by Lisa Hilton
It is true to say of the three most politically extreme of the Mitford sisters, Diana, Unity and Jessica, that their passionate beliefs were symbiotically entwined with equally passionate loves. Diana and Oswald Mosley, Unity and Adolf Hitler, Jessica and Esmond Romilly – the cause could not be separated from the man who espoused it’. Nancy’s own political views were less terrifyingly ideological, yet her ‘cause’, her belief in a particular value system, also came to be conflated with the very person of the man with whom she would fall in love. Considerations of Gaston Palewski’s political career neglect to take into account that he possessed a similar trait. Like the Mitford girls, he had need of idols, and in Lyautey he found his first. It was his admiration for Lyautey and his need to excel to please him that transformed the unwilling soldier and dilettante boulevardier into one of the most brilliant and committed French politicians of his generation.
The situation between the Moroccan population and their French ‘protectors’ was one of suspicion and unrest. When Gaston took up his post, the tribes of the Rif mountains, in a confederation led by Abdelkrim El Khattabi, had been fighting the French and Spanish armies for three years. El Khattabi was loyal to the Moroccan sultan, Moulay Youssef, who feared disturbing the concord he had achieved with the French occupiers, yet continued to rally the tribes with a view to a future revolution. France, which controlled the majority of the country, was lending aid to the Spanish who, after a disastrous defeat at Anoual, were confined to a few coastal outposts. Lyautey’s policy was one of ‘capitalist colonization’ aimed at equipping the country for eventual independence, an approach that set him at odds with many members of the French government, who favoured exploitative assimilation as practised in Algeria. Lyautey’s vice-regal lifestyle did little to endear him to a strongly republican Cabinet, and in 1925 Maréchal Pétain was sent to Rabat on what purported to be a visit of inspection. Lyautey dispatched Gaston to Paris to discuss with the secretary general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the impossibility of governing alongside Pétain, but in September that year the command was handed to Pétain and Theodore Steeg was named as resident general, a solution that pleased everybody except the Moroccans.
Gaston’s position with Lyautey thus lasted just eight months, but he found it both inspiring and influential. Lyautey lived by a maxim whose spirit Gaston adopted as his own: ‘The soul’s joy lies in doing.’2 The marshal was a member of the Académie Française, deeply read, always immaculately presented. The conversation in the dining room of the residence at Rabat, with its fountains and terrace of orange trees, was ‘the gayest and most brilliant I have been lucky enough to hear’. Though Lyautey was a monarchist, many of his ideas chimed with what became known as Gaullism – respect for social hierarchy with an emphasis on religion as a cohesive force, belief in order, a dislike of revolutionary thinking, a paternalistic approach to social welfare. To Gaston, posing as an aesthete suddenly seemed rather embarrassing. Lyautey taught him that it was possible to be intensely devoted to a duty while retaining all the refinements of a cultivated existence. Dominique Palewski remembered Gaston’s ‘classical elegance’, 3 his taste for beauty and the life of the spirit, which melded seamlessly with his integrity and commitment to political service – qualities Gaston himself attributed to the lessons of Lyautey.
On his return to Paris, though, Gaston was unsure what to do next. He had vague dreams of an attaché’s posting to Peking, but they collapsed when he discovered the necessity of sitting a competitive examination. He was determined on success, but was still arrogant enough to demand it on his own terms.
5
THE FASCISTERS
When she met Gaston Palewski in 1942, Nancy had long since decided that her husband, Peter Rodd, was the most boring man in the world. She minded less about his fecklessness, drunkenness, laziness and dishonesty, but she had already acknowledged to herself that their marriage was a failure. In a matter of days she had rebounded straight from the unwilling arms of Hamish St Clair Erskine into an engagement with Peter, and now, twelve years on, she was no longer prepared to keep up her impeccable ‘shop-front’, even to herself.
In his favour, the Hon. Peter Rodd, known, inevitably, as Prod, was genuinely brilliant. He had been a Balliol man, in the days when that meant something, at least until he was sent down for entertaining women in his rooms. He was an extremely gifted linguist and appeared to be an expert on the most recondite subjects. He was also gloriously handsome, a tow-haired Adonis with an enthusiastically heterosexual reputation. Evelyn Waugh described his looks as reminiscent of the ‘sulky arrogance’ of the young Rimbaud, his features combining a classical hauteur and sensuality to give him a look of ‘a chorister on his way to a brothel’.1 And he was, in Diana’s words, ‘wild’, which may have appealed to the reforming, maternal instinct Nancy had so embarrassingly wasted on Hamish. He was also very cosmopolitan, a result of his upbringing as one of the five children of a highly glamorous diplomatic couple, Lord and Lady Rennell. After serving in Egypt, Sweden, Norway, Abyssinia and Germany, Peter’s father, Rennell Rodd, had been appointed ambassador to Rome in 1908, and Peter and his brothers grew up multilingual and rootless in an endless shift of different schools and countries.
