Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  28th May: ‘What a summer! Pouring rain varied only by occasional thunderstorms… Meanwhile I have broken all records (for me) by having been up really late every night for three weeks, and here I am now, in bed with a poached egg and a long sleep at least I hope so.’

  ‘I was photographed by Cecil Beaton this afternoon, a fantastic experience. “How do you manage to be so skinny with such ruddy cheeks?” Too easy I might have replied, one has only to be crossed in love and adept at make-up…’

  ‘Dined with Maurice [Bowra] to meet Yeats on Tuesday, it was very interesting. I have made friends with some heavenly Americans at Oxford, they give cocktail parties almost daily at which one drinks champagne in brandy glasses, they are quite divine.’

  4th December: ‘Hamish has got his job but finds there isn’t nearly enough for him to do poor darling which makes him quite miserable as he longs for some real work. He talks of going to Canada after all, I almost hope he will… Hamish and I saw a particularly grisly murder by the Adelphi arches which gave us plenty of cocktail conversation, except that Hamish invented and embroidered till no verisimility was left and now no one believes we saw it at all… I had all my hair cut off like a baby’s and 100 little curls put in which took two hours and cost a mint, looks deevy.’

  ‘My new book is jolly good, all about Hamish at Eton. “All father’s sisters married well thank God,” is his opening remark. Betjeman is co-hero… Well deary bed bed bed. I’m so tired for no reason except this endless climate which is wearing me down. I may have to go to bed for a fortnight because of being too thin, but the children say it’s only worms. P.S. The poor old Duke of Connaught (who is obviously dying of cold) made a speech on the wireless extolling the climatic glories of Devon. Every word came with a sneeze, cough or audible shudder as accompaniment.’

  From Biddesden House, Andover, 5th January, 1932: ‘Every one here has gone to Bath but I’m still feeling quite moribund after the Chelsea Arts ball last week where I ran about screaming for about six hours with the result that I lost my voice and caught the cold of a lifetime… I am wedded to culture ha ha… There is an aeroplane looping the loop just outside, too beautiful.’

  Another young man proposed to Nancy at this time but in spite of his worldly advantages she preferred the unworldly and capricious Hamish. On 22nd January she told Mark: ‘X. laid his gingerbread mansion at my feet last Monday, and incapable as ever of giving a plain answer to a plain question I said I couldn’t hear of it anyhow until my book is finished. So now I get letters by every post saying hurry up with the book, it is rather awful. I didn’t do it from the usual feminine motive of liking rides in his car etc but believe me from sheer weakness. However, it’s all right, I shall wriggle out somehow and anyway the book can’t be finished for months. Meanwhile he intends to go into Parliament, little knowing how much I abominate politicians and all their works. But it is awful how easily one could be entrapped into matrimony with someone like that be cause it would be nice to be rich. I’m not surprised girls do that sort of thing. Besides the old boy is really awfully nice and kind in his own way. But think of having blond and stupid children. But then one could be so jolly well dressed and take lovers… But it is better to retain one’s self-respect in decent poverty isn’t it? My life is a bore, I would so much rather be dead… Hamish gave me a ring from Cartier which has been a consolation to me in these hard times.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s caddish telling you about X. because of you being so far away and also you don’t know him do you or do you? Which makes it all right I think. Besides you know all the details of my cheerless existence.’

  From Swinbrook, 19th February, 1932,: ‘It’s all right it’s all right, I’ve burned my boats so isn’t that a relief. At least I never considered it only I was so bored down here and Muv went on at me about it and said you’ll die an old maid and I hadn’t seen Hamish for months and months so I toyed with the idea for five minutes during which time I suppose I wrote to you.’

