The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  My parents had many friends and relations to stay; Mrs Hammersley was our favourite. I remember her first when I was seven and my sister Unity three. Unity had a familiar called ‘Madam’ whom she blamed for all her sins, such as scribbling with coloured chalks on the wall near her bed. My son Alexander, also at the age of three, had exactly the same excuse; his familiar was called the Dackerman. Once he got hold of some scissors and snipped his cot sheets to ribbons. When I reproached him he said: ‘But the Dackerman did it. I saw him do it.’ Unity also saw Madam at work.

  Mrs Hammersley was fascinated by Madam. ‘Tell me, Unity,’ she said, ‘what is Madam like?’

  ‘She’s got black hair, and a black dress, and a white shawl,’ said Unity very slowly, gazing at her interlocutor.

  ‘Oh! Am I Madam?’ cried Mrs Hammersley. There was no reply.

  The fact that she listened to us and seemed to be interested in us was very unusual and flattering, for in those days children were seen and not heard. Sometimes she was almost too interested. A cousin of ours who was having an unsatisfactory love affair told us that Mrs Hammersley padded along to her room late one night, and opened the conversation by saying: ‘Tell me Phyllis, Are you happy?’

  Phyllis replied untruthfully: ‘Oh yes, thank you, Mrs Hammersley. Very happy.’

  I think it was my father and uncles who called her ‘the widow’ in our hearing, and we adopted the name, which suited her wonderfully well; not only her dress, but her whole demeanour and expression were those of a widow. Her gloom acquired a new dimension when financial disaster overwhelmed her. Mr Hammersley had left her quite rich, but nearly all the money was in Cox’s Bank of which he had been a partner, and the bank went into liquidation in 1923, leaving Mrs Hammersley if not exactly poor, at least very much less well off than she was accustomed to be. I remember my mother opening a letter at breakfast one morning and saying, ‘Oh, poor Violet, Cox’s Bank has failed,’ and then, sorry though she was, laughing, because the letter announcing this terrible news was written on the back of a crumpled bill, as if to demonstrate that henceforward writing paper would be beyond the means of her old friend.

  Many years later she did the same thing to me; someone had forged her signature on a cheque. The bank reimbursed her, but in telling me of it she wrote on a scrap of waste paper.

  The big London house with the two pianos and no boot hole now had to be sold, and she moved to a charming little house in St Leonard’s Terrace in Chelsea. Christopher was at Christ Church, but David when he left Eton had to earn his living instead of going to Oxford. She minded all this quite desperately, and made no attempt whatsoever to hide her despair, let alone count her blessings.

  She never seemed poor to us because her possessions were so lovely. I knew St Leonard’s Terrace well; my parents often took it for the summer when my sisters were out dancing every night. Furniture, pictures, china, all were perfect. But she certainly felt poor, and was more and more disinclined to spend money out of her purse. When she dined with us in London my father always stood on the doorstep with half a crown at the ready to pay her taxi. ‘Oh no, David,’ she used to say, rather pleased by his little joke. There was invariably a scene before dinner, whether in London or the country.

  ‘Violet, what would you like to drink?’

  With a hollow laugh resembling a groan, Mrs Hammersley said with great emphasis, ‘You know, David, there’s only one thing I really like.’

  ‘Oh, what is it? Claret? Cider?’ He never gave in until she had uttered the word champagne, although the bottle was waiting on the ice.

  She was one of those rare persons who are equally good as hostess or guest; she was well worth the trouble she caused. Her luncheons and dinners were highly enjoyable, and possibly one of the reasons why she so resented the loss of her money was that she knew she had a great talent which she was now unable to use except in a modest way. Sybil Colefax was an old friend of hers, and it exasperated her to hear of endless luncheons at Argyle House, while she, so much cleverer and more fascinating in every way than Lady Colefax could ever be, was inhibited by lack of means from filling her house as she would, perhaps, have liked to do. In fact, however, she was far from having the robust health, stamina and energy required by anyone who aspires to the role of ‘hostess’, and she probably realized this, and was just complaining for the fun of it.

