The Real Mrs Miniver (15 page)

Surely not Mabel, thought Joyce. It was her children's nannie's name. It would be one ‘M' too many. And how could she reveal the woman's name without introducing some contrived snatch of conversation which would wreck the poetry of the interior monologue?

So she did it on the Letters page instead, on 17 December: ‘I am, Sir, yours faithfully, Caroline Miniver.' Mrs Miniver's letter to
The Times
was a motherly appeal to her readers to search their ‘put-away cupboards' for clothes to send to Lord Baldwin's Appeal Fund for Refugees, and it was effective. Five days after its publication, the one room previously in use at the clothing depot in Westbourne Terrace had multiplied to seven, and parcels were arriving steadily throughout the day by post, rail, car and hand. They often came with a covering letter, such as this one, from ‘Highgrove', Sunbury Hill, Torquay: ‘Mr Nicholls is sending the enclosed dress suit. Some years ago he took up conjuring as a hobby in winter evenings, hence the unusual pockets. He hopes it will be found in some form to be of use to a refugee.'

Joyce helped out at the clothing depot as often as she could: her Scottish spinster friend Ruth Berry was the organizing secretary and told her what to do. A refugee, Mr A. Miesels, described the scene at the depot for the
Jewish Times
(it was translated from his original Yiddish):

The clothing department occupies three stories. Smart ladies of highest social standing in the English Aristocracy, and young girls are engaged in sorting and picking out the most useful articles. Miss Ruth (who by the way is very proud of her Biblical name) explains to me that one has to be careful not to hurt the feelings of the Refugees by sending them unworthy cloths. She also introduced me to a young lady, to whose recent appeal in the ‘Times' the English population responded most generously from the farthest corners of England.

At tea-time a wooden box was brought into the office and the ladies around that improvised table talked, not about weather, kittens, but about Lord Balfour, Dr Herzl, Palestine … One's heart is growing with joy when one realises the marvellous attitude of the noble Gentry towards the unfortunate refugees …

(This was a year before thousands of such refugees, so dazzled by British kindness, were interned as enemy aliens.)

‘Mrs Miniver' was beginning to bring Joyce the power to do good in big, public ways. She was fascinated by the Jewish refugees, with their heart-rending combination of intellectual wealth and material destitution. She was meant to be sorting clothes, but she was easily distracted into conversation (in English or schoolgirl German) with the violinists, poets and scientists who wandered in. Romantic and lacking in political perspective, she would take up the cause of a single musician and fire off imploring letters to men in high places. ‘As you will appreciate,' came a reply from the headquarters of the Lord Baldwin Fund, ‘musicians are even more difficult than writers, when it comes to a question of placing them in work. People can be induced to take a domestic servant, or even a doctor, but musicians are even normally regarded as a luxury.'

‘T. out.' ‘T. to Manchester.' ‘T. to Sandwich.' ‘T. stayed at Rye.' Joyce's engagement book for 1939 (not leatherette: a Walker's ‘Flexor' in red morocco) suggests much time spent apart. But at least now there was an excuse for escaping. She was truly busy.
The Times
was commissioning a leader once a week and still expected its fortnightly ‘Mrs Miniver'; Chatto & Windus were collecting the ‘Mrs Miniver' pieces for publication; and Joyce was lying awake at night, worrying whether the sensitive-fingered Mr Hans Mahler would find a domestic position.

The Maxtone Grahams in the school holidays, 1939

‘Three times a year, during the school holidays, that one remaining branch – our intense love for our co-parenthood of the children, and our joy in their company – burst into miraculous blossom…' So Joyce wrote years later, looking back at this time. In the holidays there were still days of marital happiness. That Easter of 1939, Tony, Joyce and the children were united in a next-door-garden-tidying project at Rye. A day of apple-tree-pruning and bonfire-tending did not need to be improved on when Joyce used it for ‘Mrs Miniver': it really was as idyllic as a typical Miniver day. ‘Constructive destruction is one of the most delightful employments in the world, and in civilised life the opportunities for it are all too rare.' Sitting up in the branches, Joyce/Mrs Miniver watched as the two eldest children raced snails up the gate-posts and the youngest made an elaborate entanglement with twigs and cotton over some newly sown grass, and regretted only that ‘circumstances had never 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'. Tony/Clem handed her up a glass of beer.

‘We've made a lot of difference today,' he said. ‘You can almost 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 stabs of Hitler-induced anxiety were becoming more frequent, for the Maxtone Grahams as for the Minivers. But Joyce's naïve optimism carried on. In a
Times
leader of 18 July, she was still saying, ‘During the War – we must on no account allow ourselves to get into the habit of referring to it as “the previous war”…'

‘Worked at Bloomsbury House, 2.30–8': Joyce was the kind of person who put some of her nobler achievements into her engagement book after they had happened, so that she could flick back with pride. Bloomsbury House, in Great Russell Street, was one of the headquarters of the Jewish Refugee Committee: in a slow queue, German, Austrian and central European refugees made their way to the desk for a small weekly hand-out of money, a square meal, help with financial paperwork, and advice about employment. Joyce was drawn to Bloomsbury House, haunted almost to the point of obsession by the arriving Jews and longing to help them in some way. The man behind the desk in the Financial Guarantees office was her friend Sheridan Russell, cellist, Jew, and do-gooder, with whom she had made friends at the clothing depot. Sheridan-Christ, she soon came to call him, for not only did he work tirelessly and unpaid at Bloomsbury House; he also introduced her to the man she was to love.

