The Real Mrs Miniver Read Free Page B

hug. ‘Durnie’, a former parlour-maid, was put in charge of her for a few weeks, and the weeks extended into months, and it dawned on her very gradually that Lala had retired, and was not coming back. ‘I was spared a deep wound,’ Joyce wrote, ‘but I acquired an infection of uncertainty which took me many years to get over. My mother was spared a heartrending scene, but she never afterwards had my wholehearted trust.’
    Sleeplessness, which afflicted Joyce throughout her life, began now. She also started to develop many of the symptoms of the physically undernourished. ‘I was what was known as delicate and nervy, and I had mild St Vitus’s Dance. The grownups called it, quite kindly, Joyce’s “tricks”, and it consisted of things like jerking my head, twitching my eyes and making clicking noises in my throat. I also had the habit of developing unexplained blotches and spots all over my body.’ Joyce realized, later in life, that all these were nervous complaints, and had the same cause: allergy to parental discord. The nerve tonics, milk, cream, suet puddings, cod-liver oil and malt prescribed by the doctors alleviated but did not cure the problem.
    Eva and Harry did not separate until years later, in 1915. A small entry appears in Harry’s visitors’ book: ‘8th October. Eva walked out of my house.’ Suitable marriages like theirs, Joyce wrote, tended to be bolstered by circumstances. ‘When they rot internally the clinging ivy of social routine and feudal responsibility (which often had a hand in strangling them) keeps them standing, though the sap flows no more and the leaves wither. There is always the flower show coming on or the village bazaar which has to be opened; or a General Election is nearly due and One Has to Consider the Party.’
    When Joyce’s own first marriage was floundering in 1947, she used the same metaphor to describe its sickness; though this time it was a joint love of the children which kept it standing for so long. ‘Relationships don’t die in one piece. Sometimes the trunk appears dead, and most of the branches, but there is still some hidden flow of sap to one of the boughs which keeps it alive and green. In our case this is just what happened. The whole relationship was dead for most of the time during the last few years; but three times a year, during the school holidays, that one remaining branch – our intense love for our co-parenthood of the children – burst into miraculous blossom, and we could forget the dry twisted deadness of the rest of the tree.’
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    â€˜Educated privately, London,’ Jan Struther was to write all her adult life, when filling in forms.
    She didn’t go to school, quite: she went to ‘Classes’ in the mornings, for ten years, from the age of six to sixteen. Her first, Miss Richardson’s Classes, took place at the house of Mrs Alfred Lyttelton at 16 Great College Street. On her first day there, in 1907, Joyce made a discovery: she found she liked being a new girl. This feeling lasted all her life. ‘It didn’t matter whether I was being a New Girl at school or a house party or a public dinner or a railway carriage or a ship: I always found it fun to infiltrate, to learn the ropes, to size up the other pupils, guests or passengers and to know that I was being sized up in return.’
    Her least favourite subjects were Hist’ry and Jog. Jog was reduced to a network of political boundaries, and Hist’ry to a string of dates. ‘It was small wonder that I fell as little in love with history as would a romantic young man with a girl of whom he had seen nothing but an X-ray photograph.’ The one item of historical knowledge which inspired Joyce concerned the demise of Henry I: ‘He died of a surfeit of lampreys, of which he was inordinately fond.’ This sentence, she said, introduced her to the