The Real Mrs Miniver (8 page)

I approached the nearest young woman. She was careful to write a few more lines before raising her head.

‘I am looking for a Nannie,' I said.

‘What kind of nurse were you requiring?' she asked, poising her pen once more.

‘A really
nice
one,' I said. ‘You know what I mean – a
really
nice one.'

‘College or nursery?'

‘Oh, for a nursery.'

‘I mean college-trained or nursery-trained?' she explained patiently.

‘An hour', for Joyce, had always meant the length of time she had spent after tea in her mother's drawing-room in clean frock and sash. Now, for her own children, ‘an hour' was beginning to mean just the same: the length of time they spent each day with their parents in the drawing-room, dressed in clean clothes and playing with the drawing-room toys. Joyce gazed at them, dazzled by the backs of their necks. In her poem ‘Betsinda Dances' she described a typical drawing-room scene:

On a carpet red and blue

Sits Betsinda, not quite two,

Tracing with baby starfish hand

The patterns that a Persian planned.

Suddenly she sees me go

Towards the box whence dances flow,

Where embalmed together lie

Symphony and lullaby.

… Then, as the tide of sound advances,

With grave delight Betsinda dances:

One arm flies up, the other down

To lift her Lilliputian gown,

And round she turns on clumsy, sweet,

Unrhythmical, enraptured feet;

And round and round again she goes

On hopeful, small, precarious toes.

Dance, Betsinda, dance, while I

Weave from this a memory;

Thinking, if I chance to hear

That record in some future year,

The needle-point shall conjure yet

Horn and harp and clarinet:

But O! it shall not conjure you –

Betsinda, dancing, not quite two.

This sugary scene took place in Tony and Joyce's new house, 16 Wellington Square, off the King's Road, which they bought in 1930, the house on the left at the bottom of the square as you look down. It is easy to picture the young married Joyce rummaging for her keys.

The key turned sweetly in the lock [she wrote in ‘Mrs Miniver']. That was the kind of thing one remembered about a house: not the size of the rooms or the colour of the walls, but the feel of door-handles and light-switches, the shape and texture of the banister-rail under one's palm; minute tactual intimacies, whose resumption was the essence of coming home.

This was a house Joyce grew to love. Robert, her youngest child, was born here in 1931. (Anne Talbot mentions this birth in her diary. Her use of the neuter pronoun gives an idea of the distance between grown-ups and babies: ‘Joyce has had a baby. It is going to be called Robert.')

Joyce was now the mother of three, and the nursery floor pattered, as it was designed to, with tiny feet. Distant sounds of crying and coaxing trickled down the stairwell. Inspired by an imagined ideal of a family house, she made a playroom, with a stage and curtains, and put a canvas paddling-pool on the roof-garden, with an outdoor toy-cupboard.

‘Modern Home Making. Husband and Wife Each Design a Room.' The
Daily Telegraph, The Queen
and the
Evening Standard
devoted a ‘Home' page each to Tony and Joyce's modern way of dealing with ‘the difference between the sexes'. ‘Mr Maxtone Graham, in the dining-room, has chosen a waterlily-green table, cellulosed so that hot plates can be put upon it with impunity, and marks wiped off with a damp cloth.' ‘The drawing-room, entirely planned by Mrs Maxtone Graham, might be a room in a pleasant country house. The walls are painted Devonshire cream yellow, and cheerful notes are introduced by the red painted radiators. Built in under one windowsill is the loudspeaker of the radio-gramophone, the control of which is over by the fireplace. Each chair is provided with its own little table, ash tray, and box of cigarettes – a detail which perhaps only a woman would have remembered.' They were being held up as examples of the new-style husband and wife: equals in the home, neither in thrall to the other.

Now the parties could be bigger and better. ‘I went to Wellington Sq.,' writes Anne Talbot, ‘and found Tony and Joyce preparing for their drinks party. Preparing for festivities is one of the most delightful occupations to find people at, and I realized the heavenliness of that moment.' The dinner was ‘excellent', the wine ‘superb', and later everyone went down to the ping-pong room for a competition organized by Tony. The party ended with scrambled eggs at 2.30 – this on a Wednesday evening.

The dining-room at Wellington Square, designed by Tony

Joyce retired early to bed at her own parties. Towards the end of a party – just as towards the end of a foreign holiday – she ceased to enjoy what she was supposed to be enjoying, and longed to be unwatched. At these moments, when she mentally withdrew herself from the chatter of her surroundings, she attained the sudden sense of perspective and clarity which gave her the overwhelming urge to write.

Of all emotions, she perhaps felt the emotion of
missing
most acutely. At a party, she missed solitude. Abroad, she missed home. Cut off from her children, she longed to be with them again. When she was, she longed again for solitude. The raggle-taggle gypsy in her head beckoned her to escape.

Chapter Four

Let faith be my shield and let joy be my steed

'Gainst the dragons of anger, the ogres of greed;

And let me set free, with the sword of my youth,

From the castle of darkness the power of the truth.

Verse 3 of J.S's ‘When a knight won his spurs', from
Songs of Praise

 

I
T WAS PERHAPS
because Joyce was so unholy that she wrote such good hymns. She could stand back from Christianity and express its essence with childlike simplicity and refreshing vocabulary, from a distance.

Canon Percy Dearmer, though attached to Westminster Abbey, lived with his wife Nan near Joyce, in Embankment Gardens. He and Joyce met in 1929 and had a long talk about hymns, and which were their favourites. He later suggested she write a few hymns for his new enlarged edition of
Songs of Praise,
and she asked if she could write one to the Irish melody ‘Slane'. She sat down one morning and wrote ‘Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy' – which to this days brings in handsome royalties to the beneficiaries of her will. It is included in almost every one of the fifty or so new American hymn books published each year.

