The Oxford English Dictionary gives several meanings for ‘miniver’: ‘1. A kind of fur used as a lining and trimming in ceremonial costumes. 2a. The animal from which the fur was supposed to be obtained (obs.). 2b. (dial.) The stoat…’ So, even after the arrival of Mrs Miniver, the Court Page of The Times still featured stoats.
It was easy for Joyce not quite to get around to putting pen to paper. There were many excuses. She was moving house – twice, first to 1 Caroline Place and then to 17 Halsey Street, and feeling all the tension and lowering of self-esteem which moving to a smaller house brings. The family listened to the Abdication broadcast in the cramped drawing-room at Caroline Place. By the time of the Coronation they had moved to Halsey Street, and they watched the procession from the window of Scotland Yard, invited in by Joyce’s old detective colleagues.
On hymn-writing mornings, Joyce had written a limerick after breakfast in an effort to clean her mental slate. Now, commissioned to create the perfect housewife, she had first to unburden herself in Ogden Nashese:
Fidelity isn’t just a question of who you go to bed with:
It’d be simple enough, if that was all you had to bother your head with.
Because, after all, unless you happen to be introduced to a ravishing Russian when the weather’s particularly sultry,
It’s only too easy not to commit adultery.
But anyway, as I said,
Fidelity isn’t just a matter of Respecting the Marriage-bed.
It’s a matter of not letting other people be able,
At the dinner-table,
To tell whether you are hearing one of his stories for the first, second, tenth or twentieth time;
And of understanding, and responding to, his pantomime,
When he is bored at a party and wants you to get up and say Goodbye;
And of remembering always to say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’
And ‘our’ instead of ‘my’;
And of never accepting a telephone invitation without leaving him a loophole for escape;
And of never letting him in for amateur theatricals in any form or shape …
and so on, ending:
But pray don’t think that I am trying to disparage
Marriage.
In the spring of 1937 she sat down in the garden at Rye and tried to write about Mrs Miniver, but found she could only write about the impossibility of writing in a garden. The sunshine kept moving onto one’s piece of paper ‘like an importunate cat’, and sun-glasses were no good: ‘expensive ones give a depressing effect, as of a November twilight in a slate quarry; while cheaper brands transport the wearer to such a lurid, threatening and phantasmogorical world that he might well imagine himself to be looking at a colour film of the Day of Judgment designed by El Greco and produced by MGM.’ The Spectator published this. Joyce spent weeks of 1937 building a punt called ‘Puffin’, badly. It required six strong men to carry it to the water, and it leaked. She and Jamie also started making a cardboard model of Bodiam Castle, which afterwards became a symbol of life’s unfinished projects.
Peter Fleming’s idea took a year to come to fruition. In September 1937 he wrote again, asking Joyce to discuss the ‘embryonic project’ – and suddenly, inspired by the beginning-of-school-year bracing air, she got to work. On Wednesday, 6 October 1937, the first article appeared, in the exact spot on the Court Page which ‘Rock Gardens in Autumn’ had filled earlier the same week: ‘Mrs Miniver Comes Home’, signed ‘From a correspondent’. This is how it began:
It was lovely, thought Mrs Miniver, nodding good-bye to the flower-woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of ceremonious joy, as though it were a cornucopia; it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one’s life where the holidays (irrelevant interlude) had made one drop it. Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays: but she always felt – and it was, perhaps, a measure of her peculiar happiness – a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half-afraid to step out of the frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back. The spell might break, the atmosphere be impossible to recapture.
And this is how it ended, five paragraphs later:
She rearranged the fire a little, mostly for the pleasure of handling the fluted steel poker, and then sat down by it. Tea was already laid: there were honey sandwiches, brandy-snaps, and small ratafia biscuits; and there would, she knew, be crumpets. Three new library books lay virginally on the fender-stool, their bright new wrappers unsullied by subscriber’s hand. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed, very softly and precisely, five times. A tug hooted from the river. A sudden breeze brought the sharp tang of a bonfire in at the window. The jigsaw was almost complete, but there was still one piece missing. And then, from the other end of the square, came the familiar sound of the Wednesday barrel-organ, playing, with a hundred apocryphal trills and arpeggios, the ‘Blue Danube’ waltz. And Mrs Miniver, with a little sigh of contentment, rang for tea.
