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

of not-so-close friends to be dined with or stayed with and then invited back. Discussing the characteristics of these friends, and the infuriating conventions which made it impossible to shake them off, was a favourite pastime. ‘The Frants? The Palmers? [asked Mrs Miniver.] Really, the unevenness of married couples. Like those gramophone records with a superb tune on one side and a negligible fill-up on the other which you had to take whether you liked it or not.’ The necessity of writing the sort of gushing thank-you letter immortalized by Jane Austen’s Mr Collins inspired an article for Punch, suggested by Tony, entitled ‘Snillocs’ (‘Snilloc’ is ‘Collins’ backwards). It should be the hostess, Jan argued, who wrote the thank-you letter: ‘A thousand thanks for coming to stay … we enjoyed every moment of your visit … it was too sweet of you to go to all that trouble and expense…’
    For consider what actually happens. The host, or more probably the hostess (since nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them) – the hostess, I say, is the person who suggests the visit in the first place. She begs, she implores you to come and stay. ‘We should so adore to see you again,’ she writes. ‘So hoping you are not booked up for that weekend – I know how sought after you are!’ And again, more briefly and winningly, ‘ Do say Yes!!!’ Thus far you, the potential guest, are the wooed, the desired, the beautiful maiden whose hand has just been asked in marriage. But as soon as you accept you find yourself de-rated. The beautiful maiden becomes merely another superfluous woman who has been lucky enough to get off. From now on, you are popularly supposed to be the beneficiary, your hostess the benefactor.
    The facts, as a brief audit will show, are otherwise. You, it is true, have saved the price of a few days’ food, but that is more than swallowed up by your railway fare and tips. You are richer by a few days and nights of country air; but against that you must set the discomfort of midge-bites in summer and arctic bedrooms in winter. You have undertaken, for friendship’s sake, two of the most disagreeable tasks in the world – packing and unpacking. You have had, certainly, the pleasure of talking to your host and hostess; but you have also had to talk to their neighbours – or, more likely, to listen to them talking to each other about people you do not know.
    And for all this, if you please, you, and you only, are expected to write an effusive letter of gratitude: while your hostess, who begged you to come, whose avowed object in buying a country house was that it would be such fun to have people to stay; your hostess, into whose drab herbaceous existence your coming has brought a breath of refreshing air from a larger and livelier world, is not expected to scribble so much as a hurried thank-you letter on a postcard.
    The ideal relationship was that of guest and fellow-guest. ‘Between these two there can spring up the most delightful of friendships. When they have reached a certain degree of intimacy, they can slope off together, on the time-honoured pretext of buying stamps, and have a good gossip about their host and hostess, than which there is no more satisfying conversation in the world.’
    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