Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  She did not want to get Diana off the hook; she wanted to think the worst of her. Why else would she have said to Gladwyn Jebb, when there was no actual need for her to do so: ‘I regard her as an extremely dangerous person’ –? It is scarcely believable. This was Nancy’s sister, a woman with a small son and a baby whom she was breast-feeding, whose husband was in prison, who was burning in the fires of public vilification. She was almost certainly going to be jailed anyway; that was the climate of the times, and of course the decision would have been way beyond Nancy’s control. But would one not, in such circumstances, do all that was reasonably possible to help a sister: say yes, she has been to Germany, yes, she has been an advocate of Fascism, but she would never actually oppose Britain in the war? That was the truth, after all. Whether it would have been believed, or would have made any difference to Diana’s fate, is another story. But Nancy did not even try to say those things. She made it worse, not better; she played her part in making sure that, on 29 June, Diana would be taken away from an eleven-week-old baby to Holloway, imprisoned without trial under Defence Regulation 18B, locked in a dirty cell with a mattress on a wet floor and a window covered by rotting sandbags, left with aching breasts and a plate of gristle to eat.

  ‘Not very sisterly behaviour’, Nancy wrote to Violet Hammersley, ‘but in such times I think it one’s duty?’ The question mark perhaps betrayed a small tingle of disturbing guilt. Perhaps she knew that she had carried out the threat, made to her mother a year earlier, to ‘join hands with the devil himself to stop any further extension of the disease [of Fascism]’. Yet she may have felt no guilt at all. Her letter to Mrs Hammersley begins with a lament for the Spanish refugees whom she and Peter had helped in 1939, and who had found homes in the now conquered France: ‘all our poor refugees... no doubt will be handed over for Franco to shoot them.’ Around 25,000 of them would die at the hands of the Germans, and this must have been hard for Nancy to contemplate. Writing about it was the best possible way to justify her meeting with Gladwyn Jebb, both to Mrs Hammersley and to herself. Diana’s behaviour had made her own behaviour necessary; it was as simple as that.

  Nevertheless it took some doing. Not everyone could have done it. Nor could they have done what Nancy subsequently did, which was to treat Diana in the most sympathetic possible way: write gossipy and cheering letters (‘I saw your little Alexander the other day he is a darling how I wish they were living with me’); have Diana’s elder sons, Jonathan and Desmond Guinness, to stay before they visited their mother in Holloway (‘Fancy favourite aunt how blissful’); and accept money from her sister with which to buy a Christmas present (‘I have bought some much needed facial condiments... actually managed to find a Guerlain lipstick’). Perhaps, again, Nancy saw no hypocrisy in this. She had done her duty for her country; now she was doing it for her sister, while at the same time writing to Mrs Hammersley: ‘I would die of the lights out at 5.30 rule wouldn’t you? I suppose she sits & thinks of Adolf.’

  One can hardly blame Diana for subsequently describing Nancy as someone impelled by spite, not to be believed, ‘the most disloyal person I ever knew’.11 ‘Disloyal’ was a significant word to choose, for loyalty towards her husband was perhaps the real agent of Diana’s downfall in 1940. But Nancy had played her part in it too. Diana knew nothing of this part until years after the war had ended. She must have remembered those kindnesses of Nancy’s, offered when she was in her cell, and shuddered.

  The Mosleys were detained for more than three years. They were released – in the face of public opinion – at the end of 1943, then placed under house arrest. During her time in prison, it was really only Diana’s remarkable nature that saw her through unbowed. She became friends with the other women in F Block (when Churchill asked that Diana be allowed a bath a day, rather than once a week, she refused it as an unfair privilege). And she simply did not accept the concept of shame. She knew that her imprisonment was an illegality, a gimcrack construction made to satisfy public opinion. She suffered terribly, nonetheless. When Nancy wrote that ‘Zella who went to see her says she has never looked more blooming’12, this can only have been from a twisted kind of wishful thinking. Diana had entered prison a young woman of thirty in the prime of health; three years of living on parcels of Stilton, of unclean lavatories and semi-underground cells, wore her down, and in 1943 – by which time she and Mosley were living together, in a prison block for couples – she suffered an apparently incurable attack of diarrhoea. Another ex-BUF internee named Major de Laessoe gave her an opium pill, ‘which he said always did the trick. I passed into a deep coma for four or five days. One would have felt so awful for the poor major if one had died.’13

