The Real Mrs Miniver (6 page)

One poignant souvenir of the wedding has been preserved, a commemorative paper napkin made by an enterprising printer who hoped to sell it to the guests. It says ‘In commemoration of the marriage between Mr Anthony Maxtone Graham and Miss Joyce Anstruther at All Hallows London Wall, 4 July 1923. All Blessings and Happiness to them.' As there was no reception and therefore no cake-encrusted fingers in need of a napkin, it has survived in pristine condition.

‘Twenty-three years with the wrong woman', Joyce was later to write about Tony – twenty-three years between that wedding day in the City, with church bells ringing out above the traffic, and the last evening they spent together, washing the dishes in Chelsea in September 1946: ‘A long road from the altar in All Hallows, London Wall to the kitchen sink in Wellington Square.'

Chapter Three

              
Only in two kinds of earth

Can poets bring their songs to birth
–

In sorrow's rich and heavy clay,

Or else (and here's the rarer way)

Out of the loamy light caress

Of an abundant happiness.

Therefore, best critic and best friend,

To you these doggerel thanks I send

For each delightful day, each charming year

Your presence has ensured for me, my dear.

Dedication ‘To A. M. G.', from
Betsinda Dances

 

M
RS
M
INIVER
IS
a portrait of a woman in a cloudless marriage. When Joyce began to write it, fifteen years into her marriage to Tony, the paradise she depicted was for her a paradise lost. But the very fact that it was out of reach made her perception of it all the sharper, and it is to
Mrs Miniver
we must look for a flavour of the first blissful ten years with Tony. She put her finger on the small but intense daily pleasures of marriage, the eye to catch, the pocketful of pebbles, un-understanding.

‘Tell me,' said Mrs Miniver, ‘weren't you with an uncle of mine in Singapore – Torquil Piggott?'

‘Piggy!' exclaimed the Colonel, beaming gratefully, and plunged into reminiscence. Thank God for colonels, thought Mrs Miniver; sweet creatures, so easily entertained, so biddably diverted from senseless controversy into comfortable monologue: there was nothing in the world so restful as a really good English colonel. Clem caught her eye across the table. It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there always being an eye to catch.

As she walked past a cab rank in Pont Street Mrs Miniver heard a very fat taxi driver with a bottle nose saying a very old taxi driver with a rheumy eye: ‘They say it's all a question of your subconscious mind.'

Enchanted, she put the incident into her pocket for Clem. It jostled, a bright pebble, against several others: she had had a rewarding day. And Clem, who had driven down to the country to lunch with a client, would be pretty certain to come back with some good stuff, too. This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day's pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life.

Mrs Miniver had long ago discovered that whereas words, for her, clarified feelings, for Clem, on the whole, they obscured them. This was perhaps just as well. For if they had both been equally explicit they might have been in danger of understanding each other completely; and a certain degree of un-understanding (not mis-, but un-) is the only possible sanctuary which one human being can offer to another in the midst of the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage.

Relatives have said that ‘When Tony and Joyce were first married they were so in love that when their first son was born they neglected him completely.' This seems unlikely: there are too many photographs of Jamie (born 1924) being hugged. But she certainly handed him back to his nurse the moment he started crying. As Joyce herself wrote of her grandmother's old-fashioned behaviour, ‘They all did it. It was the way things were.'

Her babies were born at home: she was modern and brave about childbirth. Twenty-seven years after the first event she described the astonishing pain: ‘“Stick to it as long as you can,” said my doctor, “but there's no need to get to the stage of biting sheets.” “
Me,
bite sheets?” I remember thinking in arrogant astonishment; but a few hours later I saw what he meant.' She breastfed her children, but after that she felt she had done her share of hard work, and handed over to Nannie.

With Jamie in 1929

Tony and Joyce's first home was a small Georgian house in Walpole Street, Chelsea. After the hushed grandeur of débutante Mayfair, Joyce loved the vibrancy of Chelsea: the street musicians on the King's Road, and the cheap restaurants with water bottles that had once held Chianti. Their friends tended to be young, artistic Chelsea people with names like Turps (short for Turpentine) Orde. Tony worked for the Lloyds insurance brokers Harris & Dixon; he was also a ‘Name' at Lloyds. But he wasn't a businessman by nature. He and Joyce referred to his over-keen colleagues as ‘the business bastards'.

Tony came home at six and played with his model trains. In the 1920s and 1930s this was a not uncommon adult male pastime, and Tony's trains were particularly good; he had a real steam locomotive, not just clockwork or electric. But it was perhaps a sign of the schoolboyishness Tony carried with him into adulthood, and never shook off. For him, playing games, telling jokes and doing funny accents – all the things Etonians did between lessons – never lost their appeal. Playing was a way of hiding from the tedium of adulthood, and this, at first, was one of the bonds between Tony and Joyce. Writing to her brother in 1951, Joyce described her own lifelong shunning of adulthood: ‘Most people have
some
degree of histrionic sense: certainly nearly all children love dressing up and make-believe and pretending to be Red Indians and so forth. The majority of human beings grow out of this as they get older – some of them, in fact, grow out of it so completely that they become great big fucking bores, as we well know if we've had to sit next to them at dinner parties.' There was a part of her, she wrote, which never stopped being ‘the curly-headed girl who would rather have been born a boy anyhow, and who had a strong prejudice against becoming a grown-up
ever
(fostered by many adoring visits to
Peter Pan –
a work of art which is probably responsible for more neuroses among the members of my generation than poor dear James Barrie had ever heard of).'

