And let me set free, with the sword of my youth,
From the castle of darkness the power of the truth.
Verse 3 of J.S’s ‘When a knight won his spurs’, from Songs of Praise
IT WAS PERHAPS because Joyce was so unholy that she wrote such good hymns. She could stand back from Christianity and express its essence with childlike simplicity and refreshing vocabulary, from a distance.
Canon Percy Dearmer, though attached to Westminster Abbey, lived with his wife Nan near Joyce, in Embankment Gardens. He and Joyce met in 1929 and had a long talk about hymns, and which were their favourites. He later suggested she write a few hymns for his new enlarged edition of Songs of Praise, and she asked if she could write one to the Irish melody ‘Slane’. She sat down one morning and wrote ‘Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy’ – which to this days brings in handsome royalties to the beneficiaries of her will. It is included in almost every one of the fifty or so new American hymn books published each year.
Then she wrote ‘When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old’ and ‘Daisies are our silver, buttercups our gold’, both of which are apt to bring tears to the eyes of those who remember singing them to the school piano. Not many people know ‘When Stephen, full of power and grace, went forth throughout the land’, though there are a few who hold it close to their hearts. She also wrote eight other hymns: ‘High o’er the lonely hills’, ‘Round the earth a message runs’, ‘Sing, all ye Christian people!’, ‘When Mary brought her treasure’, ‘Unto Mary, demon-haunted’, ‘God, whose eternal mind’, ‘We thank you, Lord of Heaven’, and ‘O saint of summer what can we sing for you?’ These are rarely sung nowadays, but because ‘We thank you, Lord of Heaven’ contains the line ‘For dogs with friendly faces’, vicars sometimes choose it for their annual pets’ service.
Lovers of these hymns who discover that their author was not herself a churchgoer feel a sense of betrayal. The favourite hymn sung at their own wedding or at their grandfather’s funeral turns out to be, so to speak, a fake.
Like most of their generation, Tony and Joyce had been force-fed religion as children, Sunday after Sunday. Tony had suffered the stifling atmosphere of the Scottish Sabbath. As a small child his sister Ysenda was caught by their grandfather playing on a Sunday with a sixpenny tin jar with a handle which, when vigorously worked, caused the jar to emit a few cracked and reedy sounds. ‘Nurse, I do not approve of music on Sunday,’ said the terrifying grandpapa. ‘We must all remember that this child has a soul to be saved.’
Joyce, in itchy gloves, had sat through long services each Sunday, ‘and the new puppy was waiting at home to be played with, getting larger and less pick-upable minute by precious minute, and the liturgy dragged and dawdled, always far behind one’s eagerness to be gone’.
Avoidance of church was another bond between Tony and Joyce. They even avoided looking at churches. On a rainy day during the shooting visit in Lincolnshire, Joyce wrote in her diary: ‘We sat about and sat about. Finally we were reduced to deciding to drive into Lincoln and look at the cathedral (us!) but the car wouldn’t start.’ On a rainy day in Scotland, the younger generation of the family sat in the drawing-room writing clerihews about local ministers of the Church of Scotland. This was Tony’s:
The Minister of Madderty
Never had a sadder tea
Than when entertaining at the Manse
He inadvertently wet his pants.
They were getting their revenge for years of sermons. He and Joyce were always on the look-out for a ‘J. in V. B. T.’ (joke in very bad taste) or, better still, a ‘J. in W. P. T.’ (worst possible taste), and many of these were God-related. ‘I’m so hungry,’ said Tony one Sunday lunchtime, ‘I could eat the hind leg off the lamb of God.’
At this stage of her life Joyce had a gift for turning out whatever bits of writing she was asked for. She never lost the schoolgirl’s delight in showing work to the teacher and getting high marks. In adulthood, this ability to produce just what the editor required was a kind of flirtation. Editors tended to be attractive and brilliant men: to give them what they wanted in words gave her an intense, even erotic pleasure. If asked, she could turn out cigarette advertisements, such as this ‘Capstan Shanty’:
When I was Mate of the brig Carlisle
(Hulla-balloo-balay!)
