The Real Mrs Miniver (32 page)

Lecturing in city after city, staying at the Abraham Lincoln, the Leland, the Statler, the Commodore Perry, Jan put across the gist of her message: that ‘it's no manner of use the politicians working out a democratic world set-up if the individual members of each group are going to go on behaving like bastards in their personal lives.' ‘I know for certain,' Dolf wrote to her, ‘that you are going on fighting your lovely private war against stupidity and indolence … I wish I could be with you or sit somewhere at the back of the room during that terrible moment when you begin to talk. And you would touch your hair with your left hand, as a sign that you had seen me…'

At Memphis, in the segregated South, she began to feel ‘the Jungles' coming on, and her lecture, far from ‘going over swell', seemed ‘to come out as a god-damned boring mess.' The Peabody Hotel was the gloomiest yet; luncheon with the ladies of the School of Art Committee was ‘pure hell'; and a concert given ‘by a [white] man with a cold who had the effrontery to sing Negro songs in Negro dialect to a mixed but segregated audience' was excruciating. In her diary, it was the injustice of segregation which was blamed for her misery; but in her letters to Dolf, it is clear that the misery was mainly inside herself. ‘I wish I was a riveter in a factory, or a carpenter, or a cowboy, or anything except what I'm being at the moment. I'm beginning to think lecture touring is the most loathsome thing in the world … I'm so
TIRED
…'

She could not telephone Dolf, because he was deep in the Mojave Desert on manoeuvres. This was a refreshing adventure for him, and he was feeling like a true buddy of ‘the Buddies'. ‘We've been sleeping in foxholes for the last 7 days', he wrote to Jan in Buddy-speak, ‘(and does my back ache!), eating miserable cold grub (and did I throw up!), and shaving out of steel helmets (and did I cut myself!). But my health has never been better.'

Dolf's morale was also lifted by the fact that there were German prisoners nearby, and he could watch them playing in the way he had played as a boy. ‘What a complete change of circumstances,' he wrote to Jan. ‘
They
are the prisoners and
I
am the non-com with the rifle!'

One day, though it was strictly forbidden, he and some fellow GIs went and talked to the prisoners.

We took our truck down to the salvage dumps where the Krauts work. The guards – especially curious to have an interpreter – joined us and soon I and my buddies stood on the truck surrounded by 30 German prisoners and shooting questions back and forth. It is hard to realise (and yet it is an undeniable fact) that these hardworking, well-disciplined and quite humorous boys are the same who goose-stepped arrogantly through European capitals, murdering and bullying … They are all recently captured (in the South of France), partly by the French whose guts they hate. They are scared stiff of the Russians … their greatest fear is what the Russians are going to do with Germany, and that is their single reason for fighting on. Some of them, even married men with children, have been in the Army for seven years, unable to lead a normal life, and they are pretty tired of it. The wheel has come full circle …

If Dolf was out of reach, whom could Jan turn to? Feeling ‘utterly sunk' in Kansas, she telephoned Bev Robinson at midnight to cry. At Columbus, Ohio, sobbing with loneliness at the Deshler-Wallick Hotel, she picked up the telephone and rang Janet, who was at boarding school. She had never heard her mother in this state: it came as a shock. She got permission to take some time off school, and went to Cleveland to be with Jan for the last days of her tour. It was a rescue: Jan got through the final lectures, with Janet by her side. But she did not tell her daughter the true reason for her misery.

On Thanksgiving Day Jan was back in New York, on Dr Pardee's couch, talking about the insoluble problems which had once again congested her mind on the lecture tour. And on that same day, at the Albert Hall in London, the United Thanksgiving Service was taking place in the presence of Winston Churchill. Jan's poem ‘A Londoner in New England, 1941' (quoted at the beginning of Chapter Ten) was read aloud by the actress Celia Johnson. When she finished the last line, ‘How can London fall?', the orchestra swept into the final bars of Elgar's ‘Cockaigne' Overture. Churchill spoke: ‘We are moving forward, surely, steadily, irresistibly and perhaps, with God's aid, swiftly, towards victorious peace.'

