The Real Mrs Miniver (22 page)

The man turned out to be a public-health official from Oklahoma who specialized in venereal disease, ‘which he discussed with the same cool, dispassionate interest as if his subject had been insurance or tractors. When the porter asked him what time he wanted to be called he said “6.30”. I said, “An hour out of Chicago – 6.40.” “Then make it 6.40 for both of us,” said Lower Four coyly. I felt we were almost married.'

She awoke to a sparkling morning and found herself in a land of white grain elevators, which looked to her like medieval castles. At Chicago she changed trains, and at Minneapolis she took a taxi to the Nicollet Hotel: creamy-brown walls, creamy-brown bed-cover, telephone screwed to the wall too high up to reach unless she stood on the Bible ‘placed by the Gideons'.

The teachers at Minneapolis were delightful. They were unashamedly dowdy, and told her that in their language, ‘PhD' stood for ‘petticoats hanging down'. And the lecture, Jan wrote to Dolf (she was beginning to use American expressions) ‘went over swell'.

Dolf was beginning to use American expressions, too. ‘Gee, it was nice to hear your voice on the telephone,' he wrote back to her.

There were two main messages that Jan wanted to get across in this first season of lectures. The first was that she was
not
Mrs Miniver:

You see before you, Ladies and Gentlemen, a haunted woman. And if my husband and children were here today as well, you would see before you a haunted family.

Now most families, if they are haunted at all, are haunted by the people who used to live in their house in the past. But we, as a family, are haunted by five people who have never lived in our house at all. I should like to take this opportunity of stating in public what I have so often explained in private, that is, that I am NOT ‘Mrs Miniver'; my husband is NOT ‘Clem'; our three children are NOT ‘Toby', ‘Judy' and ‘Vin'. It is quite extraordinary how difficult it is to make people understand this. I suppose it's the penalty one has to pay for writing in a paper with such a reputation for truthfulness as the London
Times.

The second thing she wanted to impress on her audience was the similarities, as opposed to the differences, between Americans and British people. ‘If John Doe from Ohio meets John Doe from Yorkshire, they discover how fundamentally alike they are.' Anglo-American relations, she believed, were a matter not just for politicians but for ordinary people: they began at home. ‘I seem to be talking a lot about “ordinary people”. Well, everybody talks about them nowadays, thank goodness! They've come into their own at last, in the centre of the picture.'

What ordinary people felt and said and did was important: ‘The private opinion of today is the public opinion of tomorrow, and the public opinion of tomorrow is the legislation of the day after.'

So, to anybody who is trying to get to know the people of another country, I would offer this advice: scrap your old filing system. Put new labels on your mental pigeonholes. When you meet somebody of a different nationality, see if you can't match him up with somebody in your own country. For instance, you or I cross the Atlantic for the first time, and it so happens that one of the first people we meet is a very crotchety, difficult, overbearing old man. Our instinct is to say to ourselves immediately, ‘Oh, so this is what Americans are like, is it?' or ‘So this is a typical Englishman?' What we ought to do is to nip that thought in the bud right away, and cast our minds back in all honesty and fairness to our own side of the Atlantic. If we do, it won't be more than a matter of minutes before we find ourselves saying, ‘Why, of course; he's the spitting image of my Great-uncle Benjamin.' You try it, and see. The more you play this game, the more convinced you become that the ordinary people of the United States and the ordinary people of Great Britain are amazingly alike. They are alike in the ‘mental climate' which they breathe – in the things which they think worth living for and, most of all, in the things they think worth dying for.

At Milwaukee on 5 October she spoke to the American Assembly of University Women: two hundred of them, crammed into the College Club for a luncheon with table decorations to match the book cover of
Mrs Miniver,
and a quotation from the book folded up inside each napkin. The university women lapped up her lecture. Among the questions they asked at the end were these: ‘Where do you go when your house is bombed?', ‘Where are the little princesses?' and ‘Will you please tell me how to make an English trifle?' To that, Jan (who had no idea how to cook anything) replied that the English were currently more preoccupied with making rifles than trifles.

‘Oh boy, how I do like
people,'
she wrote to Dolf. ‘There are so many nice ones around that one hardly dares to stop still and not meet any for fear of missing something good. (I am not drunk, only heady with relief and success.)'

Places which had just been names on maps – York, Pennsylvania; Flint, Michigan; Oak Park, Illinois; St Paul, Minnesota; Cleveland, Ohio – came to life for her: she used the
Sleeping Beauty
analogy of kissing places awake by touching them. At each town she was fêted, interviewed by the local press and radio, and listened to by enthralled audiences. The American enjoyment of lecture-attendance amazed her. Who were these smiling people who gave up their lunchtimes and evenings to sit in rows and listen to someone else talking for an hour?
She
wouldn't go to a lecture if she were paid. It would be far too much like choosing to sit through a sermon.

On the last day of October 1940 she sent a cable to Nannie in England: ‘
JAMES HILTON WRITING STORY & DIALOGUE MINIVER FILM GREER GARSON PROBABLY STARRING SHALL GO HOLLYWOOD LATER CHECK ENGLISH AUTHENTICITY BOY OH BOY WISH YOU WERE HERE
.'

MGM had summoned her. The character she had invented for Peter Fleming of
The Times
was to appear on the big screen. She set off on 10 November, pausing to give lectures at Worcester, Mass. on the 11th, Rochester, N.Y. on the 12th, Toledo, O. on the 13th and Chicago, Ill. on the 14th and 15th (she liked using the correct abbreviations for states). Then she boarded the
Los Angeles Limited,
bound for the West Coast.