  ‘But I shall never marry anybody except Hamish really you know and it’s just as well because I should be too awful to any one else. I mean you’ve no idea how awful I can be if I try. But he would get the being awful in first which would be much better for my character. I’ve just had three heavenly weeks seeing him every day and every week-end… And now I’ve come home for ten days to recuperate financially and physically because no thing is so expensive or so tiring as going about with the old boy…’

  From Redesdale Arms, Otterburn, l0th April: ‘I am up here in attendance on a very ill grandmother. It is more than depressing in every way… However, it gives me a chance to finish my book…’

  ‘Hamish is in Ireland, in acute money difficulties owing to having wagered £50 on some losing horse, of course £20 of my hard-earned savings have been despatched by wire with promises of more… What is rather galling is that he always grumbles at me being so inexpensively dressed and £50 would have been quite a little help when ordering the summer ermine cape from Nurse Furrier… However I intend to make him promise never to bet again except in cash as long as he lives don’t you agree.’

  ‘I had another proposal from X. in great style, orchids, etc, at the Café de Paris with Hamish giggling at the next table and I gave him the final raspberry. He was very cross and said I should be left on the shelf (impertinence) so I went off with Hamish to the Slipspin (new and horrible night club) which made him still crosser. Lousy young man, I don’t answer any of his letters now even.’

  ‘The book [Christmas Pudding] is rather good you know if only I can ever finish it.’

  From Castle Grant, Strathspey, 27th May: ‘Hamish came last week, he has been so beastly to me over bridge that I really can’t bear much more, it seems such a silly and unimportant thing whether one leads a club or a heart but to him it is sufficiently vital to make him forget all the elements of good manners and decency. Really sometimes I could kill him… Hamish may get a job in Shell at £600 a year, wouldn’t it be lovely. It means three years in India but even so it is a wonderful opening… Hamish is really being very sweet, only I am furious with him at the moment if you understand what I mean. He is sulking in his bedroom at present.’

  From 31 Tite Street, S.W. 3, 20th June: ‘Hamish is going to America on the 2nd to seek our fortunes. This is in the well known Mitford wail. I am frightfully unhappy but slightly hopeful at the same time. After all, better that than this awful waiting about in England. Hamish’s character is so much improved, we travelled from Scotland in a 3rd class sleeper with two commercial travellers overhead and he never murmured once! He is a sweet angel isn’t he?… P.S. Poor Muv always says I never write in a letter what you wouldn’t like read out in a “Court of Law”.’ On the top of the envelope Nancy had written: ‘From the paralyzed wives of noblemen’s association,’ and at the back, with a sketch of a woman in a wheel chair, ‘under royal patronage… these poor good old women, too often with no where to go…’

  27th June: ‘Hamish is not now going to America… Comforting, only he poor duck is disappointed… My book has to be finished by the end of August. After that I shall be free to contemplate life on the ocean wave with you. It is a rotten book and needs at least six weeks of very hard work to make it remotely readable… Randolph [Churchill] has announced that he intends to install me as his maitresse en titre. Thank you… I have just written a piece of my mind to Hamish so I suppose we are having a row. But if I don’t lecture him sometimes nobody else will. Oh dear, I wish it was all over one way or the other, it’s such a tiring struggle.’

  10th July: ‘John [Sutro] the angel, is sending Hamish to Munich to learn all about films, it sounds very much the old boy’s cup of tea don’t you think. So perhaps he’ll end up as a film producer of the most opulent type which would be nice.’

  From Swinbrook, 11th November: ‘I’ve got a new idea for a book, a sort of half sham memoir called Childhood and Girlhood, pretending I was born about 1870 of rich and noble parents, and with lots of bogus photo
graphs, all of Bobo [Unity] dressed up and called My Mother, My Uncle Charles, Grandpapa, etc. But I have bagged being beautiful Sister Effie who died young and Bobo is so cross she has gone to bed, hence this letter. Life here is hellishly boring.’

  When the news of Nancy’s marriage in November 1933 to a very different person reached me I was less surprised than if she had married Hamish. Even so it seemed a gamble. Peter, the second son of the highly cultivated ambassador, Lord Rennell, was a young man of boundless promise, and one could visualize him as a future cabinet minister, a law lord, or a prominent editor. He had abundant qualifications for success in any profession he deigned to choose. So far he had chosen none. His intellectual range and his knowledge of languages had been impressive as an undergraduate at Balliol. With his devil-may-care manner and handsome features, the more handsome by contrast with a bohemian unkemptness, he had an alluring panache, and his self-assurance was superficially convincing.