We was wrecked one day on a cannibal isle
(Hulla-balloo-balay!)
And there I took up with the chieftain’s niece,
A neat little, sweet little coal-black piece.
I was downright grieved when her uncle ate her.
(Better buy Capstan – they’re blended better.)
The fact that as an editor Canon Dearmer was not only attractive but also a man of the cloth made the schoolgirl–teacher relationship all the more exciting. A genuine warm friendship sprang up between them. ‘I found his faith infectious,’ she wrote in the Manchester Guardian after his death, ‘and his kindliness a warming fire. When one had been with him one felt happier and more alive than before, with widened sympathies, a heightened perception of beauty, and a deepened conviction that – to use a childish phrase – “everything would come out all right in the end”.’
Dearmer asked Joyce if she would like to help with the proof-reading and editing of the new Songs of Praise. She said yes, and during May and June 1930 she became a daily visitor at Embankment Gardens, correcting spellings, deleting exclamation-marks (‘splaggers’), and choosing between comma, dash and semi-colon. ‘My dear Percy,’ she said one morning when he was fretting about the theology of Heaven and Hell in one of Isaac Watts’s hymns, ‘surely you don’t believe all this stuff?’
The Dean of Liverpool wrote to Percy Dearmer in May 1930: ‘I have completely fallen in love with Jan. Working through these new hymns, I see that she has got us into a new stream that will rive and make glad the city of God. Thank you for this discovery.’
Perhaps Joyce gained an extra frisson from her success as writer and editor for Songs of Praise by comparing her status, yet again, with that of Anne Talbot, who now had a part-time job as Percy Dearmer’s secretary.
It was impossible for Joyce to write a hymn without getting some irreverence off her chest first. ‘Serious Admonition by J. S. to Herself on the Occasion of an Almost Overwhelming Temptation’ she scribbled one morning, facing the blank sheet of paper. ‘Tune: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch.’
When writing a hymn on Bartholemew,
Remember the subject is solemn. You
Can’t rhyme the apostle
With ‘funny old fossil’
Or say that his cat had ‘a hollow mew’.
Cleansed, she sat down to write the hymn. She flicked through her rhyming dictionary, aware that this was dangerous: its enticing possibilities tended to deflect a poet from his original purpose. ‘I have often wondered’, she wrote in an essay on rhymes for the Spectator, ‘whether mildness (which is by no means the same thing as humility) would ever have gained such prestige as a Christian virtue if the hymn-writers had not been at their wits’ end for a rhyme to “child”.’
But out of all this frivolity and unbelief came some classic hymns with the power to touch people to the heart.
Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy,
Whose trust, ever childlike, no cares could destroy,
Be there at our waking, and give us, we pray,
Your bliss in our hearts, Lord, at the break of the day.
The break of the day, the noon of the day, the eve of the day, the end of the day: the hymn can be about a day, or about life. The words are simple and understandable, in contrast to Eleanor Henrietta Hull’s bewildering line from the hymn ‘Be thou my vision’, which is sung to the same tune: ‘Be all else but nought to me, save that thou art.’
Middle-brow poets arguably write the best hymns, and Joyce was that: a poet who expressed universal thoughts in familiar metaphors. The thought and the image might be simple, but beca
use the words fitted the thought like a glove, and because the scansion was perfect, real beauty was attained.
Writing these hymns, she imagined herself as the child in the pew. ‘When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old’ was a tomboy’s hymn – the sort of hymn she would have liked to sing as a child. She knew that a great hymn speaks not just to children but to the child in us all.
As an adult who never wanted to grow up, she retained a deep compassion for children, and a respect for their way of looking at the world. She couldn’t bear adults who were out of touch with magic and enchantment. Possibly she cared more about ‘the child inside the man’ than she did about actual children. One of her short stories begins:
Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to Mrs Murple. If she went to stay in a haunted house, the most authentic family ghost would go on strike and refuse to show off; if she entered a room where children were playing at pirates, the nursery table would instantly cease to be a Spanish galleon, and the desert island would automatically change back into a hearthrug. She would have harnessed Pegasus to a four-wheeled cab, and made the golden apples of the Hesperides into dumplings. But she had delicate features and an ethereal expression, and it was almost impossible to guess, when you saw her with that far-away look in her eyes, apparently lost in an exquisite reverie, that she was really making mental calculations about housekeeping accounts or wondering how to improve her game of golf.
