by Jan Struther
“I’m sure he must.” The tigress relaxed, mollified.
Unavoidably detained my foot, thought Mrs. Miniver. He had probably been messing about in his laboratory and had simply forgotten the time; or else he had been struck by a brilliant new idea in the Tube and had been carried on to the terminus. She knew this perfectly well, and so did Miss Perrin, and each knew that the other knew it. But they both loved Badger: so the Professor was unavoidably detained, and Mrs. Miniver sat down to wait in his study.
As a matter of fact she was glad. She had been living for several weeks through one of those arid stretches of life which lie here and there between its more rewarding moments; where there is neither nobility nor gaiety, neither civic splendour nor country peace, but only allotments and rubbish-tips, the gasworks on one side and a row of dilapidated hoardings on the other. As a rule she managed to keep household matters in what she considered their proper place. They should be no more, she felt, than a low unobtrusive humming in the background of consciousness: the mechanics of life should never be allowed to interfere with living. But every now and then some impish poltergeist seemed to throw a spanner into the works. Everything went wrong at once: chimneys smoked, pipes burst, vacuum-cleaners fused, china and glass fell to pieces, net curtains disintegrated in the wash. Nannie sprained her ankle, the cook got tonsilitis, the house-parlourmaid left to be married, and the butterfly nut off the mincing-machine was nowhere to be found.
At such times, she knew, you must just put on spiritual dungarees and remain in them until things are running smoothly again. Every morning you awake to the kind of list which begins:—Sink-plug, Ruffle-tape. X-hooks. Glue … and ends:—Ring plumber. Get sweep. Curse laundry. Your horizon contracts, your mind’s eye is focused upon a small circle of exasperating detail. Sterility sets in; the hatches of your mind are battened down. Your thoughts, once darling companions, turn into club bores, from which only sleep can bring release. When you are in this state, to be kept waiting for half an hour in somebody else’s house is nothing but the purest joy. At home the footstool limps, legless, thirsting for its glue; the curtain material lies virginally unruffled; the laundry, unconscious of your displeasure, dozes peacefully at Acton: while you yourself are free. Yet you have not played truant: truancy has been thrust upon you, thanks to the fact that elderly professors so obligingly live up to their reputation for absent-mindedness.
She leant back in Badger’s armchair and prepared to let her mind stray wherever it liked. But it had got into spiritless habits, like a dog which has been kept on a lead, and for several minutes it would do nothing but potter about sniffing at the kind of object it had grown accustomed to. There was a handle, it informed her, missing from Badger’s desk; the bookcase had a cracked pane, and the glass finger-plate on the door was hanging by a single screw. Look here, said Mrs. Miniver, haven’t I had enough of this sort of thing lately? Run away and bring me something interesting. That’s what any decent mind ought to do for its owner when she lets it off the leash—just go bounding away into the long grass and bring back a really profound thought, laying it at her feet all furry and palpitating. C’mon, now. Hey los’!
Her gaze wandered to the floor. The hearth-rug was an old Khelim strip, threadbare but still glowing. Its border was made up of a row of small lozenges, joined by their acute angles. Beginning on the extreme left, she let her eye run idly along this row, naming the colours to herself as she came to them. Blue, purple, red. Blue, purple, re—but here she was checked, for the second red was different from the first. So she had to begin again. Blue, purple, scarlet. Blue, purple, crimson. Blue, purple, sc—but here was yet a third red, which made the first one look almost orange. Blue, purple, flame, then. Blue, purple, crimson. Blue, purple, scarlet. …
And this, it occurred to her, is one of the things that make life so difficult. The linked experiences of which it is composed appear to you one at a time; it is therefore impossible to gauge their relative significance. In how much detail ought you to notice each one before it slips into the past? Will “red” do, or must you cudgel your brains for a more exact description, hesitating between claret and magenta, vermilion and cardinal? This grief, that joy, this interview, that relationship, this motor-smash, that picnic—can you weigh it up once for all and assign to it a fixed position in your scale of memories, or will you sooner or later be forced to take it out again and reclassify it? This dusty and tedious little patch of time—could she safely label it “drab” and have done with it, or would she find herself one day living through a period so relentlessly subfusc that this present lozenge would seem, by contrast, gay?
