The Real Mrs Miniver (19 page)

The Bishop of St Albans wrote a rapturous letter to
The Times,
thanking them for this leader: ‘It is so sound, so healthy, so invigorating, so timely, and so Christian.'

It was the last article Joyce wrote for
The Times,
ever.

*   *   *

Dolf tried to keep a diary on board ship, as Joyce had said he should, but after the first day it didn't work. What was there to describe, apart from Nelson's shadow, glimpsed in the starless night as he had driven towards Euston, and the grey damp dawn in Liverpool, and his co-passengers on the ship, whom he didn't much feel like talking to? Joyce could always be jolly about things, and engage in fascinating conversation with strangers, but he didn't seem to have that gift. He found it more natural to sit in apathy in his cabin, not even writing poetry. He had left his homeland, he had left his new love; and his reputation in Vienna as a brilliant young art historian had been eradicated. In America, he would have to start all over again.

But at least he would see his mother. She had been lent a room in New York by Anne de Tapla, the benefactress who had sent the affidavit which made the journey possible.

Dolf arrived in Manhattan at dawn on Saturday, 15 June, with twenty dollars in his pocket. ‘Welcome to the land of the free!' said a taxi-driver, lowering his window. ‘Would you like a ride? I'll take you wherever you want for ten dollars!' Dazzled by the man's enthusiasm and his shining yellow car, Dolf accepted. ‘Well, here you are! And a good day to you, sir,' said the driver, drawing up outside the apartment building where Dolf's mother was lodging. Dolf gave him ten dollars – a colossal sum, ten times what the ride should have cost – and walked into his mother's room. She was asleep.

‘Mutti?'

‘Ach, mein Gott!' said Pauly, waking up. She seemed more surprised than pleased to see him. She was not at all pleased when he told her how much he had given the taxi-driver.

Pauly Eisler (‘Pauly' was pronounced the Austrian way, rhyming with ‘Cowley') was an exquisitely-mannered Viennese mother who had brought Dolf up strictly according to the rules of Viennese etiquette: she had stood by while he struggled at medical school for three years, because submitting to one's husband's will was the done thing; and she had seen to it that at twenty-three Dolf lost his virginity to a prostitute attuned to the needs of the bourgeoisie, because it was the done thing. She adored Dolf, and worried about him, fussing about him being driven too fast in cars. In Vienna the family had had a maid and a cook, and Pauly had rarely needed to enter her own kitchen. Now, in New York, having lost all her possessions, she had taken on a weekday job as a charwoman. She never revealed any kind of self-pity.

Later, taking a bus this time, Dolf found his way to the refugee hostel at West 114th Street. There, pinned to the notice board in the hall, waiting for him, were three airmail letters addressed to A. K. Placzek, all from Joyce. He opened them as he stood there with his suitcase. Her loving voice, ringing clearly out of her prose, gave him the courage to announce himself to the porter. He was shown to his bed, which was in a dormitory for six.

‘Thank you for the letters – I was unspeakably glad to find them when I arrived here,' he wrote to Joyce that evening. (It was her first censored letter from him, ‘opened by Examiner 5513'.) ‘One can't be alone here for a minute or concentrate, the house is full of noise, Jews and the smell of wet paint (because Mrs Roosevelt will pay a visit next week, everybody cleans and polishes the whole day). I think of you all the time, sweet darling, and don't want to see anybody. But I will not lament about individual things in a time when immortal nations break down like putrefied trees and the hopes and lives of millions die overnight…'

Joyce had given him one important telephone number, and implored him to dial it as soon as he arrived in New York. It was that of Tony Maxtone Graham's other sister, Rachel Townsend, who was as extravagant as Ysenda was frugal, and who would, Joyce was sure, give him a warm welcome and pull strings to find him a job worthy of him. Dolf fumbled with the unfamiliar coins and rang her up, explaining that he was a friend of Joyce's.

‘Do come to dinner, and do bring your mother,' said Rachel.

So Dolf and Pauly put on their best clothes and went to dinner with Tony's sister, at 1 Beekman Place, a grand apartment block near the East River. It was a strained evening. Rachel had no idea that her forlorn-looking guest was her brother's wife's adulterous lover: it struck Dolf that he was there under false pretences. A fellow guest sat playing the piano throughout the evening, and he was not, by any means, practising his Mozart: this was
klimpern
on the grand American scale, a medley of songs from the shows and jazzy chords, and it made Pauly feel jumpy. Rachel chatted away on the sofa, but she did not see Dolf through Joyce's eyes, as an attractive, brilliant art historian and musician. She saw him as a pitiful refugee whom Joyce must have picked up in the course of her good works. ‘Mrs Townsend was very nice and very intelligent,' Dolf wrote to Joyce afterwards, ‘but rather cool and not very interested in my fate as a whole (I can't blame her).'

Dolf found a job on his own, in Union Square, wrapping and sending parcels, some of which had to be insured and some of which had to be registered. His boss was an old east European Jew with a long beard and a wet cigar in his mouth. He didn't quite trust Dolf not to make a terrible mistake.

*   *   *

Joyce, cycling, on the day France fell, along hawthorn-scented lanes in Berkshire from Twyford Station to the house where Janet and Robert were staying, had no premonition that her life was about to change dramatically. She was living from hour to hour, as everyone was during that terrifying day. ‘The Battle of France is over,' Winston Churchill was telling the House of Commons. ‘I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.'

She was fortified by a strong feeling – the belief, perhaps, of all separated lovers – that a star was watching over her and Dolf, bringing them the promise of reunion. And surely what happened in the next ten days was such a miracle that it could only have been achieved by the power of a benign star.

She was effectively being
sent
to New York.