Prosaic grown-ups need to be taught a lesson, and Miss Murple got her come-uppance. Plainly Joyce was not out of touch with nursery life. But she was never in it for long enough to be anything other than enchanted by the child’s view of the world.
Joyce claimed not to be a believer-in-God, but her sense of enchantment was so strong that it was akin to spirituality. She had moments of sudden religious vision.
‘Intimations of Immortality in Early Middle Age’
On the first of spring, walking along the Embankment,
Light-footed, light-headed, eager in mind and heart,
I found my spirit keyed to a new pitch,
I felt a strange serenity and a strange excitement.
I saw a boy running, and felt the wind
Stream past his cheeks, his heart in ribs pounding;
I saw a nurse knitting, and my own fingers
Knew the coldness of needles, warmth of the wool.
I saw, over the barges, gulls flying:
It was my own wings that tilted and soared,
With bone-deep skill gauging to a line’s breadth
The unmapped hills of air, its unplumbed hollows.
I saw a woman with child: a second heart
Beat below mine. I saw two lovers kissing,
And felt her body dissolve, his harden
Under the irrational chemistry of desire.
And I, who had always said, in idle, friendly,
Fireside thrashings-out of enormous themes,
That anybody who liked could have my share
Of impersonal after-life, fusion with the infinite,
Suddenly thought – Here, perhaps, is a glimpse
Of the sages’ vision, delight by me unimagined:
To feel without doing, to enjoy without possessing;
To bear no longer the burden of a separate self;
To live through others’ senses; to be air, to be ether,
Soundlessly quivering with the music of a million lives.
Pantheistic tosh, one might say. But Joyce said, ‘There you have my religious belief.’
* * *
Ernest Shepard. the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, became Joyce’s illustrator in Punch in 1931. Three things about her light verse of this time made it ideal material for Shepard’s talents.
The first was her tendency to write simple verses about the daily delights of childhood, which could be enjoyed by children but were really aimed at nostalgic grown-ups.
The second was her depiction of London, whose unsung charms she longed to express. She cherished the sight of tri-cycling children, muffin men, milk ponies, chimney-pots, pigeons, and Belisha beacons.
The third was her light but firm delineation of social class. The children she described (based on her own) were Christopher Robin-like in their well-brought-upness: they were children with nannies, and with smart Mummies in furs; children who peeped out of nursery windows and were allowed out in best coats and hats to tricycle up and down the square before tea. Her street characters – policemen, flower ladies, pavement artists, street musicians and so on – were comically Cockney.
E. H. Shepard was on Joyce’s wavelength in each of these three aspects. He, too, drew pictures of children and of childish pleasures which, though loved by children, were positively drooled over by grown-ups. He, too, spoke as much to the child inside the adult as to children themselves. He, too, adored London and sought to express its charms on paper. And he, too, was sensitive to social class and uninhibited about delineating it. When you look at one of his well-brought-up children with long dangly legs on a tricycle, you can hear her posh vowels, and when you look at one of his street artists, you can hear him saying, ‘Why, bless your heart. It ain’t no trouble – I’m used to Art.’
Joyce’s collaboration with Shepard began in Punch on 25 February 1931 with the first of a set of verses about London telephone exchanges called ‘Dialling Tones’:
The idea for a set of verses on this subject was an example of Joyce’s ability (when not in a holiday bad mood) to ‘pick out the lovely bits suddenly’. In the daily act of dialling ‘A–V–E’, ‘H–I–L’, ‘P–R–I’ or ‘R–I–V’, her imagination was transported to remembered avenues, hillsides, primrose meadows and riversides. This was an experience shared by many Londoners in the days before all-digital telephone numbers and Joyce, together with Shepard, gave expression to a commonly-felt urge to find poetry in the mundane.
