The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  Tony bought an expensive Armstrong Siddeley which had belonged to the racing driver Malcolm Campbell. It had the inevitable nickname ‘Bluebird’, and a flashy registration number, ‘ALO 1’. In September 1933 Tony drove it when he and Joyce took the other Talbots on holiday to Majorca: Anne’s brother Evan and his wife Cynthia. Evan had such a plum in his voice that when he said ‘I beg your pardon’ it came out as ‘Bom pom’.

  They got lost on the way to Dover. They stayed at the Grand Hotel, opposite the municipal bandstand, and the next morning the car was hoisted onto the S. R. Autocarrier. Tony handled the car capably on the way out of Calais, driving on the right as if born to it. In French hilltop towns he seemed to know instinctively where to find the prettiest street and the best restaurant. They took another boat from Barcelona to an unspoiled Majorca, where they had three weeks of scorching days in coves, with lots of wine for lunch every day, and grapes which Tony and Evan ate ‘à la Bacchus’, cramming whole bunches into their mouths and spitting out showers of skin and seeds into the bushes. Each of them had an improving book to read, Milton (Evan), Dante (Cynthia), Dickens (Tony), and Conrad (Joyce), but no one got much beyond page 21. They were woken at dawn on cloudless mornings by what Joyce described as ‘the flat golden tonking of a thousand sheep-bells’.

  They noticed New Yorker-ish sights, such as other couples at the hotel doing vigorous exercises after bathing. Like many other literary Londoners, Tony and Joyce had subscribed to the New Yorker since its first issue in 1925. ‘Getting’ the Peter Arno and Helen Hokinson cartoons enhanced their sense of being cosmopolitan. Captions such as ‘Isn’t Chile thin?’ became part of family folklore. Little did Joyce know that one day she would (on her own admission) turn into a New Yorker cartoon figure herself, stealing into her garden in slippers each sweltering Manhattan dusk to measure her gladioli.

  In northern France on the last morning of the holiday the car got stuck in the mud, visibility was bad, a cross Frenchman shouted at them, they got stuck behind some pigs, there was a fallen tree across the road, and they had a puncture. ‘Our delay’, Joyce noted, ‘was due to BOG, FOG, FROG, HOG and LOG, and if only I could make out that the puncture was due to a loose COG, my happiness would be complete.’ Driving to London from Dover, Tony pretended to be a foreigner and asked directions in Catalan. Then it was back to the nursery again. ‘Found everything as right as rain at Wellington Square, and no po-faces among the staff, which does them all great credit, as two separate nurseries in one house has been known to lead to complications.’

  Just after this holiday Joyce reviewed for the Spectator a book called The Technique of Marriage, by Mary Borden. The fault she found with it was that Miss Borden underestimated ‘the importance of what one’s grandmother calls That Side of Marriage. As a wise man once said, sex doesn’t matter all that much when it goes right, but it is very important indeed when it goes wrong.’

  It was beginning to go wrong for Tony and Joyce, and it did matter. Embarrassment and awkwardness were seeping in, where seamless union had been. Their daytime irritations with each other led to night-time non-attraction. Joyce saw beside her in bed a golfer knocking back a pink gin in a club-house. Tony saw beside him a sulky, scarf-wearing collector of sea-holly. Joyce suggested that they should visit a doctor to discuss their sexual block, which they did, but to no avail. At about this time they agreed that each could look elsewhere for sexual satisfaction, provided it was done discreetly. There are signs that Joyce had entertained the possibility of infidelity as early as 1927. Her friend Philip Hewitt-Myring, the Leader Page editor of the Daily News, became ‘P.’ in her engagement book, and they met at 12.30 on many Tuesdays and Wednesdays. When he went to America as a holder of the Walter Hines Page Fellowship in Journalism in 1927 and 1928 she kept a note of each letter sent and received: ‘To P.’, ‘From P.’ But the affair, if it was one, was short-lived, and P. soon became Philip again and was chosen as godfather to Robert.

