The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  The child hunt on the first day of this Christmas visit was a great success. Louisa and I were chosen as hares. We ran across country, the beautiful bleak Cotswold uplands, starting soon after breakfast when the sun was still a red globe, hardly over the horizon, and the trees were etched in dark blue against a pale blue, mauve, and pinkish sky. The sun rose as we stumbled on, longing for our second wind; it shone, and there dawned a beautiful day, more like late autumn in its feeling than Christmas-time.

  We managed to check the bloodhounds once by running through a flock of sheep, but Uncle Matthew soon got them on the scent again, and, after about two hours of hard running on our part, when we were only half a mile from home, the baying slavering creatures caught up with us, to be rewarded with lumps of meat and many caresses. Uncle Matthew was in a radiantly good temper, he got off his horse and walked home with us, chatting agreeably. What was most unusual, he was even quite affable to me.

  ‘I hear Brenda has died,’ he said. ‘No great loss I should say. That mouse stank like merry hell. I expect you kept her cage too near the radiator, I always told you it was unhealthy, or did she die of old age?’

  Uncle Matthew’s charm, when he chose to turn it on, was considerable, but at that time I was always mortally afraid of him, and made the mistake of letting him see that I was.

  ‘You ought to have a dormouse, Fanny, or a rat. They are much more interesting than white mice – though I must frankly say, of all the mice I ever knew, Brenda was the most utterly dismal.’

  ‘She was dull,’ I said, sycophantically.

  ‘When I go to London after Christmas, I’ll get you a dormouse. Saw one the other day at the Army and Navy.’

  ‘Oh, Fa, it is unfair,’ said Linda, who was walking her pony along beside us. ‘You know how I’ve always longed for a dormouse.’

  ‘It is unfair’ was a perpetual cry of the Radletts when young. The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness. With them I must say it nearly always operated in favour of Linda, who was the adored of Uncle Matthew.

  Today, however, my uncle was angry with her, and I saw in a flash that this affability to me, this genial chat about mice, was simply designed as a tease for her.

  ‘You’ve got enough animals, miss,’ he said, sharply. ‘You can’t control the ones you have got. And don’t forget what I told you – that dog of yours goes straight to the kennel when we get back, and stays there.’

  Linda’s face crumpled, tears poured, she kicked her pony into a canter and made for home. It seemed that her dog Labby had been sick in Uncle Matthew’s business-room after breakfast. Uncle Matthew was unable to bear dirtiness in dogs, he flew into a rage, and, in his rage, had made a rule that never again was Labby to set foot in the house. This was always happening, for one reason or another, to one animal or another, and, Uncle Matthew’s bark being invariably much worse than his bite, the ban seldom lasted more than a day or two, after which would begin what he called the Thin End of the Wedge.

  ‘Can I bring him in just while I fetch my gloves?’

  ‘I’m so tired – I can’t go to the stables – do let him stay just till after tea.’

  ‘Oh, I see – the thin end of the wedge. All right, this time he can stay, but if he makes another mess – or I catch him on your bed – or he chews up the good furniture (according to whichever crime it was that had resulted in banishment), I’ll have him destroyed, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  All the same, every time sentence of banishment was pronounced, the owner of the condemned would envisage her beloved moping his life away in the solitary confinements of a cold and gloomy kennel.

  ‘Even if I take him out for three hours every day, and go and chat to him for another hour, that leaves twenty hours for him all alone with nothing to do. Oh, why can’t dogs read?’

  The Radlett children, it will be observed, took a highly anthropomorphic view of their pets.

  Today, however, Uncle Matthew was in a wonderfully good temper, and, as we left the stables, he said to Linda, who was sitting crying with Labby in his kennel:

  ‘Are you going to leave that poor brute of yours in there all day?’

  Her tears forgotten as if they had never been, Linda rushed into the house with Labby at her heels. The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives. Their life with Uncle Matthew was a sort of perpetual Tom Tiddler’s ground. They went as far as they dared, sometimes very far indeed, while sometimes, for no apparent reason, he would pounce almost before they had crossed the boundary. Had they been poor children they would probably have been removed from their roaring, raging, whacking papa and sent to an approved home, or, indeed, he himself would have been removed from them and sent to prison for refusing to educate them. Nature, however, provides her own remedies, and no doubt the Radletts had enough of Uncle Matthew in them to enable them to weather storms in which ordinary children like me would have lost their nerve completely.