Chapter Ten

I was a citizen, once, of a great city.

    
Its buildings were of mellowed brick and of weathered stone.

I woke up every morning to its sparrows' chatter

    
And lay down every evening to its traffic's drone.

It had its faults. It was shabby in parts, and sooty;

    
Its water-front could have done with tidying up.

It was shapeless and vast: but I loved it like a village.

    
It was my home. It held my life like a cup.

Its sky-signs were my earliest constellations.

    
My nursery-rhymes were the legends of the town.

I sang,
‘London's burning, London's burning.'

    
I sang,
‘London Bridge is falling down.'

I learned to walk and talk there. By its times, its spaces,

    
Are measured for ever my thoughts of space and time.

A hundred yards is the length of the Square garden:

    
An hour is Big Ben's chime to Big Ben's chime.

Its seasons are my seasons. For me, winter

    
Is the sound of a muffin-bell through the gathering dark;

And spring, for me, is neither a lamb nor a primrose,

    
But a crocus down by the lake in St James's Park.

Summer's the smell and the feel of hot asphalt,

    
With costers selling geraniums down the street;

Autumn, for me, is a bonfire in Kensington Gardens,

    
And the rustle of plane-leaves over the children's feet.

It is peaceful here. Yet here, where maple and sumach

    
Cut unfamiliar patterns on a moonlit sky,

I am a citizen still of the same city:

    
I feel its houses crumble and its people die.

Heavy at heart, I lie awake at midnight

    
And hear a voice, five hours nearer the sun,

Speaking across the ether from a grim daybreak,

    
Calmly reciting what the night has done.

I think,
‘London's burning, London's burning.'

    
I think,
‘London Bridge is falling down.'

Then something wiser than thought says, ‘Heart, take comfort:

    
Buildings and bridges do not make a town.

‘A city is greater than its bricks and mortar;

    
It is greater than tower or palace, church or hall:

A city's as great as the people that live there.

    
You know those people. How can London fall?'

‘A Londoner in New England, 1941', from J.S's
A Pocketful of Pebbles

 

T
HE POWERLESSNESS OF
the original author to control the plot and script of a Hollywood movie ‘based on the book by…' became clear to Jan within minutes of shaking hands with her first ‘man behind a desk' at Culver City. The matter, she realized, was out of her hands. MGM were going to make a movie of
Mrs Miniver,
it was going to be a war film, there was to be bombing and death – and all she could usefully do was stand back with her fingers crossed. If these Hollywood moguls really thought they could use the character she had created to show Americans the plight of a typical British family, and if this would really help to turn the tide of public opinion in favour of joining the Allies, then they should be left to get on with it.

Within a fortnight she had signed on the dotted line, selling the rights for a lump sum of $32,000, renouncing all editorial control. ‘I got the worst contract of any author ever, second only to Margaret Mitchell for
Gone With the Wind,
' she stated later, when the film had grossed $8,878,000. In fact, it is thought to have been, at the time, the largest lump sum ever paid by a film studio for a first novel.

‘Hollywood is an awful, phoney place,' she wrote to Nannie, ‘and I'm sure you wouldn't like it any more than I do.' She met James Hilton (the author of
Lost Horizon
and
Goodbye Mr Chips
), who had been commissioned to write the screenplay: they had cocktails one night and dinner the next, and she tried to explain to him the difference (though she was not quite sure of it herself) between the British middle class and upper-middle class. She wished him luck, and fled back to New York.

‘Now, Miss Struther and gentlemen, Mrs Henry J. Shipment of Baltimore asks you this: Here are four famous American names translated into various foreign languages. Can you identify them? (a) Heinrich Langerkerl; (b) Alfredo Ferrero; (c) Benito Buonomo; (d) Giuseppe Sarto.' ‘Benny Goodman!' cried Joyce, shooting her hand up before the others had a chance. She felt much more at home among these New York brain-boxes than she had among the Los Angeles millionaires. At the
Information, Please!
anniversary party she talked and danced until four in the morning, and Wendell Willkie, the man who had recently failed to be elected President of the United States, made an unsuccessful pass at her.

Jan on
Information, Please!

Christmas was coming, and Harcourt Brace were spending $5,000 on their Christmas advertising campaign for
Mrs Miniver.
Jan and the children sent parcels and loving messages to Tony, Jamie and Nannie. On 24 December Jan had Christmas dinner and present-giving with her secret ‘family', Dolf and Pauly, and on Christmas Day with her official family at 1 Beekman Place.

*   *   *

‘Liebes, Liebes, I have had
such
fun at Kalamazoo,' Jan wrote to Dolf on 7 March 1941: she was in Michigan, and had just given her forty-first lecture. ‘A perfectly charming college, charming Faculty, charming boys and girls, and an
ENORMOUS
audience: about 800 people, including rows and rows standing up or sitting on the floor, and hundreds were turned away too. The sponsors took me on a fascinating 150-mile journey through apple orchards and vineyards … I think I am in love with the world; and the best of it is that it seems to
last.
The love, I mean. Just as – thank God – yours and mine does.' But on the back of her Details of Engagement for 13 March (Place: Buffalo, N.Y. Sponsor: The Garret Club. Correspondent: Mrs J. M. Mitchell, 70 Oakland Place), she scribbled ‘Mrs J. McC. Mitchell. Yellow-faced old bitch.'