Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  This passion for reading set her apart from her sisters though she shared their esoteric jokes and games. ‘My vile behaviour to the others,’ she confessed later, ‘was partly, I suppose, the result of jealousy and partly of a longing to be grown-up and live with grown-up people. The others bored me, and I made them feel it… I expect I would have been much worse but for Blor.’

  Lady Redesdale seems to have exerted a negative influence. According to Nancy she had ‘always lived in a dream world of her own’. Apropos of which she commented: ‘I think that nothing in my life has changed more than the relationship between mothers and young children. In those days a distance was always kept. Even so she was perhaps abnormally detached. On one occasion Unity rushed into the drawing-room, where she was at her writing-table, saying: “Muv, Muv, Decca is standing on the roof—she says she’s going to commit suicide!” “Oh, poor duck,” said my mother, “I hope she won’t do anything so terrible” and went on writing.’

  This detachment may have been a subconscious defence against her explosive husband and boisterous children. With out knowing it Lady Redesdale was an incipient Taoist, for as Lao Tzu said, ‘The weak overcomes the strong, the soft overcomes the hard… The softest things in the world over ride the hardest.’ (Lao Tzu also said: ‘Mighty is he who conquers himself,’ which scarcely applied to Lord Redesdale.) Albeit no Christian Scientist, Lady Redesdale did not believe in illness, but she was prejudiced against certain foods and against pig in particular. Ham, sausages, fried bacon were all craved for by her children, as is usual with forbidden fruit. Lady Redesdale’s brother, ‘Uncle Geoff’, seems to have swayed her ideas on health. He was an eccentric of a different kind who fancied that the fortunes of England depended on the use of natural manure in fertilizing the soil. He had violent objections to the pasteurization of milk, and his niece, Jessica, has left a funny description of his advocacy of the ‘unsplit slowly smoked bloater’ and other ingredients of wholesome diet, and she quotes a characteristic passage from a privately printed collection of his old letters to editors entitled Writings of a Rebel in her Hons and Rebels (required reading for all Mitford fans). Her mother, she tells us, added a few notions of her own to Uncle Geoff’s. ‘In defiance of the law, she refused to allow any of us to be vaccinated (“pumping dis gusting dead germs into the Good Body!”).’ When Jessica in turn begged to be sent to a school, her mother sensibly re marked: ‘If you went to school you’d probably hate it. The fact is children always want to do something different from what they are doing. Childhood is a very unhappy time of life; I know I was always miserable as a child. You’ll be all right when you’re eighteen.’ One cannot visualize young Jessica submitting to school discipline. Though she might mock her Uncle Geoff she was one of nature’s rebels. Unity went to two schools and was expelled from both. When one of her sisters said so, Lady Redesdale gently objected: ‘Oh no, darling, not expelled, asked to leave.’

  In a draft for a broadcast after The Pursuit of Love was published, Nancy wrote: ‘I have described the early years of myself and my five sisters and one brother in my last book, with some alterations necessary to a work of fiction, but with no exaggeration. Indeed it would hardly be possible to exaggerate the eccentricity and restlessness of our upbringing. My father had two manias, for selling and for building. He would build a new house every time there was a boom, when labour was scarce and expensive. He would then live in it for a while, but as soon as there was a slump, as soon as labour became easy and cheap and values dropped, he would sell what he had built at a vast loss and we would all move on to the next house whose foundation stone would be laid on the first day of a new boom.’

  ‘Our first home was a large Elizabethan palace built by my grandfather in 1900. He had my father’s mania to an even more marked degree, but concentrated it upon this one house. My father sold it as soon as he could, and thereafter we lived under the shadow, so to speak, of two hammers, the builder’s and the auctioneer’s, and fidgeted about from one house to another on different parts of my father’s estate. Sometimes they were houses which already existed but which were then altered to suit the requirements of so large a family, sometimes they were built from scratch.’

