Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  The childhood of The Pursuit of Love is childhood writ large, alive with echoes of fairytales and Enid Blyton and the Brontës creating an enclosed world of the imagination at Haworth Parsonage. It is childhood as it is no longer lived: when houses were playgrounds and battlegrounds, when parents were monoliths of apparent certainty, when poshness was an absolute protection, when siblings were many and various and constituted the whole of existence, and when the desire to escape was a wild and delicious frustration. Of course Nancy’s material was pretty special. It is less fun, for example, to describe a father who returns home from work to half an hour’s reading of the Brothers Grimm than to have one not unlike a character from the book itself. It is more interesting to have a large family of outgoing, charming, emotionally volatile children than just one little misery reading books all day in a tree-house.

  There is nothing introspective about the children in The Pursuit of Love, and it is the emphasis upon introspection which, above all, makes books about childhood such a bore: ‘I felt...’, ‘She watched...’, ‘He suffered...’; so did we all, unless we were captain of the First XI, but thankfully we moved on to other things. Nancy must have been introspective to an extent, or she could not have become such a good writer, yet she had the sense to take this dimension out of the Radletts (Linda, for example, does not really read – except at the end of the book when, heavily pregnant and aged about thirty, she lies in the Hons’ cupboard all day with books of fairy stories. Yet when Nancy was not quite six she was, according to Blor, reading as substantial a book as Ivanhoe, and until her last conscious day this habit never changed). The Mitford-Radlett childhood is presented instead as a series of playlets, divertissements with the dreary bits in between left out. Nancy gives the impression of recounting her childhood just as it was, but in fact is pulling all sorts of clever strokes to reveal its artistic truth.

  Cleverest of all is the perspective that she creates. She comes at her childhood as if remembering it, beginning the book with that elegiac little passage about the ‘photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children... I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups’. Thus she tells the reader that all of this is long gone. Then she enters the past, quickly and dartingly, through a succession of intensely realised little vignettes.

  ‘I stumbled into the hall at Alconleigh blinded by the light after a six-mile drive from Merlinford station’, she writes in the person of her narrator, Fanny, and – bang – one is right there with her.

  There was a tremendous scraping of chairs as I came in, and a pack of Radletts hurled themselves upon me with the intensity and almost the ferocity of a pack of hounds hurling itself upon a fox. All except Linda. She was the most pleased to see me, but determined not to show it. When the din had quieted down and I was seated before a scone and a cup of tea, she said:

  ‘Where’s Brenda?’ Brenda was my white mouse.

  ‘She got a sore back and died’, I said. Aunt Sadie looked anxiously at Linda.

  ‘Had you been riding her?’ said Louisa, facetiously. Matt, who had recently come under the care of a French nursery governess, said in a high-pitched imitation of her voice: ‘C’était, comme d’habitude, les voies urinaires.’

  ‘Oh, dear’, said Aunt Sadie, under her breath.

  Enormous tears were pouring into Linda’s plate...

  Now this is all immediately alive, magnificently of the here-and-now. Yet somehow, over it, there always hovers a knowledge of the inescapable past and the implacable future, a sense of the churchyard that lies beyond the family home, just as the grave at Swinbrook lay waiting for Nancy. When Fanny is blinded by the light at Alconleigh, she goes on to describe what she sees there: ‘It was always the same every year; I always came down by the same train, arriving at tea-time, and always found Aunt Sadie and the children round the table underneath the entrenching tool, just as they were in the photograph. It was always the same table and the same tea-things; the china with large roses on it, the tea-kettle and the silver dish for scones simmering over little flames – the human beings of course were getting imperceptibly older.’ It is an hommage to what is unchanging which acknowledges the remorselessness of change; and it is this sweetly painful tug, within the heart of the book, which helps to make it art.

  No wonder she didn’t want to write about it all again. She had done that thing for which writers always pray but do not really understand, caught the truth of her story in a way that implies other truth as well; which is a definition of art, in fact; and a trick that she could not hope to pull off twice.

