Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  14th June: ‘Yesterday I had to have an injection of morphia which properly laid me out—today I’m managing with a pill… My tortoises married yesterday. I could hear the noise from up here. They butt each other with clash of steel for ages and do incredibly dirty things. Marie was shocked.’

  ‘Great excitement at Jouy where aboriginal beavers (quite different from American ones) have been found in the Bièvre. A French beaver is called a Bièvre it seems, the word derives from that. Wild appeals on the télé etc. to preserve them. Diana thinks she has got them in her lake. In Blighty colonels would surge with dogs and do them in no doubt (great fun probably one must admit). They look (on télé) too sweet…’

  ‘Colonel has just telephoned to say Kay [Clark] is a lord. I thought lords were over but I’m awfully pleased, he does deserve it.’

  In July there was a sudden magical improvement. ‘The replacer of Marie, seeing me writhing about, said she could cure me. I said all right but don’t touch my back. She seized my back and practically jumped on it and in three days I had given up the drugs and in three weeks (last week) was completely cured. It turned out that she was a trained masseuse but, being a Belgian, not allowed to practise here. She took this situation to be near a married sister—is a first-class cook. The backache was caused by a twisted muscle which didn’t show in the X-rays. So you see God was on my side—made me put an advert in the local paper for a cook and I got this marvellous person. As Mme Botkin (aged 95 who lives in Venice) always says, dans la vie tout s’arrange.’

  ‘So now I’m back with Frederick. All this time I’ve read tremendously as you may imagine, and nothing else but his own works and those of his contemporaries, so now my book is writing itself, it’s all so much in my head. I can’t go to Venice—I’m still weak and thin—but hope for Silesia and Potsdam in October. Meanwhile the lovely weather and my garden are compensating for being stuck here.’

  ‘Carlyle. That is an idea. But is there not too much about him? I must find a new subject when I’ve done with Fritz.’

  On the 20th she wrote: ‘I’m better every day—no more bed at all in fact, it is made, with its cover… There’s nothing like being out of pain for the first time for seven months I can tell you. Went to the hairdresser and walked there and back (only 100 yards, but still).’ And on 24th July: ‘I’m working like mad again. The weather is a help too… I know it’s awful but the moon bores me. The men are so vile and always having to have a rest. I thought of Captain Scott. But Clem and Alph (Sir Alfred and Lady Beit—Clem was her cousin) got up in their pyjamas at the Meurice (“I set my alarm watch.” Only Clem would have one) like an air raid to see these sewers. Now Braun I suppose is an interesting man (he tried to kill us all never mind that) but they don’t show him.’

  Nancy’s resilience was remarkable. In spite of her physical anguish she told Raymond Mortimer on 25th July: ‘Frederick has really benefited. I have read tremendously. All Besterman’s 100 volumes, all Frederick’s own works and so on, and then thought about him non-stop. What an extraordinary creature. The porphyria y était pour beaucoup.’

  ‘I wonder if you’ve got Besterman’s life of Voltaire. As I always observe, only those with no sense of humour write about him—there is not one single joke. But of course, I was riveted. He is grossly unfair to Frederick. I knew he would be by the way the letters were edited—say, he engendered Hitler. Oh honestly! I wrote (to Theodore) saying I suppose you go on like that because you are frightened of what the old scamp (Voltaire I mean) will say when you see him in the Elysian Fields. He replied that Voltaire had anyway put a curse on whoever would edit his letters!’

  ‘Yesterday I received a book the size of a house, picture book on the 18th century. There are some heavenly things—the text is by dear Dr. Cobban therefore perfect—and yet and yet—some gruesome mistakes: Frederick the Great with his son and grandson; Louis XV arriving at Versailles, which had been empty since the death of Louis XIV, in 1772. I read Antonia’s [Fraser’s] book but seemed to know it all already. I envy the professional work and deplore the way it is written she falls into the modern clichés, “her personal clothes”, you know. The government is always called “the central government”. I note you didn’t review it. Peter Quennell says its success is due to prayer—the whole Pakenham family on its knees for weeks according to him. It conjures up a vision of Weidenfeld, with Spring and Autumn lists at the Wailing Wall and Jamie [Hamilton] at the Kirk.’

