The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham Page A

sometimes it was ‘We railed against Tony and Joyce’ – became common in Anne Talbot’s diary. It was a gossipy circle, which seemed to derive more pleasure from talking about Tony and Joyce than to them. Their friends, behind their backs, tried to get to the bottom of why Tony and Joyce could be so likeable, and yet so annoying.
    Joyce was often a little ill, if there were callers. Not badly ill – just a cough, and a dressing-gown on, and the bedroom door closed behind her. In Rye, to get away from the golf conversation, she made a small upstairs sitting-room for herself, with a sofa-bed, to which she retreated with the excuse of a cold and an article to finish. Being ‘under the weather’ was the easiest way of bowing out of the jollities. She wrote poems in bed, such as this one, ‘At a Dull Party’:
    In fifty years at most I shall be dead.
    Â Â Â Â These jaws, which now grind hard to scotch a yawn,
    Will gape unchecked; and in a clay-cold bed
    Â Â Â Â Clamped fast, I’ll wait a problematical dawn.
    I have less than twenty thousand days to live –
    Â Â Â Â Six hundred months, a bare half-million hours;
    And each new breath, heedless and fugitive,
    Â Â Â Â Another mouthful of my life devours.
    Then, Christ! what spendthrift folly brought me here,
    Â Â Â Â To breathe stale smoke, and drink, talk, think, small beer?
    A sense of mortality was creeping into her consciousness. This marriage was beginning to make her feel old. In her mid thirties she began to write about what it was like to grow older. It was
    â€¦ to feel on the first rose
    The breath malign and fell
    Of the first icicle,
    And in the earliest kiss,
    The handshake of farewell.
    It was to see ‘Night’s poles flash by us, day’s wires dip between them’, as one stared from the train window. It was to notice, at the annual Eton and Harrow cricket match at Lord’s, how much one’s acquaintances had aged. Joyce never enjoyed this day out. ‘Like the hands of an electric clock which pounce forward once a minute, the faces you meet at Lord’s seem to grow older in horrid jerks, bringing home the passage of time more cogently than the smooth, almost imperceptible changing of faces of intimate friends.’ As for the ordeal of having to watch the cricket match and chat to these acquaintances, this was Joyce’s opinion: ‘It may or may not be true that playing games has made Englishmen what they are. But there is no doubt whatever that it is having to watch Englishmen play games that has made English women what they are.’
    Her taste in men changed, in the mid 1930s, from the British to the central European, and preferably Jewish. Hungarians didn’t rely on anecdotes; they played violins and allowed the sadness of the world to seep into them. As Tony became less and less communicative, Joyce craved the company of men who were not afraid to talk about the blackness in one’s heart. In a letter to her son Jamie after the Second World War, referring to Tony, she wrote: ‘This bottling-up habit is the only bad fault I’ve ever had to find with him, but it certainly is a bad one, and is enough to wreck any marriage.’ As she put it in ‘Variation on an Old Proverb’, 1937,
    Hard words will break no bones,
    But more than bones are broken
    By the inescapable stones
    Of fond words left unspoken.
    The cheekbones of a Hungarian doctor she met in Chelsea, Tibor Csato, made her knees melt. We have only Anne Talbot’s description of this exotic man: ‘Good looking and beautifully made, and seems charming. He is a poor dog doing cancer research here.’ (The ‘poor dog’ went on to become a successful London surgeon, with fashionable consulting rooms in Great Cumberland Place.) Joyce wrote nothing down about Tibor, but it is clear that he was a Friend rather than a mere friend (she used that capital