The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  The only person who could help was Dolf: she fastened her hopes on him. ‘I feel sore and bruised through & through, and I think it will take me a long time to get over it. I am numb about Tony, but not about the “pattern” of happiness and the children’s childhood. I want you to take me in your arms and MAKE the Jungles go away, and make me into one whole person again, instead of this divided wretch.’

  A few weeks later, sitting at the desk in Dolf’s apartment in New York while he was in the same room playing the piano, she wrote to him again:

  How the pendulum has swung! For so many years, you were the dependent one, full of fears and panicking dreams, and I was the strong one who pulled you into contact with the outside world and tried to give you back your confidence in yourself. And now it is all reversed and you are the one who has to be strong & help me fight my terrors & conflicts & ‘the green eyes in the night’. For God’s sake, sweetheart, go on being strong for me & make me get back my own strength. Please go on believing in me as much as I have always believed in you, and please go on exercising the gentleness and patience which you have shown throughout this black time.

  Dr Lawrence Kubie first appears in Jan’s engagement book on 4 September 1947, towards the end of a sweltering summer during which Dolf worked at his job at Avery and Jan achieved little. She tried various doctors, who prescribed nerve tonics and injections, and various psychotherapists, who required her to talk about her childhood on a couch, but with Kubie, an Austrian Jewish psychoanalyst who specialized in ‘blocked’ artists, she found at last someone whom she warmed to, and who combined the two things she badly needed: expert professionalism and a willingness to allow a professional relationship to develop into a deep (though not sexual) friendship. She needed the element of love in order to blossom in any relationship, and she had an extraordinary capacity for bringing it out, especially in intelligent men, who responded to her wisdom and her frailty. From September to November she had four or five appointments with Kubie each week, and when she ran out of money to pay his fees he allowed her to come free of charge.

  She swung, he told her, between the two poles of ‘great freedom and release of energy in work and play’, and being ‘slowed up, with a loss of confidence and a tendency to be emotionally dependent on others.’ His listening and his speaking seem to have done her good – or perhaps she merely swung from one pole to the other – because by the time she sailed to England for the Christmas holidays on the RMS Mauretania on 30 November, her attitude to large ships, and to the school chapel at Stowe, had undergone a change for the better. On board ship, though the sea was still ‘wet, cold, boring and far too big’, she found a nice table-mate, a sixty-year-old widow going back to Lowestoft. ‘We talk about Yorkshire pudding recipes & so forth & it’s all very soothing.’ In the school chapel, where last year she had seen mere thin, blue-blooded chinlessness, she now saw ‘Corinthian columns rising up behind their Earnest Young Faces & stuff & stuff, and I felt highly numinous & practically believed in God.’

  She was on the ‘high veldt’ rather than in the ‘jungle swamps’ during her ten weeks in England, and she basked in it. Her house in Alexander Place, where Jamie, Janet and Robert stayed with her for Christmas, became a studenty den of carpentry, half-finished electrical jobs, musical instruments and wood-shavings on the floor. Nannie lived permanently in one room, as caretaker. Jan slept each night in her ‘darling’ sleeping-bag, which enhanced the gypsy or camping-ground atmosphere that she yearned to create. She and Jamie drank red wine at all hours, though never before eleven in the morning. The doorbell rang with visitors of all ages dropping in to drink wine or sing with the guitar, Anne Talbot the most frequent of all; and one afternoon a Herr Tischler dropped in, to deliver Dolf’s violin which he had managed to extract for him from Nazi Vienna. Tischler stayed for hours and joined the musical party, playing a duet with violin and guitar to which Jan sang in German. This was the way of living which came naturally to her.

  On this ‘high veldt’ her broadcasting nerve came back, and the BBC snapped her up. She was overflowing with ideas and energy. She wrote a twenty-eight page letter to Dolf on 14 January 1948.

  First things first.

  1 Congratulations about ‘Das Haus’ [a poem Dolf had written, which had been praised by fellow Austrians].

  2 Yes, of course, do let’s get married. Anything else would be absurd, really. I’m enchanted that you’ve booked a provisional holiday – though of course nothing is settled or inexorable or trap-like, & we won’t actually consider ourselves engaged until we meet (which thank God will be in less than a month – oh Liebstes!).

