The Real Mrs Miniver (5 page)

Stuck in a train or bus, she would sooner strike up conversation with a man than with a woman. With men she tried harder, and said wittier, cleverer things, and generally shone more. Though she coined the expression ‘She's the fondest person that I'm of' to describe her female friendships, she couldn't disguise the fact that she found men more stimulating, a trait which often annoyed the female friends she made in adulthood.

She was attracted to amusing, eloquent men. The man she married in 1923 was, primarily, funny, and amused by the things which amused Joyce. He played practical jokes, and did accents, and redeemed draughty foreign train journeys by writing an apt limerick or starting a competition to spot the passenger with the most gold teeth: brittle humour she enjoyed. But part of her rebelled against the safety of humour – the way being constantly funny removes the need for a real conversation about anything. She was also attracted to sadness, and it was perhaps inevitable that in the late 1930s she was carried away romantically as well as altruistically by the plight of the European Jews.

Beneath her thin skin, sexuality raged. ‘Over-sexed' was the word used of her in her lifetime; now she would be described as ‘highly sexed'. Men were attracted to the gypsy in her, to the boy in her, beneath the surface of the well-born pupil of Miss Richardson's Classes. She celebrated Armistice Day astride a lion in Trafalgar Square. In sex, too, her taste for the illicit – for what she shouldn't be doing, seeing, saying or wearing – was strong. The price she was to pay for her sensations of rapture was high; in the 1920s, she could have had no idea how high. This, from her book of poems
Betsinda Dances,
published by the Oxford University Press in 1931, is an inkling:

‘Evening'

I have looked too long upon the sunset.

    Its spell has stripped me bare

Of all the comfortable thoughts

    That commonly I wear.

Evening's the chink in the soul's armour,

    And through it I can feel

The soft cold fingers of desolation

    Silently, deftly steal.

Nought's left of joy now but its transience;

    Of pride, but its loneliness.

Love's a dim ache, a dying music,

    Beautiful, comfortless.

Colour to greyness turns, and slowly

    Light fades from the sky:

I sit bowed down by the weight of evening,

    Too sorrowful to cry.

Joyce got a part-time job as a secretary at Scotland Yard in 1919. It was one way of satisfying her childhood agony of curiosity about what happened to drunkards when they went inside the doors of Rochester Row Police Station. Her superior, looking over her shoulder one morning, happened to see her typing out a court report riddled with four-letter words: ‘I think we'll have one of the
men
finish that one, Miss Anstruther.' For years afterwards she remained friends with the detectives at Scotland Yard, and dropped in sometimes to play poker with them.

She was now a modern maiden, wearing high-heeled shoes and smoking cigarettes. The metaphors she used in her early articles in the
Graphic
and the
Evening Standard
(published in 1920 and 1921) reflect her daily experience: something was ‘as bland as a cocktail without ice', and you could as little do something else as ‘live on a diet of salted almonds'. The débutante's life involved many iceless cocktails and salted-almond evenings. Polite young men escorted her home to 25 Curzon Street in Mayfair, where she lived with her mother, the Dame.

Joyce's first love was Peter Sanders, whose details are to be found in the leather-bound notebook in which she recorded ‘Dances, Dinners, Boys, Girls, Etc.' between 1918 and 1920. Under ‘Men, 1920' appears ‘Sanders, Arthur (Peter), 3 Eaton Square, VIC 3785. Bayford Lodge, Wincanton, Somerset. 3rd Grenadier Gd., Gds Club.'

The modern maiden

Joyce burned her diaries in 1921 and never wrote about Peter afterwards, so it is only from the spidery handwriting of her best friend Frankie Whitehead that we know Peter to have been ‘a wonderful person, good-looking, very clean, very popular and very nice'. The last dance Joyce went to with him was at Claridge's on 11 November 1920 – the Armistice Dance. Peter went away for a few days' hunting after that, and on 22 November shot himself. Gambling debts were the official reason.

A month after Peter's death Joyce wrote this poem, which she called ‘Immortality'. It is not what one might expect from someone soon to be writing hymns.

They talk to me of the immortal soul:

    And maybe they speak the truth.

But O! small comfort, when I want the whole

    Bright bravery of your youth

Which grim death stole.

And yet wise men, forsooth,

        Try with vague tales of immortality

        To comfort me.

They talk to me of all eternity:

    I think it sounds too vast

And overwhelming just for you and me,

    Two pagan lovers; we should be aghast

And shiver at its cold immensity.

I'd rather be

    Back in our little past –

Transient, perhaps, but we

        Found it sweet, even though it might not last

        Like this strange solemn immortality

        They offer me.

The cocktails and salted almonds carried on. The social system may have seemed cock-eyed to Joyce, but she had no qualms about enjoying what it offered to her as a posh (fashionable word) girl in London, or the way it introduced her to suitable young men.

She travelled to Egypt in 1922 with her father in his capacity as a Director of the Suez Canal Company. They took the Bombay Express through France and sailed from Marseilles over Christmas. Joyce got herself up as a gypsy for the Christmas Day fancy-dress dance, and dined in the captain's cabin.

