When I started  work, I was fortunate to live in an elegant Victorian town-house.

The imposing front door opened on to a brightly coloured, mosaic floor depicting the four seasons.  A  spiral staircase swept upwards from the hall in a gentle curve to the first floor and  onwards to the second.   My landlady had a taste for richly carved  furniture in  heavy dark woods.   Ebony, mahogany and teak  furniture polished to mirror clarity furnished every room.   A spectacular mantle piece, like the west front of a Gothic cathedral dominated the lounge, three storeys of shelves, niches, tabernacles,  and projecting plinths  bearing  porcelain figurines, china vases, clocks,  picture frames, and tiny oil lamps, all of which flashed and twinkled in the fire-light.   In the dining room a corner cabinet lined with mirrors, contained her special treasures, gifts brought home from foreign parts by her late husband, a master-mariner whom she referred to as  ‘The captain’.  There was a  large chunk of some emerald -coloured rock, a conch shell elaborately bound in silver, several porcelain figures of Japanese ladies in elaborate and colourful costumes, a fully rigged ship carved  from teak and trimmed with silver, and  jade candlesticks and ink pots with silver trimmings.   Although it was a beautiful house, and the landlady the kindest I had ever  encountered,   I never felt quite at ease there because I was frightened I would inadvertently break or damage one or other of her beautiful possessions.   Her house was  not only a shrine to her life with  ‘The Captain’ but also the source of her emotional and spiritual strength and her reason for existing.   It provided her daily existence with meaning.   We lodgers, as well as being a source of income, were also important  characters  in her  personal narrative, because we were the audience, the observers of her relationship with her possessions.    Not a day went by without one or other of us, quite sincerely, expressing admiration of  her treasures or commenting that some of her objects had been swapped around or the pictures in the hall had been changed to match the changing seasons etc. It would be wrong to think she lived in the past.   She lived in the present but in a world of her own creating, partly made up of memories but mostly of her love for her possessions and the joy  she received from seeing them and handling them.   This world  provided her with all the emotional support she required to live a worthwhile life.

Hamlet said, ‘Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so’. We all live in our imagination much more than we admit to.  What happens to us we fit into our own personal narrative, the plot of which is dominated by our own needs, physical, emotional and spiritual.   To the people we encounter we attribute roles, according to how they   appear to feature in our on-going  life-story, saint or sinner. (Soap-operas are popular because they mirror the story-telling exercise that goes on in our own head.)    There are people, events, ideas to which we may attribute very great significance, a prophet or a guru perhaps, a religion, a set of values, from which we may draw strong emotional or spiritual support and comfort, but it is as well to bear n mind that while these, like prayer, provide us with a focus for our  imaginative involvement with what is unattainably beyond us, the ultimate good, all the emotional and spiritual effort is generated by ourselves.  

PASTORAL GREETINGS

We wish to express our concern and support to our members in hospital and to those who are infirm and housebound and who cannot join us on a Sunday morning or participate actively in the life of our Congregation.     Your  abiding  interest in the Church and its day to day activities   encourages us who are fortunate enough to be able to serve our community.   Your  concern  reinforces in us the conviction that our contribution is worthwhile.  We are all supportive of  each other in our various ways.  That is what makes us a caring community.

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THE ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

Twenty-four members  attended our A.G.M. on 16^th March.  The incumbent Office Bearers were re-elected, and Kathleen McGregor, Joan Matthew, Maureen Watt, Arthur Bruce and Alan Prosser  were elected to the Committee.

The question of pulpit supply during our Minister’s six months leave of absence produced a lively discussion, several  innovative approaches and several offers of  help.    Rev. Cal Courtney has agreed to take services as often as he can and  is prepared to help us find speakers willing to come to Aberdeen.   Our Chairman, Bert Inkson, will also try to recruit  a few visiting Ministers  while he and Jean are attending the G.A. meetings as our representatives.    In addition to traditional services taken by our own members, we will organise an occasional Pastoral Sunday, an Away Day Sunday,  a Nostalgia Sunday, a Special Occasion Sunday, two Women’s League Sundays, and there will be services devised and conducted by our various organisations etc.      Anyone who has an idea for using the time on Sunday morning will have the full resources of the Church  to support  him or her.   Offers of help should be communicated to the Church Secretary.   There will be no services on Sundays  13^th, 20^th, & 27^th July,  the local holiday fortnight.

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FUND-RAISING

The GRAND QUIZ NIGHT held in the Transport Club raised £197.00.   We are grateful to everyone who took part and helped to organise this event.   We are particularly indebted to Joan Matthew who liaised with the Club management and looked after us on the night, and to Margaret Robinson who organised the Raffle and ensured that the evening would be profitable. As a result of our efforts this year, we have so far raised £460.00 for our Vision Day Charity project.