  3 Sorry about handwriting. You see, I’ve been making a tool cabinet because the BBC asked me if I had a hobby & I said yes, carpentry, & they asked me to do a television broadcast about it, which I’ve just done, and I had to make a thoroughly good single-handed job of the tool cupboard, with brass hinges & handles, so that it would look all right on the screen, & I went up in blue jeans to Alexandra Palace, & it was all tremendous fun & I got 15 guineas for it. I’ve always contended that the best thing is to go on doing the things you are really interested in, & eventually somebody will come along & pay you for doing them.

  4 I have done some other broadcasts, & have made the price of my passage to America. I’m doing one on Monday (‘Woman’s Hour’) about Hill-Billy children, & I did one on Christmas Day on the BBC Christmas Party, playing a game where you had to tell a story about 4 previously unseen objects, without preparation, lasting exactly 4 minutes. Moddestamento detto, I am God’s gift to radio & television, & all the departments at the BBC, practically, are after me for one thing or another.

  5 I’ve taken to ART at last. Two weekends ago I went to stay with my brother, & he gave me an old Staffordshire zebra which had belonged to our father (which art, undoubtedly, in Heaven) & it had one foreleg missing. So I made a new one out of a pipe-cleaner & some plastic wood. Then I made a black bishop for Douglas’s chess set with a pipe-cleaner, a French franc, a coat-button, 2 metal fly-buttons, a wooden bead, and a blob of sealing-wax. Last weekend, staying with friends in Amberley, I decided to make a zebra foal, but I couldn’t get pipe-cleaners or plastic wood in the village. I was itching to model late at night & couldn’t sleep, so I made it instead out of electric light wire & candle ends melted down in a frying-pan. I found pictures of zebras in the Children’s Encyclopedia, but I couldn’t take in flat pictures, so I went out in the dark & found a live donkey in a field & felt it all over to see where its bones & muscles came (keeping it quiet meanwhile by giving it a cigarette, which it chewed with malicious avidity) …

  She justified this manic artistic urge by reminding Dolf (who was not approving of her endless diversification) that she needed to develop her visual sense in order to write the scripts for films, so that he could be freed from his ‘boring, unworthy and ridiculously underpaid’ job at the Avery Library. She and Ernest Shepard had just been to the cinema, she told Dolf, to see Alexander Korda’s Anna Karenina, and they had come back on a freezing bus warm with excitement about camera angles. She had contacts with Ealing Studios, Rank, and Korda, ‘plus a more or less standing order with MGM’: all she needed was to be able to see scenes in her head, and then her latest idea for a film (with the working title Monday is Washing Day), would come to fruition, ‘and then, darling, we’ll both be FREE at last.’

  It was clear to Dolf that going out into the dark to feel donkeys’ muscles was getting Jan further away from, rather than nearer to, her true métier of writing. There was a thin line, in these headstrong and tomboyish pursuits, between eccentric charm and battiness. But the relationship had gone beyond the stage where exasperation could do any serious damage. Their love, after eight and a half years of adversity, had grown roots. The taking of vows seemed the most natural next step in the world.

  A few months later, Jan was to ask him a dark question, disguised in frivolous language: ‘Darling, what have you been and gone and married?’

  Cha
pter Sixteen

  From this day on, our love shall be

  Open, for all the world to see:

  And folk will smile who once would frown,

  Saying, ‘At last you’ve settled down.’

  That’s what they think: but we know better.

  Theirs is the spirit, ours is the letter.

  Our ship, which nine long years has tossed,

  Helpless and helmless, nearly lost,

  Upon the steep and perilous seas

  Of a crazed world’s complexities,

  Can now, with gathering speed and force,

  Pursue a swift and steady course.

  Let those whose goal is comfort hanker

  For calm, for harborage, for anchor:

  We two shall share our double realm –

  I at the sheet, you at the helm.

  Under bare poles we’ve ridden out the gale:

  Come, love, no settling down – but setting sail.

