The Real Mrs Miniver (2 page)

Joyce spotted an advertisement in Victoria Street.

So … Ap,' she said.

‘Soap, Lamb.'

That was the way she learned to read. Lala never deliberately set out to teach her anything. But nor did she ever stop her from finding anything out.

They bought a length of hat ribbon at the Army and Navy Stores.

‘Whom shall I put it down to, Madam?'

‘Number one-oh-nine-four-one,' Lala said. ‘The Horrible Mrs Anstruther.'

And on they went for their walk, over the bridge in St James's Park, past the cowshed opposite the Horse Guards where you could buy a glass of milk for a penny, Joyce wondering all the while, but not asking, why her mother was described as ‘horrible' in the Army and Navy Stores. It was years before she realized that the word was ‘Honourable'.

They walked home the long way, through Strutton Ground where Lala picked up a bag of winkles for her tea. Street life held a fascination for Joyce which was to remain with her all her life. She loved seeing the naphtha flares, the shouting men, the scrap metal at A. Smellie, Ironmonger, the occasional drunk being arrested and taken to Rochester Row Police Station. If she saw a traffic accident – a horse which had slipped and got tangled up in the shafts, or a runaway horse with its van swaying behind – it made her afternoon. ‘Let me get this straight,' she wrote later. ‘I did not
want
disasters to happen, and I would have prevented them if I could, but if they were happening anyway I wanted to be there to see.'

In The Sanctuary, they passed the man who sold hot potatoes off a barrow.

‘Well I never! Did you ever see a monkey dressed in leather,' said Lala.

‘Oh, please may I have one?' said Joyce.

‘I don't see why not,' said Lala. The Honourable Mrs Anstruther had no idea that her daughter's favourite treat was to eat a buttery barrow potato in bed, washed down with two mouthfuls of Lala's nightly pint of stout.

After this treat came the most anxious time of day for Joyce, when Lala went downstairs to have her supper with the servants in the kitchen, leaving Joyce tucked up in bed. Would Lala never come back upstairs? Had she ‘run away for a soldier' as she often said she might? No: there, at last, was the sound of her footsteps. Joyce now felt safe to drop off to sleep.

‘A world without Lala was as monstrously inconceivable as a world without my parents or brother,' Joyce wrote later. ‘I used to read books, sometimes, about children whose mothers or fathers died, and I had bad dreams afterwards and woke up shivering and sweating. But no one ever bothered to write a book about a child whose nannie died or went away for no apparent reason, which was why I was so completely defenceless when it eventually happened to me.'

*   *   *

Joyce's mother, Eva, eldest daughter of the fourth Baron Sudeley, was not horrible, but she was odd. When she died in 1935, she left Joyce all her books. They included sixty-six cookery books and thirty-seven books on black magic. Joyce also found, in a drawer of the desk, a photograph of her mother's lifelong enemy Lady George Campbell, with pins stuck into the body. This confirmed Joyce's belief that her mother was a witch.

The sixty-six cookery books were a mystery, because the only cooking Eva ever did was on a silver chafing-dish brought to the table by a servant with all the ingredients prepared. The single piece of culinary advice she gave to Joyce on her marriage was not that of an active cook: ‘Always order a pint of cream a day. It can be used in everything.'

In her speech, Eva combined the two Edwardian fads of ‘g'-dropping (she liked pokin' about and pickin' up a bargain at a country auction and sellin' it at a profit to a London dealer) and ‘r'-rolling (saying ‘garage', ‘chauffeur' and ‘corridor' as if she were French).

She never once dressed or undressed herself without help from her lady's maid, or did her own hair. She insisted, throughout her life, that her stockings and shoes be put on before her drawers, which were lace-edged. At least three times a week the heel of a shoe tore the knicker lace, and it had to be mended by her maid.

