by Jan Struther
But presently the sight of a concert-party announcement brought her back again to the present day: for the name she read there was that of a sophisticated ensemble which she had often heard on the wireless. This was a far cry from the seaside entertainments of her childhood—the slightly shop-soiled-looking pierrots, and the Christy minstrels with straw hats, banjos, and bones.
It was one of these, curiously enough, who had first introduced her to death. He sang a song which began:—
What’s (plonk!) the use (plonk!) of saving up your money,
If you can’t take it with you when you die? (plink-plonk!)
and ended:—
But if (plonk!) you’ve got (plonk!) a wart upon your nose,
Well, you must take it with you when you die (plink-plonk!)
This, for some reason, pierced her to the heart with a shaft of realization. She burst into tears and flung herself across her nurse’s grey tweed lap. “I don’t want to die!” she sobbed. “Oh, Nannie, I don’t ever want to die!” The nurse, horrified, picked her up and carried her out of the pavilion. “There, there,” she kept saying helplessly; “there, there.” And that night she gave her a dose of magnesia.
Just beyond the pier Mrs. Miniver turned up a steep, curved street with a church in it. This was where their lodgings had been. She had no idea of the number, but she felt certain she would know the house when she came to it. Here again her nose had a good memory, for a breath of sickly-sweet scent brought her to a sudden standstill. Of course: she had quite forgotten about the privet hedge. And with that memory came another: there had been four panes of coloured glass in the middle of the front door—green, red, yellow, and blue. Looking through them in turn from the hall, you could make it be whatever season you liked in the front garden— spring, summer, autumn, or winter: but when you opened the door there was never anything but the hard white glare of July. She pushed the gate open and walked quietly up the path, to make sure whether those coloured panes were still there. They were: but as she bent down (she had once stood on tiptoe) to look at them, the door was opened by a woman with a shopping basket on her arm.
“Oh!” Mrs. Miniver tried to look self-possessed. “I was just going to ring. I—I’m looking for rooms. But if you’re going out, it doesn’t matter a bit.”
“No trouble,” said the landlady. So Mrs. Miniver had to go through with it, peering into room after room. In the second floor front she paused and looked round very carefully.
“This is a nice one,” she said. “So big and airy.” But she was thinking, How low, how small; how time contracts the rooms of one’s childhood, drawing the walls inwards and the ceilings down. What with the shrinkage and the redecoration (for now, of course, it had a porridgy modern wallpaper with an orange frieze) she would not have known it was the same room, if it hadn’t been for the fireplace. This, she was relieved to see, was untouched. There was the same ornate ironwork, the same rather bad imitation Dutch tiles; and the lowest tile on the left was still loose. By wiggling it gently, she had discovered, you could slip this tile right out and put it back again; and once, on their last day, she had dug a hole in the plaster behind it with her nurse’s nail-scissors and hidden a new farthing, in order to have some buried treasure to look for the next time they came. But there had been no next time.
“I wonder,” she thought, eyeing the loose tile— but no, it was ridiculous, things didn’t happen like that. Besides, one really couldn’t …
“There now!” said the landlady. “That’s the bell. Excuse me a moment.”
Mrs. Miniver made a bee-line for the fireplace, knelt down and wiggled gently. Her heart was thumping: she knew now what burglars must go through. The tile came out quite easily: the hole was still there, but the farthing was gone. She slipped the tile back, stood up, and managed to get her knees dusted just before the landlady reached the top of the stairs.
Afterwards, walking down the steep street towards the beach, she thought about that farthing with an absurd and unreasonable pang. It would have made such a wonderful ending to her Mole. But she was comforted when she imagined with what incredulous delight some later child, exploring, must have found it.
