Nancy Mitford (5 page)

In a draft for a broadcast after
The Pursuit of Love
was published, Nancy wrote: ‘I have described the early years of myself and my five sisters and one brother in my last book, with some alterations necessary to a work of fiction, but with no exaggeration. Indeed it would hardly be possible to exaggerate the eccentricity and restlessness of our upbringing. My father had two manias, for selling and for building. He would build a new house every time there was a boom, when labour was scarce and expensive. He would then live in it for a while, but as soon as there was a slump, as soon as labour became easy and cheap and values dropped, he would sell what he had built at a vast loss and we would all move on to the next house whose foundation stone would be laid on the first day of a new boom.’

‘Our first home was a large Elizabethan palace built by my grandfather in 1900. He had my father’s mania to an even more marked degree, but concentrated it upon this one house. My father sold it as soon as he could, and thereafter we lived under the shadow, so to speak, of two hammers, the builder’s and the auctioneer’s, and fidgeted about from one house to another on different parts of my father’s estate. Sometimes they were houses which already existed but which were then altered to suit the requirements of so large a family, sometimes they were built from scratch.’

‘The first room to be completed was always what my father called “the child-proof room” to which he would retire and snooze (for he never read or wrote) in peace after a day spent entirely in the open air. The child-proof room was invariably fitted with an immensely powerful mortice lock. However, we children usually managed to effect an escape…’

When they grew up Nancy and Tom were allowed to bring friends to stay. These
included
both athletes and aesthetes. According to Jessica, ‘at week-ends they would swoop down from Oxford or London in merry hordes, to be greeted with solid disapproval by my
mother
and furious glares from my father.’ My lamented friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant was among them. Even Lord Redesdale could not help warming to Mark, for he joined his shooting
parties
and appeared for breakfast punctually at eight o’clock, though brains turned his delicate stomach at that hour.

Of Nancy’s contemporaries perhaps Mark exerted the most obvious influence on her taste, and it was even rumoured that he hoped to marry her. While adapting himself
outwardly
to social convention he was capable of exuberant flights of fantasy. He was a cousin of Nina, the shy young Countess of Seafield, for whom he acted as an impresario. Nina then resembled a juvenile Queen Victoria with red hair and a hesitant stammer. Having spent her infancy in New Zealand, she had inherited large estates in Scotland, including Cullen and Castle Grant where Nancy often visited her, surrounded by Mark’s vivacious coterie, whose more serious members were deter mined not to seem so. Robert Byron exploited his
pugnacity
in a genial and unpredictable way. Oliver Messel, a skilful mimic, entertained the company with spicy monologues about tragi-comical White Russian refugee princesses, ‘refained’
governesses
afflicted with wind, and wriggling débutantes whose conversational gambit was
limited
to ‘Have you been to
No, no Nanette
?’ Mark had a vast repertoire of absurdly sentimental
Victorian ballads which he trilled and warbled with a gusto only rivalled by Robert Byron’s booming vociferation.

Nobody could have dreamt of the future developments of these young bloods fresh from Oxford whose talent and intelligence were often veiled by flippancy. They parodied the pursuits of bucolic neighbours and their peculiar dialect. Nancy’s first novel reflected their behaviour, the invasion of Presbyterian Scotland, as it were, by Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things. Her
protagonist
Albert Gates, for instance, was suggested by Robert’s cult of Victoriana to which most of us subscribed in a playful spirit. (‘My name,’ said Albert with some asperity, ‘is Albert Memorial Gates. I took Memorial in addition to my baptismal Albert at my confirmation out of admiration for the Albert Memorial, a very great work of art which may be seen in a London suburb called Kensington.’) A far cry from Robert’s subsequent Byzantinism! Mark was to
reappear
as the ‘Wonderful Old Songster of Kew Green’ in Nancy’s
Pigeon Pie
. Short, spare, clean-shaven, he remained one of her closest confidants.

