The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  There was worse to come, an hour later. Whom should she meet in the next compartment, also travelling to Liverpool with her two young children, but Vera Brittain?

  ‘Are you going to America with your children?’ Joyce asked her: the two were acquainted, having met at literary parties.

  ‘No,’ Vera Brittain answered. ‘I’m only seeing them off.’

  Joyce’s heart sank, again, with feelings of pity and guilt. Vera Brittain described the episode in Testament of Experience:

  ‘I feel as if I were running away,’ Jan Struther said brokenly. ‘But I thought that if I didn’t go I might never see the children again.’

  I looked at John and Shirley, and felt sick at heart. In that inexorably speeding compartment, familiar words seemed to hang in the air between Jan Struther and myself.

  ‘Lord, let this cup pass from me!’

  How many times, all over the world, had our women contemporaries uttered that prayer during their numerous Gethsemanes?

  Who was right, she or I? We had made different decisions, but so great was our mutual anguish of irresolution that neither could blame the other for her choice …

  The small gallant figures which disappeared behind the flapping tarpaulin of the Duchess of Atholl have never grown up in my mind, for the children who returned and eventually took their places were not the same; the break in continuity made them rather appear as an elder brother and sister of the vanished pair.

  Joyce went through the flapping tarpaulin with her children. She reminded herself, as she did so, that her conscience was clear: she was being sent. But one small corner of it was not clear, and never would be. She would never be able to erase those words of Sheridan’s from her memory, or to forget the encounter with Vera Brittain, who had chosen to say goodbye to her children rather than desert her country. There was a new small self-accusing voice inside Joyce’s head which would not go away; and its nagging presence went some way towards explaining the course of her life during the next five years.

  Chapter Nine

  Through space and time I range

  Seeking these two alone:

  The savour of the strange,

  The solace of the known.

  From ‘Sleeveless Errand’, in The Glass-Blower

  SHE BOARDED THE ship on 26 June 1940 as Joyce; she disembarked a week later as Jan. From the moment she left the shores of Great Britain, she never introduced herself as Joyce, always as Jan; Dolf called her Jan, and Jan she will be from now on. The almost unisex name suited her: ‘Joyce’ had overtones of the pampered hostess she had once been, who rang a bell in the drawing-room for tea. Released from that world, she wanted to be a tomboy again: someone who wore jodhpurs and lit camp fires and knew how to splice rope.

  The first day at sea was fine and warm, and she was on deck all day with the children. They had never seen their mother so funny and relaxed. She was being an impudent New Girl, pointing out stock characters among the passengers and whispering nicknames for them. The sea-breeze made them all feel hungry and full of laughter.

  After tea it began to blow harder, and it got worse, and by the next morning whole dining-roomfuls of passengers were groaning in unison as lights swung and bowls clattered. Jan was supposed to be keeping an eye on six children during the voyage: her own, Vera Brittain’s, and two little Jewish refugees who (unlike Jan) were travelling First Class. Nausea dented both her aptitude for the task and her willingness, and by the third day the cabin steward was complaining that the children were running wild. The ship was teeming with children and teenagers too excited to worry about the danger from U-boats: the voyage took place at the height of the British government’s programme of evacuating children to the United States and Canada, before the torpedoing of the City of Benares in November put a stop to it. Twelve-year-old Janet, unwatched for the first time in her life, experienced her first kiss, with Jeremy Harris, aged thirteen, in a distant corridor.

  On the fifth day the ship passed an iceberg. On the seventh it arrived in Canada, and the rush of impressions began, familiar to so many evacuees to North America: first the bright lights of Montreal (dazzling after the blackout), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the glorious banks of the St Lawrence River; then, arriving in New York, the Statue of Liberty, the shimmering heat, the skyscrapers, the noise, the yellow taxis.

  The plan was not for Jan to live with her children: she would have had no idea how to deal with the cooking or washing. They would lodge at 1 Beekman Place with Aunt Rachel Townsend, who had two sons of her own, Anthony and David, as well as another evacuated nephew, Charles Smythe, son of the Edinburgh madrigal singers, and whose apartment was geared towards nursery life. Jan took a cab straight to Beekman Place so she could shed the children. The door was opened by the cook, the children vanished with their cousins to the train-set room, and Jan breathed freely. She was off-duty at last. Dolf must have sat in this very drawing-room when he came to dinner here. He must be less than two miles away from her.