  To Sir Hugh Jackson she wrote on l0th August: ‘I’m really cured though I get sort of growing pains which are nasty but bearable. The lump which they carved out (benign like Bossuet) had nothing to do with the back, it was just an extra treat discovered by some busybody while examining me. Alas Marie has gone to her retraite—the whole thing upset her terribly and I was afraid she would fall ill. I miss her more than I can say after 29 years of her solid peasant wisdom and goodness. But I’ve got the nice person who cured me so I’m really lucky. The sad thing is that Marie lives so far away that it’s a separation like death. We write love letters almost daily.’

  ‘Frederick whizzes. I sit in the garden scribbling, without specs on account of the brilliant light—have done about a quarter…’

  ‘I’ve discovered something so amusing. You know Mme de Maintenon used to say there is a highly placed spy at Versailles and at Blenheim I think they’ve got some of his reports. Well Eugene told Frederick it was the maître des postes and that he, Eugene, used to get the orders before the French generals! The spy was never caught. I must now find out who the maître des postes was and another historical mystery will have been solved, too late alas for the Sun King.’

  ‘My book, the best I’ve ever written and next to King Solomon’s Mines ever read, is very far advanced,’ she told Raymond Mortimer. Though far from cured, for she suffered from ‘deep cramp in back and leg’ and was very weak and thin, Nancy wrote again in September: ‘I go to Potsdam and Dresden on 16th October pain or no pain, but I’ve chucked Silesia. In a way I want to see that most. Frederick loved it much more than his old Mark—the people so much cleverer and the land so beautiful…’

  Nancy mustered all her strength and courage for a journey particularly strenuous in her fragile condition, but she was accompanied by her sister Pam, so appropriately nicknamed ‘Woman’ for she had all the charm and sweetness of her sex with the gentle Mitford voice and azure eyes. Her enthusiastic accounts in letters show how cheerfully she could overcome her painful predicament.

  To Alvilde Lees-Milne she wrote in November: ‘The journey was simply amazing and I’m thankful I went. I took Pam and the Laws and wormed a huge sum of foreign currency out of the Banque de France, every penny of which I brought back. We weren’t allowed to pay for so much as a cup of coffee. They gave us two huge black Russian cars in which we bowled about in great comfort on empty roads—the speed limit is 50 m.p.h. Bliss, and the government agent who arranged the trip came everywhere with us. The curators all standing to attention at the door as we arrived and showed us everything—the one at the Zwinger in Dresden took two whole days so did the second in command at Potsdam, entirely devoted to us. I still don’t quite understand it but so it was. Then they were all so nice. Mr Friedlander the agent is a shrieker so you may imagine the jokes! Not always in the best of taste… Friedlander speaks English but nobody else—they didn’t know French let alone English, they all speak Russian and the notices in the hotels are in German and Russian.’

  ‘Of course we saw marvels and then there was the interest of it all. I had a lot of pain but no worse than when I’m here and they were so kind about bringing chairs and bringing the car to forbidden places and so on. The only thing was no baths, only showers, and I depend greatly on lying in a hot bath so that was rather a blow. Food delicious because they haven’t got round to broilers and so on and the taste was what one has forgotten, but of course if you say so they are deeply offended and say by next year all the farms will be factories. Like in all Commy countries nothing works
and the first evening I was stuck in a mad lift which whirled up and down for 35 minutes. I thought I was for it and Pam thought I’d been kidnapped. We had nine days in East Germany and two in West Berlin—staying at Potsdam, Dresden and East Berlin. I thought East Berlin vastly preferable to West, which is like one huge Oxford Street, the people are so much nicer. What Pam calls Cheek Point Charlie is too sinister—a gun in your tummy wherever you look. And we noticed that we were never left alone with anybody for a minute or allowed out alone, not that one minded.’

  ‘So that’s the journey—I’ve seldom enjoyed myself more. I’ve finished the book which is now being typed and my health has taken a distinct turn for the better so everything seems rosy again.’

