by Lisa Hilton
Gaston grew more and more frustrated with the complexities of his role in Ethiopia. Early in 1942, he had met Haile Selassie, restored to his imperial title by the British after the brief Italian occupation. Selassie was alert to the potential of co-operation with the Free French and their powerful allies against the continuing threat of Italian expansionism, but though he promised to do all he could to facilitate Gaston’s mission, Gaston himself was sceptical of the British position. He voiced his concerns to De Gaulle, claiming it was obvious that the British, obliged to evacuate Ethiopia, were as anxious as possible to remove any foreign influence, particularly that of the Free French in Djibouti with its vital railway. In response, De Gaulle blamed the State Department in Washington for its ‘protectionist’ strategy towards Vichy, which was preventing the Free French from bringing the province of the Somali coast into the war and handicapping Vichy through the Djibouti blockade.
Gaston did manage to extract the confirmation of the concession of the Djibouti railway in favour of the Free French (it had belonged to France before the war), but he also learned that a simultaneous treaty between the British and the Ethiopians would risk consigning the concession to the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT), that great Gaullist bugbear. Selassie responded to Gaston’s protests by claiming that he perfectly understood the difficulties of the Free French and asked only that they understood his. Worse still, Gaston heard that the British and Vichy had come to a secret accord whereby the territory of Djibouti would not be attacked in return for Vichy leaving the ships in the port alone, and making no attempt upon Aden. Gaston attempted to block this agreement, but the attentions of the British, and indeed De Gaulle, were frankly elsewhere.
Djibouti would not be definitively claimed for the French until January 1943, when Général Paul Legentilhomme was installed as high commissioner for the Indian Ocean after an offensive involving 1,800 troops the preceding November. By then, Gaston had been back in London for several months, having achieved little more than a medal for his efforts. Despite his extremely limited success as a diplomat, he had ventured to ask De Gaulle for an embassy, but the general, looking rather hurt, asked plaintively: ‘Do you not wish to work with me?’ and offered him the post of director of his Cabinet. From then on, they worked together in ‘perfect understanding’.
Nancy Mitford’s involvement with the Free French began in August 1940, when she took a job in a canteen at White City established for French soldiers who had been interned after Dunkirk. She stayed in North London with Julian Huxley, a biologist, and his Swiss wife Juliette. Writing to Gaston in 1963, she remembered how much she hated Mrs Huxley for her cruelty to the French troops in their time of despair. Nancy decided that she adored them. ‘I never knew what hard work was before, I only hope I can stand up to it, ’ she told Mrs Hammersley. ‘… but am perfectly happy and simply love the frogs more and more.’ She returned to Blomfield Road that September, as the Blitz was beginning. ‘The nights!’ she exclaimed. ‘Nobody who hasn’t been in it can have the smallest idea of the horror one is going through. I never don’t feel sick, can’t eat anything and though dropping with tiredness can’t sleep either … last night I shall never forget as long as I live.’ Maida Vale was particularly badly affected, as the Luftwaffe aimed for Paddington station, and Nancy’s descriptions are a moment-by-moment account of what it was like to endure the bombing.
Peter had appeared with the two small children of one of the men in his unit who had been bombed out. Their mother was dying of a miscarriage and the soldier had no leave. Nancy put them to bed in the kitchen where she was sleeping with her maid, Gladys, and at two o’clock that morning the house next door was hit. Nancy took the children through the blackout in a taxi to Hampstead – ‘it was like leaving Sodom and Gomorrah, great fires the whole way and fearful explosions’ – where her old governess Zella found them a bed. The Home Guard fired on her returning cab and she awoke to find five more Blomfield Road homes destroyed. The children, Gladys, Nancy’s bulldog, fur coat and linen were sent to the country later that morning in another cab. ‘I think every living thing that can be got out of this hell should be … the screaming bombs simply make your flesh creep … the great fires everywhere, the awful din which never stops and the wave after wave of aeroplanes, ambulances tearing up the street and the horrible unnatural blaze of light from the searchlights all has to be experienced to be understood.’ (According to Nancy, Gladys nonetheless loved air-raids – in a BBC interview she recalled her maid popping her head round the bedroom door towards the end of the war and remarking, ‘Isn’t it a treat to hear them again?’) At White City, some of her earlier enthusiasm for the divine frogs had turned to exasperation at their spoiled behaviour. She had gone to considerable trouble to procure a cardinal to offer a little spiritual succour, but they would persist in grumbling that the bombs kept them awake and that they hadn’t been taken to the theatre even once: ‘Ça je trouve un peu exagéré quand même.’