  ‘The Blue Peter’, written on the morning of J.S’s wedding to Dolf, 1 March 1948

  ‘IT WAS A very short but dignified (just like me) ceremony,’ Jan wrote to her brother Douglas after the wedding, ‘mentioning God, but leaving out all the other schmaltz.’ A civil ceremony conducted by ‘a very nice fat man’, Mr Murray H. Stand, it was over by 11.30. After lunch with Pauly, Janet and a few close friends, Dolf and Jan moved furniture into their new apartment at 150 West 82nd Street, their love ‘open for all the world to see’. Dolf agreed with all of Jan’s wedding-morning poem, apart from the last line. He would have preferred ‘Come, love, no setting sail – but settling down.’ It seemed to him that they had done more than enough setting sail already.

  ‘The wedding was on 1 March and the secret is only just out,’ wrote the New York Times a week later, embarrassed not to have picked up on it sooner. ‘The new Mr Miniver, Austrian by birth, is now a naturalized American…’ Dolf and Jan read this on their sofa, during their stationary honeymoon at home. There was no hint of scandal in the paper, only surprise. No journalist found out that the love affair had been going on since 1939.

  Jan’s long-repressed urge to show to the world her ‘unique companionship’ with Dolf found its release in the organizing of the post-wedding party: ‘Mr and Mrs Adolf Placzek request the pleasure of your company…’ It was to be a cocktail party at home on 20 May, and she invited almost everyone she could think of – literary friends, actors, broadcasting colleagues, author-acquaintances – and ordered in wine, pretzels and olives for more than a hundred guests. They came: the room was as cramped as a subway train, and Dolf felt that he – a junior librarian – was of no interest to any of these people. Standing in the doorway and longing to go out for a walk, he said to an unknown guest, ‘Well, I’d like to have met Ogden Nash, at least’, to which the man (also longing for a walk) replied, ‘I am Ogden Nash.’

  After the party there came a time of easy domesticity. Dolf’s editions of Goethe’s poetry and Jan’s of John Donne’s were side by side on the same bookshelf at last. In May Jan entered her favourite state, book-wise: Harcourt Brace commissioned her to write an autobiography of the first twenty years of her life. They wanted it in October, for publication in the spring of 1949, and they talked of pre-publication in serial, which would bring in $15,000 on top of the advance. There were months to go until October, so Jan relished the prospect of glory and income without feeling it mattered if she didn’t start writing quite yet. Dolf worked at Avery, and she wrote him an untidy poem, ‘Kalbshaxen’ (‘Veal Shanks’), expressing the culinariness of early married love.

  Liebstes:

  I cannot imagine anything lovelier, mein Schlumperdinck,

  Than hearing your key in the lock, coming home from your work,

  And standing over the stove, cooking Kalbshaxen …

  And smelling the smell of garlic (which you pretend to despise)

  And of Love (which you worship without pretending),

  And saying ‘Hello’, and watching you lie down on our Ehebett,1

  Weary with unworthy Beamtenarbeit2

  And close your beautiful tragic-humorous eyes,

  And watch your full-lipped tragic-humorous mouth relax in sleep,

  And go back to the little stove and tend the Kalbshaxen,

  And season them with pepper and salt and oregano and garlic and love

  – Above all the strong, sweet, pungent, aromatic herb of love,

  Which is sweet-sour, suitable for feast-days and fast-days,

  And utterly, beautifully Kosher,

  And wait for you to wake up and share with me

  Our dinner of herbs (and Kalbshaxen) Where Love Is.

  In July they set sail, bound for England on the SS America. The typed card on the door of their cabin said ‘Mr Dolph Placzek. Mrs Placzek.’ They kept it. Now Jan could show him off all over again. She took him to meet her brother Douglas, who was charming, though more eccentric than ever: he had installed a toy train signal by his place at the dining-room table, and when he couldn’t stand any more of his wife’s chattering he put the signal at ‘stop’. They went to Wimbledon to meet ‘Fuffs’, who had looked after Jan in her teens. They had dinner at the Ritz Grill with Charles and Oscar Spencer, in whose flat in Cheyne Walk they had had their early assignations.

