by Jan Struther
The Autumn Flit
“Where on earth is Vin?” asked Mrs. Miniver. The car was standing at the door of Starlings, ready to take them all back to London. The luggage-boot was filled to overflowing with the well-known paraphernalia of a nursery flit: even Clem’s genius for stacking had been unable to make it look like anything but a cubist cornucopia. Clem was in the driving seat; Nannie was at the back, with Toby on her knee and Judy sitting close up beside her to make room for Vin. But Vin himself was nowhere to be seen.
“Wretched boy,” said Clem amiably. “I told him what time we were starting.”
“He went off on his bike directly after breakfast,” said Judy, “to fetch his knife. He left it over at Pound Mill yesterday when he was fishing.”
“He may have come in through the garden door,” said his mother. “Mrs. Downce, you might go and see if he’s in the kitchen, and I’ll try the nursery.”
She went back into the house. It had already begun to acquire that out-at-grass, off-duty look which houses get as soon as their owners go away; it was quite obviously preparing to take off its stays and slip into something loose.
The day nursery was empty, but around it, like a line of salt wrack, lay unmistakable traces of the children. As they grew older the flotsam of the holidays, without diminishing in quantity, changed a little in character. There were fewer stones and pieces of wood, though Toby still collected flints with holes through them and sticks which had been spirally grooved by honeysuckle. On the other hand there were now things like empty cartridge-cases (spent by Vin on rabbits and retrieved by Toby for use in a vast chess-like game which he played, by himself, on the squares of the nursery linoleum); and on the edge of the window-sill lay some bright shreds of wool, silk, and tinsel, some broken feathers, and the clamp-marks of a small vice. Vin, the evening before, had been tying flies; having run out of proper materials, he had had to fall back on the contents of the toy-cupboard, and with great ingenuity he had produced something which looked at first like an Alexandra, but which was really, he admitted, a Red-Indian-and-Gollywog.
Of Judy the traces were less conspicuous: her activities were mostly personal and required little gear. But just occasionally she too was bitten with the boys’ mania for making things, and when that happened she got it badly. A few days ago, someone had described in the “Children’s Hour” how to make a reed-pipe out of a jointed wheat-stalk, or, failing that, out of a drinking straw with a blob of sealing wax at one end. The farms immediately round Starlings were all pasture and hops: so she begged a packet of straws from Mrs. Downce and used up every one of them. To make the vibrating tongue was fairly easy, but to space the six finger-holes so as to get a sol-fa scale proved to be a matter of trial and error, exasperating to herself and excruciating to her hearers. She cut her left hand and burnt her right one. The floor became littered with small square chips of straw: there was one now, lurking under the table. Every half-hour or so there would be heard a tentative tweedling cadence, full of quarter-tones and other exotic intervals; then a sigh as she snipped off the unsuccessful part of the pipe and threw it away. (The top half she thoughtfully preserved as a squeaker for Toby.) Just before bed-time the next day she managed to produce a pipe on which, by overblowing a little on the la, she could give a recognizable rendering of “Drink to Me Only.”
As it happened, that day had been for the grownups one of great tension and anxiety, with the threat of war hanging like a leaden nimbus in the air. And Mrs. Miniver had drawn a curious comfort from watching Judy’s small intent face, bent hour after hour over her delicate and absorbing task. International tempers might flame or cool; the turning kaleidoscope of time might throw mankind’s little coloured scraps of belief into new patterns, new ideologies; but the length of the vibrating column of air which, in a tube of a given calibre, would produce C natural—that was one of the fixed things. And it wasn’t the fault of the scientists, was it, if the people for whom they made the pipes chose to play dangerous tunes?
She went back to the car, and at the same moment Vin appeared from the direction of the bicycle-shed, very much out of breath.