Maida Vale was impossible, so the Rodds moved back to Rutland Gate, which was being used to house Jewish refugees from Poland evacuated from the East End. (‘Isn’t it killing?’ wrote Deborah to Diana.) Nancy was impressed by their quiet bravery and did what she could to cheer them, buying them Christmas presents (she looked up the Feast of Queen Esther first so as not to give offence) and organizing a dance. Lady Redesdale was foul about the Jews, claiming she would never again want to live at Rutland Gate and criticizing Nancy, doing her best in a huge house full of people with only one maid, for the dirt and mess. One girl of sixteen was pregnant. Nancy suggested a strenuous walk and a hot bath, but was anxious it might not take. ‘Shall I be obliged to wield a knitting needle and go down to fame as Mrs Rodd the abortionist?’ She was quick to see the comic potential in the other unlikely wartime hats she wore. She volunteered to give a course of lectures on fire-watching, but the organizer had to explain after the first that the audience found her voice too irritating. The peculiar high-pitched drawl which characterized the speech of Nancy and her peers was apparently developed to carry over the sound of Bright Young gramophones; Nancy’s listeners failed to appreciate its gaiety and wanted to put her on the fire. In 1941, she was hired to arrange holidays for ARP workers, a great success – They come back saying how the wife and I couldn’t have been better treated if we were King and Queen. They are such heaven – but, she added to Jessica, ‘The other people in the office think I’m a sort of joke and when there’s a quiet moment do imitations of me on the telephone.’
Much more exciting was the request Nancy received in March 1941 from ‘a friend of mine at the War Office’ to infiltrate the Free French officers’ club. She, too, was to have her chance of being a glamorous lady spy. The idea, Nancy explained to Mrs Hammersley, was to ‘try to find out something about them. They are all here under assumed names, all splashing mysteriously large sums of money about and our people can’t find out a thing about them and are getting very worried.’ Having so little experience of French society, Nancy was nervous and declared rather disingenuously that it would bore her to work in an officers’ club. Nevertheless she was intrigued. The espion-riddled Free French were both glamorous and enigmatic. Two neighbours in an expensive flat at Rutland Gate called themselves the Selliers and claimed to work at the Quartier Général, though another acquaintance, whose nom de guerre was Violette (‘Why not Pansy?’ asked Nancy, forgetting her Napoleon), insisted she had never heard the name.
Nancy became a Gaulliste before she ever met Gaston. Within weeks of her successful penetration of the club, she was describing to Jessica her approval of the general’s plans for post-war settlements. She also approved of the way French officers kissed one’s hand without having to be ‘rendered gaga with love first like the English ones’, their heroic stories, their love of chatting. Being amusing in a foreign language is always a boost to the self-esteem and if Nancy liked her ‘wonderful’ Free frogs, they liked her back, appreciating her knowledge of their count
ry, her prettiness and her chic, simple clothes. Their company was all the more soothing as Nancy was beginning to accept the fact that her eight-year marriage to Peter was effectively over.
Inside the cover of her day diary for 1941, Nancy wrote a sad meditation on the state of her relationship.
Marriage is the most important thing in life and must be kept going at almost any cost, it should only be embarked on where there is, as well as physical love, a complete conformity of outlook. Women, as well as men, ought to have a great many love affairs before they marry as the most critical moment in a marriage is the falling off of physical love, which is bound to occur sooner or later and only an experienced woman can know how to cope with this. If not properly dealt with, the marriage is bound to go on the rocks.
