Susan Green

Mrs Miniver lived in an unimaginable world of privilege – though I’m not sure that’s how Mrs Miniver would have seen herself. I think author Jan Struther meant her to be an ordinary middle-class housewife. Yet she had a nanny for her two youngest children, a son at Eton, a country house with a married couple to look after it, a car and a cook and a housemaid. Her observations on the joys of ordinary life – the everyday small happinesses, the flitting fleeting beauties of the mundane world – are lovely, even moving. They’re sensitively, beautifully, minutely described moments of  everyday life and routine.

Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays but always felt – and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness – a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of the frame in case one day should find herself unable to get back. The spell might break, the atmosphere be impossible to recapture.

I’ve never seen the film, but as I read I did have Greer Garson’s perfect face in mind as she manages to be brave and beautiful at the same time, keeping calm and carrying on in the face of bombs and blitz, gas masks and austerity. Not that there is much donner und blitzen in the book. Getting fitted for gas-masks, taking in evacuees, I did note that Mrs Miniver muses several times that the British are going to war against a Government or a civilization, not a nation.

I have a Tasmanian-born friend who collects instances of Tasmania equated with The End of the Earth/Utmost Darkness/Doom and I did find an instance for her in the book.

Mrs Miniver woke up one morning with a sense of doom, and knowledge that the day contained something to be dreaded. It was not a crushing weight, such as an operation, or seeing one’s best friend off to live in Tasmania; nor was it anything so light as a committee meeting or a deaf uncle to tea: it was kind of welterweight doom.

What I remember of the book is not Mrs Miniver’s stiff upper lip. It is a picture of her sitting in her beautiful drawing room, surrounded by beautiful personal objects…and ringing the bell for tea.

Taken by my husband Howard – this is just the fence outside one of the doctor’s surgeries in one of the busy streets in our town. I say ‘just’ – I pass by this fence and hedge every time I go shopping, but it takes seeing rather than looking to make an image like this one.

My new favourite heroine is Flavia de Luce.

I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no-one else did.
“All hail Flavia! Flavia forever!” I shouted…

I detected instantly that she didn’t like me. It’s a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her… With a boy you never know whether he’s smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea…

Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs Mullet’s seed biscuits the way St Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table and, with a sausage on the end of a fork as my sceptre, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, “Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry?”

Some suggestions by various critics. ‘A cross between Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle… and the Addams family.’ Or ‘a dark Nancy Drew set in gothic Midsomer.’ I can detect hints of Mistress Masham’s Repose as well.

My local Opportunity Shop is a great source of reading matter. I’m always amazed at the new and newish novels that people read and pass on. There’s always a good selection of large paperback crime and thrillers (the B-format ones that retail around the $32.95 mark) but they’re rarely the ones I want. My happy hunting ground is in the $2 classics shelf and among the children’s novels.
A couple of weeks ago I found Go Saddle the Sea by the wonderful Joan Aiken. I think I have written this before – and if I haven’t, I should have – Joan Aiken was one of my first models. It was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (for years one of my favourite books, and read I don’t know how many times) that started me off on a long love affair with Victoriana. Gas-lamp or Gothic, if it has corsets, carriages and crinolines, orotund language and bizarre surnames (Miss Slighcarp for the evil governess has rarely been bettered), I’m hooked.

So I was surprised to find that I’d never registered Aiken’s The Felix Trilogy. Go Saddle the Sea, the first book, introduces the hero Felix Brooke, a half-Spanish half-English orphan who, feeling unloved and misunderstood at home with his stern grandfather, runs away to find his father’s family in England.
It’s a ‘quest’ story. Felix, who tells the tale in the first person, sets off  to travel across Spain from the mountains to the sea. Along the way he has many adventures, experiences temporary triumphs and setbacks, encounters a changing cast of characters, makes friends and enemies. It’s a ‘picaresque’ novel; you could say it’s episodic, but it’s meant to be.  Ideal for sporadic reading. Ideal, too, for incorporating the marvellous, the fascinating –  or in the case, of the Comprachicos, the grotesque and horrifying –  from historical research.

Felix is abducted by the Comprachicos.
They “were a secret people, wandering in groups over the face of Europe, sometimes seeming to vanish for fifty or sixty years together, then, apparently, coming to life once  more. In the wake of wards and civil disturbances, plagues or bad seasons, when food was scarce and times were hard, then they would appear, plying their evil trade. What did they do? They supplied the raw material for fairs and peep-shows. And to do this they bought children from hungry parents – or they took orphans whom nobody claimed – they never stole, they drove hard but honest bargains – and they re-made these children, by terrible arts of their own, turning straight bodies into hunchbacks, dislocating joints, manufacturing dwarfs by stopping their growth – sometimes by constructing jars around them, it was said – grafting tails onto human bodies, making normal children into monstrosities. By their skilful surgery they could alter a child’s face so that its own mother would not recoginise it. At the end of Napoleon’s wars, when Europe was full of starving families and homeless children, there were the Comprachicos again, like refuse collectors, picking up human rags and turning them into profitable goods…”

There’s enough material there for a whole book –  a whole trilogy, even – but it’s just a chapter in this one.