I never visited Asthall or Swinbrook, but while I was at Oxford I was regaled with lyrical accounts of Nancy’s precocious wit and intelligence—‘a delicious creature, quite
pyrotechnical
my dear, and sometimes even profound, and would you believe it, she’s hidden among the cabbages of the Cotswolds’—from an improbable source, my former Eton crony, Brian Howard. He was so scornful of feminine intellect among contemporaries that I felt it was more than a special compliment. I still wonder how Brian and Lord Redesdale coped with each other, if they were allowed to meet. The contrast between them evoked extreme
burlesque
, and Brian’s posturings and paradoxes must have helped to stimulate the composition of Nancy’s first novel.

As a débutante Nancy enjoyed a conventional succession of seasons during that hectic period immortalized by Evelyn Waugh, when Noël Coward represented the younger
generation
of gatecrashers and jazz was in the air, though it was the genteel jazz of Jack Hylton and Ambrose, less frenzied but more suave than its Afro-American precursors. Nancy attended the coming-out balls as regularly as her coevals but with a colder, more critical eye as time went on. She was too clever to enjoy the platitudes of her callow dancing partners who were a source of disillusion to her, as to Sophia in her novel
Pigeon Pie
. Like Sophia, ‘she was not shy and she had high spirits, but she was never a romper and therefore never attained much popularity with the very young.’

During the winter she rode hard to hounds, stayed with friends, and invited them to her parents’ house. A nostalgic passage in
Pigeon Pie
betrays her love of hunting: ‘The first meet she ever went to, early in the morning with her father’s agent. She often remembered this, and it had become a composite picture of all the cub-hunting she had ever done, the autumn woods and the smell of bonfires, dead leaves and hot horses. Riding home from the last meet of a season, late in the afternoon of a spring day, there would be primroses and violets under the hedges, far far away the sound of a horn, and later an owl.’

Until Nancy was twenty-three her parents lived at Asthall in Oxfordshire, about half the size of the 10,000 acres Lord Redesdale had inherited at Batsford Park in Gloucestershire,
which he sold in 1919. In 1927 he also sold Asthall and moved to Swinbrook, where he built a house on the site of one of his farms called South Lawn, a name he wished to dispense with. None of his children liked Swinbrook House, described by Jessica as ‘a large
rectangular
structure of three stories… neither “modern” nor “traditional” nor simulated antique… It could be a small barracks, a girls’ boarding school, a private lunatic asylum, or, in America, a country club.’ To tease her father Nancy used to address her letters: ‘Builder Redesdale, The Buildings, South Lawn, Burford.’ A compensation for Swinbrook was that he bought 26 Rutland Gate, so that the girls could enjoy more time in London.

UNFORTUNATELY, LORD REDESDALE had little flair for finance and his father had been extravagant, like so many denizens of the horse world. Gradually he felt obliged to part with valuable possessions, usually at a loss. His houses were often let, especially the London
residence
, where upon his family were squeezed into the Mews behind it, or into Lady Redesdale’s cosy cottage at High Wycombe. It was economy rather than a resolve to keep Nancy at home that prevented her from moving into a private flat. Nowadays she would have looked for a job, but such an idea would not have occurred to Lord Redesdale: it was not even discussed.
Whatever
Nancy could earn from her writings was added to her meagre dress allowance. She chafed under the tedium of rustic life though this impelled her to read voraciously and, eventually, to write her first novel.

Jessica has related the circumstances with brio: ‘For months Nancy had sat giggling
helplessly
by the drawing-room fire, her curiously triangular green eyes flashing with amusement, while her thin pen flew along the lines of a child’s exercise book. Sometimes she read bits aloud to us. “You
can’t
publish that under your own name,” my mother insisted, scandalized, for not only did thinly disguised aunts, uncles and family friends people the pages of
Highland Fling
, but there, larger than life size, felicitously named “General Murgatroyd”, was Farve. But Nancy did publish it under her own name, and the Burford Lending Library even arranged a special
display
in their window, with a hand-lettered sign: “Nancy Mitford, Local Authoress—…” In spite of the brief row that flared when Nancy insisted on publishing
Highland Fling
under her own name, it became evident that my parents, and even the uncles and aunts, were actually quite proud of having an author in the family…’

