Mrs. Miniver

by Jan Struther

  One thing was certain: the ultra-modern dolls, with felt features realistically modelled, had no appeal for Judy at all. Mrs. Miniver, quite early in the expedition, had pointed one of them out. “Look, it’s exactly like a real child—isn’t it lovely?”

  “Oh, no!” said Judy with unexpected vehemence. “I don’t like it at all. You see, it’s not in the least like a real doll.” And she turned away again to the ringlets, the huge eyes, and the tiny rose-bud mouths. It was odd, thought her mother: dolls, which had begun by being crude imitations of men and women, had ended by developing a racial type of their own; and now apparently they could not stray from this without becoming less lovable.

  Judy eventually managed to narrow her field of choice down to two—a blonde in blue silk and a brunette in pink organdie; but between these she was quite unable to decide. “Better toss up,” said her mother at last. They tossed with Toby’s halfpenny, and the blonde doll won. Judy stood staring at the two open boxes, her eyes round with surprise.

  “Mummy, how extraordinary! I thought I liked them both exactly the same, but now I know for certain it’s the dark one I want. Have you ever noticed that about tossing up?”

  “Often,” said Mrs. Miniver, smiling. She remembered with what astonishment, in her own childhood, she had stumbled upon that particular piece of knowledge; and reflected once more how much of the fun of parenthood lay in watching the children remake, with delighted wonder, one’s own discoveries.

  At the Dentist’s

  “Quite comfortable?” asked Mr. Hinchley when he had played his usual little overture upon the various pedals and handles of his adjustable chair.

  “Quite, thank you,” said Mrs. Miniver. Horribly, she felt inclined to add. For really it was the refinement of civilized cruelty, this spick, span, and ingenious affair of shining leather and gleaming steel, which hoisted you and tilted you and fitted reassuringly into the small of your back and cupped your head tenderly between padded cushions. It ensured for you a more complete muscular relaxation than any armchair that you could buy for your own home: but it left your tormented nerves without even the solace of a counter-irritant. In the old days the victim’s attention had at least been distracted by an ache in the back, a crick in the neck, pins and needles in the legs, and the uneasy tickling of plush under the palm. But now, too efficiently suspended between heaven and earth, you were at liberty to concentrate on hell.

  “A lit-tle wi-der,” said Mr. Hinchley indulgently, dividing the words into separate syllables as though he were teaching a very small child to read. He was a kind, brisk, blond young man who smelt (thank heaven) of nothing except rather good shaving-soap. Mrs. Miniver obeyed meekly and resigned herself to the exquisite discomfort of the electric drill. It was a pity, she felt, that this instrument had been invented during a period when scientific images in poetry were out of favour. To the moderns, who had been brought up with it, it was presumably vieux jeu. They took it for granted; it did not fire their imagination like the pylons and the power-houses which were now the fashionable emotive symbols. But oh, what Donne could have made of it, if it had been invented in his time! With what delight he would have seized upon it, with what harsh jostling and grinding of consonants he would have worked out metaphor after metaphor, comparing its action to that of all the worst tormentors of the heart: to jealousy, to remorse, to the sharp gnawing of a bad conscience and the squalid nagging of debt.

  “Are you quite all right?” Mr. Hinchley inquired solicitously.

  “Eye aw eye,” said Mrs. Miniver. Oh, quite all right. Grand. I love it. This is just my idea of the way to spend a fine afternoon in early spring. For early spring it undoubtedly was, even though there might be a chunk of late winter still to come. Although they were not yet in bud, the bare trees outside Mr. Hinchley’s window had a quickened, bloomy look like the expression on the face of somebody who has just had a good idea but has not yet put it into words; and the sky behind them was as clearly, flatly blue as the sky in an aunt’s water-colour. Mrs. Miniver kept her eyes focused as long as possible upon the far distance, hoping that they would take her other senses with them. But they didn’t. The drill was too insistent. So presently she brought them back and cast a reproachful spaniel-glance upwards at Mr. Hinchley, which he was too much absorbed to see. She devoted the next few minutes to making a slow, dispassionate study of his left eyebrow, which was a good enough shape as eyebrows go; and then decided that nothing but a deep romantic love could make the human face tolerable at such close quarters.

