He is one of those rare birds who is exactly the same with whoever he is talking to. Children recognise him as a kindred spirit. With his formidable scholarship and prodigious memory he is just as able to spout Edward Lear or ‘There was an old Woman as I’ve heard tell, who went to market her eggs for to sell’ as Marvell or Shakespeare via Noël Coward for grown-ups.
I have got stacks of letters from him. They usually begin ‘In Tearing Haste’ or ‘In Unbelievable Haste’ and the writing jolly well shows it. This one is dated 1956, when I evidently had omitted to ask him to give a hand at my funeral: ‘Your lovely letter was marred by this business about pall bearers. You tell me all about enlisting John and Xan with never a hint of asking me, when I am exactly the right height, own a dark suit and a measured tread and would really look sad.’ Forty-four years on, this is a bit near the knuckle.
He wrote me a hilarious account of a disastrous visit to Somerset ‘not Willy to me, alas’ Maugham at the Villa Mauresque. He was taken there by Ann Fleming. All went well the first day, but soon he got deep in the mire by imitating someone who stammered. As this was an affliction of Maugham’s and one about which he was extremely sensitive, it was too much for his host ‘who offered a limp handshake and said “Well” (I won’t indicate the stutter, too late, alas!) “I’ll say goodnight and goodbye too, as I’ll still be in bed when you leave.”’ Worse was to come. ‘I had a new case with a zip and when I zipped it up the beautiful Irish linen sheet with WSM embroidered on it caught and was torn with a rending noise from top to bottom. There was nothing for it but to do a bunk.’ He was cheered to learn ‘that Cyril [Connolly] had once been made to leave the Villa Mauresque for picking and eating the last avocado on the single tree’.
These sort of letters make me look forward to the post.
Try and get him to sing his translations in Italian of ‘John Peel’ and ‘Widdecombe Fair’ – John Peel’s hounds, Ruby, Ranter, Ringwood and True, turn into Rubin, Vantardo, Rondo Bosco Campinelli and Fidele,
Tom Pierce, Tom Pierce, lend me your grey mare
All along, down along, out along lea
becomes
Tommaso Pierce, Tommaso Pierce, prestami tua grigia giumenta
Tutti lungo, fuori lungo, giù lungo prato
and Cobley’s gang are
…Gugliemo Brewer, Giacopo Stewer, Pietro Gurney,
Pietro Davey, Daniele Whiddon and Enrico ’awke
Ed il vecchio zio Tommaso Cobley e tutti quanti, etc.
– and ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ in Hindustani. Or the longest palindrome ‘Live dirt up a side track carted is a putrid evil’ delivered, for some unknown reason, in the broadest Gloucestershire accent. Just the entertainment for a winter’s night.
Andrew regards him as a latter-day Byron and thinks it fitting that Byron and Paddy share the same publisher. Handsome, funny, energetic and original, he is a brilliant, shining star – how lucky my family and I are to have had such a friend for so long. Happy birthday, Paddy!
Being Painted By Annigoni and Lucian Freud
We had seen some portraits which Annigoni had done and Andrew decided to commission him to paint me. I had to go to his studio in London every day for a month. We couldn’t talk to each other since he spoke little English, and I no Italian. The telephone often rang and I would answer it for him; it was usually a girlfriend.
There was no discussion about how I would pose; he was the Master and he would decide. He almost always painted an imaginary landscape in the background with a fisherman, which was a sort of signature. I got the distinct impression that painting me was just a chore for him; he was not enjoying it much.
Lucian Freud’s picture of me, painted four or five years later, was a different matter. Lucian is an old friend and a charming, generous man (at least to his friends). I think I was the third member of our family that he painted. I went to his studio for three hours every morning when I was in London, over several months. I can still remember the strong smell of paint in his studio. He works very slowly, often starting from one eye. Sometimes, when I arrived, he would say, ‘I had a wonderful night. I removed everything I did yesterday.’ (He often works at night.) People say I look sad or bored in the painting. I defy anyone not to look a bit wooden after sitting for so long.
There were interruptions, with bailiffs calling. Lucian is a huge gambler, and his fortunes seemed to change all the time. Sometimes, because he had pawned his car, I lent him mine, and once when I arrived for a sitting he held out my car keys and said, ‘This is all that’s left’ – the car had been stolen.
I’m not sure that I can judge the success of pictures of myself. I think my head is a little too big in the Annigoni, and perhaps his is more of a pretty picture; whereas Lucian captures the essence of people. He doesn’t like anyone to see a painting before it is finished. Eventually we were allowed to look. When Andrew arrived at the studio, someone else was already there. Andrew looked long at the picture until the other man asked, ‘Who is that?’ ‘It’s my wife.’ ‘Well, thank God it’s not mine.’
Road From the Isles
In the 1930s my parents bought a small island off the coast of Mull. Called Inchkenneth, it lies about a mile out to sea from the tiny village of Gribun: to the west there is no land till you reach America. It is a romantic and beautiful place and in fine weather has a serenity only found in such places which are difficult of access and empty of human beings.