  But what might she have written in her missing autobiography, had she been dealing in fact rather than fiction? For a start, there is one decided difference between the Radletts and the Mitfords. There is much emphasis in The Pursuit of Love upon Alconleigh as a home in which the family is ensconced as from time immemorial. Passages like the one above, which talk about tea-tables that seem never to have moved, are part of the rhythm of the book.

  Yet the Mitfords, in truth, were far more peripatetic. As with the portrayal of her parents, Nancy has not exactly lied in her novel; but she has bent reality in order to convey a feel. She has turned Alconleigh into a symbol of the world that her family inhabited: parlous, unpredictable, brutal at times with its beatings and trappings of wild animals and ‘cruel woods’ all around, but nonetheless secure. The house gives an impression of background stability against which a character like Linda can dart and shimmer. There are elements of Alconleigh in all the country houses in which Nancy herself lived while she was growing up, but the main difference is that there were three of them rather than one.

  For David Mitford was a man on the move. He had to be, really, from the time that he inherited Batsford Park in all its bizarre and ruinous glory. ‘We lived’, Nancy was later to say2, ‘under the shadows... of two hammers: that of the builder and that of the auctioneer.’ Her father never had much of an income – would hardly have worked at The Lady had he not absolutely needed to – and then he kept on having children. By the time he succeeded his father as the second Lord Redesdale, in 1916, he already had five with two more to come. Only one of them – Tom – cost real money, in respect of public school fees (thank God for daughters and home education), but they still all had to be fed and clothed. Bertram Mitford had been a rich man, but building Batsford took a lot of his money; after tax David was left with about £17,000. He also got a lot of land, 36,000 acres, but this did not bring in fortunes, and there was simply not enough cash to maintain the exorbitant little Gloucestershire castle, with its stables the size of houses, its grounds which stretch away from the eye, its deer park, its lake, its arboretum, its magnificent sense of disregard for confined space.

  Of course it was not David who was meant to inherit but his brother, Clement, who was killed in the war in 1915. After his death (which brought terrible sadness to the family, and was always remembered by eight-year-old Pamela as the first time that she saw grown-ups cry), there was a strange and awful little interlude of waiting for his widow, Helen, to deliver a baby. Had she given birth to a boy, David would not have become heir, and Nancy’s life would have been rather different; but Clementine was born instead, and not long after this Bertie died, wearied at last by grief at the age of seventy-nine. The new Lord Redesdale was in France at the time, pretty weak in health himself but fighting gamely as a transport officer, dodging the bombardment of Ypres as, sometimes twice in a night, he took supplies to his battalion. It would not have been a great surprise if he too had been killed on one of his back-breaking full-speed gallops across town. But poor exhausted David was invalided home in 1917, and given a posting with rooms in Christ Church college from where he visited his family, at a little house that Sydney took in Oxford; and at Batsford Park.

  They did not stay there very long. The place could not be sold until the war was over – in that sense the family dreaded peace, for they had no desire to move – but meanwhile it was mostly left under dustsh
eets. The Mitfords lived in the centre of the house, around and above the baronial entrance, where the sense of their presence is collected behind the stone coat of arms. It must have been a marvellous home for children of imagination, which these were par excellence: it is surely tremendous fun to have a ballroom with a ceiling that vaults up to the skies, and a fireplace as big as a kitchen in a bijou Chelsea flat. Fun too to run along corridors of panelled wood and arched stone, or up and down five staircases; to be peered at by gargoyles; to lounge on deep window seats, book in hand, with an infinity of silent space outside. As well as being a very idiosyncratic house, it was, and still is, as grand as you like – grander, certainly, than Alconleigh – and to see it is to see Nancy Mitford in all her indestructible Englishness. One imagines her, a slim and elegant girl with wiry dark hair, standing on the forecourt of the dark gold mansion, or putting gloved hands together in the little stone church of St Mary’s, just outside the grounds, and one is possessed by the feeling that this would have stayed with her for life: one does not lose this. The sense, at Batsford, of being at the very heart of the country, in all its quiet rich mystery, is overwhelmingly strong. The little market town of Moreton-in-Marsh, a couple of miles away, is all the colour of ochre, all permeated by secret age-old assurance and by the assurance of Nancy’s family, whose coat of arms is on the Redesdale Arms and on the hall built by her grandfather. This was where she spent her early teenage years, steeped in essence of England and in essence of herself. ‘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’, wrote Nancy, thirty years later, from the other world of her adult city life, and it is clear that the memory of that landscape (dark blue trees!) does not even have to be recalled: it is all still there in her.

