She already felt a sense of loyalty to Chatto & Windus because they were publishing her book of collected journalism, Try Anything Twice, due to come out in October 1938. Harold Raymond’s courting letter (‘May I tell you how delighted I have been to make the acquaintance of the Minivers? My wife drew my attention to “Three Stockings” on Christmas Eve…’) was the proposal which won her hand. She accepted Chatto in March and gracefully refused the other thirteen.
Perhaps, suggested Peter Fleming, Mrs Miniver should dare to mention the political situation: ‘Now that you have your readers purring, a little astringency might do them good.’ Joyce did not want to raise the decibel level of her prose by inserting ill-informed comments about Hitler and Mussolini. But she did continue, now, to puncture Mrs Miniver’s serenity with occasional pricks of gloom. ‘Mrs Miniver was conscious [seeing a placard with the word JEWS on it] of an instantaneous mental wincing, and an almost instantaneous remorse for it. However long the horror continued, one must not get to the stage of refusing to think about it. To shrink from direct pain was bad enough, but to shrink from vicarious pain was the ultimate cowardice. And whereas to conceal direct pain was a virtue, to conceal vicarious pain was a sin.’ Again she struck a chord with readers, putting her finger on the small ways in which one’s heart sank in 1938.
But the reader who searches the book Mrs Miniver for scenes of Dunkirk, air-raid shelters, bombs, ranting German pilots, death of heroine’s daughter-in-law, death of station master, destruction of parish church roof, and so on, all of which later found their way into the Hollywood film, will find hints only of the looming war. Mrs Miniver was a pre-war character, requisitioned by MGM.
‘I scratch for light leaders like a hen in the barren dust,’ wrote R. M. Barrington Ward to Joyce. As well as her fortnightly ‘Miniver’ pieces, Joyce wrote more than sixty unsigned Fourth Leaders for The Times between January 1938 and June 1940. Writer’s block afflicted her at home, so she was given a room of her own at the Times offices. She was so small that her legs dangled off the office chair. But she turned out just what was required. Subject: arachnophobia in the English psyche. ‘There is mental horror, because the character of spiders is so unattractive. They have all the most revolting copybook virtues – prudence, patience, perseverance, foresight, and so on. As for their vices – well, every living creature must catch its food as best it may, but there is something about the spider’s methods which is very far from cricket.’ Subject: the terrifyingness of fairy tales (inspired by news that an ‘Adults only’ certificate might be given to the Walt Disney film Snow White). ‘No more hair-raising piece of dialogue has been written than the world-famous conversation between Red Riding Hood and the wolf in grandmother’s clothing.’
Subject: advice to the young. Here, Joyce mentioned a ‘superb example’ of advice which had come from Nazi Germany that week (in June 1938). Julius Streicher, in a speech to 25,000 young Germans on the summer solstice, had exhorted them to ‘Be beautiful, godlike and natural’. ‘It is a commandment audacious in its simplicity,’ Joyce wrote. She was impressed: the word ‘Nazi’ was by no means synonymous with evil – yet. Most British people, apart from a few hardened pessimists and farsighted politicians, were still trying to see the best in the Nazis. The following merry observation, from Joyce’s leader on the 1938 summer sales in Berlin, seems unbelievably naïve now: ‘Berlin housewives are putting Aryan pride in their pocket and going to banned Jewish shops for bargains in the sales. It is a thought which cannot fail to bring a pang of sheer delight to all who are interested in psychology, ethnology, drapery, dictatorship or women.’
Then, in September 1938, came the Munich Crisis, when war suddenly seemed imminent. Anonymously, in her ‘Mrs Miniver’ articles and in her Times leaders, Joyce summed up the emotions of the nation’s optimists: first, the tension and anxiety; and then, after Neville Chamberlain returned from Germany waving his piece of paper, the relief.
