The Real Mrs Miniver Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Further Reading

  Index

  Other books by the author

  Copyright

  To Michael

  Like rays shed

  By a spent star

  The words of a dead

  Poet are,

  That through bleak space

  Unchecked fly on,

  Though heart, hand, face

  To dust are gone;

  And you who read

  Shall only guess

  What thorn-sharp need,

  What loneliness,

  What love, lust, dream,

  Shudder or sigh

  Lit the long beam

  That meets your eye:

  Nor guess you never

  So well, so true,

  Shall comfort ever

  Reach from you

  To me, an old

  Black shrivelled sphere,

  Who has been cold

  This million year.

  ‘Dedication: to an Unknown Reader’ from J.S’s collection of poems

  The Glass-Blower, 1940

  Prologue

  THIS WAS THE programme at Radio City Music Hall in New York on the evening of 4 June 1942:

  1. Music Hall Grand Organ

  2. The Music Hall Symphony Orchestra

  3. ‘At Ease!’

  ‘Bless ’Em All’

  ‘That’s Sabotage’

  ‘Ladies in the Dark’

  ‘Two of a Kind’

  ‘You Can’t Say No to a Soldier’

  ‘Finale’ (danced by the entire company)

  4. ‘Mrs Miniver’

  Directed by William Wyler

  Produced by Sidney Franklin

  Starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon

  Based on the novel by Jan Struther

  A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture

  The high-decibel music and high-kicking dancing were standard splendid fare at the ‘Showplace of the Nation’. But the film which held its première after the floor-show caused an unusual sensation. It was normal for audiences to emerge from the theatre blowing their noses: MGM were experts at activating the tear-ducts. But these tears were different. They were shed not just for the Minivers, whose wartime family tragedy the audience had just witnessed. They were shed, also, for the whole of homely civilization – village life, families, whistling milkmen, kindly old station-masters – that was being destroyed, at that very moment, by Hitler’s war in Europe.

  Mrs Miniver, more than any film which had yet been made during the Second World War, brought the meaning of ‘a people’s war’ into the minds of Americans, millions of whom had been opposed to joining the war until forced to do so by the Japanese and the Germans in December 1941. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, as Mr and Mrs Miniver, helped them to see what they were fighting for. No film had ever run for more than six weeks at Radio City Music Hall: Mrs Miniver ran for ten, breaking box-office records. (It had to be taken off to make way for Bambi.) Across the United States, across Canada, in Britain, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and India, the story was the same. People queued round the block.

  ‘Propaganda Bureaus Are Struck Dumb With Envy’ ran a headline in the Toronto Globe. Propagandists had been striving for years to make the war effort understood by the populations of the United States and Canada: and here, in a little family movie whose central plot was nothing more bellicose than a rose competition at a village flower show, that aim was achieved with little apparent effort. Winston Churchill (an uninhibited weeper during the sad bits of films) is said to have predicted that Mrs Miniver’s contribution to defeating the Axis powers would be more powerful than a flotilla of battleships. President Roosevelt was so stirred by the film’s closing sermon that he requested it to be dropped across Europe in leaflet form and broadcast to the world on Voice of America. Even the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, who loathed the film’s hero and heroine, admitted that it was an exemplary piece of propaganda, which the German industry should emulate.

  Mrs Miniver became synonymous in the public mind with all that was saintly and self-sacrificing in wartime womanhood. Chicago launched a ‘Name Chicago’s Mrs Miniver’ contest. The winner, smilingly photographed on the centre pages of the Chicago Times, was Mrs Leonard Youmans, of 5109 Kimbark, ‘who, in her patriotic accomplishments, typifies thousands of other stout-hearted local women in this war year of 1942! She has two sons, Donald and Clifford, in the Navy Air Force. Clifford was wounded on Atlantic duty and is convalescing in hospital. Mrs Youmans has a record of over 1,000 hours of service at the Chicago Servicemen’s Center. She is a Travellers’ Aid for troops in transit. She is chairman of the Home Hospitality committee of the Navy Mothers’ Club of Chicago. And she does all her own housework besides!’

  The original Mrs Miniver was a pre-war creation who first appeared on the Court Page of The Times on 6 October 1937. Once a fortnight for two years, a ‘Mrs Miniver’ piece was published: ‘Mrs Miniver and the New Car’, ‘Mrs Miniver and the New Engagement Book’, ‘The Minivers on Hampstead Heath’. The articles were anonymous, signed ‘From a correspondent’. But there seemed no doubt that they must have been written by a contented, well-balanced, happily-married woman who longed to share her joy in life, and her peace of mind, with Times readers. The articles were all about the gentle pleasures of a modern upper-middle-class marriage. Their position at the top of the Court Page was reassuring: if His Majesty The King was holding a luncheon at Holyrood in the left-hand corner, and Mr and Mrs Miniver were attending the Highland Games in the right-hand corner, then surely civilization (in spite of the horrors going on in Spain and the threatening noises from Germany) must be safe.

