The Real Mrs Miniver (9 page)

But out of all this frivolity and unbelief came some classic hymns with the power to touch people to the heart.

Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy,

Whose trust, ever childlike, no cares could destroy,

Be there at our waking, and give us, we pray,

Your bliss in our hearts, Lord, at the break of the day.

The break of the day, the noon of the day, the eve of the day, the end of the day: the hymn can be about a day, or about life. The words are simple and understandable, in contrast to Eleanor Henrietta Hull's bewildering line from the hymn ‘Be thou my vision', which is sung to the same tune: ‘Be all else but nought to me, save that thou art.'

Middle-brow poets arguably write the best hymns, and Joyce was that: a poet who expressed universal thoughts in familiar metaphors. The thought and the image might be simple, but because the words fitted the thought like a glove, and because the scansion was perfect, real beauty was attained.

Writing these hymns, she imagined herself as the child in the pew. ‘When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old' was a tomboy's hymn – the sort of hymn she would have liked to sing as a child. She knew that a great hymn speaks not just to children but to the child in us all.

As an adult who never wanted to grow up, she retained a deep compassion for children, and a respect for their way of looking at the world. She couldn't bear adults who were out of touch with magic and enchantment. Possibly she cared more about ‘the child inside the man' than she did about actual children. One of her short stories begins:

Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to Mrs Murple. If she went to stay in a haunted house, the most authentic family ghost would go on strike and refuse to show off; if she entered a room where children were playing at pirates, the nursery table would instantly cease to be a Spanish galleon, and the desert island would automatically change back into a hearthrug. She would have harnessed Pegasus to a four-wheeled cab, and made the golden apples of the Hesperides into dumplings. But she had delicate features and an ethereal expression, and it was almost impossible to guess, when you saw her with that far-away look in her eyes, apparently lost in an exquisite reverie, that she was really making mental calculations about housekeeping accounts or wondering how to improve her game of golf.

Prosaic grown-ups need to be taught a lesson, and Miss Murple got her come-uppance. Plainly Joyce was not out of touch with nursery life. But she was never in it for long enough to be anything other than enchanted by the child's view of the world.

Joyce claimed not to be a believer-in-God, but her sense of enchantment was so strong that it was akin to spirituality. She had moments of sudden religious vision.

‘Intimations of Immortality in Early Middle Age'

On the first of spring, walking along the Embankment,

Light-footed, light-headed, eager in mind and heart,

I found my spirit keyed to a new pitch,

I felt a strange serenity and a strange excitement.

I saw a boy running, and felt the wind

Stream past his cheeks, his heart in ribs pounding;

I saw a nurse knitting, and my own fingers

Knew the coldness of needles, warmth of the wool.

I saw, over the barges, gulls flying:

It was my own wings that tilted and soared,

With bone-deep skill gauging to a line's breadth

The unmapped hills of air, its unplumbed hollows.

I saw a woman with child: a second heart

Beat below mine. I saw two lovers kissing,

And felt her body dissolve, his harden

Under the irrational chemistry of desire.

And I, who had always said, in idle, friendly,

Fireside thrashings-out of enormous themes,

That anybody who liked could have my share

Of impersonal after-life, fusion with the infinite,

Suddenly thought – Here, perhaps, is a glimpse

Of the sages' vision, delight by me unimagined:

To feel without doing, to enjoy without possessing;

To bear no longer the burden of a separate self;

To live through others' senses; to be air, to be ether,

Soundlessly quivering with the music of a million lives.

Pantheistic tosh, one might say. But Joyce said, ‘There you have my religious belief.'

*   *   *

Ernest Shepard. the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, became Joyce's illustrator in
Punch
in 1931. Three things about her light verse of this time made it ideal material for Shepard's talents.

The first was her tendency to write simple verses about the daily delights of childhood, which could be enjoyed by children but were really aimed at nostalgic grown-ups.

The second was her depiction of London, whose unsung charms she longed to express. She cherished the sight of tri-cycling children, muffin men, milk ponies, chimney-pots, pigeons, and Belisha beacons.

The third was her light but firm delineation of social class. The children she described (based on her own) were Christopher Robin-like in their well-brought-upness: they were children with nannies, and with smart Mummies in furs; children who peeped out of nursery windows and were allowed out in best coats and hats to tricycle up and down the square before tea. Her street characters – policemen, flower ladies, pavement artists, street musicians and so on – were comically Cockney.

