The Real Mrs Miniver (11 page)

The weather was unpredictable. Cold garden parties were held in the grounds of Cultoquhey, the guests shivering in their tweeds as they made conversation on the wet lawn, some of them huddling under rugs. In the drawing-room on rainy days the grown-ups played paper games and card games, and such was the addiction to the
Times
crossword that two copies of the paper had to be ordered each day. ‘It was extravagance of this kind', remarked one of the aunts, ‘that led to the downfall of the Roman Empire.'

Joyce entered into the spirit of all this. She liked the ache in the legs after a stiff walk through deep heather on a grouse moor. Stories of old Scotland, recounted at length by aged in-laws, fascinated rather than bored her. The Crieff Games were an annual delight, and she saw the sword dance at the end through a mist of tears. ‘For I defy anyone', she wrote in ‘Mrs Miniver', ‘to watch a sword-dance through to the end without developing a great-grandmother called Gillespie.'

At the Crieff Games

The nannies and servants were a constant source of amusement, and at Cultoquhey there was the added spice of the Scottish accent to make the stories better. ‘I said to Campbell [the old gamekeeper] at the Games this morning,' recounted Tony, ‘“I'm sorry to see that Mrs Campbell isn't with you today as usual. I do hope she is not unwell.” “Och, the woman's done! She's finished!” Campbell answered. Of course I rushed to make enquiries, and found that poor Mrs Campbell simply had a heavy cold, and thought she shouldn't go out.'

Cultoquhey had an indoor staff of eleven. These servants were treated kindly but also, sometimes, as though they were invisible. Joyce bristled, remembering her happy days in the servants' room at Whitchurch House. She began to take note of precisely how little attention Tony and his family paid the butler and parlourmaid as they served dinner. One evening, to prove her theory, she made an excuse to be late for dinner, then dressed up in parlourmaid's uniform and served at table herself. She helped Tony to potatoes, and he didn't notice her; then he almost fainted with surprise when the parlourmaid sat down on his knee and kissed him.

*   *   *

At their tin wedding party on 4 July 1933, their tenth anniversary, Tony and Joyce were given new rolling-stock for the model railway, three buckets, five trumpets, tins of pineapples, peaches, lychees, pretzels and salted almonds, and fourteen tins of sardines. Alone together after the party, they re-read the love letters they had written before their marriage, and congratulated themselves on still feeling the same. But it was at about this time that in small ways they began to turn away from each other.

Tony had taken to golf. He wasn't good at it, and he never became good at it; but he found in it a deep source of relaxation and pleasure. As he lay awake at night, mentally urging balls into holes, he found that he was becoming addicted – and he did not resist. Golf was a new thing to
play
– and knowing that Joyce liked playing too, he hoped she might share his new addiction. She had a go, but she hated it. Where he saw excitement, camaraderie and rolling verdure, she saw futility, dull businessmen in plus-fours and a soul-destroying fake landscape. To her, golf was the opposite of interesting and the opposite of poetic. In describing the prosaic Mrs Murple at the beginning of her story about an unromantic woman she precisely named housekeeping accounts and golf as the two deadly-dull subjects which preoccupied her anti-heroine. How could Tony, who was so anti-bore, suddenly be so keen on the world of the clubhouse?

So Tony played golf with Anne Talbot and her brother, and they had lovely windblown days out at the West Surrey Golf Club, away from sulky Joyce who would have ruined the whole thing. In 1933 Tony took a long lease on a house in the middle of Rye Golf Course. The Chief Officer's House was one of a row of former coastguard cottages between Rye and Camber, and its flower beds were white with stray golf balls. Protective netting had to be put on the windows. The front garden was just like the spot described by P. G. Wodehouse in
The Clicking of Cuthbert:
‘At various points within your line of vision are the third tee, the sixth tee, and the sinister bunkers about the eighth green – none of them lacking in food for the reflective mind.'

