Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  But no less remarkable than Tap’s career was his relationship with his children, which – in externals at least – was unusually modern. Where he went, so did they. No packing off to nanny and the nursery for Tap’s two daughters: dressed in sailor suits, they helped their father canvass from his yacht and sat with him at dinner tables, where he would tell other guests if he thought they were eating too much. His views on health were extreme. He had a loathing of doctors, his wife having died from an abortion performed to save her from a fifth, life-threatening pregnancy, and he disliked medicine. He also believed that the pig should not be eaten (this was on the grounds that Jews did not suffer from cancer). His daughter took these ideas directly on board. Nancy wrote in ‘Mothering the Mitfords’ that Sydney ‘did not really believe in illness’, and certainly when she was operated on, at the age of two, for an infected foot, it was her father who insisted upon the use of chloroform. Meanwhile Jessica would recall in her book Hons and Rebels that, at the age of twelve or so, she herself had telephoned a doctor and asked him to remove her appendix, her mother having dismissed her terrible stomach pains as a consequence of over-eating. On the question of diet, Sydney held to a sensible belief in foods such as wholegrain bread, which she baked herself, but at the same time forbade her children the meats that she and David ate: ‘the occasional sucking-pig which crackled into the dining-room hardly bears contemplating, even now’, wrote Nancy, and Evelyn Waugh later described (fancifully) how in childhood Deborah would stuff ‘pork sausages up her knickers to consume in secret’.

  It is not surprising that Sydney should have been so influenced by her father, for he dominated her life. In fact he turned her into something like a wife. From the age of fourteen, she was running his large house in Lowndes Square (and thereafter was very efficient at housekeeping; although she always hated employing men, having found it hard as a girl to impose her authority upon them). Her father must have been all things to her. Yet she, in her turn, had to vie with her younger sister for his love; and indeed Dorothy – or ‘Weenie’, as she was rather repulsively called – did perhaps get more than her share of it. Tap’s sailing book The Log of the Nereid was dedicated ‘To Captain Weenie (aged 3)’ and is full of her irritating doings. No mention of Sydney, though – shades here of Nancy and Pamela?

  And a clue, perhaps, to the difficulties Sydney had in becoming a mother. She had scarcely had one herself. What she had had instead was a relationship with her father that was unusual in its closeness and that gave her a good deal of attention, but attention of a very particular kind. It must have been satisfying to a young girl, being taken like a consort to political meetings and adult weekend parties. But at the same time she may have been dissatisfied with a father who, for all his physical proximity, had a remoteness about him, a self-centredness, and was not very much like a father to her at all.

  Yet he had surely raised her expectations of life, made her feel that it would be a demanding, involved and fascinating business, that it held more than the prospects of housewifery and motherhood (although these, as it turned out, would make demands upon her that she could never have imagined). She thought of going to Girton, although nothing came of this; perhaps her father did not want to lose her. She always read a good deal – ‘she loved memoirs, Queen Victoria’s letters, that kind of thing’, says Diana – and her own unpublished memoirs show that she wrote carefully and well. Attractive in a soulful, long-eyed way that hinted at earthy passions (the sexiness of her drooping mouth was quite something), she was a hit as a debutante. She took pleasure in sailing and met painters like Tissot during summers spent, on the yacht, at smart resorts like Deauville and Trouville. She loved ice-skating (as Unity later would) and had a passion for her Swedish instructor (‘I would let him call me Sydney, I would even let him kiss me...’ she wrote in her diary for 1899). It was a free and promising life that she left when – whether dry- or wet-eyed – she walked in her white veil towards respectable penury with David Mitford.

  Of course it may have seemed that the time had come for her life to take a more regular course. Her husband, although a second son, was a decent enough catch for a girl of faintly uncertain origins. And she had, or so she wrote in her memoirs, fallen in love with him ten years earlier, when she saw him leaning in front of the fireplace at his family home of Batsford Park, in Gloucestershire. He was seventeen then, an amazingly good-looking young man, tall and strong and casual, with the refined masculine features of Gary Cooper and the blue regard of his most beautiful daughter, Diana (and of Polly Hampton in Love in a Cold Climate, ‘a blue flash, the bluest and most sudden thing I ever saw’). Hardly to be wondered at, that a young girl would swoon at such a vision, standing as he was in semi-possession of a baronial mansion. It must have been rather like the Queen, aged thirteen, falling for the blond and gleaming Philip: and these are the images of another person which endure, even into old age.

