The Real Mrs Miniver (27 page)

‘There is one great – and, so far as I can see, insuperable – problem in a lecturer's life,' she said to her audiences.

Speaking engagements are usually planned many months ahead, and it's only natural that the programme's chairmen, who have to deal with publicity, should want to know well in advance what one is going to talk about. Now, this wouldn't present any difficulty if one was a learned professor with some highly specialized subject like ‘Ancient Chinese Music' or ‘The History of English Painting in the 18th century'. But if, like me, you are not an expert or a specialist in anything at all, but only a quite un-highbrow human being whose main interest is in the day-to-day feelings of other un-highbrow human beings – well, then it's practically impossible to decide on a topic months ahead, because it all depends upon what's going to happen to the world in the meantime. So when this date was first arranged, and my lecture manager called me up and asked what the title of my talk was going to be, I replied that I hadn't the faintest notion. He said, very patiently, ‘Well, but you see, the sponsors want to know.' I said that this was just as bad as being asked to decide on a Monday morning what you were going to talk to your family about at supper a week from Saturday. And then I had an idea. I remembered having once described how ‘Mrs Miniver' used to save up all the thoughts and incidents of the day so that she could discuss them in the evening, and how ‘Clem' did the same thing, and how it was as if each was turning out a pocketful of pebbles that they'd collected for each other during the day. So I said to my lecture manager, ‘Look! You just tell them that the title of my talk will be ‘A Pocketful of Pebbles', and that'll leave me entirely free to speak about anything which occurs to me between this and then.

Audiences enjoyed this friendly babble: it was the antithesis of lecturely pomposity. The loose title enabled Jan to break the lecture up into sections rather than droning on about a single subject for sixty minutes. She liked to give an impression of off-the-cuffness in her lectures, though in fact she honed them for hours in the silence of her hotel rooms. ‘I know a lot of folks who say they always make their talks extemporaneously,' she said in an interview for the Charlotte
Observer
in February 1943 before one of her lectures. ‘Yes, and they sound like it, too.'

‘Please tell us something about your husband,' said the Charlotte journalist. ‘If you want my husband's name,' replied Jan, smiling, ‘you'd better get out your pencil, because it's pretty long. He's called Anthony Maxtone Graham. He's a prisoner-of-war in Italy. And he's doing nicely. I had a letter from him only four days ago. It was written last October.'

*   *   *

That letter had taken fourteen weeks to arrive. Some took longer. Most did not arrive at all, whether to or from Tony. The weekly allowance for a POW to send was one airmail letter form, and one postcard. Out of a total of fifty Tony sent to his family from Chieti Camp in Italy, only three were delivered. To judge from these three that have survived (none to or from Jan), it is clear that captivity (or rather, the consequent freedom from the responsibility of being grown-up) had an inspiring effect on Tony. He blossomed. Jan, in her scathing Ogden-Nashese poem about fidelity, had advised against ‘letting him [one's husband] in for amateur dramatics in any shape or form'. But now she wasn't watching. Tony's latent talents as an impresario were reflected by his election as ‘Chairman of Chieti Entertainment'. To Jamie and Ysenda he wrote:

I have written a longish 1-act play & am going to embark on the most ambitious play-writing project shortly … Music is going strong; we have a theatre variety orchestra, a dance band & a chamber-music orch., all of which come under my aegis. We had a Mozart concert on Sunday which was hugely successful. We are lucky in having Tommy Sampson, a dance band leader in private life, & above all Tony Baines, the Philharmonic player, who is superb. They work from dawn till lights out, scoring & rehearsing … We have not had any scores supplied to us yet, tho' we got the instruments without too much difficulty. The theatre is great fun, & we have produced an enormous variety of entertainments. Again we have no play scripts but James Oliphant [Tony's middle names – his POW
nom-de-plume
] has been kept busy! I have done three 1-act plays, one full-length thriller, and one full-length trial so far – very successful, though I say it. Every show runs for 4 performances – about 300 of an audience at each … I have had good letters from USA but no acknowledgement of any of mine … Tobacco is my principal want; and books on playwriting, and books of plays.

An illuminated testimonial given to Tony by his fellow prisoners mentions the forty-five plays he produced, including
The Admirable Crichton, The Man Who Came to Dinner,
and
HMS Pinafore
(there was much ironic cheering at the line ‘Or an Ital-i-an').

A prisoner-of-war-camp theatrical production. The ‘bead' curtains are made of thousands of rolled-up cigarette papers

While Tony had respected Rommel's soldiers, he held his Italian guards in contempt and up to ridicule. Notices were put up warning the prisoners not to walk or loiter too close to the barbed-wire fences, drafted by the commandant, too proud to ask for a translation from the Senior British Officer, with the help of his pocket commercial dictionary: ‘
PASSAGE AND DEMURRAGE NO ALLOW
'. As a marine insurance broker, Tony knew that ‘demurrage' was the charge paid by ships which loiter too long in port. The pompousness of the notice inspired Tony and his fellow prisoners to all the more fun, in spite of the guards.

While Jan was keeping up the morale of the lecture-going public in America, Tony was doing the same for the Chieti prisoners, many of whom might have sunk into despair but for his contagious good spirits.

*   *   *

Dolf, in uniform, boarded his Army train, and set off westwards across America with ‘the buddies'. Far from being the violin-playing types Jan had hoped for, they were sweet-natured, thick-necked men who talked about girls and tried to prise from Dolf the truth about his love life. Catching his first sight of the Mississippi, one whistled and said, ‘There she is, the big mother fucker.'