The door opened and Badger came in. His beard arrived first, his eyebrows next, then the rest of his vast yet twinkling bulk.
“I’m afraid I’m a little late,” he said. It was five minutes past two.
On the River
“Water-rat,” said Vin, jerking his head in the direction of the bank. His mother looked round just in time to see the bright eyes and sleek furry body before it disappeared behind a clump of reeds.
“Oof!” said Clem. “Let’s take it a bit easier. You’re in training and I’m not. I’d forgotten how far it was to Aunt Hetty’s by river.”
“It’s only about a mile now,” said Vin, slacking off a little. Mrs. Miniver, lying back and trailing one hand in the water, wondered what Vin thought of, consciously or subconsciously, when he said the word “mile.” Probably the stretch of road between the house and the village at his grandfather’s; that was where they had spent most of their summer holidays when he was small, before they bought Starlings. “It’s just a mile to the post office,” somebody was certain to have said in his hearing: so that from then onwards, for the rest of his life, all his miles would be measured against that one. Judy’s private mile, most likely, was the cart-track through the fields from Starlings to Brickwall Farm—her favourite walk. Toby’s might be this, too, eventually, but Toby was not yet mile-conscious. He still measured his distance by true and not by artificial reckoning: he knew quite well that Brickwall Farm was a long way off when you were tired and no distance at all when you weren’t. It was the same with time. “Ten minutes,’ for Mrs. Miniver herself, would always mean the length of the mid-morning break in her lessons with her first governess; and “an hour” was the formal time after tea in her grandmother’s drawing-room, in a clean frock and sash.
Aunt Hetty was sitting in her summer-house at the water’s edge, knitting a sock and keeping a lookout for them. They moored the boat at her little landing-stage and stepped ashore.
“My dears! Lovely to see you,” said Aunt Hetty, rolling up her wool and impaling the ball on her needles as though she was skewering a piece of mutton to make a shashlik. “Come along—we’re having tea in the strawberry-bed.”
“In the strawberry-bed?”
“Yes. It’s a new idea that occurred to me last time Vin was here. You know how much better they always taste when you eat them straight off the plants? Only the drawback is, there’s never any cream and sugar. So I thought, why not take the cream and sugar under the nets with us? We tried it, and it’s a capital plan. I can’t imagine why I never thought of it before.” She took Vin’s arm and led the way across the lawn. The others followed, exchanging telegraphically, with a smile, their amused affection for Aunt Hetty. Glorious woman: nobody else would have had an idea like that—or rather, nobody else would have put it seriously and efficiently into practice, complete with table, chairs, silver tea-pot, and cucumber sandwiches. She had even had the nets heightened on poles to give more head-room.
When tea was over, Vin took Clem off to show him the place where he had hooked (but lost) a monster trout the week before. With any luck, he said, it might still be there.
“Sure to be,” said Clem. “I don’t mind betting it’s the same one I used to see. They’re immortal, these Thames trout.”
Mrs. Miniver and Aunt Hetty strolled down to the summer-house again.
“My supply of great
-nephews is running low,” said Aunt Hetty, unskewering the shashlik. “Margaret’s youngest boy leaves at the end of this half, and then I shall only have Vin. And when he leaves, I suppose there’ll be a two years’ gap before Toby comes.”
“I’m afraid so. Although from a financial point of view that’s rather a relief.”
Aunt Hetty snorted.
“From an aunt’s point of view it’s unpardonable. Between the lot of you, you ought to have arranged things better. What on earth d’you think I’m here for, I should like to know?”
To be a pattern and example to all aunts, thought Mrs. Miniver; to be a delight to boys and a comfort to their parents; and to show that at least one daughter in every generation ought to remain unmarried, raise the profession of auntship to a fine art, and make a point of having a house within the five-mile limit, preferably between Boveney and Queen’s Eyot.
