The Real Mrs Miniver (18 page)

Dolf's visa for the United States arrived on 28 April. (His mother had managed to escape from Vienna, and had sailed to New York the month before.) He secured a passage on a ship to New York which would leave from Liverpool on 29 May. On hearing the dreaded date, Joyce lay awake for most of the night. ‘Ich bin um 6 Uhr aufgewacht, so voll Verlangen und Begierde fur dich, dass ich fast in Flammen war. Ach, Gott, wie verliebt bin ich in Dir…'
3

On their last day together, they took photographs of each other on a bench in Battersea Park. ‘My sweetest beloved darling,' wrote Dolf, after the final goodbye, ‘Now this first day is over, which was so sad, so hopeless, that I didn't write even. I don't know how I spent it, only that I sat at the piano and played again and again “Auld Lang Syne”, and “Comin' through the rye” and “Ach, wie ist's möglich denn”…'

Joyce did not go to Liverpool with Franz Philipp and Dolf's sister to see him off. She wrote a letter to him instead, addressed to the hostel in New York where he would be staying. Franz was glad she had not gone to Liverpool: ‘It was an awful crowd of refugees there,' he wrote to her in his broken English, ‘much crying and oriental gesturing, as we called it. Suzy was very, very brave. Only a little sobbing when we stepped the platform back. Really, it was very good you weren't there. It makes everyone miserable.'

Dolf was gone. Again, Joyce was divided in two. Half of her, crushed and exhausted by the loss, wanted to die.

There's no way of knowing

    What like the day will be,

The day he must be going,

    My true love, from me.

There's no way of knowing

    (And it's little I shall care)

If the wind will be blowing

    Or the sun shining fair.

But oh, I'm praying only

    That the tide may be low

When I stand there lonely

    To watch my true love go.

For then, as I wander

    Back across the strand,

I'll see a while longer

    His footprints in the sand.

The tide, inward creeping,

    Will steal them one by one,

And I'll not start weeping

    Till the last of them is gone.

But there, where it vanished,

    I'll lay my body down,

And cry, ‘My true love's banished:

    Christ, let me drown.'

But the other half – the optimistic Mrs Miniver half – wanted to live, and do good, and see justice done. ‘It does seem a little hard, I must say,' says Mrs Miniver's friend Agnes Lingfield over coffee in Sloane Street, in one of the last ‘Miniver' letters, ‘that one should have been unlucky enough to live in a time like this.'

‘Good old Agnes, how she clarifies one's feelings,' writes Mrs Miniver – and this is Joyce speaking. ‘Till that moment I had not realized how passionately I felt that I would not live in any other time if you paid me. I didn't say so; after all, the coffee was on her. But when I left her I found myself crossing the street with particular care, because it would be so awful to get run over just now and not be there to see what was going to happen.'

Part Two

Chapter Eight

You need not envy lovers who are never apart:

For not in the pin-point starry conflagration

Of touch or kiss

Deepest contentment is,

But in the memory of delight, and its anticipation –

The interstellar spaces of the heart.

‘You Need Not Envy', from
The Glass-Blower

 

C
ONNOISSEURS OF THE
film
Mrs Miniver
will remember that on the night Dunkirk fell to the Germans, 7 June 1940, Clem Miniver (played by Walter Pidgeon) was woken by a telephone call in the middle of the night. ‘What? Uh? Oh, emergency, I see … I'll be right over.' It is River Patrol, summoning him for duty. Yawning in his white monogrammed pyjamas, he gets out of his single twin bed and Mrs Miniver (played by Greer Garson) gets out of hers. ‘Sandwiches. Thermos. If you're going out on night duty you'll need them.'

Clem goes down to the village pub, which has been opened especially, and finds it full of mystified men in mackintoshes. ‘I say, Miniver,' says one. ‘What d'you make of it? I'm willing to do anything for my country, but this digging us out of bed at two in the morning – it's taking the war a bit far, don't you think?'

They are instructed to go to Ramsgate and await further announcements. We see fifty little ships chugging along in the darkness and arriving at what looks like a medieval town, with smoking chimneys, a church on a hillside, and a twin-turreted tower on the bridge. The scene was shot early in 1942, six thousand miles away from Ramsgate. The ‘little ships' were models.

