Nancy Mitford

by Selina Hastings

  They went to Rome for the honeymoon, staying in the Rennells’ magnificent apartment in Palazzo Giulia. ‘Why do people say they don’t enjoy honeymoons?’ wrote Nancy to Unity, ‘I am adoring mine.’ To Mark she sent a teasing postcard: ‘I am having a really dreadful time, dragging a badly sprained ankle round major & minor basilicas & suffering hideous indigestion from eating goats cheese. However I manage to keep my spirits up somehow.’

  Peter and Nancy began their married life in a tiny house overlooking the Thames at Strand on the Green, just down river from Kew Bridge. Rose Cottage was like a little dolls’ house, with a walled garden back and front, a stone-flagged garden path, bow-windows, and a pink china pig and two parrots balanced on top of the porch. With help from Mark, who was good at that sort of thing, Nancy made the interior elegant and pretty. Although she had almost no money she was clever at picking up bargains in the sale-room, and had bought among other things a big sofa for £2 and a carved mantelpiece for £1. Although small, the rooms were airy and light, made more so by the pale colours of the walls and carpets. In the sitting-room was a handsome, if shabby, Aubusson carpet and Nancy’s beloved desk, her bonheur-du-jour. Upstairs in the bedroom were the festooned curtains that throughout her life were such a distinctive mark of her Parisian taste; from this window Nancy could look over the garden, and on the other side of a quiet road, across to a tree-lined tow-path and the pleasant, wide expanse of the Thames. Once or twice she caught sight of something not so pleasant, the sodden mass of a suicide’s corpse drifting on the tide: this, according to the story, was the cue for Nancy to telephone the old boatman whose job it was to fish it out, at ten shillings a time – a shilling more if he had to cross over to the far side of the river.

  Nancy enjoyed her little house, she enjoyed being married – and the liberty marriage gave her. With Peter away all day at work, she had no one to please but herself. ‘I am awfully busy learning to be a rather wonderful old housewife,’ she wrote cheerfully to Mark. ‘My marriage, contracted to the amazement of all so late in life is providing me with a variety of interests, new but not distasteful, & besides, a feeling of shelter & security hitherto untasted by me.’ That her husband was the last person to be relied on to give either shelter or security was not yet apparent. For the moment she was more than happy to be away from her parents and free to play at keeping house. She had acquired a couple of French bulldogs, Millie and Lottie, on whom she doted: they were allowed to sleep, wheezing, under the eiderdown on her bed. It became a familiar sight to the neighbours, Nancy in a pair of slacks walking briskly along the tow-path with the two stout little dogs trotting after her. When the weather was fine, the garden was a great pleasure to sit and read in. ‘I go less & less to London as I love it here so much,’ she told Unity. And there was plenty of social life of the young married variety – lively entertaining done on the cheap with the emphasis on bridge, which both Rodds played well. One of these bridge-parties at the cottage was described in the Evening Standard as ‘a gay, light-hearted affair of the cheerful kind that hasn’t happened much since the days of the fabulous past when there were those Bright Young People about’, a comparison hardly justified by the modest reality of furniture pushed back against the wall, cider-cup to drink and card-tables crammed into the bedroom.