  ‘The first room to be completed was always what my father called “the child-proof room” to which he would retire and snooze (for he never read or wrote) in peace after a day spent entirely in the open air. The child-proof room was invariably fitted with an immensely powerful mortice lock. However, we children usually managed to effect an escape…’

  When they grew up Nancy and Tom were allowed to bring friends to stay. These included both athletes and aesthetes. According to Jessica, ‘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 from my father.’ My lamented friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant was among them. Even Lord Redesdale could not help warming to Mark, for he joined his shooting parties and appeared for breakfast punctually at eight o’clock, though brains turned his delicate stomach at that hour.

  Of Nancy’s contemporaries perhaps Mark exerted the most obvious influence on her taste, and it was even rumoured that he hoped to marry her. While adapting himself outwardly to social convention he was capable of exuberant flights of fantasy. He was a cousin of Nina, the shy young Countess of Seafield, for whom he acted as an impresario. Nina then resembled a juvenile Queen Victoria with red hair and a hesitant stammer. Having spent her infancy in New Zealand, she had inherited large estates in Scotland, including Cullen and Castle Grant where Nancy often visited her, surrounded by Mark’s vivacious coterie, whose more serious members were deter mined not to seem so. Robert Byron exploited his pugnacity in a genial and unpredictable way. Oliver Messel, a skilful mimic, entertained the company with spicy monologues about tragi-comical White Russian refugee princesses, ‘refained’ governesses afflicted with wind, and wriggling débutantes whose conversational gambit was limited to ‘Have you been to No, no Nanette?’ Mark had a vast repertoire of absurdly sentimental Victorian ballads which he trilled and warbled with a gusto only rivalled by Robert Byron’s booming vociferation.

  Nobody could have dreamt of the future developments of these young bloods fresh from Oxford whose talent and intelligence were often veiled by flippancy. They parodied the pursuits of bucolic neighbours and their peculiar dialect. Nancy’s first novel reflected their behaviour, the invasion of Presbyterian Scotland, as it were, by Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things. Her protagonist Albert Gates, for instance, was suggested by Robert’s cult of Victoriana to which most of us subscribed in a playful spirit. (‘My name,’ said Albert with some asperity, ‘is Albert Memorial Gates. I took Memorial in addition to my baptismal Albert at my confirmation out of admiration for the Albert Memorial, a very great work of art which may be seen in a London suburb called Kensington.’) A far cry from Robert’s subsequent Byzantinism! Mark was to reappear as the ‘Wonderful Old Songster of Kew Green’ in Nancy’s Pigeon Pie. Short, spare, clean-shaven, he remained one of her closest confidants.

  I never visited Asthall or Swinbrook, but while I was at Oxford I was regaled with lyrical accounts of Nancy’s precocious wit and intelligence—‘a delicious creature, quite pyrotechnical my dear, and sometimes even profound, and would you believe it, she’s hidden among the cabbages of the Cotswolds’—from an improbable source, my former Eton crony, Brian Howard. He was so scornful of feminine intellect among contemporaries that I felt it was more than a special compliment. I still wonder how Brian and Lord Redesdale coped with each other, if they were allowed to meet. The contrast between them evoked extreme burlesque, and Brian’s posturings and paradoxes must have helped to stimulate the composition of Nancy’s first novel.

  As a débutante Nancy enjoyed a conventional succession of seasons during that hectic period immortalized by Evelyn Waugh, when Noël Coward represented the younger generation of gatecrashers and jazz was in the air, though it was the genteel jazz of Jack Hylton and Ambrose, less frenzied
but more suave than its Afro-American precursors. Nancy attended the coming-out balls as regularly as her coevals but with a colder, more critical eye as time went on. She was too clever to enjoy the platitudes of her callow dancing partners who were a source of disillusion to her, as to Sophia in her novel Pigeon Pie. Like Sophia, ‘she was not shy and she had high spirits, but she was never a romper and therefore never attained much popularity with the very young.’

  During the winter she rode hard to hounds, stayed with friends, and invited them to her parents’ house. A nostalgic passage in Pigeon Pie betrays her love of hunting: ‘The first meet she ever went to, early in the morning with her father’s agent. She often remembered this, and it had become a composite picture of all the cub-hunting she had ever done, the autumn woods and the smell of bonfires, dead leaves and hot horses. 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.’

