Chapter Nine
Through space and time I range
Seeking these two alone:
The savour of the strange,
The solace of the known.
From ‘Sleeveless Errand’, in The Glass-Blower
SHE BOARDED THE ship on 26 June 1940 as Joyce; she disembarked a week later as Jan. From the moment she left the shores of Great Britain, she never introduced herself as Joyce, always as Jan; Dolf called her Jan, and Jan she will be from now on. The almost unisex name suited her: ‘Joyce’ had overtones of the pampered hostess she had once been, who rang a bell in the drawing-room for tea. Released from that world, she wanted to be a tomboy again: someone who wore jodhpurs and lit camp fires and knew how to splice rope.
The first day at sea was fine and warm, and she was on deck all day with the children. They had never seen their mother so funny and relaxed. She was being an impudent New Girl, pointing out stock characters among the passengers and whispering nicknames for them. The sea-breeze made them all feel hungry and full of laughter.
After tea it began to blow harder, and it got worse, and by the next morning whole dining-roomfuls of passengers were groaning in unison as lights swung and bowls clattered. Jan was supposed to be keeping an eye on six children during the voyage: her own, Vera Brittain’s, and two little Jewish refugees who (unlike Jan) were travelling First Class. Nausea dented both her aptitude for the task and her willingness, and by the third day the cabin steward was complaining that the children were running wild. The ship was teeming with children and teenagers too excited to worry about the danger from U-boats: the voyage took place at the height of the British government’s programme of evacuating children to the United States and Canada, before the torpedoing of the City of Benares in November put a stop to it. Twelve-year-old Janet, unwatched for the first time in her life, experienced her first kiss, with Jeremy Harris, aged thirteen, in a distant corridor.
On the fifth day the ship passed an iceberg. On the seventh it arrived in Canada, and the rush of impressions began, familiar to so many evacuees to North America: first the bright lights of Montreal (dazzling after the blackout), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the glorious banks of the St Lawrence River; then, arriving in New York, the Statue of Liberty, the shimmering heat, the skyscrapers, the noise, the yellow taxis.
The plan was not for Jan to live with her children: she would have had no idea how to deal with the cooking or washing. They would lodge at 1 Beekman Place with Aunt Rachel Townsend, who had two sons of her own, Anthony and David, as well as another evacuated nephew, Charles Smythe, son of the Edinburgh madrigal singers, and whose apartment was geared towards nursery life. Jan took a cab straight to Beekman Place so she could shed the children. The door was opened by the cook, the children vanished with their cousins to the train-set room, and Jan breathed freely. She was off-duty at last. Dolf must have sat in this very drawing-room when he came to dinner here. He must be less than two miles away from her.
Of course she could use the telephone, Rachel said: and Jan dialled the number Dolf had given her – his mother’s number.
‘Mrs Eisler? This is Jan Struther speaking … Yes, I’d love to meet you, too. Tomorrow evening? I’ll come round after dinner. And Dolf will be there too? Oh, I’m so glad…’ The Viennese accent made Jan’s diaphragm contract.
On their first evening, Rachel Townsend’s husband Greenough drove the new arrivals out to the New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows. They saw sensational sights (man-made lightning, and swimmers in the Aquacade forming themselves into flower and star shapes), and rode a toy train which instead of blowing its horn played the first line of ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ again and again. They had supper at the Swiss Pavilion. The contrast to blacked-out and terrified England was macabre, and made pure enjoyment impossible.
From her first day, Jan seemed to fit seamlessly into the social world of New York: there was no emptiness in her diary, no touristy wandering round museums to fill in time. In anticipation of Jan’s arrival, Rachel had entered her name in the New York Social Register, at which Jan was furious. She insisted on having her name removed from the list at once. The whole point of America, she hoped, was that one could escape from the social snobbery which would include her in a ‘set’ but exclude someone like Dolf.
