The Real Mrs Miniver (36 page)

With a single-mindedness which had a whiff of the manic about it, Jan walked the streets around Hell's Kitchen for fourteen hours a day (as she claimed), asking strangers if they knew of an apartment or room to let. She had twenty-five shopkeepers and several taxi-drivers helping with her search. Eventually a shoe-shop-keeper named Casey found her a ‘tiny little dirty place' on West 62nd Street, belonging to a dentist named Levine. She gave Mr Levine her references: the head of the BBC, the head of the radio section of the British Information Services, the head of
Information, Please!,
the British Consul, and the British Ambassador.

Levine read down the list [she wrote to Jamie and Robert], turned to me and said, ‘Yeah. But does Casey know you?' Which to my mind is
epic.
Casey's shop is 8 ft by 14 but he is respected in the neighbourhood & his recommendation counts for more than the British Ambassador's. This seems to me a superb example of the best kind of democracy.

Jan moved in, with the help of Bennes Mardenn (her elevator-attendant friend, who was now a drama teacher) and his retinue of hard-up students. They made furniture out of orange crates, and sat on them at night singing folk music. A stockpot simmered on the small stove: the butcher supplied Jan with bones and chickens' feet, and she lived on what she called ‘Dynastic soup'. Her East Side friends, including Tony's sister Rachel Townsend, were shocked to hear of her living in the slums among criminals. ‘Ah, but you see,' Jan told them, ‘the burglars live on my side of town but they do their burgling on your side of town.'

Despite her address, she carried on living the life of a radio celebrity, appearing on
Information, Please!
and doing BBC broadcasts. She wrote a fierce letter to the
New York Times
protesting against an article which had suggested that sending food parcels to Britain was no use because they hardly ever arrived. Statistics refuted this claim, she wrote: they did arrive, and Britain needed them badly. Writing that letter was as close as she was prepared to go towards lecturing on Anglo-American relations. Another reason for living in Hell's Kitchen was to make herself as uncontactable as possible by the Clark Getts agency. She and Dolf spent their evenings and weekends together, quietly, going to concerts and plays and dining with close friends.

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean – which she had to do again in March, for the Easter holidays and the divorce hearing – had lost its novelty. Being on board the
Queen Elizabeth
was ‘like staying at the Taft Hotel with a hangover'. Sitting in the draughty Tourist Class lounge being served weak coffee by overworked stewards and unable to penetrate any of the ‘family clumps' on armchairs, she yearned for the friendly chaos of the SS
Bayano
in 1945. Here, one didn't touch a rope, or see a sailor, from morning till night. ‘Large ships are no fun unless you like bridge or “horse-racing” or other horrors.' Noel Coward, whom she knew slightly, was also on board, in First Class, but she was not feeling strong or successful enough to dress up and consort with the famous.

In flooded and rationed England she went by train straight to Stowe, to visit Robert for the weekend, and again was freezing cold and saddened.

It's lovely to see him – but apart from that the weekend is being intensely boring, dreary and uncomfortable. One hangs about in the hotel or hangs about in the school, trying to keep warm, & outside it rains, and there's nowhere to sit or BE. I always hated school visits, but Stowe is the worst because you have to take taxis back or forth to Buckingham three or four times a day, since there are no ‘meals for parents' at the school and nothing whatever to do between meals in the town. (There's nothing to do at the school either, but at least it's faintly warmer & there are books here & there.)

Everybody is browned off. The taxi driver said last night that there doesn't seem to be anything left to live for in England now – only more work & more discomfort & less food & no prospects for a young man. It seems perfectly possible that GB is going to lapse into being just a Balkan state, after all its long grandeur & civilization.

I must now go & get ready for yet another journey to the school, for morning chapel. God …

In the chapel she gazed at the boys' faces. ‘They all looked so thin,' she wrote to Dolf, ‘so thin, so pale, and most of them so chinless. And so terribly alike in type. How the country needs some melting-pot blood. It's getting it, of course, in the Lower Classes, my deah, but the others…'

On her way back to London she stayed with her brother Douglas and his wife. This was more comfortable, physically, ‘but God! they look so old and tired, both of them. And everywhere you go it's the same story – panic about the food situation, both now and in the future. At least it would be panic if they weren't English & tired: as it is, it's a sort of dulled resignation. Our present coldness & wetness is less than half the trouble. It's the utter buggering-up of the harvest that's the serious thing. I can't see any prospect of improved conditions for years now.'