After his ignominious departure from Balliol, Peter was sent down the traditional black sheep’s route of a job abroad, in a Brazilian bank. He spent his time there drinking and polishing up his Russian and Portuguese before being arrested as a destitute and extracted by his elder brother Francis, who worked at the Foreign Office. Peter clearly had a promising future as a loser, and this was the first of many times when his family would be obliged to bail him out. Brazil was followed by a short spell in the City (sacked), a post with The Times in Germany (sacked), then a two-year trip with the patient Francis to the Sahara. When he became reacquainted with Nancy, whom he knew slightly from the debutante scene, he was employed by an American bank in Lombard Street, though within the first year of their marriage he had once again lost his job.
Perhaps, having tried most other things, Peter fancied having a go at wedlock. Or, to take a kindlier view, perhaps he was seeking ballast, something to pin down his waywardness and force him to grow up. Either way, he had proposed to numerous women – on one occasion, two in a single night – before Nancy accepted him at a party, and though he wrote to her suggesting squirmingly that the proposal had merely been a joke, Nancy for once refused to see it. Battered by Hamish’s rejection and veering dangerously close to the fearsome age of thirty, she too had found a life raft and she was determined to cling to it. Nancy had certainly become engaged to Peter with painful alacrity, but she was no longer the immature girl who had made eyes at Hamish while her serious suitor proposed. Peter represented pretty much her last chance, and she knew it. In the volume of family letters she edited, The Stanleys of Alderley, Nancy is quite hard on the ‘old, pathetic, ugly’ spinster daughters, Rianette and Louisa. Jessica goes into more detail about the terrible fate of the Maiden Aunt,
a gentle, wispy type who lived alone in a small London flat with one maid. The status of the Maiden Aunt had remained generally unchanged since Victorian days. She subsisted on an allowance carefully designed to provide minimum necessaries, a sum considered sufficient but not excessive for Unmarried Daughters and Younger Sons of peers. Whereas the Younger Sons were free to supplement their income by going into a profession, the armed services, Empire Building or even Trade, such avenues were firmly closed to the Unmarried Daughters, who as time went on sank into the twilight state of aunthood.2
This was quite a realistic possibility to Nancy: a lifetime’s dependence, resented and resentful, on her father and brother. Little had changed for the impoverished gentlewoman since Jane Austen wrote Sense and Sensibility: to Nancy, a lifetime’s dependence on father then brother, resented and resentful, was quite a realistic possibility. Marriage would bring freedom, status and, she thought, a secure social position, and Peter was now her only prospect of acquiring them.
> At first, they both decided to be madly in love. Peter wrote to Hamish, saving Nancy’s dignity with an honourable fiction: ‘It is absurd for me to pretend that I am sorry for taking your Nancy from you, but I know that it is hell for you and I wish it wasn’t, I am so much in love with her that I can understand how you feel.’ To Nancy he gushed: ‘Darling, darling … My darling I am glad this all started as a joke, I love you I love you, my darling … I should like to see your head lying on your pillow. This Peter who loves only you.’
The Rennells were less convinced. When they read of the engagement in the Daily Telegraph (Peter had not troubled to tell them the news), they found it inexplicable. Lady Rennell suggested that ‘as usual, it was all made up’. But Peter had manfully sat through a two-hour luncheon with Lord Redesdale at Rutland Gate and obtained his consent. He even managed to remain sober for the occasion. ‘Well, the happiness, ’ wrote Nancy to Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘Oh goodness gracious I am happy. You must get married darling, everybody should if they want a receipt for absolute bliss.’ Bounding towards the altar on waves of joy, Nancy was even prepared to like her new in-laws, an opinion she was swiftly to revise. When the Rennells came to spend a weekend at Swinbrook, with Nancy in permanent terror lest Lord Redesdale explode, she pronounced them ‘charming’ and Lady Rennell ‘really rather gorgeous’.