Aunt Hetty threw a piece of cake to a swan. She always brought some down after tea.
“Not that I like swans,” she admitted. “But they’re one’s neighbours, and I think it’s best to keep in with them.”
“I know. Conceited brutes. They always look as though they’d just been reading their own fan-mail.”
The others came back. They had seen the trout, and Clem swore that it had looked up and given him a leer of recognition.
“We’ll have to be going,” said Vin regretfully. “There isn’t a Queen’s Eyot Absence today, worse luck.”
Looking back as they rounded the next bend of the river, they could see Aunt Hetty still waving good-bye to them, sock in hand, the sun glinting on her needles.
It had been a lovely afternoon, thought Mrs. Miniver as they moved smoothly downstream between the low green banks. In most parts of England this was the season of the year that she liked the least —this ripe, sultry time when the trees were no longer jade but malachite, and the hedges looked almost black against the pale parched fields. In the country round Starlings, especially, spring was the real apex of the year. Summer was bathos, dégringolade: one waited longingly for autumn, which would bring back colour and magic. But in this sort of landscape, high summer was the perfect time. Here, the grass of the water-meadows was fresh, cool, and green; the steady onward sweep of the river, the quivering reflections in its depths and the play of light on its surface gave movement and variety, so that one felt none of that brooding stillness which mars July in unwatered countrysides. Even the rank and ramping vegetation of summer (such a come-down, in most places, after the delicate miraculous experiments of spring) seemed here to be superbly appropriate, like large jewellery on a fine, bold, handsome woman. Down by the water’s edge there were coarse clumps of comfrey and fig-wort, hemp agrimony and giant dock, on the banks, a tangle of vetch and convolvulus, moon-daisies, yarrow, and bedstraw; while from higher up still came the heavy, heady sweetness of elder flowers.
“Gosh!” said Vin suddenly, after a spell of silence. “Long Leave’s the end of next week. This half seems to have gone most frightfully quick.”
“Summer halves do,” said Clem.
Left and Right
The conversation at dinner had been so heated that by the end of it Mrs. Miniver had developed mental, moral, and physical indigestion. Teresa Frant, usually a brilliant mixer of unlikely human ingredients, had experimented for once a little too boldly. Or perhaps (for one never knew with Teresa) she had done it out of mischief. She had never had any use for her rich diehard sister-in-law Agnes Lingfield; but if she really wanted to bait her she could have chosen a more effective, because less far-fetched, opponent than little Neish. For in addition to the personal antipathy which had struck almost visible sparks from their finger-tips at the moment of introduction, these two people were so irrevocably separated by race, class, age, sex, religion, politics, and cast of mind that it seemed absurd to classify them both as human beings. The Zoo authorities had clearly put one or the other of them into the wrong cage. Therefore the argument which had sprung up between them during dinner had ended by being not so much a duel as a brawl: and while duels with food are both entertaining and eupeptic, brawls are neither.
It began by Lady Lingfield turning to Neish and saying through impalpable lorgnettes, “I hear you’re one of these Layba people: I’ve always wondered what it feels like to be a Socialist.” To which Neish replied with savage dryness: “Mebbe ye’d better j’st try it some time and see?” Oh, dear, oh, dear, thought Mrs. Miniver; from that moment on she resigned herself to a headache, and got it. Silly of Teresa. She herself, if Teresa had asked her to, could have battled with Agnes far more effectively, because from a closer range. But between a woman who thought that for her kitchenmaid to use face-powder was the beginning of Bolshevism, and a man who believed that the 30-mile speed limit was the thin end of the Totalitarian wedge, there could be no useful interchange of ideas.
