Free The Real Mrs Miniver by Ysenda Maxtone Graham Page B

her light but firm delineation of social class. The children she described (based on her own) were Christopher Robin-like in their well-brought-upness: they were children with nannies, and with smart Mummies in furs; children who peeped out of nursery windows and were allowed out in best coats and hats to tricycle up and down the square before tea. Her street characters – policemen, flower ladies, pavement artists, street musicians and so on – were comically Cockney.
    E. H. Shepard was on Joyce’s wavelength in each of these three aspects. He, too, drew pictures of children and of childish pleasures which, though loved by children, were positively drooled over by grown-ups. He, too, spoke as much to the child inside the adult as to children themselves. He, too, adored London and sought to express its charms on paper. And he, too, was sensitive to social class and uninhibited about delineating it. When you look at one of his well-brought-up children with long dangly legs on a tricycle, you can hear her posh vowels, and when you look at one of his street artists, you can hear him saying, ‘Why, bless your heart. It ain’t no trouble – I’m used to Art.’
    Joyce’s collaboration with Shepard began in Punch on 25 February 1931 with the first of a set of verses about London telephone exchanges called ‘Dialling Tones’:

    The idea for a set of verses on this subject was an example of Joyce’s ability (when not in a holiday bad mood) to ‘pick out the lovely bits suddenly’. In the daily act of dialling ‘A–V–E’, ‘H–I–L’, ‘P–R–I’ or ‘R–I–V’, her imagination was transported to remembered avenues, hillsides, primrose meadows and riversides. This was an experience shared by many Londoners in the days before all-digital telephone numbers and Joyce, together with Shepard, gave expression to a commonly-felt urge to find poetry in the mundane.
    Joyce wrote to the editor of Punch at about this time, begging to be allowed to sign herself ‘J.S.’ or ‘Jan’ instead of being anonymous. This was an honour permitted only to the most established Punch writers; and the editor at first refused. But when her second set of Shepard-illustrated verses began in February 1932, the shortened signature at last appeared: ‘Jan’.
    â€˜Sycamore Square’ was the name of this set of verses. It was about street life in Wellington Square, and at the end of 1932 Methuen published it in book form together with the telephone-exchange verses. Doggerel-like in its simplicity and shortness-of-lines, the verse was an unobtrusive backdrop for Shepard’s illustrations, such as the one of the policeman:

    There he is at the bottom of the page, jovial, with a baby on his knee, truncheon and helmet hanging on a peg behind him, cup of tea in his hand, kipper on a plate, buxom smiling wife in an apron, two more babies, and three riotous children waving their knives and forks in the air, as the Sycamore Square children never would.

    Joyce’s next collaboration with E. H. Shepard was The Modern Struwwelpeter, also published first in Punch, and then by Methuen in 1936. It was a set of cautionary verses inspired by the bad habits of Joyce’s children and nephews: James, who liked too much ice-cream (and turned to ice); Philip, who didn’t cross the road carefully (and got run over by a bus); Peter, who wouldn’t take his halibut oil (and was visited by a monstrous fish); Anthony, who said ‘You’ve got it up your sleeve’ to conjurors (and was turned into a white rabbit); Charles, who said ‘O.K.’ (and was turned into a parrot in the zoo); Janet, who said ‘Mamma, I must have that’ in toyshops (and was turned into a doll in a shop window); Robert, who dialled ‘COW’ and ‘HOG’ on ‘his mother’s toy, the telephone’ (and was terrified