This England

MRS. MINIVER--Jan Struther--Harcourt, Brace ($2).

"Mrs. Miniver herself, when buying fireworks, was apt to be led away by fantastic titles; she would order Humming Spiders, Witches' Cauldrons, Mines with Serpents. . . . Clem . . . laid out a certain amount on Roman Candles, Catherine-wheels, and Tourbillions, but for the most part he rightly concentrated on rockets. There was one bursting now, a delicate constellation of many-colored stars which drifted down and lingered in the still air."

Then "the final rocket went up, a really large one, a piece of reckless extravagance. ... It soared twice as high as any they had had before; and the moment it had burst, Mrs. Miniver remembered. 'Brightness falls from the air'--that was it! The sparks from the rocket came pouring down the sky in a slow golden cascade, vanishing one by one into a lake of darkness.

Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen's eye--"It was quite irrelevant, really, a lament by Nashe in time of pestilence. . . . Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion."

For the past three troubled years, readers of London's thundering Times have been turning to read passages like this in the column where from time to time Mrs. Miniver, or her creator, Jan Struther, reports the small doings of herself and her household in London and Kent. This week, for the first time, U. S. readers could read the best of her pieces in book form. There were 36 of them, averaging eight pages in length. They took Mrs. Miniver and the people closest to her through the routines of the English seasons, left them waiting and wondering in the midst of war.

Mrs. Miniver is haunted by evanescence. Each of her little sketches has the same haunted quality, an echo of the sense of time slipping away, which is Mrs. Miniver's main concern. Her frail net of words is flung to rescue from oblivion only the most available, most familiar things. She writes about the new car, Christmas shopping, the last day of the holidays, the first day of spring, a visit to a country house, where she has occasion to reflect on "the sound of a pack of upper-class English voices in full cry," and to be grateful for a rescuing Colonel Blimp. "Thank God for colonels, thought Mrs. Miniver; sweet creatures, so easily entertained, so biddably diverted from senseless controversy into comfortable monologue: there was nothing in the world so restful as a really good English colonel."

Mostly she writes about her three children and Clem, her husband, who is scarcely more than a head poked out the bathroom door to answer questions opportunely ; yet a pervasive presence in Mrs. Mini ver's life, like the sun. "Clem caught her eye across the table. It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch."

Mrs. Miniver takes even the war in her light, brisk stride. She begins to write about "back to normal." "Back to normal. No, thought Mrs. Miniver, standing by the window and looking out into the square, they weren't quite back to normal, and never would be; none of them. . . ."

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