Read The Real Mrs Miniver for Free Online Page A

offered to her as a posh (fashionable word) girl in London, or the way it introduced her to suitable young men.
    She travelled to Egypt in 1922 with her father in his capacity as a Director of the Suez Canal Company. They took the Bombay Express through France and sailed from Marseilles over Christmas. Joyce got herself up as a gypsy for the Christmas Day fancy-dress dance, and dined in the captain’s cabin.
    She wrote social notes for Tatler ’s ‘Bystander’ pages: ‘Among the many visitors to Egypt were Miss Bridget Keir, the artist; Sir Horace and Lady Pinching and their daughter; Lady Somerleyton (who expects to stay in Egypt until the end of April, as does also Lord Mount Edgcumbe), and Sir Henry Webb, the former Liberal MP for the Forest of Dean division.’ Her holiday diary is a Tatler -ish list of pleasures: tennis-playing at the British Club, French ladies at tea dances, hotel overlooking the Nile towards the Pyramids. ‘NB: saw entrance to new tomb – Tut-ankhamen.’ On the last day: ‘Tea on peak of highest sand dune overlooking sunset. Slid down and came home singing, Gibbs and I barefoot, Tommy Wilson with large tear in seat of bags.’ No other girl was present on the sand dune, and Joyce revelled in being the only woman among men.
    *   *   *
    Another man listed in that ‘Dances, Dinners, Boys, Girls, Etc’ book was ‘Maxtone Graham, Tony, 32 Addison Road, Kensington’. He and Peter Sanders had been friends at Sandhurst, and when Peter died, Joyce talked and cried with Tony about him. Tony told her he was in love with someone who didn’t reciprocate, then confessed that the girl was Joyce.
    It is often said that ‘Tony was the shoulder she cried on’ when Peter died, and that ‘she fell in love with Tony on the rebound’, not phrases which conjure up Brief Encounter -type swooning. It was not love at first sight, on Joyce’s part at least; it was love at about a hundred and fifty-ninth sight. But it was love. Slowly emerging love could, she discovered, be every bit as strong once it did emerge as the at-first-sight kind. Gradually, and then one day with sudden clarity, Joyce found she was at one in body, mind and spirit with the generous and fascinating man who loved her. Here is her poem called ‘Thoughts After Lighting a Fire’.
    When to this fire I held a taper,
    First flared the impressionable paper;
    I watched the paper, as I stood,
    Kindle the more enduring wood;
    And from the wood a vanguard stole
    To set alight the steadfast coal.
    So, when I love, the first afire
    Is body with its quick desire;
    Then in a little while I find
    The flame has crept into my mind –
    Till steadily, sweetly burns the whole
    Bright conflagration of my soul.
    He was the eldest son of a Scottish laird-to-be; Burke’s Landed Gentry, not the Peerage, is the book to look up the family in. His father Jim Maxtone Graham was a chartered accountant, of Maxtone Graham & Sime in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. Every morning of his working life he said ‘Morning, Sime’ to Sime and Sime said ‘Morning, Maxtone Graham’ to him. Tony’s mother, Ethel Blair Oliphant, was a writer of history books about the Maxtones, the Grahams and the Oliphants: The Maxtones of Cultoquhey, The Beautiful Mrs Graham, and The Oliphants of Gask.
    The family estate, Cultoqhuey, had been in the Maxtone family since 1429. Surrounded by larger landowners, the Maxtones had with quiet doggedness clung for fifteen generations to their beloved house in the heart of Perthshire. Mungo, the tenth Laird, had dryly summed up his opinion of his powerful and grasping neighbours in the Cultoqhuey Litany which he intoned daily at a well near the house, surrounded by his household.
    From the Greed of the Campbells,
    From the Ire of the Drummonds,
    From the Pride of the Grahams,
    From the Wind of the