The Real Mrs Miniver (7 page)

Joyce kept a diary of a week of shooting visits which began with a flat tyre on the Great North Road, and Tony cursing while he changed the wheel. They stayed at Burton Hall near Lincoln, Buckminster Park near Grantham, and Launde Abbey near Oakham, one after the other, and met the locals at dinner.

Sir Roger Gregory, a wonderful specimen of the genus Old Boy, full of the richest copy for Tony's study of same: a director of companies, evidently able, but to all appearances quite incredibly stupid and charming. White wuffly moustache, several chins, shoots in a stiff collar. Memo: Sir Roger: ‘Y'know, in geological times they say the sea used to come up here.'

I like Lady Monson [the hostess], but find her difficult with that peculiar Edwardian aloofness which is harder to cope with than the Victorian.
He
is surely the most pompous man that ever lived, and talks illimitable balls on almost every known subject.

Lady M. has that Edwardian habit of breaking into irrelevant bits of French, presumably to make things sound less dull than they are. We passed a herd of cows in the car, who stared vacuously at the bonnet. ‘Ils regardent le motor car,' she said.

‘God, I'm glad I didn't marry into a county, hunting family,' she wrote – though she did love ‘the barbaric splendour of a pheasant drive – the fusillade, the bright coloured bodies hurtling through the air, the clattering of wings, the breaking of branches as they fell, and the smell of damp earth and gunpowder.' (When asked to give her opinion on blood sports, which she frequently was at dinner parties, her reply was simple: ‘Indefensible but irresistible.')

Shooting in Scotland, Tony with a ‘rook and rabbit' rifle, and Joyce wih a double-barrelled 20-bore shotgun

After an interminable rainy afternoon at Launde Abbey, making conversation with their hosts and ‘pottering round the bloody garden at a Country House stroll', she and Tony escaped to the Crown at Oakham for a drink.

It was worth being made to potter round other people's gardens and sleep in their icy bedrooms and be introduced to their wuffly-moustached neighbours, because talking about it alone together afterwards was such bliss. Each country house visit or tedious dinner party produced some gem of an incident, and these became woven into Tony and Joyce's marriage. Its paradise was not a walking-hand-in-hand-through-meadows kind of paradise: it was less anaemic than that. It was a paradise of shared laughter, of shared noticing, imitating, discussing and remembering. Time added layer upon layer of such shared memories, so that it became more and more delicious to glimpse one another across the table and know there would be ‘an eye to catch'.

‘The Accompaniment'

When in chance talk they speak your name

    No common syllables I hear:

Rich with unuttered harmonies

    It falls upon my inward ear.

So a musician, hearing sung

    By idle lips some well-loved words,

Hears, too, beneath the naked tune,

    The richness of remembered chords.

Their inward ears sang with ‘remembered chords'. Joyce, on her own, would simply have remembered these shared moments. But for Tony, all life was potential material for anecdote. He liked to crystallize his experiences into Funny Things that Happened, and give them a beginning, a middle and a punch-line. Often, the funny stories were about Scotland.

‘Our nearest neighbours at Cultoquhey' (went one of his often-repeated anecdotes) ‘were the Drummond-Morays, who, in spite of expensive schooling at Eton, were more a sporting than a literary family. They could hardly be otherwise, when the library at Abercairney seemed to contain almost nothing but bound volumes of the
Household Brigade Magazine,
and
The Grouse in Health and Disease.
This happened in the early 1900s. On a very hot Twelfth of August the guns were toiling up a hill to the next line of butts, and they stopped for a moment to mop their sweating brows. One of the better-read guests said (and I suppose it was meant to be a joke), “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” At which the laird of Abercairney looked at the guest in amazement, and then turned to the other guns. “What's that? Did you hear what the feller said? Why, that's a most extraordinary thing – my grandfather said that!”‘

‘My parents' (went another) ‘often stayed with the de la Terriere family in Perthshire. Once, after a Saturday to Monday houseparty there, I asked Mother how they had enjoyed it. “Well,” she said, “it was quite extraordinary. The house was absolutely full, and they gave Dad and me a bedroom with no dressing-room. Luckily, there was a screen, so we managed.” I may say that by this time they had been married several years and had managed, somehow, to conceive a family of four children.'

