Of course Peter was going away, and there is nothing like that for making people feel fondly towards each other. But the fact is that their near-dead marriage had been gently rekindled by circumstances. Had no war come, had the Rodds still been living that semi-squalid, wholly dreary routine of jobs gained, jobs lost; baby conceived, baby lost; adultery; bridge; drunkenness; with nothing but litters of gorgeous, slithery puppies to lighten Nancy’s days, then that would have been it. But the international situation, and Peter’s impeccable response to it all, gave Nancy the chance to care for her husband again.
‘It is perhaps something’, he wrote to her in 1940, ‘to be destined to fight in the biggest battle since the world began. I don’t pretend not to be frightened, but duty and destiny are all so clearly defined that it will be easier to take a proper part.’ The mere fact of his writing this implies sincere feeling for Nancy, even if only a desire to look good in her eyes. Yet a throwaway remark of Harold Acton’s acts as a deadly counterbalance: in his memoir of Nancy, Acton writes that when he encountered Peter at the Savile Club, on leave during the war, ‘he would ask me not to tell Nancy that he was in London’.
Commentators tend to see the Rodd marriage as irretrievably over by this time, indeed from about 1936 onwards; they say that Nancy was merely carrying on with Peter for form’s sake, that she was suffering agonies over his infidelity and unreliability, that her life with him was a half-life only. This is true, in essentials; yet it does not quite square with the tone of the letters written, by both of them, in the early years of the war. It does not allow sufficiently for ambiguity. Marriage is never – except at its beginning and end, and not even always then – just one thing or another. It is often thought to be, but perhaps women like Nancy (and her sisters) knew better. The funny little revival in her marriage, born of residual affection, possibly of residual physical attraction, above all of circumstance, was not so surprising; nor did it require from her great forgiveness or painful compromises. In 1941 she wrote, inside the cover of her diary: ‘Marriage is the most important thing in life & must be kept going at almost any cost...’, And she believed this, even when her own behaviour betrayed her.
As for Peter, dodging his wife in the Savile Club: of course that was him all over, still playing the delinquent, still yearning for escape. It did not mean that he had no fondness for Nancy, more that he couldn’t be bothered with anything that made steady demands upon him. Nancy probably knew this. She knew that war was transitory, that it was not life, that everything would be different when it was all over. ‘War psychology’, as she would write of her heroine, Sophia, in her next novel, ‘so incomprehensible during peace time, already had her in its grip’. But for the time being, she was enjoying her strange state of limbo, and her even stranger state of looking up to her husband.
Given that her life had frankly stagnated in the mid-1930s, the novelty of the situation must have been very welcome. ‘Well I enjoyed the war very much, I’m ashamed to say,’ Nancy told her television interviewer in 1966. It energised her, and it actually made her happy again. Dreadful though it might be and had already been, it at least shook things up. Before war broke out Nancy felt that the years of her marriage had been about nothing, that all they had done was to take her down towards the end of youth. But she was only thirty-five, and in a sense was still like someone at the start of their life: ‘she had’, says Diana, ‘the joie de vivre that goes with a prolonged adolescence.’ It took little to make her buoyantly attractive once again, and wartime London seems to have done the trick. She relished it. ‘Everyone was in a very good temper. Nice and jolly,’ she said, which for her was paramount. It is surely significant that after little more than a month of war, she began a new novel (hoping, no doubt, to exorcise the memory of Wigs on the Green, whose publication had been made so utterly bloody by family feuds).
She wrote Pigeon Pie while working at a first-aid post in Praed Street, near to her home (her stint as an all-night driver clearly hadn’t lasted). The new job was atrociously boring: ‘this is my 9th day and feels like 7 years’, she wrote to Violet Hammersley. ‘Anyway in case I didn’t I must tell you about the foreheads. Well my job is writing on the foreheads of dead & dying in indelible pencil. What I write I haven’t yet discovered... I think I shall write Mrs Hammersley 31 Tite Street & see what happens, it might produce interesting complications in a case of loss of memory.’
