The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  Carl Sandberg, Jan and Paul Robeson at a gala dinner

  Jan made two new ‘bosom friends’ in the spring of 1944: one was the black actor Canada Lee, whom she had met while selling war bonds. ‘He is 37, very dark skin, and a swivel eye (from having been badly hit when he had to give up prize-fighting). He has a son called Carl, even blacker, a brother called “Lovey”, who is a postman; a divine old uncle called Mr Gaddesden (Gaddy) who is from South C’lina & fries chicken like a dream; & a host of friends, some Negro, some white.’ The other was Bennes Mardenn, aged twenty-eight, a friend of a friend of Janet’s, who was a struggling actor working as an elevator attendant. ‘Through him we’ve got to know a whole raft of struggling actors, musicians & dancers, mostly Jewish of Russian background but not in the least ghetto-ish, so don’t start snorting, you old Viennese snob … These two new worlds converge in our apartment, and we sit up playing the mandolin, guitar, concertina, etc. & talking & drinking beer, wine & Coca-Cola till anything between 2 & 5 every morning. It is the kind of “student” life which I never had, and it’s heaven compared with the depression & gloom I was in all last winter & spring. The only thing lacking is you, playing the piano in the jam session & being host with the wine & so on.’

  Staying with Bev Robinson and his wife Marian in Canada in late August, she listed to Dolf the skills she had acquired in the last few weeks, many of them picked up at Robert’s summer camp, Camp Kieve in Maine, which she visited on the way: 1 using a long-hafted woodman’s axe, 2 using a scythe, 3 playing the guitar, 4 using a soldering iron, 5 making knotted string belts in different patterns, 6 whittling, 7 graphology, 8 cooking, 9 Yiddish, 10 Russian, 11 rifle-shooting.

  I did (11) brilliantly at Rob’s camp: he practically embraced me in front of the councillors. I was able to put over a WHALE of a talk against racial intolerance at supper, & they LISTENED, which I knew damn well they wouldn’t have on the strength of any mere literary achievements. And later, sitting on the stoop of the council hall, I took a live snake out of the Nature Room & sat with it coiled round my wrist & fingers while I pursued the same line of talk. God, how they need it – at least half of the boys are from Baltimore & points south, & they stink on the Negro problem, & even on anti-Semitism. I had quite a run-in with one brat in the workshop on the same subject. Luckily I was, at that time, helping him to use a soldering iron, which was the best possible position to be in. I had a primeval longing to shove the white-hot soldering iron up his fat little Arsch …

  Dolf’s heart sank slightly when he read letters like these. When he first heard that she was feeling happier, he wrote: ‘This was really the greatest Sunday gift you could send me, Kleines.’ But he now feared that she could only escape from ‘the Jungles’ by throwing herself into this almost manic over-activity. He would have been more convinced of her recovery if she had taken up one new skill, rather than eleven. And as for all the shooting, snake-wielding and shoving things up arses – he detected suppressed rage which might turn dangerous if her mood changed.

  She crawled under the foundation posts of the house in Canada, shot a porcupine, then skinned and dissected it. ‘I got out its heart, lungs, stomachs, 9 feet of intestines – I measured them – liver, kidneys, spleen & vagina; then I made the meat into a stew with onions & we all ate it for dinner; then I boiled down the head & four paws to get their skeletons to keep for Robert. I’m going to make the teeth & claws into a bracelet. A perfectly glorious day.’

  This behaviour was Jan’s final two fingers to ladylikeness. She was flaunting her tomboyishness and her taste for the shocking and disgusting, and had it not come after a period of depression it would have been purely hilarious. But again Dolf sensed that she was over-compensating.

  Janet now had a boyfriend, whom she had met at the George School: Thomi Schmidt, a German-Jewish immigrant whose father had been murdered by the Nazis. ‘Mummy, I wonder how one ends a love-letter in German?’ she asked, sitting at the desk at 214 Central Park South. ‘I bite my tongue out at the root,’ Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘swallow three times, & then say casually, “Why not look it up in the dictionary?” I get a lot of gorgeous private pleasure out of the irony of the situation…’ Trying to be a liberated modern mother, Jan took Janet to a doctor to get her fitted with a contraceptive diaphragm; her unshockability shocked Janet. Jan was adamant that Tony must not be told, in any letter, of Janet’s love for a German, even this anti-Nazi one.

