‘I bet you don’t know what his nickname is.’
‘Fatty?’
‘No.’
‘Piggy?’
‘No.’
‘Er – Suet?’
‘My gosh!’ he exclaims respectfully. ‘However did you guess?’
The second time is when he nudges you in the ribs and jerks his head towards a round-faced solemn little boy in spectacles. ‘That’s Rupert Smith-Twissington. He collects skulls.’
On Sunday:
You spend a hot, happy day on the beach, punctuated only by a colossal lunch of sausage-rolls, bananas and ginger-beer and a hardly-smaller tea of jam-puffs, buns and raspberry cider. He is still a little remote to begin with, a little inclined to answer every inquiry with an automatic ‘Yes, thank you, Mummy’; but he soon becomes perfectly at his ease. Leaning back against a sand-dune, you try to look at him dispassionately. He is certainly much plumper and browner than he was six weeks ago; his manners have improved and he is more independent; he is, in fact, a very nice little boy of nine: and if his chief interest in life seems to be food and his small-talk consists entirely of age-old riddles and verbal catches – well, little boys of nine are like that, and you may as well accept the fact. And if you once thought that he was something a little out of the ordinary, that he had imagination, that you could talk to him as though he was a contemporary, then you were deceived; and a good thing too, you reflect, or he would be having a bad time of it at school.
At this point you notice that he has stopped chewing and is gazing curiously at the half-eaten jam-puff in his hand.
‘What’s wrong?’ you ask. ‘Isn’t it a good one?’
‘Mm,’ he replies. ‘But I was just wondering. Do you ever think things aren’t really there at all – only inside your mind?’
‘Good Lord! Have they been teaching you about Bishop Berkeley already?’
‘No. But I asked Rupert Smith-Twissington that once, and he said he’d often thought of it too.’
Joyce liked merriment in a child, but she had a particularly soft spot for inscrutableness and solemnity. She knew from experience just how frail a child’s happiness and sense of security could be. A child could express all the sadness in the world just by not laughing, or by saying something simple and grave and true. This is a moment on Guy Fawkes night, from Mrs Miniver: ‘Toby, his feet sticking out over the edge of the seat, was completely immobile, but whether from profound emotion or too many coats, it was difficult to tell.’ She understood the complicated feelings of a boy about going back to school:
Not that Vin disliked school; but it had to be regarded, he found, as another life, to be approached only by way of the Styx. You died on the station platform, were reborn, not without pangs, in the train, and emerged at the other end a different person, with a different language, a different outlook, and a different scale of values. That was what stray grown-ups you met in the holidays did not seem to understand when they asked you the fatuous and invariable question, ‘How do you like school?’ It was impossible to answer this properly, because the person of whom they asked it never, strictly speaking, arrived at school at all.
And she understood a solemn child’s eccentric way of opening Christmas stockings:
Toby pulled all his presents out, but he arranged them in a neat pattern on the eiderdown and looked at them for a long time in complete silence. Then he picked up one of them – a big glass marble with coloured squirls inside – and put it by itself a little way off. After that he played with the other toys, appreciatively enough; but from time to time his eyes would stray towards the glass marble, as though to make sure it was still waiting for him.
Mrs Miniver watched him with a mixture of delight and misgiving. It was her favourite approach to life: but the trouble was that sometimes the marble rolled away.
The enchantment of Tony and Joyce’s family life at its best was captured in that ‘Christmas Stockings’ piece. ‘Words’, wrote Joyce, ‘are a net to catch a mood: the only sure weapon against oblivion.’ Here she caught the mood of Christmas dawn on an eiderdown, and the intricate tracery of the ‘family pattern’ for which she would one day grieve.
There were cross-currents of pleasure: smiling faces exchanged by her and Vin about the two younger children; and by her and Clem, because they were both grown-ups; and by her and Judy, because they were both women; and by her and Toby, because they were both the kind that leaves the glass marble till the end. The room was laced with affectionate understanding.
