Relative poverty notwithstanding, the family was happy at Asthall. The house, which overlooks a beautiful but sombre little church, was generally accepted to be haunted (a childhood friend who stayed there described the ‘holy fear’ of hearing an unexplained ‘tick-tock of water’ outside4, and both Lord Redesdale and Diana were apparently unnerved by a ‘grey lady’ who wafted around the place). Yet it has, above all, a contented look. There are perhaps no more naturally joyful characters in literature than the Radletts, whose love of life is indomitable and, at times, almost unbearably touching. This surely comes straight from the Mitfords and from the years at Asthall: when problems were small and simple and busily resolvable, when ‘aching’ with boredom was a painfully voluptuous pleasure, and when dreams of the future gleamed as tantalisingly close as one of Lady Montdore’s famous jewels. In later and unhappier years, Sydney was to say – as one does, helplessly – that none of the family’s troubles would have happened if they had stayed at Asthall; she remembered their life in the house as ‘all summers’.
Nancy Mitford grew up in the years between the two world wars: they took her from the age of very nearly fourteen to that of thirty-five. Now, of course, we love this interwar period. We see, in satisfying images, the febrile Art Deco world of Vile Bodies, Michael Arlen and cigarette holders become darker, grittier, heavy with the realities of the Depression, thick with the shadows of great and imminent events. Not a small part of the Mitford fascination is the fact that they lived so intensely through what is now such an evocative period: they are, if you like, history made personal, and – as Nancy always knew – it is the personal in history that we do indeed like. So it is strange to read this little passage from The Pursuit of Love, typical in its artless melancholy, in which Linda muses: ‘It is rather sad... to belong, as we do to a lost generation. I’m sure in history the two wars will count as one war and that we shall be squashed out of it altogether, and people will forget that we ever existed...’
The First World War broke out when Nancy was almost ten and, in taking the life of her uncle Clement, had a profound effect upon her destiny. ‘It was more than I could do to pray for peace’, she wrote in her essay ‘Mothering the Mitfords’. ‘I prayed as hard as I could for war’. She crocheted khaki mittens while ‘sitting like a tricoteuse, on the balcony of Grandfather Redesdale’s house in Kensy High Street... all this crocheting was the nearest I ever got to killing an enemy, a fact which I am still regretting’. It may seem odd in so civilised a person, this fascination with warfare and lively response to conflict (‘she loved trouble’5, says her nephew, Alexander Mosley), yet it is very much part of her contradictory nature. She would have absorbed it from her father, and may have liked resembling him in this surprising way. She would also have had a sense that war was a natural part of an aristocrat’s world, and that fearing it was therefore rather common. Nancy herself was rattled when living in London during the aerial bombardment of the Second World War, but she saw it as a point of honour to smile and stick it out: ‘Nancy boasts that she is not the least frightened of the fly bombs’, wrote James Lees-Milne in a diary entry for 1944. ‘In bed at night she beckons to them, “Come on, come on”...’
Meanwhile, in The Pursuit of Love, Linda’s dreary little daughter Moira is shown to be terrified of air-raids (‘a child who was not thrilled by the idea of them was incomprehensible to her, and she could not imagine how she had conceived such a being’). All the Radletts have an understanding of what war means, and take it on board in their spirited way. Nancy’s way, like theirs, was extremely English, yet it was also part of her feel for the old European ideals of noblesse. She remained enthralled by battles all her life: in her last book, Frederick the Great, she devoted chapters to the explication of his campaigns (Alexander Mosley: ‘the only time I think I’ve ever understood the Seven Years War’), and towards the end of her life she wrote: ‘I would like to be a pretty young General & gallop over Europe with Frederick the Great & never have another ache or pain...’