“Sorry,” he said shortly, and scrambled into place beside Judy. Mrs. Miniver got in too. The car moved off through winding lanes towards the arterial road. It was certainly a heart-breaking day on which to leave the country. It was warm and yet fresh; blindfold, one could have mistaken it for a morning in early May: but this kind of day, she reflected, had a more poignant loveliness in autumn than in spring, because it was a receding footfall, a waning moon. The woods were just beginning to turn, the different trees springing into individuality again, demobilized from the uniform green of summer. There had been a heavy dew. From the row of fires in front of the hop-pickers’ huts the smoke rose blue and pungent. The hops were nearly all in, the stripped bines lay tumbled and tangled on the ground. One campaign at least was over without bloodshed.
Gas Masks
Clem had to go and get his gas mask early, on his way to the office, but the rest of them went at half-past one, hoping that the lunch hour would be less crowded. It may have been: but even so there was a longish queue. They were quite a large party—Mrs. Miniver and Nannie; Judy and Toby; Mrs. Adie, the Scots cook, lean as a winter aspen, and Gladys, the new house-parlourmaid: a pretty girl, with complicated hair. Six of them—or seven if you counted Toby’s Teddy bear, which seldom left his side, and certainly not if there were any treats about. For to children, even more than to grown-ups (and this is at once a consolation and a danger), any excitement really counts as a treat, even if it is a painful excitement like breaking your arm, or a horrible excitement like seeing a car smash, or a terrifying excitement like playing hide-and-seek in the shrubbery at dusk. Mrs. Miniver herself had been nearly grown-up in August 1914, but she remembered vividly how her younger sister had exclaimed with shining eyes, “I say! I’m in a war!”
But she clung to the belief that this time, at any rate, children of Vin’s and Judy’s age had been told beforehand what it was all about, had heard both sides, and had discussed it themselves with a touching and astonishing maturity. If the worst came to the worst (it was funny how one still shied away from saying, “If there’s a war,” and fell back on euphemisms)—if the worst came to the worst, these children would at least know that we were fighting against an idea, and not against a nation. Whereas the last generation had been told to run and play in the garden, had been shut out from the grown-ups’ worried conclaves: and then quite suddenly had all been plunged into an orgy of licensed lunacy, of boycotting Grimm and Struwwelpeter, of looking askance at their cousins’ old Fraulein, and of feeling towards Dachshund puppies the uneasy tenderness of a devout churchwoman dandling her daughter’s love-child. But this time those lunacies—or rather, the outlook which bred them—must not be allowed to come into being. To guard against that was the most important of all the forms of war work which she and other women would have to do: there are no tangible gas masks to defend us in wartime against its slow, yellow, drifting corruption of the mind.
The queue wormed itself on a little. They moved out of the bright, noisy street into the sunless corridors of the Town Hall. But at least there were benches to sit on. Judy produced pencils and paper (she was a far-sighted child) and began playing Consequences with Toby. By the time they edged up to the end of the corridor Mr. Chamberlain had met Shirley Temple in a Tube lift and Herr Hitler was closeted with Minnie Mouse in an even smaller rendezvous.
When they got into the Town Hall itself they stopped playing. Less than half an hour later they came out again into the sunlit street: but Mrs. Miniver felt afterwards that during that half-hour she had said good-bye to something. To the last shreds which lingered in her, perhaps, of the old, false, traditional conception of glory. She carried away with her, as well as a litter of black rubber pigs, a series of detached impressions, like shots in a quick-cut film. Her own right hand with a pen in it, filling up six yellow cards in pleasurable block capitals; Mrs. Adie, si
tting up as straight as a ramrod under the fitter’s hands, betraying no signs of the apprehension which Mrs. Miniver knew she must be feeling about her false fringe; Gladys’s rueful giggle as her elaborate coiffure came out partially wrecked from the ordeal; the look of sudden realization in Judy’s eyes just before her face was covered up; the back of Toby’s neck, the valley deeper than usual because his muscles were taut with distaste (he had a horror of rubber in any form); a very small child bursting into a wail of dismay on catching sight of its mother disguised in a black snout; the mother’s muffled reassurances—“It’s on’y Mum, duck. Look —it’s just a mask, like at Guy Fawkes, see?” (Mea mater mala sus est. Absurdly, she remembered the Latin catch Vin had told her, which can mean either “My mother is a bad pig” or “Run, mother, the pig is eating the apples.”)
