It was a Wedgwood day, with white clouds delicately modelled in relief against a sky of pale blue. The best of England, thought Mrs Miniver, as opposed to countries with reasonable climates, is that it is not only once a year that you can say, ‘This is the first day of spring’. She had already said it twice since Christmas – once in January…..when it had been warm enough to lie on the sand without a coat; and once in February, when she had taken the children for a lunch picnic in Kensington Gardens. The grass had been scattered with twigs from the previous night’s gale, and by the next afternoon it was snowing: but while it lasted that day had been part of the authentic currency of spring – a stray coin tossed down carelessly on account.
‘The First Day of Spring’ from Mrs Miniver.
I mentioned previously, in the context of Mary Poppins, the phenomenon of films which bear only a passing resemblance to the books on which they are based, but which are nonetheless good in themselves. The most striking example of this disjuncture is William Wyler’s film Mrs Miniver (1942) and the very different book on which it is based, also called Mrs Miniver (1939). William Wyler was a brilliant Hollywood director who made films that were both challenging and heart-warming: Best Years of Our Lives (1946) about the post-war adjustment of three former combatants, is great and should be more celebrated. The film Mrs Miniver didn’t ‘bring’ the USA into the Second World War – when it premiered America was already mobilised – but its story of a small English family and community caught up in conflict made Americans feel a lot better about being in the war. It is easy to criticise the details of the film, which was (of necessity) shot entirely in America. The Miniver house is open-plan, when the only open-plan British dwellings were one-room cottages or tenement flats. There is a white picket fence (ow) and the Dunkirk evacuation takes place in what looks more like a creek than the English Channel. The Observer newspaper commented (in an otherwise positive review) that no gentleman’s outfitter of their acquaintance had supplied Mr Miniver with his pyjamas. But none of that really matters. Mrs Miniver (the film) is patient and slow and takes its time over details. There’s an air-raid shelter sequence where the fear builds to an almost unbearable pitch(which is probably what the experience felt like), and the Miniver couple (Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson) are stoic and restrained in their affection for each other and their children. Terror and tragedy and toughing it out are the themes of this memorable film, which also manages to have some humour. This, apart from the characters’ names, is probably the only thing it has in common with the book on which it was based.
Mrs Miniver (the book) is set in the pre-war years and it isn’t a story at all, but a collection of articles commissioned by The Times newspaper to reflect the experience of an ‘ordinary’ (i.e upper-middle-class metropolitan) woman living an ‘ordinary’ life in the late 1930s. These articles were published in book form in October 1939, with some additional essays reflecting changed, war-time conditions. The woman commissioned to write these articles, already a well-known contributor of essays and poems to many periodicals, went by the pen-name Jan Struther (1901-1953). Her real name was Joyce Maxtone Graham (née Anstruther). When she began to write she ran the initial J into Anstruther for her pen-name. I knew none of this until Virago brought out a paperback of the book in 1989, and followed it up with a reprint of her other essays for various publications, Try Anything Twice (originally published before Mrs Miniver, in 1938). Once again, where would we be without Virago?
The Mrs Miniver essays are all written in the third person, and they are ‘about’ the wife of an architect called Clem (her own Christian name isn’t revealed till the last essay ), living in a London square with three children, Vin (away at school), Judy (11ish) and Toby (5 or 6), who are still going to day-school (I think, it is never made clear) and have a nanny (or, as she spells it, nannie). Mrs Miniver is in her early forties, which she is enjoying so much more than her late thirties:
….it was the difference between August and October, between the heaviness of late summer and the sparkle of early autumn, between the ending of an old phase and the beginning of a fresh one. (‘Mrs Miniver Comes Home’)
Unfailingly positive is Mrs Miniver. She has a lot to be positive about, and in fairness, she knows it. A house in Chelsea, then regarded as ‘not quite’ by the upper classes, but still central and comfortable, and a cottage called ‘Starlings’ in the country. When she comes home tired from shopping, she goes up to the drawing-room and tea (afternoon tea) will be laid out (honey sandwiches, brandy-snaps, small ratafia biscuits), and she just has to ring for a pot of tea to be brought up. Her enjoyment of this is not complete until she hears the Blue Danube ‘with a hundred apocryphal trills and arpeggios’ being played outside on the square by a barrel-organ. She is always tuned into the life of the city and its strolling players, taxi-drivers, shoppers, and various others, and she has a soft spot for the children minding children who make the parks their own when the Really Nice Children have gone to the sea-side: ‘whey-faced, thin, ragged, merry and shrewd’. (‘London in August’). The maid, cook and nannie, by no means invisible, have names and personalities and they are respected and valued. When the cook, Scottish Mrs Adie reads their fortunes on New Year’s Eve from lumps of lead melted in water, and says ‘If you run from your lead you’ll run from your luck’, Mrs Miniver reflects how marvellous it is that ‘any Scot, in almost any situation, can coin a phrase that has the authentic ring and cogency of an ancient proverb’. (‘New Year’s Eve’).