This is not dissimilar to the remark about longing for one more day’s hunting, made on her death-bed to Deborah. Fragile and urbane in appearance though she always was, slim as a swizzle stick with a waist ‘so small that one fears it may snap at any moment’ (Waugh), plagued by ‘low stamina’ much of her life, Nancy could display a surprising robust physicality. She had a good seat on a horse – her cousin Clementine recalled seeing her on her mare, Rachel, ‘looking like a Constantin Guys drawing’ – and in later life impressed her nephew Jonathan Guinness by catching and holding a pony while dressed in Dior (‘I was brought up in the country, you see...’). As a girl she hunted side-saddle with the Heythrop, as often as three times a fortnight in season. At the same time she saw the paradox within her passion for hunting:
The Radletts... loved foxes, they risked dreadful beatings in order to unstop their earths, they read and cried and rejoiced over Reynard the Fox, in summer they got up at four to go and see the cubs playing in the pale-green light of the woods; nevertheless, more than anything in the world they loved hunting. It was in their blood and bones and in my blood and bones, and nothing could eradicate it, though we knew it for a kind of original sin...
This was Nancy’s upbringing, to live within a society that worships animals as it perpetrates cruelties upon them. The Pursuit of Love is steeped in this paradox, bright with effusions of love for baby badgers and labradors, darkly infused with the bloodstained realities of country life:
On the other side of the house... was the Home Farm. Here the slaughtering of poultry and pigs, the castration of lambs and the branding of cattle, took place as a matter of course, out in the open for whoever might be passing to see.
Nancy always found the cruelty hard to bear. In 1966 she wrote to Deborah about the fate of the French horses ‘who used to pull the ice carts... condemned to death unless somebody rescues them. Their faces oh well, we know’. Diana later said that ‘one can no more imagine Pam or Debo without a dog than Nancy or Tom with one.’6 In fact, although Nancy had the air of a woman whose worst nightmare would be shih-tzu hairs over her Lanvin skirt, even when she moved to London she had dogs – two silky-smart little French bulldogs named Milly and Lottie, both of whom produced litters of adored puppies.
Back in the country and the interwar years, the Mitford household ran alive with animals. Chickens were always kept by the family (‘There is nothing I don’t know about all sorts of poultry’, Nancy later wrote7), and Sydney – whose housekeeping was efficient to the point of frugality – paid for the children’s governesses out of what she made from eggs and honey. Nancy had goats at Batsford and sold their milk (‘I don’t want to make butter,’ she said as a child, ‘as it is not profitable enough’). She and Pamela also had two mice which lived in what Pam, in her irony free way, later described as a ‘palace’8, made for her by the estate carpenter; one of the mice ate the other when Nancy, who had been desperate to get her mouse into the palace, neglected to feed them. There was Brownie the pony, whom David bought one morning under Blackfriars Bridge then took back to Graham Street in a hansom cab. The pony was kept in a dark room at the house until David put him in a third-class railway carriage, along with various children and dogs, and transported them all to Sydney’s cottage at High Wycombe. There were dogs of course, whippets and labradors and dachshunds, bloodhounds for child-hunting, and a terrier of Nancy’s called Peter (‘she adored that smelly old Border’, Jessica later remembered9). And then came a more arcane menagerie, mostly belonging to Unity: her goat, her grass snake Enid, her salamander Sally, and her rat, Ratular – ‘she usually had a rat or two’, Jessica recalled to David Pryce-Jones, ‘Harrods pet shop was where we constantly went buying’. For her own part, Jessica had a sheep called Miranda whom she longed to take on excursions to London (‘the dear thing would love it so’). Miranda never made it to Harrods but she did make an oblique appearance in literature. As a girl in the late 1920s, Jessica would use the word ‘sheepish’ to describe anyt
hing nice and, to annoy Unity, ‘goat-like’ for anything nasty. Evelyn Waugh, at that time in love with Diana, had become not a little fascinated with the bright, mysterious ring of solidarity that drew itself around the Mitford girls; later, in letters to Nancy, he would take evident pleasure in being able to use the private nicknames that she had invented for her sisters; and in 1930 he was perhaps seeking similar entry into the magic circle when he put these two sentences into his novel Vile Bodies: ‘He left his perfectly sheepish house in Hertford Street’ and ‘how goat-like, how sick-making, how too, too awful.’