Yet it is obvious from Nancy’s letters – which have a terrific zest, quite different from the taut misery of a couple of years earlier – that she was champing at the bit. And so, despite extremely unpropitious circumstances – the cold, the ‘electric light all day’ and what she called a brain ‘like the inside of a bad walnut’ – she started her book. ‘I am... writing a funny book about spies it is very funny indeed (I think!)’ she wrote to Jessica, in November 1939.
Not everyone would agree that Pigeon Pie is very funny indeed. Those people who don’t really get Nancy – who view her style as amusing, but also as the precious ramblings of a superficial snob – would be deeply irritated by the book. It has in fact been called her worst novel (by Jonathan Guinness). One can see why, in a way. She wrote it in fits and starts and the plot is, at first glance, terribly silly. Yet to those people who do get Nancy, who can’t get enough of that sparkling stream of consciousness, the book makes clear what has hitherto been hinted at: that here is a writer with the priceless gift of infinite readability.
This heroine, Lady Sophia Garfield, is the prime ingredient in Nancy’s Pigeon Pie. She is an extremely satisfying person for a reader to live with: feminine, rather sexy, emotional yet controlled, able to handle husband and lover and competition. She copes admirably when her lover, Rudolph (attractive, irresponsible, very much Prod), shows signs of being interested in another woman, the idiotic vampish Olga. ‘Sophia saw that she must look out. She knew very well that when a man is thoroughly disloyal about a woman, and at the same time begins to indulge in her company, he nearly always intends to have an affair with that woman.’ So Sophia puts an end to a date with Rudolph – ‘this new predilection... was becoming a bore’ – by telling him she is dining with another man: ‘Rudolph said no more. He stopped the cab... hailed another cab going in the opposite direction, jumped into it and disappeared.
‘Sophia minded rather... but he must be taught a lesson.’
This is enchanting, capable without being smug; and it shows that in many ways Sophia is the woman Nancy would like to have been. She later wrote that Sophia was based upon her pretty friend, the political hostess Lady Pamela Berry,5 who handled her life with a light but sure touch. But of course Sophia is also Nancy. Indeed writing her may have made Nancy more like her. ‘Sophia had a happy character and was amused by life’: it became true of her creator, too, because for Nancy imagining did not stop on the page, it permeated reality. And there was something else, something in the way that she wrote Sophia, the detached and benevolent assurance of the phrases that bring her to life. With Nancy, so much was a question of idiom, of portraying a view of life in a style so decided, so complete, that style becomes substance. By writing in this way, with these delicate flicks of the pen that reveal a good deal and conceal even more, Nancy began to make for herself a persona, a perspective, a philosophy that would sustain her through life: sustain her readers also.
Sophia’s charm is the book’s charm: easy, gossipy, intimate, slightly restrained. This was Nancy’s charm too, and for the first time what she wrote is marinated in her particular and inimitable flavour. Sophia’s voice infuses the novel, as Fanny’s was later to do. Moving from the third to the first person would, in The Pursuit of Love, complete the job, but even here it works beautifully. Nancy had learned, or intuited, that she need do nothing but write in her own way, that everything else is excess baggage; possibly the difficulties involved in getting Pigeon Pie on to the page forced her to keep it simple, and what luck that was. The reader is wholly comfortable with the book because Nancy too is à son aise.
She is completely confident about what she is doing, even though she knew that she could probably do better. As she would, of course, with the book that followed Pigeon Pie. In The Pursuit of Love, her complete confidence would be completely justified; there, she would have every reason in the world to believe that she knew what she was doing. There, she found her subject at last, and it danced to perfection with her voice. But the voice – clear, clean, childlike; knowing, good-natured, apparently artless – she had found already: in Pigeon Pie.