  The Hammersleys’ country house on the river at Bourne End where they had a gondola and a Venetian gondolier, was also sold. I never saw it, but heard much about ‘My friends, the Lehmanns’ who were her neighbours there. John Lehmann was Mrs Hammersley’s godson, and she was devoted to his talented sisters, Beatrix, who became a famous actress, and Rosamond, whose first novel, Dusty Answer, was a bestseller in England and was also acclaimed in France. We felt very envious of the Lehmanns. Mrs Hammersley made all her friends sound thrilling in exactly the way we most admired as adolescents. We were very conscious of being country bumpkins, and she was a link with a glittering world of ‘clever’ people. She also loved to travel to outlandish places, and stayed with various High Commissioners in the outposts of Empire, returning with tales of adventure among the crocodiles. Once she told us she was going to Rome. ‘Oh,’ said Unity, ‘isn’t Mrs Ham lucky! She’s going to roam. Where are you going roam to?’ However, it was not her roaming, it was her clever friends we longed for.

  As soon as I was grown up I acquired dozens of clever friends, and no doubt they are the salt of the earth. What they lack in good nature they make up for over and over again in the amusement and interest they provide. Mrs Hammersley was extremely clever and the best of good company, and it is curious that with so many friends who were writers she produced so little herself. I think it had to do with her character and her physique. She was not strong. and she certainly made the most of her various illnesses and was probably too engrossed in them to force herself to write. The French say ‘il ne faut pas trop s’écouter;’ Mrs Hammersley listened to herself to a rather disastrous extent.

  During a journey in North Africa with the Sitwells she fell ill, and Osbert Sitwell wrote a short story about her called ‘… that Flesh is Heir to’. The theme was that Mrs Hammersley (easily recognizable) was a carrier of every disease that flesh is heir to, and her bag stuffed with germs. When this was published she was, rather naturally, furious. With the brashness of extreme youth I invited them both to a dinner party on the same night. There was a moment of hesitation, and then they fell into each other’s arms and Osbert was forgiven.

  St Leonard’s Terrace had now been sold, and she lived nearby in Sargent’s old studio in Tite Street. She also had a charming little house, Wilmington, at Tolland Bay on the Isle of Wight. Not long after this she suffered a nervous breakdown; she sent a message, would I go round. I found her lying on a chaise longue in the drawing room at Tite Street; she looked desperate. Her face was yellow, I suppose from jaundice; her eyes were tightly shut and tears were flowing. She seized my hand and clutched it, murmuring: ‘Child! Tell me something to make me better. Tell me that we are going on a journey together. Say you are going to drive me to Cornwall.’ I fell in with her request as best I could. She wanted to be convinced, she wanted to be able to say: ‘I am far too ill to go to Cornwall,’ and for me to reassure her by persuading her that this was not so, ‘Oh no, Mrs Ham, you’ll soon be well enough and I will take care of you.’ I cannot remember how long she remained thus. I visited her several times. Cornwall faded from her mind as she painfully climbed out of the pit of despair. This depression had not, so far as I know, been brought on by any particular worry or sorrow. It came, and it went.

  Nearly all her letters are complaints about ill health, or unlucky accidents that had befallen her; sometimes she fell back on the weather if there was nothing much else to complain of. But she had sympathy, too, for friends. In 1937 Kit, speaking in the open air in a street in Liverpool, standing on the roof of a van, was struck by a brick thrown at his head by an opponent. Unconscious, he was taken off to hospi
tal. Mrs Hammersley read of it in the papers and wrote at once.

  Darling child.

  I am so grieved for you at your anxiety. Is it a serious injury? or only a slight one? Papers are so unreliable. Please write to me… I feel you so far over the hills and wish I could see you and have a long talk… I confess I am terribly anxious about international affairs.

  Your loving old friend, V.H.

  I was then living at Wootton in Staffordshire. I invited nobody to stay because Kit loved to be able to come at any time and guests bored him. Solitude was what he craved, for a few days or even hours in the whirl of his crowded, busy life, and that he found in the peace and beauty of Wootton. Our marriage was still unannounced, but naturally Mrs Hammersley knew very well that if I lived ‘so far over the hills’ it was for his sake. I made her an exception to my rule about no guests. Kit liked her company.

  She used sometimes to be driven up to Staffordshire by Unity. After tea in the nursery we had wild games of racing demon. Unity and I each helped one of my little boys aged six and seven which enraged Mrs Hammersley because in spite of this drag on our speed she could never win. She tried to get us to help her, but we said she was much too old to need help. Part of her great attraction was that even nursery racing demon was taken so seriously by her.

  She was very fond of Unity and visited her in Munich. Unity’s love of everything German, and in particular everything Bavarian, was a passion she wanted others to share. She took Mrs Hammersley to Nymphenburg, and was delighted by the admiration evoked by the castle, the park, and the Amalienburg.