This was one of the moments, thought Mrs Miniver, which paid off at one stroke all the accumulations on the debit side of parenthood: the morning sickness and the quite astonishing pain; the pram in the passage, the cold mulish glint in the cook’s eye; the holiday nurse who had been in the best families; the pungent white mice, the shrivelled caterpillars; the plasticine on the door-handles, the face-flannels in the bathroom, the nameless horrors down the crevices of armchairs; the alarms and emergencies, the swallowed button, the inexplicable earache, the ominous rash appearing on the eve of a journey; the school bills and the dentists’ bills; the shortened step, the tempered pace, the emotional compromises, the divided loyalties, the adventures continually forsworn.
It was a formidable list of parental woes. She couldn’t avoid the filth altogether. But down the margin, in her annotated copy, Joyce’s daughter Janet scribbled: ‘I don’t remember my parents forswearing many adventures.’
Chapter Five
This knowledge at least is spared us: we cannot tell
When any given tide on the heart’s shore
Comes to the full.
The crown-wave makes no signal, does not cry
‘This is the highest. Mark it with a bright shell.
It will be reached no more.’
From ‘High Tide’ in The Glass-Blower
‘I WALKED ROUND to dine at the M. Gs,’ wrote Anne Talbot in her diary of 27 April 1930. ‘We played poker. In the middle there was a lot of telephoning to Edinburgh as one of Tony’s uncles died. Joyce, although slightly upset, was a little bit proud of it all. We had a lot of journalist rot from her today, and car business from Tony. Their own experiences loom so very large…’
The death of the unmarried uncle meant that Tony’s father Jim Maxtone Graham was now Laird of Cultoquhey, and that Tony was next in line. Now the Cultoquhey summers could begin. The whole family – two sons, two daughters, eleven grandchildren, four nannies – travelled to Scotland each summer for a house party which lasted from July to September.
The holidays always began in the same way: the children were sent up to Perthshire from Euston by train, with the luggage and Nannie, and were met at Gleneagles station by Welsh, the chauffeur.
Tony and Joyce drove up together, taking turns at the wheel and stopping for a night on the way, at the Haycock at Wansford or the George at Stamford. The sign at the top of the Finchley Road marked to ‘The North’ gave them a stab of excitement every time, though there were no children in the back to share it with.
Joyce liked the way an annually repeated journey combined the thrills of travel with the comforts of tradition and familiarity. Memory flags, as she called them, accumulated along the Great North Road. The place where the car had once dropped a push-rod, which after a long search they had recovered from the gutter a quarter of a mile back; the tin garage where they had once been stranded for eight hours and played endless games of picquet on a packing-case; the field where they had passed gypsies with a skewbald horse: each of these places became like a friend, which she and Tony looked forward to passing and repassing and thinking the irresistible thought, ‘This time last year…’ At the summit of the road between Bowes and Brough, they stopped to stretch their legs and smoke, and Tony ground his cigarette end into the tinder-dry earth as they took a last look at the southward view.
They bumped along the drive towards Cultoquhey at dusk, as the gong was ringing to dress for dinner. They went upstairs to say goodnight to the children and T
ony, wearing starched cuffs, flicked sixpences to make them vanish up his sleeve by the bedsides.
Cultoquhey, from a coloured print of 1861
The family Joyce married into. Tony is bottom left, with Janet. Jamie is second left, top row. Robert is the baby, bottom right
Tony’s father Jim could not disguise his penchant for pretty young visiting girls, bitterly remarked upon by Anne Talbot in her diary. He flirted at dinner, and not with her. (This weakness was crystallized into anecdote by Tony: ‘When my father was a young man, he was at a dinner party in Perthshire, a grand affair, all the men in their kilts and doublets. He sat next to one particularly attractive girl, and he reckoned he was doing rather well with her when he felt her hand on his knee. He thought he was in for an exciting evening. That was during the soup. During the fish she gave his knee a comforting pat from time to time. But I’m afraid that when the joint was served all that happened was that his hairy knee was offered a morsel from the fair lady’s plate.’)
After nursery breakfast the children were allowed into the grown-ups’ dining-room to watch their grandpapa’s daily breakfast ceremony. First he ate his porridge standing up with his back to the wall – a tradition dating from the days when lairds used to stab one another in the back. Then he sliced the top off his soft-boiled egg and drank its liquid contents in one gulp, making a loud noise. Last, he threw his apple up into the air and caught it on the blade of his sgian-dubh.