One of the things that gave Joyce her misguided confidence in Neville Chamberlain was the fact that he was a botanist. She tried to cheer Times readers with this wishful thought: ‘Both statesman and botanist’, she wrote in a leader, ‘must be able to handle other human beings, to inspire their confidence and to justify it: let anybody who thinks otherwise watch a clumsy novice trying to worm out of a suspicious innkeeper in Teesdale the exact habitat of the Alpine Bartsia. The botanist (like the statesman) must be neither afraid to reach up for what he is seeking, nor ashamed to kneel down for it.’
The word ‘escapism’ was being bandied about: and Joyce, in a leader entitled ‘Poets and the Crisis’, wrote a defence of escapism. ‘If to draw comfort from poetry or music or painting is “escapism”, then the word has lost the meaning which the sceptics gave it: it has changed in mid-air from a missile to a crown. For to “escape” by any of these means is not to hide in an underground cavern, or even to retreat across some neutral frontier. It is to climb a mountaintop, to rest the eyes on a wider horizon, to breathe for a time a rarer, clearer air, and to come down strengthened and refreshed.’
The Minivers, meanwhile, queued up outside the Town Hall to collect their gas-masks, taking the cook and housekeeper with them.
(In real life, when Janet and Robert were told that their day-school in Tite Street was to be evacuated to North Wales, the first thing they said was not ‘Is Mummy coming with us?’, but ‘Is Nannie coming with us?’ This exchange did not find its way into ‘Mrs Miniver’.)
A typical ‘Mrs Miniver’ article, as published anonymously on the Court page of The Times, 28 September 1938
‘It’s so nice to be back to normal again,’ remarked Mrs Adie, the cook, in the ‘Mrs Miniver’ article of 6 October, subtitled ‘The Afterthoughts of Mrs Miniver’. The crisis was over; but they weren’t quite back to normal, thought Mrs Miniver, and they never would be. They were poorer by a few layers of security, though richer in other ways:
They had found themselves looking at each other, and at their cherished possessions, with new eyes. Small objects one could send to the country – a picture or two, the second edition of Donne, and the little antelope made of burnt jade; others, like the furniture, one could more or less replace: but one couldn’t send away, or replace, the old panelling on the stairs, or the one crooked pane in the dining-room window which made the area railings look bent, or the notches on the nursery door-post where they had measured the children each year. And these, among their material belongings, were the ones that had suddenly mattered the most.
And they had learned to appreciate the value of dullness. As a rule, one longed for more drama in one’s life. But now, thought Mrs Miniver, who was ‘tired to the marrow of her mind and heart’, ‘nothing in the world seemed more desirable than a long wet afternoon at a country vicarage with a boring aunt’.
The Munich Crisis had been exhausting and terrifying; but it had woken people up, and Joyce was grateful for this mental awakening in herself. ‘The most prosaic of us’, she wrote in a Times leader, ‘has begun to live at that pitch of tireless intensity and awareness which in normal times is known only to children, poets, lovers and other fanatics.’ If, as she hoped, war was finally averted, they had been granted the privilege of skimming the cream of war without having to live through a real one.
Chapter Seven
Those whose love’s no more
Than a blind alley –
A cul-de-sac
Which can have no other end
Than turning back
Or beating with bare hands
At a wall without a door –
These must go slowly.
These at a measured pace
Must walk,
And linger in one place
Often, to gaze and talk;
Even retrace
A yard or two, perhaps,
Their careful steps,
And take them over again.
By such fond strategy,
They may a long while cheat
Themselves i
nto content,
And not too deeply care
That Fate across the threshold of their street
Has scrawled ‘No Thoroughfare’.
From ‘The Cul-de-Sac’ in The Glass-Blower
‘IT OCCURS TO ME,’ suggested Peter Fleming in a letter to Joyce in November 1938, ‘that Mrs Miniver’s Xtian name is Mabel, and that you should reveal this shameful fact at some festival, as it might be Christmas.’
Surely not Mabel, thought Joyce. It was her children’s nannie’s name. It would be one ‘M’ too many. And how could she reveal the woman’s name without introducing some contrived snatch of conversation which would wreck the poetry of the interior monologue?
