The Real Mrs Miniver Read Free Page A

on living quite grandly. Joyce remembered her grandmother Sudeley at Ormeley Lodge:
    â€˜If the unthinkable occurred, and Lizzie Haycock [the head-housemaid] happened to meet my grandmother in a passage, with no nearby doorway in which to take cover, she would flatten herself against the wall, concealing her dustpan and brush behind her back as though they were a jemmy and a blowlamp. My grandmother would nod and smile and Lizzie would murmur something inaudibly apologetic, ending in “… m’lady”, and stand with lowered eyes until Her Ladyship had passed by. They all did it. It was the way things were.’
    Eva found her own finances considerably reduced. She was still comfortably well-off, but no longer a notable heiress. After 1903 her husband wasn’t even an MP or Government minister any more. ‘My father was a methodical hard-working man,’ Joyce wrote, ‘with a great eye for detail; he could draft a memorandum with meticulous care and he never composed an ambiguous sentence, but he was sometimes tactless – not out of any lack of consideration for other people’s feelings but rather because he hadn’t the sense of finesse which makes some people weigh all the subtleties of a situation before they open their lips. Moreover, he hated intrigue, which to my mother was like oxygen.’
    Joyce had only one memory of her parents being nice to each other. Her father came home with a bad toothache one evening, and her mother got a bottle of Bunter’s Nervine from the medicine cupboard and took it up to him. Joyce was tremendously pleased. ‘Perhaps things are going to be better from now on,’ she thought. But they were not.
    One day she went to tea with her friend Kathleen Gascoigne, and witnessed another episode she never forgot. ‘Kathleen’s mother was in the schoolroom with us; her father came in, had a mock quarrel with her (how different in undertones and overtones from a real one, and how gentle the ring of tin swords after the clang of genuine steel!) and ended up by picking her up in his arms and carrying her out of the room, talking and laughing. I was almost speechless with wonder, and made a mental note: other people’s parents actually talk to each other, and make each other laugh.’
    *   *   *
    In the Housekeeper’s Room at Ormeley Lodge, a book called ‘Confessions: an Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c’ was filled in one afternoon when Joyce was there. Favourite Qualities in a Man: ‘A jolly good-tempered old drunkard,’ wrote Lizzie Haycock, the head housemaid. Pet Aversion: ‘Sunday in on a fine day,’ wrote Alice Rivers, another housemaid. Which Characters in History do you Most Dislike? ‘Gentry,’ wrote a between-maid called Annie McLeod. Here are Joyce’s entries, at the age of seven:
    Your favourite qualities in a man: conjuror
    Your favourite occupation: reading
    Idea of happiness: rolling down a muddy bank with your best dress on
    Idea of misery: when Douglas is away
    Pet aversion: meat and eating my dinner
    If not yourself, who would you be? A boy
    Favourite motto: Make hay while the sun shines and no rose without a thorn
    That last motto was to prove apposite. The rose and the thorn were inextricably joined in her life.
    Joyce played on her own for hours, under and in trees. She had prehensile toes, and she could whistle with two fingers. She invented an imaginary country of which she was king, and drew maps and plans of its coastlines and castles. Every now and then she asked Lala to play the extra pirate, or the Sheriff of Nottingham, or to be a weight on the other end of a see-saw. If Lala didn’t feel like it she said ‘Oh, no, I’ve got a bone in my leg.’
    One day, when Joyce was seven, she was sitting on the floor in the drawing-room when Lala was brought in to say goodbye. Joyce was absorbed in a jigsaw puzzle and gave her an absentminded