later in life, that all these were nervous complaints, and had the same cause: allergy to parental discord. The nerve tonics, milk, cream, suet puddings, cod-liver oil and malt prescribed by the doctors alleviated but did not cure the problem.

  Eva and Harry did not separate until years later, in 1915. A small entry appears in Harry’s visitors’ book: ‘8th October. Eva walked out of my house.’ Suitable marriages like theirs, Joyce wrote, tended to be bolstered by circumstances. ‘When they rot internally the clinging ivy of social routine and feudal responsibility (which often had a hand in strangling them) keeps them standing, though the sap flows no more and the leaves wither. There is always the flower show coming on or the village bazaar which has to be opened; or a General Election is nearly due and One Has to Consider the Party.
’

  When Joyce’s own first marriage was floundering in 1947, she used the same metaphor to describe its sickness; though this time it was a joint love of the children which kept it standing for so long. ‘Relationships don’t die in one piece. Sometimes the trunk appears dead, and most of the branches, but there is still some hidden flow of sap to one of the boughs which keeps it alive and green. In our case this is just what happened. The whole relationship was dead for most of the time during the last few years; but three times a year, during the school holidays, that one remaining branch – our intense love for our co-parenthood of the children – burst into miraculous blossom, and we could forget the dry twisted deadness of the rest of the tree.’

  * * *

  ‘Educated privately, London,’ Jan Struther was to write all her adult life, when filling in forms.

  She didn’t go to school, quite: she went to ‘Classes’ in the mornings, for ten years, from the age of six to sixteen. Her first, Miss Richardson’s Classes, took place at the house of Mrs Alfred Lyttelton at 16 Great College Street. On her first day there, in 1907, Joyce made a discovery: she found she liked being a new girl. This feeling lasted all her life. ‘It didn’t matter whether I was being a New Girl at school or a house party or a public dinner or a railway carriage or a ship: I always found it fun to infiltrate, to learn the ropes, to size up the other pupils, guests or passengers and to know that I was being sized up in return.’

  Her least favourite subjects were Hist’ry and Jog. Jog was reduced to a network of political boundaries, and Hist’ry to a string of dates. ‘It was small wonder that I fell as little in love with history as would a romantic young man with a girl of whom he had seen nothing but an X-ray photograph.’ The one item of historical knowledge which inspired Joyce concerned the demise of Henry I: ‘He died of a surfeit of lampreys, of which he was inordinately fond.’ This sentence, she said, introduced her to the beauties of psalmodic rhythm, and it was still going round and round in her head forty years later when she was queuing for canned tuna fish on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  In the teaching of Literature, however, Miss Richardson’s was superb. Miss Moseley, who taught in a brimmed felt hat, had a taste for Shakespeare, but: ‘Children,’ she announced on the morning when she handed out the Everyman edition to her girls, ‘there are certain words which we are going to leave out whenever we come across them. Now I want you to take your pencils and cross them out carefully so that they can’t be read. Ready? Page twelve, line three, word seven. Page nineteen, line eight, word four…’ The girls spent a delightful morning following her instructions, with the result that ‘cuckold’, ‘whoreson’, ‘gorebellied’ and other Elizabethan rude words were engraved on their memories for ever. Joyce was instinctively keen on swear-words – she used to argue with her brother about the comparative wickedness of Damn and Blast – and there could have been no better way to whet her appetite for Shakespeare.

  Whether or not Miss Moseley adopted this ruse deliberately Joyce never knew, but her next was inspired. Rather than start her girls off, as many a felt-hatted teacher might, on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she plunged them straight into Julius Caesar. She understood children’s craving for pageantry, melodrama, rhetoric, unfamiliar words, thundering rhythms, and for the eventual punishment of the guilty, whatever might happen to the innocent.

  At once Joyce sensed in Shakespeare a kindred spirit. She experienced for the first time the squeezing of the diaphragm which happens when words or music express the essence of what one feels. She knew just what Brutus meant when he said:

  … poor Brutus, with himself at war,

  Forgets the shows of love to other men.

  ‘It might not sink in the very day we read it, but the next time we got in a tangle of temper with ourselves and tried to unravel it by being perfectly foul to our brothers, sisters, mothers and nurses, the meaning of Brutus’s words would begin to dawn upon us.’ The lines

  When love begins to sicken and decay,

  It useth an enforced ceremony

  tallied with her observation of her parents being a little too icily polite to each other; and in Mark Antony’s

  For Brutus is an honourable man;

  So are they all, all honourable men

  she recognized her mother’s confidential tone while talking to a woman friend in the drawing-room: ‘My dear, I wouldn’t say a word against Angela. She’s a thoroughly nice woman. I’m very fond of Angela…’

  Long passages of the plays were learned by heart; in their smocks and serge skirts, the girls stood up and recited. Joyce used them again for many purposes: to ennoble her daily feelings, to while away the interminableness of church, or to distract attention from brougham-sickness. York’s words in Richard II, ‘Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle’ always reminded her of Lala saying ‘Picnic? I’ll give you picnic.’