Back at 17 Alexander Place, she sat upstairs in Robert's room, the only one with a gas fire (electricity in London was cut off between nine and noon and two and four), feeling a gnawing hunger all day and rushing downstairs to open a tin of sardines while Nannie was out searching for potatoes.

The divorce hearing was to take place at Parliament House in Edinburgh in May, and the thought of it was beginning to give Jan ‘the jitters'. Fate had provided a nice tie-in for the newspapers to pick up on: her divorce from Tony would coincide with Greer Garson's from Richard Ney – a double debunking of the Miniver myth of marriage. (‘The Ney marriage', according to Greer Garson's biographer, ‘unravelled in a mire of accusations and ugly quarrels' towards the end of 1946.)

Tony, on the nights of 22 and 23 February 1947, had done what was known as ‘the gentlemanly thing': to enable Jan to sue him for divorce, he spent two nights at a hotel in Glasgow, The Bristol, with an unnamed ‘professional co-respondent'. They signed the register as ‘Mr and Mrs A. Maxtone Graham' and for the benefit of ‘witnesses' pretended to share the double bed, but in fact took turns on the sofa. Strictly speaking, this kind of collusive pantomime was illegal, but it was regularly winked at by the legal establishment. Jan was spared the ordeal of being exposed in the Press as ‘Mrs Miniver the adulteress', as must have happened had Tony sued her for divorce. They agreed to go to the Scottish Court, partly to avoid publicity, and partly to avoid the six-month ‘decree nisi' waiting period still obligatory in any English divorce.

As the day of the hearing drew nearer, Jan focused her mind on to the days beyond it. ‘I shall feel completely different when the actual case is over,' she wrote to Dolf. ‘I have a feeling that this is the last time I'll ever be in the least Jungular, & that this is only the final culmination of a long strain of misery.' A letter from Dolf arrived.

It occurred to me [she wrote back], as I walked towards the front door to pick up the mail off the mat and saw the familiar envelope lying there, that I feel just as quick and warm a rush of excitement and tenderness on seeing a letter from you as I did in 1939/40. It is the
only
compensation from being apart from you. Otherwise separations are increasingly horrible and indeed unbearable. I want desperately that people should
KNOW
we belong to each other; I want to make some kind of gesture to declare my pride and joy in our unique companionship. The longer I pursue this line of thought, the nearer it brings me to the point where it would not take a very big push to … well, I suppose it's no good talking about it yet awhile anyway.

Robert came home for the holidays and pottered helpfully about the house, connecting wires. Jan needed money to do up Alexander Place. She sold her diamond clips for £65 to pay for a carpet. She sold some tray-cloths and doilies and ‘other horrors' to Peter Jones for £5, but couldn't bring herself to sell a damask cloth belonging to her mother's family and dated 1800 in cross-stitch, because she knew it would be cut up and the bits resold to hotels. ‘But no doubt this inhibition will disappear when I need some other things badly enough. I'm beginning to hate all possessions, except musical or portable ones. I had a grisly job yesterday, turning out the family medicine cupboard, full of reminiscent smells recalling the children's bronchitises and so on. Altogether London is too full of ghosts.'

Jan travelled to Edinburgh by train, with Nannie for company. Cut off from Maxtone Grahams, they booked into a hotel. ‘Three damned nights in Edinburgh,' Jan wrote to Dolf, ‘and not even the fun of seeing T's mother, whom I still love.'

Her undefended action for divorce was heard at the Law Courts on 7 May. Much of her evidence was perjured, but this was all part of the pantomime. First, she was required to swear (falsely) that the divorce was not collusive. To prove, as was required, that Tony was domiciled in Scotland, she had to say that he now lived at his mother's house in Edinburgh and had ‘lived all his life in Scotland apart from absences caused by business or military reasons'. Finally, she had to swear to her belief in the Glasgow adultery story. Regarding her relationship with Tony, her evidence was more truthful: ‘The marriage was very happy at first, but after about eight years Tony's attitude towards me underwent a change, and by about 1936 marital relations between us had ceased. On his return from prisoner-of-war camp, I found that his attitude towards me had not changed, and matters between us remained as they had been before the war.' Without demur, the judge granted her a decree of divorce, and costs.