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CHASTE.  The Women’s League raised £308.00 for their National Project, CHASTE.

Their next  charitable undertaking is to raise funds for the Sightsavers Campaign.

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The new A-BOARD.  We are grateful to the Terrace Scottish Country Dancers who raised the money, £175.00,  to purchase the new A-Board notice board which will stand outside the Church and advertise whatever event is in progress inside.

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ARTHUR’S CONCERTS. Arthur Bruce has arranged a series of afternoon concerts in our Church to raise funds for local cancer relief charities. These will take place at 2.00pm on  15^th April, 22^nd May and  19^th June.

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FASHION SHOW. The Fashion Show will now take place on Thursday 12^th June  at 7.00pm.   Male as well as female fashions will be exhibited.   A programme of entertainment  and  refreshments will also be provided.   Tickets, £3.00 each will be available soon.

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AFTERNOON TEAS. We shall be serving traditional afternoon teas again this coming summer on  17^th July and 21^st August.

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HALLOWE'EN FAIR    Saturday 1^st November.

CHRISTMAS CRAFT FAIR   Saturday 6^th.December.

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MAY FAIR

Our May Fair opens its doors  at 10.00am on Saturday 10th May. Set up is scheduled for 1.00pm – 3.00pm  on Friday 9^th.

In addition to the usual range of stalls, we shall be offering a Cosmetic Stall, catering for gentlemen as well as ladies.  Donations of make-up, perfume etc. are urgently solicited.    We  are in desperate need of  home-baking, toffee, and delicious desserts.   We need gifts for the Wheel of Fortune and the Raffle.  Books, superior bric-a-brac and Pretty Things will receive a ready welcome from the respective stall-holders.

A Bottle Sunday, 27^th April, has been designated to acquire stock for the Bottle Stall.

And on every Sunday from now until the Fair, 20p. TOKENS will be available from Jean Lowe and Maureen Watt.

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FAIR TRADE

Congratulations to Sue Good on the outstanding success of her  Fair Trade Fair  in Aberdeen Music Hall on Saturday 8^th March.   About 2,000 people attended this event, visiting the stalls and exhibitions and enjoying the entertainment and demonstrations, which included a comedy duo, a close harmony singing group, a Fashion Show and a drama specially written for the occasion. 

A FairTrade poster competition for Primary Five school children coincided with the Fair.   The winning poster is on display at the Children’s Library.  

FAIRTRADE WALL. The contributions submitted by the Pupils of St, Peter’s Primary School are exhibited in our Church. Our members and friends are invited to view our FairTrade Wall over the next few weeks.

Thanks to Sue’s efforts information about FAIRTRADE is ever more widely spread among the citizens, organisations and commercial companies of Aberdeen,  We can help Sue in her crusade to assist producers in  the developing world by using FairTrade products ourselves and by encouraging our acquaintances to do likewise.

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WOMEN’S LEAGUE PROGRAMME

APRIL 2008

2nd.	‘The Stagers‘    Concert Party
9th	Theatre Outing
16th	What the  Papers Say.
23rd	A  Wine Tasting with Bill Stephen
30th.	Annual General Meeting.

BEHIND MRS MINIVER

By Sue Good

Joyce Anstruther was born in 1901.  Her mother Eva was the eldest daughter of Lord Sudeley and her father Henry Anstruther was Chief Liberal Whip and MP for St Andrews.   His political future seemed promising, but he resigned to become an administrator in the Suez Canal Company.  Eva was bitterly disappointed and relationships became even more strained when Lord Sudeley was declared bankrupt.    All Joyce’s memories of her parents’ marriage were unhappy ones and they finally separated, though never divorced, in 1915.  She was conscious from a very early age that any show of affection by her to either parent would upset the other one.   Joyce was very close to her father, although their love was of the unspoken kind that has to find outlets for expression in mutual interests like carpentry, heraldry, English grammar and knots and splices.  Eva had slightly more off-beat interests, including witchcraft and all things occult.  Joyce had the sort of up-bringing that most upper-class girls of her time had, with a succession of nannies and other servants providing some sort of continuity and warmth.  Her older brother went to boarding school, but she attended various morning classes daily from her London home from age six to sixteen.  She longed to have been born a boy, and with her short curly hair and slim figure she looked very like one.   She was of necessity very self-reliant and could occupy herself for hours, creating fantasy lands and acting out roles.   