At the beginning of the war, the Rodds’ union had enjoyed a brief renaissance, with Peter, so handsome in his scarlet-lined coat, so brave, so keen to do the right thing and Nancy happy to play the adoring wife keeping their home going in Blomfield Road. But her determined hopefulness was, as ever, shattered by the reality of Peter’s utter disregard for her feelings. The miscarriage does not seem to have ignited any tenderness in him. When he returned on leave he usually stayed at his club, the Savile, warning any friends he bumped into not to tell Nancy. She was, he told James Lees-Milne, ‘a very difficult woman’.1
Perhaps he thought this justified his affair with Adelaide Lubbock, a cousin of Nancy’s on the Stanley side, with whom he preferred to spend his time in London, visiting her at her first-aid post in Chelsea. Nancy does not seem to have taken the affair very seriously. She continued to mention Adelaide in her letters and invited her to dinner on at least one occasion. What pained her was more that Peter didn’t bother to conceal his neglect with good manners. When they did meet, he would cheerfully remind her that widows’ pensions were very small, and little of his army pay made its way to his wife. His legendary dullness took on an increasingly bullying tone: Lees-Milne described a dinner at the Ritz in 1944 where Prod’s droning became aggressive and Nancy tried pathetically to placate him. Whatever ‘physical love’ they had shared was dead and there was very little else left. Nancy’s letters from this period suggest she was depressed, felt old and ugly and was incapable of taking an interest in her life which, for her, was the worst sign of all.
Perhaps a solution was to take a lover of one’s own? Roy André Desplats-Pilter (nom de guerre André Roy) had joined the Free French in October 1940 and worked as a liaison officer in the Quartier Général. He was clever and charming and rich and he and Nancy were soon involved in a very adult love affair, visiting Nancy’s friend Helen Dashwood in her lovely house at West Wycombe and trying to enjoy what social life the shattered capital had to offer. Roy was clearly a kind man. In 1942 Nancy gave a party at Blomfield Road to which she invited Unity, who was now overweight and distinctly eccentric-looking. Nancy stuffed her into a black dress of her own, with a coat over the top to cover the open fastening, but Unity refused to make up her face. Roy took her to the bathroom and did it for her, rendering poor Unity ‘awfully pretty’. Not many men would have been capable of such tactful and skilful gentleness. The affair was clearly physical – it was during this relationship that Nancy suffered the ectopic pregnancy that destroyed her fertility – and again, Roy was kind, visiting her in hospital (he thought her choice of reading matter there, Châteaubriand’s Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, positively narcoleptic). After Nancy’s convalescence in the country they continued to see one another on her return to London in March 1942, when she began her job at Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street.
It was odd that Nancy didn’t meet Gaston at Heywood Hill, as the shop was popular with the Free French. It was there that Gaston bought the gift of Saint-Simon’s memoirs which Général de Gaulle later kept in his study at Colombey. The Curzon Street shop was already a nexus for social London – handy for the Ritz, Trumper’s barbers a few doors down, and a hop from the clubs of St James’s, not to mention the brothels in Shepherd Market (one of Nancy’s favourite stories was of the tart whose wartime business was going so well she wished she could open a second front). When Heywood Hill was called up at the end of the year, his wife Ann, an assistant, Molly Friese-Green, and Nancy managed the business. Nancy walked over from Maida Vale every day, sometimes running to keep warm, ‘very thin and upright, her arms folded over her chest, and her long legs jerking to left and right of her like a marionette’s’.2 She was a cold body. With the stove cranked up ‘her’ shop, as Evelyn called it, was a much more sympathetic salon than dismal, bombed-out Blomfield Road. Everyone came – Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, the Sitwell brothers, Cyril Connolly, Lord Berners (a great friend of both Nancy and Diana, and the model for Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love), Gerry Wellesley, Waugh, Raymond Mortimer. For many, the shop was an oasis of delight in wartime London. Nancy was actually a rather good bookseller, though she concealed it well – ‘A little less darling and a little more attention, please!’ rapped out one customer, wearied by the endless shrieks. ‘Even the books, ’ wrote Harold Acton, ‘seemed to join in the laughter during their exchange of gossip.’ Today a blue plaque on the site records her time there.