  A long weekend in Paris with Robert was part of their plan for these fourteen days together in Europe. Paris! Images filled their heads. Dolf yearned to see the buildings, and the pictures in the Louvre, Jan to sit at café tables on pavements, listening to cars on cobbles and glimpsing lives through upstairs shutters. Robert longed to see ‘abroad’, never having been taken to the Continent as a child. Jan hoped Robert would relax with Dolf as they strode through the Tuileries discussing mansard roofs. But it didn’t work. It was yet another strained holiday. The air was stiflingly hot, the days seemed to drag on for ever, and there was no easy communication between Jan and Robert, or between Dolf and Robert. He had not yet come to terms with his mother’s divorce and remarriage, and his way of dealing with the awkwardness and his sense of wrongness was to become very quiet. Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral were balm for the buttress-starved Dolf, but for Jan and Robert, squinting upwards clutching their Baedekers, they were tiring for the feet and somehow un-nourishing for the mind.

  On board the SS America: Dolf, Jan, Pauly, Susan

  Dolf sailed back to New York, his holiday entitlement used up, but Jan stayed in Britain for another month. She took a train to Scotland to see Jamie, who was working as a student farmer near Kelso before going to the Edinburgh Agricultural College (as the laird’s eldest son, he wanted to train to run the farm at Cultoquhey). Sitting in a hay-loft, or by the edge of a field where oats were being cut, detached from her life, her desk, her telephone and her unpaid bills, comforted by the industrious proximity of her son, Jan found – after years of being unable to write prose – that, miraculously, she was writing her autobiography. Onto pads of ‘Old Chelsea China’ lined paper, words flowed out of her by the thousand: incisive vignettes of her parents’ unhappy marriage, rambling digressions about the ‘mountain range’ which separated childhood from adulthood, whimsical passages about downstairs loos and the smell of potpourri, touching descriptions of a child torn between the ‘upstairs’ and ‘below-stairs’ worlds of an Edwardian household. Across the Atlantic, Harcourt Brace were waiting for this, arms outstretched, and she was not failing them. ‘I have a kind of race with the reaper-binder, which takes about 18 minutes to make one round of the 27-acre field,’ she wrote to Dolf. ‘The circuit, naturally, gets slightly quicker each time, but it still takes me as long to write 500 words.’ And, the next day: ‘I sat in Jamie’s loft workshop with a writing-board made of planks, and wrote nearly a chapter of my book – 3,000 words – until my pen ran out of ink & my veins of blood from the damp cold. We had our lunch sandwiches in the car for warmth. I went for a walk up the hill after lunch & communed with rabbits in a pinewood.’ She had found another existence which suited her perfectly.
She and Jamie dined one evening (at the Queen’s Hotel in Kelso, where they were staying) on grouse sent from Cultoquhey by Tony, who had no idea Jan was there. ‘It’s lovely being in a part of Scotland where one doesn’t own any of the land, & isn’t related to any of the people who do,’ she wrote to Dolf. She and Jamie did drive to Perthshire one Sunday to visit Tony’s sister Ysenda Smythe. ‘I can assure you,’ wrote Jan, ‘I felt not the smallest regret that I was no longer The Laird’s Lady.’

  To get full value out of this new sensation of being anonymous in Scotland, Jan suggested a day’s poaching. She and Jamie ‘played hookey’ from the farm and drove to a flooded burn in the wild hills near the English border. They threw a piece of fence planking across for a bridge. Jamie fished, while Jan collected firewood (which was scarce, so she ripped bark off fence-posts) and built a fireplace, and lit dead bracken as kindling. Jamie came back with five small trout, which he gutted and Jan fried on a flat stone in butter scraped out of their sandwiches, seasoned with wild thyme. ‘A band of Indians appeared down the road,’ she wrote to Dolf, ‘in the person of a band of Local Gentry, but luckily they were too far off to see what we were cooking, & Jamie’s rod lying in the heather: & anyway they couldn’t have got across the water if we’d withdrawn the plank bridge…’

  It was yet more rebellious tomboyishness verging on the batty: but what worried Dolf was the taking of a day off from writing her book. He knew that momentum, with Jan, was vital. One day off, and the whole enterprise could start to disintegrate.