‘Attention, please! Attention, please!' An amplified voice speaks to the waiting men from a naval vessel. ‘Switch off engines. As you know, the British Expeditionary Force is trapped between the enemy and the sea. Four hundred thousand men are crowded on the beaches, under bombardment from artillery and planes. Their only chance to escape annihilation rests with you. Your destination is Dunkirk…'

Kay Miniver – for that is her MGM name – cannot sleep. She comes downstairs at half-past five in the morning, nudging the hands of the grandfather clock forward ten minutes as she passes them on the stairs. (This is one of the motifs of the film which mark it as the work of the great and perfectionist director William Wyler. Wyler had a fixation about clock hands. He grew up in Alsace during the First World War, in a village which was captured and recaptured many times. When the Germans marched in they moved the clock hands to Berlin time; when the French recaptured, they moved them back to Paris time. After a while, Alsatian children believed that battles were only about time.)

In the undergrowth of her blooming Kentish garden, Mrs Miniver sees a uniformed Nazi lying asleep, wounded. There is a pistol beside him on the grass. He must be the escaped German flyer Clem was talking about yesterday. He stirs as she is trying to remove his pistol, and forces her at gunpoint towards her house. ‘Move, or make noise, I shoot.'

In the kitchen he demands food and milk, which he wolfs, and spills down his front. On Greer Garson's face terror is blended to perfection with motherly concern for the German's wounded arm. (William Wyler used to insist on as many takes as it needed to get this kind of thing right.) The milkman goes by, whistling ‘With the tow-row-row-row-row-row-row of the British Grenadiers.' The flyer points his gun at Mrs Miniver.

Then he collapses. Mrs Miniver calls the police. He regains consciousness, and Mrs Miniver gives him a cool flannel for his neck. ‘You'll be much better off in hospital,' she says. ‘Really. You'll be well looked after.'

‘I may be finished. But others vill come,' says the flyer, in a spitting German accent. ‘Ve vill bomb your cities, like Barcelona, Warsaw, Narvik, Rotterdam. Rotterdam ve destroy in two hours.'

‘Thousands were killed,' says Mrs Miniver. ‘Innocent—'

‘Not innocent! Zey were against us! Tirty tousand in two hours! And ve vill do ze same here.'

The police car arrives, and the flyer is led away. ‘Mummy! Who was that, Mummy?' Toby comes downstairs in his dressing-gown, the picture of innocence and sweetness.

It is the most unsubtly anti-German scene of the film. In the early stages, when shooting was being scheduled, Louis B. Mayer wanted to cut it. ‘We don't make hate movies,' he said. He was horrified by the idea of offending any country which might buy the film. Wyler, an unashamedly anti-Nazi, war-mongering director, wanted to keep the scene in. He got his way: within a fortnight of the start of principal photography, war had been declared between Germany and the United States, and Mayer relaxed his rules. Mrs Miniver, the perfect wife and mother, would after all come face to face with malignant Nazism in her own kitchen.

If Louis B. Mayer had known what the supposed original ‘Mrs Miniver' – Jan Struther – was doing the night Dunkirk fell, he would have been surprised. Joyce was in a drawing-room in Edinburgh, singing madrigals. Tony was in London after a day at the office, Jamie was at Gordonstoun, and Janet and Robert were lodging with friends in Berkshire.

The drawing-room was that of Tony's sister and brother-in-law Ysenda and Pat Smythe, whose company was balm for the bereft Joyce. She could not tell them her secret, but she needed to escape to Edinburgh to stay with them, in their plain, draughty spare bedroom on the top floor of 38 Heriot Row. They were frugal, and good. Ysenda had been a nurse in France in the First World War and later became a policewoman in this one. Pat was a Bach-loving lawyer with a good tenor voice who knitted his own knickerbocker stockings. ‘It was a beautiful warm light midsummer evening,' Joyce wrote later; ‘the windows were wide open and the scent of red hawthorn came floating in from the gardens on the other side of the granite-setted street. We sat round, happy and absorbed, completely at one, weaving anew in the air patterns of sound which were three or four hundred years old. I remember thinking, suddenly, “This is what we are fighting for.” And when we finally stopped, my brother-in-law said, “I've just realised – I haven't thought about the news for three hours.” Nor had any of us.'