It was a prose poem on the afternoon happiness of a very lucky Chelsea wife. Nothing was written in any leader to explain Mrs Miniver’s sudden appearance. The aura of self-satisfaction exuded by this initial essay was enough to exasperate several readers.
A fortnight later, after ‘An Enigma of the Turf’ and ‘White Sparrows – Experiments of a Bird-Breeder’, there she was again: ‘Mrs Miniver and the New Car’. Her husband, Clem, was now introduced, a charming and successful architect who had just landed two lucrative commissions and could therefore afford to swap the old Leadbetter for a smart (unspecified) new brand from the Motor Show catalogue. Readers were given a glimpse of the Minivers at home:
Clem put his head in, dishevelled from a bath. Not for the first time, she felt thankful that she had married a man whose face in the ensuing sixteen years had tended to become sardonic rather than sleek. It was difficult to tell, when people were young and their cheek lines were still pencilled and delible. Those beautiful long lean young men so often filled out into stage churchwardens at forty-five. But she had been lucky, or had a flair; Clem’s looks were wearing well. The great thing, perhaps, was not to be too successful too young.
And Mrs Miniver revealed herself as sentimental about inanimate objects. This time she was introduced, in an unsigned Leader by Peter Fleming, as ‘an imaginary lady who makes her second appearance in these pages’. Fleming liked to be funnier than anybody else. As well as introducing Mrs Miniver, he outdid her on the subject of the uselessness of one’s old car:
Over and again it has delayed us, marooned us, embarrassed us, and covered us with oil. It has subjected us to hardships, humiliations and expense. It has never been our friend. At best it was a reluctant and treacherous ally, and of late it has become, more or less openly, our enemy. Though it may be said to ‘stand meekly by’, it requires considerable effort on our part to make it do anything else.
Readers began to piece together data about this mysterious woman. Her Christian name was not revealed. She had three children, Vin (Etonian, liked fishing), Judy (took her doll out in new red dress, chain-sucked barley sugar on journeys), and Toby (small, unfathomable, made guitar out of photograph frame and eight elastic bands). Clem was a perfect piano-playing husband and father. The Minivers lived in a stucco-fronted London square, where they gave dinner parties. At weekends, when they were not invited to a country house party, they went to their cottage in Kent called Starlings, where they spent happy afternoons fitting up one of the outhouses like the cabin of a ship. They went to Perthshire each summer.
It was all idyllic enough to make for deadly dull reading – were it not for the fact that this anonymous ‘correspondent’ had a remarkable gift for expressing small universal truths. Each piece contained a few gems: a spot-on metaphor or two, and some razor-sharp insights into the sensations of daily life. Here was Mrs Miniver on rear-view mirrors: ‘She wondered why it had never occurred to her before
that you cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small, clear image of the past.’
On friends whom one half-dreads seeing: ‘There was nothing really the matter with the Lane-Pontifexes. They were quite nice, intelligent, decent people: yet for some reason one’s heart sank. Their company, as Clem said, was a continual shutting of windows.’
On choosing an engagement book: ‘She rejected the leatherette at once. In a spasm of post-Christmas economy she had once bought a very cheap engagement book, and it had annoyed her for twelve months; everything she put down in it looked squalid.’
On the first ‘Wedgwood day’ – blue sky and scudding white clouds – at the beginning of spring: ‘On certain days, the barriers were down. Mrs Miniver felt as though she and the outside world could mingle and interpenetrate; as though she was not entirely contained in her own body but was part also of every person in the street. This was the real meaning of peace – not mere absence of division, but an active consciousness of unity, of being one of the mountain-peak islands on a submerged continent.’
On a hot summer which goes on for too long: ‘As day after day broke close and windless, and night after night failed to bring any refreshing chill, she began to feel oddly uneasy. The year, now, seemed like an ageing woman whose smooth cheeks were the result, not of a heart perennially young, but of an assured income, a sound digestion, and a protective callousness of spirit.’
On a child’s inability to grade its misfortunes: ‘One never knew, when setting out to comfort Toby, whether to prepare first aid for a pinprick or a broken heart.’
On the sound of a father and child walking together: ‘Toby trotted off to the pond with Clem, his feet beating crotchets against his father’s minims.’