The New Dimension
It may or may not be true that conscience makes people cowardly: but it was certainly seasickness that made Mrs. Miniver brave, so far as air travel was concerned. Though you can hardly claim to be brave, she told herself ashamedly as she fastened the safety-strap across her knees, if your inside feels like curds and whey and your mouth is as dry as pumice. Resigned was a more suitable word for her state of mind. She had always had an exaggerated dread of the air: the reassuring statistics in the newspapers made no difference to her whatever. She was ready to admit that flying was safer than driving a car or crossing a crowded street; but she was irrationally convinced that if she herself went up in an aeroplane it was perfectly certain to crash. If it be not safe for me, she said in effect, what care I how safe it be? And so far neither the enthusiasm of her air-minded contemporaries, nor the calm assumption by the younger generation that it was the only possible way to travel, had ever been able to tempt her into the sky.
But, as every human being knows (for that term automatically excludes anybody who is “a perfect sailor”), there are some sea journeys which can revolutionize all your feelings about death: and one of these is a crossing in bad weather from Kyle of Lochalsh to the Outer Isles. Mrs. Miniver had had the misfortune, ten days before, to coincide with a summer gale: and, crawling weakly ashore at Lochmaddy, she had sworn that nothing would induce her to cross the Little Minch again, unless the weather changed.
The weather did change, of course. The wind dropped suddenly. For more than a week the days were hot and still, the water lapped gently, the narrow sickles of sand between the headlands shone white in the sunlight and whiter under the moon. The smaller islands looked like water-lily leaves floating on a pool. The sea, all day, was blue; but at sunset it was stained and streaked with rose, crimson, and purple, as though some long-foundered ship with a cargo of wine had suddenly broken open in its depths. But the evening before she was due to leave, the wind rose as suddenly as it had fallen. It blew and rained hard all night, and although by next morning the sun was out again the sea was still heaving unattractively. Mrs. Miniver took one look at it and wired to Sollas Airport. It seemed to be the only thing to do; unless indeed she was prepared to spend the rest of her life in the Hebrides, nostalgically beholding in dreams the King’s Road, Chelsea.
Peering out of the small rhomboidal window of the plane, she wished, 6rst, that some other passengers would come, to give her confidence; and, second, that no other passengers would come, so that her poltroonery might be unobserved. For her face, she felt certain, must by now be noticeably green.
It seemed as though her second wish at any rate was going to be granted, for there were only two minutes to go and she was still alone. But at the last moment a ramshackle pony-cart came down the road at full canter, and an enormous farmer, followed by a young sheep-dog, clambered into the plane. He turned at the door, shouted something in Gaelic to the woman who drove the cart, and lowered himself gingerly into a seat which seemed far too frail to hold him. The dog, with vast unconcern, curled up on the floor and went to sleep.
“I thought I would be loossing the plane,” observed the farmer pleasantly. “It wass my watch that wass fall-ty.” He tugged out an old silver turnip and adjusted it with care.
“Do you often fly?” asked Mrs. Miniver. He looked so marvellously incongruous.
“Oh—yess.” He seemed mildly surprised at the question. “I have a brother in Barra. It iss very convenient.” His matter-of-factness was reassuring; and she needed reassurance badly, for the plane was now lumbering forward over the rough grass of the landing-field.
“This is my first flight,” she yelled above the noise of the engines. She felt rather desperately that she had to tell somebody. “As a matter of fact, I’m scared stiff.” She smiled, to pretend she
was exaggerating; but she knew that she wasn’t. “I suppose,” she added, “I shan’t mind so much when it’s actually up.
“But it iss up,” said the farmer. And sure enough, looking out of the window, she saw that the incredible had happened. They were in the air. She could see the rocky headlands edged with a white frill of foam; the deserted crofts, the dry-stone dykes, the green ridge-and-furrow of the lazy-beds whose only harvest nowadays was the wild iris; and, as they gained height, the whole extraordinary pattern of North Uist, so netted and fretted with lochs that it looked like a piece of lace.