  Until Nancy was twenty-three her parents lived at Asthall in Oxfordshire, about half the size of the 10,000 acres Lord Redesdale had inherited at Batsford Park in Gloucestershire, which he sold in 1919. In 1927 he also sold Asthall and moved to Swinbrook, where he built a house on the site of one of his farms called South Lawn, a name he wished to dispense with. None of his children liked Swinbrook House, described by Jessica as ‘a large rectangular structure of three stories… neither “modern” nor “traditional” nor simulated antique… It could be a small barracks, a girls’ boarding school, a private lunatic asylum, or, in America, a country club.’ To tease her father Nancy used to address her letters: ‘Builder Redesdale, The Buildings, South Lawn, Burford.’ A compensation for Swinbrook was that he bought 26 Rutland Gate, so that the girls could enjoy more time in London.

  3

  UNFORTUNATELY, LORD REDESDALE had little flair for finance and his father had been extravagant, like so many denizens of the horse world. Gradually he felt obliged to part with valuable possessions, usually at a loss. His houses were often let, especially the London residence, where upon his family were squeezed into the Mews behind it, or into Lady Redesdale’s cosy cottage at High Wycombe. It was economy rather than a resolve to keep Nancy at home that prevented her from moving into a private flat. Nowadays she would have looked for a job, but such an idea would not have occurred to Lord Redesdale: it was not even discussed. Whatever Nancy could earn from her writings was added to her meagre dress allowance. She chafed under the tedium of rustic life though this impelled her to read voraciously and, eventually, to write her first novel.

  Jessica has related the circumstances with brio: ‘For months Nancy had sat 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. Sometimes she read bits aloud to us. “You can’t publish that under your own name,” my mother insisted, scandalized, for not only did thinly disguised aunts, uncles and family friends people the pages of Highland Fling, but there, larger than life size, felicitously named “General Murgatroyd”, was Farve. But Nancy did publish it under her own name, and the Burford Lending Library even arranged a special display in their window, with a hand-lettered sign: “Nancy Mitford, Local Authoress—…” In spite of the brief row that flared when Nancy insisted on publishing Highland Fling under her own name, it became evident that my parents, and even the uncles and aunts, were actually quite proud of having an author in the family…’

  In fact it was no novelty to have ‘an author in the family’ since both Nancy’s grandfathers had published several books. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles, was the founder of the sensational Victorian journal Vanity Fair, whose coloured cartoons of celebrities line the walls of smart London clubs but whose controversial contents were to antagonize many of his fellow members of Parliament. Nancy inherited his sharp and acid wit. Lewis Carroll (the Rev. C.L. Dodgson) was one of his friends and it is curious in these days to read that he wanted Vanity Fair to promote ‘a daily fly-sheet (which might be called “Where shall we go?” or the “Vanity Fair Play-bill”) with a list of all amusements to which ladies might safely be taken, and a warning against objectionable plays’. James Tissot and Carlo Pellegrini (‘Ape’) were two of Vanity Fair’s leading cartoonists, and Bowles was joined by Tissot when he went to Paris as a war correspondent in September 1870 before the Prussian siege. His despatches to the Morning Post during that period were extremely graphic and amusing. Apart from his political and journalistic activities he had a passion for yachting and became a notable authority on naval matters.

  After her eighteen-year-old sister Diana’s marriage to Bryan Guinness (now Lord Moyne) in January 1929 Nancy often stayed in their Buckingham Street house (now Buckingham Place), a delightful trysting place of the generations, where past and future consorted merrily with the present. Diana and Bryan attracted a galaxy of literary and artistic friends who might have been considered ‘sewers’ by Lord Redesdale. Bloomsbury was represented by Lytton Strachey and his doting Carrington; the Sitwells by Sir Osbert, Sacheverell and Georgia. Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, Henry Yorke, Brian Howard, John Sutro, Hamish Erskine, Henry and Pansy Lamb, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, with a bevy of fashionable beauties—many of Bryan’s and Tom Mitford’s Oxford cronies, my brother and I included, enjoyed their exhilarating hospitality. Nancy’s wit blossomed freely in this uninhibited atmosphere, which tended to make her more impatient of parental authority. At the age of twenty four it seemed high time to leave the nest.

