The Real Mrs Miniver (4 page)

Eva and Harry were legally separated but never divorced. Eva moved, with Joyce, first to 51 South Street, and then, in 1920, to 25 Curzon Street. Harry remained in Buckinghamshire, living alone in Whitchurch, in Old Court House (which was smaller than Whitchurch House), and here Joyce spent many beautifully ordered days with him. She always had to be careful to head him away from the subject of genealogical trees, which bored her as much as they fascinated him.

Harry changed for dinner every night of his life. He never owned a motor-car; he went everywhere either on horseback or in his two-wheeled dogcart. One thing he was meticulous about was the opening and closing of gates, which he always did without dismounting. He and Joyce would go out hunting together, and arrive home by starlight, tired and aching. ‘We would help each other off with our mud-caked boots, have warm baths with a handful of mustard in the water and then sit down to reminisce about the day over a roast pheasant and a cheese soufflé.'

Then after supper, when the oil lamps had been brought in and the coffee cups cleared away, they sat and sang to the guitar. Most often they sang the old Jacobite songs – ‘Charlie is My Darling' and ‘Wae's Me for Prince Charlie' – and as the evening wore on they worked themselves into an orgy of sadness over the exiled prince and his long-dead cause.

‘I realise now', wrote Joyce in 1948, ‘that the main reason why the Jacobite songs appealed to my father was because his own life – particularly his private life – had been something of a lost cause. When he sang “Will ye no come back again?”, the image in his mind's eye was not of Charles Edward Stuart but of a witty, pretty woman playing the hostess at the end of a long dinner table, with the sound of Big Ben booming out every quarter hour behind the talk and the laughter.'

Eva lived till 1935, in a house in Swan Walk, Chelsea: ‘Dame to tea' and ‘Dine Dame' appear in Joyce's engagement books throughout her early married life.

Harry died in 1926, knocked off his horse on ‘the narrows' near Whitchurch by a double-decker motor-bus. Joyce was never able to speak of him afterwards without tears filling her eyes. When she thought of him, she remembered a medley of scents: saddle leather, tweed, warm horseflesh, hawthorn, meadow-sweet and cow parsley.

Harry Anstruther

‘The most valuable lesson of all', she wrote, ‘was one which he never set out to teach: how comforting and clarifying, in times of loneliness and perplexity, is the companionship of inanimate objects, the touching and handling of wood and stone; and, when larger problems seem insoluble, how steadying to the nerves, how infinitely soothing to the troubled heart, is the painstaking performance of small, familiar manual tasks.'

Chapter Two

Sometimes the bliss within me burning

    
Leaps to a flame so fiercely bright

That I can feel my body turning

    
To golden ashes with delight.

Body, beware, whose every sense

    
Fans in my soul this fire of joy;

Lest, with a heat grown too intense

    
One day it shall yourself destroy.

‘Body, Beware…', from J.S's collection of poems
Betsinda Dances

 

T
HIS CHAPTER WAS
going to begin ‘Joyce did a typing and shorthand course at Kilburn Polytechnic in 1918'. It is the first postwar detail known about her, and it is arresting because ‘typing', ‘shorthand', ‘Kilburn' and ‘Polytechnic' are so unexpected after the Shakespeare, Mayfair and nannies which preceded them. Joyce was striking out as a woman, taking buses on her own.

But what kind of person was it who took these buses? She was small (five feet, two inches) with blue eyes and black hair so curly that later, when she lived in New York, she liked to have it cut and dried in Harlem. As a child she used to imitate a King Charles spaniel by pulling curls down over the sides of her face to make ears. She was slim and pretty and her eyes shone with laughter and delight.

The wanting to be a boy which had afflicted her in childhood changed in her teens into the happier state of feeling deliciously feminine as well as wanting to climb trees and shoot with a rifle. Early married photographs show her bra-less and barefoot on lawns, with boyish knees beneath a sturdy pair of shorts.

She inherited from her father a genuine liking for practical tasks. She preferred unblocking a drain to talking in a drawing-room. She liked sawing and shaping wood. Writing the hymn ‘Lord of all hopefulness' in 1930, she put into words one of the things she most admired about Jesus: that his ‘strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe'. (She was also badly in need of a rhyme for ‘faith'. Her rhyming dictionary listed only ‘baith' and ‘wraith'.)

Aged eighteen

Lined up with her three children at Cultoquhey in 1934

In her eating and in her household habits, she tended towards the masculine. She drank milk by the glass. She forgot about food for hours, then was suddenly ravenous, but could never eat a whole plateful of anything. ‘Why can't you eat it if you were so hungry?' her family asked. ‘I have a small but vicious appetite,' she replied.

She didn't notice dust or mess, and her natural inclination was to scribble useful numbers on the wall next to the telephone. She didn't put her clothes away in cupboards but hung them on the back of the chair in her bedroom, day after day, until the weight became too much and the chair fell over. In this she was different from her father, who was described by
Vanity Fair
in 1897 as ‘the tidiest man ever invented'.