Besides, Mrs. Miniver was beginning to feel more than a little weary of exchanging ideas (especially political ones) and of hearing other people exchange theirs. It’s all very well, she reflected, when the ideas have had time to flower, or at least to bud, so that we can pick them judiciously, present them with a bow, and watch them unfold in the warmth of each other’s understanding: but there is far too much nowadays of pulling up the wretched little things just to see how they are growing. Half the verbal sprigs we hand each other are nothing but up-ended rootlets, earthy and immature: left longer in the ground they might have come to something, but once they are exposed we seldom manage to replant them. It is largely the fault, no doubt, of the times we live in. Things happen too quickly, crisis follows crisis, the soil of our minds is perpetually disturbed. Each of us, to relieve his feelings, broadcasts his own running commentary on the preposterous and bewildering events of the hour: and this, nowadays, is what passes for conversation. For once in a way Mrs. Miniver felt glad when her hostess, with a scythelike sweep of the eye, mowed down the women and carried them off (unprotesting Sabines) to the drawing-room. Agnes Lingfield, her very shoulder-blades expressing a sense of outrage, preceded the others up the stairs and retired at once, in rather marked silence, to powder her nose.
“Teresa, you are very naughty. How could you?”
“Put Neish next to Agnes? My dear, she’s a joke woman; cross between a Wallis Mills and a Helen Hokinson. She’s got fatty degeneration of the soul. Do her a lot of good to be shaken up.”
“Up to a point, yes. But not quite so violently as that. It’s probably made her think that everybody who is even faintly progressive is like Neish. And it’s certainly made him think that everybody who doesn’t belong to the extreme Left is like Agnes. I shall have to spend the rest of the evening trying to convince him that they aren’t.”
“Do, darling,” said Teresa impenitently. “That’ll be just your line. As a matter of fact,” she added, “I very much doubt whether people like Neish and Agnes ever think at all. They just feel.”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Miniver. “They do both, I’m certain. But the trouble is, they keep the two processes entirely separate. They’ve never learnt to think with their hearts or feel with their minds.”
“That sounds grand,” said Teresa ironically (they were old friends). “Does it mean anything, or were you just trying it out to see what it sounded like?”
“It either means nothing at all,” said Mrs. Miniver, “or else it’s the discovery of the century. I’ll think it over and let you know.”
Agnes Lingfield came back into the room, her face more nearly matt but her eyes still gleaming.
“Well, Teresa. I must say, your Left-wing friends …”
Oh, Lord, thought Mrs. Miniver, we’re off again; and, anyway, I’m sick and tired of being offered nothing but that same old choice. Left wing … Right wing … it’s so limited; why doesn’t it ever occur to any of them that what one is really longing for is the wishbone?
“Doing a Mole”
Mrs. Miniver, having dropped the younger children at the seaside bungalow where they were going
to stay with a school friend of Judy’s, decided to spend an hour in the neighbouring town before driving back to London. It was to this town that she had been sent for a fortnight every year as a small child, and she felt a sudden desire to do a Mole. (“Doing a Mole” was Vin’s phrase—coined after reading The Wind in the Willows—for a revisitation of old haunts.)
Having parked the car, she walked along the front in the fresh dancing sunlight. This part of the town was almost unrecognizable—a street of angular lettering and neon strips, with ice-cream tricycles instead of the old painted hokey-pokey barrows. As for the children’s clothes—she tried to imagine what her old nurse would have said if she had wanted to walk from their lodgings to the beach in a wisp of a cotton sun-suit. She herself had worn no fewer than ten separate garments, including woollen combinations (folded thickly above the knee because they were too long) and baggy blue serge knickers into which all the rest of her clothes were tucked when she paddled, so that her shadow on the sand was always that of a gnome. Even in the sea she had worn blue serge, and on cold days a white Shetland spencer on top of her bathing-dress. She could still remember what it felt like when her nurse pulled it off over her wrists, wet.
At the pier she stopped and leant over the railings, hardly daring to draw a breath for fear of not finding what she was hoping for. She gave a cautious sniff, and then a luxurious one. It was all right. Evidently the most progressive of Town Councils could not do away with the peculiar, complex, deliciously nasty smell which is to be found under piers around high-water mark: a mixture of salt, rust, and slime, of rotting seaweed, dead limpets, and dried orange-peel. For a few moments, breathing it in, Mrs. Miniver could almost hear the creaking of her nurse’s stays as she settled her broad back against the breakwater for the afternoon.