Joyce wrote to the editor of Punch at about this time, begging to be allowed to sign herself ‘J.S.’ or ‘Jan’ instead of being anonymous. This was an honour permitted only to the most established Punch writers; and the editor at first refused. But when her second set of Shepard-illustrated verses began in February 1932, the shortened signature at last appeared: ‘Jan’.
‘Sycamore Square’ was the name of this set of verses. It was about street life in Wellington Square, and at the end of 1932 Methuen published it in book form together with the telephone-exchange verses. Doggerel-like in its simplicity and shortness-of-lines, the verse was an unobtrusive backdrop for Shepard’s illustrations, such as the one of the policeman:
There he is at the bottom of the page, jovial, with a baby on his knee, truncheon and helmet hanging on a peg behind him, cup of tea in his hand, kipper on a plate, buxom smiling wife in an apron, two more babies, and three riotous children waving their knives and forks in the air, as the Sycamore Square children never would.
Joyce’s next collaboration with E. H. Shepard was The Modern Struwwelpeter, also published first in Punch, and then by Methuen in 1936. It was a set of cautionary verses inspired by the bad habits of Joyce’s children and nephews: James, who liked too much ice-cream (and turned to ice); Philip, who didn’t cross the road carefully (and got run over by a bus); Peter, who wouldn’t take his halibut oil (and was visited by a monstrous fish); Anthony, who said ‘You’ve got it up your sleeve’ to conjurors (and was turned into a white rabbit); Charles, who said ‘O.K.’ (and was turned into a parrot in the zoo); Janet, who said ‘Mamma, I must have that’ in toyshops (and was turned into a doll in a shop window); Robert, who dialled ‘COW’ and ‘HOG’ on ‘his mother’s toy, the telephone’ (and was terrified when the telephone let out a blood-curdling screech); and Reckless Mike and Ruthless John, the twins who tried to make their governess Miss Marlinespike vanish with vanishing cream (but she remained in the air, slapping them invisibly). Though the time Joyce spent with these nephews was limited, she did capture their essence, and many acknowledge that they carried the attributes she spotted into th
eir later lives.
* * *
‘But why are you allowed to do things, Mummy, if we’re not?’ Joyce’s daughter Janet asked her one morning in 1933.
‘If I can’t be a shining example to you,’ was her reply, ‘let me at least be a horrible warning.’
Her children were becoming old enough to ask taxing questions and to remember the answers, and Joyce adored them more and more – though she still avoided the daily drudgery of looking after them. One day in 1933 when a cluster of nannies from different families were all off-duty, Joyce had to drive three or four children to school herself in her Baby Morris, as well as taking Jamie (aged nine) to the school train. The day was so abnormal and so hectic that in the evening she wrote it all down. From Victoria Station she went to Peter Jones to buy nursery chairs, then to Michelin House to buy a guide to France (for a forthcoming grown-ups-only holiday). ‘Went to lunch with Dame at 1.30, and as we sat down suddenly remembered we’d got four people coming to dinner tonight, and I hadn’t told Ada. So I had to order dinner over the telephone.’
The love she felt for her children was all the more intense because she saw so little of them. An article she wrote for the Spectator called ‘Half-Term’, about visiting Jamie at boarding-school, depicts the cut-offness of parents from children, and the briefness of a 1930s half-term. Children got only the tiniest whiff of non-school life. Parents stayed in a hotel near the school, watched the school cricket match on Saturday, then went to school chapel on Sunday and took the child out afterwards for a picnic on the beach. That was the end of half-term.
On Saturday:
Throughout the afternoon he sits wedged between you on a garden seat, watching the match with unflagging seriousness. You yourself are more occupied with watching him; he is close beside you, yet a thousand miles away; he is still living in an alien world. ‘Played!’ he says at intervals; and ‘Oh, bad luck’ dutifully, when somebody misses a catch. Only twice during the afternoon does he make any remark unconnected with the game. The first time is when an immensely fat boy of about twelve walks past.
The Real Mrs Miniver Page 6