Joyce, whose reflective mind was not nourished by that kind of food, retaliated with beachcombing and botany. While Tony played golf with his friends, she wandered alone among the sand dunes, picking up bits of driftwood and sea-holly, and occasionally (if it was the morning after a southerly gale) a bottle with a French name on it – ‘a detail', she wrote, ‘which has somehow put France on the map for me as no amount of geography lessons ever did.' Every now and again she bent down to examine a tiny patch of dune, to see how many species of flora – speedwell, forget-me-not, pearlwort, white flax, stork's-bill, crane's-bill, white saxifrage, moss – could fit inside the ‘O' made by her finger and thumb.

These were the perfect antisocial pastimes for an anti-golfer. When the others came home feeling virtuous with exercise and achievement, Joyce could trump them with new insights into geography and nature in which they felt obliged to feign interest. She wrote enthusiastically about beachcombing and botany in the
Spectator,
with no hint that she was in any way snubbing golf. Yet in writing about even such innocent subjects as these she managed to introduce a new acerbic tone, a briskness, a sort of horticultural leftiness which seemed subtly designed to get her own back on the social world of the golfers. Here she is on gardens:

As things to sit in, well and good; as things to be taken round, definitely bad: though the possibility of finding an unknown wild flower skulking in somebody's herbaceous border has often enabled me to wear an expression of eager interest which has entirely deceived my hostess. (I scored caper spurge in that way, I remember, hailed it with perhaps rather tactless triumph in the middle of a tedious homily on antirrhinums, and was never asked again.)

And here she is on gardening (which she had never tried until she lived at Rye):

I had not the faintest idea what I ought to do. Weed? Perhaps. The idea did not attract me. To anyone accustomed to the vigorous and jostling democracy in which wild flowers contrive to flourish and look beautiful, weeding smacks both of mollycoddling and of snobbism. I felt, in fact, about these civilised plants much as a worker in a slum parish, used to the spry and merry hardihood of the Cockney child, might feel if suddenly put in charge of a party of Mayfair brats who could not so much as blow their own noses.

She was expected to entertain Tony's golfing friends for dinner at the Chief Officer's House; and the very sound of their voices, let alone their conversation, brought out a new left-wingness in Joyce.

The ‘car business' mentioned by Anne Talbot was another small area of annoyance. Tony, Joyce noticed, was becoming a car bore as well as a golf bore. After the Motor Show each year she had to listen to exchanges like this:

‘Well, I must say, I liked the new Scott Hermes.'

‘What, the fourteen?'

‘No, the twenty-six. Guaranteed to do eighty-five.'

‘M'm. Don't like that overhead camshaft. Now, the Skipper Straight Eight…'

Her own attitude to cars was sentimental rather than acquisitive. The day when the beloved old car was taken away, never to be seen again, and the new one purred up to the front door in its place was the subject of one of her Mrs Miniver vignettes. ‘A car, nowadays,' she wrote, ‘was such an integral part of one's life, provided the aural and visual accompaniment to so many of one's thoughts, feelings, conversations and decisions, that it had acquired at least the status of a room in one's house … Old horses one pensioned off in a paddock, where one could go and see them occasionally. Or one even allowed them to pull the mowing-machine in round leather boots. But this part exchange business…'

Tony bought an expensive Armstrong Siddeley which had belonged to the racing driver Malcolm Campbell. It had the inevitable nickname ‘Bluebird', and a flashy registration number, ‘ALO 1'. In September 1933 Tony drove it when he and Joyce took the other Talbots on holiday to Majorca: Anne's brother Evan and his wife Cynthia. Evan had such a plum in his voice that when he said ‘I beg your pardon' it came out as ‘Bom pom'.