  2

  It was an accepted fact at Alconleigh that Uncle Matthew loathed me. This violent, uncontrolled man, like his children, knew no middle course, he either loved or he hated, and generally, it must be said, he hated. His reason for hating me was that he hated my father; they were old Eton enemies. When it became obvious, and obvious it was from the hour of my conception, that my parents intended to doorstep me, Aunt Sadie had wanted to bring me up with Linda. We were the same age, and it had seemed a sensible plan. Uncle Matthew had categorically refused. He hated my father, he said, he hated me, but, above all, he hated children, it was bad enough to have two of his own. (He evidently had not envisaged so soon having seven, and indeed both he and Aunt Sadie lived in a perpetual state of surprise at having filled so many cradles, about the future of whose occupants they seemed to have no particular policy.) So dear Aunt Emily, whose heart had once been broken by some wicked dallying monster, and who intended on this account never to marry, took me on and made a life’s work of me, and I am very thankful that she did. For she believed passionately in the education of women, she took immense pains to have me properly taught, even going to live at Shenley on purpose to be near a good day school. The Radlett daughters did practically no lessons. They were taught by Lucille, the French governess, to read and write, they were obliged, though utterly unmusical, to ‘practise’ in the freezing ballroom for one hour a day each, their eyes glued to the clock, they would thump out the ‘Merry Peasant’ and a few scales, they were made to go for a French walk with Lucille on all except hunting days, and that was the extent of their education. Uncle Matthew loathed clever females, but he considered that gentlewomen ought, as well as being able to ride, to know French and play the piano. Although as a child I rather naturally envied them their freedom from thrall and bondage, from sums and science, I felt, nevertheless, a priggish satisfaction that I was not growing up unlettered, as they were.

  Aunt Emily did not often come with me to Alconleigh. Perhaps she had an idea that it was more fun for me to be there on my own, and no doubt it was a change for her to get away and spend Christmas with the friends of her youth, and leave for a bit the responsibilities of her old age. Aunt Emily at this time was forty, and we children had long ago renounced on her behalf the world, the flesh, and the devil. This year, however, she had gone away from Shenley before the holidays began, saying that she would see me at Alconleigh in January.

  On the afternoon of the child hunt Linda called a meeting of the Hons. The Hons was the Radlett secret society, anybody who was not a friend to the Hons was a Counter-Hon, and their battle-cry was ‘Death to the horrible Counter-Hons.’ I was a Hon, since my father, like theirs, was a lord.

  There were also, however, many honorary Hons; it was not necessary to have been born a Hon in order to be one.
As Linda once remarked: ‘Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood.’ I’m not sure how much we really believed this, we were wicked snobs in those days, but we subscribed to the general idea. Head of the hon. Hons was Josh, the groom, who was greatly beloved by us all and worth buckets of Norman blood; chief of the horrible Counter-Hons was Craven, the gamekeeper, against whom a perpetual war to the knife was waged. The Hons would creep into the woods, and hide Craven’s steel traps, let out the chaffinches which, in wire cages without food or water, he used as bait for hawks, give decent burial to the victims of his gamekeeper’s larder, and, before a meet of the hounds, unblock the earths which Craven had so carefully stopped.

  The poor Hons were tormented by the cruelties of the countryside, while, to me, holidays at Alconleigh were a perfect revelation of beastliness. Aunt Emily’s little house was in a village; it was a Queen Anne box; red brick, white panelling, a magnolia tree and a delicious fresh smell. Between it and the country were a neat little garden, an ironwork fence, a village green and a village. The country one then came to was very different from Gloucestershire, it was emasculated, sheltered, over-cultivated, almost a suburban garden. At Alconleigh the cruel woods crept right up to the house; it was not unusual to be awoken by the screams of a rabbit running in horrified circles round a stoat, by the strange and awful cry of the dog-fox, or to see from one’s bedroom window a live hen being carried away in the mouth of a vixen; while the roosting pheasant and the waking owl filled every night with wild primeval noise. In the winter, when snow covered the ground, we could trace the footprints of many creatures. These often ended in a pool of blood, a mass of fur or feathers, bearing witness to successful hunting by the carnivores.

  On the other side of the house, within a stone’s throw, was the Home Farm. Here the slaughtering of poultry and pigs, the castration of lambs and the branding of cattle took place as a matter of course, out in the open for whoever might be passing by to see. Even dear old Josh made nothing of firing, with red-hot irons, a favourite horse after the hunting season.

  ‘You can only do two legs at a time,’ he would say, hissing through his teeth as though one were a horse and he grooming one, ‘otherwise they can’t stand the pain.’

  Linda and I were bad at standing pain ourselves, and found it intolerable that animals should have to lead such tormented lives and tortured deaths. (I still do mind, very much indeed, but in those days at Alconleigh it was an absolute obsession with us all.)

  The humanitarian activities of the Hons were forbidden, on pain of punishment, by Uncle Matthew, who was always and entirely on the side of Craven, his favourite servant. Pheasants and partridges must be preserved, vermin must be put down rigorously, all except the fox, for whom a more exciting death was in store. Many and many a whacking did the poor Hons suffer, week after week their pocket-money was stopped, they were sent to bed early, given extra practising to do; nevertheless they bravely persisted with their discouraged and discouraging activities. Huge cases full of new steel traps would arrive periodically from the Army and Navy Stores, and lie stacked until required round Craven’s hut in the middle of the wood (an old railway carriage was his head-quarters, situated, most inappropriately, among the primroses and blackberry bushes of a charming little glade); hundreds of traps, making one feel the futility of burying, at great risk to life and property, a paltry three or four. Sometimes we would find a screaming animal held in one; it would take all our reserves of courage to go up to it and let it out, to see it run away with three legs and a dangling mangled horror. We knew that it then probably died of blood-poisoning in its lair; Uncle Matthew would rub in this fact, sparing no agonizing detail of the long drawn-out ordeal, but, though we knew it would be kinder, we could never bring ourselves to kill them; it was asking too much. Often, as it was, we had to go away and be sick after these episodes.

