The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  A few days after her arrival at Prestwick Airport on 8 August, she and Tony agreed to separate, and to seek a divorce.

  ‘You, bless you,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘understand how little the actual divorce matters in all of our lives: it is the mere formal burying of a corpse – or rather of a skeleton which is so bared and whitened by sun and vultures that it doesn’t even stink any more, but has acquired a certain stark integrity and bearableness. The hellishly miserable time was when it still had flesh on it but needed burying, and when we were still trying, first, artificial respiration and, second, a kind of amateurish embalming.’

  Breaking the news to Robert was as dreadful as she had predicted: he was as upset as she had known he would be. Now she had done it. The pattern was broken. But there was one last week of family life before the planned date of separation. In this week, a new friendliness filled the air at Wellington Square. ‘The atmosphere in the house is so peaceful and even gay,’ Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘that it must seem even more incomprehensible to Robbie that we are going to part.’

  Packing and sorting out her belongings, Jan managed not to cry. But one thing moved her very much. Walking into Tony’s bedroom when she didn’t know he was in, she found him fast asleep.

  He was curled up on a little sofa which was the first piece of furniture we bought, and looking very small and thin and sad. When people are asleep, they should not be looked at unawares by other people. Their defences are down & their masks are off. Poor Tony: he has so much sweetness in him. ‘Twenty-three years with the wrong woman’ has cramped his style and soured him, but he will be free now and will blossom again into his natural gaiety. I think he is hating this week, and feeling – as anybody well might – that if we can get on as well as this for a short time, why can’t we do it always? But he knows really, as I know, that these few days owe their harmony & serenity to the fact that they are a finale. The concert is nearly over, and the people who have trains to catch are already groping for their hats.

  ‘Incidentally,’ Jan wrote to Dolf in the ‘P.S.’ at the end of that letter written in the last week with Tony, ‘I bought a house yesterday, 17 Alexander Place.’ Her jewellery (about which she was unsentimental) had recently been stolen from the car, and with the help of the insurance she had enough money to buy this leasehold house in South Kensington. Of all the impulsive purchases she ever made, this was perhaps the rashest: she was intending to live in New York for eight months of each year. ‘But I came to the conclusion that it was more important to have my bigger “residence” this side of the Atlantic, not only because I want to make a nice home for Robbie, but also because when I’m on the other side, with you, I’m so happy that I don’t need possessions.’

  In her days as a Times Fourth Leader writer, producer of ‘Miniver’ columns and wartime lecturer in America, Jan’s distinctive voice had been that of the cheerer-up, the noticer of small pleasures, the anatomizer of happiness. Now, as her mind was growing darker, she began to reveal the other side of that talent, and to use the same powers of observation to anatomize unpleasantness. It was perhaps the mental equivalent of her apparent urge to dissect porcupines. Rather than glossing over the activities of 27 August, the macabre last afternoon of her marriage, she described them in detail to Dolf. At two o’clock she took Culi (the cairn terrier which the farmer in Argyll had given Robert) to a ‘large, sinister house’ in Kensington to be ‘married’.

  I was greeted by a tall thin cruel icy-faced Belgian doctor. His wife was away & there was no one in the house except him & me & the two dogs. We left them in the back kitchen to get on with it (it had a slippery tiled floor on which Culi skidded). We watched them through the glass doors for a bit, Dr Borel being very cold & impersonal & technical, & me standing there thinking, ‘For Culi, this day is the beginning of family life: for me, the end.’ Then we went upstairs to find a drink, & he couldn’t find it, so he walked around showing me his pictures by people I didn’t know about, & I kept thinking, ‘The Jungle is coming back & I need a DRINK.’ Finally he had to go to a meeting & I had to get back to cook dinner (the last I’ll ever cook for Tony). So we went off in two taxis, & I finished cooking the dinner which Nannie had got under way & it was excellent – roast wild goose and a sort of soufflé thing – and afterwards we all washed up (the last time, I kept thinking quite dispassionately, that he and I shall stand at a sink together). Then we all went upstairs & had coffee & played a few records, & then I excused myself & went to bed with as large a drink as rationing would permit, & the wind howling outside the windows.

