Highland Fling

In a sense,
Highland Fling
is a taster of coming delights. It was Nancy Mitford’s first novel, published in 1931 when she was still in her twenties, and among its pages the reader may find seeds of the characters that would so memorably people her later books,
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
, for both of which she is justly celebrated. General Murgatroyd is certainly the ancestor of Uncle Matthew, both descending, as they do, from Mitford’s own father, Lord Redesdale, who must surely rank as her principal source material throughout her career. I always enjoy his response when he was accused of discrimination. ‘I don’t discriminate,’ he spluttered indignantly. ‘I hate everybody.’ But alongside the splenetic General, there are clear traces of Linda Radlett in Jane Dacre, Lady Prague lays the groundwork for Lady Montdore, Albert Memorial Gates is a precursor of Cedric Hampton, and so on. But if it is fun to find the clues of what would come after, the book has its own merit in that this is the first time Mitford attempted to quantify and codify and explain the world of her beginnings, always seen with her wonderful, comic vision.

Admittedly, this world was not a hard place. Young couples live on nothing at all, highland castles are lent and borrowed, no one seems to have much in mind beyond some decent shooting and dinner at the club. Only Albert is engaged in anything remotely resembling a profession and that as a surrealist painter. Mitford’s men did not push pens or languish behind desks, her women spent their time gossiping and changing their clothes. Nor did they question the rules of a society that enabled them to idle away their days, or ask why they should be waited on hand and foot even when they hadn’t a penny to their name. But that is what makes this account of them a restful and hilarious read. It was a thoughtless age, perhaps, and even a selfish one, but without our moral
smuggery which prompts every soap opera celebrity to veil their own self-obsession with much vaunted, anguished care for the environment or the survival of the whale. There is an honesty in that.

As a young woman, Nancy Mitford was madly, if quite unsuccessfully, in love with a Scottish aristocrat, Hamish St Clair-Erskine, and it is hard not to feel that
Highland Fling
may, in some ways, be a form of revenge after those wasted, tearful years in fruitless pursuit. How much time must she have spent in just such houses as Dalloch Castle, waiting for Hamish to love her, and how frustrating it must have been. Lord Craigdalloch himself, to say nothing of horsy Lady Brenda Chadlington or the intolerably dull Admiral Wenceslaus, all have the quality of being drawn from life, while the snobbish and philistine Lady Prague comes in for particularly savage treatment. “ ‘Why let her learn oils?’ said Lady Prague. ‘There are too many oil paintings in the world already. Let her do water colours. They take up much less room.’ ” Guided by Mitford’s sly description, we grasp at once why Lady Prague would be quite unable to resist Mrs Fairfax, an amoral bolter of the first order, because, during her many marriages, Mrs Fairfax has given birth to an English marquess and an Italian duke. “ ‘Dear Louisa,’ explains Lady Prague, ‘was always such a high-spirited girl, she can scarcely be blamed for her actions.’ ” But when others without so many connections in the ranks of the Peerage break her ladyship’s rules, there can be no mercy for them. The point is that Mitford knows these men and women. She knows how they work. She grasps their self-interest and their hypocrisy and their double standards. I would not say she never loves them, or some of them, but she knows them for what they are.

In
Highland Fling
, as always with this author, there is the vividness of personal experience in her work and this pre-war group do seem to embody exactly what a clever, quick-witted
woman must have found hard to endure about that oh-so-predictable life on the hill. It is a culture of watching others kill all day, getting ever more cold and wet before returning to freezing baths and bad dinners with boring people. Indeed, she writes with such relish that I am convinced the fate she metes out to the scene of their pleasures is one she wished on too many of such house-parties in this unsatisfactory period of her own past. Because, for me, that is the key to Mitford’s genius: her intimate knowledge of this world and these people. Indeed, no one knew it – or certainly could articulate it – better. But, in her own way, even by this stage of her life, she had grown out of its limited values and, free as she was, she could afford to turn the torch of her own acerbic wit on a tribe who thought themselves the very acme of high life and high principle but were instead living in a foolish and largely pointless bubble, a bubble, what is more, that was soon to burst.

Of course there is cruelty here beneath the comedy, a kind of sharpness that bears testimony to the force of her judgement even where it is wrapped in the cotton wool of humour. But most of all, there is truth. And truth, as all the world knows, is the basis of great comedy.