Eva was herself a published author and it was thanks to her that Joyce’s first story was published in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in 1918.  From this time on, she became a much-published short-story writer, light  journalist and poet.    Her pseudonym was very simple;  she took her initial and her surname and made Jan Struther.  Jan was a name much more suited to her and in later years she was to become known as Jan rather than Joyce.   In 1923, she married Tony Maxtone Graham, the son of a Perthshire laird and they set up house together in Chelsea.  Tony worked for Lloyds Insurance Brokers and came home each evening to play with his model trains, something that was popular with men of the upper classes in the twenties and thirties.    For him, playing games, telling jokes and doing funny accents never lost their appeal – it was a way of hiding from the tedium of adulthood and at first was one of the bonds between himself and Joyce.   She wrote that there was a part of her that had never stopped being the curly-headed girl who would rather have been born a boy anyhow and who had a strong prejudice against becoming a grown-up ever.  It remained with her, as did an enthusiasm for taking up new pursuits

Joyce spent her days writing and her articles, poems, short stories etc were published at the rate of about one a week in the Evening Standard, the Daily Express, the Graphic, the Lady’s Pictorial, Punch, the Spectator and the New Statesman.   Editors particularly liked her conciseness, her epigrammatic style and her great gift for observing the minutiae of  universal daily experience.  The Maxtone Grahams had a small circle of close friends and a wider circle of not-so-close friends with whom they partied, dined, or stayed and then of course invited back.  They also went each August to Scotland for the grouse shooting.    In 1929, they decided on a whim to go off to Rumania for a three week holiday, taking with them a friend who couldn’t raise the cash and so for whom they footed the bill.   At this time they had two children, aged five and one who stayed firmly behind in the nursery with Nannie.   Contact with parents was limited, as had been the case with Joyce, to an hour in the evening, clean and tidy in the drawing-room.

Neither Tony nor Joyce was in the least bit religious.  Tony had suffered from the observance of the Scottish Sabbath during his childhood and Joyce had found the Anglican services a great trial.   She always had difficulty in sitting through concerts and theatre performances, even though she enjoyed them, as she got bored very easily, so church services had seemed interminable.   It may seem surprising then, that she wrote a dozen hymns altogether.  Joyce’s biographer comments that people often feel cheated when they discover that somebody who wrote what might be their favourite hymn, was not herself a church goer or even a believer in the conventional sense.  I think that is to look at it the wrong way round – it’s the hearer’s attitude of mind that’s important, not the writer’s. She wrote because her friend, Canon Percy Dearmer, who was compiling the schools hymnbook “Song of Praise”, asked her if she would write a few hymns for it.   One was “Daisies are our silver”, which was a popular choice at school assemblies.   Another one that struck a chord with those reared on the romantic stories of Robin Hood and of King Arthur and his knights, was “When a knight won his spurs”  Her hymns were mostly remarkable for their everyday detail, particularly when it came to nature.   “High o’er the lonely hills” is I think, a beautiful word picture of dawn and yet it has never been as popular as Eleanor Farjeon’s “Morning has broken”.  If it is used at all, it is usually around advent-tide, but it is not included in many of the mainstream hymnbooks.  By far and away her most popular hymn is the one she chose to fit to the old Irish hymn tune Slane.   “Lord of all hopefulness, lord of all joy”, with its stanzas that could refer to times of the day or to stages in a life, is still very much requested, both at weddings and at funerals – the acid test of a good hymn!   

Ten years into her marriage Joyce now had three children, whom she adored, although she avoided the daily drudgery of looking after them.   But the marriage, which had seemed so perfect, was beginning to crack and in many small ways she and Tony started drifting apart.  Tony became passionate about cars and also took up golf in a big way and Joyce, who loathed the game, resorted to botany and beachcombing.  Tony became less communicative, Joyce sulked and to cap it all they had money worries.  It was at this point that Joyce received the letter that was to change the course of her life.   The writer was Peter Fleming, who was a leader-writer at the Times newspaper.  He suggested that she might write a series of articles to appear on the Court Page of the Times, to provide a light and feminine touch in contrast to the news of Buckingham Palace, the funerals of Bishops and grand weddings.  “We want someone to invent a woman and write an article about her every few weeks”, Peter Fleming told her.   To Joyce’s query “what sort of a woman?” he answered “oh, just an ordinary sort of woman, who leads an ordinary sort of life.  Rather like yourself” I imagine that his definition of an ordinary woman is something we would all take issue with, but Joyce saw nothing ironical in it.  She promised to consider the idea.

Finding a name for this character was to prove a challenge, as the name had to be long enough to sound nice, short enough not to be a problem in column headings; if possible it should begin with “M” for the sake of alliteration and most importantly, it shouldn’t be a real surname, to avoid any libel actions.   Thinking about this as she walked along a Westminster street, Joyce happened to notice a man delivering skins to a furrier’s warehouse.  She remembered the heraldic names for fur that her father had taught her and so the name Mrs Miniver was chosen.   It was Joyce’s intention to make the character of Mrs Miniver as happy as she once had been.  In October 1937, with no introduction or explanation, the first Mrs Miniver article, “Mrs Miniver comes home” appeared anonymously on the Court page of the Times.  This is how it began:-

It was lovely, thought Mrs Miniver, nodding goodbye to the flower-woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of ceremonious joy, as though it were a cornucopia; it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one’s life where the holidays (irrelevant interlude) had made one drop it.  Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays; but she always felt – and it was, perhaps a 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 she should find herself unable to get back.  The spell might break, the atmosphere be impossible to recapture.