Finally, in another room, there were the masks themselves, stacked close, covering the floor like a growth of black fungus. They took what had been ordered for them—four medium size, two small— and filed out into the street.
It was for this, thought Mrs. Miniver as they walked towards the car, that one had boiled the milk for their bottles, and washed their hands before lunch, and not let them eat with a spoon which had been dropped on the floor.
Toby said suddenly, with a chuckle, “We ought to have got one for Teddy.” It would have been almost more bearable if he had said it seriously. But just as they were getting into the car a fat woman went past, with a fatter husband.
“You did look a fright,” she said. “I ’ad to laugh.”
One had to laugh.
“Back to Normal”
“—And a Welsh rabbit,” said Mrs. Miniver. “Vin’ll be spending the night here, and he likes that. Why, Mrs. Adie, what’s the matter?”
“It’s nothing, madam,” said Mrs. Adie, fumbling in vain for a handkerchief and finally wiping her eyes on her apron. “It’s only, it’s so nice to be back to normal again.” A wintry smile reestablished itself on her thin lips; she went out of the room, sniffing. It was the first sign of emotion she had shown since the Crisis began.
Back to normal. No, thought Mrs. Miniver, standing by the window and looking out into the square, they weren’t quite back to normal, and never would be; none of them, except perhaps Toby. He was at an age when shapes, colours, and textures still meant more to him (as they do to some people throughout life) than human relationships. Therefore, his treasure was safe: there would always be warm moss and pink shells and smooth chestnuts. But the rest of them—even, to a slight degree, Judy—would never be exactly the same again. Richer and poorer, but not the same. Poorer by a few layers of security, by the sense of material permanence, by the conviction, when planting a bulb, that one would pretty certainly be there to see the daffodil in flower. But richer by several things, of which the most noticeable was a quickened eyesight. On the drive up from Starlings, a casual glimpse through the window had reminded her of De la Mare’s “Fare Well”:—
May the rusting harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller’s Joy entwine
And as happy children gather
Posies once mine.
And when things grew really serious—when Clem had gone off with his Anti-Aircraft Battery, and Vin had been sent up to Quern, and the children’s day school had been evacuated to the west country, and the maids had gone down to Starlings to prepare it for refugees, and she herself, staying at her sister’s flat, had signed on as an ambulance driver—during all the rather grim little bouts of staff-work which these arrangements entailed, she had been haunted day and night by the next two lines of the same poem:—
Look thy last on all things lovely
Every hour. …
For even if none of them was killed or injured, and even if their house did not, after all, attract one of the high-explosive bombs intended for the near-by power station, yet these possibilities had been abruptly and urgently mooted: and they had found themselves looking at each other, and at their cherished possessions, with new eyes. Small objects one could send to the country—a picture or two, the second edition of Donne, and the little antelope made of burnt jade; others, like the furniture, one could more or less replace: but one couldn’t send away, or replace, the old panelling on the stairs, or the one crooked pane in the dining-room window which made the area railings look bent, or the notches on the nursery door-post where they had measured the children every year. And these, among . their material belongings, were the ones that had suddenly seemed to matter most.
Another thing they had gained was an appreciation of the value of dulness. As a rule, one tended to long for more drama, to feel that the level stretches of life between its high peaks were a waste of time. Well, there had been enough drama lately. They had lived through seven years in as many days; and Mrs. Miniver, at any rate, felt as though she had been wrung out and put through a mangle. She was tired to the marrow of her mind and heart, let alone her bones and ear-drums: and nothing in the world seemed more desirable than a long wet afternoon at a country vicarage with a rather boring aunt. A mountain range without valleys was merely a vast plateau, like the central part of Spain: and just about as exhausting to the nerves.