  The far and the near having both failed her, she explored the middle distance: the embossed plaster patterns on the ceiling; the round, white lamp—an albino moon—which hung between her and the window; the X-ray machine; the sterilizer, the glass bowl on her left with the tumbler of pink mouthwash beside it; and on her right the large composite fitment, so absurdly like a porcelain snowman, out of which burgeoned, among other things, this insufferable, this inescapable, this altogether abominable drill.

  “Don’t forget,” said Mr. Hinchley brightly, “you can always switch it off yourself if it gets unpleasant. ”

  “Ank,” said Mrs. Miniver. Gets unpleasant. … Understatement could be carried too far. She felt with her forefinger for the small cold knob on the right arm of the chair, which would, if she pressed it, silence the monster at once. This, at any rate, was a humane provision which did not exist in the case of jealousy and the other tormentors. But so far as Mrs. Miniver was concerned it might just as well not have been there, for she had never yet been able to bring herself to use it. Something always held her back—some vague blend of noble and ignoble motives, of pride and masochism and noblesse oblige and the Spartan Boy and Kate Barlass and a quite unreasonable feeling of hostility towards the white-veiled, white-coated young woman who hovered all the time behind Mr. Hinchley waiting for him to say “Double-ended spatula” or “Pink wax.” There was nothing whatever wrong with Miss Bligh, who was civil, decorative, and efficient: but somehow her presence made the use of the merciful switch a psychological impossibility.

  And now, at last, Mr. Hinchley turned off the drill of his own accord.

  “Finished?” asked Mrs. Miniver with a hopeful, lopsided smile.

  “Afraid not. But I thought you’d had about as much as you could do with. I’d better give you a local.”

  Miss Bligh, as though by prestidigitation, suddenly held a syringe between her scarlet finger-tips. She could just as easily, Mrs. Miniver felt, have produced a billiard ball, a white rabbit, or an ace-high straight flush. The prick of the injection was sharp, but its effect was magical. In an instant the left-hand side of her face ceased to belong to her. She put up one finger and stroked her cheek curiously. It was like stroking somebody else’s; and therefore it was, factually, like seeing herself clearly for the first time. Not in a mirror, where the eyes must always bear the double burden of looking and being looked into; but from outside, through a window, catching herself in profile and unawares.

  Oh! page John Donne, she thought again impatiently. Run, buttoned cherubim, through the palm lounges and gilt corridors of heaven, turning his name (as is your habit) into a falling, drawling dissyllable. “Meess-tah Dah-ahnne … Meess-tah Dah-ahnne …” And tell him that there are at least two poems waiting to be written in Mr. Hinchley’s surgery. Miss Bligh will hand him a pen.

  A Pocketful of Pebbles

  As she walked past a cab rank in Pont Street Mrs. Miniver heard a very fat taxi-driver with a bottle nose saying to a very old taxi-driver with a rheumy eye: “They say it’s all a question of your subconscious mind.”

  Enchanted, she put the incident into her pocket for Clem. It jostled, a bright pebble, against several others: she had had a rewarding day. And Clem, who had driven down to the country to lunch with a client, would be pretty certain to come back with some good stuff, too. This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day’s pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs
of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life: though never, on the other hand, quite a single one.

  She found herself involuntarily rehearsing her pebble as she walked. “It was pure New Yorker. Just as I went past, the fat one said to the old one …” And then it would be Clem’s turn: “There was a superb horsy man there, like a prawn with a regimental tie. He said: ‘What I always say is, there’s gone in the wind and—er—gone in the wind.’” And then she could bring out Mary’s engagement, heard of by telephone after Clem had left the house; and the joke which Toby had made on the way to school; and, best of all, a beautiful saga about the woman who had sat next to her at lunch. Mrs. Miniver had not heard her name at all, but if she had invented her she would have called her Burfish. Lady Constance Burfish, probably: or perhaps Mrs. Charles Burfish would be subtler. Anyway, it appeared that she lived in Gloucestershire: where did Mrs. Miniver live? In London, but they had a small house in Kent.

