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

Chelsea. After the hushed grandeur of débutante Mayfair, Joyce loved the vibrancy of Chelsea: the street musicians on the King’s Road, and the cheap restaurants with water bottles that had once held Chianti. Their friends tended to be young, artistic Chelsea people with names like Turps (short for Turpentine) Orde. Tony worked for the Lloyds insurance brokers Harris & Dixon; he was also a ‘Name’ at Lloyds. But he wasn’t a businessman by nature. He and Joyce referred to his over-keen colleagues as ‘the business bastards’.
    Tony came home at six and played with his model trains. In the 1920s and 1930s this was a not uncommon adult male pastime, and Tony’s trains were particularly good; he had a real steam locomotive, not just clockwork or electric. But it was perhaps a sign of the schoolboyishness Tony carried with him into adulthood, and never shook off. For him, playing games, telling jokes and doing funny accents – all the things Etonians did between lessons – never lost their appeal. Playing was a way of hiding from the tedium of adulthood, and this, at first, was one of the bonds between Tony and Joyce. Writing to her brother in 1951, Joyce described her own lifelong shunning of adulthood: ‘Most people have some degree of histrionic sense: certainly nearly all children love dressing up and make-believe and pretending to be Red Indians and so forth. The majority of human beings grow out of this as they get older – some of them, in fact, grow out of it so completely that they become great big fucking bores, as we well know if we’ve had to sit next to them at dinner parties.’ There was a part of her, she wrote, which never stopped being ‘the curly-headed girl who would rather have been born a boy anyhow, and who had a strong prejudice against becoming a grown-up ever (fostered by many adoring visits to Peter Pan – a work of art which is probably responsible for more neuroses among the members of my generation than poor dear James Barrie had ever heard of).’

    Tony and Joyce in 1928
    In the daytime she sat at home writing articles, poems, short stories and fables which were published, at the rate of about one a week, under her pseudonym Jan Struther, first in G. K’s Weekly, the Evening Standard, the Daily News and the Daily Express, the Graphic, and Eve, the Lady’s Pictorial, and later, from 1928 onwards, in Punch, the Spectator and the New Statesman. Favourite themes in her earliest pieces were Justice Done to the Underdog, The Dreamer is Revenged on the Prosaic World, and Arrogance Knocked Off its Perch. Editors liked her conciseness, her epigrammatic style, her gift for observing universal daily experience, and her mastery of the irresistible first paragraph.
    Giving a party is very like having a baby: its conception is more fun than its completion, and once you have begun it is almost impossible to stop.
    She wrote about party-giving and party-going a great deal, because she was continually doing it in real life and half-liked it, half-loathed it. Tony had a gift for entertaining. Dinner parties at Walpole Street were not sleepy affairs with guests yawning on sofas. After dinner (celery cream soup, roast plover, French beans, rissole potatoes, Hungarian pudding and cheese patties, produced by Ada the cook), jazz records were played in the drawing-room. There was ping-pong (Joyce played until the last day of each pregnancy), or sometimes darts, or Tony would get his model trains working. Late at night, on a whim, everyone would jump into cars and drive twenty miles to Iver in Buckinghamshire, to stand on the railway bridge and watch the Cornish Riviera Express fly past underneath.
    They had a small circle of close friends: Guy and Jacynth Warrack, Anne Talbot, Evan and Cynthia Talbot, Klop and Nadya Ustinov, Charles and Oscar Spencer (Oscar was a woman), and Clifford and Peter Norton (Peter was a woman). There was also a wider circle