  When the articles were published in book form by Chatto & Windus in October 1939, the author’s name was revealed: Jan Struther, the pseudonym of Joyce, née Anstruther, whose married name was Mrs Anthony Maxtone Graham, resident of Chelsea and mother of three. The book – an ideal Christmas present in its pink and grey slip-case – was loved by some readers and detested by others. The rightness, the relentless optimism and the exquisite sensitiveness of the heroine got on many British people’s nerves. But when it was published in America in 1940, it became the Number One national bestseller. ‘Mrs Miniver will place a gentle hand on your elbow,’ said the New Yorker, ‘and bid you stop to observe something insignificant; and lo! it is not insignificant at all. That touch – the touch of Charles Lamb, even of Shakespeare in a minor mood – is one of the indefinable things that English men and English women are fighting and dying for at the moment.’

  Jan Struther was my grandmother. But this is not a book a
bout a dear old grandmama with whom I went to have scones for tea in the 1980s. I sometimes imagine the kind of grandmother she might have turned into, if she really had been the ‘Mrs Miniver’ of her own creation. She would have been one of those paper-thin, white-haired Chelsea ladies who live in mansion flats off the King’s Road, and who occasionally venture out in their tweeds and pearls to make the journey to Peter Jones on a number 11 or 22 bus. Her drawing room would have been a chintzy, scented haven of pot-pourri and lilies, with pink-and-white striped sofas and silver-framed photographs of her deceased husband in a kilt. She would have managed to keep on a loyal old retainer, who baked the scones and laid her tray for breakfast. We would have sat together by the fire (gas-flame, perhaps), and she would have talked about what the King’s Road used to be like in the 1930s.

  But Jan Struther never reached old age. She died at fifty-two, nine years before I was born. Even if she had survived till her eighties, she wouldn’t have been that kind of grandmother at all. She would have lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in an untidy apartment strewn with open reference books and wood-shavings and long-playing records not put back into their sleeves. We would have sat by the air-conditioning unit drinking gin and tonic out of chipped glasses and talking about love and politics. Her venturings-out would have been to the drugstore for malted milk, or to the hardware store for carpentry tools.

  During the height of Mrs Miniver’s fame and success during the war, Jan toured America as an unofficial ambassadress for Britain, giving hundreds of lectures about Anglo-American relations to enchanted audiences. The public wanted to believe that she was the embodiment of her fictional creation, a sensible, calm, devoted wife and mother. She felt it was her wartime duty not to disappoint them. No one guessed – no one could possibly have guessed – that she was in fact living two parallel lives.

  She foresaw the unreachableness of her dead self in the poem quoted at the beginning of this book. We can never know her. But she had a remarkable capacity for writing important things down. I hope in these chapters to throw some light on the thorn-sharp need, the loneliness, the love, lust, dreams, shudders and sighs which guided her path through her short life.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  In my own private Revised version, the commandment would read: ‘Honour your father and your mother, your Nannie, your brother, your parents’ cook and parlourmaid and housemaid and gardener and groom and chauffeur, and the man who comes to do odd jobs, and all the other people who take care of you and, above all, who teach you things.’

  From J.S’s unfinished autobiography

  ‘IF I HAD a face like that, I’d pawn it and lose the ticket.’

  Joyce Anstruther, aged five in 1906, was having her gloves put on by her nannie inside the front door of 9 Little College Street, Westminster. She was screwing her face up: her two pet hates were whites of egg and woollen gloves. ‘Come on, Lamb,’ said her nannie, whose name was Lucy Hudson, or ‘Lala’. ‘Quick’s the word and sharp’s the action. We’re off to the Army and Navy Stores.’

  ‘But can we go for a picnic afterwards?’

  ‘Picnic? I’ll give you picnic!’

  Joyce was almost an only child. Her brother Douglas was twelve and away at boarding school. Her daytime companion was Lala. Nannie sayings would form the bedrock of her life’s vocabulary.

  Joyce spotted an advertisement in Victoria Street.

  So … Ap,’ she said.

  ‘Soap, Lamb.’

  That was the way she learned to read. Lala never deliberately set out to teach her anything. But nor did she ever stop her from finding anything out.

  They bought a length of hat ribbon at the Army and Navy Stores.

  ‘Whom shall I put it down to, Madam?’

  ‘Number one-oh-nine-four-one,’ Lala said. ‘The Horrible Mrs Anstruther.’

  And on they went for their walk, over the bridge in St James’s Park, past the cowshed opposite the Horse Guards where you could buy a glass of milk for a penny, Joyce wondering all the while, but not asking, why her mother was described as ‘horrible’ in the Army and Navy Stores. It was years before she realized that the word was ‘Honourable’.

  They walked home the long way, through Strutton Ground where Lala picked up a bag of winkles for her tea. Street life held a fascination for Joyce which was to remain with her all her life. She loved seeing the naphtha flares, the shouting men, the scrap metal at A. Smellie, Ironmonger, the occasional drunk being arrested and taken to Rochester Row Police Station. If she saw a traffic accident – a horse which had slipped and got tangled up in the shafts, or a runaway horse with its van swaying behind – it made her afternoon. ‘Let me get this straight,’ she wrote later. ‘I did not want disasters to happen, and I would have prevented them if I could, but if they were happening anyway I wanted to be there to see.’

