Accidental Heroes of the 20th Century; 25 - Joyce Grenfell, Actor
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Your support makes all the difference.THE PICTURE of Joyce Grenfell on the jacket of a recently published volume of her letters shows her writing in her study, looking relaxed, soft, feminine and really quite beautiful. It comes as something of a shock.
So utterly convincing was Joyce's galumphing gaucherie in the St Trinian's movies, and the well-meaning but hopeless nursery teacher of her most famous monologue, that it is sometimes difficult to conceive of another existence in which she is not wielding a hockey stick and facing the camera with an embarrassed, toothy smile.
The nursery teacher is a typical Grenfell character, full of misplaced enthusiasm, gradually losing patience with her recalcitrant charges - "George, don't do that" - but in a very genteel, English way. It is a beautifully observed piece and, like so much of Grenfell, says more about a certain kind of middle-class Englishwoman than any amount of Betjeman's Joan Hunter Dunnery.
Joyce was a kind of poet of niceness. This probably came naturally to her since she was by all accounts every bit as kind, caring and, well, nice as most of her heroines, the difference being that in Joyce's case, acts of generosity were achieved with quiet efficiency.
Janie Hampton, who edited her letters, tells how Joyce paid school fees for nephews and nieces, and occasionally gave a car or a house or, bizarrely, in one case a dishwasher, to a friend in need. (Elvis gave Cadillacs, Joyce household appliances. How very English.) "We are fearfully rich," wrote Grenfell, "and of all the forms of self-indulgence, giving is the pleasantest."
But it is Joyce's hugely influential body of work - often disregarded or seriously undervalued - rather than her saintliness, that qualifies her for inclusion in this series; the more so since it stemmed from such unlikely beginnings.
If anybody's success could be said to be inadvertent it is Grenfell's. She started performing her sketches and songs in revues only in her late twenties, in 1939, after friends whom she had entertained at dinner parties urged her to "have a bash".
Joyce's gentle guying of women of her own background - debutante, Paris finishing school - was perhaps not that remarkable. But how she ever acquired her ear for the cadences of lower-middle-class and working-class conversations remains something of a mystery.
The pieces in which Joyce stepped outside her own class have been criticised for being patronising, but this is absolutely unjustified. In a monologue called "The Telephone Call", a 30-year-old in Sydney who has given up her job as a shopgirl to look after her aged father tries to explain to her boyfriend why she cannot go to the pictures with him that evening: "I asked Letty to come over and sit with him, but she's got the kids and Frank and it's a hell of a way over here, and they do take him out driving in the car on Sundays... I put him first because I have to... But you know what I feel about you." The impatient boyfriend dumps her. It's poignant, it feels true and, what is more, it has a strong feminist streak.
It would be fanciful to place Joyce Grenfell, who died in 1979, in the vanguard of the women's movement, although many of her pieces pointed out inequalities between the sexes, but she was certainly a standard- bearer for the kind of character-based comedy performed by people such as Victoria Wood and Barry Humphries. She was also, happily, not completely without malice.
A wickedly funny piece in which a writer of children's books talks in twee terms about how she writes her almost identical books by going into her Hidey-Hole and visiting the Land of Make-Believe is obviously based on Enid Blyton. "Now my husband has his own Hidey-Hole," she says, "where he adds up."
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