  Nancy craved adventure and Peter invested his slightest activities with an aura of risk. His background was cosmopolitan-romantic. His father, Sir Rennell Rodd, later Lord Rennell, had been so popular as ambassador in Rome during the First World War that he had been presented with a fine property near Naples by the Italian government. While at Oxford, where he had been a friend of Oscar Wilde, he had also won the Newdigate Prize, and in 1882 Wilde wrote an ‘envoi’ to Rodd’s book of poems Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf, for which he had suggested the title.1 Having arranged for its publication, Wilde had brazenly inserted a dedication to himself as ‘heart’s brother’ which embarrassed Rennell Rodd at the time, and even more during his diplomatic career. Peter was said to have hunted for rare copies of this volume and sold them profitably to his parent. This was quite in character, for Peter was the model for Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal.

  I never encountered Nancy and Peter together but I imagine they provided plenty of amusement for each other during the early years of their marriage. That Nancy had fallen in love with Peter more seriously than with Hamish, who seems to have prolonged her adolescence, is apparent from her letters to Mark Ogilvie-Grant. On 14th August, 1933, she wrote: ‘Oh goodness gracious I am happy. You must get married darling, everybody should this minute if they want a recipe for absolute bliss. Of course I know there aren’t many Peters going about but still I s’pose everybody has its Peter (if only Watson). So find yours dear the sooner the better. And remember true love can’t be bought. If I really thought it could I’d willingly send you £3 tomorrow. What I want to know is why nobody told me about Peter before—I mean if I’d known I’d have gone off to Berlin after him or anywhere else. However, I’ve got him now which is the chief thing… We are going to be married early in October and then live at Strand on the Green… We’re going to be damned poor you see.’ And later: ‘I have no news, the happiness is unabated at present and shows no immediate signs of abating either… I don’t expect we shall be married much before November which gives you plenty of time to save up for a deevy presey… We think of living in a house called Glencoe at Chiswick.’

  Of her honeymoon in Rome where the Rennells had a house on Via Giulia, Nancy wrote to her sister Unity, 8th December, 1933: ‘Why do people say they don’t enjoy honeymoons? I am adoring mine.’ A week later, however, she was writing to Mark, on a postcard of the garish Victor Emmanuel monument: ‘This of course is much the prettiest thing in Rome. I go and look at it every day. I am having a really dreadful time, dragging a badly sprained ankle round major and minor basilicas and suffering hideous indigestion from eating goats’ cheese. However, I manage to keep up my spirits somehow.’

  Back in England, she wrote from Rose Cottage, Strand on the Green, Chiswick: ‘I am awfully busy learning to be a rather wonderful old housewife. My marriage, contracted to the amazement of all so late in life, is providing me with a variety of interests, new but not distasteful, and besides, a feeling of shelter and security hitherto untasted by me. Why not follow my example and find some nonagenarian bride to skip to the altar with. Remember ‘tis better to be an old girl’s sweetheart than a young girl’s slave…’

  If ever Nancy woke up to the fact that Peter could become a bore, she was far too loyal to admit it. Yet she must have had Peter in mind when she described a first-class bore as one who ‘had a habit of choosing a subject, and then droning round and round it like an inaccurate bomb-aimer round his target, unable to hit: he knew vast quantities of utterly dreary facts, of which he did not hesitate to inform his companions, at great length and in great detail, whether they appeared to be interested or not.’

  Peter was a compulsive lecturer who enjoyed bombarding one with a miscellaneous jumble of facts: he belonged to the tribe of doctrinaires and he was seldom, as Evelyn Waugh expressed it, ‘disinclined to be instructive’. While he was beaming with youth and enthusiasm these monologues about the Senussi and the Tuaregs and the locality of Atlantis might dazzle and amaze one, but one surmised that Nancy might be surfeited with such volleys of abstruse information. During the war I suspected that many were inventions, as if to prove that he knew more than the rest of us. He sounded plausible: a very superior con man.