Tony and Joyce in 1928

In the daytime she sat at home writing articles, poems, short stories and fables which were published, at the rate of about one a week, under her pseudonym Jan Struther, first in
G. K's Weekly,
the
Evening Standard,
the
Daily News
and the
Daily Express,
the
Graphic,
and
Eve, the Lady's Pictorial,
and later, from 1928 onwards, in
Punch,
the
Spectator
and the
New Statesman.
Favourite themes in her earliest pieces were Justice Done to the Underdog, The Dreamer is Revenged on the Prosaic World, and Arrogance Knocked Off its Perch. Editors liked her conciseness, her epigrammatic style, her gift for observing universal daily experience, and her mastery of the irresistible first paragraph.

Giving a party is very like having a baby: its conception is more fun than its completion, and once you have begun it is almost impossible to stop.

She wrote about party-giving and party-going a great deal, because she was continually doing it in real life and half-liked it, half-loathed it. Tony had a gift for entertaining. Dinner parties at Walpole Street were not sleepy affairs with guests yawning on sofas. After dinner (celery cream soup, roast plover, French beans, rissole potatoes, Hungarian pudding and cheese patties, produced by Ada the cook), jazz records were played in the drawing-room. There was ping-pong (Joyce played until the last day of each pregnancy), or sometimes darts, or Tony would get his model trains working. Late at night, on a whim, everyone would jump into cars and drive twenty miles to Iver in Buckinghamshire, to stand on the railway bridge and watch the Cornish Riviera Express fly past underneath.

They had a small circle of close friends: Guy and Jacynth Warrack, Anne Talbot, Evan and Cynthia Talbot, Klop and Nadya Ustinov, Charles and Oscar Spencer (Oscar was a woman), and Clifford and Peter Norton (Peter was a woman). There was also a wider circle of not-so-close friends to be dined with or stayed with and then invited back. Discussing the characteristics of these friends, and the infuriating conventions which made it impossible to shake them off, was a favourite pastime. ‘The Frants? The Palmers? [asked Mrs Miniver.] Really, the unevenness of married couples. Like those gramophone records with a superb tune on one side and a negligible fill-up on the other which you had to take whether you liked it or not.' The necessity of writing the sort of gushing thank-you letter immortalized by Jane Austen's Mr Collins inspired an article for
Punch,
suggested by Tony, entitled ‘Snillocs' (‘Snilloc' is ‘Collins' backwards). It should be the hostess, Jan argued, who wrote the thank-you letter: ‘A thousand thanks for coming to stay … we enjoyed every moment of your visit … it was too sweet of you to go to all that trouble and expense…'

For consider what actually happens. The host, or more probably the hostess (since nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them) – the hostess, I say, is the person who suggests the visit in the first place. She begs, she implores you to come and stay. ‘We should so adore to see you again,' she writes. ‘So hoping you are not booked up for that weekend – I know how sought after you are!' And again, more briefly and winningly, ‘
Do
say Yes!!!' Thus far you, the potential guest, are the wooed, the desired, the beautiful maiden whose hand has just been asked in marriage. But as soon as you accept you find yourself de-rated. The beautiful maiden becomes merely another superfluous woman who has been lucky enough to get off. From now on, you are popularly supposed to be the beneficiary, your hostess the benefactor.

The facts, as a brief audit will show, are otherwise. You, it is true, have saved the price of a few days' food, but that is more than swallowed up by your railway fare and tips. You are richer by a few days and nights of country air; but against that you must set the discomfort of midge-bites in summer and arctic bedrooms in winter. You have undertaken, for friendship's sake, two of the most disagreeable tasks in the world – packing and unpacking. You have had, certainly, the pleasure of talking to your host and hostess; but you have also had to talk to their neighbours – or, more likely, to listen to them talking to each other about people you do not know.

And for all this, if you please, you, and you only, are expected to write an effusive letter of gratitude: while your hostess, who begged you to come, whose avowed object in buying a country house was that it would be such fun to have people to stay; your hostess, into whose drab herbaceous existence your coming has brought a breath of refreshing air from a larger and livelier world, is not expected to scribble so much as a hurried thank-you letter on a postcard.

The ideal relationship was that of guest and fellow-guest. ‘Between these two there can spring up the most delightful of friendships. When they have reached a certain degree of intimacy, they can slope off together, on the time-honoured pretext of buying stamps, and have a good gossip about their host and hostess, than which there is no more satisfying conversation in the world.'