Nancy Mitford (30 page)

‘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
ambulances
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…’

Of Elizabeth Longford Nancy wrote with admiration: ‘She was that rare bird when I was young an undergraduette at Oxford (now one would say student I suppose). She was as
beautiful
and merry as she was brilliant—everybody courted her and lucky Frank Pakenham got her. (I was frantically jealous of her.) They had eight children, now mostly grown up, and became R.C’s. We never meet but the friendship endures—I love Pakenhams anyway. Frank is a goose but a great dear. He worries about the dull lives of those people who tortured
little
girls to death on moors—I can’t say I do but it shows a Christian nature.’

Assuring Sir Hugh Jackson that he would enjoy Elizabeth Longford’s book on Wellington, she wrote (23rd March 1970): ‘One always likes reading about what one knows already, if well done… My only criticism would be that she doesn’t see either the genius or the glamour of Napoleon so that, for instance, the hundred days, the return and all that become rather incomprehensible. During Waterloo there is not quite enough about what happened on the French side. The fog of war and the poor intelligence must have made
battles
chancy no doubt. Frederick used to say that all battles are a lottery.’

‘I suppose the death of Berthier was decisive. Elizabeth merely says he fell out of a
window
without relating the pathetic facts. One really hates Soult for the muddles.’

‘About the horses—she says the French cavalrymen slept on their horses during that night of terrible rain so of course the poor things were tired the next day. I loved the
Brunswickers
going into battle looking like a hearse (all in black for their duke killed at Jena). How fascinating what you say about the roads being blocked. Do you remember when, in ‘68, we expected the parachutists here from Algiers and Malraux made the population block the road from Orly with their motors? Good idea.’

‘Frederick will appear in October. I do hope you will approve. I’m reading Martet’s
Conversations with Clemenceau
, very highly enjoyable. In 1928 he
knew
what would happen in 1939 and never stopped warning people. He had an operation in the lovely clinic where I was last year—like me he was in love with the nuns, like me he handed out his last book to them. How unchanging Paris is, thank goodness.’

‘Have you read
Wellington
?’ she wrote again to Sir Hugh. ‘It is masterly. I read Waterloo four times, what a lovely battle. Wellington and Frederick the Great have an amazing amount in common and of course there is so little time between them that the very campaigns have certain similarities. They are both the no-nonsense type of general, incapable of putting on charm, showing off and so on—the opposite of Monty and Nelson. The funny thing is that both sorts succeed about equally with the men. Of course Frederick’s battles against fearful odds were far more
desperate
and he quite often lost them, as Wellington never did, but then Frederick didn’t have dithering politicians to cope with, surely a huge advantage. I suppose almost any Parliament would have sued for peace long before the end of the Seven Years
War as it seemed hopeless from the very start, for the Prussians.

‘I think of writing about Clemenceau. What would you say to that?’

‘The publishers [of
Frederick the Great
] took it upon them to change many colloquialisms as I know they do in America and Russia—hadn’t realized that the habit has taken on here. “They had a good gossip” became “they reminisced” and so on. La moutarde m’est montée au nez and I brought up big guns—made a fearful fuss and got my own way. All this, if you please, on the
proofs
, so changing back will I hope cost them a fortune! No wonder American books read so dull and flat—I’m told every publisher employs several re-writers. It was
really
super-cheek on the part of mine because Raymond Mortimer, a master of English, had been over the typescript and removed many horrors as I’m the first to admit—I naturally accepted all his changes but then the high school girls at Rainbird’s took over. Oh No. Luckily I bring them in money and they don’t really want to kill the goose.’

To Mr. Brian Pearce, whose translation of Professor A.D. Lublinskaya’s
French Absolutism
had fascinated her—‘it inspires total confidence which is the first necessary merit of a
history
book and rather rare!’—and who had had to revise another translation from scratch, though only paid on a ‘revision’ basis, Nancy wrote feelingly: ‘Publishers are the limit and usually only saved by some bright girl in the office who, as soon as one gets used to her, immediately marries. Somebody said, when I was in Greece, this country is entirely run by boys of 14; when they are 15 they take to love and become useless. Like publishers’ young ladies.’

Nancy dreaded the prospect of entering a hospital in March but in the meantime Hassan was a comfort. ‘All is so easy with Hassan, thank Allah for him. Only, not at week-end as he rushes to the arms of his mistress and I live on porridge, all I know how to make. Saturday afternoon until Monday brekker which is now my favourite meal of the week, I am starving for it… I was examined by about twenty doctors this morning—the terror!’ Hassan like all very young people thinks pain rather funny and that’s good for me, stops me moaning and groaning. But he is truly kind and seems to like me and to like it here, thank Allah.’