In fact it was no novelty to have ‘an author in the family’ since both Nancy’s grandfathers had published several books. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles, was the founder of the sensational Victorian journal
Vanity Fair
, whose coloured cartoons of celebrities line the walls of smart London clubs but whose controversial contents were to antagonize many of his fellow members of Parliament. Nancy inherited his sharp and acid wit. Lewis Carroll (the
Rev. C.L. Dodgson) was one of his friends and it is curious in these days to read that he wanted
Vanity Fair
to promote ‘a daily fly-sheet (which might be called “Where shall we go?” or the “Vanity Fair Play-bill”) with a list of all amusements to which ladies might safely be taken, and a warning against objectionable plays’. James Tissot and Carlo Pellegrini (‘Ape’) were two of
Vanity Fair’s
leading cartoonists, and Bowles was joined by Tissot when he went to Paris as a war correspondent in September 1870 before the Prussian siege. His despatches to the
Morning Post
during that period were extremely graphic and amusing. Apart from his political and
journalistic
activities he had a passion for yachting and became a notable authority on naval matters.

After her eighteen-year-old sister Diana’s marriage to Bryan Guinness (now Lord Moyne) in January 1929 Nancy often stayed in their Buckingham Street house (now Buckingham Place), a delightful trysting place of the generations, where past and future consorted merrily with the present. Diana and Bryan attracted a galaxy of literary and artistic friends who might have been considered ‘sewers’ by Lord Redesdale. Bloomsbury was represented by Lytton Strachey and his doting Carrington; the Sitwells by Sir Osbert, Sacheverell and Georgia. Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, Henry Yorke, Brian Howard, John Sutro, Hamish Erskine, Henry and Pansy Lamb, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, with a bevy of fashionable beauties—many of Bryan’s and Tom Mitford’s Oxford cronies, my brother and I included, enjoyed their exhilarating hospitality. Nancy’s wit blossomed freely in this uninhibited atmosphere, which tended to make her more impatient of parental authority. At the age of twenty four it seemed high time to leave the nest.

Two of her closest girl friends were Lady Pansy Pakenham and the Hon. Evelyn Gardner, both aspiring writers who had shared lodgings before their marriages, the former to Henry Lamb and the latter to Evelyn Waugh. (Henry Lamb was to paint the best likeness of the male Evelyn at this time.) The newly wedded Waughs found a modest flat in Canonbury Square (17a), Islington, to which they lent a personal charm as remote from the modish as it was from Bloomsbury and Mayfair. They looked like a juvenile brother and sister. The male Evelyn’s first novel had been acclaimed with salvoes of judicious applause. But one swallow makes not a spring, and Evelyn’s second novel proved even more successful than his first, though its
gestation
had been interrupted by his wife’s illness. After her convalescence he needed a spell of
solitude
to finish his book, so he decided to work in the country during the week and join his wife in London for weekends.

At this juncture a temporary solution was found for Nancy’s yearning for independence. The Waughs offered her a room in their flat and she accepted it with alacrity. Evelyn’s wife gained an enchanting companion during his absence and Nancy, in creative mood, sparkled in this unconventional environment.
Highland Fling
was about to be published and she was
producing
topical articles for
Vogue
, embellished by Mark Ogilvie-Grant’s illustrations.

Everything here seemed favourable to a budding novelist of slender means. She enjoyed the simple life spiced with jokes and spontaneous fantasy: it seemed idyllic. But it was too good to last. In July a thunderbolt fell. Mrs. Waugh confessed to Nancy that she had only married Evelyn to escape from her stifling family. In the meantime she had fallen in love with John Heygate, the ebullient author of
Decent Fellows
, a naughty novel about Eton. While Nancy could sympathize
with her motives she could not approve of her method. Apart from her admiration for Evelyn’s brilliance, she appreciated his human qualities. He inspired affection in his intimate friends, who readily forgave his peccadilloes. He was too young and too fond to tolerate infidelity and it was not in his nature to laugh it off like those contemporaries he satirized in
Vile Bodies
. The shock of disappointment had lasting repercussions. Only his conversion to Catholicism could heal the wound, whose traces are distinct in A
Handful of Dust
. Nancy packed her bags and departed from Canonbury Square. Her sympathies were with the he-Evelyn and they remained lifelong friends.