So she did it on the Letters page instead, on 17 December: ‘I am, Sir, yours faithfully, Caroline Miniver.’ Mrs Miniver’s letter to The Times was a motherly appeal to her readers to search their ‘put-away cupboards’ for clothes to send to Lord Baldwin’s Appeal Fund for Refugees, and it was effective. Five days after its publication, the one room previously in use at the clothing depot in Westbourne Terrace had multiplied to seven, and parcels were arriving steadily throughout the day by post, rail, car and hand. They often came with a covering letter, such as this one, from ‘Highgrove’, Sunbury Hill, Torquay: ‘Mr Nicholls is sending the enclosed dress suit. Some years ago he took up conjuring as a hobby in winter evenings, hence the unusual pockets. He hopes it will be found in some form to be of use to a refugee.’
Joyce helped out at the clothing depot as often as she could: her Scottish spinster friend Ruth Berry was the organizing secretary and told her what to do. A refugee, Mr A. Miesels, described the scene at the depot for the Jewish Times (it was translated from his original Yiddish):
The clothing department occupies three stories. Smart ladies of highest social standing in the English Aristocracy, and young girls are engaged in sorting and picking out the most useful articles. Miss Ruth (who by the way is very proud of her Biblical name) explains to me that one has to be careful not to hurt the feelings of the Refugees by sending them unworthy cloths. She also introduced me to a young lady, to whose recent appeal in the ‘Times’ the English population responded most generously from the farthest corners of England.
At tea-time a wooden box was brought into the office and the ladies around that improvised table talked, not about weather, kittens, but about Lord Balfour, Dr Herzl, Palestine … One’s heart is growing with joy when one realises the marvellous attitude of the noble Gentry towards the unfortunate refugees …
(This was a year before thousands of such refugees, so dazzled by British kindness, were interned as enemy aliens.)
‘Mrs Miniver’ was beginning to bring Joyce the power to do good in big, public ways. She was fascinated by the Jewish refugees, with their heart-rending combination of intellectual wealth and material destitution. She was meant to be sorting clothes, but she was easily distracted into conversation (in English or schoolgirl German) with the violinists, poets and scientists who wandered in. Romantic and lacking in political perspective, she would take up the cause of a single musician and fire off imploring letters to men in high places. ‘As you will appreciate,’ came a reply from the headquarters of the Lord Baldwin Fund, ‘musicians are even more difficult than writers, when it comes to a question of placing them in work. People can be induced to take a domestic servant, or even a doctor, but musicians are even normally regarded as a luxury.’
‘T. out.’ ‘T. to Manchester.’ ‘T. to Sandwich.’ ‘T. stayed at Rye.’ Joyce’s engagement book for 1939 (not leatherette: a Walker’s ‘Flexor’ in red morocco) suggests much time spent apart. But at least now there was an excuse for escaping. She was truly busy. The Times was commissioning a leader once a week and still expected its fortnightly ‘Mrs Miniver’; Chatto & Windus were collecting the ‘Mrs Miniver’ pieces for publication; and Joyce was lying awake at night, worrying whether the sensitive-fingered Mr Hans Mahler would find a domestic position.
The Maxtone Grahams in the school holidays, 1939
‘Three times a year, during the school holidays, that one remaining branch – our intense love for our co-parenthood of the children, and our joy in their company – burst into miraculous blossom…’ So Joyce wrote years later, looking back at this time. In the holidays there were still days of marital happiness. That Easter of 1939, Tony, Joyce and the children were united in a next-door-garden-tidying project at Rye. A day of apple-tree-pruning and bonfire-tending did not need to be improved on when Joyce used it for ‘Mrs Miniver’: it really was as idyllic as a typical Miniver day. ‘Constructive destruction is one of the most delightful employments in the world, and in civilised life the opportunities for it are all too rare.’ Sitting up in the branches, Joyce/Mrs Miniver watched as the two eldest children raced snails up the gate-posts and the youngest made an elaborate entanglement with twigs and cotton over some newly sown grass, and regretted only that ‘circumstances had never led her to discover that the way to spend the spring was up an apple tree, in daily intimacy with its bark, leaves and buds’. Tony/Clem handed her up a glass of beer.
