The Real Mrs Miniver (17 page)

His sister Susan arrived in London in the autumn of 1938 and found a job as a nurse at a Quaker hospital. Dolf arrived in March 1939, a year after the
Anschluss,
with his cousins Ernst and Franz Philipp, who had also managed to get out. They found lodgings in a seedy attic room at 100 Denbigh Street, Pimlico, and they queued at Bloomsbury House. Thanks to Sheridan Russell, Dolf soon got a part-time job there as an interpreting clerk. In the evenings the three cousins walked the streets, for mile after mile. During the lonely London weekends, uprooted and under-occupied, they sat in their room tearing one another's poetry apart.

Farewell photographs of Dolf's Viennese home

Their landlady, Mme Luhn, was a kind-hearted former Madam who insulted her lodgers while ladling them bowlfuls from great vats of
pot-au-feu.
One evening after supper, when the cousins were sitting upstairs as usual, scorning one another's use of cloud-imagery, Mme Luhn called up the stairwell: ‘Monsieur Placzek. Le téléphone.' Dolf trembled again. He ran down four flights.

‘Hello, you won't know me. I'm Joyce Maxtone Graham, a friend of Sheridan Russell's, and he gave me your number because he said you might be interested in giving German lessons.'

They arranged to meet outside Lyon's Corner House in the Strand, at 4.30 on Tuesday, 21 November. ‘I'm very small,' said Joyce, ‘and I'll be carrying a white gas-mask.' ‘Placek, 4.30' she wrote in her engagement book, spelling his name wrong. (Later, in the United States, Dolf was careful to emphasize the ‘cee-zee', as he learned to call it, in the middle. The name is pronounced ‘Plah-chek'.)

They met; and so strong was the instant attraction that neither of them could eat their rock cake. ‘I don't feel too good in my stomach,' Dolf said. ‘We don't call it “stomach”', said Joyce. ‘We might possibly call it “tummy”.' ‘Pardon?' Dolf needed to learn the social subtleties of English, she noticed, as much as she needed to improve her German. He told her he had learned his colloquial English on an exchange visit to Ramsgate in 1935. Joyce advised him at once to ‘forget Ramsgate'.

Dolf was a foot taller and thirteen years younger than Joyce. She was in love with the idea of him before their initial encounter: being Jewish, Viennese, twenty-six and recommended by Sheridan Russell, he could hardly fail to fascinate her. As soon as they met, they both felt an overwhelming sense that they were (as they later called it) ‘one river'. It was not a case of irresistible cheekbones: Dolf did not have film-star good looks. Joyce described his face as ‘tragic-humorous': the nose was large, the forehead wide, the smile neither sardonic nor sleek but boyishly uncontrolled, the eyes hidden behind round spectacles, the gestures gawky. If Dolf needed to scratch his right temple, he brought his left arm over the top of his head and reached down to the itch. But he had immense sex appeal, and Jan's string of scurrying thoughts at the moment of their meeting might have run like this: tall, thick black hair, couldn't be less like Tony, lean, young, hands of a pianist, Viennese accent exuding high intellect and high passion, only pleased by the finest things in life, but intensely and sensually pleased by them.

Feeling light-headed, unhungry, and already at home in one another's company, they read the notice-board outside the National Gallery. ‘Concert, 5.30 today.' ‘Let's go in,' said Joyce. She had already been to one of the new Myra Hess National Gallery concerts: Mrs Miniver, in her letter of 16 October, had described it:

All sorts of people, young and old, smart and shabby, in uniform and out of it, soldiers, nurses, Salvation Army girls, typists, office-boys, old ladies with ear-trumpets, and a few of the regular ‘musicals' with coiled plaits. A few were there, perhaps, out of curiosity, but most of them because they were suffering from a raging thirst for music, and for some assurance of pattern in a jangled world. She played magnificently and thoughtfully, almost as if she were discovering – no,
un
covering – the music for the first time. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms – ironical, isn't it, how the world has to turn to the great Germans to find healing for the spiritual wounds inflicted by the ignoble ones? There were so many people in tears that it might have been a revivalist meeting. So it was in a way. And the curious thing was that everything she played seemed to have a kind of double loveliness, as though she had managed to distil into it all the beauty of the pictures that were missing from the walls.

This time, all Joyce said, as she and Dolf came down the steps after the concert, was ‘Bach is so all-right-making, isn't he?' The compound adjective struck Dolf as perfect. ‘Who is this magical creature,' he wondered, ‘who can express what I have always thought about Bach but have never found the right words?'

The German lessons started at once, three times a week, at Halsey Street. The subjects discussed tended to be metre and botany. The daily letter-writing also began. Each wrote in the other's language: ‘Lieber Herr Placzek!,' ‘Dear Mrs Graham'. Joyce wrote on ‘Mrs A. Maxtone Graham' postcards, and Dolf, in italic handwriting which spoke of years steeped in Goethe, on torn-out sheets from a Pimlico stationer's pad.

Joyce, on Christmas Eve, from Rye: ‘Anne Talbot ist gestern abend angekommen. Jetzt spielen sie alle Golf (Anne, mein Mann, Jamie und Janet). Um vier Uhr werden wir den “Messiah” auf dem Rundfunk zuhören. Heute nacht die drei Kindern werden die Strümpfe aufhängen. Leider kann ich nach London diese Woche nicht fahren. Meine nächste deutsche Stunde muss deshalb im Jahre 1940 sein!'
1

Dolf: ‘The refugees – I can recognise them in the street at the first glance. I shun them whenever I can. I never suffered more than when I was a clerk at the Bloomsbury House, not even in Germany. There one could show courage, dignity, heroism. Now, in safety, free (while the less agile and lucky who have not been able to get out slowly die at home) – what remains? Outside the petty financial misery, and inside aimless emptiness. Dante was right who said that the worst what can happen to a human mind is exile.'

