Chapter Three
Only in two kinds of earth
Can poets bring their songs to birth –
In sorrow’s rich and heavy clay,
Or else (and here’s the rarer way)
Out of the loamy light caress
Of an abundant happiness.
Therefore, best critic and best friend,
To you these doggerel thanks I send
For each delightful day, each charming year
Your presence has ensured for me, my dear.
Dedication ‘To A. M. G.’, from Betsinda Dances
MRS MINIVER IS a portrait of a woman in a cloudless marriage. When Joyce began to write it, fifteen years into her marriage to Tony, the paradise she depicted was for her a paradise lost. But the very fact that it was out of reach made her perception of it all the sharper, and it is to Mrs Miniver we must look for a flavour of the first blissful ten years with Tony. She put her finger on the small but intense daily pleasures of marriage, the eye to catch, the pocketful of pebbles, un-understanding.
‘Tell me,’ said Mrs Miniver, ‘weren’t you with an uncle of mine in Singapore – Torquil Piggott?’
‘Piggy!’ exclaimed the Colonel, beaming gratefully, 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. Clem caught her eye across the table. It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there always being an eye to catch.
As she walked past a cab rank in Pont Street Mrs Miniver heard a very fat taxi driver with a bottle nose saying a very old taxi driver with a rheumy eye: ‘They say it’s all a question of your subconscious mind.’
Enchanted, she put the incident into her pocket for Clem. It jostled, a bright pebble, against several others: she had had a rewarding day. And Clem, who had driven down to the country to lunch with a client, would be pretty certain to come back with some good stuff, too. This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day’s pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life.
Mrs Miniver had long ago discovered that whereas words, for her, clarified feelings, for Clem, on the whole, they obscured them. This was perhaps just as well. For if they had both been equally explicit they might have been in danger of understanding each other completely; and a certain degree of un-understanding (not mis-, but un-) is the only possible sanctuary which one human being can offer to another in the midst of the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage.
Relatives have said that ‘When Tony and Joyce were first married they were so in love that when their first son was born they neglected him completely.’ This seems unlikely: there are too many photographs of Jamie (born 1924) being hugged. But she certainly handed him back to his nurse the moment he started crying. As Joyce herself wrote of her grandmother’s old-fashioned behaviour, ‘They all did it. It was the way things were.’
Her babies were born at home: she was modern and brave about childbirth. Twenty-seven years after the first event she described the astonishing pain: ‘“Stick to it as long as you can,” said my doctor, “but there’s no need to get to the stage of biting sheets.” “Me, bite sheets?” I remember thinking in arrogant astonishment; but a few hours later I saw what he meant.’ She breastfed her children, but after that she felt she had done her share of hard work, and handed over to Nannie.
With Jamie in 1929
Tony and Joyce’s first home was a small Georgian house in Walpole Street, Chelsea. After the hushed grandeur of débutante Mayfair, Joyce loved the vibrancy of Chelsea: the street musicians on the King’s Road, and the cheap restaurants with water bottles that had once held Chianti. Their friends tended to be young, artistic Chelsea people with names like Turps (short for Turpentine) Orde. Tony worked for the Lloyds insurance brokers Harris & Dixon; he was also a ‘Name’ at Lloyds. But he wasn’t a businessman by nature. He and Joyce referred to his over-keen colleagues as ‘the business bastards’.
Tony came home at six and played with his model trains. In the 1920s and 1930s this was a not uncommon adult male pastime, and Tony’s trains were particularly good; he had a real steam locomotive, not just clockwork or electric. But it was perhaps a sign of the schoolboyishness Tony carried with him into adulthood, and never shook off. For him, playing games, telling jokes and doing funny accents – all the things Etonians did between lessons – never lost their appeal. Playing was a way of hiding from the tedium of adulthood, and this, at first, was one of the bonds between Tony and Joyce. Writing to her brother in 1951, Joyce described her own lifelong shunning of adulthood: ‘Most people have some degree of histrionic sense: certainly nearly all children love dressing up and make-believe and pretending to be Red Indians and so forth. The majority of human beings grow out of this as they get older – some of them, in fact, grow out of it so completely that they become great big fucking bores, as we well know if we’ve had to sit next to them at dinner parties.’ There was a part of her, she wrote, which never stopped being ‘the curly-headed girl who would rather have been born a boy anyhow, and who had a strong prejudice against becoming a grown-up ever (fostered by many adoring visits to Peter Pan – a work of art which is probably responsible for more neuroses among the members of my generation than poor dear James Barrie had ever heard of).’