From the Hôpital Rothschild Nancy wrote to her ‘unique and indispensable’ friend Raymond Mortimer (8th April, 1970): ‘Have you ever been in a hospital? You can’t conceive the horror, at least to somebody who, like me, is thoroughly spoilt. On this étage all the patients have got skin diseases and one queues up for the loo with people like that picture of Napoleon at Aleppo—male and female—who have not been trained in use of same by English nannies. I’ve got an old Romanian who is the double of Abdul Hamid—she has red things all over her poor face and is in agonies. Day and night she groans—all penetrate my
boules quies
. But she won’t allow the window to be opened. The heat is like in Venice when the servants say it is
infernale
—if we were in summer I’m sure she would complain bitterly of it—it’s not that I mind, but the stuffiness.’

‘By far the worst, they can’t find anything wrong with me so I suppose I am condemned to this horrible pain for life—also to never again going for walks. I feel in deep despair. Don’t know when they will let me out. I can’t crawl out on all fours, my clothes in my teeth, as that
would look so ungrateful. The people, of course, except Abdul Hamid, are completely
heavenly
one and all, as French people always are to me, from the great Panjandrum Himself who swaggers in with a quartier général of young men looking like Austrian officers, down to the smallest little housemaid.’

‘Abdul asks questions non-stop. “Where is your husband?” “Dead.” “Never marry again.” “You’re telling me—once bitten twice shy.” Rather disobliging of her as her poor old husband comes every day with little gifts… One thing about Abdul, she has neither wireless nor TV. I vastly prefer her groans. Well, you see, I suffer. Don’t know for how long…’

Nancy’s English friends suspected that the French doctors were mistakenly opposed to the use of pain killers. Nancy wrote again on the subject to Raymond Mortimer (18th April, 1970): ‘You mustn’t blame the French doctors anent (as Sir Hugh Jackson always says) pain killers. For months they have begged and implored me, sometimes in tears, to take them. My philosophy is this (A) If we are sent a pain in the leg it must be for some reason unknown to us—if we dodge it the result might be bad in other ways. (B) I have got a little spot of grey matter and I don’t want to spoil it with drugs or drink or anything else. My horror of drugs is the greatest of all my many prejudices.’

‘The last week at the hospital (I came back yesterday in an ambulance) was the most
devilish
I have ever known. I was cast on my back, no pillow, unable to write and almost unable to read, with, as fellow, the wife of a vigneron from Champagne—and I don’t mean Odette Pol-Roger! She refused a chink of window and indeed had to have heavy linoleum curtains drawn over it and DID, all night, into a pot between our beds, never emptied or covered…’ Then all the things they did to me, wheeling me on a stretcher to a torture
chambre dans le sous-sol
, hurt fearfully… Meanwhile I have collapsed as regards pain killers in spite of my brave words above.’

‘As I lay there I held over my head whenever I could Mauriac’s
Vie Intérieure
. Never again will a group of intellectuals have so much fun as he, Jammes, du Bos, Maritain, Bernanos and the others had over Gide, Mme Gide and God. Say what you like, God is really more
interesting
than human beings are and Mauriac more interesting than Robbe-Grillet.’

‘My garden is a paradise. Having been mocked for long grass and weeds I am now praised by professional gardeners for the prettiness. Then, Hassan has practically repainted the whole house while I was away—he is a good boy, the best thing that has happened for ages.’

Even out of the hospital she had to submit to more tests: ‘a liver test (what for? my liver has always been pristine) and it has tickled me up properly and I’m in that state no pain killer can cope with…. But it will all calm down,’ she added optimistically.

In the meantime she told Sir Hugh: ‘I’ve asked for two lots of page proofs [of
Frederick
]—I’m so anxious for your verdict. I only pray the printers will have attended to the work I did on the galleys. Isn’t the misprinting horrible nowadays? The papers often read like a joke—nobody cares a bit. You never see a misprint in old books and we know Balzac wrote his novels on the proofs. Now they charge you pounds for the tiniest alteration and
telephone
from London begging you to think again on account of their wretched time table! Oh how I hope I shall go to a different kind of world next time—I would like to be a pretty young general and gallop over Europe with Frederick the Great and never have another ache or pain. All very well, Frederick himself was never without one and Maréchal de Belleisle had to give up soldiering because of his sciatica. One can’t escape I suppose in any century.’

Though she confessed that she could hardly enjoy seeing people she decided to go to Venice in July: ‘I put cards on the table to Anna Maria [Cicogna]—how often I have to stay in bed, etc., and asked if she really wanted me. She says all will turn themselves into nannies to look after me—she is a good friend. So I’ll risk it… I’ve been looking at old letters. G.M. Young used to write “My Dearest Creature”, how too funny—it all seems and indeed is another world.’