Listed or unlisted, she was sought-after. Editors, dramatists and broadcasters wanted to meet her. Far from making her wilt, the heat and noise of New York gave a new spring to her step. Everything seemed possible. She strode down Third Avenue on that first Saturday afternoon, feeling more free than ever before, squinting up at the Elevated Railroad and making detours into numbered streets which looked too interesting to resist.
Then, after dinner at the Townsends’, she let herself out quietly and walked to Mrs Eisler’s apartment. Dolf came to the door.
* * *
The certainty of separation-for-ever had hovered so low over Dolf and Jan during their last week in London only forty days earlier that they had felt like ghosts. Their way of making the imminent ending bearable had been to behave, in the last hours, as if the end had already passed. On that last day in Battersea Park they had been, as Dolf put it in a poem, ‘blessed shadows of souls which died long ago’.
They had become used to living at this pitch of tragic intensity. And now, for the time at least, that could change. As they sat in Pauly’s room, listening as she chatted on about the horrible speed of New York cars and her trunk of beloved possessions which had never arrived from Trieste (and never did), they looked across at one another with amazement and trepidation. Now they were no longer ghosts. They must readjust to being flesh-and-blood secret lovers living in the same city.
Pauly guessed, in an unspoken way, that the two were in love. She was more pleased than shocked, because she wanted Dolf to be happy and could see that Jan made him so. Her motherly Viennese goodness touched Jan deeply, and she fell willingly into the role of second ‘daughter’ to Pauly, and co-adorer of Dolf. (Pauly’s real daughter, Susan, remained in London all through the war.)
Within a few days of her arrival Jan rented a tiny apartment which she had spotted on one of her walks – tiny, because wartime regulations had prevented her from taking money out of Britain. It was on East 49th Street between Second and Third Avenue, within sight of the ‘El’ track which so fascinated her. She set up a desk by the window and watched the trains taking commuters downtown in the morning and uptown in the evening, and the Italian newsagent’s wife hanging out three little blue striped frocks in the morning and taking them down in the evening. She was enchanted and distracted. From a Third Avenue junk shop she bought an old bed, which had bedbugs. She wrote to Tony, describing all this in detail.
Everything seemed possible – even living two parallel lives. Three thousand miles to the east of her, Tony was at Pirbright Camp in Surrey, as a Second Lieutenant, learning to be a Weapons Training Officer with the Scots Guards. He had rejoined the army, with an immediate commission, just after Joyce and the children sailed from Liverpool. He and Joyce, as he of course always called her, were still very much a married couple, separated only by the necessities of war, and wrote to each other every few weeks. The letters have not survived.
There was no question of setting up house with Dolf. He found an apartment with his mother at 215 West 101st Street, and Jan took a lodger at East 49th Street, her friend Bea Horton (the writer Beatrice Curtis Brown), who helped pay the rent. Dolf and Jan’s meetings still had to be conducted in secret, and their craving for each other was intensified, as ever, by a sense of forbiddenness.
From the very beginning the secrecy of their love affair was of paramount importance from the family point of view. Tony must never find out, the children must never find out, Rachel must never find out. But later, in the extraordinary weeks after Mrs Miniver was published in America on 29 July, the secrecy started to become important from a patriotic point of view. As the author of a book about a supremely happy marriage, Jan was representing her country. Try as she might to dissuade them, her American readers would equate her with Mrs Miniver. And she could not have guessed how many hundreds of thousands of Americans would read the book, or how wide its influence would be.
It was far from Jan’s intention to rise to fame in the United States as Mrs Miniver, the perfect, ‘cute’, saintly housewife from plucky little England, torn apart from her husband by war alone, who never thought a wicked thought. But that was just what happened. Americans, it seemed, were in search of a wifely role model from across the Atlantic, and the publication of the book was perfectly timed by Harcourt Brace. England was standing alone in Europe under the Nazi threat; gradually, consciences across the United States were awakening; and here, touring American bookshops and lecture halls in the person of Jan Struther/Mrs Miniver, was the embodiment of what the Nazis were trying to destroy.