  But, even in these early days, the marriage had its problems. Peter’s new responsibilities had not changed him, and he was once again out of a job. Concerned letters were soon flying to and fro between Francis and the rest of the family. Nancy had confided to Golly, her sister-in-law, that she was worried by Peter’s lack of financial sense, and that the two of them had had some bad rows on their honeymoon over his devil-may-care extravagance. This piece of information was now being chewed over by the Rodd clan, together with the details of Peter’s lack of employment. Francis’s wife, Mary, an enthusiastic Moral Rearmer, wrote to her husband, ‘What are we to do with Peter. You know if Peter doesn’t make good over this it will be the end of him for so far marriage is the only thing he has not tried.’ ‘Taffy mentions in his last letter to me that Peter is not in a job,’ Lady Rennell came chiming in. ‘Once more his future seems in the balance. What on earth have they got to live on except the allowance he gets from us.’ Her husband, more in sorrow than in anger, expressed disappointment in his son, whose failure to get the job he had assured everyone was in the bag had rather upset his father. ‘What you say about Peter has rather upset me,’ he complained to Francis. ‘I was under the belief that he had a definite engagement with Hamburger and was to begin on £500 a year. It was on the strength of this assurance that I went into the question of settlements and discussed the whole matter with Lord Redesdale who was equally convinced that he had a definite undertaking from H. I am now afraid that as usual the whole story was built on a mere possibility without any substance. It is always the same story with him … I have not said much about it but his unconcern for every one else in order to gratify his whim of the moment has made me unhappy for many years – when all the rest of the family are only joy to us.’ This sort of thing had become the established pattern with Peter – never holding on to any job for long, leaving one position always with the much-vaunted promise of something better in the offing which somehow never quite materialised. Lord Rennell was perplexed by Peter’s fecklessness – so different from the reliable Francis – and, being a kind man, he worried about their poverty. ‘One feels a little scared about the young couple and I am wondering whether their house is healthy or whether they get enough to eat and keep warm … They do not tell us much, but one cannot help realising that since he gave up £600 a year on an over optimistic hope of a better job it must be rather difficult for them to get along on the remainder, unless there are other sources of revenue about which I do not know … I should like to be reassured that these repeated attacks of flu are not the result of inadequate resources.’

  Although not, in Nancy’s phrase, ‘poor like poor people’, certainly by the standards of their families and friends the Rodds were fairly hard-up. Between them they had an income of about £500 a year, which included allowances from both sets of parents, the little Nancy made from her journalism, and from the stocks and shares bought with the proceeds of Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding. On this they could live modestly at Rose Cottage, with one servant and later on a small car; but there was no margin for treats or extravagance, no margin for the good clothes for which Nancy longed, nor for the expensive drinking bouts at fashionable night-clubs to which Peter was quickly becoming addicted. More than once Nancy had to rely on discreet gifts from her father-in-law (‘Don’t tell Lil’), and more than once she was visited by the bailiffs. Nancy being Nancy, she made a good story out of this, telling how she got to know them so well that she used to ask them in to tea, which no doubt she did. Nonetheless to be in such a predicament was unnerving and this period of acute economic insecurity, after a childhood in which financial crises were a regular occurrence, was to influence her attitude to money for the rest of her life.

  Nancy never really became fond of Peter’s family. ‘I lunched today with the Rennells,’ begins a typical account. ‘It was an awful lunch, most of the guests had to be carried upstairs on account of senile debility & there were 5 courses. So now I feel ill & liverish & cross.’ She was grateful to her father-in-law, was touched by his kindness while remaining unimpressed by the role of perfect courtier; Lady Rennell she frankly disliked (the feeling was mutual – Lil liked none of her daughters-in-law: ‘at least she’s a lady,’ was the most she was ever prepared to concede); and she found little in common with the brothers and sisters and their husbands and wives. Mitford frivolity did not blend well with the Rodd breed of public servant, with their salt-of-the-earth seriousness and their tendency towards Doing Good. The only member of the family, apart from Peter, whom Nancy did like was Aunt Vi, Lady Rennell’s sister, a spirited old lady who lived with her husband, Edward Stuart Wortley, at Highcliffe, an immense and immensely grand Gothic castle on th
e Dorset coast. Aunt Vi was fond of Nancy and admired her patience in dealing with her husband. ‘My word, how lucky Peter was to find a wife like that. She adores him, and is marvellously patient, for he is like an irresponsible school boy, still, and hopelessly unpractical.’

  But the Rennells had their uses, one of them being a villa at Posilipo near Naples, built by Lord Rennell as a summer retreat on land presented to him by a grateful Italian government. The villa itself was hideous, but its situation could hardly have been more beautiful, on top of a cliff looking across the Bay of Naples, with Vesuvius in one direction, the island of Capri in the other. Nancy, who went there for the first time the summer after her wedding, loved the luxury and the swimming and sunbathing, though not, it must be said, the company. ‘In this family everyone is either too high brow or too low brow for me,’ she told Diana. ‘Lord R is fearfully erudite & the others think about nothing but making money. None of them have heard of the Russian ballet for instance so one can never have a really cosy chat.’ Peter himself stayed only for a few days so that Nancy was thrown very much on the company of his brother Taffy (‘a miserable worm’) and his wife Yvonne, who irritated her past bearing. ‘That awful Yvonne is coming tomorrow which will wreck all,’ she wrote to Diana. ‘She made £40 in Venice sewing (a new name for it eh? & one to be remembered I feel for future use) I can’t bear the idea of her face, you know the feeling.’ Nancy’s natural indolence and lack of curiosity about the local sights did not fit in with the Rodds’ natural vigour and keenness for doing things. ‘Tomorrow I am off at 9 to Paestum, so you see what a culture hog I have become. I must say oh dear oh me I would rather sit on my bottom here.’