I could write three or four blogs about Jan Struther’s upper-middle-class assumptions, which, although far more self-aware than those of say, Elizabeth Bowen or Virginia Woolf, are still quite remarkable. But I’d rather write about her descriptions of everyday life, which bring us right back to England in the late 1930s. ‘Three Stockings’ reveals that Mrs Miniver and her husband sleep in separate beds, and that when the three children (one of them a young teenager) invade the parents’ bedroom early on Christmas morning to empty their stockings ‘there was nothing for it but to switch on the lights, shut the windows and admit that Christmas Day had….begun’. So even in midwinter, bedroom windows were open all night. Clem is Scottish (like Tony Maxtone Graham, Joyce/Jan’s husband) so the entire family goes north for the ‘glorious twelfth’ of August, for shooting and the annual ritual of the Crurie Games, complete with hurdy-gurdies: ‘In the far distance the steam organ of the roundabout was playing, sweetly and puffily, ‘My Lily of Laguna’. (‘At The Games’). At dinner in a country house, she manages to distract herself from a pointless argument about the morality of blood sports by establishing that her neighbour at table, an elderly colonel, served in Singapore with her uncle, Torquil Piggott:
‘Piggy!‘ exclaimed the Colonel…and plunged into reminiscence. Thank God for colonels, thought Mrs Miniver; sweet creatures, so easily entertained, so biddably diverted from senseless controversy into comfortable monologue: there was nothing in the world so restful as a really good English colonel.(‘The Eve of the Shoot’)
As well as getting the best out of everybody from colonels to charwomen (‘In Search of a Charwoman’), she appreciates hop-picking and gardening and all kinds of physical activity (except housework). When the Minivers are clearing brambles and other foliage at their country cottage, she comments that gardening is ‘it’s so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.’ (‘Brambles and Apple-trees’) Metaphors of entanglement and encirclement are in the news. On the evening- paper-placards, blowing in the wind outside the newsagent’s, every word of the headline is hidden except ‘Jews’ (a detail that is itself striking); ‘Mrs Miniver was conscious of an instantaneous mental wincing and an almost instantaneous remorse for it. …..To shrink from direct pain was bad enough, but to shrink from vicarious pain was the ultimate cowardice.’ (‘A Wild Day’)When gas-masks are issued, in the summer of 1938, ‘It was for this…..that one had boiled the milk for their bottles, and washed their hands before lunch, and not let them eat with a spoon which had been dropped on the floor’. (‘Gas Masks’). Parents all over Europe, I am sure, felt this (or variations of it), just as parents in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Iran and the Congo do, today.
Some critics found (and still find) Mrs Miniver smug: I don’t. It is all too easy to snigger at her fears of the coming conflict (around the time of Munich); even if they aren’t all killed, she fears that their lives will change irrevocably:
Small objects one could send to the country – a picture or two, the second edition of Donne, and the little antelope made of burnt jade, but one couldn’t send away or replace, the old panelling on the stairs, or the one crooked pane on the dining-room window…or the notches on the nursery door-post where they measured the children every year. (‘Back to Normal’)
But a lot of people who were even wealthier than she was, didn’t have her self-awareness, or her dawning realisation of what truly mattered.
The happy wife and mother with a rich and varied social life as described in the articles/essays was a fiction. Joyce Maxtone Graham/Jan Struther’s own life story is too complicated to get into; her grand-daughter’s brilliant biography relates it in the book cited below. In Mrs Miniver, Struther omitted the discontent and restlessness, but she used her keen observational skills to describe the world as she encountered it in her ordinary round – at the dentist, Christmas shopping, attending a committee meeting, choosing a doll with her daughter Judy, learning how to fit a gas mask, making out a Christmas list – and she described it forensically. Here she is on ‘that tribe of humble familiars which jog along beside one from year’s end to year’s end’:
A sponge, a comb, a tooth-brush, a spectacle-case, a fountain pen – these are the things which need to be chosen with care. They become, in time, so much a part of one that they can scarcely be classed as inanimate. (‘The New Engagement Book’).
The items she lists are very much of her time, but Struther’s descriptions have more than historical significance. Reading her makes me want to appreciate and describe my own humdrum everyday life in the same detailed way – not for posterity, but for myself.
Jan Struther, Mrs Miniver (London: Chatto & Windus 1939: Virago 1989). Persephone Books also brought out an edition in 2024.
_______Try Anything Twice (London: Chatto & Windus 1938: Virago 1990). Very good essays on a variety of topics, including shopping for school-clothes, the Family Photograph, trying to find a nannie in a servant agency, and many other themes. Not as charming as Mrs Miniver but good nonetheless.
Both of these Virago editions have good introductions by Valerie Grove, whose biographies of Dodie Smith and John Mortimer (among others) are of a re-readable quality.
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Real Mrs Miniver: Jan Struther’s Story (London: John Murray 2001). This is a page-turner, lively and loving, with lots of photographs. The author inherited some of her grandmother’s light touch.
Alison Light, Forever England: femininity, literature and conservatism between the wars (London: Routledge 1991) has a perceptive chapter ‘Peace in our time: Mrs Miniver‘. Quite critical, it should be read alongside Maxtone Graham and Grove, but it still acknowledges Struther’s courage in admitting that a middle-class life in the 1930s was actually quite nice and enjoyable most of the time, an admission that enraged critics like E.M.Forster.
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