Julian Fellowes

May 2010

Albert Gates came down from Oxford feeling that his life was behind him. The past alone was certain, the future strange and obscure in a way that it had never been until that very moment of stepping from the train at Paddington. All his movements until then had been mapped out unalterably in periods of term and holiday; there was never for him the question ‘What next?’ – never a moment’s indecision as to how such a month or such a week would be spent. The death of his mother during his last year at Oxford, while it left him without any definite home ties, had made very little difference to the tenor of his life, which had continued as before to consist of terms and holidays.

But now he stood upon the station platform faced – not with a day or two of uncertain plans, but with all his future before him a complete blank. He felt it to be an extraordinary situation and enjoyed the feeling. ‘I do not even know,’ he thought, ‘where I shall direct that taxicab.’ This was an affectation, as he had no serious intention of telling the taxi to go anywhere else than the Ritz, as indeed a moment later he did.

On the way he pretended to himself that he was trying hard to concentrate on his future, but in fact he was, for the present, so much enjoying the sensation of being a sort of mental waif and stray, that he gave himself up entirely to that enjoyment. He knew that there would never be any danger for him of settling down to a life of idleness: the fear of being bored would soon drive him, as it had done so often in the past, to some sort of activity.

Meanwhile, the Ritz.

An hour later he was sitting in that spiritual home of Oxonian youth, drinking a solitary cocktail and meditating on his own very considerable but diverse talents, when his best friend, Walter Monteath, came in through the swing doors with a girl called Sally Dalloch.

‘Albert, darling!’ cried Walter, seeing him at once, ‘easily the nicest person we could have met at this moment.’

‘How d’you do, Sally?’ said Albert getting up. ‘What’s the matter, why are you so much out of breath?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact it’s rather exciting, and we came here to find somebody we could tell about it; we’ve been getting engaged in a taxi.’

‘Is that why Walter’s face is covered with red paint?’

‘Oh, darling, look! Oh, the shame of it – large red mouths all over your face. Thank goodness it was Albert we met, that’s all!’ cried Sally, rubbing his face with her handkerchief. ‘Here, lick that. There, it’s mostly off now; only a nice healthy flush left. No, you can’t kiss me in the Ritz, it’s always so full of my bankrupt relations. Well, you see, Albert, why we’re so pleased at finding you here, we had to tell somebody or burst. We told the taxi-man, really because he was getting rather tired of driving round and
round
and
round
Berkeley Square, poor sweet, and he was divine to us, and luckily, there were blinds – which so few taxis have these days, do they? – with little bobbles on them and he’s coming to our wedding. But you’re the first
proper
person.’

‘Well,’ said Albert, as soon as he could get a word in, ‘I really do congratulate you – I think it’s quite perfect. But I can’t say that it comes as an overwhelming surprise to me.’

‘Well, it did to me,’ said Walter; ‘I’ve never been so surprised about anything in my life. I’d no idea women – nice ones, you know – ever proposed to men, unless for some very good reason – like Queen Victoria.’

‘But I had – an excellent reason,’ said Sally, quite unabashed. ‘I wanted to be married to you frightfully badly. I call that a good reason, don’t you, Albert?’

‘It’s
a
reason,’ said Albert, rather acidly. He disapproved of the engagement, although he had realized for some time that it was inevitable. ‘And have you two young things got any money to support each other with?’ he went on.

‘No,’ said Walter, ‘that’s really the trouble: we haven’t; but we think that nowadays, when everyone’s so poor, it doesn’t matter particularly. And, anyway, it’s cheaper to feed two than one, and it’s always cheaper in the end to be happy because then one’s never ill or cross or bored, and look at the money being bored runs away with alone, don’t you agree? Sally thinks her family might stump up five hundred a year, and I’ve got about that, too; then we should be able to make something out of our wedding presents. Besides, why shouldn’t I do some work? If you come to think of it, lots of people do. I might bring out a book of poems in handwriting with corrections like Ralph’s. What are your plans, Albert?’

‘My dear … vague. I have yet to decide whether I wish to be a great abstract painter, a great imaginative writer, or a great psychoanalyst. When I have quite made up my mind I shall go abroad. I find it impossible to work in this country; the weather, the people and the horses militate equally against any mental effort. Meanwhile I am waiting for some internal cataclysm to direct my energies into their proper channel, whatever it is. I try not to torture myself with doubts and questions. A sidecar for you, Walter – Sally? Three sidecars, please, waiter.’