  Worse than the physical suffering was the torment of being separated from her sons, who were taken to live with Pam. All the BUF women with young children were released from jail in 1940, except Diana. She did not see her new baby for ten months after her arrest. She had to endure a night in her cell, waiting for news, while Jonathan was taken to hospital for an emergency appendectomy. At the end of visits to the prison, two-year-old Alexander ‘often had to be forcibly dragged away from Diana, his tears soaking her clothes’14. It is hard to accept that she deserved this kind of agony; she was punished for being married to the wrong person, for being high-profile and charismatic. A hearing of her case, in October 1940, concluded that she was ‘an attractive and forceful personality’ who ‘could be extremely dangerous if she were at large’. She had admitted, at this hearing, that she supported her husband in his Fascist beliefs: ‘...he told me a great deal about it... I thought that is the thing for me’. She admitted that Hitler had attended her wedding to Mosley: ‘Because he is a friend of mine.’ She did not attempt to hide her desire for a Fascist state in Britain, nor that she had opposed war with Germany; but, she said, ‘I absolutely differentiate between my government and my country.’ She had known, of course, that whatever she said before the Advisory Committee would make no odds. The Mosleys would stay in prison because that was what people wanted. Nancy, apparently, wanted it more than anyone.

  Was it purely a question of principle, that led her to denounce her sister? Was it principle, indeed, that led Lord Moyne to urge Diana’s imprisonment in the first place? Can it ever be said, in fact, that there is such a thing as ‘pure’ principle? Does the personal not obtrude, whether one is aware of it or not? Nancy probably thought that she was acting according to principle alone. No doubt she believed, as she marched into the Home Office bearing her metaphorical sword of truth, that she was merely a vessel filled to the brim with disinterested duty.

  But she – had she been writing about herself – would have seen through this slightly terrifying image to the motivations within. She would have picked out the gleaming thread that led back to Wigs on the Green, and the cold falling-out with Diana over the whole question of political belief. She would have followed the thread back further, tracing the rivalry that she had felt since childhood with her beautiful, clever, moon-goddess sister. Then she might have moved onwards and sideways, and seen the mysterious fulfilment that Diana had achieved with her second marriage. She might, too, have conjured an image of Diana sitting, calm and satisfied and exquisite, with four sons around her. And she would have imagined her own self, whose adult life had so far been a raggedy clutching at happiness, and discerned the sad, small, spiteful compulsion that lurked within her grand gesture. Mistrust principle, she might have written, about herself and indeed about her family. It is rarely what it seems to be; and when it is sincere it is worst of all.

  From 1941 onwards, Nancy herself would steer well clear of it. Like Sophia with her spying, it really was not her thing. Now she would detach herself differently, by finding a new and happy life, which would begin after the saddest event of all.

  6

  In November 1941, when Nancy was staying in Oxford with her friends Roy and Billa Harrod1, she was seized with appalling pains in her stomach. Typically, she made light of it; foolishly, she walked
off with her suitcase and made her own way back to London. Then she went to the University College Hospital in Bloomsbury.

  It was, she was told, an ectopic pregnancy. The condition was serious, and it would be necessary to operate. All she could do was make a desperate plea to the surgeon, before she went under the anaesthetic, to try to preserve her fertility. But she awoke to learn that her fallopian tubes had been damaged beyond repair and removed. At the age of thirty-seven, Nancy was now definitively barren.

  She must have feared as much, but that is not the same as having one’s fears confirmed, hearing the final judgment pronounced, realising that one’s life, now, will be different from that of most women. It must have been a cold and terrible awakening for her, coming round in that hospital bed with her stitched and cavernous abdomen, preparing to face this particular fact. ‘I have had a horrible time, so depressing’, she wrote to Diana in Holloway. It was the closest she came to a confession of anguish. ‘I can’t say I suffered great agony but quite enough discomfort...’