The tone could not have been more different from one of Tony's letters. Here was raw emotion, sadness examined head-on.

On Christmas Eve, the three Viennese cousins were sitting in the attic as usual when the doorbell rang. It was the postman, and he handed over a large parcel addressed to Herrn Placzek and Philipp: ‘With all best wishes for Christmas, from Joyce.' It was a basket of peaches. Peaches in winter! The symbolism was not lost on the three poets. The attic room seemed suddenly full of the warmth of a Mediterranean country, of abundance, indulgence, and hope. They ate some of the peaches, and got to work incorporating the event into their verses.

The first days of 1940 were dark and cold. Joyce was with her family at Rye, writing postcards to Dolf by the fire. She said how dangerous it was to make new friendships in a world where separation and death were becoming commonplace: you laid yourself open to the risk of severe pain. Dolf sent her some of his poems. They discovered they had used the same images, almost word for word, in poems they had written before they met. ‘Dear, dear Dolf,' wrote Joyce on 13 January, breaking into English, ‘This becomes more and more extraordinary, and almost uncanny. All poets, perhaps, come from the same springs in the same mountain, but occasionally two of them seem to come from the identical spring, and that is what has happened here. It is not as though we can have been influenced by reading the same lyrics in our childhood. I give it up – it is a riddle.'

Janet and Robert, still being kept away from London, started at Rye Grammar School. Joyce returned to London, through snowdrifts, to take Jamie to the overnight train for Gordonstoun. London was white with snow. The school train left at 7.30 on Thursday 18 January; and in the hours afterwards Dolf and Joyce became lovers.

‘Ich bin sehr schläftig,' wrote Joyce to Dolf the next day, ‘und voll von einer Süsse, friedliche, traümende Glück. Ich habe dich lieb, und ich freue mich dass wir bald wieder zusammen sein werden.'
2

Writing in German made Joyce feel it wasn't quite Joyce Maxtone Graham who was writing. It was akin to the pleasantly guiltless feeling of spending foreign currency: you could convince yourself that it wasn't quite real, and that you would not have to suffer the consequences.

But within days, the implications began to weigh on their hearts. If you fell in love with a man on a waiting-list for a visa for the United States, the ‘severe pain' of parting wasn't a risk, it was an inevitability. ‘Ours is “eine Schiffskameradschaft”,' Joyce wrote to Dolf, a friendship between two people thrown together on board ship, who would have to part when it docked. They must remember this; they must not depend on each other's presence. As soon as Dolf got his visa for the United States, he would have to leave the country. After months of losing sleep over not getting a visa, Dolf was now losing sleep over getting one.

For someone as susceptible to mood swings as Joyce, the situation was precarious. Elated, dancing on air, she would make her way from Halsey Street to 113 Cheyne Walk, where she and Dolf met on their ‘Zusammentage' – their days together while Tony was in his office or playing golf at Rye. Her friend Charles Spencer had lent them a room, overlooking the river. It became ‘their' room, and all the sounds outside – the tugs hooting (as they had in Mrs Miniver's hearing), the houseboats lapping, the evening newspaper-seller chanting the war headlines – were for ever after associated in their minds with these days of intense secret happiness. Their hours together, Joyce wrote later, were ‘full of the sweet flowing interchange of thoughts and feelings, which is the mainspring of our rare relationship: physical love-making, though the most ecstatic and satisfying that I have ever had, is between us only the overflow from a deep lake.' They walked together in the early evenings, over the bridge to Battersea Park, or along the river to a National Gallery concert, trying to live in the present moment.

Joyce would return to Rye by train, writing to Dolf on the journey. The children would be waiting for her; she hugged them; they had supper together, chatting about school. She and Tony sat by the fire afterwards, late into the evening. Joyce switched the wireless on and tuned it to the Home Service. Beethoven's ‘Archduke' trio sent her into a reverie. She was with Dolf as she listened. She was divided into two, and she was full of a sense of foreboding. She had already known the guilt of an adulterous love affair. But she had never known the ‘guillotine feeling' – the knowledge that at some moment in the near future the loved one would sail away and she would not see him again.

The guillotine began to hover over their meetings: Joyce found it impossible to banish it from her imagination. ‘I wish I could live in the present like you,' she wrote to Dolf on 14 February. ‘But I can't. When I love, especially, I need the future as a kind of sounding-box in which the sound of the present can ring clear. A present with no future, to me, has a muffled sound, as though one struck a bell in a box. Anyway, I will try, on Saturday, to forget that there is not an unlimited vista of Saturdays stretching before us…'

On that next Saturday Joyce made excuses to be away from Rye – an article to finish at
The Times
– and she and Dolf went to Brighton together, where they were snapped by a street photographer as they squinted in the south-coast glare: spring lovers enjoying a stroll. As Europe began to fall apart around them, they stole what private happiness they could. When she found herself with an unexpected free day, Joyce sent Dolf a telegram saying when and where to meet. There were wartime regulations against using foreign words in telegrams, so instead of writing ‘Deine J.' at the end, she wrote ‘Dinah J'. From that day on, she signed her letters to him ‘Immer deine kleine Dinah'.

Taken by a street photographer in Brighton