Some hours later, in the train between Glasgow and Stirling, she tried to sort out her impressions. How hopelessly people fail, she thought, when they try to describe flying to someone who has never done it. They leave out all the really important things. They tell you that it saves time and (taking everything into account) money; they tell you that it makes the earth look like a map, cows like ants, and cars like beetles. But they don’t tell you that it is staggering, tremendous; that it is not merely an experience but a re-birth; that it gives you for the first time in your life the freedom of a new dimension (for although we know that there are three of them, we are forced to move mainly in two: so that our sense of up-and-downness is necessarily dim and undeveloped compared with our acute perception of the to-and-fro). They don’t tell you that when you are up there it is the aeroplane that seems to be the safe solid core of things, while the earth is a distant planet upon which unfamiliar beings move among unthinkable dangers. They don’t tell you, either, that you will be torn all the time between an immense arrogance and an immense humility, so that you are at one moment God and at the next a nameless sparrow. Nor do they tell you what it feels like to thread your way among the noble and exciting architecture of the clouds; nor how—best of all—you may suddenly find a rainbow arched across the tip of your wing, as though you had caught it in passing and carried it along with you.
If only they had told her these things, she would have flown long ago: for the promise of so much enchantment would have overcome fear.
London in August
The woman at the far end of the Park seat kept on nervously twisting and untwisting her handkerchief as though in acute mental distress. She was muttering to herself, too, under her breath. Mrs. Miniver glanced at her sideways once or twice, wondering what was wrong and wishing there was something she could do about it; but all of a sudden the woman, noticing her glances, looked up and smiled quite cheerfully.
“It’s me First Aid,” she explained. “I do get so muddled up with them knots. The lecturer, she says, ‘Right over left, left over right,’ see? But it never seems to come out the same, not when I do it meself.”
“I wonder,” suggested Mrs. Miniver tentatively, “whether you’d find it any easier if you thought about it as ‘back and front’?”
The woman experimented with this idea for a few moments, and then her brow cleared as if by magic.
“Well, that’s funny! So it is! It all depends on how you look at things, doesn’t it?”
She laid the knotted handkerchief on the palm of her hand and beamed at it as proudly as though she had just made a successful cake. Oh, well, thought Mrs. Miniver; even if no other good comes out of the present condition of the world, at least there soon won’t be a person left in England who doesn’t know how to tie a reef-knot. And that’s always something.
“I must say,” the other woman confided, “I do enjoy me First Aid classes. It’s like being back at school again—makes you feel quite young.”
“I know,” said Mrs. Miniver. Yes, she thought, that’s the whole point. That is the one great compensation for the fantastic way in which the events of our time are forcing us to live. The structure of our life—based as it is on the ever-present contingency of war—is lamentably wrong: but its texture, oddly enough, is pleasant. There is a freshness about, a kind of rejuvenation: and this is largely because almost everybody you meet is busy learning something. Whereas in ordinary times the majority of grown-up people never try to acquire any new skill at all, either mental or physical: which is why they are apt to seem, and feel, so old.
She looked at her watch, got up, and walked on towards Kensington Gardens, where Clem had said he would meet her for tea if he could. His latest job was a big new school on Campdeh Hill which had to be finished early in September: this gave him a reason, and Mrs. Miniver an excellent excuse, for spending a good deal of August in London. The children were away, and so were the maids; Mrs. Burchett came in every morning to do their breakfast, and they had the rest of their meals out.
London in August, Mrs. Miniver had long ago discovered, is bleak in theory but enjoyable in practice. For one thing, your circle of acquaintances, without any of the pangs of bereavement or estrangement, is arbitrarily reduced to half its normal size, with some interesting results. You find yourself knowing better, quite suddenly, people with whom you have been at a standstill for years; understudies blossom into stars; even boaks occasionally reveal an unsuspected jewel in the head. And the town itself, too, has a strange charm, in spite of the shuttered houses, the empty window-boxes, the dusty plane-trees, and the smell of hot asphalt. Or perhaps, in a way, because of these. For young Johnny Flint (whose poems, she noticed, had lately been getting more personal and less political) had said yesterday that anybody who had a genuine passion for London got a particular pleasure out of being there at this time of year, “as you do out of being with somebody you’re really in love with when they’re looking very tired and rather plain.” So that was it. Thank goodness, Mrs. Miniver had thought, as she always did when any of her friends came into love or money. She wondered idly who it could be, but knew that with poets this didn’t really matter. Beatrice, Fanny Brawne, Anne More, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets—they are all one and the same person: or perhaps no person at all. Happy or unhappy, kind or unkind, they are nothing but bundles of firewood.