The thought of all the animals that roamed and padded around the Mitford homes adds to the impression of germinating life; one imagines the smell of wet dog hair on sofas, rats scuttling beneath nursery desks, the clip-clop of hooves outside windows. Large as these houses were, there is always a sense of them bursting at the seams, spilling out children and dogs and servants and sheep. Noise would have been constant: rows, tantrums, shrieks; barks, neighs, bleats; stock-whips cracking, the twang of Nancy’s ukelele (which she took up in her late teens), the ripplings from Tom’s piano (the sound of Handel, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven was left out of The Pursuit of Love, but then music was not one of Nancy’s great passions). It must have been a maelstrom. For a girl like Nancy, whose keen intelligence had shown itself early, and which now needed something to sharpen itself upon, it must also at times have been madly frustrating. Where was privacy to be found? Where conversation amongst equals? Much later she was to say: ‘I feel sorry for people who have family planning’, meaning that life without siblings was greatly impoverished; but it is interesting nonetheless that she lived alone from the age of about forty. Perhaps, when she made that remark, she too was seeing her childhood ‘through the eyes of my books’? At any rate, during the time that she did have to live with a large family, she was sufficiently provoked by it to go in for what she called ‘great nastiness to the others’.
This relentless teasing was, according to Nancy’s nephew Alexander Mosley, a consequence of restlessness. ‘It was also a highly-honed weapon to keep a lot of very competitive, bright, energetic sisters in order. She used it as a weapon, as a form of discipline, as a form of self-protection, as a form of attack. And it was quite an important part of her personality.’
Unfortunately, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the sister who suffered most from Nancy’s teasing was the one least equipped to counter it: Pamela. Even though Pam lived with the effects of infantile paralysis, having endured an attack at the age of three which left her slow and weak (Sydney did, for once, call in several doctors), Nancy could not stop herself. Something about Pam’s stolid shepherdess aspect seems to have brought out all that was most gleamingly mischievous in her sister, and this did not change much as the girls grew older. Nancy descended into the cheapest kind of female spite: she would, for example, find out which young men Pam fancied and then tell her that she had seen them dancing with other partners. ‘I was rather fat,’ Pam later recalled, which never does much for a girl’s self-confidence, but according to Diana this had already been undermined by Nancy: ‘She was very unkind to Pam.’ There was no hint, however, in the 1980 BBC documentary that Pamela had any resentment of this. Her gentle, contented nature led her, rather, to remember Nancy as one would a meteor, a natural phenomenon requiring only to be accepted and admired, and that had left her blinking in awe and pleasure.
During the television programme a story was told of how, at the time of the 1926 General Strike, the two sisters briefly ran a café together supplying tea to the emergency services (which meant, according to Jessica, that Pam would do all the work while Nancy would ‘sort of drift in – she always used to say [plaintive voice] “Oh, I don’t know how to make the sandwiches”...’). One very early morning Pam was busying herself in her calm way when she was assailed by a terrible-looking tramp, who demanded a cup of tea, leered violently and darted round the counter, grabbing at her: ‘Can I have a kiss?’ Only when the tramp dissolved into Nancy’s characteristic shrieking laugh was ‘his’ true identity revealed. It was a remarkably involved trick: she must have been pretty bored to go to so much trouble, although her incredible inventiveness no doubt demanded this kind of expression. And something about Pamela – irresistible butt of Nancy’s most sparkling jokes, wide-eyed and gaping at the irruption into her carefully run tea-stall – seems to have demanded it also.
One account of this incident ends with Pam falling and breaking an ankle, so desperate was she to get away from the tramp. Although this would hardly have been Nancy’s intention – if true – it does make the whole thing seem rather sadistic. And was it sadism that caused Nancy to force Pam and Diana to become girl guides, wholly against their wishes? Rather oddly, and at the age of nearly seventeen, Nancy started a company in which she made herself captain and her sisters patrol leaders; she was encouraged in this by her mother, who seems to have seen in it welcome signs of normality, and indeed thought it so good an idea that she would not hear of Diana backing out after a year, as she had promised. ‘It was one of the great injustices of my childhood,’ Diana told the BBC in 1980, amused by the memory but still, no doubt, viewing the episode as an example of what she described as ‘Nancy’s will to power’.10 It may have been that Nancy drew genuine pleasure from knots and campfires; possibly the impulse to revert to childish regimentation showed a fear of imminent adulthood (‘She was a very late developer,’ says Deborah). But girl guides – what could be less Mitfordian? How could so individualistic a girl as Nancy go in for such a thing? Unless, of course, it was all an elaborate joke. ‘I think the whole thing was really invented by Nancy, in order to tease me,’ was the conclusion offered by Diana to the BBC.