  Tony, sometime after the 1933 holiday in Majorca, began an affair with Cynthia Talbot. Nannie Good discovered that on her Chelsea walks with the children she had to be careful to avoid taking them along Walpole Street where Cynthia lived, because the Bluebird, with its all-too-recognisable number plate, was often parked there in the late afternoons.

  Cracks were appearing in the Wellington Square life which had been immortalized as such a paradise by Joyce and E. H. Shepard. A few doors down, at number 28, the Warrack marriage was breaking up; Jacynth was having an affair, and Joyce let her telephone her lover from the safety of number 16. The sentence ‘We talked about Tony and Joyce’ – sometimes it was ‘We railed against Tony and Joyce’ – became common in Anne Talbot’s diary. It was a gossipy circle, which seemed to derive more pleasure from talking about Tony and Joyce than to them. Their friends, behind their backs, tried to get to the bottom of why Tony and Joyce could be so likeable, and yet so annoying.

  Joyce was often a little ill, if there were callers. Not badly ill – just a cough, and a dressing-gown on, and the bedroom door closed behind her. In Rye, to get away from the golf conversation, she made a small upstairs sitting-room for herself, with a sofa-bed, to which she retreated with the excuse of a cold and an article to finish. Being ‘under the weather’ was the easiest way of bowing out of the jollities. She wrote poems in bed, such as this one, ‘At a Dull Party’:

  In fifty years at most I shall be dead.

  These jaws, which now grind hard to scotch a yawn,

  Will gape unchecked; and in a clay-cold bed

  Clamped fast, I’ll wait a problematical dawn.

  I have less than twenty thousand days to live –

  Six hundred months, a bare half-million hours;

  And each new breath, heedless and fugitive,

  Another mouthful of my life devours.

  Then, Christ! what spendthrift folly brought me here,

  To breathe stale smoke, and drink, talk, think, small beer?

  A sense of mortality was creeping into her consciousness. This marriage was beginning to make her feel old. In her mid thirties she began to write about what it was like to grow older. It was

  … to feel on the first rose

  The breath malign and fell

  Of the first icicle,

  And in the earliest kiss,

  The handshake of farewell.

  It was to see ‘Night’s poles flash by us, day’s wires dip between them’, as one stared from the train window. It was to notice, at the annual Eton and Harrow cricket match at Lord’s, how much one’s acquaintances had aged. Joyce never enjoyed this day out. ‘Like the hands of an electric clock which pounce forward once a minute, the faces you meet at Lord’s seem to grow older in horrid jerks, bringing home the passage of time more cogently than the smooth, almost imperceptible changing of faces of intimate friends.’ As for the ordeal of having to watch the cricket match and chat to these acquaintances, this was Joyce’s opinion: ‘It may or may not be true that playing games has made Englishmen what they are. But there is no doubt whatever that it is having to watch Englishmen play games that has made English women what they are.’

  Her taste in men changed, in the mid 1930s, from the British to the central European, and preferably Jewish. Hungarians didn’t rely on anecdotes; they played violins and allowed the sadness of the world to seep into them. As Tony became less and less communicative, Joyce craved the company of men who were not afraid to talk about the blackness in one’s heart. In a letter to her son Jamie after the Second World War, referring to Tony, she wrote: ‘This bottling-up habit is the only bad fault I’ve ever had to find with him, but it certainly is a bad one, and is enough to wreck any marriage.’ As she put it in ‘Variation on an Old Proverb’, 1937,

  Hard words will break no bones,

  But more than bones are broken

  By the inescapable stones

  Of fond words left unspoken.

  The cheekbones of a Hungarian doctor she met in Chelsea, Tibor Csato, made her knees melt
. We have only Anne Talbot’s description of this exotic man: ‘Good looking and beautifully made, and seems charming. He is a poor dog doing cancer research here.’ (The ‘poor dog’ went on to become a successful London surgeon, with fashionable consulting rooms in Great Cumberland Place.) Joyce wrote nothing down about Tibor, but it is clear that he was a Friend rather than a mere friend (she used that capital ‘F’ to distinguish sexual from non-sexual friendships). Tibor came to stay at the coastguard’s cottage in Rye, when Tony was there: the capital ‘F’ aspect was kept deeply secret, and Tony was lavish, as always, with hospitality and good wine. Tony and Joyce never ceased to be ‘a good team’ on social occasions. For the sake of the children, and for the sake of not having to face anything unpleasant, they maintained the façade of a happy marriage.

