{review} mrs. miniver

Jan Struther Mrs. Miniver (1939)

She rearranged the fire a little, mostly for the pleasure of handling the fluted steel poker, and then sat down by it. Tea was already laid: there were honey sandwiches, brandy-snaps, and small ratafia biscuits; and there would, she knew, be crumpets. Three new library books lay virginally on the fender-stool, their bright paper wrappers unsullied by subscriber's hand. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed, very softly and precisely, five times. A tug hooted from the river. A sudden breeze brought the sharp tang of a bonfire in at the window. The jig-saw was almost complete, but there was still one piece missing. And then, from the other end of the square, came the familiar sound of the Wednesday barrel-organ, playing, with a hundred apocryphal trills and arpeggios, the 'Blue Danube' waltz. And Mrs. Miniver, with a little sigh of contentment, rang for tea.

Mrs Miniver had me from the moment I read that perfectly contrived description of an idyllic English "tea". This book offers a perfectly worded and eminently quotable gem of propaganda-worthy hearth-and-home sentiment on almost every page. This could prove somewhat glutinous (especially given that, unlike her peer The Provincial Lady, Mrs. Miniver is financially secure in her world), except that Mrs Miniver is leavened by an often quite startling commentary on these idyllic pictures.

When Mrs Miniver has described the post-Christmas scene ("The room was laced with an invisible network of affectionate understanding"), this is cut with the comment that,

This was one of the moments, thought Mrs. Miniver, which paid off at a single stroke all the accumulations on the debit side of parenthood: the morning sickness and the quite astonishing pain; the pram in the passage, the cold mulish glint in the cook's eye; the holiday nurse who had been in the best families; the pungent white mice, the shrivelled caterpillars; the plasticine on the door-handles, the face-flannels in the bathroom, the nameless horrors down the crevices of armchairs; the alarms and emergencies, the swallowed button, the inexplicable earache, the ominous rash appearing on the eve of a journey; the school bills and the dentists' bills; the shortened stop, the tempered pace, the emotional compromises, the divided loyalties, the adventures continually forsworn.

Astonishing, isn't it? 

Rating: 5/5. Loved it.

If you liked this... I don't think Mrs. Miniver will overtake The Provincial Lady for top place in my affections. There are less laugh-out-loud moments (except those swans: "Conceited brutes. They always look as though they'd just been reading their own fan-mail"). Must watch the film again. I retain the impression that I didn't like it.

That is a truly horrid cover.

{review} good evening mrs. craven

Good Evening Mrs. Craven: the Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes (Persephone Classics 2008)

Women of all ages liked Winthrop Biddle - 'He's a great dear' was the expression they generally used - and he was devoted to the whole sex in the cosy way of an uncle who enjoys the confidence of a vast number of totally unrelated nieces. His feminine friends knew that he could be relied up to provide a lunch, a bed, sound advice, or a cast-iron alibi as required, and not to go in for jolly avuncular pouncings in taxis. ('Lunch with Mr. Biddle', 1940)

These short stories appeared in The New Yorker during the Second World War. Mollie Panter-Downes was drawn to what the ordinary lives of ordinary people - the 'quotidian' as the Introduction nicely puts it. She wrote, "If the pieces had value, it's because I took note of the trivial, ordinary things that happened to ordinary people." How do the 'ordinary' man and woman on the home-front deal with the changes wrought by war?

Barrage balloons. Source.

Panter-Downes' writing completely blew me away: she has such a gift for the iconic portrait of her subjects (and objects: the barrage balloons are "spread over the sky like some form of silvery dermatitis". Isn't that perfect?). A baby-wear saleswoman "snuffled… with a damp blend of sentiment and catarrh" ('The Waste of it All', 1944)

"Battalions of willing ladies" have "emerged from herbaceous borders to answer the call of duty": "firm-lipped spinsters who yesterday could hardly have said 'Boo!' to an aster." ('Letter from London', 1939)

Major Marriot, "a grizzled Adonis", lives with his sister in the country. He waits for the false war to end so that he can throw himself into air-warden duties. Mrs Trent sees him watching the sky "smiling sweetly as he sometimes smiled at her, with rakish twinkle of the born charmer, the absent-minded tenderness of a man who loved women and danger but had somehow ended up with Miss Marriot and a warden's rattle beneath crossed assegais." When he picks up the air-warden's rattle, she sees him "look at it longingly, and put it down again, like a small boy with a parcel which he knows he mustn't open till Christmas." ('It's the Real Thing This Time', 1940)

Panter-Downes' language is terribly seductive, and she has a very witty line in the revelation of her character's hidden, internal observations. Mrs. Ramsay, in the opening story, who goes to meet an old flame home from Malaya, "noted coldly that he was a good deal yellower than he had been five years ago." ('Date with Romance', 1939)

On a friend's mother who has imposed herself into the Ramsay's Sussex cottage for the duration, Mrs. Ramsay offers the observation ("morbidly"):

All autumn Mrs. Parmenter had run out between the showers and picked the asters, saying brightly that an old woman must be allowed to do something around the house. Opposition would hardly have been hysterical if she had offered to make the beds, but her tastes appeared to be floral. (Mrs. Ramsay's War, 1940)

A number of stories display this delicate wickedness. Other stories are quite melancholic or reveal the tiny tragedies of life in wartime: how can a mistress discover that her married lover is safe? Dare she ring his wife? Do one's domestic squabbles still rate while the world outside faces destruction? What if one realises that one "had almost grown used to doing without him." Will wartime break down the social barriers between the middle-class lady and the char when both share similar heartbreaks? And what about all that interminable waiting, waiting, waiting and pretending not to fear the worst?

When she had hung up the receiver the clock was striking six. She went over to the radio, turned the knob, and sat down with all the other anxious women to knit and listen. ('War Among Strangers', 1942)

In sum: a must read for lovers of the 30s/40s. Beautiful prose. Wonderful, jewel-like stories.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... Jan Struther's Mrs Miniver and E. M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady, of course.