Grown-ups did tricks and organized occasional family concerts and fancy-dress parades, but were otherwise rarely concerned with child care. Nannies, as always, looked after the children. But at Cultoquhey there was the complication of conflicts between the nannies belonging to the different batches of cousins. Joyce, after many fruitless interviews at agencies, had found a Canadian nannie-from-heaven. Even her name was heavenly: Mabel Good. The Smythe cousins also had a nice normal nannie, Scottish Nannie Blythe, under whose benign rule the American Townsend cousins longed to live. Their nannie, known as Irish Nannie, was not like other nannies. Instead of eating at the nursery table with everybody else, she took her plate and chair, opened the toy-cupboard door, and ate her meal facing into the cupboard where nobody could see her. Every day she would walk up the long drive to the post office at Gilmerton with a parcel addressed to somewhere in Ireland. What, the other nannies wondered, was she sending? Was it a food parcel which she had secretly been filling behind the cupboard door? Once they spotted her trying to post a letter in a petrol pump.
Irish Nannie was eventually replaced by a French nannie, who was worse. She wore a whistle round her neck which she blew to summon the boys, as if they were dogs. She did not allow them to eat a sweet or toffee unless she had tasted it first and pronounced it fit for consumption, so all sweets and toffees tasted of French saliva.
The weather was unpredictable. Cold garden parties were held in the grounds of Cultoquhey, the guests shivering in their tweeds as they made conversation on the wet lawn, some of them huddling under rugs. In the drawing-room on rainy days the grown-ups played paper games and card games, and such was the addiction to the Times crossword that two copies of the paper had to be ordered each day. ‘It was extravagance of this kind’, remarked one of the aunts, ‘that led to the downfall of the Roman Empire.’
Joyce entered into the spirit of all this. She liked the ache in the legs after a stiff walk through deep heather on a grouse moor. Stories of old Scotland, recounted at length by aged in-laws, fascinated rather than bored her. The Crieff Games were an annual delight, and she saw the sword dance at the end through a mist of tears. ‘For I defy anyone’, she wrote in ‘Mrs Miniver’, ‘to watch a sword-dance through to the end without developing a great-grandmother called Gillespie.’
At the Crieff Games
The nannies and servants were a constant source of amusement, and at Cultoquhey there was the added spice of the Scottish accent to make the stories better. ‘I said to Campbell [the old gamekeeper] at the Games this morning,’ recounted Tony, ‘“I’m sorry to see that Mrs Campbell isn’t with you today as usual. I do hope she is not unwell.” “Och, the woman’s done! She’s finished!” Campbell answered. Of course I rushed to make enquiries, and found that poor Mrs Campbell simply had a heavy cold, and thought she shouldn’t go out.’
Cultoquhey had an indoor staff of eleven. These servants were treated kindly but also, sometimes, as though they were invisible. Joyce bristled, remembering her happy days in the servants’ room at Whitchurch House. She began to take note of precisely how little attention Tony and his family paid the butler and parlourmaid as they served dinner. One evening, to prove her theory, she made an excuse to be late for dinner, then dressed up in parlourmaid’s uniform and served at table herself. She helped Tony to potatoes, and he didn’t notice her; then he almost fainted with surprise when the parlourmaid sat down on his knee and kissed him.
* * *
At their tin wedding party on 4 July 1933, their tenth anniversary, Tony and Joyce were given new rolling-stock for the model railway, three buckets, five trumpets, tins of pineapples, peaches, lychees, pretzels and salted almonds, and fourteen tins of sardines. Alone together after the party, they re-read the love letters they had written before their marriage, and congratulated themselves on still feeling the same. But it was at about this time that in small ways they began to turn away from each other.
Tony had taken to golf. He wasn’t good at it, and he never became good at it; but he found in it a deep source of relaxation and pleasure. As he lay awake at night, mentally urging balls into holes, he found that he was becoming addicted – and he did not resist. Golf was a new thing to play – and knowing that Joyce liked playing too, he hoped she might share his new addiction. She had a go, but she hated it. Where he saw excitement, camaraderie and rolling verdure, she saw futility, dull businessmen in plus-fours and a soul-destroying fake landscape. To her, golf was the opposite of interesting and the opposite of poetic. In describing the prosaic Mrs Murple at the beginning of her story about an unromantic woman she precisely named housekeeping accounts and golf as the two deadly-dull subjects which preoccupied her anti-heroine. How could Tony, who was so anti-bore, suddenly be so keen on the world of the clubhouse?
