The Real Mrs Miniver (10 page)

The love she felt for her children was all the more intense because she saw so little of them. An article she wrote for the
Spectator
called ‘Half-Term', about visiting Jamie at boarding-school, depicts the cut-offness of parents from children, and the briefness of a 1930s half-term. Children got only the tiniest whiff of non-school life. Parents stayed in a hotel near the school, watched the school cricket match on Saturday, then went to school chapel on Sunday and took the child out afterwards for a picnic on the beach. That was the end of half-term.

On Saturday:

Throughout the afternoon he sits wedged between you on a garden seat, watching the match with unflagging seriousness. You yourself are more occupied with watching him; he is close beside you, yet a thousand miles away; he is still living in an alien world. ‘Played!' he says at intervals; and ‘Oh, bad
luck'
dutifully, when somebody misses a catch. Only twice during the afternoon does he make any remark unconnected with the game. The first time is when an immensely fat boy of about twelve walks past.

‘I bet you don't know what
his
nickname is.'

‘Fatty?'

‘No.'

‘Piggy?'

‘No.'

‘Er – Suet?'

‘My gosh!' he exclaims respectfully. ‘However did you guess?'

The second time is when he nudges you in the ribs and jerks his head towards a round-faced solemn little boy in spectacles. ‘That's Rupert Smith-Twissington. He collects skulls.'

On Sunday:

You spend a hot, happy day on the beach, punctuated only by a colossal lunch of sausage-rolls, bananas and ginger-beer and a hardly-smaller tea of jam-puffs, buns and raspberry cider. He is still a little remote to begin with, a little inclined to answer every inquiry with an automatic ‘Yes, thank you, Mummy'; but he soon becomes perfectly at his ease. Leaning back against a sand-dune, you try to look at him dispassionately. He is certainly much plumper and browner than he was six weeks ago; his manners have improved and he is more independent; he is, in fact, a very nice little boy of nine: and if his chief interest in life seems to be food and his small-talk consists entirely of age-old riddles and verbal catches – well, little boys of nine are like that, and you may as well accept the fact. And if you once thought that he was something a little out of the ordinary, that he had imagination, that you could talk to him as though he was a contemporary, then you were deceived; and a good thing too, you reflect, or he would be having a bad time of it at school.

At this point you notice that he has stopped chewing and is gazing curiously at the half-eaten jam-puff in his hand.

‘What's wrong?' you ask. ‘Isn't it a good one?'

‘Mm,' he replies. ‘But I was just wondering. Do you ever think things aren't really there at all – only inside your mind?'

‘Good Lord! Have they been teaching you about Bishop Berkeley already?'

‘No. But I asked Rupert Smith-Twissington that once, and he said
he'd
often thought of it too.'

Joyce liked merriment in a child, but she had a particularly soft spot for inscrutableness and solemnity. She knew from experience just how frail a child's happiness and sense of security could be. A child could express all the sadness in the world just by not laughing, or by saying something simple and grave and true. This is a moment on Guy Fawkes night, from
Mrs Miniver:
‘Toby, his feet sticking out over the edge of the seat, was completely immobile, but whether from profound emotion or too many coats, it was difficult to tell.' She understood the complicated feelings of a boy about going back to school:

Not that Vin disliked school; but it had to be regarded, he found, as another life, to be approached only by way of the Styx. You died on the station platform, were reborn, not without pangs, in the train, and emerged at the other end a different person, with a different language, a different outlook, and a different scale of values. That was what stray grown-ups you met in the holidays did not seem to understand when they asked you the fatuous and invariable question, ‘How do you like school?' It was impossible to answer this properly, because the person of whom they asked it never, strictly speaking, arrived at school at all.

And she understood a solemn child's eccentric way of opening Christmas stockings:

Toby pulled all his presents out, but he arranged them in a neat pattern on the eiderdown and looked at them for a long time in complete silence. Then he picked up one of them – a big glass marble with coloured squirls inside – and put it by itself a little way off. After that he played with the other toys, appreciatively enough; but from time to time his eyes would stray towards the glass marble, as though to make sure it was still waiting for him.

Mrs Miniver watched him with a mixture of delight and misgiving. It was her favourite approach to life: but the trouble was that sometimes the marble rolled away.

The enchantment of Tony and Joyce's family life at its best was captured in that ‘Christmas Stockings' piece. ‘Words', wrote Joyce, ‘are a net to catch a mood: the only sure weapon against oblivion.' Here she caught the mood of Christmas dawn on an eiderdown, and the intricate tracery of the ‘family pattern' for which she would one day grieve.

There were cross-currents of pleasure: smiling faces exchanged by her and Vin about the two younger children; and by her and Clem, because they were both grown-ups; and by her and Judy, because they were both women; and by her and Toby, because they were both the kind that leaves the glass marble till the end. The room was laced with affectionate understanding.

This was one of the moments, thought Mrs Miniver, which paid off at one stroke all the accumulations on the debit side of parenthood: the morning sickness and the quite astonishing pain; the pram in the passage, the cold mulish glint in the cook's eye; the holiday nurse who had been in the best families; the pungent white mice, the shrivelled caterpillars; the plasticine on the door-handles, the face-flannels in the bathroom, the nameless horrors down the crevices of armchairs; the alarms and emergencies, the swallowed button, the inexplicable earache, the ominous rash appearing on the eve of a journey; the school bills and the dentists' bills; the shortened step, the tempered pace, the emotional compromises, the divided loyalties, the adventures continually forsworn.

