The Real Mrs Miniver (21 page)

The newspaper and magazine interviews began: Jan found herself scrutinized by journalists, some of whom had not read the book. They wanted ‘heart-rending human incidents', details of what it felt like to part from one's home and half one's family. They wanted revealing nuggets about her life – and here was a good, safe one to fob them off with: Jan Struther didn't like tea. But surely all English ladies drank tea? Especially Mrs Miniver, to go with those crumpets and small ratafia biscuits? No, Jan said: ‘You see, in reality in England I was at a typewriter in a newspaper office at four o'clock with a thick mug of coffee beside me.' She really
didn't
like tea. She had expressed her loathing for it in one of her early articles for
Punch:
‘It is difficult to make perfectly but nauseating when anything less than perfect. Neat, it is pleasing to the eye but acrid to the palate; diluted with milk, it is passable in taste but revolting in colour.' The drink became one of the banes of her life in America. She was constantly given imperfect cups of it by kind hostesses who wanted to make her feel at home.

‘Dear Nannie,' Jan wrote on 5 August, ‘We have arrived safely, and we are now at Cape Cod staying with Mrs Patrick's mother [Tony's brother Patrick's American mother-in-law, who had a large house on the Cape]. The children are being very good, and if ever they get quarrelsome, I mutter ‘H. and P. of the B. E.' (Honour and Prestige of the British Empire) and they pull themselves together.
Mrs Miniver
is selling well, and all the chaps who really matter here seem to agree that it's exactly the right book to put Great Britain across over here, and that it will do a great deal of good, especially among American housewives…! It really is an extraordinary development, considering how little I was thinking about the US when I wrote the bloody things.'

While the children were canoeing and eating banana splits with their cousins on Cape Cod, Jan kept dashing back on trains to New York for meetings in grills, hotel lounges and 28th-floor offices. On 7 August she met Clark Getts: ‘Clark H. Getts, Inc., Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York City' – she was to become all too familiar with that showy sans serif letter-heading over the next four years. Clark Getts were prestigious lecture-circuit agents, and among their fifty-three lecturers for the coming season, many of them advertised in the papers as ‘eye-witnesses of the war', were Carl J. Hambro, President of the Norwegian Parliament and of the League of Nations Assembly (‘I Saw it Happen'), Sir Evelyn Wrench, Editor of the London
Spectator
(‘What is Happening in Europe'), and Norman Alley, ‘Ace of the Newsreels' (‘War on Review'). Now Jan Struther was to join their list. She was particularly pleased to be with the same agents as the children's author Munro Leaf: she loved
Ferdinand.

‘It is understood that I will assume my rail and Pullman lower berth fares, that I will assume all other travel expenses incident to engagements … It is also understood that if it becomes necessary for me to cancel any engagements, I will reimburse you and the local management for all expenses incurred … For and in consideration of your services, you are to receive 40% of all earnings before remitting the balance to me…' She signed up with Getts on 24 August, with no qualms that they were sinking their claws into her. Lecture tours sounded thrilling. You travelled from state to state and there was somebody waiting on the platform to greet you. What better way to meet the real America? She wouldn't mind a bit about the tiringness of long-distance travel, if it was all in the cause of putting Great Britain across to isolationists. She had always been at her happiest and most creative on trains, anyway.

On another of her dashes from Cape Cod she met Clifton Fadiman, who was ‘master of ceremonies' (that is, the man who asked the questions) on the famous radio quiz programme
Information, Please!
He was in search of a female guest for the programme, and Jan said she would be happy to have a go. Her first
Information, Please!
broadcast was scheduled for 10 September, and she would leave for her first lecture tour on 2 October.

Pictured right is the first of 276 Details of Engagement which Jan was to receive from Clark Getts over the next four years. What would the West High School in Minneapolis look like? What would Mrs J. Harold Kettelson look like? Who would turn up to listen to the lecture? Jan was intrigued.

Fizzing with excitement after meeting influential people all day, Jan collected Dolf from his work in the evening – he was still wrapping parcels in Union Square. The unworthiness of the job filled her with rage. ‘How
can
you work there? The smell of that man's cigar! I
know
you'll find something better soon … I did a lovely book-signing today at the British War Relief, and I had a hilarious lunch with the Morleys at Harcourt Brace…' Jan talked away as they walked together up to East 50th Street. ‘D'you like the top of that building?' Dolf gave an architectural appraisal shining with art-historical wisdom, and Jan was dazzled by the fineness of his mind.

He did, eventually, make the terrible mistake which got him sacked from the parcel-wrapping job: he registered a large consignment of parcels which were supposed to be insured, and insured a pile which were supposed to be registered, and sent them all off to South America before the mistake had been spotted. ‘You will be happier somewhere else, Herr Doktor,' said his boss. ‘Get out!'

Dolf was grateful for that final ‘Herr Doktor': it implied recognition that he had been too bright, rather than too dim, for the job. Jan was delighted, but not for long. Dolf did indeed soon get another job, but it was addressing envelopes: he was paid by the hundred. Now at least he could work at home.

*   *   *

‘It's 8.30 p.m. Welcome to
Information, Please!
' This was Clifton Fadiman speaking into his microphone at Radio City. ‘And with us tonight on our panel we have Jan Struther, the author of
Mrs Miniver,
and John Gunther, author of
Inside Europe
and
Inside Asia.
They are joining our usual friends Franklin P. Adams and John Kieran. As you know, the aim is to send in a question the panel can't answer. If you succeed, we will send you ten dollars and all twenty-four volumes of the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
But first, a word from our sponsor.'