She wrote social notes for
Tatler
's ‘Bystander' pages: ‘Among the many visitors to Egypt were Miss Bridget Keir, the artist; Sir Horace and Lady Pinching and their daughter; Lady Somerleyton (who expects to stay in Egypt until the end of April, as does also Lord Mount Edgcumbe), and Sir Henry Webb, the former Liberal MP for the Forest of Dean division.' Her holiday diary is a
Tatler
-ish list of pleasures: tennis-playing at the British Club, French ladies at tea dances, hotel overlooking the Nile towards the Pyramids. ‘NB: saw entrance to new tomb – Tut-ankhamen.' On the last day: ‘Tea on peak of highest sand dune overlooking sunset. Slid down and came home singing, Gibbs and I barefoot, Tommy Wilson with large tear in seat of bags.' No other girl was present on the sand dune, and Joyce revelled in being the only woman among men.

*   *   *

Another man listed in that ‘Dances, Dinners, Boys, Girls, Etc' book was ‘Maxtone Graham, Tony, 32 Addison Road, Kensington'. He and Peter Sanders had been friends at Sandhurst, and when Peter died, Joyce talked and cried with Tony about him. Tony told her he was in love with someone who didn't reciprocate, then confessed that the girl was Joyce.

It is often said that ‘Tony was the shoulder she cried on' when Peter died, and that ‘she fell in love with Tony on the rebound', not phrases which conjure up
Brief Encounter
-type swooning. It was not love at first sight, on Joyce's part at least; it was love at about a hundred and fifty-ninth sight. But it was love. Slowly emerging love could, she discovered, be every bit as strong once it did emerge as the at-first-sight kind. Gradually, and then one day with sudden clarity, Joyce found she was at one in body, mind and spirit with the generous and fascinating man who loved her. Here is her poem called ‘Thoughts After Lighting a Fire'.

When to this fire I held a taper,

First flared the impressionable paper;

I watched the paper, as I stood,

Kindle the more enduring wood;

And from the wood a vanguard stole

To set alight the steadfast coal.

So, when I love, the first afire

Is body with its quick desire;

Then in a little while I find

The flame has crept into my mind –

Till steadily, sweetly burns the whole

Bright conflagration of my soul.

He was the eldest son of a Scottish laird-to-be; Burke's
Landed Gentry,
not the
Peerage,
is the book to look up the family in. His father Jim Maxtone Graham was a chartered accountant, of Maxtone Graham & Sime in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. Every morning of his working life he said ‘Morning, Sime' to Sime and Sime said ‘Morning, Maxtone Graham' to him. Tony's mother, Ethel Blair Oliphant, was a writer of history books about the Maxtones, the Grahams and the Oliphants:
The Maxtones of Cultoquhey, The Beautiful Mrs Graham,
and
The Oliphants of Gask.

The family estate, Cultoqhuey, had been in the Maxtone family since 1429. Surrounded by larger landowners, the Maxtones had with quiet doggedness clung for fifteen generations to their beloved house in the heart of Perthshire. Mungo, the tenth Laird, had dryly summed up his opinion of his powerful and grasping neighbours in the Cultoqhuey Litany which he intoned daily at a well near the house, surrounded by his household.

From the Greed of the Campbells,

From the Ire of the Drummonds,

From the Pride of the Grahams,

From the Wind of the Murrays,

             Good Lord deliver us.

His prayer was answered in every line but the third: Maxtones repeatedly married Grahams. The first Maxtone Graham was James, the thirteenth Laird, who combined the names in 1860.

The gabled old house had been knocked down and replaced by a large new gothick house in 1820. Tony's father did not inherit the estate until his unmarried brother died in 1930, so when Joyce was introduced to the family they were living at Bilston Lodge, near Edinburgh. Spinster aunts came to tea. Tony's mother turned out to be the great-niece of Lady Nairne, author of the Jacobite song ‘Will ye no come back again?' The Scottishness in Joyce's own blood came quickly to the surface. She was enchanted.

When she and Tony danced, people stood back from the dance floor and watched. When they talked, their eyes flashed with the pleasure of finding the same things funny. They were so immersed in one another's company that they were often the last to leave a restaurant, forced out at midnight by the sound of chairs being put up on tables.

They started a commonplace book together, writing out their favourite poems, Joyce's hand girlishly loopy, Tony's Etonian and disciplined. Words, and the enjoyment of noticing how other people used them, were a source of constant amusement. They both liked rude words and dirty jokes, a taste neither had ever been able to indulge with anyone else. Being scurrilous together was a new pleasure, and made what Joyce called their ‘hanky-panky on the back stairs' all the more uninhibited. Tony encouraged Joyce in her wittiness, and her writing now developed two strands: the brittle, amusing social-observer strand, nurtured by Tony, and the noticing-sadness-in-everyday-life strand, which was her own.

Their parents told them they were too young to marry, which only made them all the more desperate to do so. They were married at the unfashionably early hour of half-past ten in the morning of Wednesday, 4 July 1923, at All Hallows, London Wall, Joyce draped in downward-hanging silvery 1920s clothes. The wedding was quiet, with only fifty-five guests, no bridesmaids and no reception. Officially this was because of ‘family mourning', but the fourth Baron Sudeley had died seven months before. The true reason was that Dame Eva and Harry were not on speaking terms. Before settling in her pew the Dame was heard to whisper loudly to Tony's father, ‘If that man comes up to speak to me, I want you to knock him down.'

The
Evening Standard's
photograph of the wedding

Quiet though it was, the wedding was reported in no fewer than ten newspapers and magazines. The heading in the Scottish
Evening Telegraph and Post
of 4 July 1923 was ‘Fife Lady Married in London Today. Bridegroom Son of Perthshire Laird.'
The Pall Mall Gazette
noted that Joyce ‘carried no gloves, flowers, or prayer-book.' The London
Evening Standard,
searching for copy, reported that Tony wore a red flower instead of the more conventional white in his buttonhole.