They were good stories. But there came a time when Tony was only comfortable in conversation when he was inside the safe walls of an anecdote with its beginning, middle and end.

*   *   *

It was a marriage that needed the constant presence of other people to enhance the pleasure of snatched moments
à deux.

It was a marriage that needed, particularly, Anne Talbot. Sometimes two very happily married people crave the company of one less happy unmarried person, who is dazzled by their company and envious of their relationship, and reminds them of their luck. Perhaps the fact that they need such a person is a sign that they are not quite as happy as they think.

Big Anne was the sister of Tony's childhood friend Evan. She was man-sized, and she drank beer, played golf and hated going to bed early. She lived with her parents in Chelsea and was at first a secretary to Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang at Lambeth Palace but later worked as an interior decorator for John Fowler at Peter Jones. She was romantic and longed for love, but had only short-lived affairs which left her feeling bereft. Tony and Joyce needed her because she was an excellent observer and enjoyer of the present moment, because she loved spontaneity as they did, and liked paper games and scurrilous talk, because she was a good person to play practical jokes on; and because she made them feel better about themselves.

She needed them because she longed to belong, and they made her feel needed. ‘I went round to Tony and Joyce…' ‘Tony and Joyce fetched me at 4…' ‘I was woken at 8 by Tony and had morning tea with them…' Her diaries, diligently kept through the 1920s and 1930s, are full of Tony and Joyce. She writes of them as a couple dazzling in their togetherness and in their ability to make the world seem all right. Wherever Tony and Joyce were, fun was, and laughter, and new jazz records, and a party in the past or future to discuss, and early-morning tea brought to one's bed, and a new funny story from Tony. (‘Joyce and I were in a restaurant the other day sitting near the green-baize door, and we overheard one waiter whisper to another as he carried out a tray of empty plates, “He's eaten it”.')

Anne hung around the Maxtone Grahams to such a degree that she earned herself the reputation of a sponger. But it is clear that they requested her presence as much as she was eager to provide it. Tony was conspicuously generous, the kind of man who gets up from the table towards the end of a party in a restaurant and settles the bill with the waiter before anyone can argue. Anne, with a small daytime job and no house of her own, was a gratifying person to practise his generosity on.

Wednesday 30 January 1929. Tony rang up asking me to go round at once – very urgent. I went, rather thrilled, and found him and Joyce saying would I come to Rumania with them for 3 weeks. We discussed the impossibility of me getting £50 for it and finally they said they would pay for it all.
Frightfully
kind of them …

And off they went on 8 February 1929, on a night ferry from Harwich and across frozen Europe by train. They were a party of four: Tony, Joyce, a yacht-owning friend called Mike Mason, and Anne. It was supposed to be a duck-shooting holiday, but so long did it take to arrive at the chosen marsh in Rumania that the first day's shooting was not till the 24th. Joyce and Anne both kept diaries. Anne's gives a glimpse of how infuriating Joyce could be, how she liked to be the centre of male attention, and what a hostile reaction she could provoke from other women.

Before they even reach Liverpool Street, Anne is slightly annoyed because Joyce is wearing ‘innumerable leather and fur coats etc'. Joyce is happy, enchanted by the exoticism of
wagonslits
and
café complet.
She gazes first out of the train window and then at the train window, where she goes into a trance with the fascination of comparing ‘Do not lean out of the window', ‘Nicht hinauslehnen', and ‘E pericoloso sporgersi'.

‘Joyce and Tony are excellent travellers, Tony always in good spirits as though he was comfortably in London, Joyce efficient and neat,' writes Anne.