E. H. Shepard was on Joyce's wavelength in each of these three aspects. He, too, drew pictures of children and of childish pleasures which, though loved by children, were positively drooled over by grown-ups. He, too, spoke as much to the child inside the adult as to children themselves. He, too, adored London and sought to express its charms on paper. And he, too, was sensitive to social class and uninhibited about delineating it. When you look at one of his well-brought-up children with long dangly legs on a tricycle, you can hear her posh vowels, and when you look at one of his street artists, you can hear him saying, ‘Why, bless your heart. It ain't no trouble – I'm
used
to Art.'

Joyce's collaboration with Shepard began in
Punch
on 25 February 1931 with the first of a set of verses about London telephone exchanges called ‘Dialling Tones':

The idea for a set of verses on this subject was an example of Joyce's ability (when not in a holiday bad mood) to ‘pick out the lovely bits suddenly'. In the daily act of dialling ‘A–V–E', ‘H–I–L', ‘P–R–I' or ‘R–I–V', her imagination was transported to remembered avenues, hillsides, primrose meadows and riversides. This was an experience shared by many Londoners in the days before all-digital telephone numbers and Joyce, together with Shepard, gave expression to a commonly-felt urge to find poetry in the mundane.

Joyce wrote to the editor of
Punch
at about this time, begging to be allowed to sign herself ‘J.S.' or ‘Jan' instead of being anonymous. This was an honour permitted only to the most established
Punch
writers; and the editor at first refused. But when her second set of Shepard-illustrated verses began in February 1932, the shortened signature at last appeared: ‘Jan'.

‘Sycamore Square' was the name of this set of verses. It was about street life in Wellington Square, and at the end of 1932 Methuen published it in book form together with the telephone-exchange verses. Doggerel-like in its simplicity and shortness-of-lines, the verse was an unobtrusive backdrop for Shepard's illustrations, such as the one of the policeman:

There he is at the bottom of the page, jovial, with a baby on his knee, truncheon and helmet hanging on a peg behind him, cup of tea in his hand, kipper on a plate, buxom smiling wife in an apron, two more babies, and three riotous children waving their knives and forks in the air, as the Sycamore Square children
never
would.

Joyce's next collaboration with E. H. Shepard was
The Modern Struwwelpeter,
also published first in
Punch,
and then by Methuen in 1936. It was a set of cautionary verses inspired by the bad habits of Joyce's children and nephews: James, who liked too much ice-cream (and turned to ice); Philip, who didn't cross the road carefully (and got run over by a bus); Peter, who wouldn't take his halibut oil (and was visited by a monstrous fish); Anthony, who said ‘You've got it up your sleeve' to conjurors (and was turned into a white rabbit); Charles, who said ‘O.K.' (and was turned into a parrot in the zoo); Janet, who said ‘Mamma, I
must
have that' in toyshops (and was turned into a doll in a shop window); Robert, who dialled ‘COW' and ‘HOG' on ‘his mother's toy, the telephone' (and was terrified when the telephone let out a blood-curdling screech); and Reckless Mike and Ruthless John, the twins who tried to make their governess Miss Marlinespike vanish with vanishing cream (but she remained in the air, slapping them invisibly). Though the time Joyce spent with these nephews was limited, she did capture their essence, and many acknowledge that they carried the attributes she spotted into their later lives.

*   *   *

‘But why are you allowed to do things, Mummy, if we're not?' Joyce's daughter Janet asked her one morning in 1933.

‘If I can't be a shining example to you,' was her reply, ‘let me at least be a horrible warning.'

Her children were becoming old enough to ask taxing questions and to remember the answers, and Joyce adored them more and more – though she still avoided the daily drudgery of looking after them. One day in 1933 when a cluster of nannies from different families were all off-duty, Joyce had to drive three or four children to school herself in her Baby Morris, as well as taking Jamie (aged nine) to the school train. The day was so abnormal and so hectic that in the evening she wrote it all down. From Victoria Station she went to Peter Jones to buy nursery chairs, then to Michelin House to buy a guide to France (for a forthcoming grown-ups-only holiday). ‘Went to lunch with Dame at 1.30, and as we sat down suddenly remembered we'd got four people coming to dinner tonight, and I hadn't told Ada. So I had to order dinner over the telephone.'