The article goes on to describe, in atmospheric detail, the tea-time ritual.  It is beautifully observed and obviously a word picture of a very privileged and contented London lady.  Each successive article contained a few gems; a metaphor that was exactly right; an observation describing exactly some small detail of everyday life; an insight into those philosophical discoveries we all make, even if we don’t call them that.   Here for instance is Mrs Miniver’s take on rear-view mirrors: - “She wondered why it had never occurred to her before that you cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small, clear image of the past” Or, on a child’s inability to grade its misfortunes: “One never knew, when setting out to comfort Toby, whether to prepare first aid for a pinprick or a broken heart”

Inasmuch as Mrs Miniver had a husband and three children and she lived in London, her life mirrored Joyce’s own, but it was an idealised version of her life and in time it served to underline for her how trapped she felt by her marriage.  Many people, particularly those who knew her, mixed up the two lives completely and took the stories for autobiographical sketches.   Others would write to Mrs Miniver, asking for directions to the place she visited in one of the articles to employ a charlady.   There was also much speculation on the Times letter page as to the identity of the writer, and many readers were convinced it could only be a man.  As soon as the second article appeared, the first publishers were applying for publication rights and 14 in all made application over the next two years to publish in book form.  Chatto and Windus was the publisher finally chosen and the book “Mrs Miniver” came out in October 1939.  As well as all the acclamation, the book had its detractors, notably the authors E.M. Forster and Rosalind Lehmann, but the fairly vitriolic letters in the Times only served to make the book more popular.

The book was set in the pre-war period, although there are one or two articles about preparations for war and Joyce, as the perceived persona of Mrs Miniver, found herself being asked to do various voluntary duties.  It was through one of these, at the Jewish Refugee Committee, that she met the man who was to be the love of her life - Viennese art historian and musician Adolf Placzek, known as Dolf, who was waiting for an entry visa to the US.  They had four months together before he left for his new country.

Meanwhile, the US publication of Mrs Miniver was due in another six months and the publishers requested the author’s presence to promote the book.   Tony and Joyce’s elder son was at Gordonstoun, but they decided that Joyce would do the requested lecture tours and also take the two younger children to Tony’s sister in New York, where they would remain for the duration. 

 Americans took Joyce, or Jan as she now became known, completely to their hearts.  Part of the book’s fascination for them, as indeed now for us, separated by time, is the enchantment of a lifestyle completely different from their own.  The situations described, even if they might be slightly dull, were what they thought of as essentially English and a way of life that was under threat.  During Jan’s lecture tours she was bombarded with all sorts of questions about the British way of life and she worked hard to convince her audiences that the similarities between Americans and Britons were greater than the differences, often speaking to audiences of more than two hundred.  MGM approached Jan to buy the film rights of her book and she soon realised that she would have no control over the film.  Hollywood would use the character she created to make a war film about the plight of ordinary English families. Ironically, very little of Jan’s original character remains in the film, beyond the fact that she is married, has three children and a house in Kent.   Hollywood created landed gentry, a German paratrooper, an eponymous rose and a village church with hymns that were surely sung by a cathedral choir.  All the insights and the philosophy were replaced by speaking looks from Greer Garson.  Still, it did the trick, and was credited by Winston Churchill with hastening America’s entry into the war.

When the war was over, Jan and Tony did try to resume family life again, but it didn’t work out and after the divorce Jan returned to America and married Dolf.   Their happiness was short-lived, however, and Jan died in 1953 of a brain tumour.

That was a very condensed version of the life of Joyce Anstruther, otherwise known as Jan Struther, the lady behind Mrs Miniver.    When I first read her biography, I felt rather depressed by her story, as it did seem to me that the most obvious way she was remembered was as the author of something she never wrote – that film.  All her poetry and her everyday insights have to be sought out.    Then I remembered her most popular hymn – Lord of all hopefulness -it still provides spiritual uplift and comfort to many people today.  Perhaps, as we measure our global footprints these days, we should also measure our philosophical footprints – how will people remember us?   Will our footprints do as Longfellow says and help a forlorn and shipwrecked brother to take heart again?   

What effect our words, whether written or spoken may have on others, is something we can never know. 

I’ll give the last word to another poet who bridges the generation gap between Longfellow and Jan and who seems to sum up the matter of influence, quite succinctly.  His name was Francis Thompson.

The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.