  Her loneliness was intense. No doubt she wished that Diana had not been put in prison, that she could have had her there to laugh with, to be told how lucky it was that ‘one was lovely One’2. She tried for jokes, in the letter, and certainly she achieved irony: ‘Muv was wonderful... When my symptoms were explained to her she said “ovaries – I thought one had 700 like caviar”. Then I said how I couldn’t bear the idea of a great scar on my tum to which she replied “But darling who’s ever going to see it?”’ Nancy also had a conversation with Sydney in which she first learned that she might, as a child, have been infected with syphilis. Her doctor had asked if she had ever had contact with the disease, a question that she in turn put to her mother. Sydney apparently then admitted to having employed a syphilitic nurserymaid and, from that point onwards, Nancy chose to believe that her mother had caused her infertility. She could not have really believed it: she had absolutely no symptoms of syphilitic infection, and her doctor should probably never have put the idea into her head in the first place. Nor should her mother have confessed about the nurserymaid, when a modicum of imagination would have said that this could only intensify Nancy’s anguish. Of course Sydney may never have said anything of the kind, although it is unlikely that Nancy completely invented it. But she certainly seized upon it, and in a very characteristic way: as usual with Sydney, she wanted to believe in her guilt. She wanted to be able to attribute her own pain to the actions of her mother.

  Small wonder that she had run to Mrs Hammersley and Aunt Vi after her miscarriage the year before. Leave aside the story about the syphilitic nurserymaid: the remark about the ovaries, which Nancy cannot possibly have invented, is confirmation enough of her mother’s innate detachment. Meanwhile Deborah, who had given birth to a stillborn baby around the time of Nancy’s hysterectomy, was being looked after by Sydney at the Swinbrook cottage. This contrasting treatment surely caused Nancy more pain, and she mustered a strange sort of sympathy for her sister in the letter to Diana. ‘Poor Debo it must be wretched the worst thing in the world I should think – except losing a manuscript which I always think must be the worst.’

  And that, from then on, would be Nancy’s view. She would not have a baby; but she would have her writing still, and writing would become a real and solid life to her. It is customary, nowadays, to pretend that women can write books with an equal level of intensity as men while at the same time raising children, but in truth this is not usual: for whatever reason, the finest female artists have tended to be childless. Selfishness is required. And when Nancy was able to give her selfishness free rein, she became an artist: not a Jane Austen, nor an Emily Brontë, but someone who found her deepest fulfilment through her work, who realised through it her own vision of life. She did not ‘write like a man’, or any such nonsense. She remained intensely feminine, intensely herself – ‘a survival of the time before feminism’, as Evelyn Waugh wrote, semi-seriously, ‘when it was thought feminine to be capricious’3 – and she kept up the illusion that her books were produced with semi-detached casualness. But this was, indeed, an illusion, and an extremely clever one. Nancy’s books took all the sustained effort that any proper, lasting work demands: for all their apparent ease of manner, their integrity was an unfathomable distance away from chick-lit.

  The ballerina Alicia Markova was once asked if she regretted not having had a family, and she was fearless enough to say that her art would have suffered: ‘Concentration, you see.’ Nancy was not a writer whose work overwhelmed the whole of her life, that was not the nature of her absorption in it; but there is no doubt that the books she produced after her hysterectomy were better, surer, more fully formed, than those that she wrote when she had thought of herself – whether seriously or not – as a wife and potential mother. In fact they were in a different league altogether. This could be coincidence, or simply maturity. But there is probably more to it than that. Nancy was in many ways there already with Pigeon Pie, yet the book has a slightly amateurish quality. It really is semi-detached. Even then she was trying to get pregnant, playing house with Peter as he came back and forth, seeing marriage still as her natural destiny. ‘The worst of it is I can’t work when he’s here’, she wrote in 1949. ‘I’m sure it’s very silly but I can’t. He has no respect for work & wanders in & out chatting.’ Which implies that she could not dedicate herself to writing until she was fully free, living the kind of life that was, in those days, almost always lived by a man.