They got lost on the way to Dover. They stayed at the Grand Hotel, opposite the municipal bandstand, and the next morning the car was hoisted onto the
S. R. Autocarrier.
Tony handled the car capably on the way out of Calais, driving on the right as if born to it. In French hilltop towns he seemed to know instinctively where to find the prettiest street and the best restaurant. They took another boat from Barcelona to an unspoiled Majorca, where they had three weeks of scorching days in coves, with lots of wine for lunch every day, and grapes which Tony and Evan ate ‘à la Bacchus', cramming whole bunches into their mouths and spitting out showers of skin and seeds into the bushes. Each of them had an improving book to read, Milton (Evan), Dante (Cynthia), Dickens (Tony), and Conrad (Joyce), but no one got much beyond page 21. They were woken at dawn on cloudless mornings by what Joyce described as ‘the flat golden tonking of a thousand sheep-bells'.

They noticed
New Yorker
-ish sights, such as other couples at the hotel doing vigorous exercises after bathing. Like many other literary Londoners, Tony and Joyce had subscribed to the
New Yorker
since its first issue in 1925. ‘Getting' the Peter Arno and Helen Hokinson cartoons enhanced their sense of being cosmopolitan. Captions such as ‘Isn't Chile thin?' became part of family folklore. Little did Joyce know that one day she would (on her own admission) turn into a
New Yorker
cartoon figure herself, stealing into her garden in slippers each sweltering Manhattan dusk to measure her gladioli.

In northern France on the last morning of the holiday the car got stuck in the mud, visibility was bad, a cross Frenchman shouted at them, they got stuck behind some pigs, there was a fallen tree across the road, and they had a puncture. ‘Our delay', Joyce noted, ‘was due to BOG, FOG, FROG, HOG and LOG, and if only I could make out that the puncture was due to a loose COG, my happiness would be complete.' Driving to London from Dover, Tony pretended to be a foreigner and asked directions in Catalan. Then it was back to the nursery again. ‘Found everything as right as rain at Wellington Square, and no po-faces among the staff, which does them all great credit, as two separate nurseries in one house has been known to lead to complications.'

Just after this holiday Joyce reviewed for the
Spectator
a book called
The Technique of Marriage,
by Mary Borden. The fault she found with it was that Miss Borden underestimated ‘the importance of what one's grandmother calls That Side of Marriage. As a wise man once said, sex doesn't matter all that much when it goes right, but it is very important indeed when it goes wrong.'

It was beginning to go wrong for Tony and Joyce, and it did matter. Embarrassment and awkwardness were seeping in, where seamless union had been. Their daytime irritations with each other led to night-time non-attraction. Joyce saw beside her in bed a golfer knocking back a pink gin in a club-house. Tony saw beside him a sulky, scarf-wearing collector of sea-holly. Joyce suggested that they should visit a doctor to discuss their sexual block, which they did, but to no avail. At about this time they agreed that each could look elsewhere for sexual satisfaction, provided it was done discreetly. There are signs that Joyce had entertained the possibility of infidelity as early as 1927. Her friend Philip Hewitt-Myring, the Leader Page editor of the
Daily News,
became ‘P.' in her engagement book, and they met at 12.30 on many Tuesdays and Wednesdays. When he went to America as a holder of the Walter Hines Page Fellowship in Journalism in 1927 and 1928 she kept a note of each letter sent and received: ‘To P.', ‘From P.' But the affair, if it was one, was short-lived, and P. soon became Philip again and was chosen as godfather to Robert.

Tony, sometime after the 1933 holiday in Majorca, began an affair with Cynthia Talbot. Nannie Good discovered that on her Chelsea walks with the children she had to be careful to avoid taking them along Walpole Street where Cynthia lived, because the Bluebird, with its all-too-recognisable number plate, was often parked there in the late afternoons.

Cracks were appearing in the Wellington Square life which had been immortalized as such a paradise by Joyce and E. H. Shepard. A few doors down, at number 28, the Warrack marriage was breaking up; Jacynth was having an affair, and Joyce let her telephone her lover from the safety of number 16. The sentence ‘We talked about Tony and Joyce' – sometimes it was ‘We railed against Tony and Joyce' – became common in Anne Talbot's diary. It was a gossipy circle, which seemed to derive more pleasure from talking
about
Tony and Joyce than to them. Their friends, behind their backs, tried to get to the bottom of why Tony and Joyce could be so likeable, and yet so annoying.