  “In Kent? How nice,” said Mrs. Burfish. Her tone conveyed that Kent was not quite out of the top drawer.

  The talk turned, inevitably, on to the evacuation and billeting of children. Mrs. Miniver said they had offered to take six at Starlings, or more if the Government would provide enough beds to turn the oast-house playroom into a dormitory.

  “Wonderful of you,” said Mrs. Burfish. “But, you know, a small house is rather different. I mean, one doesn’t expect—does one?—to keep up quite the same standards. …”

  Mrs. Miniver, whose standards of comfort, like Clem’s, were almost reprehensibly high, mentally compared the compact warmth of Starlings with some of the bedrooms she had occupied in large country houses. But she said nothing: she did not want to interrupt what promised to be an enjoyable turn.

  “Of course,” went on Mrs. Burfish (no, she would have to be Lady Constance after all), “I was perfectly civil to the little woman they sent round. In fact, I felt quite sorry for her. I said: ‘What an unpleasant job it must be for you, having to worm your way into people’s houses like this.’ But you know, she didn’t seem to mind. I suppose some people aren’t very sensitive.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Miniver, “I suppose not.”

  “And I said to her quite plainly, ‘If there’s a war you’ll find me only too willing to do my duty. But I cannot see the point,’ I said, ‘of tying oneself down publicly beforehand and upsetting the servants.’”

  What luck I do have, thought Mrs. Miniver gratefully. She had, of course, read about this kind of thing in the papers, but a friend of hers who had helped with the billeting survey had assured her that it was mercifully rare. So that now, face to face—or rather, elbow to elbow—with an authentic example of it, she was filled with the same sense of privileged awe which had overcome her when, emerging suddenly from a painful encounter with a juniper thicket in Teesdale, she had once seen a startled woodcock unmistakably carrying off its young between its feet. Looking, fascinated, at Lady Constance, she almost felt that she ought to write a letter to The Field. Moreover, Lady Constance seemed bent upon giving good measure. For she went on:—

  “And, of course, I said to her before she left: ‘Even if the worst does come to the worst, you must make it quite clear to the authorities that I can only accept Really Nice Children.’”

  “And where,” Mrs. Miniver could not restrain herself from asking, “are the other ones to go?”

  “There are sure to be camps,” said Lady Constance firmly.

  The talk swung in the opposite direction. A few minutes later Mrs. Miniver heard Lady Constance’s other neighbour, who bore one of the famous Norfolk surnames, saying politely: “In Gloucestershire? How nice.”

  Kent was avenged.

  Brambles and Apple-Trees

  “The worst of gardening,” said Mrs. Miniver, lying along one of the upper boughs of an apple-tree and reaching out to snip with a satisfying crunch through a half-inch-thick bramble, “is that it’s so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.”

  “I know,” said Clem from the ground below. He severed the root of the bramble with a bill-hook and began to haul it down hand over hand like a rope. “This is a prize one. It must have been about thirty feet long when it was whole.”

  They had just bought the tiny white weather-boarded cottage on the far side of Starlings Wood, which had been standing empty ever since old Parsloe, the hurdle-maker, had died there a year ago. For at least two years before that he had been almost bedridden, so that the little garden and orchard had become a wilderness. The Minivers had bought it partly because they were afraid that Bateman, the local builder, might get hold of it first and spoil it, and partly because, having made Starlings as nearly perfect as they could, they were both filled with a restless longing for new material: a state of mind which is as natural in the sphere of house-property as it is in that of human relationships, but which those who do not share it are apt to mistake for inconstancy. Of this there was no question, for they both adored Starlings and would not have exchanged it for any other house in England: but just at the moment they were frankly enjoying a pretty shameless flirtation with old Parsloe’s cottage. When it was finished, as Clem said, they would probably marry it off to one of their friends; in the meanwhile it was the making of the Easter holidays. They came over with the children nearly every day, working indoors when the weather was bad, and out of doors when it was fine: painting and whitewashing and carpentering and digging and weeding and planting, without too deeply inquiring why, and for whom, they were doing it.

