The Real Mrs Miniver Read Free

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.
    His name was Henry Torrens Anstruther, and his love for his only daughter, and hers for him, was of the unspoken kind which must find outlets for expression in mutual unembarrassing delights such as heraldry, etymology and punctuation.
    Things Harry taught me:
    Knots and splices
    Carpentry
    Grammar
    Love of reference books, maps, luggage, stationery
    Handwriting
    Love of Scotland
    Not to dog-ear books
    A Scot, he was Chief Liberal Whip and Member of Parliament for St Andrews, Fife until 1903 when he resigned on taking up the post of government representative on the Administrative Council of the Suez Canal Company. He was also a Justice of the Peace, an Alderman of the London County Council and a director of the North British Railway Company. But he could have earned his living, Joyce later wrote, and would have led a far happier life, as a jobbing carpenter.
    When Eva married him, he was a promising Member of Parliament who seemed destined for the Cabinet. She was the pretty, witty Eva Hanbury-Tracy, aged twenty, brought up amid great wealth in London and at two large and grand country houses, Toddington in Gloucestershire and Gregynog in Wales. She could have made any match she chose.
    â€˜My mother had visions of herself,’ Joyce wrote, ‘as a hostess of some famous London house, standing at the head of a long staircase, welcoming Cabinet Ministers and their wives to epoch-making parties and influencing the destiny of the nation by a diplomatic nod or the quick tap of a fan on a crucial forearm. When this plan went agley, she was terribly disappointed, and she just couldn’t take it.’
    In 1893, a year before Eva and Harry’s first child Douglas was born, Lloyd’s Bank filed a bankruptcy petition against Eva’s father, and Lord Sudeley was virtually ruined. Though asset-rich, he suffered from what would now be called a cash-flow problem. ‘To put it briefly,’ Joyce wrote, glossing over the true complications of the affair, ‘my grandfather Sudeley, who was incurably optimistic, embarked on a tremendous scheme of fruit-growing but failed to grasp the elementary botanical truth that the trees he had planted would take seven years to mature.’
    Queen Victoria wept on hearing of the bankruptcy. Lord Sudeley’s great-grandson, the present seventh Baron, has spent most of his life demonstrating, inside and outside Parliament, the unfairness of the treatment of the fourth Baron, and how he was cheated of his estate.
    Eva’s parents moved to Ormeley Lodge in Ham, which many would now consider one of the most covetable houses in Greater London: Queen Anne red brick with wings, high white gates, and topiary garden at the back. Lady Sudeley considered it ‘a villa’. But she carried