  From the age of nine until she was twelve, Joyce went to Miss Wolff’s in South Audley Street, where her friends were Peggy Lewis, Gena Drummond, Di Darling, Nell Joshua, Vera Jessel, Gladys Hirsch, Rene Lazarus, Elsie Raphael, and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen, whom Joyce thought beautiful, and whose pigtails she dipped into an ink-pot. Peggy Lewis said ‘Oh, Lord!’ and ‘one’ instead of ‘I’. Joyce lost no time copying her. When, aged twelve, Joyce went to visit her cousin Ruth Hanbury, the first thing she said to Ruth was, ‘Oh, Lord! You’re not still playing with that hoop, are you?’

  Ruth, sitting with a rug and a Labrador on her lap in her drawing room in Co. Monaghan in May 1999, said: ‘Oh, dear, I never played with it again. And I did love that hoop. Joyce was very sophisticated, and she gave me an inferiority complex which I’ve only really outgrown, perhaps, in my nineties.’

  Miss Wolff, who was of German blood, taught her girls to intone ‘Der, den, des, dem. Die, die, der, der. Das, das, des, dem,’ which appealed to Joyce: grammatical tables, she found, were the only method which worked for getting hold of a language. But strict as she was, Miss Wolff turned to wax when she introduced the girls to German poetry. Joyce felt her diaphragm squeeze again at these words from Heinrich Heine’s ‘Die Lorelei’:

  Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,

  Dass ich so traurig bin …1

  * * *

  When the First World War began, Joyce was at her third and last educational institution, Mrs Martin Holland’s. She had a pash for Cynthia Lubbock and Cynthia Lubbock had a pash for her. Janet Thomson, on the day war broke out, announced to her classmates that the way to help the war was to be good and not to worry the grown-ups, who were probably worried enough anyway. They all started knitting socks.

  In her notes towards her autobiography, Joyce later listed the main points about her sexual awakening.

  Facts of life

  1 Looking up adultery in dictionary.

  2 Thinking babies born fully dressed in red twill frocks.

  3 ‘Nice feelings’ when reading about tortures. Still persist. Also when tight-lacing one’s stays.

  4 Seeing my mother in bath but always discreetly hunched up.

  5 Doug given the job of telling me facts of life. Interesting remark (inaudible by my sneeze) about buggery; too proud to ask him to repeat it. Never heard of lesbians till engaged.

  6 Masochism – being tied up to trees during Red Indians, etc.

  7 Romance: a wall-light seen through an archway; bonfire light on men’s faces; a man’s torn shirt-sleeve. E. Gosling tearing his thumb, out hunting.

  It was about at this time, also, that she first felt ‘the lonely melancholy ecstatic feeling when you know you are about to write a poem’.

  Eva, meanwhile, was embarking on the work which was to make her Dame Eva, ‘the Dame’ for short. On microfiche at the Imperial War Museum library, under ‘World War I Benevolent Institutions’ and among the lists of ladies organizing funds to send Bovril, mouth-organs, chessmen, gramophones, boxing-gloves and walking-sticks to the troops, is to be found The Hon. Eva Anstruther, Honorary Secretary of the
Camps Library, which collected books and sent them to the trenches, reinforcement camps and hospitals of northern France and Flanders. People could hand any book over at any post-office counter in Britain and it would make its way, via the distribution office in Horseferry Road, to grateful soldiers whose company commanders wrote back: ‘I have often wished that you could see how eager the men are to receive the literature, and how it lessens the monotony of their lives.’

  The Camps Library started in 1915, a month before those words in Harry’s visitors’ book, ‘Eva walked out of my house.’ The Chairman was Sir Edward Ward, who had been Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the War Office until 1914, and was now Director-General of Voluntary Organisations. He had found in The Hon. Mrs Anstruther, said the Morning Post, ‘an invaluable executive officer’. It was he who recommended her for an honour, and she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1918.

  But Joyce’s best friend Frankie Whitehead was not allowed to visit Joyce at 9 Little College Street because, shockingly, Sir Edward Ward was sometimes to be seen emerging from the house in the afternoons. Joyce knew about the affair. Once, in her late teens, she arrived home as noiselessly as possible late one night, only to encounter her mother also arriving home as noiselessly as possible from the other direction. How long the affair lasted is not recorded. Eva built a house called Pan’s Garden in Beaulieu; it had an altar-like chimney-piece in honour of the god Pan, and Sir Edward often visited her there from 1913, until she sold it in 1919.

  But as Eva grew older, Joyce wrote, ‘her personal unhappiness grew deeper without increasing her spiritual maturity’, and she began to depend more and more on her intuitions and psychic powers. She was intensely superstitious about spilled salt, crossed knives, black cats and walking under ladders. She went in for automatic writing and every possible kind of fortune-telling, both as practitioner and as client, and there was always a crystal ball in her room.