* * *
The Davenport, Iowa Times, in its bestseller lists, classed Mrs Miniver as fiction, the Springfield, Ohio News as non-fiction. The truth, as we know, was somewhere in between. ‘So you’re Mrs Miniver!’ someone said to Jan at one of her first book-signings. ‘No, I write Mrs Miniver,’ Jan corrected her. ‘But I have begun to wonder whether it wouldn’t be more true to say, “Mrs Miniver writes me”.’
By 3 August, four days after its publication, the book was on its third printing. By the third week of August (the week, incidentally, when Alice Duer-Miller’s The White Cliffs was published, also to instant acclaim) Mrs Miniver was selling in America at the rate of 1,500 hardback copies a day, and it jumped in that week from twenty-first to seventh on the national bestseller list.
‘What Albany Is Reading’… ‘What Chicago Is Reading’… ‘Philadelphia Likes…’ – Mrs Miniver was everywhere. Wives sitting on their porches in the prairies revelled in it – though what they made of the men in kilts tossing cabers and doing the sword dance, Jan could only guess. The Highlands, and Eton, and Piccadilly, must have been as exotic and fascinating to them as the Grand Canyon and the Badlands were to her. What seemed to appeal to readers was the mixture of foreignness and universality: on every page there were uplifting words of wisdom about marriage, or children, or Christmas, or growing older, which cut across all nationalities.
There was none of the vitriol the book had engendered in Great Britain. There were no E. M. Forsters or Rosamond Lehmanns to point out the infuriating rightness of the heroine. Critics were enchanted: their only problem was how to review the book without merely quoting it. ‘The book defies review,’ said the Flemington, New Jersey Republican. ‘There are no fireworks, no dramatic climaxes, nothing, as a matter of fact, but the delicious experience of meeting in print a woman whose philosophical musings are always interesting, sometimes amusing, and never dull. I urge you just to read it, and then you will understand why persons have pounced on it with a fervor that is astonishing.’
‘If there are thousands of English women like Mrs Miniver,’ said the Battleborough, Vermont Reformer, ‘for whom the whole of England is covered with memory flags, who listen absorbed to the windshield wiper to find what it is saying – if England is full of Mrs Minivers, then it is going to be mighty hard to soften Britain. And we are inclined to think that Mrs Miniver is the most winning and remarkable ambassador that embattled people could have sent to this country just now.’ ‘Men fortified by the spirit of the millions of Mrs Minivers in England’, said the Lincoln, Illinois Courier, ‘form a fighting army which neither accepts nor knows defeat.’ ‘The book is perhaps unintentionally tragic,’ said the Grand Island, Nebraska Independent, ‘for what is happening to the England of Mrs Miniver? There is no place in war for truly civilized people, and when this war is over, there may be no place in England for them.’ ‘Of Mrs Miniver’s philosophy,’ said the St Petersburg, Florida Times, ‘one can truly say that she has found the true art of living, the art of loving, the art of marriage, the art of family life, the art of happiness. There are no triangular love affairs, not an indecent suggestion. It is a book any granddaughter can safely put in the hands of her grandmother.’ (In the margin of that last clipping, Jan pencilled a small exclamation mark.)
The newspaper and magazine interviews began: Jan found herself scrutinized by journalists, some of whom had not read the book. They wanted ‘heart-rending human incidents’, details of what it felt like to part from one’s home and half one’s family. They wanted revealing nuggets about her life – and here was a good, safe one to fob them off with: Jan Struther didn’t like tea. But surely all English ladies drank tea? Especially Mrs Miniver, to go with those crumpets and small ratafia biscuits? No, Jan said: ‘You see, in reality in England I was at a typewriter in a newspaper office at four o’clock with a thick mug of coffee beside me.’ She really didn’t like tea. She had expressed her loathing for it in one of her early articles for Punch: ‘It is difficult to make perfectly but nauseating when anything less than perfect. Neat, it is pleasing to the eye but acrid to the palate; diluted with milk, it is passable in taste but revolting in colour.’ The drink became one of the banes of her life in America. She was constantly given imperfect cups of it by kind hostesses who wanted to make her feel at home.
