In her restless quest for attention, for amusement, she could make jokes and delight herself with the thought that the others did not understand them; she could write her funny little stories without having their style deadened by orthodoxy; she could fence like a Beatrice with her father, a worthy but less nimble adversary; she could dress up as a tramp or, on another occasion, as an old lady with a vast false bosom, specs and moustaches who came to view Asthall and fell upon a horror-stricken Decca (‘what a darling little girl!!’); she could fret and chafe and ‘ache’ and dream, as Linda did, of appearing like a Tolstoyan princess in a box at the opera, or of winning the love of the Prince of Wales (clever girls do this kind of thing too). And Nancy was, yes, too clever for the life she was leading. Yet the stimuli that it gave her were enduring as well as ephemeral – boredom can be a wonderfully productive thing, in the right mind – and surely greater than those to be found amongst the twittering debs of Hatherop Castle, her ‘place of education’.
A quiet but highly significant figure in all of this was the one Mitford brother, Tom. According to Jessica, he was the ‘only mitigating factor’ in her life at Swinbrook. As a cure for the boredom that he seemed to understand, he made her read Milton and Balzac. Deborah was once asked by a census-taker what her family consisted of, and answered: ‘Three Giants’ (Nancy, Diana, Unity), ‘three Dwarves’ (Pamela, Jessica and herself) ‘and one Brute’. The Brute was Tom but this spitting fury against him ‘was merely’, as Jessica wrote, ‘the curious Honnish mirror-world expression of our devotion to him’. Of course, as the only boy, Tom was in an immensely favoured position: everyone, without exception, thought well of him and wanted his good opinion.
He was a cool character – perhaps inevitably in his outnumbered situation – and a bit of a mystery really, but he silently counterbalanced the weight of the six sisters. In him, the intellectual strain that passed lightly through the Mitfords was strengthened and solidified – his reading for choice included Kant and Schopenhauer – and if this had an effect upon Jessica then it must surely have influenced Nancy and Diana, Tom’s cleverest sisters. Impossible not to imagine that these two girls were in competition for his slightly detached approbation. Even now Diana says, with some pride, that although Nancy was close to her brother – ‘they were fond of each other, and she amused him very much’ – the relationship was ‘not like Tom and me’.
Diana and Tom were extremely near in age, with barely a year between them. They also shared a passion for music and, later, for Germany, neither of which did much for Nancy. Nevertheless she was described by a Hatherop Castle contemporary as having a ‘brother-worship for Tom’18, and Diana says that she ‘looked up to him’ – quite unusual with Nancy – ‘because he was very clever, and very sensible’. In other words he was harder to impress than most people, and therefore worth impressing; perhaps, like all of the men whom Nancy was to worship, he gave her slightly less back than she wanted.
Tom went to Eton and so was not around for much of the time; yet his importance within the family remained. When he went away to school to develop his mind, Nancy and Diana were left behind to do the same thing, in their own way. And who is to say that they did it with less success?
‘I always think once you’ve learned to read then you do the rest yourself, but I know that’s not the fashionable view’19, Debo was later to remark. And, indeed, Nancy and Diana read like fiends. ‘There were masses of books,’ says Diana, ‘you see we had a wonderful library.’ This was Bertram Mitford’s collection. It was kept in the handsome room at Batsford with the vast, deep window seats, then later in a converted barn at Asthall which, for the children – or at least for Tom, Nancy and Diana – was a place of exquisite and happy privacy.
Both Jessica and Nancy have, in their way, propagated the image of their father as someone almost violently anti-reading, unless it was Tom who was doing it. Nancy once said that if any of the girls was seen by David with a book he would instantly dream up some errand for them to do instead. Jessica, in Hons and Rebels, portrays her home as a place of intellectual near-vacuity. As usual, however, the picture is not so simple: Diana says that ‘my father never stopped us reading’ and this is confirmed by Deborah (‘my sisters and my brother could go into the barn and work and do what they liked. Not work – play. It was their pleasure’). And on the subject of Hons and Rebels, Diana found its image of her home so removed from fact that she felt obliged, in 1960, to write an incisive response to the TLS (which had recently reviewed the book): ‘As children we had access, at home, to an exceptionally well-chosen library; therefore scorn of intellectual values was a matter of choice for the individual child, not of necessity.’ Nancy, too, took a shot at Jessica’s views during her 1966 television interview. ‘She made our home life out to be barbaric really, which it really was not... She sees it through fifteen years in America, has told the stories before to Americans and rather embroidered them – and then through the novels which, being novels, are more of a caricature than actual fact, you know’: an observation which rather implicated the speaker as well.
But at Swinbrook life was less stimulating: the family did split in half to an extent, with Asthall having been very much the home of the older children, perhaps Swinbrook that of Decca and Debo (Unity somewhat stranded between the two). And the value of the Asthall barn was immense. All the same, the love of reading was so deep in Nancy – one remembers Blor’s first sight of her, aged six, ‘furious little round face’ buried in Ivanhoe – that it would surely have flourished in any circumstances. There are few people – even ‘educated’ ones – who would have chosen to read Macaulay during the longueurs of the phoney war, or a life of Talleyrand (in French, bien entendu) to distract them from the agonies of undiagnosed cancer, yet this was Nancy’s instinct. There are few pairs of socialite sisters who would, as Nancy and Diana did, ‘laugh over Carlyle’ and his life of Frederick the Great; more likely they would talk coke and Blahniks instead. Which leads one to think that Debo was on to something in her praise of auto-didacticism.
For heaven’s sake – Debo, Jessica, Diana and Nancy all grew up to be writers. Very possibly the influence of Nancy led the others to do something that they might otherwise have not, but still they did it extremely well, each possessing – to a greater or lesser degree – that clear tone, as of a wonderfully clever and slightly wayward child, which characterises Nancy’s writing. Where would education have helped her with that? Of course she couldn’t do things like punctuate (‘it is not your subject’, said Waugh) and her spelling was never up to much (‘asparogas’, ‘Tchaichowsky’ and ‘Foust’ (by Gounod) were three typical efforts). But these frailties were part of her style. Once she accepted them and allowed her own, stunningly original mind to push her prose along, rather than trying to hold it up with misplaced semi-colons and dutiful sub-clauses, she became a true writer: the writer that one hazards she would not have been had St Mary’s, Wantage, got its hands on her. Indeed one is tempted to attribute a vast deal of her vitality of mind to the fact that she was not raised to take twelve GCSEs, nor to get into head-to-heads with swots, nor to write tutorial essays on historical totems like the Seven Years War.20
In a 1951 essay Evelyn Waugh wrote of Nancy that ‘she received no education except in horsemanship and French. Liverish critics may sometimes detect traces of this defect in her work. But she wrote and read continually and has in the end achieved a patchy but bright culture and a way of writing so light and personal that it can almost be called a “style”.’ He is teasing hideously, of course, but he is also sincere; however much he may at times have deplored his own admiration for Nancy’s work, he was quite capable of recognising its specialness, and applauding its extraordinary trick of standing, delicately poised, between art and artlessness. Despite himself, he might have agreed that auto-didacticism had been the making of her.
Learning was something that Nancy would do for the rest of her life. What she learned specifically during her childhood was somet
hing less tangible; but, for her, at least as important. It was the value, the absolute value, of jokes. Those stolid country houses saw the birth of the ‘Mitford tease’. They were where Nancy first played upon people the prancing, probing tricks that she would practise all her life; as when at the age of fifty she drove half of England to distraction with her delicate fingering of its nerves in ‘U and Non-U’. They were where she began to weave the intricate pattern of private jokes, nicknames and languages which – as if the Mitfords were a separate species, with a view of the world too fantastical for the rest to see – the sisters would use into old age: Nancy and Jessica would always address one another as Susan, Diana would be Honks, Cord or Bodley (this was from Bodley Head – as a baby Diana’s head was said to be large), Pam was Woman, Deborah was Nine or Miss, Unity was Bonehead, Tom was Tuddemy (the word was thought to rhyme with adultery – a hilarious concept to the girls when applied to Tom), and Nancy herself was Naunce or Koko (from her dark and almost oriental appearance, said to resemble that of the character in The Mikado). Many families do this kind of thing, of course (although few writers put it into books, as Nancy did in The Pursuit of Love; yet few things bring characters to life so much as private jokes). With the Mitfords, however, the network became something deliberately obscure, extraordinarily exclusive: an endlessly complex game whose arcane rules were mostly invented by Nancy.
And the game was the outward expression of what became Nancy’s most fervently expressed belief: that nothing in the world matters more than jokes. For her, laughter came to have an intrinsic worth. It was how she dealt with growing up, with the irruption of Pam into her paradisiacal existence (dress up as a tramp and pretend to want to rape her), with the near-unbearable gloriousness of Diana (put her in a girl guide’s uniform), with the disturbing oddity of Unity (‘Darling Head of Bone & Heart of Stone’21), with the intense irritation caused to her by the little sisters (‘nit, sick and bore’), with the rivalry for the affections of her first nanny and her mother and her brother, with the tricky temperament of her father, with the whole damn lot of them in fact: everything, whether funny or not, became the subject of a joke, and that is how everything would remain. ‘Oh the screams’, she would write in her letters, so frequently that the phrase became its own kind of punctuation mark, ‘such screams... are you shrieking?’
It was an article of faith for Nancy, to laugh: and how she has been misunderstood for it! In the very words ‘screams’ and ‘shrieks’, which for Nancy meant nothing more sinister than laughter, there are those who strive to hear her repressed Munchian agony. But how wrong they are, to miss the stoical, smiling bravery of what became her philosophy of life: ‘I have decided’, as one of her heroes Voltaire had it, ‘to be happy, because it is better for my health.’ In a letter to Waugh she wrote: ‘In novels what I chiefly value are jokes’, a typical remark, whose partial truth is made complete by the sheer strength of her belief. If something was funny, it became bearable; and nothing was unbearable, because there was nothing that could not be made funny.
And this, perhaps, is the real difference that her upbringing made to Nancy. Almost certainly, in circumstances that were more ‘normal’, she would not have developed this carapace, a veneer that occasionally cracked but was never stripped away. It was, as her nephew Alexander says, a defence, a weapon: a necessity, indeed, for this rampantly clever and acutely sensitive girl, this black-haired green-eyed changeling set amongst those beautiful, calm Brünnhildes (‘I always felt’, she would later say, ‘I had come down the wrong chimney and ought to have been Anastasia’).
What else was she to do, trapped as she was in that milieu and that class, except amuse and be amused? Restless and relentless in her quest for laughter, the adolescent Nancy was the spark that set that family crackling – as it still does – with vitality. ‘The whole world’, said Jessica, describing the Mitford childhood to the BBC, ‘became a sort of tease put on by Nancy.’ One imagines her, striding lightly and elegantly through enormous chilly rooms, eyes terrifyingly alert beneath their veil of languor, neat head turning this way and that as she scented out the possibility of a new joke. Nasty? Alarming? Evidence of her ‘will to power’? Yes, in a way – as she herself was later to write: ‘There’s always surely an element of cruelty... I am a tease and I know it.’ And might she have lived differently, written differently, had she not been? Yes, again – for at a young age she learned to deflect her feelings, and they were strong ones: loves and resentments and jealousies and frustrations, feelings for which our modern orthodoxy demands free expression (You are not being funny, Nancy, you are in denial).
Yet in the midst of all this, one remembers Deborah’s straightforward, beautiful judgment upon her sister: ‘A light – she was like a light. She was an absolute live person. Her whole life was being so alive that you couldn’t imagine what she was like unless you were with her. And the funniness –!’
Surely this is the point? For all that we affect nowadays to hear sadness beneath laughter, or feel the iron thread of spite within jokes, we must never forget the pleasure that Nancy took in merriment, nor the sheer, determined, vital joy that was in her: ‘the frivolity’, as Rebecca West wrote after Nancy’s death, ‘which was her special grace’. Nor, perhaps, forget this throwaway remark from John Betjeman, who as an Oxford undergraduate came to know the family, who cast himself in the role of lovelorn admirer to ‘Miss Pam’ and who knew, one guesses, pretty much what was going on: ‘Nancy was the warmest of them all.’22
3
Avenue Henri-Martin is a Parisian thoroughfare typical of the seizième – broad, shadowy, sublimely correct – and it was described in a letter by Nancy Mitford as ‘more perfect and melancholy than any place you’ve ever seen. I don’t know why but I waited for a bus there once and when the bus came I was in tears...’
She continues, about Paris: ‘And then one can be more cheerful there than anywhere else in the world and I have often danced all the way down the Champs-Elysées... I think all day La Muette, Place de la Concorde, Place de l’Etoile, Avenue Hoch, Avenue du Bois, Place des Vosges, Palais Royal, Rue de Rivoli...’ This was written to Tom in 1927, years before Nancy went to live in the city, not long after a stay there with her mother and sisters. But these were feelings that she would never lose. Even as a girl, she seems to have intuited that fulfilment, for her, would lie outside England: that her intense Englishness would flower more brightly in a foreign setting.
She had visited Paris for the first time in 1922, aged seventeen, when she also went to Florence and Venice in the company of girls from Hatherop Castle. She fell head over heels for it all. Her excitement still vibrates, almost heartbreakingly, through the letters that she sent home: ‘we had a very scrumptious “croissant” ... How I loved the Louvre... I got postcards of all my favourite pictures. Mona Lisa is wonderful. Miss S. says men still fall in love with her... Oh! such fun...’1 This was a much simpler Nancy than the one that her family had had to deal with: a straightforward adolescent, happy amongst her peers, envying them the powdered noses which Lord Redesdale forbade, shrieking at jokes which bear no trace of anything but high spirits: ‘Such an amusing thing happened last night’, she wrote to her mother from Florence. ‘We had asparogas... We dared Marigold to throw her stalk over her back & she actually did it!... There is one old man who had an awfully nice face sitting opposite us, and he did laugh!’
Nancy fell into conversation with the old man (‘he is really, quite 45’) who was surprised to discover that she had read Ruskin, surely an unusual accomplishment amongst this merry band of gigglers; she was flattered by the episode but there is no real coquetry in the way she recounts it. How extraordinarily young she seems –! Innocent joy is the tone of her letters home. Yet they are full to the brim with an emotion that would develop and sustain Nancy all her life: an intense love for these new places, their sumptuous yet formal aestheticism, their worshipping at the altar of civilisation. These were the things that mattered to Nancy, as she was
now powerfully realising, and beneath her girlish frivolling she drank them down in gorgeous deep draughts. ‘If you knew what it is like here you would leave England for good & settle here at once’, she wrote to her mother; it was something she would say, and mean, more and more.
And her mother might have agreed with her when she saw her new house: Swinbrook, or Swinebrook, as Nancy was to call it. In 1926, Sydney and her daughters returned from a hotel on the elegant Avenue Victor Hugo to the home that Lord Redesdale had built for them all. It was the first time they had seen it, and it was a hideous shock. Perhaps Sydney was partly to blame in a way, leaving her husband to get on with the house while she went back and forth from Asthall to London, and then off to France; as David Pryce-Jones put it, ‘everyone who might have softened its design was away in Paris’. In 1927, when the full awfulness of Swinbrook had made itself apparent, Nancy wrote to Tom in the mocking, slightly theatrical tone that she habitually used in her letters to him:
Deep depression has the Mitford family in its clutches, the birds [her parents] never speak save to curse or groan & the rest of us are overcome with gloom. Really this house is too hideous for words & its rather pathetic attempt at aesthetic purity makes it in my opinion worse.
It is an odd-looking house, no question. Swinbrook village is a place of somnolent and secret calm, taking its name from the stream that trickles gently through its heart; a place of old stone houses, sloping fields and climbing, winding lanes against whose banks pheasants gleam like jewels. Swinbrook House, which looms aggressively on top of a hill rising out of the village, looks like some lesser Nazi’s vision of a Cotswold manor house. Its eight identical window-frames seem to have been outlined with a thick dark pen, its four identical chimneys are unyieldingly square, its brickwork is rough and hard and of mysteriously bogus appearance. This was Lord Redesdale’s land, and he could do with it whatever he pleased, but the horribly symmetrical house he built looks, quite frankly, like an imposition. Nobody liked it, except Deborah, who was so blissfully happy growing up in the country – riding to hounds, reading the Sporting Life, picking fleas off her dachshund – that even living in this odd, bare, draughty box could not depress her. Also, unlike the other children, she had not had time to get attached to Asthall.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 8