I'm sure any booklover out there understands what I mean when I say
how dear imaginary characters can become to you, like old friends that
you can always go back and visit. Mrs. Miniver is one of those
characters that I instantly adored. A 1940s housewife on the brink of
WW2, a blurb on the front flap describes Mrs. Miniver as "of the
endurable and pleasant sides of existence. Against the shadow of the
present, she holds up to view the everyday domesticities, the comings
and goings of family life, and finds them good ... the ordinary becomes
extraordinary, and suddenly important."
Her station is described as middle class, but upon reading the book I
couldn't help but get the feeling Mrs. Miniver is definitely an upper middle
class lady, who owned a home in London complete with domestic staff.
Nevertheless, she exemplifies the beauty in daily routine life and
simple
pleasures. One of my favorite sections is the one dedicated to Mrs.
Miniver choosing the perfect diary, simply titled "The New Engagement
Book."
The book is actually not a novel, but a collection of short stories
that were originally printed in The Times. Most of the stories focus on Mrs.
Miniver's musings surrounding domesticity, routines, social etiquette, and thoughts
about her family. I marked quite a few quotes that resonated with me,
and still make me smile when I reread them. Mrs. Miniver seems like such
a kindred spirit.
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Greer Garson as Mrs. Miniver in the 1942 film.
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"This was the kind of thing one remembered about a house: not the
size of the rooms or the color of the walls, but the fell of
door-handles and light-switches, the shape and texture of the
banister-rail under one's palm; minute tactile intimacies, whose
resumption was the essence of coming home.""As a rule she managed
to keep household matters in what she considered their proper place.
They should be no more, she felt, than a low unobtrusive humming in the
background of consciousness: the mechanics of life should never be
allowed to interfere with living."
"No, it wasn't shyness. It was
more like a form of claustrophobia - a dread of exchanging the freedom
of her own self-imposed routine for the inescapable burden of somebody
else's. She must be prepared to adjust herself all day to an alien
tempo: to go out, to come in, to go to bed, to sit, to stride, to potter
(oh! worst of all, to potter), whenever her hostess gave the hint.
There was always a chance, of course, that the Havelocks' tempo might
turn out to be the same as her own ... and realize that a day without a
good chunk or two of solitude in it is like a cocktail without ice."
"She gave herself an extra handful of bath salts as a futile antidote to woe."
"To be entirely at leisure for one day is to be for one day an immortal."
"It is a thing, she knew, which must never be done in a hurry. An
engagement book is the most important of all those small adjuncts to
life, that tribe of humble familiars which jog along beside one from
year's end to year's end, apparently trivial, but momentous by reason of
their terrible intimacy. A sponge, a comb, a tooth-brush, a
spectacle-case, a fountain-pen - these are the things which need to be
chosen with care. They become, in time, so much a part of one that they
can scarcely be classes as intimate ... so it wasn't until January that
Mrs. Miniver ... found herself in the stationer's shop with enough
leisure to give the matter the attention it deserved. She stopped in
front of the rack marked 'Diaries' and prepared to enjoy herself."
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| This adorable, peachy-pink edition from 1940 is one of my most beloved books. |
"Besides,
Mrs. Miniver was beginning to feel more than a little weary of
exchanging ideas and of hearing other people exchange theirs. It's all
very well, she reflected, when the ideas have had time to flower, or at
least to bud, so that we can pick them judiciously, present them with a
bow, and watch them unfold in the warmth of each other's understanding:
but there is far too much nowadays of pulling up the wretched little
things just to see how they are growing ... Half the verbal sprigs we hand
to each other are nothing but up-ended rootlets, earthy and immature;
left longer in the ground they might have come to something: but once
they are exposed we seldom manage to replant them. It is largely the
fault, no doubt, of the times we live in. Things happen too quickly,
crisis follows crisis, the soil of our minds is perpetually disturbed.
Each of us, to relieve his feelings, broadcasts his own running
commentary on the preposterous and bewildering events of the hour: and
this, nowadays, is what passes for conversation."
"She saw every
relationship as a pair of intersecting circles. The more they
intersected, it would seem at first glance, the better the relationship;
but this is not so. Beyond a certain point the law of diminishing
returns sets in, and there aren't enough private resources left on
either side to enrich the life that is shared."
"Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion."
"She
breathed surreptitiously on the window of the car and drew two circles
with her finger; but they were hardly interested at all - a mere moonlight
infatuation which would soon peter out - so she added ears and whiskers
and turned them into Siamese cat twins."
― TYG
The history of the little red hankie starts with none other than Joan Crawford. Rumor has it that while attending a glitzy awards show, she went to dab her lips and soiled her hankie with red lipstick - a bit of an etiquette faux pas! Hopefully she knew to use the folded underside of her hankie to hid her excess lipstick from the public. Nevertheless, soon after she asked her seamstress to whip her up a red handkerchief so she could dab at her lips without worry... and the red hankie was born! The audience took notice and soon all young women followed suit with their own red hankies at the ready.