Janet took her mother and brother to spend Christmas with Thomi Schmidt's family at Binghampton, New York. It was a time of rest and stability, before unknown upheavals to come. ‘1944 wasn't quite as much “our” year as the preceding ones,' Dolf wrote to Jan on New Year's Eve, ‘but our love hasn't changed. It walks into 1945 without too much hope but with the old feeling of perfection and never-ending meaning. Darling, I couldn't say “Happy New Year” to you, but my thoughts are with you very much.'

*   *   *

An inspecting officer inspected Dolf's office in January 1945, and said that his were the best records he had seen in all his years of inspecting. Dolf would not be sent overseas after all; and he was even invited to supper by the inspecting officer. ‘His wife was beautiful,' Dolf wrote to Jan, ‘and when I heard her call him “Honey” I felt suddenly nostalgic for you and for our home, a feeling I always have when I see a happily married couple at home. “Nirgendwo fühlt der Fremdling sich fremder, als wo die Liebenden wohnen.”'
2

The spring of 1945 struck both Dolf and Jan as beautiful, coming – as it must be – before an end. ‘Spring is in the air,' Dolf wrote, ‘an irregular, unsystematic kind of spring, with bitter winter and full hot summer in it, an American kind of spring, but it makes me restless again. I wish at moments like this that it was all over, but the future is such an empty canvas, and we have nothing to print on it.' Sitting by a lake in Central Park, Jan wrote, ‘I am just melting inside with the exquisiteness of the spring & the greening trees & the prospect of your coming.'

He did come to New York, on 10 April, and they had once again what Dolf called their ‘ghost-days' together – the days of ‘bitter bliss' just before parting, when it was almost as if the parting had already happened. Jan had not resolved her dilemma by travelling to America in 1940: she had merely postponed its resolution. The scene of farewell had moved from Battersea Park in May 1940 to Central Park in April 1945.

On 27 April, the morning after Dolf left to go back to California, Jan received a cable from Frankie Whitehead to tell her that Tony had been liberated ten days previously, and expected to be home shortly. Later that day there was a cable from Tony himself to say that he had reached England safely.

‘I cabled back suitably and lovingly,' Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘and said we'd get a passage back as soon as possible. I feel sort of numb and stunned and I can't keep any food down – the usual thing. Oh God, I'm so
genuinely
thankful that he's safe and well. I am not a ghoul, darling, and I am
really
fond of him and anxious to see him again. It's only that my heart is all yours, and I cannot take it back with me.'

The Ministry of War Transport telephoned Jan on 4 May: there was a passage for them on the 8th. Frantic busyness was a merciful anodyne. Janet and Robert came home from school. The ‘raft of struggling actors, musicians and dancers' helped with the packing, breaking off occasionally to make last-minute records on Jan's recording machine. Trunks were sent off, loaded with gramophone records, teddy bears, soldering irons and musical instruments. The Golenpauls, Jan's friends whom she had met through
Information, Please!,
gave a farewell party on the last day, during which Jan slipped into her hostess's bedroom to sign a contract with Harcourt Brace for a collected edition of her poems, lectures and stories, to be called
A Pocketful of Pebbles.
Jan described the final hour to Dolf: ‘… And then I opened my last bottle of wine & we all drank our healths. And in the middle of all this, VE Day was announced on the radio & paper began falling through the sky like snow-flakes, & we drove to the station, nearly unable to get there because of the Times Square celebrations, & finally we
LEFT
, with all of them expressing their emotions in their characteristic ways. The whole thing was so ridiculously fantastic that I didn't cry at all, but took a swig of rum & slept all through Connecticut.'

They were caught up in the Halifax Riots, when soldiers and sailors celebrated victory in Europe by smashing glass and looting beer, and their ship (the SS
Bayano,
a converted banana boat) could not leave for three days. On the voyage, they had little time to think: a gale blew for twelve days and nights, the ship rolled at forty degrees, and they had to lash themselves to the deckhouse in order not to be swept overboard, and to sling their elbows through ropes at night to stay in bed. The ship was travelling in convoy, and had to heave-to in mid Atlantic for sixteen hours because the deck cargo carried by the rest of the convoy was being broken up. Jan gave splicing lessons to sprawling groups of children, to distract them from seasickness. The crew had a drunken all-night party on the last night, after which an only-just-legible breakfast menu was typed.