‘Dear Nannie,’ Jan wrote on 5 August, ‘We have arrived safely, and we are now at Cape Cod staying with Mrs Patrick’s mother [Tony’s brother Patrick’s American mother-in-law, who had a large house on the Cape]. The children are being very good, and if ever they get quarrelsome, I mutter ‘H. and P. of the B. E.’ (Honour and Prestige of the British Empire) and they pull themselves together. Mrs Miniver is selling well, and all the chaps who really matter here seem to agree that it’s exactly the right book to put Great Britain across over here, and that it will do a great deal of good, especially among American housewives…! It really is an extraordinary development, considering how little I was thinking about the US when I wrote the bloody things.’
While the children were canoeing and eating banana splits with their cousins on Cape Cod, Jan kept dashing back on trains to New York for meetings in grills, hotel lounges and 28th-floor offices. On 7 August she met Clark Getts: ‘Clark H. Getts, Inc., Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York City’ – she was to become all too familiar with that showy sans serif letter-heading over the next four years. Clark Getts were prestigious lecture-circuit agents, and among their fifty-three lecturers for the coming season, many of them advertised in the papers as ‘eye-witnesses of the war’, were Carl J. Hambro, President of the Norwegian Parliament and of the League of Nations Assembly (‘I Saw it Happen’), Sir Evelyn Wrench, Editor of the London Spectator (‘What is Happening in Europe’), and Norman Alley, ‘Ace of the Newsreels’ (‘War on Review’). Now Jan Struther was to join their list. She was particularly pleased to be with the same agents as the children’s author Munro Leaf: she loved Ferdinand.
‘It is understood that I will assume my rail and Pullman lower berth fares, that I will assume all other travel expenses incident to engagements … It is also understood that if it becomes necessary for me to cancel any engagements, I will reimburse you and the local management for all expenses incurred … For and in consideration of your services, you are to receive 40% of all earnings before remitting the balance to me…’ She signed up with Getts on 24 August, with no qualms that they were sinking their claws into her. Lecture tours sounded thrilling. You travelled from state to state and there was somebody waiting on the platform to greet you. What better way to meet the real America? She wouldn’t mind a bit about the tiringness of long-distance travel, if it was all in the cause of putting Great Britain across to isolationists. She had always been at her happiest and most creative on trains, anyway.
On another of her dashes from Cape Cod she met Clifton Fadiman, who was ‘master of ceremonies’ (that is, the man who asked the questions) on the famous radio quiz programme Information, Please! He was in search of a female guest for the programme, and Jan said she would be happy to have a go. Her first Information, Please! broadcast was scheduled for 10 September, and she would leave for her first lecture tour on 2 October.
Pictured right is the first of 276 Details of Engagement which Jan was to receive from Clark Getts over the next four years. What would the West High School in Minneapolis look like? What would Mrs J. Harold Kettelson look like? Who would turn up to listen to the lecture? Jan was intrigued.
Fizzing with excitement after meeting influential people all day, Jan collected Dolf from his work in the evening – he was still wrapping parcels in Union Square. The unworthiness of the job filled her with rage. ‘How can you work there? The smell of that man’s cigar! I know you’ll find something better soon … I did a lovely book-signing today at the British War Relief, and I had a hilarious lunch with the Morleys at Harcourt Brace…’ Jan talked away as they walked together up to East 50th Street. ‘D’you like the top of that building?’ Dolf gave an architectural appraisal shining with art-historical wisdom, and Jan was dazzled by the fineness of his mind.