  Beyond the potato-patch, close under the high-banked hedge which separated the garden from Carter’s Lane, there stood three apple-trees. These, during the last few years, had been stealthily but steadily invaded by an army of brambles. Some had pressed downwards from the bank in a solid phalanx, smothering the hinder branches almost to death; others had thrust upwards from the ground, looping themselves over the topmost boughs and falling to take root again on the other side, so that the trees were bound to the earth with criss-cross cords, like haystacks on a windy headland. The job of rescuing them—combining as it did all the most attractive features of a crusade and a demolition contract—was one which the Minivers particularly enjoyed. Constructive destruction is one of the most delightful employments in the world, and in civilized life the opportunities for it are only too rare. Also, a bonfire is always fun; and here was an excellent excuse for the children to keep one going all day and every day, piling it high with Clem’s big bramble-faggots and roasting potatoes (very unevenly) in the intervals. As for Mrs. Miniver herself, she only regretted that circumstances had never before led her to discover that the way to spend the spring was up an apple-tree, in daily intimacy with its bark, leaves, and buds. In early spring, as in the early years of children, there are times when the clock races, the film runs in swift motion, and the passionate watcher does not dare to glance away for fear he should miss some lovely and fleeting phase. The present week was one of those times. She looked, and the buds were as tightly, rosily clenched as a baby’s fist; she looked again, and they were half uncurled. Tomorrow they would be nearly open; the next day, perhaps, in full bloom, like those of the pear-tree on the other side of the garden, which towered up in the sunlight as tall, rounded and dazzling as a cumulus cloud.

  “Time for beer,” said Clem, and went into the cottage to get it.

  Mrs. Miniver stuck her secateur into her belt and disposed herself more comfortably among the branches. She was determined not to come down to earth before she need; if possible, never. Peering downwards through the young leaves, she could see Toby making an elaborate entanglement with twigs and cotton over some newly sown grass. He trod on the seeds a good deal, because his soul was bent on getting the pattern of the network symmetrical. Vin and Judy were eating potatoes and racing snails up the gate-posts. In the field beyond, two lambs—the only living creatures which never fail to come up to expectation—were authentically gambolling. Their whiteness rivalled the pear-blossom’s. The smoke of the bonfire drif
ted, blue and sweet, across the potato-patch. An invisible, indefatigable blackbird went on saying “Doh-mi!” from somewhere on the other side of Carter’s Lane; he had made this remark so many hundreds of times every day that they were all beginning to ignore it.

  Clem, coming out of the cottage, paused for a moment to take a critical look at what they had done.

  “We’ve made a lot of difference today,” he said, as he handed her glass up to her through the branches. “One is really beginning to see the shape of the trees.”

  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Miniver between gulps, “the brambles would try to make out that the apple-trees had been practising encirclement.”

  “That reminds me,” said Clem. “We ought to be getting home pretty soon if we don’t want to be late for the news.”

  The Khelim Rug

  “Professor Badgecumbe has just telephoned to say that he is very sorry indeed, but he can’t get back for another twenty minutes.” Behind his secretary’s air of apology crouched a protecting tigress, ready to spring if Mrs. Miniver showed the least sign of vexation. To Miss Perrin, Badger was a god, and luncheon guests whom he kept waiting had no right whatever to complain. The privilege of knowing him ought to be enough for them.

  “It doesn’t matter in the least,” said Mrs. Miniver, who rather agreed with her. “I’m sure he must have been unavoidably detained.”