The Real Mrs Miniver (14 page)

Joyce later insisted, in lectures and interviews, that though her husband and children were remarkably similar in age, habits and temperament, she was not Mrs Miniver. Many of the incidents, it was true, were drawn straight from life, but heightened by Joyce's own, real, poetic way of looking at things. Yet, unlike Mrs Miniver, she was no longer living in a large house in a Chelsea square; she had moved to a small house in a Chelsea street. The ‘little sigh of contentment' as the tug hooted from the river and Mrs Miniver rang for tea were echoes from Joyce's past. The utterly good-natured Clem, in perfect mental union with his wife, handsome, sardonic rather than sleek, turning out his ‘pocketful of pebbles' for her each evening, was not quite the golfing, clubbable, gin-drinking man Tony was becoming; tellingly, there was no mention of golf in ‘Mrs Miniver'. And there was no hint of the dark side of Joyce's mind, the side which could blot out beauty and see nothing but barrenness; the side which, at the height of her success at
The Times,
wrote this poem:

This is the measure of my soul's dis-ease:

I, who for love of life,

Once grudged each moment of the night's oblivion,

Now seek out sleep, unearned;

Cling to its depths, and wake reluctantly

As though to bodily pain.

Mrs Miniver's outlook on the world was the polar opposite of the depressive's, who sees futility in everything. Nothing was futile for Mrs Miniver: even a rear-view mirror, even a swing-door, even a dentist's ceiling, could inspire a thought about the human condition.

It is too simple to say that in ‘Mrs Miniver' Joyce was recreating a lost paradise. Officially she and Tony were still a steadily married couple: the laughter, the funny accents, the brilliant thoughts, the impetuous adventures continued, and there was no feeling, even in private, that the marriage itself was threatened. It has been suggested that Tony did not like having a wife who was successful and clever, but this was not the case. What he did mind, more and more, was having a rebellious wife, a depressed wife, a left-wing wife, a sulky wife, a wife who felt fenced in. Tony and Joyce visited the
Times
offices, and became friends of Geoffrey Dawson and R. M. Barrington-Ward, the successive editors. It was another world to discover together and laugh about. Tony was heartened by the ‘Mrs Miniver' articles: if Joyce could capture the sparkling days of their marriage and co-parenthood so vividly and lovingly in print, maybe this was how she still saw their marriage: and maybe everything was all right.

For Joyce, writing ‘Mrs Miniver' actually had the effect not of helping her to regain her lost state of serene Chelsea wife but of making her realise that she didn't want to be that type of person ever again. It was almost as if the creation of ‘Mrs Miniver' was a way of writing the exquisiteness out of herself. Readers saw Mrs Miniver's life as an enviable paradise; Joyce, privately, was beginning to see it as a cage to which she was ready to say good riddance.

*   *   *

The first inkling that Joyce might not be able to get away from her creation came the day after the appearance of the second ‘Mrs Miniver' article. The publishers Lovat Dickson, having discovered her identity, wrote to her care of
The Times
to ask whether they could publish the pieces in book form when there were enough of them. Between October 1937 and November 1938 Joyce received letters from Constable, Black, Methuen, Arnold, Chatto & Windus, Cassell's, Harrap, Jonathan Cape, Hodder & Stoughton, Macmillan, Longmans Green, Dent and Hamish Hamilton, each of them courting her favour. Each found a different way of sounding attractive: ‘All of us in the firm are very hopeful that you may be interested…'; ‘If you can be persuaded – and I do so hope you can – I know there will be no difficulty about terms'; ‘Do you want any more of these obviously boring requests from publishers?' Peter Fleming wrote to ask. ‘Or shall we turn them down ourselves and pass on their letters to you already answered?' Wooed, desired, popular, choosing and rejecting suitors, Joyce was in the foothills of fame, and loving it.

She already felt a sense of loyalty to Chatto & Windus because they were publishing her book of collected journalism,
Try Anything Twice,
due to come out in October 1938. Harold Raymond's courting letter (‘May I tell you how delighted I have been to make the acquaintance of the Minivers? My wife drew my attention to “Three Stockings” on Christmas Eve…') was the proposal which won her hand. She accepted Chatto in March and gracefully refused the other thirteen.

Perhaps, suggested Peter Fleming, Mrs Miniver should dare to mention the political situation: ‘Now that you have your readers purring, a little astringency might do them good.' Joyce did not want to raise the decibel level of her prose by inserting ill-informed comments about Hitler and Mussolini. But she did continue, now, to puncture Mrs Miniver's serenity with occasional pricks of gloom. ‘Mrs Miniver was conscious [seeing a placard with the word
JEWS
on it] of an instantaneous mental wincing, and an almost instantaneous remorse for it. However long the horror continued, one must not get to the stage of refusing to think about it. To shrink from direct pain was bad enough, but to shrink from vicarious pain was the ultimate cowardice. And whereas to conceal direct pain was a virtue, to conceal vicarious pain was a sin.' Again she struck a chord with readers, putting her finger on the small ways in which one's heart sank in 1938.

But the reader who searches the book
Mrs Miniver
for scenes of Dunkirk, air-raid shelters, bombs, ranting German pilots, death of heroine's daughter-in-law, death of station master, destruction of parish church roof, and so on, all of which later found their way into the Hollywood film, will find hints only of the looming war. Mrs Miniver was a pre-war character, requisitioned by MGM.