The plot, however, can surely be dismissed as a spy story so ludicrous that Sapper wouldn’t have given it house room. Or can it? In fact, Pigeon Pie holds up pretty well on that front also. ‘I must tell you it’s very evocative of the phoney war’, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh in 1951, when the novel was reissued, as passages such as this one show: ‘Rather soon after the war was declared, it became obvious that nobody intended it to begin. The belligerent countries were behaving like children in a round game, picking up sides.’6
This is the kind of simple, sensible thing that Nancy wrote and that turns her silly spy story into light but legitimate satire. She creates an old singer, Sir Ivor King, much beloved by the English and known as ‘The King of Song’, who is kidnapped by the Nazis and forced to make wireless broadcasts for them (‘“Good night dears”, said the old König, “keep your hairs on. By the way, where is the Ark Royal?”’). Ridiculous, of course; but the whole point is that it is meant to be. It is a joke on the phoney-war mentality, when people were so primed for action that they saw nuns as Huns and carrier pigeons as enemy agents. Sophia is a part of this. She wants to be a secret agent, she wants to inhabit the world of Bulldog Drummond and save her country; but when it comes down to it ‘she had not really the temperament best suited to the work. It was not in her nature, for instance, to relish being sent out on a cold and foggy evening, after she had had her bath and changed her clothes.’ Nancy’s joke is to put an unlikely person bang in the middle of a spy story; like Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm, Sophia shows up her surroundings just by being in them. ‘You’ve known the whole works since Greta disappeared, haven’t you?’ says Heatherley, the American (double) agent with whom Sophia thinks she is in league. ‘What works? Darling Heth, do tell me; it does sound such heaven...’
Nancy is pulling the same trick as she did in Wigs on the Green, when she put Fascism into the village of Chalford and yokels into Union Jack shirts. She was cutting through the mists that grow around ideas, concepts, ideologies, and picking out the personal motivations that lie within (later she would do this, to delectable effect, in her historical biographies). It is a wonderful way of telling the truth about people. Sophia wants to be a spy for noble reasons, because she wants to help England win the war; but she also wants to be a spy because Olga has been hinting at her own secret-agent activities. ‘How fortunate’, Sophia thinks, wishing that Heatherley were more attractive, ‘she loved her work for its own sake (and that of Olga).’
This kind of satire is not really satire at all: it is just Nancy’s way of looking at things, which is so clear as to seem almost skewed. As such, it is easy to see why Pigeon Pie has been condemned as silly to the point of irresponsibility. Again, however, this misses the point. From the time of Pigeon Pie onwards, Nancy was not attempting to be a satirist, she was simply relating things as she saw them. Those who criticise her writing – as naïve, trivial, frivolous, snobbish – do so as if, in their collective mind, there was some mysterious ideal of correctness against which she is refusing to measure up. They judge her in relation to something that she is not, rather than according to what she is. Yet by 1940 Nancy was pretty much sui generis as a writer: ‘purely idiosyncratic’, as Evelyn Waugh was to say7. Criticising Pigeon Pie as naïve, trivial etc. therefore seems meaningless, like criticising a poodle for failing to be a Dobermann.
Anyway the book is not wholly silly. When Sophia rescues the King of Song from his kidnappers at the end of the book, he ‘looked at her, she thought, as if he never expected to see her again in life; he spoke with the abruptness and irritation of a badly frightened man’. Even at this preliminary stage of the war, Nancy knows where the necessary loyalties lie: any character who has ever been remotely keen on Germany is subjected to a delicate, merciless contempt. Of Sophia’s husband – based upon her brother-in-law Francis Rodd – Nancy writes that ‘the chief reason he loved the Germans was because they buttered him up so much. All those free rides in motors and aeroplanes.’ Anyone who dodges war work is also made to suffer. Jessica Romilly appears in the book as a character called Mary Pencill, who ‘loved Sophia but thought her incurably frivolous’, and who is stuffed to the brim with principle, little of which translates into action. Mary mocks Sophia’s job of writing on foreheads at the first-aid post, ‘Sophia said that it was better than doing nothing like Mary, and they rang off, each in a huff.’
Nancy felt very deeply about what she saw as shirking. ‘I really think it rather queer that out of 7 able-bodied Mitfords only Tom and I are attempting any sort of war work’, she wrote to Mrs Hammersley in October 1939. This was a little unfair: Unity was hors de combat, Diana had a very young child (Alexander Mosley, born in 1938) and was pregnant with her fourth son (Max, born April 1940). Jessica had travelled with Esmond to America, where he would join up with the Canadian Air Force and she would conceive his child (Constancia, born in February 1941) Pamela, whose husband Derek Jackson was in the RAF, was running a farm; and Deborah, of whom Nancy wrote in 1939 that she was ‘having a wild time with young cannon fodder at the Ritz etc.’, later worked in a YMCA canteen (although she did admit that marriage, to Lord Andrew Cavendish in 1941, was a preferable kind of ‘work of national importance’). But these anti-family remarks of Nancy’s were in keeping with her detachment from them all at this time; as was her dig at Jessica in Pigeon Pie. The book, incidentally, was not liked by Nanny Blor, who may have intuited its coolness towards the girls she loved.
