Free The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

cannibal isle
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â (Hulla-balloo-balay!)
    And there I took up with the chieftain’s niece,
    A neat little, sweet little coal-black piece.
    I was downright grieved when her uncle ate her.
    (Better buy Capstan – they’re blended better.)
    The fact that as an editor Canon Dearmer was not only attractive but also a man of the cloth made the schoolgirl–teacher relationship all the more exciting. A genuine warm friendship sprang up between them. ‘I found his faith infectious,’ she wrote in the Manchester Guardian after his death, ‘and his kindliness a warming fire. When one had been with him one felt happier and more alive than before, with widened sympathies, a heightened perception of beauty, and a deepened conviction that – to use a childish phrase – “everything would come out all right in the end”.’
    Dearmer asked Joyce if she would like to help with the proof-reading and editing of the new Songs of Praise. She said yes, and during May and June 1930 she became a daily visitor at Embankment Gardens, correcting spellings, deleting exclamation-marks (‘splaggers’), and choosing between comma, dash and semi-colon. ‘My dear Percy,’ she said one morning when he was fretting about the theology of Heaven and Hell in one of Isaac Watts’s hymns, ‘surely you don’t believe all this stuff?’
    The Dean of Liverpool wrote to Percy Dearmer in May 1930: ‘I have completely fallen in love with Jan. Working through these new hymns, I see that she has got us into a new stream that will rive and make glad the city of God. Thank you for this discovery.’
    Perhaps Joyce gained an extra frisson from her success as writer and editor for Songs of Praise by comparing her status, yet again, with that of Anne Talbot, who now had a part-time job as Percy Dearmer’s secretary.
    It was impossible for Joyce to write a hymn without getting some irreverence off her chest first. ‘Serious Admonition by J. S. to Herself on the Occasion of an Almost Overwhelming Temptation’ she scribbled one morning, facing the blank sheet of paper. ‘Tune: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch.’
    When writing a hymn on Bartholemew,
    Remember the subject is solemn. You
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Can’t rhyme the apostle
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â With ‘funny old fossil’
    Or say that his cat had ‘a hollow mew’.
    Cleansed, she sat down to write the hymn. She flicked through her rhyming dictionary, aware that this was dangerous: its enticing possibilities tended to deflect a poet from his original purpose. ‘I have often wondered’, she wrote in an essay on rhymes for the Spectator, ‘whether mildness (which is by no means the same thing as humility) would ever have gained such prestige as a Christian virtue if the hymn-writers had not been at their wits’ end for a rhyme to “child”.’
    But out of all this frivolity and unbelief came some classic hymns with the power to touch people to the heart.
    Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy,
    Whose trust, ever childlike, no cares could destroy,
    Be there at our waking, and give us, we pray,
    Your bliss in our hearts, Lord, at the break of the day.
    The break of the day, the noon of the day, the eve of the day, the end of the day: the hymn can be about a day, or about life. The words are simple and understandable, in contrast to Eleanor Henrietta Hull’s bewildering line from the hymn ‘Be thou my vision’, which is sung to the same tune: ‘Be all else but nought to me, save that thou art.’
    Middle-brow poets arguably write the best hymns, and Joyce was that: a poet who expressed universal thoughts in familiar metaphors. The thought and the image might be simple, but because the words fitted the thought like a