  To Sir Hugh Jackson she confided that she still had a lot of pain: ‘I suppose I must make up my mind to that—specially in the morning.’ But her obsession with Frederick was almost analgesic; ‘The accounts of his personality all tally with each other so one can describe him much better than say, Louis XV, whose observers were more subjective. His sex life (as they say nowadays) is more mysterious but I suppose it consisted quite straightforwardly of footmen! He may have had two serious attachments, Keyserling and Rothenbourg, but there is no proof, no love letters as far as I know. In any case he had nothing like mignons and was uninfluenced by anybody… The Silesian journey I hope to make in the spring.’

  ‘East Germany fascinated me… and I saw all the things I wanted to though alas sometimes in a fog. Saxony is too beautiful: Dresden, n’en parlons pas. A heap of rubble with a few skyscrapers. But all the pictures were saved as well as the stunning treasure, by being buried under a prison for French generals! As for present living conditions, by our standards they are poor but of course that makes touring more agreeable. No motors on the roads and a very strict speed limit… East Berlin is shabby and badly lit but there are no advertisements, all the pretty old buildings are there more or less restored after the raids… Except for the tyranny and terror of which one got an occasional glimpse I would much rather live in the Eastern part…’

  She was beginning to feel better: ‘My masseuse says some thing has moved in my spine of its own accord and indeed I can see it has—about time too.’ The future of Potsdam worried her and she wrote to Raymond Mortimer, who had become her chief literary mentor since the death of Evelyn Waugh: ‘Will you join my Save Potsdam Campaign? They are going to pull down that exquisite town and put up workers’ flats. Some Germans are putting up a bitter fight and one must try and help them… Mr Friedlander, the government agent whom I loved because he was in many little ways so kind to me and such a shrieker, is really only interested in turbines—I am the first pen pusher he has ever had there. So I imagine his outlook is typical. When the Conservateur (deputy) took me round the town (he gave up two days—first the palaces, then town and gardens) I said “This town is really unique.” “Yes, it’s sad that it must go.”—“Go?”—“Yes, people can’t live in these houses any more, they must have heating, etc. etc.” “But” says I, “all that can be put in these houses very easily nowadays and people have far happier lives in them. In France as soon as they have a little money they ooze out of the skyscrapers into little houses. If you do this, Mr Friedlander, you will regret it in fifty years or less.”—“Very possibly, but it’s a question of money.” Then I said to the Conservateur, “surely you can object, what’s the good of a palace in the middle of an industrial complex? The conservateur of Versailles is very powerful in these ways.” “Alas, we are not.”’

  ‘Then I saw a professor who came to give me a history lesson and she said she has got a friend on the Potsdam council who is putting up a bitter fight and any comment from abroad would be a help. The point partly is that the Germans don’t admire the eighteenth century and Frederick is thought to have been far too Frenchified—Potsdam actually more Italian than French but still (and in parts Dutch). If they could be made to see that the eighteenth century is greatly prized now that their things are regarded as treasures, I believe it would help. I believe I slightly shook Mr Friedlander. The first evening we arrived we went to the hotel, a ghastly skyscraper opposite Frederick’s lovely stables and I said, “Mr Friedlander pull that down!”—“But we’ve only just put it up.” “Well, it’s a mistake—pull it down again.” He shook with laughter but I believe something sunk.’

  ‘You know when towns are demolished it just happens—comes the bulldozer and all is over in a trice. Hard to have any precise information, especially behind the darling curtain where people are very properly subject to discipline and seldom tell you their true thoughts!’

  ‘If you could sort of worm praise of the town of Potsdam into an article, I think it might be a great help if they were made to feel they are sacrificing something more than a lot of dirty old houses nobody wants. I saw that, at Dresden, the line is aren’t we lucky to have this lovely new town so up to date (vertical slums). I’m afraid Friedlander has already forgotten me like nurses do the moment you’ve left the clinic… Do pass on what I’ve said to Sir John Summerson. I think words of praise for what exists would be of immense help.’

  The German journey had given Nancy a salutary fillip, as we may deduce from her correspondence. Apparently she could not convert Raymond Mortimer to her infatuation for Frederick. ‘Do you think Frederick so German?’ she expostulated with him. ‘I see him as a purely eighteenth-century character, in some ways so modern. It seems to me his reign, after Frederick William’s, is into a Watteau out of a Rembrandt. Battles. It is the sorrow of my life never to have been in one. I suppose a cavalry charge must be the nearest thing to heaven on this earth. When I was little I was so jealous of my great-uncle for being killed in one (against the Boers—so wicked when I was a child and so wicked again now).’