It was a formidable list of parental woes. She couldn't avoid the filth altogether. But down the margin, in her annotated copy, Joyce's daughter Janet scribbled: ‘I don't remember my parents forswearing many adventures.'

Chapter Five

This knowledge at least is spared us: we cannot tell

When any given tide on the heart's shore

Comes to the full.

The crown-wave makes no signal, does not cry

‘This is the highest. Mark it with a bright shell.

It will be reached no more.'

From ‘High Tide' in
The Glass-Blower

 

‘I
WALKED ROUND
to dine at the M. Gs,' wrote Anne Talbot in her diary of 27 April 1930. ‘We played poker. In the middle there was a lot of telephoning to Edinburgh as one of Tony's uncles died. Joyce, although slightly upset, was a
little
bit proud of it all. We had a lot of journalist rot from her today, and car business from Tony. Their own experiences loom so very large…'

The death of the unmarried uncle meant that Tony's father Jim Maxtone Graham was now Laird of Cultoquhey, and that Tony was next in line. Now the Cultoquhey summers could begin. The whole family – two sons, two daughters, eleven grandchildren, four nannies – travelled to Scotland each summer for a house party which lasted from July to September.

The holidays always began in the same way: the children were sent up to Perthshire from Euston by train, with the luggage and Nannie, and were met at Gleneagles station by Welsh, the chauffeur.

Tony and Joyce drove up together, taking turns at the wheel and stopping for a night on the way, at the Haycock at Wansford or the George at Stamford. The sign at the top of the Finchley Road marked to ‘The North' gave them a stab of excitement every time, though there were no children in the back to share it with.

Joyce liked the way an annually repeated journey combined the thrills of travel with the comforts of tradition and familiarity. Memory flags, as she called them, accumulated along the Great North Road. The place where the car had once dropped a push-rod, which after a long search they had recovered from the gutter a quarter of a mile back; the tin garage where they had once been stranded for eight hours and played endless games of picquet on a packing-case; the field where they had passed gypsies with a skewbald horse: each of these places became like a friend, which she and Tony looked forward to passing and repassing and thinking the irresistible thought, ‘This time last year…' At the summit of the road between Bowes and Brough, they stopped to stretch their legs and smoke, and Tony ground his cigarette end into the tinder-dry earth as they took a last look at the southward view.

They bumped along the drive towards Cultoquhey at dusk, as the gong was ringing to dress for dinner. They went upstairs to say goodnight to the children and Tony, wearing starched cuffs, flicked sixpences to make them vanish up his sleeve by the bedsides.

Cultoquhey, from a coloured print of 1861

The family Joyce married into. Tony is bottom left, with Janet. Jamie is second left, top row. Robert is the baby, bottom right

Tony's father Jim could not disguise his penchant for pretty young visiting girls, bitterly remarked upon by Anne Talbot in her diary. He flirted at dinner, and not with her. (This weakness was crystallized into anecdote by Tony: ‘When my father was a young man, he was at a dinner party in Perthshire, a grand affair, all the men in their kilts and doublets. He sat next to one particularly attractive girl, and he reckoned he was doing rather well with her when he felt her hand on his knee. He thought he was in for an exciting evening. That was during the soup. During the fish she gave his knee a comforting pat from time to time. But I'm afraid that when the joint was served all that happened was that his hairy knee was offered a morsel from the fair lady's plate.')

After nursery breakfast the children were allowed into the grown-ups' dining-room to watch their grandpapa's daily breakfast ceremony. First he ate his porridge standing up with his back to the wall – a tradition dating from the days when lairds used to stab one another in the back. Then he sliced the top off his soft-boiled egg and drank its liquid contents in one gulp, making a loud noise. Last, he threw his apple up into the air and caught it on the blade of his
sgian-dubh.

Grown-ups did tricks and organized occasional family concerts and fancy-dress parades, but were otherwise rarely concerned with child care. Nannies, as always, looked after the children. But at Cultoquhey there was the complication of conflicts between the nannies belonging to the different batches of cousins. Joyce, after many fruitless interviews at agencies, had found a Canadian nannie-from-heaven. Even her name was heavenly: Mabel Good. The Smythe cousins also had a nice normal nannie, Scottish Nannie Blythe, under whose benign rule the American Townsend cousins longed to live.
Their
nannie, known as Irish Nannie, was not like other nannies. Instead of eating at the nursery table with everybody else, she took her plate and chair, opened the toy-cupboard door, and ate her meal facing into the cupboard where nobody could see her. Every day she would walk up the long drive to the post office at Gilmerton with a parcel addressed to somewhere in Ireland. What, the other nannies wondered, was she sending? Was it a food parcel which she had secretly been filling behind the cupboard door? Once they spotted her trying to post a letter in a petrol pump.

Irish Nannie was eventually replaced by a French nannie, who was worse. She wore a whistle round her neck which she blew to summon the boys, as if they were dogs. She did not allow them to eat a sweet or toffee unless she had tasted it first and pronounced it fit for consumption, so all sweets and toffees tasted of French saliva.