Tony and Joyce in 1928
In the daytime she sat at home writing articles, poems, short stories and fables which were published, at the rate of about one a week, under her pseudonym Jan Struther, first in G. K’s Weekly, the Evening Standard, the Daily News and the Daily Express, the Graphic, and Eve, the Lady’s Pictorial, and later, from 1928 onwards, in Punch, the Spectator and the New Statesman. Favourite themes in her earliest pieces were Justice Done to the Underdog, The Dreamer is Revenged on the Prosaic World, and Arrogance Knocked Off its Perch. Editors liked her conciseness, her epigrammatic style, her gift for observing universal daily experience, and her mastery of the irresistible first paragraph.
Giving a party is very like having a baby: its conception is more fun than its completion, and once you have begun it is almost impossible to stop.
She wrote about party-giving and party-going a great deal, because she was continually doing it in real life and half-liked it, half-loathed it. Tony had a gift for entertaining. Dinner parties at Walpole Street were not sleepy affairs with guests yawning on sofas. After dinner (celery cream soup, roast plover, French beans, rissole potatoes, Hungarian pudding and cheese patties, produced by Ada the cook), jazz records were played in the drawing-room. There was ping-pong (Joyce played until the last day of each pregnancy), or sometimes darts, or Tony would get his model trains working. Late at night, on a whim, everyone would jump into cars and drive twenty miles to Iver in Buckinghamshire, to stand on the railway bridge and watch the Cornish Riviera Express fly past underneath.
They had a small circle of close friends: Guy and Jacynth Warrack, Anne Talbot, Evan and Cynthia Talbot, Klop and Nadya Ustinov, Charles and Oscar Spencer (Oscar was a woman), and Clifford and Peter Norton (Peter was a woman). There was also a wider circle of not-so-close friends to be dined with or stayed with and then invited back. Discussing the characteristics of these friends, and the infuriating conventions which made it impossible to shake them off, was a favourite pastime. ‘The Frants? The Palmers? [asked Mrs Miniver.] Really, the unevenness of married couples. Like those gramophone records with a superb tune on one side and a negligible fill-up on the other which you had to take whether you liked it or not.’ The necessity of writing the sort of gushing thank-you letter immortalized by Jane Austen’s Mr Collins inspired an article for Punch, suggested by Tony, entitled ‘Snillocs’ (‘Snilloc’ is ‘Collins’ backwards). It should be the hostess, Jan argued, who wrote the thank-you letter: ‘A thousand thanks for coming to stay … we enjoyed every moment of your visit … it was too sweet of you to go to all that trouble and expense…’
For consider what actually happens. The host, or more probably the hostess (since nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them) – the hostess, I say, is the person who suggests the visit in the first place. She begs, she implores you to come and stay. ‘We should so adore to see you again,’ she writes. ‘So hoping you are not booked up for that weekend – I know how sought after you are!’ And again, more briefly and winningly, ‘Do say Yes!!!’ Thus far you, the potential guest, are the wooed, the desired, the beautiful maiden whose hand has just been asked in marriage. But as soon as you accept you find yourself de-rated. The beautiful maiden becomes merely another superfluous woman who has been lucky enough to get off. From now on, you are popularly supposed to be the beneficiary, your hostess the benefactor.
The facts, as a brief audit will show, are otherwise. You, it is true, have saved the price of a few days’ food, but that is more than swallowed up by your railway fare and tips. You are richer by a few days and nights of country air; but against that you must set the discomfort of midge-bites in summer and arctic bedrooms in winter. You have undertaken, for friendship’s sake, two of the most disagreeable tasks in the world – packing and unpacking. You have had, certainly, the pleasure of talking to your host and hostess; but you have also had to talk to their neighbours – or, more likely, to listen to them talking to each other about people you do not know.