  Yet David, too, was not all that he seemed, nor quite what his eldest daughter would later make him seem. Like his future wife, he had lived with the overwhelming presence of a father of character. Bertram Mitford, born in 1837, would later become a friend of Tap Bowles, which was how Sydney (taken everywhere as usual) came to stay at Batsford. It is not surprising that these two men should have gravitated towards each other when they entered Parliament, after the 1892 election, as they were in many ways very alike: both possessed of an almost alarming energy and restless desire to achieve. In Tap this was probably a consequence of his illegitimacy. In Bertie it may have been something similar: even if one dismisses the strong rumour that he, too, was illegitimate, he had to endure the trauma of his mother – Lady Georgina Ashburnham, a nineteenth-century Bolter – running off with a son of the Earl of Sefton when he was aged just four. The Mitford family had always been sedate landed gentry, with roots near Morpeth in Northumberland and with one reasonably well-known member, William, Nancy’s great-great-great-grandfather, who had written a history of Greece. But Bertie was not like his ancestors. He and his descendants may not even have been Mitfords at all; after his death it was said that if one wanted to know who the family really was, one should look in Burke’s Peerage under ‘Sefton’ rather than ‘Redesdale’. This, of course, is the kind of thing that people say with more relish than cause, and it is not a rumour given universal credence. What is certain is that something in the mingling of Bertie’s blood with that of Tap Bowles helped to turn the ‘Mitfords’ from the calm, discreet family of the past six hundred years into a wilder, more dazzling breed.

  Bertie was one of those typical dynamic Victorians, but he was also more than a type. He had what Edmund Gosse would later refer to as a ‘redundant vitality... His nature swarmed with life.’ After Eton and Oxford, he became a diplomat. He immersed himself to varying degrees in foreign cultures and, while keeping his Englishness preserved, like a jar of Cooper’s Oxford, he allowed his mind to be opened by his travels. He watched a samurai commit hara-kiri and was deeply moved by the ritual; was moved, too, by what he saw as the savage treatment of North American Indians. Much later he would also, and rather less endearingly, stay with the Wagner family at Bayreuth and embrace the theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which set out something very like the Nazi creed. The significance of this to the future lives of Diana and Unity is, of course, pretty striking; although what really strikes one is the entranced naïvety with which Bertram Mitford absorbed Chamberlain’s work. He was a man of the world, but only in the literal sense. He was on the first train to Paris after the end of the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871, met Garibaldi in Italy, hunted buffalo (and brought a head back to Batsford), met the Mormon leader Brigham Young in Utah, and all by his middle thirties – it was quite some life, of the kind that cannot really be lived today. He subsequently wrote about it in his Memoirs and his Tales of Old Japan. This last book has never been out of print; like his granddaughter Nancy, Bertie knew how to write what people wanted to read.

  When he returned home from his dip
lomat’s life, Disraeli gave him responsibility for London’s parks and monuments: plenty there to get his hungry teeth into, vast refurbishments of the Tower of London and so on. He also acquired a wife, Lady Clementine Ogilvie. This was a very good match; so much so that his mother-in-law, the Countess of Airlie, refused to acknowledge the marriage and always addressed her daughter by her maiden name. She knew all too well – possibly, it was said, from first-hand experience – that Bertie was a womaniser, like his friend the Prince of Wales. It is almost certain that he had an affair with his sister-in-law, Lady Blanche Hozier, whose daughter (also named Clementine, later the wife of Winston Churchill) was said to resemble David Mitford.9 Blanche’s marriage to Colonel Hozier was unhappy and she solaced herself with at least nine lovers, conducting her affairs with shameless aplomb. She was given to robust pronouncements – ‘I love privilege!’ – that remind one of the terrible, irresistible things that Lady Montdore says in Love in a Cold Climate (‘I love being so dry in here’, she remarks from the inside of her luxurious motor car, ‘and seeing all those poor people so wet’). Still, Blanche and the rest notwithstanding, the sweet-natured Clementine Mitford bore her husband six children in twelve years, of which David was the third.

