The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  If Louis B. Mayer had known what the supposed original ‘Mrs Miniver’ – Jan Struther – was doing the night Dunkirk fell, he would have been surprised. Joyce was in a drawing-room in Edinburgh, singing madrigals. Tony was in London after a day at the office, Jamie was at Gordonstoun, and Janet and Robert were lodging with friends in Berkshire.

  The drawing-room was that of Tony’s sister and brother-in-law Ysenda and Pat Smythe, whose company was balm for the bereft Joyce. She could not tell them her secret, but she needed to escape to Edinburgh to stay with them, in their plain, draughty spare bedroom on the top floor of 38 Heriot Row. They were frugal, and good. Ysenda had been a nurse in France in the First World War and later became a policewoman in this one. Pat was a Bach-loving lawyer with a good tenor voice who knitted his own knickerbocker stockings. ‘It was a beautiful warm light midsummer evening,’ Joyce wrote later; ‘the windows were wide open and the scent of red hawthorn came floating in from the gardens on the other side of the granite-setted street. We sat round, happy and absorbed, completely at one, weaving anew in the air patterns of sound which were three or four hundred years old. I remember thinking, suddenly, “This is what we are fighting for.” And when we finally stopped, my brother-in-law said, “I’ve just realised – I haven’t thought about the news for three hours.” Nor had any of us.’

  As she sang ‘Adieu, sweet Amaryllis’ and ‘Draw on, sweet night’, Joyce was singing for civilization. She was also, in her deepest heart, singing for Dolf, who was at that moment crossing the Atlantic, moving further and further away from her by the minute. Beautiful music always had the effect of making her feel he was in the room with her. She was not a good sight-reader, and relied heavily on her co-soprano sister-in-law for her entries; but for civilization, and for Dolf, she persevered. Later in the evening she sat up writing to him, shoring up pillows between her spine and the iron bedstead. She wrote in English: the time had come, she decided, to drop the German veil. The letter was addressed to a refugee hostel at 611 West 114th Street, Manhattan, and marked ‘personal’.

  The imminent invasion of Britain was on everyone’s lips, as the Germans drew closer and closer to Paris. Every precaution was being taken, and one of these was the systematic wiping-out of place-names on signposts across Britain. Joyce – always apt to focus on the minute consequences of national events – felt a pang of compassion for the imagined German parachutist (disguised as a commercial traveller) asking an English yokel for directions. She expressed this in a letter to The Times on 10 June, entitled ‘Our Secret Weapon’. With tongue in cheek, she envisaged the following monologue from the mild-eyed farmer leaning on his hayfork, speaking to the bewildered invader:

  ‘Clodborough Junction? Ah! Not Market Clodborough, or Nether Clodborough, or Clodborough Canonicorum? No? Oh, well, if the gent is quite certain it’s Clodborough Junction he wants … Ah. Well, you go along this road for half a mile, or maybe three-quarters, and then there’s a by-road on the right – but you don’t take no notice of that. And then about a furlong further on there’s a big tithe-barn on the left – but you don’t take no notice of that neither: except that if so be as there’s a chap with a wooden leg alongside of it, loading dung, you might just let him know as young Fred’s home on leave and O.K. And then you take the second turn on the right (that is, the second if you don’t count the little lane as goes down to Starvecrow, but the third, of course, if you do), and keep straight on past the Jolly Soldiers. (What? Lord bless you, no, it’s just the name of a pub. And let me tell you, the draught bitter there is summat like; but they won’t be open for another two hours.) Of course, if you want to save time, you can cross the stile just beyond the duckpond and go across the fields alongside Ribstone Wood. Only mind out for old Perigoe’s bull in the Ten-Acre; he’s a terror, especially when the flies ’ve been at him…’

  But what is this? A rifle-shot rings out! The Local Defence Volunteers, having discovered the parachute, have had time to creep up silently behind the hedge. The ersatz commercial traveller lies prone upon the tarmac. The mild-eyed yokel goes on with his haymaking. Our secret weapon has triumphed once again.

  It was all couched in hilarity and parody; but Joyce, again, was expressing what Britain was fighting for: the lovely ancient unliteralness of the Englishman in his fields and by-roads, threatened by an invasion of Nazi militarism and precision.

