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Books and Beyond

I give thanks that I’ve been reading Mrs. Miniver in December. On Christmas Eve I read several of the articles to my husband, who had just come inside from the porch where he put up a few lights. Since I had a cold, we decided to stay home from Christmas Eve services. In the afternoon I sang Christmas carols to our cat Pandora.

The articles in Mrs. Miniver were published in the Times in London in 1939; I will refer to them as columns. The library categorizes the book, published in 1942, as fiction. (The DVD is available too.) Jan Struther is the author’s name. Several of the 37 short pieces are about the holidays. In the background is the build-up to World War II. Mrs. Miniver’s husband Clem eventually goes to serve, and their country house Starlings becomes home to seven children who need safe refuge.

One favorite for me was “Three Stockings.” It’s Christmas morning, and that’s when the three Miniver children get to see what’s in their stockings. They awake early, come in their parents’ bedroom, and are invited to get in bed with them. It’s just past six o’clock. The oldest son, Vin, starts eating a tangerine from his sock. Youngest son Toby gets a fancy glass marble. And Judy finds a miniature baby doll in a cradle. Then they go downstairs for breakfast and for opening presents under the tree. Mrs. Miniver is very happy, but she thinks about some of the tough times of raising children. One of the closing sentences took my breath away: “Eternity framed in domesticity” (p. 25). That’s how I felt about the entire book and about the world we now live in.

As I read the 1939 columns (over and over), I thought of the columns in The Independent — the everyday subjects, yet how the important things of life are hovering in our consciousness. What a rich picture of domesticity when we read about walks in parks, good food to cook, wines to drink, books to read, exercises, plants to take care of, fishing, family life on the farm. The subjects are not trivial.

Another column I liked was “The New Engagement Book.” Mrs. Miniver is in a store trying to choose from three possible books: one bound in green lizard-skin, one in crimson leatherette, and one in brown calf. She looks mainly at how they are organized — would it fit her way of writing about daily happenings? She finally gets the brown calf — the less expensive one, gets on the bus to travel to Starlings. Soon she gets off the bus to go back to the store; she wants the green lizard-skin engagement book. Guess who already has her “engagement book” for 2018!

Most of the traveling in the book is by car back and forth to Starlings, their home away from home on the southwest coast of England. We just mentioned a bus trip. Riding on a train comes up now and then. In “The New Dimension,” Mrs. Miniver has her first airplane ride. She flies to Scotland, and sitting in the airplane by her is a man with his sheepdog!

I’ll always remember “Christmas Shopping.” It’s a rainy day, and Caroline Miniver (her first name is given once at the end of a letter she writes) is driving in the rain to buy presents. She describes the sound of the windshield wipers going back and forth in the rain: “Sea-green . . . sea-green.” And “Wee Free. . . Wee Free.” Several years ago I wrote a poem about being a child in my mother’s arms as my father is driving home from church in the rain:

Silver wands

wash away the animals to a lullaby

of water. I sleep

against mother’s arm —

my cradle the humming car

and the rocking rainbows.

I hope my readers have a good New Year’s weekend. “The Last Day of the Holidays” tells us what the Minivers do. They play darts, Round the Clock, and charades. Nannie makes toffee. In the evening Clem plays the piano and the family gathers around him singing “The Ash Grove” and “A Bicycle Made for Two.” Maybe your family will play some games and decide to sing together.

In Mrs. Miniver’s columns, underneath it all is her attitude of thanks. Underneath my column is thanks, too — for friends, family, people who give to others with love and generosity, and thanks for the Marshall-Lyon County Library.

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