And for all this, if you please, you, and you only, are expected to write an effusive letter of gratitude: while your hostess, who begged you to come, whose avowed object in buying a country house was that it would be such fun to have people to stay; your hostess, into whose drab herbaceous existence your coming has brought a breath of refreshing air from a larger and livelier world, is not expected to scribble so much as a hurried thank-you letter on a postcard.
The ideal relationship was that of guest and fellow-guest. ‘Between these two there can spring up the most delightful of friendships. When they have reached a certain degree of intimacy, they can slope off together, on the time-honoured pretext of buying stamps, and have a good gossip about their host and hostess, than which there is no more satisfying conversation in the world.’
Joyce kept a diary of a week of shooting visits which began with a flat tyre on the Great North Road, and Tony cursing while he changed the wheel. They stayed at Burton Hall near Lincoln, Buckminster Park near Grantham, and Launde Abbey near Oakham, one after the other, and met the locals at dinner.
Sir Roger Gregory, a wonderful specimen of the genus Old Boy, full of the richest copy for Tony’s study of same: a director of companies, evidently able, but to all appearances quite incredibly stupid and charming. White wuffly moustache, several chins, shoots in a stiff collar. Memo: Sir Roger: ‘Y’know, in geological times they say the sea used to come up here.’
I like Lady Monson [the hostess], but find her difficult with that peculiar Edwardian aloofness which is harder to cope with than the Victorian. He is surely the most pompous man that ever lived, and talks illimitable balls on almost every known subject.
Lady M. has that Edwardian habit of breaking into irrelevant bits of French, presumably to make things sound less dull than they are. We passed a herd of cows in the car, who stared vacuously at the bonnet. ‘Ils regardent le motor car,’ she said.
‘God, I’m glad I didn’t marry into a county, hunting family,’ she wrote – though she did love ‘the barbaric splendour of a pheasant drive – the fusillade, the bright coloured bodies hurtling through the air, the clattering of wings, the breaking of branches as they fell, and the smell of damp earth and gunpowder.’ (When asked to give her opinion on blood sports, which she frequently was at dinner parties, her reply was simple: ‘Indefensible but irresistible.’)
Shooting in Scotland, Tony with a ‘rook and rabbit’ rifle, and Joyce wih a double-barrelled 20-bore shotgun
After an interminable rainy afternoon at Launde Abbey, making conversation with their hosts and ‘pottering round the bloody garden at a Country House stroll’, she and Tony escaped to the Crown at Oakham for a drink.
It was worth being made to potter round other people’s gardens and sleep in their icy bedrooms and be introduced to their wuffly-moustached neighbours, because talking about it alone together afterwards was such bliss. Each country house visit or tedious dinner party produced some gem of an incident, and these became woven into Tony and Joyce’s marriage. Its paradise was not a walking-hand-in-hand-through-meadows kind of paradise: it was less anaemic than that. It was a paradise of shared laughter, of shared noticing, imitating, discussing and remembering. Time added layer upon layer of such shared memories, so that it became more and more delicious to glimpse one another across the table and know there would be ‘an eye to catch’.
‘The Accompaniment’
When in chance talk they speak your name
No common syllables I hear:
Rich with unuttered harmonies
It falls upon my inward ear.
So a musician, hearing sung
By idle lips some well-loved words,
Hears, too, beneath the naked tune,
The richness of remembered chords.
Their inward ears sang with ‘remembered chords’. Joyce, on her own, would simply have remembered these shared moments. But for Tony, all life was potential material for anecdote. He liked to crystallize his experiences into Funny Things that Happened, and give them a beginning, a middle and a punch-line. Often, the funny stories were about Scotland.
‘Our nearest neighbours at Cultoquhey’ (went one of his often-repeated anecdotes) ‘were the Drummond-Morays, who, in spite of expensive schooling at Eton, were more a sporting than a literary family. They could hardly be otherwise, when the library at Abercairney seemed to contain almost nothing but bound volumes of the Household Brigade Magazine, and The Grouse in Health and Disease. This happened in the early 1900s. On a very hot Twelfth of August the guns were toiling up a hill to the next line of butts, and they stopped for a moment to mop their sweating brows. One of the better-read guests said (and I suppose it was meant to be a joke), “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” At which the laird of Abercairney looked at the guest in amazement, and then turned to the other guns. “What’s that? Did you hear what the feller said? Why, that’s a most extraordinary thing – my grandfather said that!”‘
‘My parents’ (went another) ‘often stayed with the de la Terriere family in Perthshire. Once, after a Saturday to Monday houseparty there, I asked Mother how they had enjoyed it. “Well,” she said, “it was quite extraordinary. The house was absolutely full, and they gave Dad and me a bedroom with no dressing-room. Luckily, there was a screen, so we managed.” I may say that by this time they had been married several years and had managed, somehow, to conceive a family of four children.’