  The next day was clear and sunny, and ‘fresh as the freshness of new life that we were both starting on’. Jan cooked pancakes and coffee for the family, and then Tony’s hired car arrived, to take him to catch a train to Scotland. He hugged Janet and Robert, but not Jan: Janet and Nannie thought this unpardonable, but Jan thought it ‘perfectly understandable and therefore forgivable’.

  Then [Jan continued to Dolf] Tony turned & went into the car & up Wellington Square & out of my life. And I sat down with my back to the window, & finished my breakfast, & lit a cigarette & opened my letters & read The Times. There was no need to put on an act: it was no act. It was just like drawing a line under a signature, or throwing away the husk of a walnut from which the kernel has been eaten.

  Later in the morning, an immense feeling of relief began to grow in me, which has been ripening ever since like a beautiful swelling purple plum. Darling, I am free. Je suis libre. Ich bin frei. Have you taken it in? I can hardly believe it, even yet.

  That same week, Janet left for America to take up a job working as a secretary for Good Housekeeping, Robert went to Scotland with Tony for three weeks’ stalking, and Jamie arrived in London. He had at last been granted compassionate leave from the Army, on the grounds that he was needed at home to ‘patch up his Old Folks’ affairs’, as he put it. But when he arrived, Jan convinced him that he was too late. So he spent much of his leave sitting with her on the roof-garden, and she felt she was meeting him properly for the first time. ‘To paraphrase the old cliché about one’s children’s marriage,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘I have lost a husband and gained a son. I never really knew him before, except during the school holidays before the war. And even then, not properly, because I always had to keep up a pretence of being Parental and Happily Married. Suddenly we have both become people – and, darling, he is delightful.’ They discovered their joint tastes for wine, Strega, Bach, olives, John Donne, travel, dirty jokes, and getting one’s house into ‘a gorgeous mess’. These initial impressions of life post-marriage were encouraging. Perhaps this was what it was going to be like: you changed from being a parent to your children to being their friend.

  In October Jan sailed to New York, where she stayed for five months. Short of money, having spent it on Alexander Place, she decided to revel in poverty. She pretended to her family that it was through force of necessity that she was obliged to look for accommodation in Hell’s Kitchen, the unsalubrious area around the West 50s and 9th Avenue, near where the Lincoln Center now is. But in truth she was actively seeking a slummy existence as an antidote to the final months of icy grandeur in Wellington Square. There was also an element of self-punishment: the charade of being a happily married, secure ‘Mrs Miniver’ wife was well and truly over, and she wanted to steep herself in the potential consequences. She stayed for two weeks in a seventh-rate hotel with cockroaches on the floor (‘not the black English kind which go “squoosh” but the slim American kind which go “squeesh”‘). There was, even now, no question of living with Dolf: she was still married, and when they parted in the early morning they still had to look out of the window to make sure no one was watching.

  With a single-mindedness which had a whiff of the manic about it, Jan walked the streets around Hell’s Kitchen for fourteen hours a day (as she claimed), asking strangers if they knew of an apartment or room to let. She had twenty-five shopkeepers and several taxi-drivers helping with her search. Eventually a sh
oe-shop-keeper named Casey found her a ‘tiny little dirty place’ on West 62nd Street, belonging to a dentist named Levine. She gave Mr Levine her references: the head of the BBC, the head of the radio section of the British Information Services, the head of Information, Please!, the British Consul, and the British Ambassador.

  Levine read down the list [she wrote to Jamie and Robert], turned to me and said, ‘Yeah. But does Casey know you?’ Which to my mind is epic. Casey’s shop is 8 ft by 14 but he is respected in the neighbourhood & his recommendation counts for more than the British Ambassador’s. This seems to me a superb example of the best kind of democracy.

  Jan moved in, with the help of Bennes Mardenn (her elevator-attendant friend, who was now a drama teacher) and his retinue of hard-up students. They made furniture out of orange crates, and sat on them at night singing folk music. A stockpot simmered on the small stove: the butcher supplied Jan with bones and chickens’ feet, and she lived on what she called ‘Dynastic soup’. Her East Side friends, including Tony’s sister Rachel Townsend, were shocked to hear of her living in the slums among criminals. ‘Ah, but you see,’ Jan told them, ‘the burglars live on my side of town but they do their burgling on your side of town.’