Darling love: It's over, and it went through all right, and I'm back in London, and I found your sweet telegram waiting for me – and, oh honey, it was unspeakably ghastly. The wigs & gowns and the mechanical legal faces and the gloomy old Parliament House, and the utter squalor of the whole thing, so remote from anything that had ever been happy or tender. Nannie's presence – not in the Court, but in the awful hotel where we had to spend 3 nights trying to keep warm, and sitting in the Lounge, and listening to the genteel murmurs of the fellow guests, or tramping the streets & going to bad movies to pass the hours away – Nannie's presence, as I was saying, was the only thing that saved me from going completely nuts. And then the 9-hour journey back, trying to keep one's mind on a book in order to forget the ordeal …

Surely the ‘Jungles' should have vanished, along with the marriage from which she had at last escaped? They had been caused, she had always believed, by the strain of her double life, which was now a single one. She had envisaged the train journey south from Edinburgh as a blissful ride of freedom; she had imagined that she would return to a state of unattached girlhood, her life simplified, the rotten bit cleanly amputated. But it was not like that. She had left the marriage behind, but the misery came with her on the train.

The only person who could help was Dolf: she fastened her hopes on him. ‘I feel sore and bruised through & through, and I think it will take me a long time to get over it. I am numb about Tony, but not about the “pattern” of happiness and the children's childhood. I want you to take me in your arms and
MAKE
the Jungles go away, and make me into one whole person again, instead of this divided wretch.'

A few weeks later, sitting at the desk in Dolf's apartment in New York while he was in the same room playing the piano, she wrote to him again:

How the pendulum has swung! For so many years, you were the dependent one, full of fears and panicking dreams, and I was the strong one who pulled you into contact with the outside world and tried to give you back your confidence in yourself. And now it is all reversed and
you
are the one who has to be strong & help me fight my terrors & conflicts & ‘the green eyes in the night'. For God's sake, sweetheart, go on being strong for me & make me get back my own strength. Please go on believing in me as much as I have always believed in you, and please go on exercising the gentleness and patience which you have shown throughout this black time.

Dr Lawrence Kubie first appears in Jan's engagement book on 4 September 1947, towards the end of a sweltering summer during which Dolf worked at his job at Avery and Jan achieved little. She tried various doctors, who prescribed nerve tonics and injections, and various psychotherapists, who required her to talk about her childhood on a couch, but with Kubie, an Austrian Jewish psychoanalyst who specialized in ‘blocked' artists, she found at last someone whom she warmed to, and who combined the two things she badly needed: expert professionalism and a willingness to allow a professional relationship to develop into a deep (though not sexual) friendship. She needed the element of love in order to blossom in any relationship, and she had an extraordinary capacity for bringing it out, especially in intelligent men, who responded to her wisdom and her frailty. From September to November she had four or five appointments with Kubie each week, and when she ran out of money to pay his fees he allowed her to come free of charge.

She swung, he told her, between the two poles of ‘great freedom and release of energy in work and play', and being ‘slowed up, with a loss of confidence and a tendency to be emotionally dependent on others.' His listening and his speaking seem to have done her good – or perhaps she merely swung from one pole to the other – because by the time she sailed to England for the Christmas holidays on the RMS
Mauretania
on 30 November, her attitude to large ships, and to the school chapel at Stowe, had undergone a change for the better. On board ship, though the sea was still ‘wet, cold, boring and far too big', she found a nice table-mate, a sixty-year-old widow going back to Lowestoft. ‘We talk about Yorkshire pudding recipes & so forth & it's all very soothing.' In the school chapel, where last year she had seen mere thin, blue-blooded chinlessness, she now saw ‘Corinthian columns rising up behind their Earnest Young Faces & stuff & stuff, and I felt highly numinous & practically believed in God.'