The weather was all important; there was much tapping of the glass and listening to every BBC forecast, as the narrow channel between the island and Mull became very rough with little warning, and we were often cut off for days at a time. For this reason the island had to be self-supporting in the necessities of life, and could produce some luxuries as well. There was a walled kitchen garden which had been there when Dr Johnson stayed on the island in his tour of the Hebrides in the eighteenth century. Oats, hay and potatoes were grown on the small enclosed field and we had lobster pots and trawled for mackerel, and at spring tides there were even oysters and mussels for the picking. We kept chickens and ducks, so there was no shortage of eggs. Sheep and bullocks completed the farm stock and grazed the unenclosed hill.
There were three house cows. To have a continual supply of milk was the aim, of course, but the problem of calving at a certain date, never easy, was made acute by the fact that each cow had to swim to Gribun to visit the bull. Cows can swim well when they have to. There was a large sloping rock which the cow was led across, and the tide had to be just right so that with a mighty heave she was pushed into the water without too much fuss. The boat at once set off, towing the cow by a rope around her horns. All too often it started to blow a gale when this vital journey was to take place – and so another three weeks would go by until we could try again.
The result of such curiously vague mating arrangements was that one summer, when the house was full of visitors and children, all the cows were dry and there was nothing but tinned milk, which no one liked. So my mother decided to buy a goat. She found a British Saanen of uncertain ancestry and gave it to me. She was called Narny and a more charming animal you could not imagine: everyone liked her from the beginning. She was free to go where she liked, and she used to jump on to the retaining wall of a steep bank by the kitchen door to be milked – fresher milk there never was.
My mother soon added more goats to the farm stock and had some beautiful British Saanens, large and quiet, and wonderful milk producers. It was an ideal place for them as they had the run of the island, a mile long, and were able to graze on ledges and places where even the sheep did not dare go. They had bells round their necks, and the whole effect was beautiful when they were grazing on the stretches of grass and salty herbs which ran down to the sea.
I was on Inchkenneth when war was declared in September 1939 and had to go back to Oxfordshire. Naturally I could not leave my goat behind so, together with a whippet and a Labrador, we set out on a journey which, at that time, took twenty-four h
ours.
We left the island at 6.30 a.m. in the dark. At low tide there was a long walk over seaweed-covered rocks, and it was impossible to reach the boat without stepping into a pool or slipping over. Wet, and often grazed as well, there was another hazardous walk over the rocks on the coast of Mull to the tin hut where the car was kept. Sometimes that car was agonisingly stubborn about starting. There was no other means of transport, and it was eleven miles across Mull to Salen where the mail boat called only once a day to go to Oban, so one could be stuck for twenty-four hours if the car did not cooperate. The goat travelled in the rickety old luggage trailer covered by a tarpaulin against the driving rain.
The mail boat was well equipped for such passengers as my animals. At that time it was the only transport for all farm stock as well as humans; one could safely give anything from a bull to a book of stamps to the staff, and either would be miraculously delivered to the right person at the other end.
The boat took three hours to get to Oban, with two stops on the way, through some of the most beautiful scenery in Scotland. There was a long day to pass in Oban, as the London train did not leave till the evening. After a few weeks on the island it was always exciting to see shops again, and the goat and the dogs dutifully followed round. A greengrocer and a butcher provided their meals for the day.
It was dark again when the time came to go to the station at the other end of the harbour. Goat in the guard’s van, dogs in the carriage, we settled down to one of those endless war-time journeys with a dim light and crowded train.
In the middle of the night we arrived at Stirling, where we had to change and wait for an hour for the London train. I milked the goat in the First Class Waiting Room, which I should not have done as I only had a third class ticket. Luckily, no one noticed. The dogs were delighted with their unexpected midnight drink of new milk, and, relieved and refreshed, we boarded the London train.
There was a long queue for taxis at Euston, and I was rather apprehensive that when my turn came the driver might not be too willing to take on such a curious assortment of passengers; but luckily he turned out to be one of those cheerful Cockneys who are not put out by anything, and the four of us arrived at my sister Nancy’s house in perfect order – just 9d extra on the clock. She lived in Blomfield Road and had quite a big garden, so Narny feasted on Nancy’s roses. Enough pruning was done in two hours to last for a long time – as all goat and garden owners will understand.
Paddington Station was within walking distance, but the hurrying London crowds did not notice the dishevelled party of girl, goat and dogs.
Narny lived for a long time, produced twins every year and an enormous amount of milk, but I shall always remember her for her perfect behaviour on the journey from the Hebrides to her new home at Kingham in Oxfordshire.
Childhood
My childhood seems to belong to another world. Some thought our upbringing strange, even then, but we didn’t – children just accept what they find.
I was born in 1920, in my parents’ house in London, the youngest of a family of seven, six girls and one boy. My eldest sister, Nancy Mitford, was sixteen when I was born – then came Pam, Diana, Tom, Unity and Jessica.
My mother’s dearest wish was to have a big family of boys and every time another girl was born there was bitter disappointment.