  ‘The lover, the party-giver and the freelance journalist are the only people who feel a genuine interest in the postman’s knock,’ Joyce wrote; and, for a time, she was all three. But in public she was still the safe wife, tending to display wit rather than emotion. The brittle social-observer strand in her journalism was being over-used, the noticing-sadness-in-everyday-life strand under-used. At the end of some of her Spectator pieces of the mid 1930s, an invisible ‘Will this do? is all but legible. Perhaps the weakest article of her whole career was ‘A Brief Guide to Cornwall’ written for the Spectator in 1935. She and Tony had been on a cheap Cornish holiday, and Joyce frivolously summed up the county using that crutch for the lazy or uninspired journalist, the ‘A to Z’ method. ‘Place-names: Unbelievable. Still, there they are on the map. But don’t go to St Anthony-in-Roseland, because no place could possibly live up to a name like that. We avoided it, for fear of disillusion.’ (Informationless though it was, this article made its way into the pages of The Statesman, Calcutta.)

  Why were Tony and Joyce driving around Cornwall being facetious about the place-names, dialect, customs and inhabitants? They were economizing.

  They had never been good at hanging on to their money. In 1925, two years into their marriage, they had decided against ‘taking care of the pence’ in their life – saving money on matches, stamps and bits of string. It was more important, they felt, to take care of the pounds and ‘let the pence go hang’ – to live in a cottage but have a never-failing supply of first-class cigarettes. At that time, they were indeed living in a kind of cottage – a small house in Chelsea.

  But now, in the 1930s, they were trying to maintain a fourteen-roomed house with a triple garage in the mews, and a seaside cottage, and the staff of both – as well as keeping up the supply of first-class cigarettes. Then Tony suffered a blow at work. He had been earning a handsome commission from Lord Beaver-brook’s newspapers with an insurance brokerage scheme by which readers could cut out coupons entitling them to free accident insurance. Then Tony’s father, the chartered accountant, auditing in Canada, declined to approve the accounts of one of Lord Beaverbrook’s companies there. Beaverbrook was furious, and refused to do any more business with anyone called Maxtone Graham. Tony’s income suddenly dropped.

  It was no longer enough to let Wellington Square for the summer season, as they had been doing. In 1936 they had to let it permanently, and move out. Later, Joyce named the moment of shutting up Wellington Square as the first time she experienced what she believed was depression – ‘I fondly thought’, she wrote to her brother, ‘that I was in the lowest depths, little dreaming that there was a Grand Canyon beyond. Actually, it was eight years before I had anything one could call a real depression.’ Here she is, in 1936, on bankruptcy, both literal and metaphorical:

  ‘Audit’

  Bankrupt of joy, who once was rich in it,

  Must drop pretence at last, no longer hide

  Behind drawn blinds rooms ravished by distraint;

  Swallow his pride,

  And openly admit

  His fortune spent.

  That over, what remains? Only to sit

  By a cold hearth, staring at a stripped wall,

  And with humility make

  His statement of account;

  Recall

  The past’s transactions; rack the brain, and wonder

  What accident, extravagance or blunder

  Frittered his pounds to pence

  And brought so rich a heart to indigence.

  Wonder in vain. It is too late to take

  Remorseful vows.

  This was a gracious and a lovely house:

  But now its floors are bare,

  And there are heavy footsteps on the stair.

  The family moved, with Nannie Good, to a tiny house in Caroline Place (now Donne Place) near the Brompton Road, where they were woken at three o’clock each morning by the milk ponies of the United Dairies. They couldn’t stand it for long, and moved again, to 17 Halsey Street, Chelsea.

  On 2 September 1936, during this black time, Joyce received a letter from Peter Fleming, whom she had got to know when he was Literary Editor of the Spectator. Now he was a leader-writer at The Times, and a favourite of the Editor, Geoffrey Dawson.

