Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  It brought their marriage to an end. Grief is conventionally thought to bring people closer together; in fact, at its strongest, when both parties are feeling with equal intensity, it separates them. And so it was with the Redesdales, who anyway were not the kind of people to share their emotions. David could not bear to be with his daughter. More sensitive than Sydney, he also became more useless; he had always shuddered at clumsiness or messiness in children (‘spilling food on the good table-cloth’ he would say – this may partly explain Nancy’s own fastidiousness) and now, in a grown girl, he had to watch the dribblings of a new-born baby. Beyond this, however, was the sense that Hitler was to blame for it all. David must have torn himself apart over his own brief infatuation with that gimcrack regime, but he at least was over it. Sydney – perhaps for similar reasons of self-justification – still professed admiration for Germany, which was ridiculous but understandable. But it was too much for her husband. ‘Things are terrible’, Nancy wrote to Mrs Hammersley from High Wycombe in February. ‘Muv & Farve absolutely at loggerheads...’

  One feels for both of them, to an appalling degree. It was not David’s fault that he could not cope with it, that he took refuge in Inch Kenneth or Rutland Gate: his solitary misery must have been acute. It was from Sydney, however, that the day-in, day-out bravery was required. There was not much else she could have done, of course; it was one of those situations that can only be endured (Blor helped out for a while, but she had her own family). Nonetheless Sydney’s stoicism and competence were admirable. Even Nancy said as much, in a letter to Decca: ‘Muv has been too wonderful with her [Unity] and has absolutely given up her whole life.’ Conversely, David ‘hardly goes near her, and has never been there to relieve Muv and give her a chance to have a little holiday’. David had been told, quite early on, that Unity would never recover, while Sydney was given a ‘kindlier’ prognosis. ‘I think, for her sake, one should cling to the former don’t you?’ wrote Nancy. But the harsher version was the true one, as so often is the case. Unity did regain strength and mobility, and would embark on little excursions from the cottage that Sydney took next door to the pub in Swinbrook (near the hated old Mitford home), taking a bus into Oxford, sometimes simply wandering off like a vagrant. She had become a shambolic figure: bursting hugely out of her clothes, seething with frustrations that she barely understood. Her pleasures were the goats that Sydney kept (making cheese ‘off the ration’ from their milk), and the collages that she made on tables in the cottage sitting room. ‘...if I so much as put my knitting on one of them she hies up and shrieks BLOODY FOOL in my ear which becomes rather irksome’8, wrote Deborah, who lived in Swinbrook before her marriage to Lord Andrew Cavendish. Unity had taken an irrational hatred to Deborah: ‘She is completely different to what she was and I think the worst thing... is that she’s completely lost her sense of humour and never laughs.’ The worst thing, indeed, for a Mitford.

  But Nancy, who despite frequent visits to Swinbrook was less grindingly exposed to Unity, decided to view things differently. In March 1940, she wrote to Jessica that ‘Bowd is so wonderfully much better... now she is her old self again. Of course very ill still, but the same person, not a quite different one.’ Perhaps Nancy was trying to console both Jessica and herself. At any rate she achieved what she wanted, which was to absorb the sadness of her sister’s situation and nurture the small flame of her own happiness.

  If she had hopes for Pigeon Pie, however, these would come to nothing. That clever little creature was stillborn in May 1940: the phoney war had got too real for readers to laugh at the kidnapping of the King of Song. ‘It should be just what people are in the mood for, if we are quick’, said her new publisher, Hamish Hamilton. They were not quick enough. Holland and Belgium fell as Nancy’s novel emerged with its pretty hands over its eyes. ‘Poor, sweet, charming Sophia!’ wrote the Spectator. ‘She is, alas! An unimportant casualty’, concluded the review, not unkindly.

  So Pigeon Pie bit the dust just as Wigs on the Green had done. One has to wonder how Nancy felt at this time about her writing career, and whether it seemed like a career at all. One suspects not. She had written four novels, a considerable achievement for someone doing it, as it were, on the side; the books were always reviewed, usually politely and never savagely; she had improved immeasurably as a writer, as she must have been aware, yet there had been no real change in her status since she came up with Highland Fling back in 1931.