They were good stories. But there came a time when Tony was only comfortable in conversation when he was inside the safe walls of an anecdote with its beginning, middle and end.
* * *
It was a marriage that needed the constant presence of other people to enhance the pleasure of snatched moments à deux.
It was a marriage that needed, particularly, Anne Talbot. Sometimes two very happily married people crave the company of one less happy unmarried person, who is dazzled by their company and envious of their relationship, and reminds them of their luck. Perhaps the fact that they need such a person is a sign that they are not quite as happy as they think.
Big Anne was the sister of Tony’s childhood friend Evan. She was man-sized, and she drank beer, played golf and hated going to bed early. She lived with her parents in Chelsea and was at first a secretary to Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang at Lambeth Palace but later worked as an interior decorator for John Fowler at Peter Jones. She was romantic and longed for love, but had only short-lived affairs which left her feeling bereft. Tony and Joyce needed her because she was an excellent observer and enjoyer of the present moment, because she loved spontaneity as they did, and liked paper games and scurrilous talk, because she was a good person to play practical jokes on; and because she made them feel better about themselves.
She needed them because she longed to belong, and they made her feel needed. ‘I went round to Tony and Joyce…’ ‘Tony and Joyce fetched me at 4…’ ‘I was woken at 8 by Tony and had morning tea with them…’ Her diaries, diligently kept through the 1920s and 1930s, are full of Tony and Joyce. She writes of them as a couple dazzling in their togetherness and in their ability to make the world seem all right. Wherever Tony and Joyce were, fun was, and laughter, and new jazz records, and a party in the past or future to discuss, and early-morning tea brought to one’s bed, and a new funny story from Tony. (‘Joyce and I were in a restaurant the other day sitting near the green-baize door, and we overheard one waiter whisper to another as he carried out a tray of empty plates, “He’s eaten it”.’)
Anne hung around the Maxtone Grahams to such a degree that she earned herself the reputation of a sponger. But it is clear that they requested her presence as much as she was eager to provide it. Tony was conspicuously generous, the kind of man who gets up from the table towards the end of a party in a restaurant and settles the bill with the waiter before anyone can argue. Anne, with a small daytime job and no house of her own, was a gratifying person to practise his generosity on.
Wednesday 30 January 1929. Tony rang up asking me to go round at once – very urgent. I went, rather thrilled, and found him and Joyce saying would I come to Rumania with them for 3 weeks. We discussed the impossibility of me getting £50 for it and finally they said they would pay for it all. Frightfully kind of them …
And off they went on 8 February 1929, on a night ferry from Harwich and across frozen Europe by train. They were a party of four: Tony, Joyce, a yacht-owning friend called Mike Mason, and Anne. It was supposed to be a duck-shooting holiday, but so long did it take to arrive at the chosen marsh in Rumania that the first day’s shooting was not till the 24th. Joyce and Anne both kept diaries. Anne’s gives a glimpse of how infuriating Joyce could be, how she liked to be the centre of male attention, and what a hostile reaction she could provoke from other women.
Before they even reach Liverpool Street, Anne is slightly annoyed because Joyce is wearing ‘innumerable leather and fur coats etc’. Joyce is happy, enchanted by the exoticism of wagonslits and café complet. She gazes first out of the train window and then at the train window, where she goes into a trance with the fascination of comparing ‘Do not lean out of the window’, ‘Nicht hinauslehnen’, and ‘E pericoloso sporgersi’.
‘Joyce and Tony are excellent travellers, Tony always in good spirits as though he was comfortably in London, Joyce efficient and neat,’ writes Anne.
‘All day in the train we played Nouns and Questions and Telegrams and talked,’ writes Joyce. ‘Delicious children in head-kerchiefs.’ ‘We played games a certain amount and we all talked a good deal about sex,’ writes Anne. ‘There is more vulgar talk in this party than I’ve ever known.’