  Of course she could use the telephone, Rachel said: and Jan dialled the number Dolf had given her – his mother’s number.

  ‘Mrs Eisler? This is Jan Struther speaking … Yes, I’d love to meet you, too. Tomorrow evening? I’ll come round after dinner. And Dolf will be there too? Oh, I’m so glad…’ The Viennese accent made Jan’s diaphragm contract.

  On their first evening, Rachel Townsend’s husband Greenough drove the new arrivals out to the New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows. They saw sensational sights (man-made lightning, and swimmers in the Aquacade forming themselves into flower and star shapes), and rode a toy train which instead of blowing its horn played the first line of ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ again and again. They had supper at the Swiss Pavilion. The contrast to blacked-out and terrified England was macabre, and made pure enjoyment impossible.

  From her first day, Jan seemed to fit seamlessly into the social world of New York: there was no emptiness in her diary, no touristy wandering round museums to fill in time. In anticipation of Jan’s arrival, Rachel had entered her name in the New York Social Register, at which Jan was furious. She insisted on having her name removed from the list at once. The whole point of America, she hoped, was that one could escape from the social snobbery which would include her in a ‘set’ but exclude someone like Dolf.

  Listed or unlisted, she was sought-after. Editors, dramatists and broadcasters wanted to meet her. Far from making her wilt, the heat and noise of New York gave a new spring to her step. Everything seemed possible. She strode down Third Avenue on that first Saturday afternoon, feeling more free than ever before, squinting up at the Elevated Railroad and making detours into numbered streets which looked too interesting to resist.

  Then, after dinner at the Townsends’, she let herself out quietly and walked to Mrs Eisler’s apartment. Dolf came to the door.

  * * *

  The certainty of separation-for-ever had hovered so low over Dolf and Jan during their last week in London only forty days earlier that they had felt like ghosts. Their way of making the imminent ending bearable had been to behave, in the last hours, as if the end had already passed. On that last day in Battersea Park they had been, as Dolf put it in a poem, ‘blessed shadows of souls which died long ago’.

  They had become used to living at this pitch of tragic intensity. And now, for the time at least, that could change. As they sat in Pauly’s room, listening as she chatted on about the horrible speed of New York cars and her trunk of beloved possessions which had never arrived from Trieste (and never did), they looked across at one another with amazement and trepidation. Now they were no longer ghosts. They must readjust to being flesh-and-blood secret lovers living in the same city.

  Pauly guessed, in an unspoken way, that the two were in love. She was more pleased than shocked, because she wanted Dolf to be happy and could see that Jan made him so. Her motherly Viennese goodness touched Jan deeply, and she fell willingly into the role of second ‘daughter’ to Pauly, and co-adorer
of Dolf. (Pauly’s real daughter, Susan, remained in London all through the war.)

  Within a few days of her arrival Jan rented a tiny apartment which she had spotted on one of her walks – tiny, because wartime regulations had prevented her from taking money out of Britain. It was on East 49th Street between Second and Third Avenue, within sight of the ‘El’ track which so fascinated her. She set up a desk by the window and watched the trains taking commuters downtown in the morning and uptown in the evening, and the Italian newsagent’s wife hanging out three little blue striped frocks in the morning and taking them down in the evening. She was enchanted and distracted. From a Third Avenue junk shop she bought an old bed, which had bedbugs. She wrote to Tony, describing all this in detail.

  Everything seemed possible – even living two parallel lives. Three thousand miles to the east of her, Tony was at Pirbright Camp in Surrey, as a Second Lieutenant, learning to be a Weapons Training Officer with the Scots Guards. He had rejoined the army, with an immediate commission, just after Joyce and the children sailed from Liverpool. He and Joyce, as he of course always called her, were still very much a married couple, separated only by the necessities of war, and wrote to each other every few weeks. The letters have not survived.