  Almost certainly she would not have sought such a thing. She just wrote her books, as and when, for satisfaction and for money, with pride but apparently without expectation. It is an attitude hardly conceivable nowadays, when so many authors plot their careers like graphs on a business plan. Which is not to say that Nancy did not care about the fate of Wigs on the Green and Pigeon Pie: they were a great deal better than her first two novels, they deserved better, and they were both scuppered by circumstance. Apart from anything else, she needed them to sell because she was, as always, desperately poor. (When Pigeon Pie was reissued in 1952, it sold more than 10,000 copies: ‘What madness’, wrote Nancy to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Rather sad when you think what it would have meant to me when it first appeared and I was penniless.’) Probably no one would have been more amazed than Nancy had she been told, in May 1940, that the publication of her next book would transform her life: that The Pursuit of Love would sell, and succeed, with the unstoppable force of the Germans then marching upon Europe, and that a writing ‘career’ would suddenly, and triumphantly, be hers.

  When Pigeon Pie made its abortive appearance, however, Nancy had much of her mind on other things. She was, for instance, pregnant again: further evidence of the revival of her marriage, as she did not conceive with ease. When Peter was home – in between training in Cambridge and commanding his company in Colchester – he must have been mostly in his wife’s bed, playing Rudolph to Nancy’s Sophia.

  In May, he was sent to France. This can’t have been easy for Nancy, although her letters are hardly seized up with anxiety about him; this, in its turn, implies that what she felt for Peter was very much bound up with the war, and with the decent way in which he was answering its moral questions. She writes with pride about the fact that Simon Elwes (married to Nancy’s sister-in-law) had joined the Welsh Guards ‘so will be vastly junior to Pete which is nice’. Peter was proud of his wife, too. Nancy wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant that she had hoped to send him a copy of Pigeon Pie (the character of Sir Ivor is a teasing take on Mark), ‘but when I got home I found that Rodd had bagged all my comp: copies to give to his brother officers’. Which no doubt pleased her.

  Nancy’s letters make no reference to the second miscarriage that she suffered in June 1940, and so one can only imagine how she felt about it. She may have tried to dismiss it. At the same time she probably saw it as a death to hope. Her sisters had lost babies too: Jessica’s first daughter, Julia, died at five months from measles; Debo’s first child was stillborn in 1941; Pamela suffered two miscarriages; only Diana seemed unstoppably fecund. But these women were all younger than Nancy. Their chances of having children were therefore better (although Pam, in fact, never carried a baby to term), and this may have filled her with some of the old, bitter, sisterly envy.

  Her reaction to the loss was to leave Blomfield Road, firstly to stay with Mrs Hammersley on the Isle of Wight, then with Peter’s aunt, Violet Stuart-Wortley, in Hampshire. Aunt Vi was a marvellous woman who thought the world of Nancy (‘my word, how lucky Peter was to find a wife like that’, she had said when the Rodds first married). And in a letter to Deborah in 1971, Nancy wrote that she had had a ‘love for old ladies: Aunt Vi, Mrs H’, because of the ‘unsatisfactory relationship I had with Muv’.

  For it should surely have been her mother to whom Nancy turned? Of course she may have thought that Sydney had her hands full with Unity, which was certainly true. But when Deborah had her stillborn baby, Unity was moved out of the Swinbrook cottage for a while so that her sister could stay there. Nancy, it is
clear, felt more comfortable elsewhere; she would not have relied on her mother to give the right sort of sympathy, nor on herself to elicit it. She may even have felt embarrassed, unwilling to demand comfort. And so she went instead to help Aunt Vi with a consignment of evacuees (a hard thing to do, for someone who had just lost a child). She planned to take ‘a job on the land. True I am very soft at present but I could get fit no doubt & it would be nice to feel one was growing things.’ She was a countrywoman at heart, after all, and working the land might have seemed a fitting way to bury her various griefs.