‘We champed slightly,’ writes Joyce, of a nine-hour wait in the train to Nisch, Yugoslavia. ‘On the way to Nisch,’ writes Anne, ‘Joyce, who was tired, was at her very worst – the child-wife business – fussing over her food and changing places because the light was in her eyes, and being kittenish and taking up all the room and then refusing offers of help.’
‘We talked about books,’ writes Joyce. ‘There have been interesting moments with these two,’ writes Anne. ‘Joyce’s snobbery on literature and far less knowledge than she pretends, and Tony’s appalling conceit about his driving and knowledge of cars, for examples.’
There is a jolt, and the train to Nisch is derailed. Anne gives this incident three-quarters of a page. ‘In the middle of a flat snowy plain, the train suddenly, with a shaking bump, derailed. Tony and Joyce went green.’ Joyce’s account covers ten pages, the first entirely taken up by the large inky smudge which it produced. The derailment is by far her favourite event of the whole holiday, providing an excuse for conversations with guards in caps and women with chickens and men with gold teeth. ‘The whole thing has been the most terrific fun,’ she writes.
In deepest Rumania at last, they go for a day’s duck-shooting, and two sheepdogs from the village make friends and spend the day with them. But Joyce decides to spend the next day on her own rather than shooting. ‘The others got home at about 8.30, purple in the face from sun and wind.’ ‘We told Joyce about our day and she said we were all sunburnt,’ writes Anne.
On the way back to England, they stay for two nights in Vienna. ‘Vienna is lovely and dignified and chic,’ writes Joyce. ‘We looked at pictures at the Imperial Museum,’ writes Anne. ‘Titian and Tintoretto, some Dutch and some decayed Italian. I found Giordano well represented. Joyce was bored really but thought she ought to study them. She was very dull about Vienna, and seemed to notice nothing towards the end, such as the beauty of new-fallen snow. They are no good at picking out lovely bits suddenly.’
That last comment seems extraordinary, because as a writer Jan Struther’s greatest strength was precisely her ability to ‘pick out lovely bits suddenly’. But by now Joyce was longing to go home. She had had enough of making intelligent and poetic remarks about abroad. Though she did not admit it to herself, she had descended into a holiday sulk. If she was not enjoying something, she liked to ruin it for everyone else.
Anne sought revenge in her diary, but Joyce avenged herself in print. In ‘A Balkan Journey’, published in the New Statesman of 1 February 1930, she immortalized Anne – not herself – as the maker of uninspiring remarks.
For an hour or so we travelled at a leisurely pace across a plain of incredible flatness and whiteness. ‘It’s what a table-cloth must look like,’ said T., ‘to a caterpillar walking across it.’ ‘More like Bedfordshire, really,’ said A., who, when we are in exciting places, has a perverse habit of making prosaic comparisons.
In the dining-car from Harwich to Liverpool Street they ate bacon and eggs, and read the morning papers. They said goodbye. Anne arrived home ‘just as Father was beginning prayers, which he cancelled’. Joyce arrived home and went straight to the nursery.
* * *
At the time of their Balkan holiday Tony and Joyce had two children, Jamie, five, and Janet, one. They wouldn’t have dreamed of taking the children with them. Children stayed behind, eating potato soup, boiled rabbit and blancmange in the nursery and going for walks with Nannie.
Joyce’s early married engagement books contain frequent scribbles about interviewing nannies, or relief nannies to work on the nannie’s day off. She described the nannie-agency experience for Punch in 1930:
I felt as a man might feel who had entered heaven in the devout belief that he would get individual attention, and found instead that the place was run on the card-index system by a band of efficient seraphim.
I approached the nearest young woman. She was careful to write a few more lines before raising her head.
‘I am looking for a Nannie,’ I said.
‘What kind of nurse were you requiring?’ she asked, poising her pen once more.
‘A really nice one,’ I said. ‘You know what I mean – a really nice one.’
‘College or nursery?’
‘Oh, for a nursery.’
‘I mean college-trained or nursery-trained?’ she explained patiently.