The third and most important gain was a sudden clarifying of intentions. On one of the blackest evenings of all several of their friends had dropped in to listen to the news and exchange plans. Among them were Badgecumbe, the old bio-chemist, and a young man called Flint, who wrote poetry and rather neat essays. When Mrs. Miniver switched off the set on a note of gloom they sat for a few moments too stunned to speak. Then Johnny Flint said:—
“I suppose that play of mine won’t get written now. I’ve been talking about it for years. Oh, God. Nothing but a slim vol. and a bunch of light middles.”
And old Badger said in a tired growl from the depths of his armchair:—
“At least you’ll still be young, Johnny, if you come through it at all. But I wish I’d left all the small stuff and concentrated on the LP. experiments.”
“I know,” said Mrs. Miniver. “I haven’t got a pen like you, Johnny, or a laboratory like Badger. But there were a lot of things I wanted to do, too, that seemed fairly important. Only one never got around to them, somehow.”
“‘Time’s winged chariot,’” said Johnny bitterly. “It’s caught us up this time all right.”
“Looks like it,” said Mrs. Miniver. “But if by any miraculous chance it hasn’t …”
Well, it hadn’t, after all. As she turned away from the window the date on her writing-table calender caught her eye. Just a year ago, she remembered, she had stood at that same window putting the summer away and preparing to enjoy the autumn. And here she was again: only this time it wasn’t chrysanthemums she was rearranging, but values.
Badger and the Echidna
Mrs. Miniver left the committee meeting about four o’clock in a mood half-way between exasperation and despair. The subject (a privately run, rather Utopian scheme connected with slum clearance) had fired her imagination when she had first heard of it: but why, she wondered, leaving the Comfreys’ ample portico behind her and crossing over into Regent’s Park, why must Pegasus always be harnessed to a dray, with a ham-handed cretin at the reins? By what mismanagement, what mistaking of bulk for importance, of bonhomie for goodwill, had a project like this been saddled with Lord Comfrey as chairman? And how could it succeed, if the meetings were always to be held in that moss-carpeted mausoleum of a house, at that smug post-prandial hour? If I had my way, she thought, walking very quickly so as to create a wind past her temples, I’d arrange the scene of every conference to suit its subject: and this particular committee ought to meet in a damp basement bedroom in Shoreditch, sitting on upturned soapboxes. Rats, blackbeetles, and all.
She decided to go to the Zoo. It would be a relief to her feelings. As she passed the still open trenches she caught sight of old Badgecumbe standing among a little knot of sightseers, his vast head bent, his eyes hidden as usual beneath jutting, grizzled brows
.
“Badger! You, rubber-necking?”
“I’ve been working with pyridine all day, and I need a breath of air.”
“So do I. Not pyridine—people. I was just going to do a Whitman. Why not come too?”
Badger nodded towards the trenches. “Woolley and the rest of ’em dig to uncover past civilizations. We dig to bury our own.”
“I hear they’re going to roof them in and put flower-beds on top.”
“Very suitable,” said Badger drily. “To remind us, I suppose, that ‘this flower, safety,’ is still growing in pretty shallow soil.”
“Come mee-yer, Alf-ay!” A woman standing at the foot of a gravel mountain beckoned with peevish urgency to her child. “You’ll fall in and break your neck, and serve you right. And besides,” she added, “you’ll get them new boots in a muck.”
“‘I’m the King of the Castle,’” chanted the urchin from the topmost pinnacle.
“I’ll give you Castle …” She breasted the foothills briskly. But her son had already slithered to the ground on the other side, and was bearing down upon some new sightseers with outstretched palm.
“This wye to the trenches, lidy. Penny to show you round. …”
“I think perhaps you’re right,” said Badger, taking Mrs. Miniver’s arm. “It’ll be a relief to go and look at creatures who only behave grotesquely because they can’t help it.”
“Let’s choose the funniest,” said Mrs. Miniver. “The mandrills. And the giraffes.”
They made their way towards the main entrance of the Zoo.
“On second thoughts,” said Badger, “we’ll go straight to the echidna. You know the echidna?”
