The Real Mrs Miniver (42 page)

At Cape Cod in June she felt dizzy and sick and became incoherent in her speech; the local doctor suggested that she might be suffering from Ménière's Disease. ‘Or Miniver's Disease?' Jan retorted. But in New York, a brain tumour was diagnosed, and Dolf was told that no surgery was possible. Jan was taken to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital; the radiologist there, Gerhard Schwarz, turned out to have been at school with Dolf, at the Wasa Gymnasium in Vienna. Rachel, Janet (who had flown over from England at the news), Dolf and Bennes took turns at Jan's bedside as loving letters arrived from Robert, and Jamie, and Nannie. For three weeks she drifted in and out of consciousness, and on 20 July, with Dolf on one side of her bed and Janet on the other, she died.

She never reached the autumn of life which most grandmothers achieve, so the supposition of this poem, written when she was pregnant with Janet in 1928, was not realized. But it is a poem her six granddaughters read and think about.

‘Advice to my Future Granddaughter'

While I am young, and have not yet forsworn

    Valour for comfort, truth for compromise,

I write these words to you, the unknown, unborn

    Child of my child that in this cradle lies:

‘Live, then, as I live; love as I love

    With body and heart and mind, the tangled three;

Sell peace for beauty's sake, and set above

    All other things ecstasy, ecstasy.'

And if, grey-haired by the fireside,

    Filled with the withered wisdom of October,

I frown upon your April; if I chide

    And murmur, ‘Child, be good,' or ‘Child, be sober,'

        Then, then (I charge you now) no longer stay:

        But laugh, and toss your head, and go your way.

Epilogue

D
OLF NEVER SLEPT
at 68 West 68th Street again, but took a suitcase to his mother's apartment. He forced himself to hold down his job at Avery Library, though his heart was broken.

Jan's funeral took place at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, but she was not buried in New York. ‘Imagine being buried in
Queen's
!' she had said, with a frown of distaste. Her ashes were taken to the parish church at Whitchurch in Buckinghamshire, where she had lived as a child, and a simple service of interment was held.

In 1957 Dolf married Beverley Kalitinsky, née Robinson, Canadian niece of the Beverley Robinson to whom Jan had told her secret at the Republican dinner party during the war. Dolf and Bev had forty-three years of cloudless happiness together, united in their love of architecture, German, French and English literature, music and conversation with friends young and old, in their book-filled apartment with a Mozart or Beethoven sonata open on the grand piano. Dolf never fathered a child, but Bev had a daughter from her first marriage, and the step-children and step-grandchildren from both his marriages remained Dolf's family.

Between 1960 and 1980 he was Avery Librarian, expanding the collection by purchases abroad and helping to make it internationally known as one of the greatest architectural libraries in the world. If Jan had ‘set him free' from his junior job there, this might not have happened. He was made an emeritus professor on his retirement, after which he was Editor-in-Chief of the four-volume
Macmillan Encyclopaedia of Architects
and founding editor of a still larger project,
The Buildings of the United States,
the American ‘Pevsner'.

I visited him and Bev at their apartment in West 87th Street in 1998 and 1999, and we talked for days, sitting near the chess table which Jan had made at the Austin Riggs Sanatorium in the depths of her depression. Dolf died in New York on 19 March 2000, a few days after his eighty-seventh birthday, and his obituary – like Jan's – appeared in the London
Times.
His memoirs of growing up in Vienna and of Viennese refugees in New York were published to great acclaim in Germany and Austria, at the very end of his life. His sister Susan still lives in New York.

Tony married Peggy Barne in 1952. After the house of Cultoquhey was sold in 1955 they lived happily at Aberlady Mains House in East Lothian, near Muirfield Golf Course, and travelled a great deal together. Tony died in an aeroplane over India in 1971.

Jamie was twice married and twice divorced, and had three children. After farming at Cultoquhey he became a freelance journalist, and in 1976 he opened the smallest restaurant in Britain, with only one table, in Peebles High Street. Later, much more successfully, he became the world's leading dealer in vintage fishing-tackle.

Janet and Pat Rance had seven children. In 1954 they took over the village shop in Streatley, Berkshire, which Pat transformed into one of the best-known cheese shops in the country. Janet wrote for the
Reader's Digest,
and Pat wrote definitive books on French and English cheese. They died at the end of the 1990s, and ‘Lord of all hopefulness' was sung at both their funerals.

Robert, my father, became a Scottish advocate, then an estate agent, and then an entrepreneur and a Planning Inspector. In 1962 he married Claudia Page-Phillips,
née
Tannert, who with her Jewish Austro-Hungarian parents had fled from Austria to England in 1938. They live in Sandwich, Kent, in the house in which I was born.