  Despite her address, she carried on living the life of a radio celebrity, appearing on Information, Please! and doing BBC broadcasts. She wrote a fierce letter to the New York Times protesting against an article which had suggested that sending food parcels to Britain was no use because they hardly ever arrived. Statistics refuted this claim, she wrote: they did arrive, and Britain needed them badly. Writing that letter was as close as she was prepared to go towards lecturing on Anglo-American relations. Another reason for living in Hell’s Kitchen was to make herself as uncontactable as possible by the Clark Getts agency. She and Dolf spent their evenings and weekends together, quietly, going to concerts and plays and dining with close friends.

  Crossing the Atlantic Ocean – which she had to do again in March, for the Easter holidays and the divorce hearing – had lost its novelty. Being on board the Queen Elizabeth was ‘like staying at the Taft Hotel with a hangover’. Sitting in the draughty Tourist Class lounge being served weak coffee by overworked stewards and unable to penetrate any of the ‘family clumps’ on armchairs, she yearned for the friendly chaos of the SS Bayano in 1945. Here, one didn’t touch a rope, or see a sailor, from morning till night. ‘Large ships are no fun unless you like bridge or “horse-racing” or other horrors.’ Noel Coward, whom she knew slightly, was also on board, in First Class, but she was not feeling strong or successful enough to dress up and consort with the famous.

  In flooded and rationed England she went by train straight to Stowe, to visit Robert for the weekend, and again was freezing cold and saddened.

  It’s lovely to see him – but apart from that the weekend is being intensely boring, dreary and uncomfortable. One hangs about in the hotel or hangs about in the school, trying to keep warm, & outside it rains, and there’s nowhere to sit or BE. I always hated school visits, but Stowe is the worst because you have to take taxis back or forth to Buckingham three or four times a day, since there are no ‘meals for parents’ at the school and nothing whatever to do between meals in the town. (There’s nothing to do at the school either, but at least it’s faintly warmer & there are books here & there.)

  Everybody is browned off. The taxi driver said last night that there doesn’t seem to be anything left to live for in England now – only more work & more discomfort & less food & no prospects for a young man. It seems perfectly possible that GB is going to lapse into being just a Balkan state, after all its long grandeur & civilization.

  I must now go & get ready for yet another journey to the school, for morning chapel. God …

  In the chapel she gazed at the boys’ faces. ‘They all looked so thin,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘so thin, so pale, and most of them so chinless. And so terribly alike in type. How the country needs some melting-pot blood. It’s getting it, of course, in the Lower Classes, my deah, but the others…’

  On her way back to London she stayed with her brother Douglas and his wife. This was more comfortable, physically, ‘but God! they look so old and tired, both of them. And everywhere you go it’s the same story – panic about the food situation, both now and in the future. At least it would be panic if they weren’t English & tired: as it is, it’s a sort of dulled resignation. Our present coldness & wetness is less than half the trouble. It’s the utter buggering-up of the harvest that’s the serious thing. I can’t see any prospect of improved conditions for years now.’

  Back at 17 Alexander Place, she sat upstairs in Robert’s room, the only one with a gas fire (electricity in London was cut off between nine and noon and two and four), feeling a gnawing hunger all day and rushing downstairs to open a tin of sardines while Nannie was out searching for potatoes.

  The divorce hearing was to take place at Parliament House in Edinburgh in May, and the thought of it was beginning to give Jan ‘the jitters’. Fate had provided a nice tie-in for the newspapers to pick up on: her divorce from Tony would coincide with Greer Garson’s from Richard Ney – a double debunking of the Miniver myth of marriage. (‘The Ney marriage’, according to Greer Garson’s biographer, ‘unravelled in a mire of accusations and ugly quarrels’ towards the end of 1946.)

  Tony, on the nights of 22 and 23 February 1947, had done what was known as ‘the gentlemanly thing’: to enable Jan to sue him for divorce, he spent two nights at a hotel in Glasgow, The Bristol, with an unnamed ‘professional co-respondent’. They signed the register as ‘Mr and Mrs A. Maxtone Graham’ and for the benefit of ‘witnesses’ pretended to share the double bed, but in fact took turns on the sofa. Strictly speaking, this kind of collusive pantomime was illegal, but it was regularly winked at by the legal establishment. Jan was spared the ordeal of being exposed in the Press as ‘Mrs Miniver the adulteress’, as must have happened had Tony sued her for divorce. They agreed to go to the Scottish Court, partly to avoid publicity, and partly to avoid the six-month ‘decree nisi’ waiting period still obligatory in any English divorce.