The teasing of the younger girls, meanwhile, was more straightforward. When, for example, Nancy announced one day to Unity, Jessica and Deborah that they had revolting middle syllables to their names – nit, sick and bore – it was the simple tyranny of an older sister making a joke at the expense of those who lacked the wit to reply (‘That kept her going for a week,’ Debo recalled for the BBC. ‘Made us all cry.’). This kind of thing was relatively free of the complications that informed Nancy’s behaviour towards Pamela and Diana, with whom rivalries were far more acute. In Hons and Rebels Jessica wrote that Nancy was ‘sharp-tongued and sarcastic’, but she seemed not to bear too much of a grudge. And Deborah says, quite simply, ‘I adored Nancy. She was fairly prickly, and sharp. But she certainly, certainly was not malevolent. She certainly was never malevolent with me, and I expect I was maddening – you know how children are, just really irritating and annoying. But she was always marvellous.’
Nevertheless Deborah was very much the subject of Nancy’s teasing; as with Pam, if in a different way, she was a perfect butt, because it took absolutely nothing to make her cry. The poem about the ‘little, houseless match’ which features in The Pursuit of Love (‘...it makes no moan...’) was frequently used upon Deborah, who could be made to well up if Nancy merely shook a matchbox in a significant way. ‘Everybody cried when you were born’ was another arrow that Nancy would shoot at her youngest sister. Sydney was forty when Deborah was born, and the Redesdales had seen this pregnancy as their last chance for another son; but, as Mabel the parlourmaid said, ‘I knew it was a girl by the look on his lordship’s face.’ Thus the appearance of Deborah gave Nancy yet another toy to play with.
Is this nastiness? Or is it simply a consequence – not very nice, but inevitable – of frustrated intelligence? ‘Well it was family life,’ says Debo, ever the voice of sanity. ‘I can’t imagine anything different.’ For Diana, however, Nancy unequivocally had a ‘sort of strange spiteful side. She was very witty and amusing, but she was also quite spiteful.’ Quite rightly, Diana emphasises that Nancy could not have been legitimately jealous of Pamela, because ‘they didn’t cross each other at all’; towards Pam, one can only say that the habit of nastiness had been instilled in Nancy at a very early age, and she saw no reason to break it. But with Dian
a herself – every year becoming more beautiful, clever and amusing, all the things that Nancy strove to be and that in Diana appeared so effortless – the jealousy would have been all too legitimate. This incipient goddess constituted a threat that a little girl like Deborah did not. ‘Oh, I think Nancy was jealous of Diana all her life,’ says Debo. What sister, close in age, would not have been? One like Pam, perhaps, but Nancy was no Pam. She was an outwardly cool but inwardly feverish person (maddeningly, Diana was cool through and through, despite her capacity for passion). And it was her needling, vibrant, competitive character that kept the Mitford maelstrom spinning so wildly. Everything, as Jessica told the BBC, ‘sprang full-blown from Nancy’.
So this was family life, yes, but – as in The Pursuit of Love – it was writ large. The Mitford situation was such an unusually fertile breeding ground for envy, rivalry, fantasy. There was scant possibility of escape: the children were thrown utterly together. Despite sudden bursts of discipline to bring them into line, despite the sweetly regulating presence of Blor (‘very silly, darling’), they were, in a sense, in charge of the house, living in many ways just as they wanted to, speaking their private languages, creating the world of their own that was symbolised by the Hons’ cupboard. It is perhaps an exaggeration to say, as David Pryce-Jones does in his biography of Unity, that the Mitford parents ‘were defenceless’ in the face of their children’s extreme imaginative vitality. All the same they did little to check it, which still has the power to shock.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 6