  ‘Very hard on my old dad that he died too soon—if murder had been allowed when he was in his prime our home would have been like the last act of Othello almost daily—it’s a shame. Various characters, like Lloyd George, would soon have been dealt with, at least one of my aunts, and innumerable neighbours. It is unfair.’

  Everything seemed less and less rosy in 1970, and Nancy had to endure waves of shooting pain until she died. On 3rd January she wrote to Alvilde: ‘I’ve had ‘flu and can’t get going and my leg though better now has been worse than ever before… This ‘flu is the devil. Mme Guimont (char) is gravely ill with it. But far the worst on Xmas eve my little Marie was run over and lies in hospital over two hours drive from here with a broken leg and concussion. I can’t go to her I can’t even go downstairs. When I ring up they hardly say anything but I’ve had a letter from her neighbours saying she’s dans un triste état.’

  ‘I can’t work, I can only read Simenon. I don’t think I’ve ever been so low in my life.’

  Pain killers were suggested but she argued stoically against them. ‘If one has a perpetual pain this is what happens. They kill it. They also give you a headache, make you stupid and stop you going to the loo. Then after about four hours the pain comes back and as well you have got a headache and can’t go to the loo and feel like death as well as having the pain. What they are good for is something like migraine which, when it is over, is over.’

  ‘If I weren’t afraid of it not working and permanently ruining my brain what there is of it, I would have tried to take an overdose of something ages ago because I would much sooner be dead than have this awful pain all the time.’

  On 30th January she engaged a Moroccan servant called Hassan who appeared to have admirable qualities, for her previous attendant had shown signs of fatigue and ill temper which added mental discomfort to physical distress. ‘It would be so wonderful to have somebody who is never tired and a slave—I mean it will be wonderful until he murders me… I’ve got a new doctor and am having various tests nearly every day in Paris: it’s a bore but I have faith in him for some reason… Mme Guimont’s grandson went skiing as they all do now (free) and she went to the station to meet him. She says the yard was crammed with a
mbulances and you couldn’t move for stretchers and it was like the trains coming back from Verdun! “Mais Christian est indemne.” I screamed at the account.’

  ‘Yes, dear little Tony [Gandarillas]. He fell down at a dinner chez Schiaparelli and they thought he had hurt his shoulder but I suppose really it was a stroke. Rather perfect as I don’t think he knew much about it and died four or five days later. Marie-Laure [de Noailles] was marvellous, saw to everything and paid the hospital… He was much more like ninety—no age in the Figaro.’

  The big-hearted and versatile Marie-Laure herself was to die soon after nursing our ancient Chilean friend.

  After a whole week of gruelling tests Nancy’s doctor decided that she had neither arthritis nor tuberculosis (which he had suspected because she was so emaciated) nor a slipped disc. But he could not diagnose the disease and insisted that she be examined further in a hospital. ‘He cleverly said people who have a métier they like are never malades imaginaires.’

  Hassan soon endeared himself to the rue d’Artois. ‘He is a real cook, absolutely the top—I’m so thrilled. Then so smart and nice and kind; he found one of my hedgehogs and brought it in and so on—you know, the sort of person one can do with. Everybody loves him already—Mme Guimont (char) IN love and comes free! on her days off to give a hand if he seems to want her. I can’t believe my luck… I’m only afraid he’ll be bored down here but he says not…’

  ‘Will you come round the world next year in the France with me?… Oh do. I’ve got a letter from Gerry [Wellington] on a cruise saying he had never met middle-class people before, “they are quite different from us”. Isn’t he awful!… I’ve got a new pill which keeps the pain under control.’

  In spite of the ache in her bones Nancy drove off to visit Marie a few days later: ‘Pam took me to see old Marie—nearly a hundred miles—I wish to goodness she were nearer… I never saw such a nice hospital—she is in a huge sunny room with only two others and the prettiest view of old houses and fruit trees—she is amused by watching the people in them. She’s still rather muddled and one eye is shut and she can’t walk but they seem to say in time all will be well. She’s had no pain whatever. Very good colour and simply delighted to see us. Hassan continues to be perfect…’