  In The Sanctuary, they passed the man who sold hot potatoes off a barrow.

  ‘Well I never! Did you ever see a monkey dressed in leather,’ said Lala.

  ‘Oh, please may I have one?’ said Joyce.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Lala. The Honourable Mrs Anstruther had no idea that her daughter’s favourite treat was to eat a buttery barrow potato in bed, washed down with two mouthfuls of Lala’s nightly pint of stout.

  After this treat came the most anxious time of day for Joyce, when Lala went downstairs to have her supper with the servants in the kitchen, leaving Joyce tucked up in bed. Would Lala never come back upstairs? Had she ‘run away for a soldier’ as she often said she might? No: there, at last, was the sound of her footsteps. Joyce now felt safe to drop off to sleep.

  ‘A world without Lala was as monstrously inconceivable as a world without my parents or brother,’ Joyce wrote later. ‘I used to read books, sometimes, about children whose mothers or fathers died, and I had bad dreams afterwards and woke up shivering and sweating. But no one ever bothered to write a book about a child whose nannie died or went away for no apparent reason, which was why I was so completely defenceless when it eventually happened to me.’

  * * *

  Joyce’s mother, Eva, eldest daughter of the fourth Baron Sudeley, was not horrible, but she was odd. When she died in 1935, she left Joyce all her books. They included sixty-six cookery books and thirty-seven books on black magic. Joyce also found, in a drawer of the desk, a photograph of her mother’s lifelong enemy Lady George Campbell, with pins stuck into the body. This confirmed Joyce’s belief that her mother was a witch.

  The sixty-six cookery books were a mystery, because the only cooking Eva ever did was on a silver chafing-dish brought to the table by a servant with all the ingredients prepared. The single piece of culinary advice she gave to Joyce on her marriage was not that of an active cook: ‘Always order a pint of cream a day. It can be used in everything.’

  In her speech, Eva combined the two Edwardian fads of ‘g’-dropping (she liked pokin’ about and pickin’ up a bargain at a country auction and sellin’ it at a profit to a London dealer) and ‘r’-rolling (saying ‘garage’, ‘chauffeur’ and ‘corridor’ as if she were French).

  She never once dressed or undressed herself without help from her lady’s maid, or did her own hair. She insisted, throughout her life, that her stockings and shoes be put on before her drawers, which were lace-edged. At least three times a week the heel of a shoe tore the knicker lace, and it had to be mended by her maid.

  The servants stayed, in spite of Eva’s oddness; the young Joyce liked to spend time below stairs, listening to them talking, and learning to twist Bromo paper into a fan-shape with her fist. The impression she got from the servants was that with Mrs A. There Was Never a Dull Moment, while with Mr A. You Always Knew Where You Were. A bell rang.

  ‘That’s Her.’

  ‘Oh, well. No peace for the wicked.’

  ‘And precious little for the good.’ And upstairs the parlourmaid went.

  ‘There’s been some friction up there today,’ Joyce heard the parlo
urmaid say on her return. The servants had only an inkling of what Joyce knew and felt deeply: that Mr and Mrs A. were, in fact, extremely unhappily married. Joyce had plenty of love as a child, but something essential was missing. She wrote about it later, in the beginning of an autobiography which never progressed beyond the age of fourteen.

  ‘To make the complete emotional circuit which is the most important thing about family life,’ she wrote, ‘a child’s love should flow up to one of its parents, across to the other, and down to the child again, strengthened and enriched by their mental understanding. In my family this did not happen. My father adored my mother, but he did not understand her. She understood him pretty well but could not stand hair nor hide of him. Therefore there was a break in the circuit. The electrical force flashed back and forth between me and my mother, and flowed more steadily between me and my father: there were streaks of brilliant lightning, but much driving power was lost, and it was all a considerable strain. If I expressed my affection for him in front of her, I was dimly aware that it made her jealous; if I curled up with her on a sofa in front of him, I was conscious of a vague feeling of sadness emanating from the armchair on the other side of the fireplace. This particular conversation-piece must have occurred early in my life, because since the age of four or five I do not remember them ever sitting together in the same room, unless there was a luncheon or dinner party.’

  The family’s country house from 1904 till 1911 was Whitchurch House in Buckinghamshire, which had a long, French-pronounced corridor along the ground floor. Mrs A’s den was at one end, with its sign on the door: ‘No admittance EVEN on business’. She did her writing there: short stories with a Boer War backdrop for Outlook and the Saturday Westminster Gazette, later published in book form.

  Aged two, in Dutch fancy dress

  Mr A’s den was at the other end, and if you happened to look in he would probably be sharpening his pencil or a chisel. If there was nothing to sharpen, he would be mending something, and if there was nothing to mend he would be cleaning something, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to the same level above each elbow. He carried on cleaning his golf clubs with emery paper regularly, long after he had given up the game.