  The move to Batsford Park, near Moreton-in-Marsh and deep in the damp, rich, honey-coloured Cotswolds, came in 1886. Bertie inherited the large estate from a cousin named Freeman, whose name was thereafter joined to that of the Mitfords: Nancy’s full name was Nancy Freeman-Mitford. Now he embarked upon the third part of his life, throwing himself with absolute intensity into the part of a country squire, becoming a magistrate, a horse breeder, a deputy Lord Lieutenant and MP for Stratford-upon-Avon. He also became a builder. He pulled down the original house at Batsford, a delightful Georgian oblong, and put in its place what now stands there: a child’s dream of Rapunzel’s castle which, against the sombre English sky, gives an impression of near unreality. Its colour is old gold, its shape fantastical. The main door is like a fortress, with above it an enormous Redesdale coat of arms and one vast, painted window; the other windows are small and leaded, made for the imprisoning of beautiful Gloucestershire princesses. There are gargoyles, and little turrets, and all the thrilling paraphernalia of fairytale, and so although it is conventional to lament the destruction of the symmetrical Georgian house, one cannot help but be glad that someone dared to build such a place as this. It is a work of the imagination, glowing deep ochre in the dark countryside. As such it is a magnificent one-off, testament to the vitality and – why not? – the arrogance of the man who conceived it.

  Yet David Mitford cried when the old house was pulled down. Inside his very masculine exterior he was a sensitive soul. And he must, surely, have suffered from the fact that his older brother was so very much the golden boy. Clement was loved and confident, he attended Eton where he was clever and popular; in his ability to achieve he resembled his father, although he may have been more likeable, whereas David was a rather different proposition. Handsome, strong and tough all right, but in no other way very satisfactory to a man such as Bertie Mitford.

  David was the only one of the four sons to be sent to Radley, which has a reputation anyway for putting chips on the shoulders of people who had hoped to go to Eton (David’s own son, Tom, did go there, which was perhaps David’s way of righting a ‘wrong’). And then he hated all the things that one is supposed to love at such places, for example team games; he had, wrote his grandson Jonathan Guinness, ‘no trace of the conventional public school man’s heartiness’10, being like his daughters far too much of an individualist. His discomfort at the school must have been worsened by the fact, which nobody seems to have hidden from him, that he had been sent there in order that he should not be an embarrassment to Clement. For David, with his ‘tempers’, his sudden ‘illnesses’, was regarded as a bit of a liability. If the illnesses were psychosomatic, brought on when he felt thwarted in any way, there is no denying that the tempers were real: once, having been locked in a room by his father, he attacked him with a poker that he had been steadily heating on the fire. But were they also a product of his frustrations? It has been suggested that he may have been dyslexic, as he found reading and academic work difficult – he failed the written exam into Sandhurst – and yet spoke perfect French. Meanwhile his brother and father were highly literate, competent men, to an extent that must have made him feel excluded. And even though he himself worshipped Clement, indeed seems really to have loved him (as did all the family – he was Nancy’s favourite uncle), there is a limit to how much anyone can stand being held up for comparison with a paragon.

  Of course David Mitford, who was born in 1878, was a product of the Victorian upper-classes, and unlikely therefore to have been susceptible to theories about ‘inferiority complexes’ and other such feeble modern tosh. But he had his areas of uncertainty, all the same (as did his future wife). Being sent off as a tea-planter to what was then Ceylon was so very much the kind of thing that one did with a tricky second son. What else was there for him?