On the sound a pneumatic windscreen-wiper makes: ‘“Successful?” asked Clem, seeing her festooned with parcels. “Look here,” she said, “that screen-wiper – I think what it says is ‘Beef Tea.’” “My goodness,” said Clem. “I believe you’re right.”’
It became an oasis of gentle wit and wifely common sense, this fortnightly patch of the Court Page; it was a safe, framed world to retreat to after facing the news on the previous pages, which was steadily getting worse. This analysis of happiness, written by a modern independent wife, was something quite new. Fundamentally contented readers who also bought new cars, had family firework displays, bought engagement books, did Christmas shopping, sent their children back to school and so on, saw their own thoughts expressed for the first time.
There was, perhaps, something a little suspicious about the utter happiness of the Minivers. An author genuinely blissfully happy with her husband can dare to criticize him. Today’s columnist will complain cheerfully about ‘the dreadful Simon’ who forgets to turn taps off – and it is plain that really she is flaunting the success of her marriage. There was not a single criticism of Clem, or of married life, in the ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns. To cynical modern eyes it seems obvious that the author may have had something to hide.
By inventing a happily married woman and describing her thoughts, Joyce was turning out what Peter Fleming had asked for, and Mrs Miniver was an ideal vehicle for her minute observations of daily life. But with hindsight it seems that Joyce was describing the marriage she once had, which perhaps she wished she could have had for ever, and which she might regain if she wrote about it with enough enthusiasm. She and Tony were equally loath to face up to failure: the Miniver essays, which Tony read and approved of, were an exercise in mutual convincing, an effort to cover over the cracks and pretend they were not there.
The question which occupied readers’ minds in 1938 was not why the pieces were written, but who had written them. A friend of Tony’s overheard two colonels in a golf club on the south-east coast. ‘I say,’ said one, ‘do you know who writes those “Miniver” articles in The Times?’ The other replied, ‘I’ve never been able to find out; but of one thing I’m quite certain, and that is that they couldn’t possibly be written by anyone but a man.’
At first, Joyce received letters saying either ‘Dear Madam: I simply love your Miniver articles – do go on with them’, or ‘Dear Sir: I simply loathe your Miniver articles – do stop.’ Some of Mrs Miniver’s most bloodthirsty critics, as well as several of her most enthusiastic fans, were clergymen; Joyce could not decide whether this was proof of inconsistency in ‘Mrs Miniver’, or of schism in the Church.
After a time, she noticed that people were no longer writing ‘Dear Sir’ or ‘Dear Madam’: it was ‘Dear Mrs Miniver’, as though she were a real person. In one article Mrs Miniver found a new charwoman at number 23, Block H, The Buildings, a fictitious hunting-ground for people in search of daily help. The next day there was a letter for Joyce enclosing a stamped addressed postcard: ‘Dear Mrs Miniver: Do be an angel and let me know exactly which block of dwellings it was. I have been looking for a charwoman for weeks and am quite distracted. Forgive my bothering you, but I know what a good housekeeper you are.’ The last sentence made Joyce feel guilty, since she knew only too well that she herself was not a good housekeeper.
Even friends and relations who knew she was the author of the ‘Miniver’ pieces began to confuse Joyce’s real life with Mrs Miniver’s. For Easter 1938 Mrs Miniver and Clem went off to Cornwall. The following week a friend rang Joyce and said, ‘Oh, you’re back, are you? Cornwall must have been heavenly. I wish I’d been there.’ ‘So do I,’ said Joyce. In August, wanting to inflict some pain on her character, she sent Mrs Miniver to London to the dentist, for a filling. ‘Darling,’ one of Joyce’s aunts wrote to her, ‘I’m so sorry you’ve been having such a nasty time with your teeth.’
These reactions were all quite gratifying in a way, but they were also alarming. Joyce began to feel that she wasn’t in charge of her own life any more. ‘In fact,’ she wrote later, ‘I felt rather like a ventriloquist whose doll has suddenly struck up an independent conversation with the audience.’