He did, eventually, make the terrible mistake which got him sacked from the parcel-wrapping job: he registered a large consignment of parcels which were supposed to be insured, and insured a pile which were supposed to be registered, and sent them all off to South America before the mistake had been spotted. ‘You will be happier somewhere else, Herr Doktor,’ said his boss. ‘Get out!’
Dolf was grateful for that final ‘Herr Doktor’: it implied recognition that he had been too bright, rather than too dim, for the job. Jan was delighted, but not for long. Dolf did indeed soon get another job, but it was addressing envelopes: he was paid by the hundred. Now at least he could work at home.
* * *
‘It’s 8.30 p.m. Welcome to Information, Please!’ This was Clifton Fadiman speaking into his microphone at Radio City. ‘And with us tonight on our panel we have Jan Struther, the author of Mrs Miniver, and John Gunther, author of Inside Europe and Inside Asia. They are joining our usual friends Franklin P. Adams and John Kieran. As you know, the aim is to send in a question the panel can’t answer. If you succeed, we will send you ten dollars and all twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. But first, a word from our sponsor.’
‘Canada Dry is the aristocrat of the table…’
Help, thought Jan. The sponsor was bringing momentary respite, but any second now the ordeal would begin. She was sitting uncomfortably on a copy of the Manhattan telephone directory, which she had been given to raise her to the level of the microphone.
‘Now, Miss Struther and gentlemen, Lois B. Walker of Mill Valley, California has sent in the following question: What practical use is made of these scientific facts: (a) helium is lighter than air and non-inflammable; (b) silver chloride is sensitive to light; (c) liquid ammonia absorbs heat when it vaporizes; (d) wood alcohol has a low freezing point?’
This was awful. They hadn’t done much science at Miss Richardson’s Classes. The first one must be something to do with balloons … But Mr Adams had put his hand up. ‘The first is airships. Silver chloride and light: that’s photography. Liquid ammonia: that must be refrigeration. Wood alcohol: isn’t that the anti-freeze they put into automobile radiators?’
‘Attaboy, Mr Adams! Now, Mr Frank J. Mason of Laurel, Mississippi asks us the following: What pitcher (a) holds the Major League record for strikeouts in one game; (b) holds the Major League lifetime record for strikeouts? (c) holds the record of the greatest number of consecutive hitless innings?’
Surely she couldn’t be expected to know that. Even the others on the panel had to confer. Wasn’t it Bob Feller, or someone, of Cleveland, who struck out eighteen Detroit Tigers back in 1938? And surely Walter Johnson must be the record-holder for strikeouts? Correct; but they couldn’t answer the consecutive hitless innings question. They were stumped, Jan noticed. And they wouldn’t even know what ‘stumped’ meant.
‘Congratulations, Mr Mason. The Encyclopedia Britannica is on its way to you. And now another word from our sponsor.’
These men knew their stuff. They knew their chemical elements, their Bible, their Greek myths, their Swinburne, their Longfellow. Their hands went up before Jan had time to think. But her moment of glory came. ‘Mrs Donald G. Dempsey of Sharon, Ohio asks the following: Name a work of fiction in which: (a) five sisters are among the principal characters; (b) four sisters are among the principal characters; (c) three sisters are among the principal characters; (d) two sisters are among the principal characters; (e) one sister is the principal character.’
‘Well, Pride and Prejudice is five,’ said John Kieran, ‘and Little Women is four, and King Lear is three…’
‘And what are the names of the Little Women?’
‘Let me see. There’s Amy…’
But the men didn’t know the others. Joyce put her hand up. ‘They are called Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March,’ she said in a quiet and startlingly English-sounding voice.
‘Good on you, Miss Struther.’
She would be invited again.
* * *
Term began for the children, at Trinity School, a private day school on the West Side of Manhattan, where all the cousins went. Rachel Townsend, a great ‘fixer’, managed to persuade the maintenance man of 1 Beekman Place, Al Cominucci, to agree to be the family chauffeur for the school run. Off the children went each morning; and Rachel sat in bed for another two hours. Her breakfast tray had slots on the sides for the post and the papers.
