The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham Page B

‘F’ to distinguish sexual from non-sexual friendships). Tibor came to stay at the coastguard’s cottage in Rye, when Tony was there: the capital ‘F’ aspect was kept deeply secret, and Tony was lavish, as always, with hospitality and good wine. Tony and Joyce never ceased to be ‘a good team’ on social occasions. For the sake of the children, and for the sake of not having to face anything unpleasant, they maintained the façade of a happy marriage.
    â€˜The lover, the party-giver and the freelance journalist are the only people who feel a genuine interest in the postman’s knock,’ Joyce wrote; and, for a time, she was all three. But in public she was still the safe wife, tending to display wit rather than emotion. The brittle social-observer strand in her journalism was being over-used, the noticing-sadness-in-everyday-life strand under-used. At the end of some of her Spectator pieces of the mid 1930s, an invisible ‘Will this do? is all but legible. Perhaps the weakest article of her whole career was ‘A Brief Guide to Cornwall’ written for the Spectator in 1935. She and Tony had been on a cheap Cornish holiday, and Joyce frivolously summed up the county using that crutch for the lazy or uninspired journalist, the ‘A to Z’ method. ‘Place-names: Unbelievable. Still, there they are on the map. But don’t go to St Anthony-in-Roseland, because no place could possibly live up to a name like that. We avoided it, for fear of disillusion.’ (Informationless though it was, this article made its way into the pages of The Statesman, Calcutta.)
    Why were Tony and Joyce driving around Cornwall being facetious about the place-names, dialect, customs and inhabitants? They were economizing.
    They had never been good at hanging on to their money. In 1925, two years into their marriage, they had decided against ‘taking care of the pence’ in their life – saving money on matches, stamps and bits of string. It was more important, they felt, to take care of the pounds and ‘let the pence go hang’ – to live in a cottage but have a never-failing supply of first-class cigarettes. At that time, they were indeed living in a kind of cottage – a small house in Chelsea.
    But now, in the 1930s, they were trying to maintain a fourteen-roomed house with a triple garage in the mews, and a seaside cottage, and the staff of both – as well as keeping up the supply of first-class cigarettes. Then Tony suffered a blow at work. He had been earning a handsome commission from Lord Beaver-brook’s newspapers with an insurance brokerage scheme by which readers could cut out coupons entitling them to free accident insurance. Then Tony’s father, the chartered accountant, auditing in Canada, declined to approve the accounts of one of Lord Beaverbrook’s companies there. Beaverbrook was furious, and refused to do any more business with anyone called Maxtone Graham. Tony’s income suddenly dropped.
    It was no longer enough to let Wellington Square for the summer season, as they had been doing. In 1936 they had to let it permanently, and move out. Later, Joyce named the moment of shutting up Wellington Square as the first time she experienced what she believed was depression – ‘I fondly thought’, she wrote to her brother, ‘that I was in the lowest depths, little dreaming that there was a Grand Canyon beyond. Actually, it was eight years before I had anything one could call a real depression.’ Here she is, in 1936, on bankruptcy, both literal and metaphorical:
    â€˜Audit’
    Bankrupt of joy, who once was rich in it,
    Must drop pretence at last, no longer hide
    Behind drawn blinds rooms ravished by distraint;
    Swallow his pride,
    And openly admit
    His fortune spent.
    That over, what remains? Only to sit
    By a cold hearth, staring at a stripped wall,
    And with humility make
    His statement of account;
    Recall
    The