  The Boer War came to his rescue, in a way. He wrote of General Brabazon, whose orderly he became, ‘He is a soldier and a gentleman, and that is the most you can say for any man’. Military life gave him a sense of purpose and pride. He was decorated in the campaign, from which he returned in 1902 with only one lung. Two years after that he married Sydney, having dictated a love letter to her from his hospital bed to be sent in the event of his death. Although, when she had seen him standing like a young god up against the Batsford fireplace, all he had probably seen was an odd, sombre little creature in a sailor suit, by the time she grew up he was clearly head over heels. Her calm remoteness, which Nancy found so difficult, was just what he was looking for. He did not much care for working at his father-in-law’s publication The Lady throughout the first ten years of his marriage – the real David was expressed through the mongoose that he took into the office and let loose on the rats in the cellar – but his letters from the time exhale the undeniable scent of true happiness.

  What he liked, above anything, was to be at home with his wife, eating bread and milk in his dressing-gown. After work every Friday he would go, with his pay packet, to the market at Covent Garden and find a perfect peach for Sydney which she would eat, ceremoniously, after dinner. For a couple on barely £1,000 a year, this small gift served a sweetly symbolic purpose. It was not until twenty years or so later that David learned that Sydney hated peaches. Although she herself had never told him, there is a little paradigm for their early marriage in that story: he eager, almost unbearably so, to please; she smiling and swallowing and calmly thinking – what?

  This is hardly the ‘roaring, raging’ Uncle Matthew of The Pursuit of Love. There is actually something very touching about David Mitford, with his beautiful patrician face and his huge peasant’s hands, a man who had the energy of his father but not the accomplishments through which to channel them. He was a schemer and a dreamer. He had gone prospecting for gold in Ontario as a very young man and went with Sydney on what sound like very romantic little voyages, in the first years of their marriage; he got tangled up with a dubious wheeler-dealer selling papier mâché covers for wireless sets; he moved house several times, and like his father had the urge to build; these are restless activities, really. Nancy was later to say, and it is one of her most perceptive remarks, that the trouble with her father was ‘he simply hadn’t got enough to do.’11

  She went on to tell the story of how, on her birth certificate, she had found that in the space beneath the word ‘Occupation’, her father had written: ‘Honourable’. One would have thought that when, in 1916, he became Lord Redesdale, a landowner and a member of the House of Lords, he would have had more than enough on his plate, what with seven children and so on; but until old age and sadness quenched him this was not the case. Owning land anchored him, as his marriage had done, but it did not calm him. He fought staunchly on one lung in the First World War, although he was invalided home twice; the
second time, in 1917, saw him return a thirty-nine-year-old wreck. He was never again able to ride to hounds, which must have been a terrible blow. But whereas a lesser man might have seized the opportunity to take things easy, bodily frustration had the opposite effect upon David Mitford and made him ever more wildly alive.

  And this, when one thinks about it, is very much the key to the character of Uncle Matthew. He is not just an assemblage of hilarious eccentricities and sayings, although he has been seen as such; he is, as E.F. Benson wrote of a character in his Mapp and Lucia books (deeply loved by Nancy, incidentally), ‘a hot coal thrown from the furnace of creation’. He is a striding mass of continually thwarted vitality. All that tooth-grinding, the obsession with punctuality (‘in precisely six and three-quarter minutes the damned fella will be late’), the rising at 5 a.m. and prowling around ‘clanking cups of tea, shouting at his dogs, roaring at the housemaids, cracking the stock-whips he had brought back from Canada on the lawn with a noise greater than gun-fire, and all to the accompaniment of Galli-Curci on his gramophone...’, the constant rages which rub against his knowledge that they should be suppressed – this is all unspeakably vivid stuff. But it rings true beneath the theatricality, the cardboard dimension, because it is informed by Nancy’s instinctive understanding of her father: a man who was so magnificently all that he seemed, and yet more than he seemed. Even his buried vulnerability is there in Nancy’s portrayal. It is delicately implied in Matthew’s doglike worship of silly Lord Montdore, in his blustering hatred of leaving the domain in which he feels secure, in the security he gains from the presence of his wife. His loathing of foreigners, too (‘they are all the same, and they all make me sick’), is on one level the knee-jerk jingoism of unassailable English self-confidence: somehow, Nancy implies that it is also a defence, against what is not understood. This is why, when she is writing at her best, David/Uncle Matthew is her best subject, for like any mythical creation he works on two levels: the archetypal and the particular.