The news pages were full of the forthcoming presidential elections. Rachel supported Roosevelt, because she sensed (in spite of his cautious words) that he would not stand by and let Nazism triumph in Europe. Greenough (being right-wing Eastern Seaboard) was anti-Roosevelt. Jan felt the same way as Rachel, but she went further: she loved Roosevelt for his quiet rhetoric and his vibrant face which belied his physical frailty. She admired him for daring to be unpopular with the rich to help the poor, and she could read on his face the anguish of a man torn in two directions, between Winston Churchill and Congress. She even started dreaming about him from about this time. ‘I’ve been dreaming fantastically, mostly FDR-politically,’ she told Dolf.
And still Mrs Miniver crept up the national bestseller list. On 22 September 1940 it was second, and on 29 September it was Number One. ‘TOP!’ wrote Jan, next to the Herald Tribune headline ‘What America is Reading’. The next four, in descending order, were How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn, The Beloved Returns by Thomas Mann, Stars on the Sea by F. van Wyck Mason, and To the Indies by C. S. Forrester. On the nonfiction list, Mein Kampf was seventeenth.
Jan boarded a train in the direction of Minneapolis on 2 October, as bidden by Clark Getts. The paint was olive-green, the upholstery was brownish plush, and Jan was full of curiosity. ‘I love seeing the approaches to small towns from the train,’ she wrote, ‘– the children’s toys in the yard, the bright-coloured washing hanging on the line: there was a beautiful old patchwork quilt just now hanging outside a very poor little frame house – probably their only heirloom and treasure. Glimpses like that, to me, are the real essence of America – not the skyscrapers or the Statue of Liberty.’
Then, as night fell, there was the new experience of sleeping in a curtained berth above or below the berth of an American stranger. ‘I’m sharing with a pleasant moon-faced middle-aged man with rimless glasses,’ Jan wrote, ‘who has slept most of the way, awakening only at intervals to enquire from new passengers about the progress of the Ball Game at St Louis. He has the Lower Berth, I have the Upper. I know nothing about him and he knows nothing about me. We will never see each other again. Yet just for this night I shall sleep suspended 3 feet above him in that curiously impersonal proximity which seems such a fascinating part of American Pullman life.’
The man turned out to be a public-health official from Oklahoma who specialized in venereal disease, ‘which he discussed with the same cool, dispassionate interest as if his subject had been insurance or tractors. When the porter asked him what time he wanted to be called he said “6.30”. I said, “An hour out of Chicago – 6.40.” “Then make it 6.40 for both of us,” said Lower Four coyly. I felt we were almost married.’
She awoke to a sparkling morning and found herself in a land of white grain elevators, which looked to her like medieval castles. At Chicago she changed trains, and at Minneapolis she took a taxi to the Nicollet Hotel: creamy-brown walls, creamy-brown bed-cover, telephone screwed to the wall too high up to reach unless she stood on the Bible ‘placed by the Gideons’.
The teachers at Minneapolis were delightful. They were unashamedly dowdy, and told her that in their language, ‘PhD’ stood for ‘petticoats hanging down’. And the lecture, Jan wrote to Dolf (she was beginning to use American expressions) ‘went over swell’.
Dolf was beginning to use American expressions, too. ‘Gee, it was nice to hear your voice on the telephone,’ he wrote back to her.
There were two main messages that Jan wanted to get across in this first season of lectures. The first was that she was not Mrs Miniver:
You see before you, Ladies and Gentlemen, a haunted woman. And if my husband and children were here today as well, you would see before you a haunted family.
Now most families, if they are haunted at all, are haunted by the people who used to live in their house in the past. But we, as a family, are haunted by five people who have never lived in our house at all. I should like to take this opportunity of stating in public what I have so often explained in private, that is, that I am NOT ‘Mrs Miniver’; my husband is NOT ‘Clem’; our three children are NOT ‘Toby’, ‘Judy’ and ‘Vin’. It is quite extraordinary how difficult it is to make people understand this. I suppose it’s the penalty one has to pay for writing in a paper with such a reputation for truthfulness as the London Times.