There was a streak in her which rebelled against what she was supposed to be doing, seeing, saying or wearing. Partly because her mother was so interested in antiques, Jan wasn't at all. Wandering about in a town, she would be drawn not to the shops which sold mahogany chests but to junkier ones where she might pick up an old wooden flute, or a bit of lustre-ware. She liked shininess, and preferred costume jewellery to diamonds. The defiant lyrics of ‘The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies' sang in the back of her head. If she met anyone who came of gypsy stock, she was, fascinated and jealous. Part of her yearned to swap her goose-feather bed for the cold open fields.

It was perhaps the hanging-around with the household staff throughout her childhood which gave her a lifelong preoccupation with justice and injustice. In her unfinished autobiography she described the moment, at the age of seven, when her social conscience was awakened:

When I think of Lala, one small incident always comes back to me. It had nothing to do with her, really, as an individual, but it has always stuck in my mind because it introduced me to two new feelings. My mother and various grown-up guests were having tea with me for a treat in the downstairs day nursery at Whitchurch House. There was a big fireplace in it and Lala was making drop scones for the whole party. The rest of us were all sitting round the table, but Lala went on standing by the fire, ladling the pale golden batter on to the round iron griddle with the hoop handle. When the scones were done she slathered them over with butter, piled them on to a plate and went back to make a second batch, and then a third. My mother had poured out the tea and we were all eating and talking and laughing. After a while Lala turned her hot red face from the fire and said to my mother, ‘Could I please have a cup, Madam?' My mother said:

‘I'm so sorry, Lucy, I forgot all about you!' and handed her a cup.

It was the purest oversight, I suppose, but for some reason I was swept by a wave of shame, embarrassment and vicarious remorse. It was the first time I ever had the feeling that I afterwards learned to call a sense of pathos: and it was the first time I was ever consciously aware that the social system was more than a little cock-eyed. This is an opinion I have never had any temptation to revise.

Joyce wasn't one of those voracious readers who work their way through their father's whole library by the age of twelve. A miniaturist in her writing, she was also a miniaturist in her reading, preferring to devour and re-devour old favourites (
Scouting for Boys, Kidnapped, How to Survive on Land and Sea
) than tackle a long book by Dickens. The books she collected were books of poetry, and her favourite poet was Donne. Given a free hour on a train, she liked to look out of the window and gaze into back gardens and allotments, or write a letter. She never travelled without writing-paper, envelopes, stamps, fountain pen and ink.

She loved films: ‘I would prefer to be at a bad movie than at no movie at all,' she said. Her favourite films, over her lifetime, were
Casablanca, Brief Encounter, Double Indemnity
and
The Third Man.
She unashamedly liked middlebrow art. She didn't love museums, although (and partly because) she knew she ought to. Their hallowed atmosphere annoyed her. At Miss Richardson's Classes the girls had been taken on gallery outings, and Joyce's eyes glazed over after the first room. She liked Ophelia lying dead in the water. ‘Always had a vile taste in pictures,' she wrote in her autobiographical notebook. Her feet hurt. If she stood still for a long time in front of a painting, it tended to be because she was over a hot-air ventilator. There were too many Virgin-and-Childs, and all Joyce wanted to do when confronted with such paintings was to search for the walled town in the distant background and wonder, as she did with back gardens seen from trains, what it would be like to live there.

To sit in rows watching a live spectacle felt like a kind of imprisonment. Of a ballet in the 1930s she wrote in a letter the next day, ‘the males wore lime-green tights so tightly fitting that it was only too apparent that their amorous gestures were not, so to speak, heartfelt.' The interminableness of plays reminded her of the interminableness of church as a child. Even at concerts, which she loved the idea of and the beginning of, her mind would take flight in the second half. She wrote poems on concert programmes, round the edge.

‘Quartet for two fiddles, viola and cello',

That's what it was called by the Austrian fellow.

Well, some people's
Sitzfleisch
is stronger than mine.

‘Quartet for two buttocks, a coccyx and a spine.'

If she turned on the wireless, though, and Schubert's ‘Trout' Quintet happened to be playing, or a Bach violin concerto, she was all a-tingle with the beauty of it, and with the sense of luck which happening to switch on at the right moment brought. She liked to come across beauty or good art by chance, rather than be made to sit in front of it.

But she couldn't get enough of the Royal Tournament. This, she never wanted to end. In 1931 she described the Combined Horse and Motor-Cycle Display by the Royal Corps of Signals for
Punch:
‘Side by side the ancient and the modern, the flesh-and-blood and steel-and-rubber go through identical manoeuvres, until one would be hard put to it to know which to fill with petrol and which with oats.' She was enchanted by the two milk-white war horses, Peter and Punch, aged 23 and 25, who had fought all through the war and were due to retire at the end of the year. Horses moved her more than actors did.