  ‘Faute de mieux,’ says Debo, who is in no doubt that had Nancy had her ‘proper husband, proper children’ she would have happily consigned writing to the level of a well-executed hobby. ‘She had success as a writer – I think that’s a second thing, myself. Being a total female, you see. And I think Nancy would have been but she never had the chance – and I don’t think, I may be absolutely wrong, but I don’t think anything makes up for women having husbands, lovers and children, and whatever it is that women want. I really don’t. I mean Diana’s life – it was very sad in lots of ways, all those years in prison, but on the other hand it was much more what the papers now call fulfilled. Whatever that may mean, but I think I know what it means.

  ‘Nancy adored children. She pretended not to much, but my children adored her – all children adored her, from me onwards.’ Of Nancy’s hysterectomy, she says: ‘It was a terrible thing.’

  It is true, and striking, that Nancy’s writings are full of references to the loveliness of other people’s children. Even the letter to Diana about the hysterectomy speaks of Roy and Billa Harrod’s son Henry in the sweetest possible terms: ‘They have an ideal child called Hen – I think the prettiest, most amusing little boy I ever saw.’ This reads courageously. What also required courage was the knowledge, for Nancy, that she must face a life surrounded by other children, those of Diana and Deborah4 probably being the hardest to bear.

  And yet: although Diana accepts that Nancy wanted children when she was young – ‘I think it’s something that people do long for really’ – she also believes that she adjusted more easily than most to their absence. ‘I think probably they’d have been a great pest to her later on.’ What Nancy really liked was to have charming young men like the Mosley boys or Debo’s son Stoker5 to visit: they were amusing and fun, they roared at her jokes and she, in turn, was what Alexander Mosley calls ‘a wonderful aunt’. She also liked being godmother to Evelyn Waugh’s daughter Harriet, upon whom she bestowed many carefully chosen presents: ‘it’s such fun getting things for a little girl, nearly all my relations of that age are boys except Emma [Debo’s daughter] who has too many adorers & doesn’t even glance at a present if you give her one.’ ‘You are the most wonderful godmother,’ wrote Waugh, ‘something out of a pantomime.’

  But this demanded relatively little; and the question is whether in her heart she would have wanted to give more. Later, Harriet Waugh implied not: ‘She had minimal interest in children and so on my brief glimpses of her I thought her chilly and unlikeable.�
�6 This is a little surprising in the light of all the presents,7 over which Nancy took so much trouble and pleasure. But it is interesting as it shows her to have been much keener on children when they were at a safe distance. ‘She’d have been a lousy mother,’ says John Julius Norwich robustly. ‘Nancy was not maternal. I don’t think she would have minded the hysterectomy all that much. I mean certainly not as much as other women would have minded. I really don’t think so. How old was she when she had it? Getting a bit long in the tooth for having children, and particularly in those days.’ (As Nancy would later write of Emilie du Châtelet, heroine of her historical biography Voltaire in Love: ‘Her pregnancy, at her age, made her a figure of fun and she knew it.’)

  This is very much the anti-sentimentalist viewpoint, and it is offered by someone who knew Nancy socially, rather than intimately: to Lord Norwich, Nancy valued friends and wit and the adult pleasures of civilisation; the untidy world of the nursery would have been a drag and a bore. To Deborah, on the other hand, this was all a front. What Nancy really wanted was what women have always wanted, the mysterious, miraculous rewards of child-bearing.

  As for Nancy herself – once her ability to have a baby had been taken from her, the last thing she would have wanted was pity. Nor would she have entertained for a second the notion that her life was ruined (‘I am not quite so wonderfully well as I was’, she wrote to James Lees-Milne, a couple of days after her operation, ‘running a little temperature’). She would have considered that a commonplace idea, contrary to her creed. In a letter to Evelyn Waugh in 1946, she took an honest stance. ‘There is a young woman who lives next door here (Blomfield Road) with 3 & I pity her from morning to night (and she pities me, so all is well really). I mind less and less not having any except I do think when they are puppies, from 1 to 4 they are rather heaven. 4–20 is unbearable.’ But this was not the whole truth, of course. In 1949 she wrote to Waugh: ‘I deplore not having any children.’