Aching and bruised, Jan, Janet and Robert emerged onto the bomb-scarred
terra firma
of Liverpool. A row of old ladies of the WVS gave them bread and margarine on the quay. They noticed how old the dockers and porters looked: all men of normal working age, they supposed, must still be in the Forces. They took a slow train southwards, and eventually drew into Euston Station. Tony was waiting for them on the platform. Jan ran to him and hugged his thin frame.

Part Three

Chapter Fourteen

                         
Wandering, I have discovered

Much treasure on my way, and none more precious

Than the meaning of Going Home, the real meaning.

One traveller said: ‘Home's where I hang my hat.'

Well, there's some truth, but not all truth, in that.

Add two more letters – then, instead of part,

You'll get the whole: ‘Home's where I hang my heart.'

Part of ‘Going Home', from
A Pocketful of Pebbles

 

O
UTSIDE
E
USTON
S
TATION
, Tony hailed a taxi. ‘To the King's Road, please.' As it swept southwards through bombed streets and past Nelson's still-standing Column, Jan basked in the sound of Robert and Janet laughing with their father over the drunken breakfast menu. It was like music. In Tony's smile to her from across the seat, she felt once again the warm, shared pleasure of co-parenthood which she had not known for five years. Tony was gazing with delighted amazement at his fourteen-year-old son and elegant seventeen-year-old daughter.

Only Jamie's presence was needed was to make his happiness complete, but Jamie was in Yugoslavia with the Scots Guards, having been refused compassionate leave. During rough games in the Officers' Mess a few days earlier, Tony explained, Jamie had squirted a brigadier with a soda siphon, and his commanding officer was not, in the circumstances, inclined to grant him special favours.

Tony looked astonishingly well, Jan thought: thinner and balder, but not wasted or sunken-eyed. Indeed, the sparkle of schoolboy mischief was still in his eyes, even more so than before, perhaps because he had been stuck in a succession of horrible boarding-school-type establishments for three years. (‘Picnic? I'll give you picnic!' As the taxi drove past St James's Park, Jan could hear her nannie Lala's words.) She knew how much he must be treasuring these first moments of family life regained. But was he, like herself, privately agonizing about the question of that night's sleeping arrangements?

Looking out of the taxi window at the thin and war-weary Londoners scurrying about near Victoria Station, Jan tested her conscience. She was deeply moved – she had known she would be – to see these people who must have lived through the bombing, and to see the city of her childhood so changed, with unexpected empty plots and vistas where buildings had been. But she did not feel the violent assault of guilt which other Londoners claimed to have felt on returning from wartime exile. She reflected that in her own way she, too, was war-weary after five nomadic years as Allied propaganda.

The taxi passed Wellington Square, but did not stop. The house Jan glimpsed at the far end on the left looked shut up and neglected. It was uninhabitable, Tony explained, having been vacant for several years, and the basement kitchen had dry rot.

‘Just here, please.' They drew up outside King's Court North, a 1930s block of flats next to Chelsea Town Hall where Jan's childhood friend Frankie Whitehead lived; she had arranged to put them up for a short time in a flat belonging to a friend. She greeted the new arrivals from America with delighted hugs, and didn't mention bedrooms. They all went straight out to supper at the Queen's Restaurant in Sloane Square, a favourite of Tony and Joyce's from pre-war days. Some other friends came too, including Anne Talbot. It was an evening of celebratory reunion, with funnier-than-ever stories from Tony (the comedy enhanced by the blackness of the German-prison context) and lots of laughter and catching of eyes across the table. Anne observed ‘Tony and Joyce': they seemed to be as good a ‘team' as ever, giving one another leads in conversation. What was the truth? Was it not odd that on their first night together for five years they should choose to have dinner in a large group, rather than alone? Anne would no doubt find out.