Notes

Chapter One

Chapter Seven

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Sixteen

Acknowledgements

I
HAVE BEEN
greatly helped, in researching and writing this book, by many people. Dolf Placzek's telephone call to me in June 1998 launched me into the project when I was hovering round the edge. He and Bev were inspiring, and sympathetic to the biographer's need to get to the bottom of Jan's complicated character. Dolf's last telephone message to me before he died expressed (in his thick-as-ever Viennese accent) delight that the story was being told. I am also grateful to Bennes Mardenn, Harriet Harvey, Susan Stern, Ruth Hanbury-Tenison, John Maxtone Graham, Michael Maxtone Graham, David Townsend, Ian Anstruther and Merlin Sudeley, for helping me with research and talking to me so candidly about Jan; to Nicola Beauman, for giving me initial confidence in the project; to Rupert Christiansen, for solidifying that confidence; and to Grant McIntyre, for his well-judged guidance. My father Robert Maxtone Graham, expert archivist, verifier and indexer, was an invaluable eye-witness and a constant but never intrusive support. Janet Rance's notes, and Jamie Maxtone Graham's papers, lent to me by his son Robert, helped me greatly, as did Victoria Rance's, Anthony Gardner's, Geoffrey Barraclough's and my mother Claudia Maxtone Graham's insights and comments. Kathleen Dunpark undertook some research for me at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. Henry Villiers gave me access to his aunt Anne Talbot's diaries. Joy Grant provided me with notes which she had made on Jan. David Drew-Smythe of New South Wales gave me access to documents inherited from his grandfather Douglas Anstruther, and compiled the Jan Struther website. David and Daphne Smith gave me time to write during the school holidays. I am grateful also to the Library of Congress, the London Library, the A.P. Watt archives, the Chatto & Windus archives, the British Film Institute Library and the FDR Library. My husband Michael (who played piano duets with Dolf during our last visit to him in New York in 1999) helped me each day in the quest for the essence of Jan and the
mots justes
to express it. This book is dedicated to him.

Further Reading

Mrs Miniver
and
Try Anything Twice
were last published in London in the paperback series Virago Modern Classics, both with introductions by Valerie Grove. An American edition of
Mrs Miniver
was published in 1990.

Editions and translations are described in my father's illustrated
Bibliography of Mrs Miniver and of the other books by Jan Struther,
copies of which are at the British Library, London Library, Cambridge and Oxford University Libraries, National Library of Scotland, Library of Congress, and University of Pennsylvania Library (where Jan was awarded an honorary D. Litt. in 1943).

An Internet edition of
Mrs Miniver,
and of that
Bibliography,
can be freely downloaded from the first of the following list of useful websites:

www.bigfoot.com/∼idds/home/janstruther.htm
is my cousin David Drew-Smythe's ‘Jan' web page, which also has links to:
www.reelclassics.com/Movies/Miniver/miniver.htm
which includes many articles about the 1942 film and its cast.

www.google.com
if searched under ‘Jan Struther' or ‘Mrs Miniver' will reveal hundreds of more or less relevant websites, including those listed above.

www.digital.library.upenn.edu/books
is the ‘On-Line Books Page' of the University of Pennsylvania. Links to Author/Struther will lead to the text of the following works, freely available on the internet:
Mrs Miniver, Try Anything Twice,
her hymns, and all poems printed in her five volumes of collected verse.

[email protected]
is my father's email address. He has available for sale, by post, some copies of the Futura paperback of
Mrs Miniver
(1980).

Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

The initial ‘J' stands both for Joyce and for Jan.

Ada, the cook at Wellington Square

Adams, Franklin P. (1881–1960, NYC newspaper columnist)

Appin, Argyllshire; family stayed at Druimavuic House

Austin Riggs Sanatorium, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

Anstruther family, originally of Balcaskie, Pittenweem, Fife:

Henry Torrens (Harry), MP for St Andrews, J's father, 1860–1926, younger son of the 5th baronet

Hon. Eva, DBE (1869–1935, his wife, née Hanbury-Tracy, ‘the Dame', J's mother)

Douglas Tollemache (their only son, J's brother, born 1893, married twice, died 1956), of Greyfriars, Redbourn, Herts

Joyce, their only daughter,
see
Struther

Bach, J.S.

Balkan journey

Barrington-Ward, Robert M., DSO, MC (1891–1948, editor of
The Times)

Bayano
(Fyffes Line banana boat, built 1917, converted for passengers, 6,815 tons); drunken breakfast menu

BBC

Beaverbrook, 1st Baron (1879–1964, politician and newspaper magnate)

Berry, Ruth (1900–88, of Campden Street, Kensington)

Bev,
see
Placzek,
and see
Robinson

Blythe, Nan (nannie to the Smythe family, died 2002, unmarried, aged 101)

Bowes-Lyon, Lady Elizabeth (fellow pupil, later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, died 2002 aged 101)

British Information Service

Brittain, Vera (1893–1970, author, of Glebe Place, Chelsea)

Brown, John Mason (1900–69, critic and author)

Brunswick, Germany, Tony's POW camp; Brunswick Boys' Club, London, founded by Tony and fellow POWs

Cambridge, where Robert took his law degree at Trinity College

Campbell, Lady George, née Sybil Lascelles Alexander (1860–1947, the Dame's enemy, first mother-in-law of Douglas Anstruther)

Campbell, James, gamekeeper at Cultoquhey

Camp Kieve, Nobelboro, Maine

Camps Library, First World War charity

Cane, Melville (NYC attorney and poet)

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Chamberlain, Neville (1869–1940, Prime Minister)

Chatto & Windus Ltd, publishers

Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy, Tony's POW camp

Churchill, Winston (1874–1965, Prime Minister)

City of Benares
(Ellerman Line flagship, torpedoed in late 1940 with loss of 77 evacuee children)

Cominucci, Al, maintenance man at Beekman Place

Csato, Tibor, MD Vienna, MRCS, LRCP London, Hungarian doctor engaged in cancer research at Brompton Hospital, later consultant at Great Cumberland Place, London

Cultoquhey, Crieff, Perthshire, original home of the Maxtone Graham family (pronounced ‘Cult-o-way')

Curtis Brown Ltd, literary agents