‘We’ve made a lot of difference today,’ he said. ‘You can almost see the shape of the trees.’
‘I suppose’, said Mrs Miniver between gulps, ‘the brambles would try to make out that the apple-trees had been practising encirclement.’
‘That reminds me,’ said Clem. ‘We ought to be getting home pretty soon if we don’t want to be late for the news.’
The stabs of Hitler-induced anxiety were becoming more frequent, for the Maxtone Grahams as for the Minivers. But Joyce’s naïve optimism carried on. In a Times leader of 18 July, she was still saying, ‘During the War – we must on no account allow ourselves to get into the habit of referring to it as “the previous war”…’
‘Worked at Bloomsbury House, 2.30–8’: Joyce was the kind of person who put some of her nobler achievements into her engagement book after they had happened, so that she could flick back with pride. Bloomsbury House, in Great Russell Street, was one of the headquarters of the Jewish Refugee Committee: in a slow queue, German, Austrian and central European refugees made their way to the desk for a small weekly hand-out of money, a square meal, help with financial paperwork, and advice about employment. Joyce was drawn to Bloomsbury House, haunted almost to the point of obsession by the arriving Jews and longing to help them in some way. The man behind the desk in the Financial Guarantees office was her friend Sheridan Russell, cellist, Jew, and do-gooder, with whom she had made friends at the clothing depot. Sheridan-Christ, she soon came to call him, for not only did he work tirelessly and unpaid at Bloomsbury House; he also introduced her to the man she was to love.
Tony and Joyce drove up the Great North Road to Cultoquhey in time for the Twelfth of August. The cousins gathered, the nannies argued, boiled rabbit was served in the nursery, the children rode their bicycles on the gravel: all was as normal, and London seemed far away. But suddenly the black clouds were overhead. Neville Chamberlain made his broadcast to the grown-ups on Sunday morning, 3 September, and the grown-ups rephrased it to the children, telling them that war with Germany had broken out.
‘To children,’ wrote Joyce in ‘Mrs Miniver’, ‘even more than to grown-ups (and this is at once a consolation and a danger), any excitement really counts as a treat, even if it is a painful excitement like breaking your arm, or a horrible excitement like seeing a car smash, or a terrifying excitement like playing hide-and-seek in the shrubbery at dusk. Mrs Miniver herself had been nearly grown-up in August 1914, but she remembered vividly how her youngest sister had exclaimed with shining eyes, “I say, I’m in a war!”’
* * *
With bombing expected, there was no going back to school in London. Jamie was at Gordonstoun, the school founded in 1934 by Kurt Hahn in a huge mansion in the far north of Scotland. Joyce had sentimental feelings about Gordonstoun, partly because she had spent summers there with her cousin Ruth as a child, when they had smoked the butler’s cigarett
es and written poems sitting on gravestones; and partly because of Kurt Hahn, whom she hero-worshipped for being both Jewish and a scout: she imagined school life there would be one long knot-tying, camp-fire-lighting adventure. But Jamie, a highly intelligent, lazy and non-games-playing child, loathed the school. It was remote, it lacked kindred spirits, and the days consisted of a succession of physical discomforts, many involving cold water.
Janet and Robert were sent daily to Morrison’s Academy in Crieff, with new uniforms and gas-masks. Joyce stayed in Perthshire for a fortnight to settle them in and returned to London on 23 September. It was turning into a childless city. Separated from her own children, she wrote with feeling in a Times leader:
In many of the more well-to-do houses there may have been other valuables which had to be removed to the country or lodged in the bank. But in the poorest homes the children were the only treasure: and now that they are gone the parents must be feeling destitute indeed. Some of them, looking at an empty cot, a stray slipper, a doll lying face-downwards on the floor, may be tempted to think that the burden of anxiety which has been lifted from their minds by the evacuation was almost easier to bear than the burden of silence and loneliness which succeeded it. It is astonishing how loud a noise children can make simply by not being there; and how large a table for six can seem when there are only two to sit at it.
The Real Mrs Miniver Page 10