  Dolf’s furlough came up in September, and he went to New York for a fortnight. Reunited with him, Jan felt almost calm again, and whole. And for once, she left before he did. On 6 October she boarded The Mohawk, Train 5, Car 30, Upper 4, for what she rightly guessed would be her last lecture tour of the war years. ‘The farewell wasn’t so bad this time, was it?’ she wrote to him on the train. ‘Definitely it is far easier to be the one who goes away first. Next time let’s arrange to go simultaneously in different directions – nearly as difficult as arranging to come simultaneously! (A propos of that, I am as randy as hell. But don’t worry. I am so full of the sweetness of love that lust has no attractions.)’

  She kept an un-private diary of this six-week trip, as well as writing private letters to Dolf. Reading both, the contrast between her outward stiff upper lip and her increasing inner exhaustion and loneliness stands out. Exactly the same ingredients which she had found so exhilarating on previous tours – staying in strangers’ houses, looking out of hotel-room windows, being taken out for dinner, shaking hands with hundreds of people, being the centre of attention at the coffee-party after the lecture – now wore her down. She saw their dark rather than their light side. Remarks on her Details of Engagement – ‘You will be required to attend a private luncheon and make a 10-minute speech. This is a special privilege they require from all our speakers’ – were merely tiring to contemplate. ‘Privilege’, indeed!

  She was not sure which was worse: staying with people (in which case you had to be on best behaviour), or staying in a hotel (in which case you were lonely in a room ‘which contained everything you needed but nothing you ever wanted to see again’). At St Louis she was a guest, staying with Mrs T. N. Sayman of 5399 Lindel Boulevard. There was a butler, and an over-sophisticated daughter, Do-Jean, who discussed the steak and kidney pie with her mother over the luncheon-table. ‘Do-Jean, they’ve made this much better this time.’ ‘I don’t know, mother. I think the kidneys ought to have been soaked still longer in red wine.’ The atmosphere reminded Jan of ‘pre-prewar big country houses in England’, and she had a nightmare afterwards of going back to Britain and being forced to live in a Big House with a butler. ‘I woke up almost in tears. God, how awful it would be.’ After the St Louis lecture she slipped away to Walgreen’s delicatessen for a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, to avoid dinner at the Saymans’ table. At Wichita, Kansas, where she lectured at the University, she made friends with five college girls (Betty, Beverley, Joanie, Francie and Darline) and spent three relaxed evenings in their house drinking Cokes and 7-Ups and reading old copies of The New Yorker in front of the fire. She was becoming allergic to best behaviour.

  At this very time Tony, a prisoner at Oflag 79 near Brunswick in Germany, was dreaming about precisely how wonderful it would be to live in a Big House with a butler. He was imagining the blissful reunion with his family. He wrote to Jan (she quoted the letter to Dolf), saying that he hoped ‘having a grown-up family would not make him feel too ancient’, and that he was ‘longing to take up the threads of family life’. Waiting for the war to end, he was planning the future. He and his co-prisoners would establish the Brunswick Boys’ Clubs, an idea they had dreamed up together, and for which many of them had promised generous sums of money. He might stand for Parliament, as a Conservative candidate in Perthshire. There would be long, happy summers at Cultoquhey (which he had by now inherited, his father having died in 1940). He would make the most of the house, as his parents never quite had … the food needed improving, and the wine cellar … he would install new bathroom
s, and make sure there was endless hot water … he would invite his friends up for golfing house-parties, and for shooting, fishing and stalking … the gong would ring to dress for dinner, the last course would be a savoury (devils on horseback? cheese soufflé?), and there would be jazz records and billiards till late into the night.