  After a while, ‘Child,’ said Mrs Hammersley, ‘is there anywhere here where I could retire?’ ‘Oh yes, Mrs Ham,’ was the enthusiastic reply, ‘the whole Schloss is full of grace and favour flats with old princesses in them, oh do come!’ She already envisaged the pleasure of having Mrs Hammersley as a permanent neighbour. But all Mrs Ham wanted was to be shown a lavatory.

  Tite Street was a lovely house, and in the high drawing room, formerly Sargent’s studio, her full-length portrait by Wilson Steer was shown to perfection. It is a masterpiece. She is sitting under a Gainsborough-like tree wearing a voluminous white satin dress. ‘Oh, Mrs Ham, if you won’t leave me your ring, please leave me the Steer!’ we used to beg. Unfortunately this splendid picture, which should be in the Tate, was acquired by a gallery in Australia; when Tite Street was sold she had nowhere to put it.

  She once took me to see Wilson Steer, who also lived in Chelsea near the river. After looking at his pictures we all walked rather slowly along the Embankment, as it was a fine spring day. Every now and again Steer stopped and put his hand inside his overcoat. Mrs Hammersley said that if he felt a bead of sweat on his chest he immediately returned home; he was a hypochondriac, and pneumonia was his favourite terror.

  Once when I was lunching with her at Tite Street Mrs Hammersley began inveighing against the wretches who borrow one’s books and fail to return them. A fellow guest, Logan Pearsall Smith [brother-in-law of Bertrand Russell and author of Trivia], got up from the table and opened a glass-fronted bookcase. He took out three volumes at random, and each had somebody else’s name on the fly leaf. She was unabashed.

  Not only an inveterate borrower, she never hesitated to ask for something if she happened to want it. After I grew up there was the reiterated cry of ‘Child! Will you céder me that dress?’

  The answer was usually: ‘Oh Mrs Ham, I wish I could, but you see it’s the only one I’ve got.’

  She made me take her to Harrods because I refused to céder her a rather cheap coat I could not spare. The department where it was to be found was called Junior Miss, which seemed almost incredibly inappropriate for El Greco’s widow: nevertheless she found what she wanted.

  She knew we called her Mrs Ham, and in fact generally signed her letters ‘Fond love always, Mrs Ham.’ ‘Wid’ was another matter, and I am not sure whether she knew we generally referred to her thus among ourselves; certainly to my mother she was always Violet. However, one day Muv, very vague, answered the telephone, and we heard her say: ‘Hello. Who? Oh, is it you, Wid?’ There was a long pause, and then Mrs Hammersley said firmly, ‘Yes. Fem.’ Fem (short for female) was the cheeky name my younger sisters had given our mother years before.

  Poor Mrs Ham! Life, in the inexorable way it has, gave her many blows; quite enough to justify any amount of gloom. The worst by far was the death of her son David. Christopher lived far away, in the West Indies, so that she saw him rarely. Only Monica, with four children, remained, and she was too busy to have much time to spare for her mother, who now lived mostly in the Isle of Wight. Mrs Hammersley added a garden room to Wilmington and showed us the architect’s plans. In one corner was the word ‘German’. ‘Oh Mrs Ham, you are lucky to have a German in the corner!’ said Unity. It was where she intended to put a china wood-burning stove.

  Our own tragedies were overwhelming, and Mrs Hammersley was full of sympathy. When my brother Tom was killed, at the end of the Second World War, she wrote to me:

  I feel I must write one line to tell you how grieved I am about Tom. I always looked upon you as his special sister, but perhaps I was wrong about this and that he meant a great deal to all his sisters. Nevertheless that is how it did strike me in old days… Tom had so much charm, Byronic charm, was so handsome and clever, and I suppose he should have married long ago.

  I am ill again…

  Now that the war was over, she gradually became slightly more cheerful. Working on a book, Nancy went to stay with her at Wilmington; rationing was still at its most stringent. Nancy wrote to me: ‘The Widow performs the dance of the seven veils for the butcher, but he never gives us anything.’ We had just killed a bull calf on the farm, and I wrote asking whether I should post them a few pounds of veal. A telegram handed in at Totland Bay arrived; it contained the one word: ‘Yes’. Mrs Ham was famous for her short telegrams, sometimes they were so short as to be incomprehensible to the recipient, which necessitated a second telegram. Her only rival in this respect was a French friend of ours, Jean de Gaigneron, who, hearing of the death of an old lady in whose house he had lunched and dined times without number for fifty years, telegraphed her son: ‘Navré’ and signed it with his surname.

