Free The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham Page A

glove, and because the scansion was perfect, real beauty was attained.
    Writing these hymns, she imagined herself as the child in the pew. ‘When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old’ was a tomboy’s hymn – the sort of hymn she would have liked to sing as a child. She knew that a great hymn speaks not just to children but to the child in us all.
    As an adult who never wanted to grow up, she retained a deep compassion for children, and a respect for their way of looking at the world. She couldn’t bear adults who were out of touch with magic and enchantment. Possibly she cared more about ‘the child inside the man’ than she did about actual children. One of her short stories begins:
    Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to Mrs Murple. If she went to stay in a haunted house, the most authentic family ghost would go on strike and refuse to show off; if she entered a room where children were playing at pirates, the nursery table would instantly cease to be a Spanish galleon, and the desert island would automatically change back into a hearthrug. She would have harnessed Pegasus to a four-wheeled cab, and made the golden apples of the Hesperides into dumplings. But she had delicate features and an ethereal expression, and it was almost impossible to guess, when you saw her with that far-away look in her eyes, apparently lost in an exquisite reverie, that she was really making mental calculations about housekeeping accounts or wondering how to improve her game of golf.
    Prosaic grown-ups need to be taught a lesson, and Miss Murple got her come-uppance. Plainly Joyce was not out of touch with nursery life. But she was never in it for long enough to be anything other than enchanted by the child’s view of the world.
    Joyce claimed not to be a believer-in-God, but her sense of enchantment was so strong that it was akin to spirituality. She had moments of sudden religious vision.
    â€˜Intimations of Immortality in Early Middle Age’
    On the first of spring, walking along the Embankment,
    Light-footed, light-headed, eager in mind and heart,
    I found my spirit keyed to a new pitch,
    I felt a strange serenity and a strange excitement.
    I saw a boy running, and felt the wind
    Stream past his cheeks, his heart in ribs pounding;
    I saw a nurse knitting, and my own fingers
    Knew the coldness of needles, warmth of the wool.
    I saw, over the barges, gulls flying:
    It was my own wings that tilted and soared,
    With bone-deep skill gauging to a line’s breadth
    The unmapped hills of air, its unplumbed hollows.
    I saw a woman with child: a second heart
    Beat below mine. I saw two lovers kissing,
    And felt her body dissolve, his harden
    Under the irrational chemistry of desire.
    And I, who had always said, in idle, friendly,
    Fireside thrashings-out of enormous themes,
    That anybody who liked could have my share
    Of impersonal after-life, fusion with the infinite,
    Suddenly thought – Here, perhaps, is a glimpse
    Of the sages’ vision, delight by me unimagined:
    To feel without doing, to enjoy without possessing;
    To bear no longer the burden of a separate self;
    To live through others’ senses; to be air, to be ether,
    Soundlessly quivering with the music of a million lives.
    Pantheistic tosh, one might say. But Joyce said, ‘There you have my religious belief.’
    *   *   *
    Ernest Shepard. the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, became Joyce’s illustrator in Punch in 1931. Three things about her light verse of this time made it ideal material for Shepard’s talents.
    The first was her tendency to write simple verses about the daily delights of childhood, which could be enjoyed by children but were really aimed at nostalgic grown-ups.
    The second was her depiction of London, whose unsung charms she longed to express. She cherished the sight of tri-cycling children, muffin men, milk ponies, chimney-pots, pigeons, and Belisha beacons.
    The third was