  There was no question of setting up house with Dolf. He found an apartment with his mother at 215 West 101st Street, and Jan took a lodger at East 49th Street, her friend Bea Horton (the writer Beatrice Curtis Brown), who helped pay the rent. Dolf and Jan’s meetings still had to be conducted in secret, and their craving for each other was intensified, as ever, by a sense of forbiddenness.

  From the very beginning the secrecy of their love affair was of paramount importance from the family point of view. Tony must never find out, the children must never find out, Rachel must never find out. But later, in the extraordinary weeks after Mrs Miniver was published in America on 29 July, the secrecy started to become important from a patriotic point of view. As the author of a book about a supremely happy marriage, Jan was representing her country. Try as she might to dissuade them, her American readers would equate her with Mrs Miniver. And she could not have guessed how many hundreds of thousands of Americans would read the book, or how wide its influence would be.

  It was far from Jan’s intention to rise to fame in the United States as Mrs Miniver, the perfect, ‘cute’, saintly housewife from plucky little England, torn apart from her husband by war alone, who never thought a wicked thought. But that was just what happened. Americans, it seemed, were in search of a wifely role model from across the Atlantic, and the publication of the book was perfectly timed by Harcourt Brace. England was standing alone in Europe under the Nazi threat; gradually, consciences across the United States were awakening; and here, touring American bookshops and lecture halls in the person of Jan Struther/Mrs Miniver, was the embodiment of what the Nazis were trying to destroy.

  * * *

  The Davenport, Iowa Times, in its bestseller lists, classed Mrs Miniver as fiction, the Springfield, Ohio News as non-fiction. The truth, as we know, was somewhere in between. ‘So you’re Mrs Miniver!’ someone said to Jan at one of her first book-signings. ‘No, I write Mrs Miniver,’ Jan corrected her. ‘But I have begun to wonder whether it wouldn’t be more true to say, “Mrs Miniver writes me”.’

  By 3 August, four days after its publication, the book was on its third printing. By the third week of August (the week, incidentally, when Alice Duer-Miller’s The White Cliffs was published, also to instant acclaim) Mrs Miniver was selling in America at the rate of 1,500 hardback copies a day, and it jumped in that week from twenty-first to seventh on the national bestseller list.

  ‘What Albany Is Reading’… ‘What Chicago Is Reading’… ‘Philadelphia Likes…’ – Mrs Miniver was everywhere. Wives sitting on their porches in the prairies revelled in it – though what they made of the men in kilts tossing cabers and doing the sword dance, Jan could only guess. The Highlands, and Eton, and Piccadilly, must have been as exotic and fascinating to them as the Grand Canyon and the Badlands were to her. What seemed to appeal to readers was the mixture of foreignness and universality: on every page there were uplifting words of wisdom about marriage, or children, or Christmas, or growing older, which cut across all nationalities.

  There was none of the vitriol the book had engendered in Great Britain. There were no E. M. Forsters or Rosamond Lehmanns to point out the infuriating rightness of the heroine. Critics were enchanted: their only problem was how to review the book without merely quoting it. ‘The book defies review,’ said the Flemington, New Jersey Republican. ‘There are no fireworks, no dramatic climaxes, nothing, as a matter of fact, but the delicious experience of meeting in print a woman whose philosophical musings are always interesting, sometimes amusing, and never dull. I urge you just to read it, and then you will understand why persons have pounced on it with a fervor that is astonishing.’

  ‘If there are thousands of English women like Mrs Miniver,’ said the Battleborough, Vermont Reformer, ‘for whom the whole of England is covered with memory flags, who listen absorbed to the windshield wiper to find what it is saying – if England is full of Mrs Minivers, then it is going to be mighty hard to soften Britain. And we are inclined to think that Mrs Miniver is the most winning and remarkable ambassador that embattled people could have sent to this country just now.’ ‘Men fortified by the spirit of the millions of Mrs Minivers in England’, said the Lincoln, Illinois Courier, ‘form a fighting army which neither accepts nor knows defeat.’ ‘The book is perhaps unintentionally tragic,’ said the Grand Island, Nebraska Independent, ‘for what is happening to the England of Mrs Miniver? There is no place in war for truly civilized people, and when this war is over, there may be no place in England for them.’ ‘Of Mrs Miniver’s philosophy,’ said the St Petersburg, Florida Times, ‘one can truly say that she has found the true art of living, the art of loving, the art of marriage, the art of family life, the art of happiness. There are no triangular love affairs, not an indecent suggestion. It is a book any granddaughter can safely put in the hands of her grandmother.’ (In the margin of that last clipping, Jan pencilled a small exclamation mark.)