  But this idea of an idyll did not last: perhaps Nancy was bored, perhaps the introspection of the life was not really bearable. At any rate, as if magnetised, as if wanting to endure all that war could throw at her, back she went to the iron furnace of Blomfield Road and to the full force of ‘Hitty’s’ bombs. The Blitz began on 7 September 1940, kindling in Nancy a perverse vitality. Proximity to Paddington Station put her in the firing line and, on 9 September, she wrote to Mrs Hammersley in a state of stoical hysteria: ‘Darling the nights! Nobody who hasn’t been in it can have the smallest idea of the horror one is going through. I never don’t feel sick, can’t eat anything & although dropping with tiredness can’t sleep either. No doubt one will get used to it soon – last night I shall never forget as long as I live. I emerged this morning confident that, apart from 12 Blomfield, not one stone in the neighbourhood could possibly be left upon another. Actually, search as I might, I could see no damage of any kind! However there has been a good deal actually & very near, in streets behind the house... Ten hours is too long, you know of concentrated noise & terror, in a house alone. Thank heaven for Milly who is a rock.’ The maid, Gladys, had spent the night ‘in a trench’ in Hyde Park, and things became easier when she was there. As Nancy wrote, she was ‘really a heroine. She arrived back at 6 this morning all smiles & was ready with my breakfast punctually at 8.’ It was the kind of behaviour that Nancy admired above any other, and although she said of herself ‘it is terrible to be such a coward’ this was not in fact true. Nancy always had courage: it was one of her defining characteristics, and it showed itself most in the good humour that she strove to retain. Bravery was not bravery, unless it wore a mask of cheerfulness – so she thought, and she was probably right.

  Her letters from September 1940 convey the chaos of the Blitz, the way in which tragedy was subsumed into a petty, relentless inconvenience. She told Mrs Hammersley an exhausting, terrible saga that began when Peter turned up at Blomfield Road ‘with the two babies (5 & 3) of one of his soldiers. They and their mother had had their house in Brixton collapse on them & the mother had a ghastly miscarriage & was dying. The poor man couldn’t even be given 4 hrs leave to arrange things...’ In the night ‘a Molotoff bread basket descended on the next door house which caught fire’. Nancy sent for the fire brigade and fled with the two children to Hampstead, where her old French governess Zella was living; then returned to Blomfield Road, ‘shot at on the way by the Home Guard because the taxi didn’t stop. Had a fearful pasting here all the rest of the night – 5 large houses in the next street just vanished into thin air.’ Eventually Nancy sent the children, Gladys, Milly, ‘my fur coat & all my linen’ to the Buckinghamshire home of her friend Lady Diana Worthington. ‘They were such darling children & so good.’

  Gladys had not wanted to leave Nancy, even though ‘this part (Mai Vale) has got it worse than almost anywhere (except the East End of course).’ But as Nancy wrote to Mrs Hammersley: ‘I think every living thing that can be got out of this hell should be – NOBODY can have the slightest idea of what it is like until they’ve experienced it. Asfor the screaming bombs they simply make your flesh creep but the whole thing is so fearful that they are actually only a slight added horror... Oh dear there are the sirens again what a horrid life.’ Her nerves, understandably, were in shreds; despite her gallant nature Nancy was not a robust person; her insubstantial body shrank very easily to skin and bone, and she had not long since had a miscarriage. Yet she wrote on 12 September that she was ‘trying to get some work in the East End’: one can only admire.

  She felt that she should stick the war out, as people like Gladys and Peter were doing, and she seems to have been almost high on this belief. She was fanatical about observing measures like four inches of water in the bath, no water heater and walking everywhere to save resources. Later she took up fire-watching, which would have meant hardly any sleep at all, and after dealing competently with an incendiary that landed in Hill Street in 1944 was asked to lecture on the subject. (Then she was asked to stop: ‘Well you see it’s your voice. It irritates people so much, they said they’d like to put you on the fire.’9)

  In 1942 she refused to attend a ball thrown by Debo, because she thought dancing inappropriate while Tom Mitford (in Libya) and Peter (in Ethopia) were fighting overseas. James Lees-Milne, in his diaries, mused upon this new stern conventionality of Nancy’s: ‘she so often shocks me’, he wrote in March 1942, ‘accustomed as I still am to think of her running contrary to conventions in her old girlish, mocking manner.’ He saw in this a mixture of sincerity and perversity, and he probably had a point. He quoted Nancy as saying that it was the duty of the upper-classes ‘to remain in England after the war, whatever the temptations to get out’, which is quite funny when one knows that the first thing Nancy did, after peace was declared, was to leave for Paris.