Nancy used to tell me with glee of the gloom that descended on the house when they heard of my birth.
Until I was six we lived in an Elizabethan manor house called Asthall in the beautiful Cotswold valley of the Windrush and a few years ago, when the house was for sale, the agent took my husband and me to see round it. I had only been in it once since we left to live at Swinbrook, seventy-two years before. It was a strange feeling to see the empty rooms and to remember how many people had lived there from 1919 to 1926 – seven of us children, Nanny, a nursery maid, a governess for the older ones, Mabel and her helper in the pantry, Annie the head housemaid and two young girls under her, cook and a kitchen maid, an odd man, Mr Dyer – and my father and mother. In this company our lives were secure and regular as clockwork. We had parents who were always there, and an adored Nanny who came when Diana was three months old and stayed for forty years.
‘The barn’, converted by my father and separate from the main house, was a haven for Nancy, Pam, Tom and Diana. They had the run of my grandfather’s excellent library – Nancy and Diana always said it gave them their interest in literature. Music was my brother’s passion and his piano was in this big room.
Our nursery looked out over the churchyard and we younger ones were forbidden to watch funerals, which of course made them more fascinating, and we always did. Jessica and I once fell into a newly dug grave, to the delight of Nancy who pronounced that we should have bad luck for the rest of our lives.
Our animals were as important to us as were the humans in the house – mice, guinea pigs, a piebald rat belonging to Unity, poultry and goats. The big animals of farm and stables, the garden which seemed so huge to a small child, the village beyond the churchyard, the Post Office where acid drops were 1½d a quarter in a twist of paper weighed on the same brass weighing scale as the letters – that was our world. We knew no other.
In the summer we bathed in the river and in winter we skated on the flooded frozen fields between Widford and Burford.
Nancy wrote a lot about our childhood, of course, in The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate which, to her amazement, became best-sellers, and people still ask me, ‘Was your father really like Uncle Matthew in the books?’
He was, in lots of ways. He could get terrifyingly angry and we were certainly in awe of him, but at the same time he was wonderfully funny and the source of all the jokes in the family. He and Nancy together were better than anything I’ve ever seen on the stage.
The fact that one couldn’t always judge his mood made things exciting and we all played the game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground to see how far we dared go before he turned and bellowed at us.
He hunted my older sisters with his bloodhounds, which surprised the neighbours. He was punctual to the second. If he expected someone at one o’clock, he would start looking at his watch at six minutes to and with a furious face say, ‘In seven minutes the damn feller will be late.’
In London he did all his shopping at the Army & Navy Stores and used to be there well before the doors opened at nine. When my mother asked why he had to arrive so early, he said if he left it any later, he was impeded by ‘inconveniently shaped’ women.
My father was no good at business and always seemed to be on the losing side of whatever he went into. He was one of the first in the Great Gold Rush in Canada in the 1920s but the acres he staked out were the only ones for miles where there was no gold.
Because of this land and other similar ventures, plus the depression of the Thirties, we lived in smaller and smaller houses and I was thankful when I grew up that there was no longer room for parties of young people to come and stay, as I observed from the safety of the nursery how terrifying it could be for the unsuspecting young men-friends of my sisters.
My father did not exactly make them feel at home. If there was a pause in the conversation at meals, he used to shout down the table to my mother, ‘Have these people no homes of their own?’
One friend was banished into the snow because he bent down to pick something up for my father and a comb fell out of his pocket. A man, carrying a comb…He was the nineteen-year-old James Lees-Milne, the distinguished writer who remained friends with us all to the end of his life, in spite of this strange treatment.
My parents hated social life and we seldom saw anyone but the family, local uncles, aunts and cousins, and each other. I never remember them going out to meals and hardly ever having anyone to our house until my sisters grew up. I suppose my mother was taken up with everyday life and so many children, but my father used to go to London to attend the House of Lords where he was Chairman of the Drains Committee. He came back with rich tales of his f
ellow peers, who were even odder than they are now. At home, he saw to the farms and woods and the multifarious jobs to do with an estate.
Being the youngest, and sometimes the favourite of my father, I soon learnt that tears nearly always succeeded in getting me what I wanted and getting the others into trouble for teasing me.
In other ways though, being the youngest wasn’t so good. I never had any new clothes, always the wretched cut-down things of the sisters. Pocket money was less, just because of being younger. My sister Unity, called Bobo, had far more than even her age warranted, because my mother said she liked money more than the rest of us. This led to a shouted chorus which was used about everything. IT IS UNFAIR, Bobo’s got a rat and lots of money and I haven’t got anything.
IT IS UNFAIR was the great cry. But as everything in life is unfair, perhaps the sooner it is realised the better.
My mother had unusual views on health. We were brought up on the Jewish laws about the subject – no doubt very wise in the climate of Israel before refrigerators, but hardly necessary in Oxfordshire. We could only have meat which ‘divided the hoof and chewed the cud’ and fish which had ‘tails and fins’, therefore no pig meat and no shellfish was allowed.
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