The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  Pictured right is the first of 276 Details of Engagement which Jan was to receive from Clark Getts over the next four years. What would the West High School in Minneapolis look like? What would Mrs J. Harold Kettelson look like? Who would turn up to listen to the lecture? Jan was intrigued.

  Fizzing with excitement after meeting influential people all day, Jan collected Dolf from his work in the evening – he was still wrapping parcels in Union Square. The unworthiness of the job filled her with rage. ‘How can you work there? The smell of that man’s cigar! I know you’ll find something better soon … I did a lovely book-signing today at the British War Relief, and I had a hilarious lunch with the Morleys at Harcourt Brace…’ Jan talked away as they walked together up to East 50th Street. ‘D’you like the top of that building?’ Dolf gave an architectural appraisal shining with art-historical wisdom, and Jan was dazzled by the fineness of his mind.

  He did, eventually, make the terrible mistake which got him sacked from the parcel-wrapping job: he registered a large consignment of parcels which were supposed to be insured, and insured a pile which were supposed to be registered, and sent them all off to South America before the mistake had been spotted. ‘You will be happier somewhere else, Herr Doktor,’ said his boss. ‘Get out!’

  Dolf was grateful for that final ‘Herr Doktor’: it implied recognition that he had been too bright, rather than too dim, for the job. Jan was delighted, but not for long. Dolf did indeed soon get another job, but it was addressing envelopes: he was paid by the hundred. Now at least he could work at home.

  * * *

  ‘It’s 8.30 p.m. Welcome to Information, Please!’ This was Clifton Fadiman speaking into his microphone at Radio City. ‘And with us tonight on our panel we have Jan Struther, the author of Mrs Miniver, and John Gunther, author of Inside Europe and Inside Asia. They are joining our usual friends Franklin P. Adams and John Kieran. As you know, the aim is to send in a question the panel can’t answer. If you succeed, we will send you ten dollars and all twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. But first, a word from our sponsor.’

  ‘Canada Dry is the aristocrat of the table…’

  Help, thought Jan. The sponsor was bringing momentary respite, but any second now the ordeal would begin. She was sitting uncomfortably on a copy of the Manhattan telephone directory, which she had been given to raise her to the level of the microphone.

  ‘Now, Miss Struther and gentlemen, Lois B. Walker of Mill Valley, California has sent in the following question: What practical use is made of these scientific facts: (a) helium is lighter than air and non-inflammable; (b) silver chloride is sensitive to light; (c) liquid ammonia absorbs heat when it vaporizes; (d) wood alcohol has a low freezing point?’

  This was awful. They hadn’t done much science at Miss Richardson’s Classes. The first one must be something to do with balloons … But Mr Adams had put his hand up. ‘The first is airships. Silver chloride and light: that’s photography. Liquid ammonia: that must be refrigeration. Wood alcohol: isn’t that the anti-freeze they put into automobile radiators?’

  ‘Attaboy, Mr Adams! Now, Mr Frank J. Mason of Laurel, Mississippi asks us the following: What pitcher (a) holds the Major League record for strikeouts in one game; (b) holds the Major League lifetime record for strikeouts? (c) holds the record of the greatest number of consecutive hitless innings?’

  Surely she couldn’t be expected to know that. Even the others on the panel had to confer. Wasn’t it Bob Feller, or someone, of Cleveland, who struck out eighteen Detroit Tigers back in 1938? And surely Walter Johnson must be the record-holder for strikeouts? Correct; but they couldn’t answer the consecutive hitless innings question. They were stumped, Jan noticed. And they wouldn’t even know what ‘stumped’ meant.

  ‘Congratulations, Mr Mason. The Encyclopedia Britannica is on its way to you. And now another word from our sponsor.’

  These men knew their stuff. They knew their chemical elements, their Bible, their Greek myths, their Swinburne, their Longfellow. Their hands went up before Jan had time to think. But her moment of glory came. ‘Mrs Donald G. Dempsey of Sharon, Ohio asks the following: Name a work of fiction in which: (a) five sisters are among the principal characters; (b) four sisters are among the principal characters; (c) three sisters are among the principal characters; (d) two sisters are among the principal characters; (e) one sister is the principal character.’

  ‘Well, Pride and Prejudice is five,’ said John Kieran, ‘and Little Women is four, and King Lear is three…’

  ‘And what are the names of the Little Women?’

  ‘Let me see. There’s Amy…’

  But the men didn’t know the others. Joyce put her hand up. ‘They are called Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March,’ she said in a quiet and startlingly English-sounding voice.

  ‘Good on you, Miss Struther.’

  She would be invited again.

  * * *

  Term began for the children, at Trinity School, a private day school on the West Side of Manhattan, where all the cousins went. Rachel Townsend, a great ‘fixer’, managed to persuade the maintenance man of 1 Beekman Place, Al Cominucci, to agree to be the family chauffeur for the school run. Off the children went each morning; and Rachel sat in bed for another two hours. Her breakfast tray had slots on the sides for the post and the papers.

  The news pages were full of the forthcoming presidential elections. Rachel supported Roosevelt, because she sensed (in spite of his cautious words) that he would not stand by and let Nazism triumph in Europe. Greenough (being right-wing Eastern Seaboard) was anti-Roosevelt. Jan felt the same way as Rachel, but she went further: she loved Roosevelt for his quiet rhetoric and his vibrant face which belied his physical frailty. She admired him for daring to be unpopular with the rich to help the poor, and she could read on his face the anguish of a man torn in two directions, between Winston Churchill and Congress. She even started dreaming about him from about this time. ‘I’ve been dreaming fantastically, mostly FDR-politically,’ she told Dolf.

  And still Mrs Miniver crept up the national bestseller list. On 22 September 1940 it was second, and on 29 September it was Number One. ‘TOP!’ wrote Jan, next to the Herald Tribune headline ‘What America is Reading’. The next four, in descending order, were How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn, The Beloved Returns by Thomas Mann, Stars on the Sea by F. van Wyck Mason, and To the Indies by C. S. Forrester. On the nonfiction list, Mein Kampf was seventeenth.

  Jan boarded a train in the direction of Minneapolis on 2 October, as bidden by Clark Getts. The paint was olive-green, the upholstery was brownish plush, and Jan was full of curiosity. ‘I love seeing the approaches to small towns from the train,’ she wrote, ‘– the children’s toys in the yard, the bright-coloured washing hanging on the line: there was a beautiful old patchwork quilt just now hanging outside a very poor little frame house – probably their only heirloom and treasure. Glimpses like that, to me, are the real essence of America – not the skyscrapers or the Statue of Liberty.’

  Then, as night fell, there was the new experience of sleeping in a curtained berth above or below the berth of an American stranger. ‘I’m sharing with a pleasant moon-faced middle-aged man with rimless glasses,’ Jan wrote, ‘who has slept most of the way, awakening only at intervals to enquire from new passengers about the progress of the Ball Game at St Louis. He has the Lower Berth, I have the Upper. I know nothing about him and he knows nothing about me. We will never see each other again. Yet just for this night I shall sleep suspended 3 feet above him in that curiously impersonal proximity which seems such a fascinating part of American Pullman life.’

  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

  THE 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.