  Nancy returned to England at the end of August to find herself on the brink of what was to turn into a row of truly Mitford proportions. In the spring of 1934, before her holiday in Italy, she had started work on a new novel, the idea being a tease on Unity and Diana, whose recent conversion to Fascism had provided Nancy with her inspiration. The heroine was modelled on Unity, and there was to be a lot of comic business about the Führer, and about the English Leader, Captain Jack (Mosley), and his uniformed band of Union Jackshirts (the British Union of Fascists). Unfortunately this was a tease that neither Unity nor Diana found in the least amusing.

  When Diana fell in love with Mosley, she became set on a course that would stay unchanged for the rest of her life. For her (as later for Nancy), falling in love with a man meant an unswerving dedication to his cause: love for the man and belief in his cause became one and the same, leading both to a rare depth of devotion and a corresponding blindness to flaws in either the man or in his ideal. Mosley had launched the British Union of Fascists in the autumn of 1932, the year he and Diana had met. His wife, Cimmie2, died in May of the following year, which meant that he and Diana could now plan to marry, as soon as the cumbersome process of her divorce from Bryan Guinness was complete. With Cimmie’s death, Diana could more publicly ‘nail her colours’ to the Leader’s mast, colours which to most of her friends were of a most disturbing hue. To the liberal-aesthete circle, Nancy among them, which comprised most of Diana’s friends, Mosley’s brand of Fascism, distinct from but sympathetic towards the German version, was abhorrent. When in the summer of 1933 Diana returned from her first visit to Germany, full of enthusiasm for what she had seen of the Nazi Party on show at the Nuremberg Parteitag, several of them tried to argue her out of her, as they saw it, disastrous illusion. It seemed inconceivable that a woman as charming and sophisticated as Diana, a lover of the arts, a passionate subscriber to all that was most civilised in their world, should be in thrall to such a dark and ugly creed. But in thrall she was, and argument was a waste of breath.

  Fanatical as Diana’s committal to her Leader and his cause appeared to most of her friends, Unity’s seemed little short of lunatic. Having met Mosley with Diana at Eaton Square, she had succumbed at once to his mesmerising charm and the appealing simplicity of his argument. Eagerly she joined the Movement, and accompanied her sister on that decisive first visit to Germany in 1933. She and Diana drew close over their common interest. But while Diana in her first exposure to Hitler’s Fascism saw, in common with many English people of that time, a marvellously efficient organisation, effectively transforming Germany from poverty and chaos into a well-ordered and prosperous nation (and could not the same be done for Britain, also in a state of economic decline and with a distressingly high rate of unemployment?), Unity at the Nuremberg Parteitag underwent nothing less than a religious conversion. Transported by the martial music and the sight of thousands of marching men, ecstatic under the spell of the Führer’s hypnotic oratory, she took to Hitler and Fascism as a born-again Christian takes to God. She went home full of her new enthusiasm, and as soon as she could returned to Munich, ostensibly in order to learn German (Muv was surprised and pleased: Bobo’s refusal to learn French had distressed her, and she was glad to see a sign in her recalcitrant daughter of some cultural curiosity), in fact to devote herself to following Hitler, studying details of his movements in the papers, and positioning herself outside his flat on the Prinzregentenplatz, or by the Brown House, or at a table at the Osteria Bavaria where he frequently came for lunch. Her perseverance was eventually rewarded with a personal introduction and the entrée to the inner circle of Nazi Prominenten to which Hitler made her known. He gave her a special swastika badge all of her own with his signature engraved on the back. As Hitler’s guest she appeared at rallies, at the Olympic Games of 1936, at the Parteitag celebrations and much of the rest of the Nazi propaganda performance, which she described in letters home childishly adorned with swastikas and ‘Heil Hitlers!’.