So Tony played golf with Anne Talbot and her brother, and they had lovely windblown days out at the West Surrey Golf Club, away from sulky Joyce who would have ruined the whole thing. In 1933 Tony took a long lease on a house in the middle of Rye Golf Course. The Chief Officer’s House was one of a row of former coastguard cottages between Rye and Camber, and its flower beds were white with stray golf balls. Protective netting had to be put on the windows. The front garden was just like the spot described by P. G. Wodehouse in The Clicking of Cuthbert: ‘At various points within your line of vision are the third tee, the sixth tee, and the sinister bunkers about the eighth green – none of them lacking in food for the reflective mind.’
Joyce, whose reflective mind was not nourished by that kind of food, retaliated with beachcombing and botany. While Tony played golf with his friends, she wandered alone among the sand dunes, picking up bits of driftwood and sea-holly, and occasionally (if it was the morning after a southerly gale) a bottle with a French name on it – ‘a detail’, she wrote, ‘which has somehow put France on the map for me as no amount of geography lessons ever did.’ Every now and again she bent down to examine a tiny patch of dune, to see how many species of flora – speedwell, forget-me-not, pearlwort, white flax, stork’s-bill, crane’s-bill, white saxifrage, moss – could fit inside the ‘O’ made by her finger and thumb.
These were the perfect antisocial pastimes for an anti-golfer. When the others came home feeling virtuous with exercise and achievement, Joyce could trump them with new insights into geography and nature in which they felt obliged to feign interest. She wrote enthusiastically about beachcombing and botany in the Spectator, with no hint that she was in any way snubbing golf. Yet in writing about even such innocent subjects as these she managed to introduce a new
acerbic tone, a briskness, a sort of horticultural leftiness which seemed subtly designed to get her own back on the social world of the golfers. Here she is on gardens:
As things to sit in, well and good; as things to be taken round, definitely bad: though the possibility of finding an unknown wild flower skulking in somebody’s herbaceous border has often enabled me to wear an expression of eager interest which has entirely deceived my hostess. (I scored caper spurge in that way, I remember, hailed it with perhaps rather tactless triumph in the middle of a tedious homily on antirrhinums, and was never asked again.)
And here she is on gardening (which she had never tried until she lived at Rye):
I had not the faintest idea what I ought to do. Weed? Perhaps. The idea did not attract me. To anyone accustomed to the vigorous and jostling democracy in which wild flowers contrive to flourish and look beautiful, weeding smacks both of mollycoddling and of snobbism. I felt, in fact, about these civilised plants much as a worker in a slum parish, used to the spry and merry hardihood of the Cockney child, might feel if suddenly put in charge of a party of Mayfair brats who could not so much as blow their own noses.
She was expected to entertain Tony’s golfing friends for dinner at the Chief Officer’s House; and the very sound of their voices, let alone their conversation, brought out a new left-wingness in Joyce.
The ‘car business’ mentioned by Anne Talbot was another small area of annoyance. Tony, Joyce noticed, was becoming a car bore as well as a golf bore. After the Motor Show each year she had to listen to exchanges like this:
‘Well, I must say, I liked the new Scott Hermes.’
‘What, the fourteen?’
‘No, the twenty-six. Guaranteed to do eighty-five.’
‘M’m. Don’t like that overhead camshaft. Now, the Skipper Straight Eight…’
Her own attitude to cars was sentimental rather than acquisitive. The day when the beloved old car was taken away, never to be seen again, and the new one purred up to the front door in its place was the subject of one of her Mrs Miniver vignettes. ‘A car, nowadays,’ she wrote, ‘was such an integral part of one’s life, provided the aural and visual accompaniment to so many of one’s thoughts, feelings, conversations and decisions, that it had acquired at least the status of a room in one’s house … Old horses one pensioned off in a paddock, where one could go and see them occasionally. Or one even allowed them to pull the mowing-machine in round leather boots. But this part exchange business…’
The Real Mrs Miniver Page 7