‘All day in the train we played Nouns and Questions and Telegrams and talked,' writes Joyce. ‘Delicious children in head-kerchiefs.' ‘We played games a certain amount and we all talked a good deal about sex,' writes Anne. ‘There is more vulgar talk in this party than I've ever known.'

‘We champed slightly,' writes Joyce, of a nine-hour wait in the train to Nisch, Yugoslavia. ‘On the way to Nisch,' writes Anne, ‘Joyce, who was tired, was at her very worst – the child-wife business – fussing over her food and changing places because the light was in her eyes, and being kittenish and taking up all the room and then refusing offers of help.'

‘We talked about books,' writes Joyce. ‘There have been interesting moments with these two,' writes Anne. ‘Joyce's snobbery on literature and far less knowledge than she pretends, and Tony's appalling conceit about his driving and knowledge of cars, for examples.'

There is a jolt, and the train to Nisch is derailed. Anne gives this incident three-quarters of a page. ‘In the middle of a flat snowy plain, the train suddenly, with a shaking bump, derailed. Tony and Joyce went green.' Joyce's account covers ten pages, the first entirely taken up by the large inky smudge which it produced. The derailment is by far her favourite event of the whole holiday, providing an excuse for conversations with guards in caps and women with chickens and men with gold teeth. ‘The whole thing has been the most terrific fun,' she writes.

In deepest Rumania at last, they go for a day's duck-shooting, and two sheepdogs from the village make friends and spend the day with them. But Joyce decides to spend the next day on her own rather than shooting. ‘The others got home at about 8.30, purple in the face from sun and wind.' ‘We told Joyce about our day and she said we were all sunburnt,' writes Anne.

On the way back to England, they stay for two nights in Vienna. ‘Vienna is lovely and dignified and chic,' writes Joyce. ‘We looked at pictures at the Imperial Museum,' writes Anne. ‘Titian and Tintoretto, some Dutch and some decayed Italian. I found Giordano well represented. Joyce was bored really but thought she ought to study them. She was very dull about Vienna, and seemed to notice nothing towards the end, such as the beauty of new-fallen snow. They are no good at picking out lovely bits suddenly.'

That last comment seems extraordinary, because as a writer Jan Struther's greatest strength was precisely her ability to ‘pick out lovely bits suddenly'. But by now Joyce was longing to go home. She had had enough of making intelligent and poetic remarks about abroad. Though she did not admit it to herself, she had descended into a holiday sulk. If she was not enjoying something, she liked to ruin it for everyone else.

Anne sought revenge in her diary, but Joyce avenged herself in print. In ‘A Balkan Journey', published in the
New Statesman
of 1 February 1930, she immortalized Anne – not herself – as the maker of uninspiring remarks.

For an hour or so we travelled at a leisurely pace across a plain of incredible flatness and whiteness. ‘It's what a table-cloth must look like,' said T., ‘to a caterpillar walking across it.' ‘More like Bedfordshire, really,' said A., who, when we are in exciting places, has a perverse habit of making prosaic comparisons.

In the dining-car from Harwich to Liverpool Street they ate bacon and eggs, and read the morning papers. They said goodbye. Anne arrived home ‘just as Father was beginning prayers, which he cancelled'. Joyce arrived home and went straight to the nursery.

*   *   *

At the time of their Balkan holiday Tony and Joyce had two children, Jamie, five, and Janet, one. They wouldn't have dreamed of taking the children with them. Children stayed behind, eating potato soup, boiled rabbit and blancmange in the nursery and going for walks with Nannie.

Joyce's early married engagement books contain frequent scribbles about interviewing nannies, or relief nannies to work on the nannie's day off. She described the nannie-agency experience for
Punch
in 1930:

I felt as a man might feel who had entered heaven in the devout belief that he would get individual attention, and found instead that the place was run on the card-index system by a band of efficient seraphim.