Deductions about the precise social status of Mrs Miniver and sightings of flaws in her perfection became a running game on The Times Letters and Leader pages. The name of the Minivers’ country cottage, Starlings, was a clue. ‘These homely old rural names’, said a Leader on 19 April, ‘always suggest not a family house but a purchase.’ Mrs Miniver, it seemed, was not ‘top drawer’: she was ‘top drawer but one.’ And her teeth seemed to have something wrong with them. ‘It was a shock to learn that she had to go to the dentist, and to come up from Starlings for the purpose. That could not have been for one of the regular half-yearly assurances that her teeth, like her taste, were flawless: it must have been a special visit, denoting a defect. How Mrs Miniver must loathe to have anything about her that is not perfect – Mrs Miniver, so delicately sensuous that she can take delight in the feel of her own fluted steel poker!’
Joyce later insisted, in lectures and interviews, that though her husband and children were remarkably similar in age, habits and temperament, she was not Mrs Miniver. Many of the incidents, it was true, were drawn straight from life, but heightened by Joyce’s own, real, poetic way of looking at things. Yet, unlike Mrs Miniver, she was no longer living in a large house in a Chelsea square; she had moved to a small house in a Chelsea street. The ‘little sigh of contentment’ as the tug hooted from the river and Mrs Miniver rang for tea were echoes from Joyce’s past. The utterly good-natured Clem, in perfect mental union with his wife, handsome, sardonic rather than sleek, turning out his ‘pocketful of pebbles’ for her each evening, was not quite the golfing, clubbable, gin-drinking man Tony was becoming; tellingly, there was no mention of golf in ‘Mrs Miniver’. And there was no hint of the dark side of Joyce’s mind, the side which could blot out beauty and see nothing but barrenness; the side which, at the height of her success at The Times, wrote this poem:
This is the measure of my soul’s dis-ease:
I, who for love of life,
Once grudged each moment of the night’s oblivion,
Now
seek out sleep, unearned;
Cling to its depths, and wake reluctantly
As though to bodily pain.
Mrs Miniver’s outlook on the world was the polar opposite of the depressive’s, who sees futility in everything. Nothing was futile for Mrs Miniver: even a rear-view mirror, even a swing-door, even a dentist’s ceiling, could inspire a thought about the human condition.
It is too simple to say that in ‘Mrs Miniver’ Joyce was recreating a lost paradise. Officially she and Tony were still a steadily married couple: the laughter, the funny accents, the brilliant thoughts, the impetuous adventures continued, and there was no feeling, even in private, that the marriage itself was threatened. It has been suggested that Tony did not like having a wife who was successful and clever, but this was not the case. What he did mind, more and more, was having a rebellious wife, a depressed wife, a left-wing wife, a sulky wife, a wife who felt fenced in. Tony and Joyce visited the Times offices, and became friends of Geoffrey Dawson and R. M. Barrington-Ward, the successive editors. It was another world to discover together and laugh about. Tony was heartened by the ‘Mrs Miniver’ articles: if Joyce could capture the sparkling days of their marriage and co-parenthood so vividly and lovingly in print, maybe this was how she still saw their marriage: and maybe everything was all right.
For Joyce, writing ‘Mrs Miniver’ actually had the effect not of helping her to regain her lost state of serene Chelsea wife but of making her realise that she didn’t want to be that type of person ever again. It was almost as if the creation of ‘Mrs Miniver’ was a way of writing the exquisiteness out of herself. Readers saw Mrs Miniver’s life as an enviable paradise; Joyce, privately, was beginning to see it as a cage to which she was ready to say good riddance.
* * *
The first inkling that Joyce might not be able to get away from her creation came the day after the appearance of the second ‘Mrs Miniver’ article. The publishers Lovat Dickson, having discovered her identity, wrote to her care of The Times to ask whether they could publish the pieces in book form when there were enough of them. Between October 1937 and November 1938 Joyce received letters from Constable, Black, Methuen, Arnold, Chatto & Windus, Cassell’s, Harrap, Jonathan Cape, Hodder & Stoughton, Macmillan, Longmans Green, Dent and Hamish Hamilton, each of them courting her favour. Each found a different way of sounding attractive: ‘All of us in the firm are very hopeful that you may be interested…’; ‘If you can be persuaded – and I do so hope you can – I know there will be no difficulty about terms’; ‘Do you want any more of these obviously boring requests from publishers?’ Peter Fleming wrote to ask. ‘Or shall we turn them down ourselves and pass on their letters to you already answered?’ Wooed, desired, popular, choosing and rejecting suitors, Joyce was in the foothills of fame, and loving it.
The Real Mrs Miniver Page 9