  During this visit Mrs Hammersley complained to Nancy that now the war was over she felt rather constricted by living entirely in the Isle of Wight and wished she had something in London. She missed her friends. She often stayed with the Julian Huxleys, but she wanted a place of her own. Monica had no spare room. The sort of hotel she could afford was rather wretched. Tite Street had fetched very little, much less than she had hoped it would. And so on and so forth. Nancy listened for several minutes and then said brightly: ‘I know! Buy back Tite Street,’ a remark which called forth a deluge of reproaches.

  At this time we had a small publishing business, Euphorion Books, and we published Thackeray’s Daughter, a memoir of Lady Ritchie written by Mrs Hammersley in collaboration with Lady Ritchie’s daughter. It had a modest success; having taken the trouble to write it, Mrs Hammersley was anxious to see it in print, and we obliged. Later on, more ambitiously, a volume of her translation of a selection of Mme de Sévigné’s letters appeared, and for this the publisher was Secker & Warburg.

  As I have said, she was a demanding guest. She was always welcome at Chatsworth, where Andrew and Debo could easily accommodate her desires, and where they and their friends delighted in her company. ‘Come on Violet, think of the Pope!’ Andrew used to say when urging her to get up out of a deep sofa. She also stayed with them at Lismore Castle in Ireland; we had a house not far away and Debo took Mrs Hammersley to see it.

  She wrote to me:

  Darling,

  I’ve seen your house! It’s delightful, and could be no-one’s but yours, white, gold, light. O the bed in the window!!! I wonder you ever leave. It’s been ‘heaven’ here, but alas! the ghastly journey looms ahead on Thursday. I’m glad I was brave enough to come. If only I could have a you
ng, competent, strong Courier, permanently attached! In fact an unpaid gigolo.

  Much love, Mrs Ham.

  When Nancy got her flat in Paris at 7 Rue Monsieur, where I sometimes stayed during the years before we bought the Temple at Orsay, she made me promise not to tell Mrs Hammersley that there was a bed in the dining room. We lunched and dined in the big drawing room, and the fact that there was a dining room with a bed in it was supposed to be a secret from Mrs Ham, who was never left alone in the flat for fear she might open the door of Bluebeard’s chamber. Nancy thought to have her to stay would make too much work for the bonne à tout faire, Marie.

  In any case, just then the annual visits to Mme Costa at Fontaine-les-Nonnes were resumed. They were a tradition for Mrs Hammersley ever since the days of her youth, interrupted only by the two wars. She introduced Nancy to Mme Costa and they took to each other immediately. Nancy was invited to stay at Fontaine, and these autumn visits had nothing in common with the two hurried days of a weekend in the country followed by an endless wait in a queue of cars returning to Paris on Sunday evening. They were more like visits in the eighteenth century and lasted for weeks, the golden weeks of September and October. Some of Nancy’s happiest days, perhaps the happiest of her whole life, were spent at Fontaine with Mme Costa, Mrs Hammersley and a few chosen guests. They gossiped, played cards, and went for long walks across the vast stubble fields of Seine et Marne from which an abundant harvest had recently been cut.

  Although so fond of her, Nancy could never resist teasing Mrs Hammersley; she was an ideal victim because she always rose so satisfactorily to the bait. Nancy’s teasing was usually on the same lines: ‘While I slave away writing books, you live comfortably on your rentes. Oh to be rich like you!’ Nothing could be calculated to annoy Mrs Hammersley more, because in fact it was now Nancy who was rather rich. In any case Mrs Hammersley’s poverty, dating from 1923, had grown to be an integral part of her, not to be doubted, much less made fun of. Mme Costa was very rich and, according to Mrs Hammersley, hardly a day passed without nuns calling at Fontaine, where they knew Mme Costa was a ‘soft touch’; her own daughter had taken the veil. Their conversations with Mme Costa seemed to last an eternity, the sacred hour for luncheon came and went, the hungry guests grew impatient. Then there was a sound of crackling bank notes, and the nuns went on their way. Once Mme Costa came looking for pen and ink, and infuriated Mrs Hammersley afterwards by saying the nuns had been good-natured enough to accept a cheque, as she had run out of cash. This definition of good nature was altogether too much to be borne.