  Yet the serenity of Batsford she had only by default, and not for very long, and never properly anyway. The place was sold in 1919, and the Mitfords moved to another country house, Asthall in Oxfordshire. It must have been a wrench for Nancy: the sense of being at the centre of things, of immanence, which surely came from living at Batsford, would never quite be recaptured, and she was old enough to realise this. Asthall is terrifically attractive, a Jacobean manor built in Cotswold stone, far more homely than Batsford and with a charming asymmetry brought about, partly, by Lord Redesdale’s urge to build upon it: although he cried when his father tore down his old home, he inherited the same passion for upmarket DIY. All the same, what Nancy would later teasingly call the descent from Batsford PARK to Asthall MANOR to Swinbrook HOUSE does show that the Mitfords were never quite so rooted and secure as one imagines. They were upperclass, but they were not steeped too deep in privilege for displacement. And Nancy, all her life, was aware of this.

  ‘Dearest Nancy’, her friend Evelyn Waugh was to write in 1955, in An Open Letter responding to her famous article on the subject of ‘U and Non-U’,3

  You were at the vital age of twelve when your father succeeded to his peerage, and until less than a year before there was little likelihood of his ever succeeding. It was a great days for ‘Hons’ when you and your merry sisters acquired that prefix of nobility. Hitherto it had been the most shadowy of titles, never spoken, and rarely written. You brought it to light, emphasised and aspirated, and made a glory of it... If your uncle had not been killed in action, if your posthumous cousin had been a boy, all you enchanting children would have been whisked away to a ranch in Canada or a sheep-run in New Zealand. It is fascinating to speculate what your careers would then have been. Anyway, at that impressionable age an indelible impression was made; Hons were unique and lords were rich.

  Rather hard to understand Waugh’s last assertion, when Nancy knew perfectly well, from her own father, that lords were not necessarily rich at all. But the point of what he writes is lethally unmissable: Nancy was intrigued by the question of what constitutes an aristocrat because she was only one herself by the skin of her pointed little teeth. ‘Her tendency’, wrote Anthony Powell after her death, ‘[was] to be a little insistent on her aristocratic side.’ Nancy would always have been a lady, cela va sans dire, but she might have been a bit less interested in the fact had she been surer of it.

  And there is a degree of truth to what Waugh wrote, if not quite in the way that he intended. So much of the joy of the Mitfords comes from the contradiction between their upper-class lineage and their bright willingness to transcend it: they are, let’s face it, very much more fascinating than the majority of their kind. The conflict was so alive in them between what they were born to do and what they actually did. They used their blithe confidence as a springboard into different worlds, engaging with people and writing and ideas in a way that would seem, to a typical member of the English aristocracy, unnecessary to say the least. It might be said that the conflict was too alive in them; certainly in a couple of cases. But the point still holds good. Would they have had this beautiful curiosity, this glorious zest, this sometimes wayward energy, this lack of self-importance, had their background been a little more orthodox: had they been the children of Clement rather than David, had their mother been the child of a less maverick man, had they had the money to live on in Batsford’s isolated grandeur? Would they ever, then, have become the Radletts?

  In many ways they were conventional. Asthall Manor looks like a perfect example of the Country Life page-to-itself advertisement house, completely devoid of vulgarity but tremendously self-assured, and the little village around it is a perfect example of the same kind of thing. Outsiders, one feels, would not be welcomed. Even now, a strange car driving carefully through the tiny, winding lanes of Asthall is regarded with something like suspicion: one has a sense of unspoken codes of behaviour, of an Englishness only fully understood by those who belong to it. The Mitford family lived in this still and secret backwater for seven years. It was the house in which Nancy spent her adolescence – from age thirteen to twenty-one – and it is the house which most closely resembles Alconleigh.