  Also in the clarity of the Edinburgh spare bedroom, she wrote for The Times a leader in defence of the heart, which was published on 17 June, the day France capitulated. Readers could have had no inkling of how close to the writer’s heart this anonymous leader was.

  A girl in love was recently heard to say, ‘I feel I ought to be ashamed of myself for being so happy’; and a woman whose child had just died wrote to a friend: ‘I don’t feel that I’ve even got the right to cry: one’s own individual sorrows seem so unimportant nowadays compared with the vastness of the world tragedy.’

  Both these opinions are understandable; yet both are based on the same profound mistake. World tragedy, or world triumph, is only an abstraction, a mosaic pattern made up of the individual joys and sorrows of countless human beings. These joys and sorrows are no less important in time of war than in time of peace; and indeed, in this particular war, they have acquired a heightened significance. For in this war, above all, we are fighting for the rights of the individual against the tyranny of the state machine. Whatever happens, we must not restrict our capacity for delight and grief. For this is the only thing that keeps us human among all the inhumanities of war; this is our life-line, which will one day haul us back again from these monster-haunted depths to the world of light and sanity which we used to know.

  The Bishop of St Albans wrote a rapturous letter to The Times, thanking them for this leader: ‘It is so sound, so healthy, so invigorating, so timely, and so Christian.’

  It was the last article Joyce wrote for The Times, ever.

  * * *

  Dolf tried to keep a diary on board ship, as Joyce had said he should, but after the first day it didn’t work. What was there to describe, apart from Nelson’s shadow, glimpsed in the starless night as he had driven towards Euston, and the grey damp dawn in Liverpool, and his co-passengers on the ship, whom he didn’t much feel like talking to? Joyce could always be jolly about things, and engage in fascinating conversation with strangers, but he didn’t seem to have that gift. He found it more natural to sit in apathy in his cabin, not even writing poetry. He had left his homeland, he had left his new love; and his reputation in Vienna as a brilliant young art historian had been eradicated. In America, he would have to start all over again.

  But at least he would see his mother. She had been lent a room in New York by Anne de Tapla, the benefactress who had sent the affidavit which made the journey possible.

  Dolf arrived in Manhattan at dawn on Saturday, 15 June, with twenty dollars in his pocket. ‘Welcome to the land of the free!’ said a taxi-driver, lowering his window. ‘Would you like a ride? I’ll take you wherever you want for ten dollars!’ Dazzled by the man’s enthusiasm and his shining yellow car, Dolf accepted. ‘Well, here you are! And a good day to you, sir,’ said the driver, drawing up outside the apartment building where Dolf’s mother was lodging. Dolf gave him ten dollars – a colossal sum, ten times what the ride should have cost – and walked into his mother’s room. She was asleep.

  ‘Mutti?’

  ‘Ach, mein Gott!’ said Pauly, waking up. She seemed more surprised than pleased to see him. She was not at all pleased when he told her how much he had given the taxi-driver.

  Pauly Eisler (‘Pauly’ was pronounced the Austrian way, rhyming with ‘Cowley’) was an exquisitely-mannered Viennese mother who had brought Dolf up strictly according to the rules of Viennese etiquette: she had stood by while he struggled at medical school for three years, because submitting to one’s husband’s will was the done thing; and she had seen to it that at twenty-three Dolf lost his virginity to a prostitute attuned to the need
s of the bourgeoisie, because it was the done thing. She adored Dolf, and worried about him, fussing about him being driven too fast in cars. In Vienna the family had had a maid and a cook, and Pauly had rarely needed to enter her own kitchen. Now, in New York, having lost all her possessions, she had taken on a weekday job as a charwoman. She never revealed any kind of self-pity.

  Later, taking a bus this time, Dolf found his way to the refugee hostel at West 114th Street. There, pinned to the notice board in the hall, waiting for him, were three airmail letters addressed to A. K. Placzek, all from Joyce. He opened them as he stood there with his suitcase. Her loving voice, ringing clearly out of her prose, gave him the courage to announce himself to the porter. He was shown to his bed, which was in a dormitory for six.