The second thing she wanted to impress on her audience was the similarities, as opposed to the differences, between Americans and British people. ‘If John Doe from Ohio meets John Doe from Yorkshire, they discover how fundamentally alike they are.’ Anglo-American relations, she believed, were a matter not just for politicians but for ordinary people: they began at home. ‘I seem to be talking a lot about “ordinary people”. Well, everybody talks about them nowadays, thank goodness! They’ve come into their own at last, in the centre of the picture.’
What ordinary people felt and said and did was important: ‘The private opinion of today is the public opinion of tomorrow, and the public opinion of tomorrow is the legislation of the day after.’
So, to anybody who is trying to get to know the people of another country, I would offer this advice: scrap your old filing system. Put new labels on your mental pigeonholes. When you meet somebody of a different nationality, see if you can’t match him up with somebody in your own country. For instance, you or I cross the Atlantic for the first time, and it so happens that one of the first people we meet is a very crotchety, difficult, overbearing old man. Our instinct is to say to ourselves immediately, ‘Oh, so this is what Americans are like, is it?’ or ‘So this is a typical Englishman?’ What we ought to do is to nip that thought in the bud right away, and cast our minds back in all honesty and fairness to our own side of the Atlantic. If we do, it won’t be more than a matter of minutes before we find ourselves saying, ‘Why, of course; he’s the spitting image of my Great-uncle Benjamin.’ You try it, and see. The more you play this game, the more convinced you become that the ordinary people of the United States and the ordinary people of Great Britain are amazingly alike. They are alike in the ‘mental climate’ which they breathe – in the things which they think worth living for and, most of all, in the things they think worth dying for.
At Milwaukee on 5 October she spoke to the American Assembly of University Women: two hundred of them, crammed into the College Club for a luncheon with table decorations to match the book cover of Mrs Miniver, and a quotation from the book folded up inside each napkin. The university women lapped up her lecture. Among the questions they asked at the end were these: ‘Where do you go when your house is bombed?’, ‘Where are the little princesses?’ and ‘Will you please tell me how to make an English trifle?’ To that, Jan (who had no idea how to cook anything) replied that the English were currently more preoccupied with making rifles than trifles.
‘Oh boy, how I do like people,’ she wrote to Dolf. ‘There are so many nice ones around that one hardly dares to stop still and not meet any for fear of missing something good. (I am not drunk, only heady with relief and success.)’
Places which had just been names on maps – York, Pennsylvania; Flint, Michigan; Oak Park, Illinois; St Paul, Minnesota; Cleveland, Ohio – came to life for her: she used the Sleeping Beauty analogy of kissing places awake by touching them. At each town she was fêted, interviewed by the local press and radio, and listened to by enthralled audiences. The American enjoyment of lecture-attendance amazed her. Who were these smiling people who gave up their lunchtimes and evenings to sit in rows and listen to someone else talking for an hour? She wouldn’t go to a lecture if she were paid. It would be far too much like choosing to sit through a sermon.
On the last day of October 1940 she sent a cable to Nannie in England: ‘JAMES HILTON WRITING STORY & DIALOGUE MINIVER FILM GREER GARSON PROBABLY STARRING SHALL GO HOLLYWOOD LATER CHECK ENGLISH AUTHENTICITY BOY OH BOY WISH YOU WERE HERE.’
MGM had summoned her. The character she had invented for Peter Fleming of The Times was to appear on the big screen. She set off on 10 November, pausing to give lectures at Worcester, Mass. on the 11th, Rochester, N.Y. on the 12th, Toledo, O. on the 13th and Chicago, Ill. on the 14th and 15th (she liked using the correct abbreviations for states). Then she boarded the Los Angeles Limited, bound for the West Coast.