  If The Pursuit of Love gives us, pricelessly and theatrically, the sense of life played out at Alconleigh, it also gives a sense of its backdrop: the innately respectable, somewhat impoverished and – yes – conventional world of the Cotswold gentry. Again, the memories run so deep in Nancy that they hardly need to be pulled out. They imbue her book with a near Chekhovian feel for the detail so familiar it becomes almost unnoticeable. She handles a set-piece, like a coming out ball, with a wonderful grasp of its drama – the fear that there will not be enough men, the longing for the men to arrive, the disappointment with the men when they do – but there is also this deliciously subtle scenic colouring: the band, ‘Clifford Essex’s third string’, resting beforehand ‘in Mrs Craven’s cottage’; the ‘floating panels of taffeta’ on the home-made dresses; the ‘twenty oil-stoves’ brought in for warmth. Warmth and the lack of it is a constant motif. Cold permeates The Pursuit of Love as it would surely have permeated Asthall: ‘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-room was hardly affected.’ Hence the Hons’ cupboard (actually a linen cupboard in Swinbrook House), where the Radlett children huddle for that wonderful sense of private cosiness.

  Hence, too, the cleverness of the title Love in a Cold Climate, given to the novel that succeeded The Pursuit of Love and that also has this faded homespun backdrop, made all the funnier because contrasted with the almost appalling wealth of Lord and Lady Montdore. At the Montdore home, Hampton – geographically close to Alconleigh, spiritually on another planet – the central heating blazes ‘and the temperature everywhere was that of a hot-house’. Ladylike Fanny arrives there for a flashy weekend party wearing a ‘nutria coat’, which is the kind of glorious touch that cannot really be invented, and with her ‘Ascot dress’ dyed dark red. The dinner is eight sumptuous courses of ‘exaggerated food
’, a far cry from the shepherd’s pie eaten, at Alconleigh, by the light of ‘three electric bulbs hanging in a bunch from the ceiling’.

  Similarly, Montdore House on Park Lane is a very different thing from the genteel London houses rented by the Radletts (just as Lady Redesdale did, for Nancy’s first season), while Polly Hampton’s coming out ball (‘which cost £2,000, or so Lady Montdore told everybody’) can hardly be compared with the twenty oil-stoves and the floating panels. Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie attend the ball, and bring to it their own particular flavour: Sadie chats about the ‘Skilton village idiot’, winner of the ‘asylum 100 yards’, while Matthew falls asleep ‘on his feet as horses can, waiting patiently to be led back to his stable’. Of course – as Nancy would always be – they are perfectly at ease within the grandeur of the Montdore sphere, to which their birth gives them complete access. But it is not their world and nor, until fame took her into it, was it Nancy’s. Nancy was brought up at Asthall to wear dresses made in the village (although, with her narrow breastless mannequin’s shape, she looked extremely elegant in them), and to rub her bony shoulders in hopelessly ill-heated rooms. Like the Radletts, her family would make sudden wild attempts at household economies, as when Sydney decided to do away with napkins at meals. ‘Peeress Saves Ha’Pence’ ran the headline in the Daily Sketch (and if she thought that was embarrassing, there was much worse to come). On another occasion she asked all her children to draw up a budget of how they would spend £500 a year on running a home: ‘Flowers: £490’ was Nancy’s first entry. It was a reasonable joke, as these flurries of panic about money never seemed to make any real difference. ‘The family are in a terrible financial crisis’, Nancy wrote to her brother Tom during one of the periods when the writing paper was getting thinner and the lavatory paper thicker. ‘However we continue as before to eat (however humbly) drink and drive about in large Daimlers. Mitfords are like that.’ All her life, however, Nancy was preoccupied with money, so the sense of growing up without much of it must have had its effect. She never, one feels, wanted to wear a nutria coat again.