Then she wrote ‘When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old' and ‘Daisies are our silver, buttercups our gold', both of which are apt to bring tears to the eyes of those who remember singing them to the school piano. Not many people know ‘When Stephen, full of power and grace, went forth throughout the land', though there are a few who hold it close to their hearts. She also wrote eight other hymns: ‘High o'er the lonely hills', ‘Round the earth a message runs', ‘Sing, all ye Christian people!', ‘When Mary brought her treasure', ‘Unto Mary, demon-haunted', ‘God, whose eternal mind', ‘We thank you, Lord of Heaven', and ‘O saint of summer what can we sing for you?' These are rarely sung nowadays, but because ‘We thank you, Lord of Heaven' contains the line ‘For dogs with friendly faces', vicars sometimes choose it for their annual pets' service.

Lovers of these hymns who discover that their author was not herself a churchgoer feel a sense of betrayal. The favourite hymn sung at their own wedding or at their grandfather's funeral turns out to be, so to speak, a fake.

Like most of their generation, Tony and Joyce had been force-fed religion as children, Sunday after Sunday. Tony had suffered the stifling atmosphere of the Scottish Sabbath. As a small child his sister Ysenda was caught by their grandfather playing on a Sunday with a sixpenny tin jar with a handle which, when vigorously worked, caused the jar to emit a few cracked and reedy sounds. ‘Nurse, I do not approve of music on Sunday,' said the terrifying grandpapa. ‘We must all remember that this child has a soul to be saved.'

Joyce, in itchy gloves, had sat through long services each Sunday, ‘and the new puppy was waiting at home to be played with, getting larger and less pick-upable minute by precious minute, and the liturgy dragged and dawdled, always far behind one's eagerness to be gone'.

Avoidance of church was another bond between Tony and Joyce. They even avoided looking at churches. On a rainy day during the shooting visit in Lincolnshire, Joyce wrote in her diary: ‘We sat about and sat about. Finally we were reduced to deciding to drive into Lincoln and look at the cathedral (
us!
) but the car wouldn't start.' On a rainy day in Scotland, the younger generation of the family sat in the drawing-room writing clerihews about local ministers of the Church of Scotland. This was Tony's:

The Minister of Madderty

Never had a sadder tea

Than when entertaining at the Manse

He inadvertently wet his pants.

They were getting their revenge for years of sermons. He and Joyce were always on the look-out for a ‘J. in V. B. T.' (joke in very bad taste) or, better still, a ‘J. in W. P. T.' (worst possible taste), and many of these were God-related. ‘I'm so hungry,' said Tony one Sunday lunchtime, ‘I could eat the hind leg off the lamb of God.'

At this stage of her life Joyce had a gift for turning out whatever bits of writing she was asked for. She never lost the schoolgirl's delight in showing work to the teacher and getting high marks. In adulthood, this ability to produce just what the editor required was a kind of flirtation. Editors tended to be attractive and brilliant men: to give them what they wanted in words gave her an intense, even erotic pleasure. If asked, she could turn out cigarette advertisements, such as this ‘Capstan Shanty':

When I was Mate of the brig
Carlisle

              (Hulla-balloo-balay!)

We was wrecked one day on a cannibal isle

              (Hulla-balloo-balay!)

And there I took up with the chieftain's niece,

A neat little, sweet little coal-black piece.

I was downright grieved when her uncle ate her.

(Better buy Capstan – they're blended better.)

The fact that as an editor Canon Dearmer was not only attractive but also a man of the cloth made the schoolgirl–teacher relationship all the more exciting. A genuine warm friendship sprang up between them. ‘I found his faith infectious,' she wrote in the
Manchester Guardian
after his death, ‘and his kindliness a warming fire. When one had been with him one felt happier and more alive than before, with widened sympathies, a heightened perception of beauty, and a deepened conviction that – to use a childish phrase – “everything would come out all right in the end”.'

Dearmer asked Joyce if she would like to help with the proof-reading and editing of the new
Songs of Praise.
She said yes, and during May and June 1930 she became a daily visitor at Embankment Gardens, correcting spellings, deleting exclamation-marks (‘splaggers'), and choosing between comma, dash and semi-colon. ‘My dear Percy,' she said one morning when he was fretting about the theology of Heaven and Hell in one of Isaac Watts's hymns, ‘surely you don't believe all this stuff?'

The Dean of Liverpool wrote to Percy Dearmer in May 1930: ‘I have completely fallen in love with Jan. Working through these new hymns, I see that she has got us into a new stream that will rive and make glad the city of God. Thank you for this discovery.'

Perhaps Joyce gained an extra
frisson
from her success as writer and editor for
Songs of Praise
by comparing her status, yet again, with that of Anne Talbot, who now had a part-time job as Percy Dearmer's secretary.

It was impossible for Joyce to write a hymn without getting some irreverence off her chest first. ‘Serious Admonition by J. S. to Herself on the Occasion of an Almost Overwhelming Temptation' she scribbled one morning, facing the blank sheet of paper. ‘Tune: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch.'

When writing a hymn on Bartholemew,

Remember the subject is solemn. You

              Can't rhyme the apostle

              With ‘funny old fossil'

Or say that his cat had ‘a hollow mew'.

Cleansed, she sat down to write the hymn. She flicked through her rhyming dictionary, aware that this was dangerous: its enticing possibilities tended to deflect a poet from his original purpose. ‘I have often wondered', she wrote in an essay on rhymes for the
Spectator,
‘whether mildness (which is by no means the same thing as humility) would ever have gained such prestige as a Christian virtue if the hymn-writers had not been at their wits' end for a rhyme to “child”.'