A pretty little house was found for the couple, Rose Cottage at Strand-on-the-Green near Kew. Nancy knew that they were going to be ‘damn poor’ but was clearly thrilled at the prospect of escaping her ageing-deb status and finally beginning life as an adult woman. Peter struck a rather ominous note as to his expectations of his bride when he remarked that Lord Redesdale refused to ‘tie himself up about a settlement. I hope he does his stuff about your allowance even if he sours on the marriage’, but Nancy was too happy to pay attention. She ordered her wedding dress, in white chiffon with narrow frills, which was to be a present from her thoughtful ex-brother-in-law Bryan Guinness, and decided on a bouquet of white gardenias and roses. The eleven page boys were to wear white satin, while the mother of the bride opted for brown velvet and a plumed hat. Lord Redesdale gave his eldest daughter away at St John’s, Smith Square, on Monday 4 December 1933 and, after a reception for over two hundred guests at Rutland Gate, Nancy changed into the dark green woollen coat and skirt and the duck-egg jumper (carefully chosen to ‘go with’ though not to ‘match’ her suit) in which she was to begin married life.
Peter’s parents lent their apartment in the Palazzo Giulia in Rome for the honeymoon. Although Nancy loved Italy, she never quite took to the Eternal City. To Mark Ogilvie-Grant, she wrote teasingly: ‘I am having a really dreadful time, dragging a sprained ankle round major and minor basilicas and suffering horrible indigestion from eating goats’ cheese. However, I manage to keep my spirits up somehow. PS And all my shoes hurt.’ And to Unity: ‘Why do people always say they don’t enjoy honeymoons? I am adoring mine.’ The hint of the negative is just a little too strong for the joke to take. In a Sunday Times essay of 1952, Nancy commented that ‘Arnold Bennett once said that “pavement” is the most beautiful word in the English language, a sentiment which must be echoed by anyone who has ever tottered about on Roman cobbles and splashed in and out of Roman puddles, trying to avoid death from the huge buses which squeeze their way between the palaces at ninety miles an hour’. Nancy’s true feelings about her honeymoon came out in Pigeon Pie, her 1939 novel of the ‘Phoney War’. The husband of the heroine, Sophia Garfield, is purportedly modelled on Francis Rodd, while Peter is cast as the dashing, raffish lover Rudolph, but many of the brothers’ traits are conflated. Sophia ponders:
How soon she began to realize he was a pompous prig she could not remember. He was a sight-seeing bore and took her the Roman rounds with dutiful assiduity, and without ever allowing her to sit on a stone and use her eyes. Her jokes annoyed and never amused him; when she said that all the sites in Rome were called after London cinemas, he complained that she was insular, facetious and babyish.
But in many ways, Nancy was. She and Peter did in fact share a sense of humour, and she would make a point of repeating his better lines to her correspondents, including Gaston, throughout his life. He made her laugh a lot, always the most important characteristic for Nancy, and one of his better-known teases, declining an invitation from Von Ribbentrop to the German Embassy in Yiddish, was a perfect example of the alignment of their humour (though Nancy did remove the letter from the post as she feared it would create unpleasant publicity). But even as early as the honeymoon, Nancy sensed that she would never prove capable of really holding Peter. Curling Hamish’s hair had hardly prepared her for a full physical relationship, so one wonders about the sex. The enforced intimacies of a honeymoon (sharing a bed is one thing, sharing a bathroom quite another) lurk behind the slightly awkward cheerfulness of her letters.
Peter was an experienced lover but, like many Englishmen of his generation, and like Sir Conrad in The Blessing, he appeared to prefer to make love with ladies whose profession it was. A nervous twenty-nine-year-old virgin with a tendency to shriek could hardly have been an arousing prospect.
The extent of Nancy’s actual sexual experience is difficult to ascertain. Peter’s sister described her disparagingly as ‘shop-soiled’, though that may have been merely a reference to her long ‘affair’ with Hamish. The world of the Bright Young Things floats in a historical miasma of licentiousness, but one historian of the period notes that it was in fact one of the most ‘tightly regulated’ eras in English history.3 Avid press coverage of outrageous parties disguised the fact that young women like Nancy still lived in a constrained and chaperoned society in which the sexes occupied largely separate spheres. Assuming that Nancy was aware of Hamish’s tendencies (and Driberg’s delights aside, there are enough hints in Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding to suggest that she was), had their protracted engagement been a means of evading a mature sexual relationship? Nancy’s mother could not have been much help on the subject. When a friend explained to her what she might expect on her own wedding night, she recoiled in horror – ‘a gentleman would never do anything like that’4 – and when Nancy went on to experience gynaecological difficulties, she remarked vaguely that she thought women had millions of eggs, ‘like sturgeon’. No one could mistake the physical passion that flourished between Diana and Mosley, and in a later diary entry Nancy observed that love was a ‘punchy physical affair’, but it seems reasonable to infer that when she married, she was unprepared for its reality and that Peter, on subsequent evidence, was a keener tour guide than he was a seducer.