And it will matter little, in after days,
Whether this twig, or that, kindled the blaze.
It was four o’clock. This was the hour when at any other time of year the great tide of perambulators, which is drawn up into the Park twice a day by some invisible and unvarying moon, would have been on the ebb. They would have been streaming steadily out through every gateway, back to the nursery tea-tables of Bayswater, Kensington, Brompton, Belgravia and Mayfair: sleek, shining, graceful, expensive perambulators, well-built, well-sprung, well-upholstered, pushed by well-trained nurses and occupied by well-bred, well-fed children. What that woman at the luncheon-party had called Really Nice Children: the sort of children who had rocking-horses, and special furniture with rabbits on it, and hats and coats that matched, and grandmothers with houses in the country. But in August the shores of the Park were forsaken by this tide, and another one took its place. They straggled over the worn, slippery grass in little processions—whey-faced, thin, ragged, merry and shrewd. The boys carried nets and jam-jars. The eldest girl, almost always, was lugging a dilapidated push-chair with an indeterminate baby in it; and sometimes an ex-baby as well, jammy-mouthed and lolling over the edge.
These were the other children. With any luck, if there was a war before they grew up, they would one day see cows, and running streams, and growing corn. But not otherwise. Unless, of course, a miracle happened; unless the structure could be changed without altering the texture, and the people of England, even after the necessity for it had been averted, remembered how to tie a reef-knot.
Back from Abroad
“Partir, c’est mourir un peu. …” How shrewdly the French language can drive home a nail, thought Mrs. Miniver, seeing again in her mind’s eye the row of smiling faces to which she had waved a regretful good-bye, the evening before, from the window of the little Alpine train. At her sister-in-law’s request she had travelled out with her niece Alison, who was going to spend six months living with a Swiss family; and she had stayed on for a week at a pension in the same village, just to see that Alison
was happily established. The whole family had come to see her off at the station. The solitary porter, standing beside his yellow toy barrow, had had a grass stalk between his teeth; and the moon, just topping the Mittelhorn, had looked for the space of a breath or two like a vast snow-ball which was about to roll down the glacier.
But why, she wondered, as the serene but unjoyful landscape of northern France slid past the dining-car windows—the white horses, the dun cattle, the red farms, the grey shutters, the beaded cemeteries, the hedgeless fields like foreheads without eyebrows— why has nobody ever made the parallel observation: “Revenir, c’est savoir ce que c’est que d’être un revenant”? That would be no less shrewd: for when you first come home from a strange place you are always something of a ghost. They were sorry when you went away, and they welcome you back with affection: but in the meanwhile they have adjusted their lives a little to your absence. For the first meal or two, there is not quite enough room for your chair. They ask, “Where did you go? What was it like?”; but for the life of you you cannot tell them. You can say, “It was like a large, neat Scotland”; or “They use nonante instead of quatre-vingt-dix”; or, “They trim all their buildings with wooden lace”; or, “There was a nice little German boy staying at the pension”; or, “I made friends with a charming farmer at the village fête.” But however eagerly they listen they do not really take in what you are saying. For you cannot make them understand the essential point, which is that when you went away you took the centre of the universe with you, so that the whole thing went on revolving, just as usual, round your own head. How could they, indeed, be expected to believe this, when they know quite well that all the time the centre of everything stayed at home with them? It is a day or two, as a rule, before your universe and theirs (like the two images in a photographic range-finder) merge and become concentric: and when what happens, you know you are really home.