  ‘Thank you for the letters – I was unspeakably glad to find them when I arrived here,’ he wrote to Joyce that evening. (It was her first censored letter from him, ‘opened by Examiner 5513’.) ‘One can’t be alone here for a minute or concentrate, the house is full of noise, Jews and the smell of wet paint (because Mrs Roosevelt will pay a visit next week, everybody cleans and polishes the whole day). I think of you all the time, sweet darling, and don’t want to see anybody. But I will not lament about individual things in a time when immortal nations break down like putrefied trees and the hopes and lives of millions die overnight…’

  Joyce had given him one important telephone number, and implored him to dial it as soon as he arrived in New York. It was that of Tony Maxtone Graham’s other sister, Rachel Townsend, who was as extravagant as Ysenda was frugal, and who would, Joyce was sure, give him a warm welcome and pull strings to find him a job worthy of him. Dolf fumbled with the unfamiliar coins and rang her up, explaining that he was a friend of Joyce’s.

  ‘Do come to dinner, and do bring your mother,’ said Rachel.

  So Dolf and Pauly put on their best clothes and went to dinner with Tony’s sister, at 1 Beekman Place, a grand apartment block near the East River. It was a strained evening. Rachel had no idea that her forlorn-looking guest was her brother’s wife’s adulterous lover: it struck Dolf that he was there under false pretences. A fellow guest sat playing the piano throughout the evening, and he was not, by any means, practising his Mozart: this was klimpern on the grand American scale, a medley of songs from the shows and jazzy chords, and it made Pauly feel jumpy. Rachel chatted away on the sofa, but she did not see Dolf through Joyce’s eyes, as an attractive, brilliant art historian and musician. She saw him as a pitiful refugee whom Joyce must have picked up in the course of her good works. ‘Mrs Townsend was very nice and very intelligent,’ Dolf wrote to Joyce afterwards, ‘but rather cool and not very interested in my fate as a whole (I can’t blame her).’

  Dolf found a job on his own, in Union Square, wrapping and sending parcels, some of which had to be insured and some of which had to be registered. His boss was an old east European Jew with a long beard and a wet cigar in his mouth. He didn’t quite trust Dolf not to make a terrible mistake.

  * * *

  Joyce, cycling, on the day France fell, along hawthorn-scented lanes in Berkshire from Twyford Station to the house where Janet and Robert were staying, had no premonition that her life was about to change dramatically. She was living from hour to hour, as everyone was during that terrifying day. ‘The Battle of France is over,’ Winston Churchill was telling the House of Commons. ‘I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’

  She was fortified by a strong feeling – the belief, perhaps, of all separated lovers – that a star was watching over her and Dolf, bringing them the promise of reunion. And surely what happened in the next ten days was such a miracle that it could only have been achieved by the power of a benign star.

  She was effectively being sent to New York.

  It began with the New York publishers Harcourt Brace, who sent a telegram in early June to Chatto & Windus: ‘Mrs Miniver Book of the Month Club Choice for September. Publication date 29 July.’ The author’s presence was requested, to help to promote the book.

  Then Rachel Townsend, who like thousands of people in America wanted to do something to help the British in 1940, rang Tony and implored him to send the children over to America to stay with her for the duration of the war, with or without Joyce.

  Then Tony himself left a telephone message for Joyce in Berkshire on 17 June: ‘I think you should take Janet and Robert to New York as soon as possible.’

  Finally Sir Frederick Whyte, head of the American Division of the Ministry of Information, summoned Joyce to a meeting on 19 June – a meeting now untraceable in the Public Record Office, so one can only guess what was said. The gist was that Joyce, if she were to undertake a lecture tour in the United States, representing Mrs Miniver, could play an effective role as a propagandist for Britain. Americans still isolationist after the horrors of the First World War needed to hear the viewpoint of an archetypal British wife and mother, now faced with total war.

  Love plays havoc with priorities, and at this pivotal moment in Joyce’s life the line between what she ought to do and what she wanted to do were blurred. Sail to America! Of course she jumped at the chance. Not only would she be reunited with Dolf – she would also be able to stretch her wings, constricted by years of country house visits and golfing weekends. She would be able to travel thousands of miles by train, through ‘Ole Virginny’ and Dixieland and the Wild West. The British Information Services wanted her to do this. Her duty and her heart’s desire seemed, miraculously, to be one and the same.