  Dear Jan,

  If you ever read the articles on the Court Page of The Times, you will have noticed that they are mostly about stoats. This seems to me a bad thing, and we should welcome a light and feminine touch occasionally. The demand is not for essays but rather for anecdotes: you probably know the form. I am not in a position to commission anything but if you should ever feel inspired to turn out the simple and rather dim kind of stuff that is necessary, it would get very sympathetic consideration.

  Come and have a drink tomorrow.

  Yours ever,

  Peter.

  This laconic note set Joyce thinking what she might write. (At the age of eight she had written ‘thinking what I might write’ in one of the servants’ confessional albums, under the heading ‘Present state of mind’. It was her state of mind for ever.)

  She decided to write about a woman who was as happy as she had once been.

  Chapter Six

  Stepping lightly down the square, Mrs Miniver suddenly understood why she was enjoying her forties so much better than she had enjoyed her thirties: it was the difference between August and October, between the heaviness of late summer and the sparkle of early autumn, between the ending of an old phase and the beginning of a new one.

  From ‘Mrs Miniver Comes Home’

  THERE HADN’T, ACTUALLY, been any mention of stoats on the Court Page of The Times for more than a month when Peter Fleming wrote that letter to Joyce. It was nonsense to claim that the Court Page was ‘mostly about stoats’: it was mostly about Buckingham Palace, and grand marriages, and the funerals of deans and bishops. But in a deep way, Peter Fleming was accurate. Constitutionally unable to resist comic effect, he had used a monosyllable to express a wide general subject – minority-interest flora and fauna. Almost every day, in the top right-hand corner of the Court Page, there was indeed an article about some kind of wild animal or plant.

  In the fortnight leading up to his letter these had included ‘Hop-picking–A Midland Memory’, ‘Pheasants in 1936’, ‘Woody Plants for Limy Soil’, ‘Family Cares of the Little Owl’, ‘Stork Colonies in Germany’, and ‘Pot-hunting on a Sussex Marsh’. Occasionally the subjects strayed from Nature, but they still tended towards the masculine: ‘A 64-Gun Ship at Trafalgar’, by Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, or ‘Cars of Today: the Morris Fourteen-Six’.

  The only whiff of femininity on the page came from the fashion edicts, but their tone was headmistressy rather than light. ‘The simple afternoon dresses are short, straight, and may have front and back panels indicated by ribbed seams.’ ‘Cloth coats with plain material collars and tailor-mades with which furs can be worn are now the fashion.’ It is no wonder that Peter Fleming, with his ear for the arresting detail and his loathing of humourlessness, yearned for ‘a light and feminine touch’.

  Joyce went, as bidden, to have a drink with him at Printing House Square the next afternoon. ‘We want somebody to invent a
woman and write an article about her every few weeks,’ he said. ‘Will you take it on?’

  ‘What sort of woman?’ asked Joyce.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know – just an ordinary sort of woman, who leads an ordinary sort of life. Rather like yourself.’

  Joyce took this as a compliment, and agreed to have a go. ‘Right,’ said Peter. ‘Now, the first thing you’ve got to do is think of a name for her. You want something that’s long enough to sound nice, and short enough not to be a nuisance in narrow column headings; and if possible it ought to begin with an “M”, for the sake of alliteration. And it would be better not to have a real surname, otherwise we might go letting ourselves in for libel actions.’

  Joyce went out of Printing House Square and walked along Upper Thames Street, thinking of all the ‘M’-words she could. Every one she thought of was either too long or too short, or a real name, or didn’t sound like a name at all. Then she noticed a man carrying a bundle of skins out of one of the furriers’ warehouses, and this set her thinking about the heraldic names for fur which her father had taught her. Vair and counter-vair, potent and counter-potent, ermine and erminois … and what was the other one? It was on the tip of her tongue for several minutes. Then she remembered it. She went straight back to Printing House Square.

  ‘What about calling her “Mrs Miniver”?’

  ‘That’s not half bad,’ said Peter Fleming.