‘An hour’, for Joyce, had always meant the length of time she had spent after tea in her mother’s drawing-room in clean frock and sash. Now, for her own children, ‘an hour’ was beginning to mean just the same: the length of time they spent each day with their parents in the drawing-room, dressed in clean clothes and playing with the drawing-room toys. Joyce gazed at them, dazzled by the backs of their necks. In her poem ‘Betsinda Dances’ she described a typical drawing-room scene:
On a carpet red and blue
Sits Betsinda, not quite two,
Tracing with baby starfish hand
The patterns that a Persian planned.
Suddenly she sees me go
Towards the box whence dances flow,
Where embalmed together lie
Symphony and lullaby.
… Then, as the tide of sound advances,
With grave delight Betsinda dances:
One arm flies up, the other down
To lift her Lilliputian gown,
And round she turns on clumsy, sweet,
Unrhythmical, enraptured feet;
And round and round again she goes
On hopeful, small, precarious toes.
Dance, Betsinda, dance, while I
Weave from this a memory;
Thinking, if I chance to hear
That record in some future year,
The needle-point shall conjure yet
Horn and harp and clarinet:
But O! it shall not conjure you –
Betsinda, dancing, not quite two.
This sugary scene took place in Tony and Joyce’s new house, 16 Wellington Square, off the King’s Road, which they bought in 1930, the house on the left at the bottom of the square as you look down. It is easy to picture the young married Joyce rummaging for her keys.
The key turned sweetly in the lock [she wrote in ‘Mrs Miniver’]. That was the kind of thing one remembered about a house: not the size of the rooms or the colour of the walls, but the feel of door-handles and light-switches, the shape and texture of the banister-rail under one’s palm; minute tactual intimacies, whose resumption was the essence of coming home.
This was a house Joyce grew to love. Robert, her youngest child, was born here in 1931. (Anne Talbot mentions this birth in her diary. Her use of the neuter pronoun gives an idea of the distance between grown-ups and babies: ‘Joyce has had a baby. It is going to be called Robert.’)
Joyce was now the mother of three, and the nursery floor pattered, as it was designed to, with tiny feet. Distant sounds of crying and coaxing trickled down the stairwell. Inspired by an imagined ideal of a family house, she made a playroom, with a stage and curtains, and put a canvas paddling-pool on the roof-garden, with an outdoor toy-cupboard.
‘Modern Home Making. Husband and Wife Each Design a Room.’ The Daily Telegraph, The Queen and the Evening Standard devoted a ‘Home’ page each to Tony and Joyce’s modern way of dealing with ‘the difference between the sexes’. ‘Mr Maxtone Graham, in the dining-room, has chosen a waterlily-green table, cellulosed so that hot plates can be put upon it with impunity, and marks wiped off with a damp cloth.’ ‘The drawing-room, entirely planned by Mrs Maxtone Graham, might be a room in a pleasant country house. The walls are painted Devonshire cream yellow, and cheerful notes are introduced by the red painted radiators. Built in under one windowsill is the loudspeaker of the radio-gramophone, the control of which is over by the fireplace. Each chair is provided with its own little table, ash tray, and box of cigarettes – a detail which perhaps only a woman would have remembered.’ They were being held up as examples of the new-style husband and wife: equals in the home, neither in thrall to the other.
Now the parties could be bigger and better. ‘I went to Wellington Sq.,’ writes Anne Talbot, ‘and found Tony and Joyce preparing for their drinks party. Preparing for festivities is one of the most delightful occupations to find people at, and I realized the heavenliness of that moment.’ The dinner was ‘excellent’, the wine ‘superb’, and later everyone went down to the ping-pong room for a competition organized by Tony. The party ended with scrambled eggs at 2.30 – this on a Wednesday evening.
The dining-room at Wellington Square, designed by Tony
Joyce retired early to bed at her own parties. Towards the end of a party – just as towards the end of a foreign holiday – she ceased to enjoy what she was supposed to be enjoying, and longed to be unwatched. At these moments, when she mentally withdrew herself from the chatter of her surroundings, she attained the sudden sense of perspective and clarity which gave her the overwhelming urge to write.
Of all emotions, she perhaps felt the emotion of missing most acutely. At a party, she missed solitude. Abroad, she missed home. Cut off from her children, she longed to be with them again. When she was, she longed again for solitude. The raggle-taggle gypsy in her head beckoned her to escape.