‘Canada Dry is the aristocrat of the table…'

Help, thought Jan. The sponsor was bringing momentary respite, but any second now the ordeal would begin. She was sitting uncomfortably on a copy of the Manhattan telephone directory, which she had been given to raise her to the level of the microphone.

‘Now, Miss Struther and gentlemen, Lois B. Walker of Mill Valley, California has sent in the following question: What practical use is made of these scientific facts: (a) helium is lighter than air and non-inflammable; (b) silver chloride is sensitive to light; (c) liquid ammonia absorbs heat when it vaporizes; (d) wood alcohol has a low freezing point?'

This was awful. They hadn't done much science at Miss Richardson's Classes. The first one must be something to do with balloons … But Mr Adams had put his hand up. ‘The first is airships. Silver chloride and light: that's photography. Liquid ammonia: that must be refrigeration. Wood alcohol: isn't that the anti-freeze they put into automobile radiators?'

‘Attaboy, Mr Adams! Now, Mr Frank J. Mason of Laurel, Mississippi asks us the following: What pitcher (a) holds the Major League record for strikeouts in one game; (b) holds the Major League lifetime record for strikeouts? (c) holds the record of the greatest number of consecutive hitless innings?'

Surely she couldn't be expected to know that. Even the others on the panel had to confer. Wasn't it Bob Feller, or someone, of Cleveland, who struck out eighteen Detroit Tigers back in 1938? And surely Walter Johnson must be the record-holder for strikeouts? Correct; but they couldn't answer the consecutive hitless innings question. They were stumped, Jan noticed. And they wouldn't even know what ‘stumped' meant.

‘Congratulations, Mr Mason. The
Encyclopedia Britannica
is on its way to you. And now another word from our sponsor.'

These men knew their stuff. They knew their chemical elements, their Bible, their Greek myths, their Swinburne, their Longfellow. Their hands went up before Jan had time to think. But her moment of glory came. ‘Mrs Donald G. Dempsey of Sharon, Ohio asks the following: Name a work of fiction in which: (a) five sisters are among the principal characters; (b) four sisters are among the principal characters; (c) three sisters are among the principal characters; (d) two sisters are among the principal characters; (e) one sister is the principal character.'

‘Well,
Pride and Prejudice
is five,' said John Kieran, ‘and
Little Women
is four, and
King Lear
is three…'

‘And what are the names of the Little Women?'

‘Let me see. There's Amy…'

But the men didn't know the others. Joyce put her hand up. ‘They are called Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March,' she said in a quiet and startlingly English-sounding voice.

‘Good on you, Miss Struther.'

She would be invited again.

*   *   *

Term began for the children, at Trinity School, a private day school on the West Side of Manhattan, where all the cousins went. Rachel Townsend, a great ‘fixer', managed to persuade the maintenance man of 1 Beekman Place, Al Cominucci, to agree to be the family chauffeur for the school run. Off the children went each morning; and Rachel sat in bed for another two hours. Her breakfast tray had slots on the sides for the post and the papers.

The news pages were full of the forthcoming presidential elections. Rachel supported Roosevelt, because she sensed (in spite of his cautious words) that he would not stand by and let Nazism triumph in Europe. Greenough (being right-wing Eastern Seaboard) was anti-Roosevelt. Jan felt the same way as Rachel, but she went further: she loved Roosevelt for his quiet rhetoric and his vibrant face which belied his physical frailty. She admired him for daring to be unpopular with the rich to help the poor, and she could read on his face the anguish of a man torn in two directions, between Winston Churchill and Congress. She even started dreaming about him from about this time. ‘I've been dreaming fantastically, mostly FDR-politically,' she told Dolf.

And still
Mrs Miniver
crept up the national bestseller list. On 22 September 1940 it was second, and on 29 September it was Number One. ‘TOP!' wrote Jan, next to the
Herald Tribune
headline ‘What America is Reading'. The next four, in descending order, were
How Green Was My Valley
by Richard Llewellyn,
The Beloved Returns
by Thomas Mann,
Stars on the Sea
by F. van Wyck Mason, and
To the Indies
by C. S. Forrester. On the nonfiction list,
Mein Kampf
was seventeenth.

Jan boarded a train in the direction of Minneapolis on 2 October, as bidden by Clark Getts. The paint was olive-green, the upholstery was brownish plush, and Jan was full of curiosity. ‘I love seeing the approaches to small towns from the train,' she wrote, ‘– the children's toys in the yard, the bright-coloured washing hanging on the line: there was a beautiful old patchwork quilt just now hanging outside a very poor little frame house – probably their only heirloom and treasure. Glimpses like that, to me, are the real essence of America – not the skyscrapers or the Statue of Liberty.'

Then, as night fell, there was the new experience of sleeping in a curtained berth above or below the berth of an American stranger. ‘I'm sharing with a pleasant moon-faced middle-aged man with rimless glasses,' Jan wrote, ‘who has slept most of the way, awakening only at intervals to enquire from new passengers about the progress of the Ball Game at St Louis. He has the Lower Berth, I have the Upper. I know nothing about him and he knows nothing about me. We will never see each other again. Yet just for this night I shall sleep suspended 3 feet above him in that curiously impersonal proximity which seems such a fascinating part of American Pullman life.'