  Yet she meant what she was saying at the time, she lived by what she said; and this intense emphasis upon duty may well have derived – like so much else – from her relationship with her family. When she wrote in 1942 that Deborah had become ‘simply horrid... a very exigeante [demanding] little creature & dreadfully spoilt’, this was not what she really thought. Nor, in different circumstances, would she have been so much against attending a ball in wartime. She was simply, obdurately against her family. In the first half of the war, what sustained her rather comfortless life – alongside the occasional attentions of Peter and the more faithful ones of Milly – was the sense that she was the sole Mitford (except Tom) to be behaving as a person should.

  And so, possessed by righteousness, Nancy performed one of the most extraordinary acts of her life.

  In May 1940, when the war got serious, Sir Oswald Mosley was arrested under Defence Regulation 18B, a severe emergency power that allowed the Government to detain without trial. Rightly or wrongly, Mosley was regarded as a threat to national security. He had certainly opposed war with Germany; nevertheless he had, since its outbreak, urged members of the British Unionist party to fight for their country and ‘do nothing... to help any other power’. Nor had he had dealings of any significant kind with Hitler. The notion that he believed he might rule a conquered Britain, as a puppet of the Germans, was utterly ludicrous.

  But for an avowed supporter of fascism to be free, when Britain faced a powerfully real threat of invasion by the Nazis, was regarded as an insult, an affront to a national morale that needed clear and simple enmities to feed upon. And so Mosley was banged up in Brixton, along with a few hundred other internees, in a part of the prison that had been on the point of demolition and was running alive with bedbugs. ‘I am thankful that Sir Oswald Quisling has been jugged aren’t you’, wrote Nancy to Mark Ogilvie-Grant. She too required straightforward gestures. Nor had she ever liked Mosley. But, she continued, ‘I think it quite useless if Lady Q is still at large.’ If Mosley had to be jailed then Diana should be too. If she, Nancy, was suffering the privations of war whilst supporting its rightful prosecution, then Diana, who supported the regime that was the cause of the war, should surely suffer too.

  A month later, Nancy received a request from the Home Office to give information about Diana (whose putative imprisonment had been urged by her former father-in-law, Lord Moyne). She went to be interviewed by Gladwyn Jebb10, then working for the Under-Secretary of State. She was obliged to do so. She could hardly refuse to help a wartime Government on the grounds of family loyalty. What would anyone do
in such a situation? Realistically, one would probably go along, feeling rather grim and torn by the necessity, and say as little as was consistent with honesty.

  Nancy did far more than that. On the subject of Diana’s visits to Germany: ‘I advised him [Jebb] to examine her passport to see how often she went.’ She had gone quite often, in fact. Her reason was that she was trying to win a concession for her husband to start a wireless station, not as a propaganda vehicle but purely as a money-making exercise, a sort of Teutonic Radio Luxembourg. This was impossible to do in Britain, where the BBC had a monopoly of the wavelengths, and Diana’s connections in the Nazi high command made Germany the obvious country. So she talked to Hitler about it, hoping that he would override Goebbels (who wanted all the wavelengths for himself); and her success seemed assured around the time that war broke out.

  Nancy did not know that Diana had a motive for spending long evenings chatting with Hitler, beyond her admitted pleasure in his company. As Jan Dalley put it in her biography of Diana, ‘some of the stigma of her flirtation with the Nazis might have been mitigated (in Nancy’s eyes, for instance) by the fact that she was doing business, as it were, for the family firm.’ But the radio station ‘alibi’ looked dodgy, all the same. MI5 knew about Diana’s visits to Hitler, knew the reason for them, and – Dalley again – ‘found it hard to believe that there were no direct propaganda intentions’. The alibi, in fact, only helped to convince the British Government of Diana’s ‘guilt’. No doubt Nancy felt much the same way.