  Lecturing in city after city, staying at the Abraham Lincoln, the Leland, the Statler, the Commodore Perry, Jan put across the gist of her message: that ‘it’s no manner of use the politicians working out a democratic world set-up if the individual members of each group are going to go on behaving like bastards in their personal lives.’ ‘I know for certain,’ Dolf wrote to her, ‘that you are going on fighting your lovely private war against stupidity and indolence … I wish I could be with you or sit somewhere at the back of the room during that terrible moment when you begin to talk. And you would touch your hair with your left hand, as a sign that you had seen me…’

  At Memphis, in the segregated South, she began to feel ‘the Jungles’ coming on, and her lecture, far from ‘going over swell’, seemed ‘to come out as a god-damned boring mess.’ The Peabody Hotel was the gloomiest yet; luncheon with the ladies of the School of Art Committee was ‘pure hell’; and a concert given ‘by a [white] man with a cold who had the effrontery to sing Negro songs in Negro dialect to a mixed but segregated audience’ was excruciating. In her diary, it was the injustice of segregation which was blamed for her misery; but in her letters to Dolf, it is clear that the misery was mainly inside herself. ‘I wish I was a riveter in a factory, or a carpenter, or a cowboy, or anything except what I’m being at the moment. I’m beginning to think lecture touring is the most loathsome thing in the world … I’m so TIRED…’

  She could not telephone Dolf, because he was deep in the Mojave Desert on manoeuvres. This was a refreshing adventure for him, and he was feeling like a true buddy of ‘the Buddies’. ‘We’ve been sleeping in foxholes for the last 7 days’, he wrote to Jan in Buddy-speak, ‘(and does my back ache!), eating miserable cold grub (and did I throw up!), and shaving out of steel helmets (and did I cut myself!). But my health has never been better.’

  Dolf’s morale was also lifted by the fact that there were German prisoners nearby, and he could watch them playing in the way he had played as a boy. ‘What a complete change of circumstances,’ he wrote to Jan. ‘They are the prisoners and I am the non-com with the rifle!’

  One day, though it was strictly forbidden, he and some fellow GIs went and talked to the prisoners.

  We took our truck down to the salvage dumps where the Krauts work. The guards – especially curious to have an interpreter – joined us and soon I and my buddies stood on the truck surrounded by 30 German prisoners and shooting questions back and forth. It is hard to realise (and yet it is an undeniable fact) that these hardworking, well-disciplined and quite humorous boys are the same who goose-stepped arrogantly through European capitals, murdering and bullying … They are all recently captured (in the South of France), partly by the French whose guts they hate. They are scared stiff of the Russians … their greatest fear is what the Russians are going to do with Germany, and that is their single reason for fighting on. Some of them, even married men with children, have been in the Army for seven years, unable to lead a normal life, and they are pretty tired of it. The wheel has come full circle …

  If Dolf was out of reach, whom could Jan turn to? Feeling ‘utterly sunk’ in Kansas, she telephoned Bev Robinson at midnight to cry. At Columbus, Ohio, sobbing with loneliness at the Deshler-Wallick Hotel, she picked up the telephone and rang Janet, who was at boarding school. She had never heard her mother in this state: it came as a shock. She got permission to take some time off school, and went to Cleveland to be with Jan for the last days of her tour. It was a rescue: Jan got through the final lectures, with Janet by her side. But she did not tell her daughter the true reason for her misery.

  On Thanksgiving Day Jan was back in New York, on Dr Pardee’s couch, talking about the insoluble problems which had once again congested her mind on the lecture tour. And on that same day, at the Albert Hall in London, the United Thanksgiving Service was taking place in the presence of Winston Churchill. Jan’s poem ‘A Londoner in New England, 1941’ (quoted at the beginning of Chapter Ten) was read aloud by the actress Celia Johnson. When she finished the last line, ‘How can London fall?’, the orchestra swept into the final bars of Elgar’s ‘Cockaigne’ Overture. Churchill spoke: ‘We are moving forward, surely, steadily, irresistibly and perhaps, with God’s aid, swiftly, towards victorious peace.’

  Janet took her mother and brother to spend Christmas with Thomi Schmidt’s family at Binghampton, New York. It was a time of rest and stability, before unknown upheavals to come. ‘1944 wasn’t quite as much “our” year as the preceding ones,’ Dolf wrote to Jan on New Year’s Eve, ‘but our love hasn’t changed. It walks into 1945 without too much hope but with the old feeling of perfection and never-ending meaning. Darling, I couldn’t say “Happy New Year” to you, but my thoughts are with you very much.’