Pigeon Pie sets forth what Nancy considered the correct form of behaviour: insouciant courage, and unrelenting patriotism. Germans are ghastly (‘they have always been the same since the days of the Roman Empire’), Americans are almost worse (‘Luke hates jokes and hates the war... so isn’t he lucky to be going to America where they have neither?’). Meanwhile there is an instinctive faith in Englishness: ‘Mind you, of course, we’re bound to win really, in the end’, says one of Sophia’s light-hearted Cabinet minister friends: ‘we always do.’
It is a joke, but Nancy means it. In its way her philosophy had, by this time, become as simple as that of her sisters. It gave her life a straightforward and satisfying meaning, not least because of the respect it enabled her to feel for her husband. She would never have written Rudolph as such a sexy character – a devil, but deep down on the side of righteousness – had relations with Peter not revived themselves. This was what war could do. It simplified, and it brought to life as it destroyed. For Nancy, more than most people, this would be very precisely the case.
There is a strange, semi-poetic passage early in Pigeon Pie, in which Sophia delves beneath the polished surface of her life, and remembers buried days of hunting. ‘Riding home from the last meet of a season, late in the afternoon of a spring day, there would be primroses and violets under the hedges, far far away the sound of a horn, and later an owl. The world is not a bad place, it is a pity to have to die. But of course, it is only a good place for a very few people.’
It is the kind of memory – so surprising in so urban a woman – that would inform The Pursuit of Love: infuse it, indeed. Here it is uncharacteristic, and one wonders what was in Nancy’s mind when she wrote it. It is as though she was impelled in some unconscious way by thoughts of the life now gone, when the Mitford family had seemed an indestructible entity beneath the Cotswold sky. Perhaps she was thinking not just of herself but of Unity, whose memories of that former life were now scattered about her brain like refugees, or lost in the hole she believed the doctors to have made in her head
. At the start of 1940, Unity made her halting way back to Oxfordshire and to the world of the Mitford past. ‘She is like a child in many ways’, Nancy wrote to Mrs Hammersley. ‘She is very happy to be back, keeps on saying “I thought you all hated me but I don’t remember why”. She said to me You are not one of those who would be cruel to somebody are you? So I said I was very much against that.’
Nancy’s detachment failed her when, for the first time, she saw great galumphing Boud lying in her nursing home bed, incontinent, with yellow teeth and matted hair and eyes whose blue glare had been switched to dim: for Unity, the world was not a good place, it was sad and still, filled only with pity, and would never be much more again. Nancy had to leave the room to weep for the wreckage of her sister. Then she stayed for a while with her mother at Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe, helping out while she tried to finish Pigeon Pie (‘Darling I hasten to write a word... such a scribble...’ she wrote to Violet Hammersley: every second was clearly precious). But Nancy could not have left Lady Redesdale after a mere flying visit. This was a duty too, as much as war work.
Unity was not just an outcast, who had blistered her family name by its searing contact with Nazism (even now, seventy years on, it is what people say first: ‘Oh the Mitfords, wasn’t one of them in love with Hitler?’). She was not just destructive, she was destroyed; and the mother whose life she had effectively ended had now to tend the ruin of her daughter. Unity needed continual nursing. There was the bed linen to be changed daily, the feeding as of an elderly stroke patient, the endless attempts to understand and to convey meaning, and all for a twenty-five-year-old girl who, a few months earlier, had had the massive life force of a six-month-old St Bernard. Those who condemn Unity as a wicked fool who got all that she deserved forget that she was not the only casualty. Her parents had to live with the consequences of her pointless action, and it is hard to imagine anything much harder to bear.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 19