It began with the New York publishers Harcourt Brace, who sent a telegram in early June to Chatto & Windus: ‘Mrs Miniver Book of the Month Club Choice for September. Publication date 29 July.' The author's presence was requested, to help to promote the book.

Then Rachel Townsend, who like thousands of people in America wanted to do something to help the British in 1940, rang Tony and implored him to send the children over to America to stay with her for the duration of the war, with or without Joyce.

Then Tony himself left a telephone message for Joyce in Berkshire on 17 June: ‘I think you should take Janet and Robert to New York as soon as possible.'

Finally Sir Frederick Whyte, head of the American Division of the Ministry of Information, summoned Joyce to a meeting on 19 June – a meeting now untraceable in the Public Record Office, so one can only guess what was said. The gist was that Joyce, if she were to undertake a lecture tour in the United States, representing Mrs Miniver, could play an effective role as a propagandist for Britain. Americans still isolationist after the horrors of the First World War needed to hear the viewpoint of an archetypal British wife and mother, now faced with total war.

Love plays havoc with priorities, and at this pivotal moment in Joyce's life the line between what she ought to do and what she wanted to do were blurred. Sail to America! Of course she jumped at the chance. Not only would she be reunited with Dolf – she would also be able to stretch her wings, constricted by years of country house visits and golfing weekends. She would be able to travel thousands of miles by train, through ‘Ole Virginny' and Dixieland and the Wild West. The British Information Services
wanted
her to do this. Her duty and her heart's desire seemed, miraculously, to be one and the same.

Once the idea had taken hold of her imagination, there was no looking back: the magnetic force pulling her across the Atlantic was too strong. She was determined to go. Why should she stay? Tony would shortly be away on active service in the Army. In Britain, she would be just one more hungry mouth. She felt single-minded and confident as she queued, with Janet and Robert, at the American Embassy, the passport office, and the US Consulate. She was going because she had been sent. It was not her idea. No one could say it was. (But oh! Where would she first meet Dolf? By a lake in Central Park? On Broadway? Outside the Waldorf Astoria? Only a month before, they had said goodbye for ever.)

*   *   *

On Sunday, 23 June, Rachel Townsend invited Dolf for a drink at Beekman Place.

‘You know, I had a cable from Tony today, saying that Joyce is bringing the children over here for a while. She's leaving England on Wednesday, and she'll be here in ten days' time.'

Dolf could hardly speak.

‘Jan, darlingest,' he wrote that night. ‘I just heard from Rachel Townsend that you might come over here with the children. I can hardly believe it – it's too wonderful for any words…'

*   *   *

Things were happening quickly now for Joyce. Jamie was allowed out from Gordonstoun to say goodbye, and arrived in London at midnight on 24 June, just before an air-raid warning. He was too old to be evacuated: he had another year to go at Gordonstoun, then he would be called up into the Army. The next day – her last day before sailing – Joyce took Jamie to a National Gallery concert (Mozart's violin sonata in C Major K296 became ‘their' piece, ever afterwards), and Tony took Janet and Robert to Regent's Park Zoo. Janet and Robert, aged twelve and nine, could not know how long the impending separation would be: months, they supposed. No one guessed that it would be five years.

Tony and Jamie took them to the station to catch an early-morning train from Euston to Liverpool the next day. Now it was Joyce's turn to drive past Nelson's Column, Joyce's turn to experience the dampness of maritime Liverpool. Nannie came with them on the train, to see them safely onto the
Duchess of Atholl.
Two years before, during the evacuations of the Munich Crisis, when the children had asked ‘Is Nannie coming with us?' the answer had been ‘Yes': Nannie had been allowed to go with them to Wales. But this time the answer was ‘No': Nannie was staying in Britain. Joyce knew only too well how devastating this separation from Nannie would be for Janet, and especially for Robert. And on board ship, for the first time in her life, she would be in sole charge of her children, for eight whole days.

Joyce had not had time to read her morning's mail before she left London: but now, on the train, she opened her letters. There was one from her friend Sheridan Russell which gave her a brutal shock. She expected – she needed – words of loving encouragement and farewell, but Sheridan had written: ‘I am disappointed in you, that you should be running to your lover at this terrible moment for your country.'

Joyce felt sick. In the last nine days, since that message from Tony suggesting she should take the children to America, she had been so busy (or she had made herself so busy), shopping and queuing for visas and packing, that she had not given herself a chance to examine her conscience fully. She had been all a-flutter with the intoxicating mixture of public responsibility and private excitement, and with the pre-travel urgency of everything. She had repressed any inclination to stop what she was doing, stand back from her busyness, and ask herself, unemotionally, whether she should go or stay.

Now, as she looked out of the train window at the Midlands disappearing behind her, she felt the first icy shafts of guilt. Running to her lover? Was that what she was doing? Sheridan had said so, the saintly Sheridan-Christ, who had worked so hard for Jewish refugees: he had seen straight through her.

But no, she thought, watching drops of rain running into each other down the ‘No smoking' sign: the facts did not fit Sheridan's accusation. He knew – she had hinted to him – that she and Dolf had fallen in love; but he could not know that she had been
sent
to America. She would never be running in Dolf's direction if it were not for the young children, Harcourt Brace, the Ministry of Information, Rachel Townsend, Tony, and the Book of the Month Club. A burning sense of the injustice of Sheridan's letter began to smother her feelings of guilt. She hated Sheridan for writing such hard words to her. She never wrote back.

There was worse to come, an hour later. Whom should she meet in the next compartment, also travelling to Liverpool with her two young children, but Vera Brittain?

‘Are you going to America with your children?' Joyce asked her: the two were acquainted, having met at literary parties.

‘No,' Vera Brittain answered. ‘I'm only seeing them off.'