  When I returned to England from China with dire forebodings in the summer of 1939 I heard much of Peter’s activities in Perpignan among the refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Nancy had joined him there in May, and Chapter XV of The Pursuit of Love is based on her experiences at this time. Christian is a thinly disguised version of Peter: ‘He did not ask how she was or whether she had had a good journey—Christian always assumed that people were all right unless they told him to the contrary, when, except in the case of destitute, coloured, oppressed, leprous, or otherwise unattractive strangers he would take absolutely no notice. He was really only interested in mass wretchedness, and never much cared for individual cases, however genuine their misery, while the idea that it is possible to have three square meals a day and a roof and yet be unhappy or unwell, seemed to him intolerable nonsense.’

  Peter was as much in his element at Perpignan as Basil Seal at the Ministry of Modernization in Azania. He was too concerned with the problems of refugees to pay much attention to Nancy, who for all her kindness of heart was absurdly miscast in the role of social worker. Like Linda in the novel she ‘went to the camps every day, and they filled her soul with despair. As she could not help very much in the office owing to her lack of Spanish, nor with the children, since she knew nothing about calories, she was employed as a driver, and was always on the road in a Ford van full of supplies, or of refugees, or just taking messages to and from the camps. Often she had to sit and wait for hours on end while a certain man was found and his case dealt with… the sight of these thousands of human beings, young and healthy, herded behind wire away from their womenfolk, with nothing on earth to do day after dismal day, was a recurring torture to Linda. She began to think that Uncle Matthew had been right—that abroad, where such things could happen, was indeed unutterably bloody, and that foreigners, who could inflict them upon each other, must be fiends.’

  From Perpignan Nancy wrote to her mother (16th May, 1939): ‘I never saw anybody work the way these people do [Peter and his associates], I haven’t had a single word with Peter although I’ve been here two days. They are getting a boat off to Mexico next week with 600 families on board and you can suppose this is a job, reuniting these families.’

  ‘The men are in camps, the women are living in a sort of gymnasium in the town, and the children scattered all over France. Peter said yesterday one woman was really too greedy, she already has four children and she wants three more. I thought of you! These people will all meet on the quayside for the first time since the retreat. Peter sees to everything… I believe he will be here for life, refugees are still pouring out of Spain where it seems the situation is impossible for ex-Government supporters and their families. Over 100 a day come out.’

  ‘There is the original General Murgatroyd here, oh goodness he is funny. He has been sent by the Government to help
with the embarkation, speaks no French or Spanish but bursts into fluent Hindustani at the sight of a foreigner and wastes poor Peter’s time in every possible way. All the same he is a nice old fellow and very pro-refugee. Indeed no one who sees them could fail to be that, they are simply so wonderful. I haven’t yet been to one of the awful camps, just the women’s one in the town and to a hostel which Peter started at Narbonne, where people who are got out of camps can be cleaned up and rested before they go off to their destination. There are about 70 there and it is very nice indeed, with a garden which they have planted with vegetables. It is run by an English girl entirely on her own there, most of the present occupants are going in this ship to Mexico.’

  ‘Peter has two helpers, one called Donald Darling is a young man who owned a travel agency in Barcelona and is now of course ruined. He only thinks of the refugees although his own future is in as much of a mess as theirs. The other is Humphrey Hare, a writer who lives in the South of France, came over to see the camps and stayed on. They both, like Pete, work 14 hours a day for no pay and all three look absolutely done up. It is a most curious situation, apparently the préfet here said—“supposing there were refugee camps for Norwegians in England and three young Frenchmen went over and began telling the English how they should be run”—Actually however they have got the French quite fairly docile I can’t imagine how…’

  And on 25th May Nancy continued: ‘If you could have a look, as I have, at some of the less agreeable results of fascism in a country I think you would be less anxious for the swastika to become a flag on which the sun never sets. And, whatever may be the good produced by that régime, that the first result is always a horde of unhappy refugees cannot be denied. Personally I would join hands with the devil himself to stop any further extension of the disease. As for encirclement, if a person goes mad he is encircled, not out of any hatred for the person, but for the safety of his neighbours, and the same applies to countries. Furthermore, I consider that if the Russian alliance does not go through we shall be at war in a fortnight, and as I have a husband of fighting age I am not particularly anxious for that eventuality. You began the argument so don’t be cross if I say what I think!’