  The newspaper and magazine interviews began: Jan found herself scrutinized by journalists, some of whom had not read the book. They wanted ‘heart-rending human incidents’, details of what it felt like to part from one’s home and half one’s family. They wanted revealing nuggets about her life – and here was a good, safe one to fob them off with: Jan Struther didn’t like tea. But surely all English ladies drank tea? Especially Mrs Miniver, to go with those crumpets and small ratafia biscuits? No, Jan said: ‘You see, in reality in England I was at a typewriter in a newspaper office at four o’clock with a thick mug of coffee beside me.’ She really didn’t like tea. She had expressed her loathing for it in one of her early articles for Punch: ‘It is difficult to make perfectly but nauseating when anything less than perfect. Neat, it is pleasing to the eye but acrid to the palate; diluted with milk, it is passable in taste but revolting in colour.’ The drink became one of the banes of her life in America. She was constantly given imperfect cups of it by kind hostesses who wanted to make her feel at home.

  ‘Dear Nannie,’ Jan wrote on 5 August, ‘We have arrived safely, and we are now at Cape Cod staying with Mrs Patrick’s mother [Tony’s brother Patrick’s American mother-in-law, who had a large house on the Cape]. The children are being very good, and if ever they get quarrelsome, I mutter ‘H. and P. of the B. E.’ (Honour and Prestige of the British Empire) and they pull themselves together. Mrs Miniver is selling well, and all the chaps who really matter here seem to agree that it’s exactly the right book to put Great Britain across over here, and that it will do a great deal of good, especially among American housewives…! It really is an extraordinary development, considering how little I was thinking about the US when I wrote the bloody things.’

  While the children were canoeing and eating banana splits with their cousins on Cape Cod, Jan kept da
shing back on trains to New York for meetings in grills, hotel lounges and 28th-floor offices. On 7 August she met Clark Getts: ‘Clark H. Getts, Inc., Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York City’ – she was to become all too familiar with that showy sans serif letter-heading over the next four years. Clark Getts were prestigious lecture-circuit agents, and among their fifty-three lecturers for the coming season, many of them advertised in the papers as ‘eye-witnesses of the war’, were Carl J. Hambro, President of the Norwegian Parliament and of the League of Nations Assembly (‘I Saw it Happen’), Sir Evelyn Wrench, Editor of the London Spectator (‘What is Happening in Europe’), and Norman Alley, ‘Ace of the Newsreels’ (‘War on Review’). Now Jan Struther was to join their list. She was particularly pleased to be with the same agents as the children’s author Munro Leaf: she loved Ferdinand.

  ‘It is understood that I will assume my rail and Pullman lower berth fares, that I will assume all other travel expenses incident to engagements … It is also understood that if it becomes necessary for me to cancel any engagements, I will reimburse you and the local management for all expenses incurred … For and in consideration of your services, you are to receive 40% of all earnings before remitting the balance to me…’ She signed up with Getts on 24 August, with no qualms that they were sinking their claws into her. Lecture tours sounded thrilling. You travelled from state to state and there was somebody waiting on the platform to greet you. What better way to meet the real America? She wouldn’t mind a bit about the tiringness of long-distance travel, if it was all in the cause of putting Great Britain across to isolationists. She had always been at her happiest and most creative on trains, anyway.

  On another of her dashes from Cape Cod she met Clifton Fadiman, who was ‘master of ceremonies’ (that is, the man who asked the questions) on the famous radio quiz programme Information, Please! He was in search of a female guest for the programme, and Jan said she would be happy to have a go. Her first Information, Please! broadcast was scheduled for 10 September, and she would leave for her first lecture tour on 2 October.