Gaston, too, has a blue plaque to commemorate his achievements: at 1 Rue Bonaparte in Paris. There is nothing left, now, of the garden at the Allies Club where he and Nancy met, but the geography of their affair can still be traced through Mayfair and St James’s, Hyde Park Corner, Maida Vale. From that first evening, for Nancy, for ever, this was love. In The Pursuit of Love, Linda describes the sensation.
She was filled with a wild, strange, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love … she knew that never before, not even in dreams, and she was a great dreamer of love, had she felt anything remotely like this. She told herself, over and over again, that she must go back … but she had no intention of going back, and she knew it.
Ann Rosse, Oliver Messel’s sister, was a close friend of both Nancy and Evelyn Waugh. She was part of the set of upper-class habitués of London’s smartest air-raid shelter, the ‘Dorch’. In 1942, she lent Gaston a house at 27 Eaton Terrace. And so, one morning in September, he returned there at dawn from dinner at Blomfield Road, got into bed and picked up the telephone. It rang across the Park, in the house he had just left.
‘Alors, racontez.’
Nancy asked him to pronounce her name the French way, like the town. She liked the sound of her name in his heavy accent. He agreed, and she recounted the first of the stories of her life, her family and friends that kept him fascinated for thirty years. From September until May, Gaston dined with her and slept at her house, returning in his car to Belgravia to telephone her for a long, deliciously silly conversation before setting off to Carlton Gardens for another day of liberating France.
Gaston was unlike any man Nancy had ever known. As is the case with many men who genuinely like women, there was a feminine side to his character. His interest in lovely things, in chatting, in jokes, was seductive in an entirely different fashion to the rather aggressive (indeed comic) masculinity of Tom Mosley. One can’t really imagine Noël Coward calling him ‘chéri’ as he did Gaston. Mosley, whose relationship with Diana Nancy has been represented as envying, was sexual Marmite – strong, unsophisticated, something one either craves or hates. Unlike Mosley, who never had and never did amount to anything politically from the day he left the Labour benches, Gaston was also someone Nancy could admire, a decorated hero, illuminated by the halo of ‘le Grand Charles’ fighting to save the country she worshipped. She had a very handsome husband already, so his lack of looks didn’t matter a bit (she sticks to the truth with Fabrice de Sauveterre, though admittedly, by the time she gets to Charles-Edouard de Valhubert the colonel resembles a film star). And, there is no doubt, his lovemaking was an education and a revelation.
In his family memoir The House of Mitford, Jonathan Guinness suggests that Nancy was never very interested in sex. His brother Alexander agreed, but then young men rarely
find their aunts sexy. Jonathan’s argument is based on Nancy’s portrayal of Mme de Pompadour in her biography of Louis XV’s mistress as physically a cold woman who found lovemaking exhausting. To infer from this that Nancy felt the same seems odd – characters like Polly Hampton and the Bolter adore ‘rolling and rolling’ with their lovers and Jonathan never suggests, correspondingly, that Nancy went in for that. She was completely relaxed about sex – in her correspondence with Waugh she happily discusses ‘fucking’ and masturbation – Lady Jane Grey was an early, if improbable favourite, and she is quite fascinated by lesbianism (‘Lizes’) and homosexuality (‘buggers’). She described herself as ‘ferociously normal’ and in an interview at an age where women are supposed to be past that sort of thing she pronounced love-making ‘delightful’.
Before she met Gaston, Nancy plainly hadn’t met anyone who was much good at sex. (Poor Capitaine Roy died of tuberculosis just after the war, and may not have been very vigorous.) A Spectator reviewer, Alistair Forbes, who knew them both put it quite bluntly: ‘To a beguiled and consenting party like Nancy his pleasure-giving skills in the sack made her conclude that … Peter Rodd had quite simply been ignorant of the facts of lovemaking life.’ Nancy’s letters to Gaston only go so far as to refer to her longing for him, but they employ a code, ‘Connaught hotel’, that alludes to a mortifying incident in which Nancy was caught by an officious concierge on her way up to Gaston’s room. It is used between them well into the Sixties, to tease, but also, given the content of the letters in which it appears, as a shorthand for a reminder of pleasure shared.