The servants stayed, in spite of Eva's oddness; the young Joyce liked to spend time below stairs, listening to them talking, and learning to twist Bromo paper into a fan-shape with her fist. The impression she got from the servants was that with Mrs A. There Was Never a Dull Moment, while with Mr A. You Always Knew Where You Were. A bell rang.

‘That's Her.'

‘Oh, well. No peace for the wicked.'

‘And precious little for the good.' And upstairs the parlourmaid went.

‘There's been some friction up there today,' Joyce heard the parlourmaid say on her return. The servants had only an inkling of what Joyce knew and felt deeply: that Mr and Mrs A. were, in fact, extremely unhappily married. Joyce had plenty of love as a child, but something essential was missing. She wrote about it later, in the beginning of an autobiography which never progressed beyond the age of fourteen.

‘To make the complete emotional circuit which is the most important thing about family life,' she wrote, ‘a child's love should flow up to one of its parents, across to the other, and down to the child again, strengthened and enriched by their mental understanding. In my family this did not happen. My father adored my mother, but he did not understand her. She understood him pretty well but could not stand hair nor hide of him. Therefore there was a break in the circuit. The electrical force flashed back and forth between me and my mother, and flowed more steadily between me and my father: there were streaks of brilliant lightning, but much driving power was lost, and it was all a considerable strain. If I expressed my affection for him in front of her, I was dimly aware that it made her jealous; if I curled up with her on a sofa in front of him, I was conscious of a vague feeling of sadness emanating from the armchair on the other side of the fireplace. This particular conversation-piece must have occurred early in my life, because since the age of four or five I do not remember them ever sitting together in the same room, unless there was a luncheon or dinner party.'

The family's country house from 1904 till 1911 was Whitchurch House in Buckinghamshire, which had a long, French-pronounced corridor along the ground floor. Mrs A's den was at one end, with its sign on the door: ‘No admittance EVEN on business'. She did her writing there: short stories with a Boer War backdrop for
Outlook
and the
Saturday Westminster Gazette,
later published in book form.

Aged two, in Dutch fancy dress

Mr A's den was at the other end, and if you happened to look in he would probably be sharpening his pencil or a chisel. If there was nothing to sharpen, he would be mending something, and if there was nothing to mend he would be cleaning something, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to the same level above each elbow. He carried on cleaning his golf clubs with emery paper regularly, long after he had given up the game.

His name was Henry Torrens Anstruther, and his love for his only daughter, and hers for him, was of the unspoken kind which must find outlets for expression in mutual unembarrassing delights such as heraldry, etymology and punctuation.

Things Harry taught me:

Knots and splices

Carpentry

Grammar

Love of reference books, maps, luggage, stationery

Handwriting

Love of Scotland

Not to dog-ear books

A Scot, he was Chief Liberal Whip and Member of Parliament for St Andrews, Fife until 1903 when he resigned on taking up the post of government representative on the Administrative Council of the Suez Canal Company. He was also a Justice of the Peace, an Alderman of the London County Council and a director of the North British Railway Company. But he could have earned his living, Joyce later wrote, and would have led a far happier life, as a jobbing carpenter.

When Eva married him, he was a promising Member of Parliament who seemed destined for the Cabinet. She was the pretty, witty Eva Hanbury-Tracy, aged twenty, brought up amid great wealth in London and at two large and grand country houses, Toddington in Gloucestershire and Gregynog in Wales. She could have made any match she chose.

‘My mother had visions of herself,' Joyce wrote, ‘as a hostess of some famous London house, standing at the head of a long staircase, welcoming Cabinet Ministers and their wives to epoch-making parties and influencing the destiny of the nation by a diplomatic nod or the quick tap of a fan on a crucial forearm. When this plan went agley, she was terribly disappointed, and she just couldn't take it.'

In 1893, a year before Eva and Harry's first child Douglas was born, Lloyd's Bank filed a bankruptcy petition against Eva's father, and Lord Sudeley was virtually ruined. Though asset-rich, he suffered from what would now be called a cash-flow problem. ‘To put it briefly,' Joyce wrote, glossing over the true complications of the affair, ‘my grandfather Sudeley, who was incurably optimistic, embarked on a tremendous scheme of fruit-growing but failed to grasp the elementary botanical truth that the trees he had planted would take seven years to mature.'