As she sang ‘Adieu, sweet Amaryllis' and ‘Draw on, sweet night', Joyce was singing for civilization. She was also, in her deepest heart, singing for Dolf, who was at that moment crossing the Atlantic, moving further and further away from her by the minute. Beautiful music always had the effect of making her feel he was in the room with her. She was not a good sight-reader, and relied heavily on her co-soprano sister-in-law for her entries; but for civilization, and for Dolf, she persevered. Later in the evening she sat up writing to him, shoring up pillows between her spine and the iron bedstead. She wrote in English: the time had come, she decided, to drop the German veil. The letter was addressed to a refugee hostel at 611 West 114th Street, Manhattan, and marked ‘personal'.

The imminent invasion of Britain was on everyone's lips, as the Germans drew closer and closer to Paris. Every precaution was being taken, and one of these was the systematic wiping-out of place-names on signposts across Britain. Joyce – always apt to focus on the minute consequences of national events – felt a pang of compassion for the imagined German parachutist (disguised as a commercial traveller) asking an English yokel for directions. She expressed this in a letter to
The Times
on 10 June, entitled ‘Our Secret Weapon'. With tongue in cheek, she envisaged the following monologue from the mild-eyed farmer leaning on his hayfork, speaking to the bewildered invader:

‘Clodborough Junction? Ah! Not Market Clodborough, or Nether Clodborough, or Clodborough Canonicorum? No? Oh, well, if the gent is quite certain it's Clodborough
Junction
he wants … Ah. Well, you go along this road for half a mile, or maybe three-quarters, and then there's a by-road on the right – but you don't take no notice of that. And then about a furlong further on there's a big tithe-barn on the left – but you don't take no notice of that neither: except that if so be as there's a chap with a wooden leg alongside of it, loading dung, you might just let him know as young Fred's home on leave and O.K. And then you take the second turn on the right (that is, the second if you don't count the little lane as goes down to Starvecrow, but the third, of course, if you do), and keep straight on past the Jolly Soldiers. (What? Lord bless you, no, it's just the name of a pub. And let me tell you, the draught bitter there is summat like; but they won't be open for another two hours.) Of course, if you want to save time, you can cross the stile just beyond the duckpond and go across the fields alongside Ribstone Wood. Only mind out for old Perigoe's bull in the Ten-Acre; he's a terror, especially when the flies 've been at him…'

But what is this? A rifle-shot rings out! The Local Defence Volunteers, having discovered the parachute, have had time to creep up silently behind the hedge. The
ersatz
commercial traveller lies prone upon the tarmac. The mild-eyed yokel goes on with his haymaking. Our secret weapon has triumphed once again.

It was all couched in hilarity and parody; but Joyce, again, was expressing what Britain was fighting for: the lovely ancient unliteralness of the Englishman in his fields and by-roads, threatened by an invasion of Nazi militarism and precision.

Also in the clarity of the Edinburgh spare bedroom, she wrote for
The Times
a leader in defence of the heart, which was published on 17 June, the day France capitulated. Readers could have had no inkling of how close to the writer's heart this anonymous leader was.

A girl in love was recently heard to say, ‘I feel I ought to be ashamed of myself for being so happy'; and a woman whose child had just died wrote to a friend: ‘I don't feel that I've even got the right to cry: one's own individual sorrows seem so unimportant nowadays compared with the vastness of the world tragedy.'

Both these opinions are understandable; yet both are based on the same profound mistake. World tragedy, or world triumph, is only an abstraction, a mosaic pattern made up of the individual joys and sorrows of countless human beings. These joys and sorrows are no less important in time of war than in time of peace; and indeed, in this particular war, they have acquired a heightened significance. For in this war, above all, we are fighting for the rights of the individual against the tyranny of the state machine. Whatever happens, we must not restrict our capacity for delight and grief. For this is the only thing that keeps us human among all the inhumanities of war; this is our life-line, which will one day haul us back again from these monster-haunted depths to the world of light and sanity which we used to know.