  * * *

  An inspecting officer inspected Dolf’s office in January 1945, and said that his were the best records he had seen in all his years of inspecting. Dolf would not be sent overseas after all; and he was even invited to supper by the inspecting officer. ‘His wife was beautiful,’ Dolf wrote to Jan, ‘and when I heard her call him “Honey” I felt suddenly nostalgic for you and for our home, a feeling I always have when I see a happily married couple at home. “Nirgendwo fühlt der Fremdling sich fremder, als wo die Liebenden wohnen.”’2

  The spring of 1945 struck both Dolf and Jan as beautiful, coming – as it must be – before an end. ‘Spring is in the air,’ Dolf wrote, ‘an irregular, unsystematic kind of spring, with bitter winter and full hot summer in it, an American kind of spring, but it makes me restless again. I wish at moments like this that it was all over, but the future is such an empty canvas, and we have nothing to print on it.’ Sitting by a lake in Central Park, Jan wrote, ‘I am just melting inside with the exquisiteness of the spring & the greening trees & the prospect of your coming.’

  He did come to New York, on 10 April, and they had once again what Dolf called their ‘ghost-days’ together – the days of ‘bitter bliss’ just before parting, when it was almost as if the parting had already happened. Jan had not resolved her dilemma by travelling to America in 1940: she had merely postponed its resolution. The scene of farewell had moved from Battersea Park in May 1940 to Central Park in April 1945.

  On 27 April, the morning after Dolf left to go back to California, Jan received a cable from Frankie Whitehead to tell her that Tony had been liberated ten days previously, and expected to be home shortly. Later that day there was a cable from Tony himself to say that he had reached England safely.

  ‘I cabled back suitably and lovingly,’ Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘and said we’d get a passage back as soon as possible. I feel sort of numb and stunned and I can’t keep any food down – the usual thing. Oh God, I’m so genuinely thankful that he’s safe and well. I am not a ghoul, darling, and I am really fond of him and anxious to see him again. It’s only that my heart is all yours, and I cannot take it back with me.’

  The Ministry of War Transport telephoned Jan on 4 May: there was a passage for them on the 8th. Frantic busyness was a merciful anodyne. Janet and Robert came home from school. The ‘raft of struggling actors, musicians and dancers’ helped with the packing, breaking off occasionally to make last-minute records on Jan’s recording machine. Trunks were sent off, loaded with gramophone records, teddy bears, soldering irons and musical instruments. The Golenpauls, Jan’s friends whom she had met through Information, Please!, gave a farewell party on the last day, during which Jan slipped into her hostess’s bedroom to sign a contract with Harcourt Brace for a collected edition of her poems, lectures and stories, to be called A Pocketful of Pebbles. Jan described the final hour to Dolf: ‘… And then I opened my last bottle of wine & we all drank our heal
ths. And in the middle of all this, VE Day was announced on the radio & paper began falling through the sky like snow-flakes, & we drove to the station, nearly unable to get there because of the Times Square celebrations, & finally we LEFT, with all of them expressing their emotions in their characteristic ways. The whole thing was so ridiculously fantastic that I didn’t cry at all, but took a swig of rum & slept all through Connecticut.’

  They were caught up in the Halifax Riots, when soldiers and sailors celebrated victory in Europe by smashing glass and looting beer, and their ship (the SS Bayano, a converted banana boat) could not leave for three days. On the voyage, they had little time to think: a gale blew for twelve days and nights, the ship rolled at forty degrees, and they had to lash themselves to the deckhouse in order not to be swept overboard, and to sling their elbows through ropes at night to stay in bed. The ship was travelling in convoy, and had to heave-to in mid Atlantic for sixteen hours because the deck cargo carried by the rest of the convoy was being broken up. Jan gave splicing lessons to sprawling groups of children, to distract them from seasickness. The crew had a drunken all-night party on the last night, after which an only-just-legible breakfast menu was typed.

  Aching and bruised, Jan, Janet and Robert emerged onto the bomb-scarred terra firma of Liverpool. A row of old ladies of the WVS gave them bread and margarine on the quay. They noticed how old the dockers and porters looked: all men of normal working age, they supposed, must still be in the Forces. They took a slow train southwards, and eventually drew into Euston Station. Tony was waiting for them on the platform. Jan ran to him and hugged his thin frame.

  Part Three