Queen Victoria wept on hearing of the bankruptcy. Lord Sudeley's great-grandson, the present seventh Baron, has spent most of his life demonstrating, inside and outside Parliament, the unfairness of the treatment of the fourth Baron, and how he was cheated of his estate.

Eva's parents moved to Ormeley Lodge in Ham, which many would now consider one of the most covetable houses in Greater London: Queen Anne red brick with wings, high white gates, and topiary garden at the back. Lady Sudeley considered it ‘a villa'. But she carried on living quite grandly. Joyce remembered her grandmother Sudeley at Ormeley Lodge:

‘If the unthinkable occurred, and Lizzie Haycock [the head-housemaid] happened to meet my grandmother in a passage, with no nearby doorway in which to take cover, she would flatten herself against the wall, concealing her dustpan and brush behind her back as though they were a jemmy and a blowlamp. My grandmother would nod and smile and Lizzie would murmur something inaudibly apologetic, ending in “… m'lady”, and stand with lowered eyes until Her Ladyship had passed by. They all did it. It was the way things were.'

Eva found her own finances considerably reduced. She was still comfortably well-off, but no longer a notable heiress. After 1903 her husband wasn't even an MP or Government minister any more. ‘My father was a methodical hard-working man,' Joyce wrote, ‘with a great eye for detail; he could draft a memorandum with meticulous care and he never composed an ambiguous sentence, but he was sometimes tactless – not out of any lack of consideration for other people's feelings but rather because he hadn't the sense of finesse which makes some people weigh all the subtleties of a situation before they open their lips. Moreover, he hated intrigue, which to my mother was like oxygen.'

Joyce had only one memory of her parents being nice to each other. Her father came home with a bad toothache one evening, and her mother got a bottle of Bunter's Nervine from the medicine cupboard and took it up to him. Joyce was tremendously pleased. ‘Perhaps things are going to be better from now on,' she thought. But they were not.

One day she went to tea with her friend Kathleen Gascoigne, and witnessed another episode she never forgot. ‘Kathleen's mother was in the schoolroom with us; her father came in, had a mock quarrel with her (how different in undertones and overtones from a real one, and how gentle the ring of tin swords after the clang of genuine steel!) and ended up by picking her up in his arms and carrying her out of the room, talking and laughing. I was almost speechless with wonder, and made a mental note: other people's parents actually talk to each other, and make each other laugh.'

*   *   *

In the Housekeeper's Room at Ormeley Lodge, a book called ‘Confessions: an Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c' was filled in one afternoon when Joyce was there. Favourite Qualities in a Man: ‘A jolly good-tempered old drunkard,' wrote Lizzie Haycock, the head housemaid. Pet Aversion: ‘Sunday in on a fine day,' wrote Alice Rivers, another housemaid. Which Characters in History do you Most Dislike? ‘Gentry,' wrote a between-maid called Annie McLeod. Here are Joyce's entries, at the age of seven:

Your favourite qualities in a man: conjuror

Your favourite occupation: reading

Idea of happiness: rolling down a muddy bank with your best dress on

Idea of misery: when Douglas is away

Pet aversion: meat and eating my dinner

If not yourself, who would you be? A boy

Favourite motto: Make hay while the sun shines and no rose without a thorn

That last motto was to prove apposite. The rose and the thorn were inextricably joined in her life.

Joyce played on her own for hours, under and in trees. She had prehensile toes, and she could whistle with two fingers. She invented an imaginary country of which she was king, and drew maps and plans of its coastlines and castles. Every now and then she asked Lala to play the extra pirate, or the Sheriff of Nottingham, or to be a weight on the other end of a see-saw. If Lala didn't feel like it she said ‘Oh, no, I've got a bone in my leg.'