Read Online The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham - Free Book Online

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.
    I approached the nearest young woman. She was careful to write a few more lines before raising her head.
    â€˜I am looking for a Nannie,’ I said.
    â€˜What kind of nurse were you requiring?’ she asked, poising her pen once more.
    â€˜A really nice one,’ I said. ‘You know what I mean – a really nice one.’
    â€˜College or nursery?’
    â€˜Oh, for a nursery.’
    â€˜I mean college-trained or nursery-trained?’ she explained patiently.
    â€˜An hour’, for Joyce, had always meant the length of time she had spent after tea in her mother’s drawing-room in clean frock and sash. Now, for her own children, ‘an hour’ was beginning to mean just the same: the length of time they spent each day with their parents in the drawing-room, dressed in clean clothes and playing with the drawing-room toys. Joyce gazed at them, dazzled by the backs of their necks. In her poem ‘Betsinda Dances’ she described a typical drawing-room scene:
    On a carpet red and blue
    Sits Betsinda, not quite two,
    Tracing with baby starfish hand
    The patterns that a Persian planned.
    Suddenly she sees me go
    Towards the box whence dances flow,
    Where embalmed together lie
    Symphony and lullaby.
    â€¦ Then, as the tide of sound advances,
    With grave delight Betsinda dances:
    One arm flies up, the other down
    To lift her Lilliputian gown,
    And round she turns on clumsy, sweet,
    Unrhythmical, enraptured feet;
    And round and round again she goes
    On hopeful, small, precarious toes.
    Dance, Betsinda, dance, while I
    Weave from this a memory;
    Thinking, if I chance to hear
    That record in some future year,
    The needle-point shall conjure yet
    Horn and harp and clarinet:
    But O! it shall not conjure you –
    Betsinda, dancing, not quite two.
    This sugary scene took place in Tony and Joyce’s new house, 16 Wellington Square, off the King’s Road, which they bought in 1930, the house on the left at the bottom of the square as you look down. It is easy to picture the young married Joyce rummaging for her keys.
    The key turned sweetly in the lock [she wrote in ‘Mrs Miniver’]. That was the kind of thing one remembered about a house: not the size of the rooms or the colour of the walls, but the feel of door-handles and light-switches, the shape and texture of the banister-rail under one’s palm; minute tactual intimacies, whose resumption was the essence of