Tony and Joyce drove up the Great North Road to Cultoquhey in time for the Twelfth of August. The cousins gathered, the nannies argued, boiled rabbit was served in the nursery, the children rode their bicycles on the gravel: all was as normal, and London seemed far away. But suddenly the black clouds were overhead. Neville Chamberlain made his broadcast to the grown-ups on Sunday morning, 3 September, and the grown-ups rephrased it to the children, telling them that war with Germany had broken out.

‘To children,' wrote Joyce in ‘Mrs Miniver', ‘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 youngest sister had exclaimed with shining eyes, “I say, I'm in a war!”'

*   *   *

With bombing expected, there was no going back to school in London. Jamie was at Gordonstoun, the school founded in 1934 by Kurt Hahn in a huge mansion in the far north of Scotland. Joyce had sentimental feelings about Gordonstoun, partly because she had spent summers there with her cousin Ruth as a child, when they had smoked the butler's cigarettes and written poems sitting on gravestones; and partly because of Kurt Hahn, whom she hero-worshipped for being both Jewish and a scout: she imagined school life there would be one long knot-tying, camp-fire-lighting adventure. But Jamie, a highly intelligent, lazy and non-games-playing child, loathed the school. It was remote, it lacked kindred spirits, and the days consisted of a succession of physical discomforts, many involving cold water.

Janet and Robert were sent daily to Morrison's Academy in Crieff, with new uniforms and gas-masks. Joyce stayed in Perthshire for a fortnight to settle them in and returned to London on 23 September. It was turning into a childless city. Separated from her own children, she wrote with feeling in a
Times
leader:

In many of the more well-to-do houses there may have been other valuables which had to be removed to the country or lodged in the bank. But in the poorest homes the children were the only treasure: and now that they are gone the parents must be feeling destitute indeed. Some of them, looking at an empty cot, a stray slipper, a doll lying face-downwards on the floor, may be tempted to think that the burden of anxiety which has been lifted from their minds by the evacuation was almost easier to bear than the burden of silence and loneliness which succeeded it. It is astonishing how loud a noise children can make simply by not being there; and how large a table for six can seem when there are only two to sit at it.

Her instinct, as a wartime writer and later lecturer, was to console: to focus on small inspiring sights, and renew her readers' or audiences' faith in the fundamental benignness of the world. But she no longer felt able to write her ‘Mrs Miniver' pieces in the serene essay style. In peacetime, the thoughts of Mrs Miniver about windscreen-wipers or tree pruning or door-knobs were all very well; but now, with the black-outs, the evacuations and the genuine fear of death in the air, exquisite prose poems no longer seemed apposite. She changed to the epistolary style, and wrote to an imaginary sister-in-law: ‘Dear Susan … With love, yours ever, Caroline.' These letters are less good, as writing, than the earlier essays. It is as if Elizabeth Bennett had stepped out of
Pride and Prejudice
and started chatting on the telephone: the gossipiness jars. The essence of the pleasure of the earlier essays lay in the way one was distanced from Mrs Miniver by the third-person narrative, while gaining intimate access to her thoughts. In letter form, some of her mystery is lost and she becomes just an unusually observant, talkative female.

But as bits of bracing journalism which in November and December 1939 made
Times
readers sit up straight, the Miniver letters were good. ‘It oughtn't to
need
a war to make a nation paint its kerbstones white, carry rear-lamps on its bicycles, and give all its slum children a holiday in the country. And it oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it
has
needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have.'

She found endless things to be uplifting about: the nice ‘damp jutey smell' of sandbags, and the sight of people sitting on them eating sandwiches; the way London was beginning to look and sound like a country town, with its tinkle of bicycle bells and clopping of hoofs; the cheerful brightness of white clothes; the way people's figures were improving through exercise; the beauty of buildings' silhouettes in the moonlight of the black-out, and the enhancement of the sense of touch, when you clutched hold of railings which you couldn't see; the singing of the barrage balloon cables which made you feel you were ‘going to sleep on a ship at anchor, with the sound of wind in the rigging'; the way Londoners were learning to carry gas masks with panache, as if they were going off to a picnic with a box of special food.

But there were two things Caroline Miniver missed:

The first is golden windows. It used to be so lovely, that hour after the lamps were lit and before the curtains were drawn, when you could catch glimpses into other people's lives as you walked along the street: a kitchen table with a red cloth and a fat cook writing a letter, laboriously; or a ground-floor sitting-room, very spick and span, full of obvious wedding presents, with a brand-new wife, rather touching and self-important, sitting sewing, her ears visibly tuned for the sound of a latch-key; or an old man by the fire, doing a crossword, with an empty afternoon behind him and an empty evening in front. And occasionally, by great luck, a dining-room with a child's birthday party going on; a ring of lighted candles round the cake and a ring of lighted faces round the table; one face brighter than all the others, like a jewel on the ring. But now all this is gone. Houses slip straight from day to night, with tropical suddenness.

The other thing I miss, terribly, is children. Not only my own – I do at least see them (and plenty of others) at weekends: but children in general, as an ingredient of the town's population, a sort of leaven. It may be different in some parts of London, but certainly round here they have acquired rarity interest. They used to be daisies and are now bee-orchises. One looks round with a lift of pleasure on hearing a child's voice in a bus …