Mother –
what?
Dolf had never heard the expression before, and his Viennese sensibilities were ruffled. Saying that about a
river?
He tried not to think of Pauly.

His address, in the coming months, was ‘Company B, 77th Infantry Training Battalion, Camp Roberts, California'. As soon as it was discovered that he could type, he was marked out for desk work, rather than combat duty. His wartime service, as he later described it, was ‘on the typewriter front'. Three thousand miles away from anyone he knew, six thousand miles away from his homeland, he relied on Jan's letters for sustenance. And they came.

‘When are you going to write your next book?' journalists often asked Jan. A sequel to
Mrs Miniver,
or a book about America?' ‘Next week, positively next week, I
will
begin writing that book,' she sometimes replied. But, in truth, no such book was germinating inside her. Apart from her lectures and occasional poems, all her creative energy was channelled into communicating with Dolf. It was the only writing which seemed worthwhile to her.

The war was causing a great slowing-down of transport across America. Trains ran six, seven, eight hours late, and Jan spent these hours at a standstill with pad and pen. Gasoline rationing meant that people had to share rides and forgo non-essential journeys, but despite the shortage three thousand people attended her lecture in Greenville, South Carolina, a fact which astonished her. Would nothing stop them from going to lectures? One thing the gasoline shortage did put a stop to, however, much to her relief, was the compulsory sightseeing drive the morning after.

Darling [she wrote on 16 February 1943], I managed to catch the Cincinnati Express – the station authorities at Richmond were persuaded to hold it for me! (The station-master was a Miniver fan, & had heard me speak at Loew's Theatre last July.) So I rushed across the tracks, & clambered on to the train to find there was no food on it. However, the conductor gave me his only apple, and the Pullman porter came up to my bunk & shyly said, ‘Ah hev an orange yew could hev ef yew lakke…' I ate them and then slept for eight hours & feel fine.

Don't worry about me: I'm tired but at the very
TOP
of my form, making gorgeous speeches & writing gorgeous poetry. I can't be unhappy when I'm in my present state of acute, starry, clear-headed but burning-hearted inner fertility. I've gone down to 108 lbs & am size 10 again. I feel all the time as though I'm walking – no, dancing – on air & my head is bursting with poems and ideas. Forgive my arrogance but who wouldn't be arrogant if they had my luck? – The greatest part of which is to have been your lover for three such perfect years & to know that I am still loved by a great poet who I know is also going to be a great soldier …

Dan [Jan's friend Dan Golenpaul, the businessman behind
Information, Please!
] is going to put me on
Inf. Pl.
at least once a month, if not oftener, as the ‘anchor' guest on the opposite week from Oscar Levant: and as I now get $400 a time instead of $200, you can see what a difference this will make to my finances. But you know nothing changes me inside, whether it's success or revenues, just as long as I have enough vitamins and red corpuscles. (And love. Not sex, but
LOVE
.) Sweet love, I adore you, & I carry round with me two of the photographs I took of you in Battersea Park just before our last agonizing farewell!

Dolf didn't feel that he was being a great soldier. What he was experiencing for the first time in his life – like so many people new to the Army – was boredom. Jan longed for his news: for hilarious details about barrack rooms, or about any violinists he had unearthed. But Dolf could think of little to report, except which film he had seen in downtown Los Angeles during his twenty-four-hour pass. ‘Just came back from my pass, which was on the lonely side, as usual.'

From Jamie in England, too, Jan received letters hinting at the loneliness and newslessness of the soldier. Jamie was at Pirbright Camp, having joined the Scots Guards in October 1942. Army life was too repetitive and dull to write about. The only news Jamie – like Dolf – felt inspired to give was what he had done on his leaves. There was no home to go to in London (the lease on Halsey Street had been given up, and Wellington Square was shut up, its rooms draped with dust-sheets), so he stayed in friends' flats, and went out for solitary dinners at the Martinez in Swallow Street. For spiritual sustenance, he went to National Gallery concerts: in one letter he enclosed a programme of Schubert songs accompanied by Gerald Moore, to which he went alone on 19 April 1943. These concerts always reminded him of the one he had been to with his mother on the day before she sailed.

Both Dolf and Jamie, cut off though they were from Jan, could see her name on the screen and hear her voice on the airwaves.
‘Mrs Miniver
was shown at Pirbright cinema at the weekend,' Jamie wrote. ‘I thought Vin was awful, but it is getting a terrific reception here.' He also heard Jan on a trans-Atlantic Brains Trust programme, broadcast from New York. Dolf sometimes tuned in to
Information, Please!,
just to hear Jan's voice. And, knowing he might be listening, she secretly spoke to him, or sang to him: ‘Oh,
if
you listened last night I hope you got my message! There was a question – “Sing a line of a song containing the word ‘Johnnie'.” So I upped and sang, “I would give them all for my handsome winsome Johnnie”, and thought so
so
longingly of you while I sang.'

She was still being strong for them both. ‘The Placzek–Struther Axis is strong and we'll lick the world yet, whether we're in each other's arms or not. When I'm up on a platform trying to sway an audience, you're standing invisibly beside me saying, “Stand up
straight,
& let's have a nice Joycerl smile.” And when you're on kitchen duty peeling potatoes with hands that should be playing Mozart, then
I'm
beside
you,
saying “Hold the knife the other way, you sweet left-handed son of a bitch.”'

At about this time, though, she began to betray small hints of the exhaustion which was beginning to seep into her body and mind. Adrenalin enabled her to sail, glowing, through evenings like this one at the Weir Cove Community Women's Club of West Virginia: