And then there were the writers: Waugh of course (‘I loved Evelyn really I think the best of all my friends,’ Nancy said when he died19); Henry Yorke (whose grimly clever books were published under the name Henry Green – ‘No one wrote about the poor before him,’ said Waugh to Nancy, not wholly seriously); John Betjeman (whose joyful, watchful eye was the first to perceive the sisters as an entity, in his little poem ‘The Mitford Girls, the Mitford Girls! I love them for their sins’); and so it went on. Tom Driberg, James Lees-Milne, Cecil Beaton... no wonder poor old Sir Hugh of the Grenadier Guards lacked something in the conversation stakes. What made these men so fantastically attractive to Nancy was that they celebrated laughter – her favourite thing – but at the same time they gave to it an intellectual underpinning: a rigour. In many ways they were probably just as silly as any of the other young people she had ever met, what with their desire to shock and show off, their innate schoolboyishness, their faintly desperate clubbishness, their joking passion for hideous Victoriana, their sexual naïvety. But with all of this they had wonderful lively brains, which – rather as with Nancy herself – had developed way beyond everything else about them.
Mostly they were friends of Tom’s, from Eton and Oxford (they all attended the university, which was near Swinbrook, and all came down with terrible degrees – indeed Betjeman left with none). Nancy later said: ‘Everything changed when my brother went to Eton’20, although it is odd that she saw Tom as the bridge between herself and her new life, when she had already begun to meet these dazzlers under her own steam. Mark Ogilvie-Grant was a cousin of Nina Seafield, and thus the means to all sorts of amusing ends: in 1928 Nancy described a fortnight at Cullen, one of Nina’s homes in Scotland, as ‘a perfect fortnight among highly civilised people!!’ The highest praise, indeed.
‘Most of the people I know are frank barbarians (Muv & Farve specially)’, her letter to Tom continued. Her delicious new friendships had set up a situation that she seems almost to have relished: the pull between dank, freezing Swinbrook and joyful, coruscating London. The fact that Nancy understood both sides of the paradox equally well – the parochial and the cosmopolitan, the earthy and the worldly – was to inform her novels for many years.
For one couldn’t make it up, really, the idea of a clash between Lord Redesdale and, say, Brian Howard. One thinks of Love in a Cold Climate, and the scene in which Uncle Matthew loses control when he sees that the glittering homosexual, Cedric Hampton, has the seams of his coat ‘piped in a contrasting shade’. Nancy and Tom would turn up at their Lesser Nazi Country House with a bunch of aesthetes in tow: the Swinbrook Sewers, sloshing around in their Oxford bags (as pioneered by Harold Acton) or drooping on sofas like so many giggling Chattertons. Jessica described the scene in Hons and Rebels:
At week-ends they would swoop down from Oxford or London in merry hordes, to be greeted with solid disapproval by my mother and furious glares by my father. Boud [Unity], Debo and I were on the whole carefully insulated from Nancy’s friends, as my mother considered them a totally bad influence. ‘What a set!’ she always said when some of their more outrageous ideas were expounded by Nancy. They talked in the jargon of their day: ‘Darling, too, too divine, too utterly sickmaking, how shamemaking!’
As usual with Jessica, this is teetering upon exaggeration; and, as usual, Nancy is partly responsible, because the character of Uncle Matthew, with his towering hatred of art and literature and anything remotely unmanly, has surely informed Jessica’s account. In fact Robert Byron wrote a letter to his mother, possibly doctored for her consumption, that gave a (disappointingly) sober view of his Swinbrook weekend: ‘The Mitford family are very amusing – especially Nancy, and I enjoy being here.’ Even Brian Howard was probably saved by his ability to ride to hounds; while Mark Ogilvie-Grant became a great favourite of Lord Redesdale and was invited to eat ‘brains for breakfast!’ at eight o’clock sharp.
And if the aesthetes did behave like Noël Coward on a Countryside Alliance March, or – as James Lees-Milne did – put their foot in it by being insufficiently anti-German, it probably gave Lord Redesdale something to get his tired old dentures into. As for his wife, who like Aunt Sadie ‘had known the world as a girl’, she probably derived some amusement from these irruptions into her comfortless new home. The Redesdales didn’t have to accept these people at Swinbrook, yet they visited often enough.
Anyway, how irritating it would have been to Nancy had her parents embraced the aesthetes wholeheartedly! In her first novel, Highland Fling, her heroine Jane has ‘charming, rather cultured’ parents of infinite tolerance, and it drives her mad; little is more annoying to a child than to do something shocking only to find that one’s parents are not shocked at all, and Nancy was still in many ways a child. Jessica recounts how Nancy tripped home one day with a print of Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection, which sent her father into ‘one of his classic rages’. ‘We rather assumed that at least a partial reason for this interest [in modern art] was to “tease the Old Sub-Human” – and tease him it did, most effectively.’ If the story is true then of course Jessica’s assumption is right.
Such behaviour was all part of this limbo in which Nancy was living, between the schoolroom and the marriage bed. She chafed against it; even though, when she had had her chance of escape to Queen’s Gate in 1927, she couldn’t stick it at all. It was part of the Mitford myth – started by Nancy, perpetuated by Jessica – to portray the girls as shrieking Rapunzels behind the walls of Swinbrook prison, yearning for the world outside to which their father barred the door. All the same: ‘Leaving home – I think that’s been rather exaggerated,’ Diana later said of Nancy.21 When Diana married in January 1929, acquiring a beautiful house in Buckingham Street to which the Swinbrook Sewers flocked, Nancy had a place where she could see her friends (now – annoyingly? – Diana’s also) in total freedom. Later that year she tasted freedom again, moving to the little flat in Canonbury Square taken by Evelyn Waugh and his wife; but this cosy arrangement, which promised much fun, came to an end after a bare month, when Waugh’s wife announced that she had taken a lover (a development that deeply coloured the work-in-progress Vile Bodies). But Nancy still had Nina Seafield and other friends; she had Rutland Gate, and the mews house behind it in which Tom was living while studying for the Bar; as prison life went, it was not so bad.
Nevertheless there was some real, not theatrical, parental exasperation at this time, which probably had concern for Nancy’s future at the root of it. After all, nobody thought that she would make a career for herself as a writer. Jobs for women were not an option; what, then, was to happen to her? All she ever did, apparently, was gallivant with a bunch of shrieking urban poseurs who left her parents occasionally amused but more often bewildered. Her mother disapproved of her staying with Nina Seafield (Sydney had a genuine distrust of very rich people, no doubt seeing in their money the means to immorality; although Nina was hardly Eurotrash. According to Harold Acton she ‘resembled a juvenile Queen Victoria with red hair and a hesitant stammer’). In 1931 Nancy wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, saying of her parents: ‘They have been simply too odious lately, & had a fearful row the other day ending up by accusing me of drinking.’ This is almost comical, when one thinks that a year later Diana would be leaving Bryan Guinness to set herself up as Oswald Mosley’s maîtresse en titre. But before 1932 it was Nancy who was deemed, relatively speaking, to be the problem.
Which is why, in Highland Fling, published in 1931, she created the character of General Murgatroyd: a pantomime version of Uncle Matthew, a one-dimensional Lord Redesdale, upon whom she vents her frustrations (in an act of authorial revenge, for example, the General is shown wildly beating his gundog on a shoot and then being savaged by a tiny Pekinese). At the age of twenty-five or-six she was still under her father’s ultimate jurisdiction, and her parents were still treating her like a rebellious adolescent, because her adolescence was still, in a sense, going on. Yet her frustrations were not, au fond, with the Rede
sdales, but with her own life. For all its compensations and jollifications, by the end of the 1920s it was beginning to disenchant her: as her newly discovered vocation would make increasingly clear.
‘I wrote a book because I wanted to earn a hundred pounds.’ So Nancy would later say22 (in fact she earned £90 from Highland Fling), and like many of her statements it was probably about half true. Why anyone becomes a writer is in the end a mystery. But certainly at the beginning Nancy followed Dr Johnson, in believing that the desire to earn money was as good a reason as any: ‘Oh yes, oh yes, I’ve always needed money! Terribly!... That’s why I had to chuck painting, because I realised I couldn’t earn any money at it.’ When she said this, on television in 1966, writing had made her a rich woman. But back in the late 1920s money simply meant a sudden new shoot of independence, or a new dress, or some other kind of hand to mouth pleasure; she started to write with that uppermost in mind.
All the same it was in the blood. Bertram Mitford had written; Thomas Bowles had founded Vanity Fair and The Lady; it was not so surprising, that Nancy should think of contributing articles to magazines like Vogue, nor that in 1930 she should become a regular columnist (paid £5.5s.0d. a week) on The Lady, nor that she should try her hand – as many of her friends did – at a novel.
Much of her charm comes from the fact that she clearly had no desire, ever, to struggle with writing. Jessica described in Hons and Rebels how Nancy had sat writing Highland Fling, ‘giggling helplessly by the drawing-room fire, her curiously triangular green eyes flashing with amusement, while her thin pen flew along the lines of a child’s exercise book’: the impression, above all, is of someone for whom this came naturally. Later – after The Pursuit of Love – when she discovered that this had become her job for life, she often struggled like mad and complained, during a radio broadcast in 1946, of suffering from writer’s cramp. But at the start the whole point of writing was to make her life easier, not harder: agonising in noble poverty was not Nancy’s scene. Nor did she ever have difficulty in getting published: ‘I never had any trouble. Luckily, because I think if I had it would have put me orf completely, I don’t think I’d ever have gone on.’23
In fact it is slightly surprising that Highland Fling did get published: it really isn’t very good (‘I blush now when I read it,’ Nancy said in 1946). Because it is a comic novel of upper-class life, one might assume it to have similarities with her post-war books, but there are only the barest flashes of authentic Mitford. Jokes about the cult of Victoriana (as espoused by Robert Byron), or modern art (she describes a painter using ‘prepared dung’ – little did she know), or Bright Young Things staging a fake funeral for fun, are not quite her. That delicious clear voice of hers – which would later ring out with the strength and simplicity of a bell – is muffled by modishness and show-off lack of assurance. And her humour, which would become so soufflé light, is heavy going: one has the sense of a horse being flogged into desperate life.
‘My book has gone to the agents whose verdict I await in a state of palpitation’, Nancy wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant in early 1930. ‘I’m afraid it won’t be accepted, everyone thinks it very bad.’ But Nancy, from the first, had the gift of writing the right thing at the right time, and satire on the bright young people was then all the rage. ‘Have had to alter the book quite a lot as it is so like Evelyn’s in little ways, such a bore.’ In fact Nancy did not care for Vile Bodies (‘I was frankly very much disappointed in it I must say’24), whose grandiose and hysterical cynicism would not have been to her taste. Nevertheless it is in a different league altogether to Highland Fling.
But Thornton Butterworth Ltd, Nancy’s first publisher, saw something there. No doubt they liked the idea of this pretty, well-connected girl who wrote in the style du jour; a bit of a novelty, after all, and a good bet for publicity. ‘I suppose they don’t take anything that’s absolutely unmarketable’, Nancy wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who drew the cover for the book. And Highland Fling sold well for a first novel (‘it sells a steady 30 a day’), not least because it was well reviewed (‘specially in the Evening News & Standard which really count as I don’t know who writes them’25). This was perhaps a by-product of privilege. Although Nancy would later be judged with the tough respect accorded to a ‘real’ writer, and later still would be characterised as a ‘posh dizzy spinster’26, never were her books tossed casually to the wolves in the way that happens with so many writers. She was always, to an extent, protected by who she was.
And it was her position in society that got her writing career kicked off. Not just the family connection with The Lady; her earliest journalism took the form of anonymous gossip sold to newspapers (as is portrayed in Vile Bodies). Then, from 1929, she became a sort of social commentator. For Vogue she anatomised the society wedding and the shooting party (for which she was paid a ‘stingy’ £6.6s.0d. – she always remarked upon her fee); for her column in The Lady she wrote about a day at a point-to-point, or an evening of Wagner at Covent Garden; and so on. It was the kind of thing that she would always do, a tease upon the upper-classes. And it was done well enough, based as it was upon close (if not especially inspired) observation. This is from ‘At a Point-to-Point’, published in March 1930: ‘Let me here remind you that it is in no way your duty to put money on those of your acquaintances who may be riding: your pound does them no good, and is lost to you for ever. Far better to keep it to spend on flowers, books, or chocolates for them in the nursing home where they are almost certain to pass the next few weeks.’ Such writing reads very cosily now, with a satirical bite as harmless as a kitten’s; although it looks a little more jagged in the context of old copies of The Lady, among articles entitled – for instance – ‘How to Knit a Chenille Beret’.
The columns give a flavour of what her life was like: conventional in the extreme and not especially congenial to her. There is a fascinating, slow-growing antipathy to the typical values and pursuits of the English upper-classes. Nancy is laughing, but she is also gritting her teeth as she describes the cold of country houses (‘it is advisable to wear a little coat over your dinner dress’), or the dimness of country house guests (‘It is tolerably safe to chatter away on such subjects as The Toll of the Road’). ‘It is well known all over the world that the English, as a nation, take their pleasures sadly’, she wrote in her article about point-to-points, meaning it about a good deal else besides. When, in Highland Fling, Nancy’s hero says that Paris is ‘the only place where he had known complete well-being’, he is speaking for what Nancy herself had started, dimly, to realise.
In fact there is real disenchantment in Highland Fling. The dynamic of the book lies in the clash between youth and age, Bright Young Things and Blimps: the plot takes a small band of languid Londoners and sets them among a hunting, shooting and fishing house party in a Scottish castle. It is a promising idea, but the satire is all over the place. The young characters are actually less attractive than the codgers. This is probably because, deep inside herself, Nancy didn’t like them much either.
She shows us, for example, the marriage of a smart, impoverished young couple – Walter and Sally Monteath – who despite Walter’s careless infidelities are absolute soulmates. This could be real and interesting, but Walter is so fatally charmless that it is impossible to care. When he says, of his new baby, that he wants to call it Morris because ‘we might get one free for an advertisement’, it is clear that his creator is trying to be cynical. But the effect is more cynical than Nancy realises; depressingly cynical, as only young people like Walter can be, when they are both horribly confident and hopelessly at sea. Never trust the teller, trust the tale: beneath the remorseless high spirits, this book has an odd, bleak sense of dislocation. English society, declaims one of the characters, has ‘no sex or brain left, only nerves and the herd instinct’. Nancy may not have known quite what she meant by this, may have thought she was being merely daring, but within the desire to shock there is a germ of confused sincerity.
Of course Highland Fling was received, at the time, very much as a romp: ‘an excellent antidote to care or a railway journey’, said the TLS, kindly. Nowadays, the book is fascinating in relation to Nancy’s later work, for in it her real self is overlaid with attitudes: those of the iconoclastic young with whom she had little empathy. Like an elegant woman who feels obliged, in order to be modish, to dress herself in ripped jeans and Converse trainers, so Nancy writes, in Highland Fling, that the statues of great men should be ‘put where they belong – in the Chamber of Horrors – thus serving the cause both of Art and of Morals’. As if she believed anything of the kind –! But she does not, as yet, have a clue what else she should be saying or thinking. She writes of her heroine, Jane, that ‘her brain was like a mirror, reflecting the thoughts and the ideas of her more intelligent friends and the books that she read’, and this was utterly true of Nancy: her book is a queasy cocktail of cut-price Waugh and bargain-basement Wodehouse, topped off with quotes from people whose remarks sounded witty at a party but on the page look downright daft.
Yet within the impenetrable maze that is Highland Fling are faint gleams of the writer that Nancy would become: the one who did the most daring thing of all, threw off all other influences in order to see and think entirely for herself. As the TLS, almost twenty years on and with deceptively simple understanding, would put it in a review of Love in a Cold Climate: ‘She writes about things clearly as they appear to her to happen: not about things which might happen if human nature were altogether different; or things described through a fog of verbal obscurity. In doing this she does no small service to the contemporary English novel...’
Life in a Cold Climate Page 11