  Two of her closest girl friends were Lady Pansy Pakenham and the Hon. Evelyn Gardner, both aspiring writers who had shared lodgings before their marriages, the former to Henry Lamb and the latter to Evelyn Waugh. (Henry Lamb was to paint the best likeness of the male Evelyn at this time.) The newly wedded Waughs found a modest flat in Canonbury Square (17a), Islington, to which they lent a personal charm as remote from the modish as it was from Bloomsbury and Mayfair. They looked like a juvenile brother and sister. The male Evelyn’s first novel had been acclaimed with salvoes of judicious applause. But one swallow makes not a spring, and Evelyn’s second novel proved even more successful than his first, though its gestation had been interrupted by his wife’s illness. After her convalescence he needed a spell of solitude to finish his book, so he decided to work in the country during the week and join his wife in London for weekends.

  At this juncture a temporary solution was found for Nancy’s yearning for independence. The Waughs offered her a room in their flat and she accepted it with alacrity. Evelyn’s wife gained an enchanting companion during his absence and Nancy, in creative mood, sparkled in this unconventional environment. Highland Fling was about to be published and she was producing topical articles for Vogue, embellished by Mark Ogilvie-Grant’s illustrations.

  Everything here seemed favourable to a budding novelist of slender means. She enjoyed the simple life spiced with jokes and spontaneous fantasy: it seemed idyllic. But it was too good to last. In July a thunderbolt fell. Mrs. Waugh confessed to Nancy that she had only married Evelyn to escape from her stifling family. In the meantime she had fallen in love with John Heygate, the ebullient author of Decent Fellows, a naughty novel about Eton. While Nancy could sympathize with her motives she could not approve of her method. Apart from her admiration for Evelyn’s brilliance, she appreciated his human qualities. He inspired affection in his intimate friends, who readily forgave his peccadilloes. He was too young and too fond to tolerate infidelity and it was not in his nature to laugh it off like those contemporaries he satirized in Vile Bodies. The shock of disappointment had lasting repercussions. Only his conversion to Catholicism could heal the wound, whose traces are distinct in A Handful of Dust. Nancy packed her bags and departed from Canonbury Square. Her sympathies were with the he-Evelyn and they remained lifelong friends.

  Nancy had written Highland Fling to amuse herself before amusing others. It was a frolicsome performance o
f which later she became unreasonably ashamed, but in a Christmas cracker way it was effective. If, as she maintained, she wished to emulate P.G. Wodehouse, she had chosen the wrong model and Evelyn Waugh’s influence was not yet apparent. Family pride in the sprightly relation who startled her uncles and aunts with her all-too-recognizable caricatures must have gratified and encouraged her to stick to her guns. To her friend James Lees-Milne, who had expressed his enjoyment, she replied: ‘such letters are far more encouraging than reviews in newspapers. The book is going fairly well, it went into a second impression three days after it came out but won’t I fear be a best-seller or anything like that. The publishers however are pleased and surprised at the amount sold… By the same post as yours I had a letter from an aged friend of mama’s saying that the silliness of my young people is only equalled by their vulgarity and that if by writing this I intend to devastate and lay waste to such society I am undoubtedly performing a service to mankind. And a great deal more. I fear now that I shall never be mentioned in her will…’

  Already a faint whiff of the professional author may be detected.

  In the meantime I set forth on my wanderings and eventually settled in Peking, so there is a considerable blank in my vision of Nancy, a gap of nearly nine years. On the last few occasions I saw her before sailing from Europe she was invariably escorted by Hamish Erskine, an elegant and amiable young social butterfly who was also a ‘Hon’, and for a long time it was rumoured that they were about to marry. In fact they were blithe companions floating on a frivolous tide, playing a charade of Pierrot and Columbine and sharing endless jokes to compensate for lack of lucre. Mutual friends who enjoyed them separately became as exasperated as Nancy’s parents by this indefinite flirtation. Hamish, who could seldom face crude reality before midday, was to distinguish himself for his courage in Italy during the war. Maybe Nancy had divined the pluck which was one of his attractions.