  As the day of the hearing drew nearer, Jan focused her mind on to the days beyond it. ‘I shall feel completely different when the actual case is over,’ she wrote to Dolf. ‘I have a feeling that this is the last time I’ll ever be in the least Jungular, & that this is only the final culmination of a long strain of misery.’ A letter from Dolf arrived.

  It occurred to me [she wrote back], as I walked towards the front door to pick up the mail off the mat and saw the familiar envelope lying there, that I feel just as quick and warm a rush of excitement and tenderness on seeing a letter from you as I did in 1939/40. It is the only compensation from being apart from you. Otherwise separations are increasingly horrible and indeed unbearable. I want desperately that people should KNOW we belong to each other; I want to make some kind of gesture to declare my pride and joy in our unique companionship. The longer I pursue this line of thought, the nearer it brings me to the point where it would not take a very big push to … well, I suppose it’s no good talking about it yet awhile anyway.

  Robert came home for the holidays and pottered helpfully about the house, connecting wires. Jan needed money to do up Alexander Place. She sold her diamond clips for £65 to pay for a carpet. She sold some tray-cloths and doilies and ‘other horrors’ to Peter Jones for £5, but couldn’t bring herself to sell a damask cloth belonging to her mother’s family and dated 1800 in cross-stitch, because she knew it would be cut up and the bits resold to hotels. ‘But no doubt this inhibition will disappear when I need some other things badly enough. I’m beginning to hate all possessions, except musical or portable ones. I had a grisly job yesterday, turning out the family medicine cupboard, full of reminiscent smells recalling the children’s bronchitises and so on. Altogether London is too full of ghosts.’

  Jan travelled to Edinburgh by train, with Nannie for company. Cut off from Maxtone Grahams, they booked into a hotel. ‘Thr
ee damned nights in Edinburgh,’ Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘and not even the fun of seeing T’s mother, whom I still love.’

  Her undefended action for divorce was heard at the Law Courts on 7 May. Much of her evidence was perjured, but this was all part of the pantomime. First, she was required to swear (falsely) that the divorce was not collusive. To prove, as was required, that Tony was domiciled in Scotland, she had to say that he now lived at his mother’s house in Edinburgh and had ‘lived all his life in Scotland apart from absences caused by business or military reasons’. Finally, she had to swear to her belief in the Glasgow adultery story. Regarding her relationship with Tony, her evidence was more truthful: ‘The marriage was very happy at first, but after about eight years Tony’s attitude towards me underwent a change, and by about 1936 marital relations between us had ceased. On his return from prisoner-of-war camp, I found that his attitude towards me had not changed, and matters between us remained as they had been before the war.’ Without demur, the judge granted her a decree of divorce, and costs.

  Darling love: It’s over, and it went through all right, and I’m back in London, and I found your sweet telegram waiting for me – and, oh honey, it was unspeakably ghastly. The wigs & gowns and the mechanical legal faces and the gloomy old Parliament House, and the utter squalor of the whole thing, so remote from anything that had ever been happy or tender. Nannie’s presence – not in the Court, but in the awful hotel where we had to spend 3 nights trying to keep warm, and sitting in the Lounge, and listening to the genteel murmurs of the fellow guests, or tramping the streets & going to bad movies to pass the hours away – Nannie’s presence, as I was saying, was the only thing that saved me from going completely nuts. And then the 9-hour journey back, trying to keep one’s mind on a book in order to forget the ordeal …

  Surely the ‘Jungles’ should have vanished, along with the marriage from which she had at last escaped? They had been caused, she had always believed, by the strain of her double life, which was now a single one. She had envisaged the train journey south from Edinburgh as a blissful ride of freedom; she had imagined that she would return to a state of unattached girlhood, her life simplified, the rotten bit cleanly amputated. But it was not like that. She had left the marriage behind, but the misery came with her on the train.