Evelyn Waugh was encouraging. ‘I do think it’s top-hole about you and Rodd, and I foresee a very wild and vigorous life in front of you.’ All the same, he added while he was glad to think Hamish would now disappear from her work, ‘I won’t have you writing books about Rodd because that would be too much to bear.’ In fact it was Evelyn who really immortalized Peter, as Basil Seal in Black Mischief, Put Out More Flags and the late story, poignant in the light of what actually became of him, Basil Seal Rides Again.
Whether she enjoyed or merely endured her honeymoon, Nancy set about married life with gusto and continuing assertions of happiness. She declared that she was learning to be ‘a rather wonderful old housewife’, and though she never learned to cook anything much beyond scrambled eggs, she was successful in turning Rose Cottage into a truly pretty house. Lady Redesdale had always had a talent for charming interiors, what Alexander Mosley called a gift for mise en scène, which was inherited by Nancy and Diana and, on a much grander scale, by Deborah, and her taste for spare lines, delicate colours, beautiful furniture and simple, delicious food characterized her daughters’ homes. As she would later at Rue Monsieur, Nancy hung festooned curtains, framing her views of the garden and the river, and with the help of Mark Ogilvie-Grant picked up cheap, effective pieces such as a sofa and a carved chimneypiece that complemented an Aubusson carpet and her beloved Sheraton writing desk. ‘That little
house was really exquisite, there wasn’t an ugly thing in it, ’ Deborah commented. The Evening Standard even wrote up an evening of bridge-playing as ‘a gay, light-hearted affair’ even if Nancy did have to contrive space for her guests by cramming the tables into the bedroom.
Compared with most of their contemporaries, the Rodds were poor. ‘Not poor like poor people, ’ Nancy admitted, but beyond providing necessities like a servant and, later, a car, their income of £500 per year – made up of parental allowance, Peter’s salary, Nancy’s journalism and the earnings from the shares she had bought with the profits from her two novels – didn’t go far. Peter soon chucked his City job on a vague promise of a better post at £600 per year, but inevitably it never materialized, and Lord Rennell was left wondering whether ‘their house is healthy and they get enough to eat and keep warm … I should like to be reassured that these repeated attacks of flu are not the result of inadequate resources.’ Lord Rennell occasionally slipped a discreet hand-out to Nancy behind his wife’s back, but Lady Rennell was blithely brazen about the fact that she gave much less money to Peter than to her other children. He always seemed to get by somehow, she claimed. How he got by was mostly Nancy.
Wigs on the Green, Nancy’s third novel, which she began in early 1934, caused a cataclysmic row within the Mitford family and has remained her most contentious book. Nancy herself refused to allow her publishers to reissue it after the war, when anything with her name on it was a guaranteed bestseller. ‘We were young and high spirited then and didn’t know about Buchenwald, ’ she wrote to Evelyn. But before considering the political context, the financial circumstances of its production are worth recalling. Quite early in her marriage, Nancy had to confront the fact that Peter simply didn’t care enough for her to rouse himself from his over-entitled indolence. As ever, she put a good face on his incompetence, joking about what a lovely new set of bailiffs they were acquiring and inviting the embarrassed debt-collectors in for tea, but it was a horrible humiliation. Whenever Nancy did have some money Peter would ‘borrow’ or quite simply steal it from her in order to go off on a ‘bat’ in the London nightclubs. He refused to acknowledge her growing anxiety and was quite shameless about living off his wife. Wigs is in many ways an inadequate book, but also, in context, a brave one. There is a whiff of Grub Street about the novel, written swiftly in a cold house with the bills stacking up on the table and the duns at the door. Not quite Richard Savage, yet those who see Nancy as the frivolous child of privilege fail to recognize how urgent it was to her, at the time, to produce something that would permit the Rodd ménage to flounder on a little longer with some degree of self-respect.