  The Hons’ meeting-place was a disused linen cupboard at the top of the house, small, dark, and intensely hot. As in so many country houses the central-heating apparatus at Alconleigh had been installed in the early days of the invention, at enormous expense, and was now thoroughly out of date. In spite of a boiler which would not have been too large for an Atlantic liner, in spite of the tons of coke which it consumed daily, the temperature of the living-rooms was hardly affected, and all the heat there was seemed to concentrate in the Hons’ cupboard, which was always stifling. Here we would sit, huddled up on the slatted shelves, and talk for hours about life and death.

  Last holidays our great obsession had been childbirth, on which entrancing subject we were informed remarkably late, having supposed for a long time that a mother’s stomach swelled up for nine months and then burst open like a ripe pumpkin, shooting out the infant. When the real truth dawned upon us it seemed rather an anticlimax, until Linda produced, from some novel, and read out loud in ghoulish tones, the description of a woman in labour.

  ‘Her breath comes in great gulps – sweat pours down her brow like water – screams as of a tortured animal rend the air – and can this face, twisted with agony, be that of my darling Rhona – can this torture-chamber really be our bedroom, this rack our marriage-bed? “Doctor, doctor,” I cried, “do something” – I rushed out into the night’ – and so on.

  We were rather disturbed by this, realizing that too probably we in our turn would have to endure these fearful agonies. Aunt Sadie, who had only just finished having her seven children, when appealed to, was not very reassuring.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, vaguely. ‘It is the worst pain in the world. But the funny thing is, you always forget in between what it’s like. Each time, when it began, I felt like saying, “Oh, now I can remember, stop it, stop it.” And, of course, by then it was nine months too late to stop it.’

  At this point Linda began to cry, saying how dreadful it must be for cows, which brought the conversation to an end.

  It was difficult to talk to Aunt Sadie about sex; something always seemed to prevent one; babies were the nearest we ever got to it. She and Aunt Emily, feeling at one moment that we ought to know more, and being, I suspect, too embarrassed to enlighten us themselves, gave us a modern textbook on the subject.

  We got hold of some curious ideas.

  ‘Jassy,’ said Linda one day, scornfully, ‘is obsessed, poor thing, with sex.’

  ‘Obsessed with sex!’ said Jassy, ‘there’s nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I’m a pygmalionist.’

  In the end we got far more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck Breeding.

  ‘Ducks can only copulate,’ said Linda, after studying this for a while, ‘in running water. Good luck to them.’

  This Christmas Eve we all packed into the Hons’ meeting-place to hear what Linda had to say – Louisa, Jassy, Bob, Matt, and I.

  ‘Talk about back-to-the-womb,’ said Jassy.

  ‘Poor Aunt Sadie,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t think she’d want you all back in hers.’

  ‘You never know. Now rabbits eat their children – somebody ought to explain to them how it’s only a complex.’

  ‘How can one explain to rabbits? That’s what is so worrying about animals, they simply don’t understand when they’re spoken to, poor angels. I’ll tell you what about Sadie though, she’d like to be back in one herself, she’s got a thing for boxes and that always shows. Who else – Fanny, what about you?’

  ‘I don’t think I would, but then I imagine the one I was in wasn’t very comfortable at the time you know, and nobody else has ever been allowed to stay there.’

  ‘Abortions?’ said Linda with interest.

  ‘Well, tremendous jumpings and hot baths anyway.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I once heard Aunt Emily and Aunt Sadie talking about it when I was very little, and afterwards I remembered. Aunt Sadie said: “How does she manage it?” and Aunt Emily said: “Skiing, or hunting, or just jumping
off the kitchen table.”’

  ‘You are so lucky, having wicked parents.’

  This was the perpetual refrain of the Radletts, and, indeed, my wicked parents constituted my chief interest in their eyes – I was really a very dull little girl in other respects.

  ‘The news I have for the Hons today,’ said Linda, clearing her throat like a grown-up person, ‘while of considerable Hon interest generally, particularly concerns Fanny. I won’t ask you to guess, because it’s nearly tea-time and you never could, so I’ll tell you straight out. Aunt Emily is engaged.’

  There was a gasp from the Hons in chorus.

  ‘Linda,’ I said, furiously, ‘you’ve made it up.’ But I knew she couldn’t have.

  Linda brought a piece of paper out of her pocket. It was a half-sheet of writing-paper, evidently the end of a letter, covered with Aunt Emily’s large babyish handwriting, and I looked over Linda’s shoulder as she read it out:

  ‘… not tell the children we’re engaged, what d’you think darling, just at first? But then suppose Fanny takes a dislike to him, though I don’t see how she could, but children are so funny, won’t it be more of a shock? Oh, dear, I can’t decide. Anyway, do what you think best, darling, we’ll arrive on Thursday, and I’ll telephone on Wednesday evening and see what’s happened. All love from Emily.’

  Sensation in the Hons’ cupboard.

  3

  ‘But why?’ I said, for the hundredth time.