‘I scratch for light leaders like a hen in the barren dust,' wrote R. M. Barrington Ward to Joyce. As well as her fortnightly ‘Miniver' pieces, Joyce wrote more than sixty unsigned Fourth Leaders for
The Times
between January 1938 and June 1940. Writer's block afflicted her at home, so she was given a room of her own at the
Times
offices. She was so small that her legs dangled off the office chair. But she turned out just what was required. Subject: arachnophobia in the English psyche. ‘There is mental horror, because the character of spiders is so unattractive. They have all the most revolting copybook virtues – prudence, patience, perseverance, foresight, and so on. As for their vices – well, every living creature must catch its food as best it may, but there is something about the spider's methods which is very far from cricket.' Subject: the terrifyingness of fairy tales (inspired by news that an ‘Adults only' certificate might be given to the Walt Disney film
Snow White
). ‘No more hair-raising piece of dialogue has been written than the world-famous conversation between Red Riding Hood and the wolf in grandmother's clothing.'

Subject: advice to the young. Here, Joyce mentioned a ‘superb example' of advice which had come from Nazi Germany that week (in June 1938). Julius Streicher, in a speech to 25,000 young Germans on the summer solstice, had exhorted them to ‘Be beautiful, godlike and natural'. ‘It is a commandment audacious in its simplicity,' Joyce wrote. She was impressed: the word ‘Nazi' was by no means synonymous with evil – yet. Most British people, apart from a few hardened pessimists and farsighted politicians, were still trying to see the best in the Nazis. The following merry observation, from Joyce's leader on the 1938 summer sales in Berlin, seems unbelievably naïve now: ‘Berlin housewives are putting Aryan pride in their pocket and going to banned Jewish shops for bargains in the sales. It is a thought which cannot fail to bring a pang of sheer delight to all who are interested in psychology, ethnology, drapery, dictatorship or women.'

Then, in September 1938, came the Munich Crisis, when war suddenly seemed imminent. Anonymously, in her ‘Mrs Miniver' articles and in her
Times
leaders, Joyce summed up the emotions of the nation's optimists: first, the tension and anxiety; and then, after Neville Chamberlain returned from Germany waving his piece of paper, the relief.

One of the things that gave Joyce her misguided confidence in Neville Chamberlain was the fact that he was a botanist. She tried to cheer
Times
readers with this wishful thought: ‘Both statesman and botanist', she wrote in a leader, ‘must be able to handle other human beings, to inspire their confidence and to justify it: let anybody who thinks otherwise watch a clumsy novice trying to worm out of a suspicious innkeeper in Teesdale the exact habitat of the Alpine Bartsia. The botanist (like the statesman) must be neither afraid to reach up for what he is seeking, nor ashamed to kneel down for it.'

The word ‘escapism' was being bandied about: and Joyce, in a leader entitled ‘Poets and the Crisis', wrote a defence of escapism. ‘If to draw comfort from poetry or music or painting is “escapism”, then the word has lost the meaning which the sceptics gave it: it has changed in mid-air from a missile to a crown. For to “escape” by any of these means is not to hide in an underground cavern, or even to retreat across some neutral frontier. It is to climb a mountaintop, to rest the eyes on a wider horizon, to breathe for a time a rarer, clearer air, and to come down strengthened and refreshed.'

The Minivers, meanwhile, queued up outside the Town Hall to collect their gas-masks, taking the cook and housekeeper with them.

(In real life, when Janet and Robert were told that their day-school in Tite Street was to be evacuated to North Wales, the first thing they said was not ‘Is Mummy coming with us?', but ‘Is Nannie coming with us?' This exchange did not find its way into ‘Mrs Miniver'.)

A typical ‘Mrs Miniver' article, as published anonymously on the Court page of
The Times,
28 September 1938

‘It's so nice to be back to normal again,' remarked Mrs Adie, the cook, in the ‘Mrs Miniver' article of 6 October, subtitled ‘The Afterthoughts of Mrs Miniver'. The crisis was over; but they weren't quite back to normal, thought Mrs Miniver, and they never would be. They were poorer by a few layers of security, though richer in other ways:

They had found themselves looking at each other, and at their cherished possessions, with new eyes. Small objects one could send to the country – a picture or two, the second edition of Donne, and the little antelope made of burnt jade; others, like the furniture, one could more or less replace: but one couldn't send away, or replace, the old panelling on the stairs, or the one crooked pane in the dining-room window which made the area railings look bent, or the notches on the nursery door-post where they had measured the children each year. And these, among their material belongings, were the ones that had suddenly mattered the most.

And they had learned to appreciate the value of dullness. As a rule, one longed for more drama in one's life. But now, thought Mrs Miniver, who was ‘tired to the marrow of her mind and heart', ‘nothing in the world seemed more desirable than a long wet afternoon at a country vicarage with a boring aunt'.

The Munich Crisis had been exhausting and terrifying; but it had woken people up, and Joyce was grateful for this mental awakening in herself. ‘The most prosaic of us', she wrote in a
Times
leader, ‘has begun to live at that pitch of tireless intensity and awareness which in normal times is known only to children, poets, lovers and other fanatics.' If, as she hoped, war was finally averted, they had been granted the privilege of skimming the cream of war without having to live through a real one.

Chapter Seven

    
Those whose love's no more

Than a blind alley –

A cul-de-sac

Which can have no other end

Than turning back

Or beating with bare hands

At a wall without a door –

These must go slowly.

These at a measured pace

Must walk,

And linger in one place

Often, to gaze and talk;

Even retrace

A yard or two, perhaps,

Their careful steps,

And take them over again.

By such fond strategy,

They may a long while cheat

Themselves into content,

And not too deeply care

That Fate across the threshold of their street

Has scrawled ‘No Thoroughfare'.

From ‘The Cul-de-Sac' in
The Glass-Blower

 

‘I
T OCCURS TO ME
,' suggested Peter Fleming in a letter to Joyce in November 1938, ‘that Mrs Miniver's Xtian name is Mabel, and that you should reveal this shameful fact at some festival, as it might be Christmas.'