I was in the Ian Potter in Fed Square a few weeks ago. In one of the upstairs galleries was this painting of schoolboys waiting in line. It’s a picture I know well, because it used to hang on our wall. And that’s because my Dad – or more properly in this context, the artist Douglas Green –  painted it.
I couldn’t stop smiling. Grinning, actually, like the Cheshire Cat. I felt like telling the other gallery goers “My Dad did that!”
But I didn’t. I did a sedate turn of the room looking at all the other pictures and then circled back again. I smiled some more, and then left, still smiling. Nice work, Dad.

My grandmother – my mother’s mother – died when I was 14. Her name was Phoebe. According to my mother, she associated her name with the cheery black maids you often saw in Hollywood films back in the 1930’s. Her ‘pet name’, the one my grandfather called her, was Tuffet. I have a few old cards, from her to him and from him to her – Harold and Tuffet, Tuffet and Harold. They were married in (I think) 1920 but he’d been gassed in the war and was never entirely well. He died in 1939.
The photographs of them at their wedding and as newly-weds show a handsome dark haired man and an extremely pretty golden-haired girl. She was the only daughter of a well-off and doting Papa.
I only ever knew my grandmother  – Nan – as an old lady. Actually, she wasn’t all that old but she’d had a series of strokes – the first before she was 50. Her muscles in her hands had shortened and they looked a little like claws but she wasn’t frightening. She was very gentle.

It’s funny, but what I remember most about visiting Nan is her things. She had lots of ornaments. There were china shells being carried by fat cupids on top of the piano; another china statue – a huge thing – of Boadicea in a chariot being pulled by two horses. The harness was made of thin leather straps. There were also a procession of ebony elephants in various sizes and a group of little red-clothed china imps. I loved those imps. Once, when I was four or five, I tried to take one home with me, but I got caught. I was in trouble, but I also remember the grown-ups laughing at me. Savage disappointment and humiliation raged in my small heart. On her dressing table she had a tortoise shell hand mirror which I have now – I still use it – and a cut-crystal perfume bottle with a  criss-cross pattern on it. Her perfume was Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass.

After she died, Mum gave me some of her things. The mirror, the petticoat Nan wore on her wedding day, a silk bridge jacket, a shawl, some jewellery, a collection of perfume bottles and a few other things. Over the past few years, I’ve started to give them away to my nieces. I have a son, but I wanted these relics to go to the female line of my family.
Most recently, I gave what used to be called a ‘toilet set’.Nothing to do with toilets – it’s really toilette, the French word which means, I suppose, something like ‘grooming’. I took some photographs – but of course since I dropped my external hard drive I don’t have all of those any more. Just a few.

Here they are. The little silver-topped jars, the scissors, the button hook and nail buffer, the tiny brush that was used to groom one’s eyebrows. They’re things, objects. For my mother, they would have brought images of younger mother, in happier times. For me, there’s the older, stroke-affected Nan.

And for my niece, there’s no real Nan at all. Nan is at a distance; she’s a great-grandmother, someone on a family tree or perhaps an old photograph. When my niece looks at these things, perhaps she will think of me.

I finally did it. I deleted my Facebook account.  I’ve escaped!

It wasn’t easy, however. Not only did  pictures of random friends appear, with the anguished (Facebook generated) message that they’d miss me, but I was required to give a reason. I ticked the box that said Facebook wasn’t useful to me, and immediately a whole lot of reasons why Facebook was useful to me popped up. One final hurdle; I was asked to log on in order to log out, but apparently my password was invalid. I tried and tried again but it was no go. After much swearing and general crossness, I decided to try changing my password. Well, the invalid password worked perfectly well this time; I made the change, logged in yet again and pushed the button. Ahhh… An extraordinary feeling of relief surged through me.
The week before I did this, I posted that in order to simplify my life, I was quitting. And while that is utterly and completely true, there is another other reason.
I’m just not a Facebook kind of person.

I found validation for my escape in a book by the American author and blogger, Gretchen Rubin. In 2009 she published a book called The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean my Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle and Generally Have More Fun.
Rubin started this on-line project not because she was unhappy – her personal and economic circumstances are, frankly, better than most and moreover, she absolutely knew it – but because she wanted to be happier in the life she was living. Each month, she chose an areas of her life such as marriage, parenthood, friendship, leisure and mindfulness – to explore. She thought and read and researched and made resolutions. And she kept a chart to track how well she kept those resolutions. The blog was a great success and turned into this book, and another – Happier at Home – published in 2012.

Now, this could be awfully twee and self-involved. Perhaps it is. I could also be critical of Rubin’s limitations. She’s not particularly adventurous; not curious about other cultures or religions; won’t try meditation; and is resolutely (that word again) her urban, middle-class, white, well-educated, professional, work-obsessed, routine-bound and somewhat obsessive, wholesome American self. But really, why ask her to be someone she’s not? And in fact, if I did a Happiness Project, it would actually be a lot like hers. I too struggle with impediments to happiness like impatience, cross moods and misguided perfectionism (and that’s only naming a few!) And I’m middle class etc etc And I’d like be happier in the life I’m living, too. And one thing I can start with is to imitate Rubin and create my own set of commandments.

Rubin ended up with 12 of them, and top of the list was ‘Be Gretchen’. Well, I’m going to start with ‘Be Susan.” And you know what? While Susan loves her friends and family, she’s not on Facebook!