  Once the idea had taken hold of her imagination, there was no looking back: the magnetic force pulling her across the Atlantic was too strong. She was determined to go. Why should she stay? Tony would shortly be away on active service in the Army. In Britain, she would be just one more hungry mouth. She felt single-minded and confident as she queued, with Janet and Robert, at the American Embassy, the passport office, and the US Consulate. She was going because she had been sent. It was not her idea. No one could say it was. (But oh! Where would she first meet Dolf? By a lake in Central Park? On Broadway? Outside the Waldorf Astoria? Only a month before, they had said goodbye for ever.)

  * * *

  On Sunday, 23 June, Rachel Townsend invited Dolf for a drink at Beekman Place.

  ‘You know, I had a cable from Tony today, saying that Joyce is bringing the children over here for a while. She’s leaving England on Wednesday, and she’ll be here in ten days’ time.’

  Dolf could hardly speak.

  ‘Jan, darlingest,’ he wrote that night. ‘I just heard from Rachel Townsend that you might come over here with the children. I can hardly believe it – it’s too wonderful for any words…’

  * * *

  Things were happening quickly now for Joyce. Jamie was allowed out from Gordonstoun to say goodbye, and arrived in London at midnight on 24 June, just before an air-raid warning. He was too old to be evacuated: he had another year to go at Gordonstoun, then he would be called up into the Army. The next day – her last day before sailing – Joyce took Jamie to a National Gallery concert (Mozart’s violin sonata in C Major K296 became ‘their’ piece, ever afterwards), and Tony took Janet and Robert to Regent’s Park Zoo. Janet and Robert, aged twelve and nine, could not know how long the impending separation would be: months, they supposed. No one guessed that it would be five years.

  Tony and Jamie took them to the station to catch an early-morning train from Euston to Liverpool the next day. Now it was Joyce’s turn to drive past Nelson’s Column, Joyce’s turn to experience the dampness of maritime Liverpool. Nannie came with them on the train, to see them safely onto the Duchess of Atholl. Two years before, during the evacuations of the Munich Crisis, when the children had asked ‘Is Nannie coming with us?’ the answer had been ‘Yes’: Nannie had been allowed to go with them to Wales. But this time the answer was ‘No’: Nannie was staying in Britain. Joyce knew only too well how devastating this separation from Nannie would be for Janet, and especially for Robert. An
d on board ship, for the first time in her life, she would be in sole charge of her children, for eight whole days.

  Joyce had not had time to read her morning’s mail before she left London: but now, on the train, she opened her letters. There was one from her friend Sheridan Russell which gave her a brutal shock. She expected – she needed – words of loving encouragement and farewell, but Sheridan had written: ‘I am disappointed in you, that you should be running to your lover at this terrible moment for your country.’

  Joyce felt sick. In the last nine days, since that message from Tony suggesting she should take the children to America, she had been so busy (or she had made herself so busy), shopping and queuing for visas and packing, that she had not given herself a chance to examine her conscience fully. She had been all a-flutter with the intoxicating mixture of public responsibility and private excitement, and with the pre-travel urgency of everything. She had repressed any inclination to stop what she was doing, stand back from her busyness, and ask herself, unemotionally, whether she should go or stay.

  Now, as she looked out of the train window at the Midlands disappearing behind her, she felt the first icy shafts of guilt. Running to her lover? Was that what she was doing? Sheridan had said so, the saintly Sheridan-Christ, who had worked so hard for Jewish refugees: he had seen straight through her.

  But no, she thought, watching drops of rain running into each other down the ‘No smoking’ sign: the facts did not fit Sheridan’s accusation. He knew – she had hinted to him – that she and Dolf had fallen in love; but he could not know that she had been sent to America. She would never be running in Dolf’s direction if it were not for the young children, Harcourt Brace, the Ministry of Information, Rachel Townsend, Tony, and the Book of the Month Club. A burning sense of the injustice of Sheridan’s letter began to smother her feelings of guilt. She hated Sheridan for writing such hard words to her. She never wrote back.