  And in many ways Unity was still a child, emotionally and intellectually immature. Nazism appealed to her on a very simple level: she liked the marching and the songs and the good-looking young men in their uniforms; she liked the badges and the pamphlets and being able to dress up in her black shirt and gauntlets. Being with Hitler gave her for the first time in her life a sense of her own importance, and she found no difficulty in swallowing his anti-semitic propaganda, propaganda which she was only too willing to regurgitate on every possible occasion.

  Nancy was fond of her eccentric younger sister, who with her statuesque proportions, expressionless face and thick fair hair did rather resemble the warrior maidens after whom she was named. Unity had charm and originality, she could be very funny and there was something endearing about her naivety. But to Nancy her obsession with Nazism, uncomprehending though it may have been, was anything but endearing. By her taunts she tried to emphasise the ridiculous aspects of Unity’s behaviour, while at the same time maintaining a façade of good-natured sisterly affection. She loved her sisters, but she loathed their politics, and this love and loathing were difficult to reconcile. There was Bobo as she always had been, sitting at the lunch table with everybody else at Swinbrook, and here was this demented Valkyrie brazenly proclaiming herself in alliance with all that Nancy most abhorred.

  In June 1935 Unity had gone to Hesselberg at the invitation of Julius Streicher, and had publicly declared her Fascist beliefs and her hatred for the Jews: following this up by giving an interview to the Münchener Zeitung, along very much the same lines, headed ‘Eine Britische Faschistin erzählt’. True to character, Nancy responded to this unappealing behaviour with mockery:

  Darling Stony-heart. We were all very interested to see that you were the Queen of the May this year at Hesselberg.

  Call me early, Goering dear

  For I’m to be Queen of the May Good gracious, that interview you sent us, fantasia, fantasia.

  She responded with mockery to every aspect of Unity’s obsession: to Horst Wessel (‘Hoarse Vessel’), to Hitler and the whole of the Nazi régime: ‘By the way aren’t you going abroad, to England, quite soon. Well then I shan’t bother to send this to the nasty land of blood baths & that will save me 1d We were asked to stay with somebody called Himmler or something, tickets & everything paid for, but we ca
n’t go as we are going to Venice & the Adriatic for our hols … Actually he wanted to show us over a concentration camp now why? So that I could write a funny book about them.’

  Nancy remained all her life politically immature, her opinions too frivolous and too subjective to be taken seriously – a limitation which restrained her not at all in the airing of these opinions. Her loathing of the Fascist Right coupled with a feeling for moderation and a dislike of extremes of behaviour in any direction led her towards a middle-of-the-road Socialism. She considered herself a Socialist, and as such could hardly be expected to show sympathy to the family Fascists, but, as always, her feelings were ambivalent, particularly where they concerned Diana. Bobo, bad backward Bobo, firmly entangled in the lunatic fringe, was a much easier target than Diana, closer to Nancy not only in age but in sympathy and interests. When Diana left Bryan, Nancy stuck loyally by her, but she could not bring herself either to like or to approve of Mosley. To Nancy Sir Ogre, as she referred to him behind his back, was a sinister influence. She could not help, either, being aware of the passion, the emotional intensity which almost tangibly existed between Mosley and Diana, and which was, as she subsconsciously recognised even during her brief period of happiness with Peter, something entirely lacking in her own life. In her typically equivocal manner, right hand carefully not looking at what left hand was doing, she supported her sister while simultaneously undermining her. In 1933, Nancy had attended a BUF meeting in Oxford, and had written to describe it to Diana, trying to please by expressing admiration for ‘the Leader’, while at the same time making clear her instinctive disgust for his methods. ‘Darling Bodley,’ she wrote from Swinbrook. ‘TPOL’s3 meeting was fascinating, but awful for him as the hall was full of Oxfordshire Conservatives who sat in hostile & phlegmatic silence – you can imagine what they were like. I think he is a wonderful speaker & of course I expect he is better still with a more interesting audience.’ That was all right; but, unable to leave well alone, she continued, ‘There were several fascinating fights, as he brought a few Neanderthal men along with him & they fell tooth & (literally) nail on anyone who shifted his chair or coughed. One man complained afterwards that the fascist’s nails had pierced his head to the skull.’