Nancy had written
Highland Fling to
amuse herself before amusing others. It was a frolicsome performance of which later she became unreasonably ashamed, but in a Christmas cracker way it was effective. If, as she maintained, she wished to emulate P.G. Wodehouse, she had chosen the wrong model and Evelyn Waugh’s influence was not yet apparent. Family pride in the sprightly relation who startled her uncles and aunts with her all-too-recognizable caricatures must have gratified and encouraged her to stick to her guns. To her friend James Lees-Milne, who had expressed his enjoyment, she replied: ‘such letters are far more encouraging than reviews in newspapers. The book is going fairly well, it went into a second impression three days after it came out but won’t I fear be a best-seller or anything like that. The publishers however are pleased and surprised at the amount sold… By the same post as yours I had a letter from an aged friend of mama’s saying that the silliness of my young people is only equalled by their vulgarity and that if by writing this I intend to
devastate
and lay
waste
to such society I am undoubtedly performing a service to mankind. And a great deal more. I fear now that I shall never be mentioned in her will…’

Already a faint whiff of the professional author may be detected.

In the meantime I set forth on my wanderings and eventually settled in Peking, so there is a considerable blank in my vision of Nancy, a gap of nearly nine years. On the last few
occasions
I saw her before sailing from Europe she was invariably escorted by Hamish Erskine, an elegant and amiable young social butterfly who was also a ‘Hon’, and for a long time it was rumoured that they were about to marry. In fact they were blithe companions floating on a
frivolous
tide, playing a charade of Pierrot and Columbine and sharing endless jokes to compensate for lack of lucre. Mutual friends who enjoyed them separately became as exasperated as Nancy’s parents by this indefinite flirtation. Hamish, who could seldom face crude reality before midday, was to distinguish himself for his courage in Italy during the war. Maybe Nancy had divined the pluck which was one of his attractions.

The infatuation was stronger on Nancy’s side for Hamish was an overt narcissist, and he must have been flattered by her
béguin
for him. Nancy’s letters to Hamish have been destroyed but through her intimate correspondence with Mark Ogilvie-Grant we may follow the
wavering
graph of her emotions. Mark was in Cairo at the time and Hamish was still up at Oxford. While in London he dragged her to the night-clubs and parties frequented by Evelyn Waugh’s characters, leading her a dance in which she was a far from happy partner, though she
exaggerated
her woes as many of us do in youth. For a girl of twenty five her letters are touchingly
ingenuous.

From Redesdale Cottage, Otterburn, she wrote on 30th December, 1929: ‘Here I am as you see banished from Hamish for three weeks. I thought I should die but am bearing up nicely partly because I adore this place and partly because my grandmother is such an angel. Also I am working really hard… [Recently in London] went to the Café de Paris, having borrowed
£
2 from Evie. Well then we found (when we’d got there) that after paying the bill we had 7½d between us. We were panicking rather when the sallow and disapproving countenance of old Mit [her brother Tom] was observed. He cut Hamish but lent me
£
1 and we went to the Bat. As we never pay there now we are treated as poor relations and put behind the band where we can neither see nor hear and we have the buttered eggs that the Mountbattens have spat into and left. All so homey and nice don’t you think. Still I feel we lend a certain
ton
to the place. Hamish has been an angel lately, not drinking a thing. I really think that bar all the good old jokes which no one enjoys more than I do, that he has literally the nicest nature of anyone I know. He gets nicer every day too.’

‘My grandmother is divine about him although she knows and hates all his relations and
forbears
. A propos of his religion [he was a Catholic] she said, “so long as a person is devout it doesn’t the least matter what his religion is, only I (no doubt wrongly) would never feel quite the same about a very devout Hindu or Buddhist. And of course Low Church people are very holy but they do so treat God like their first cousin.”’

‘I must go to bed. It is dark here all day and I keep looking out for the midday moon, haven’t seen it yet… Have had to alter the book (
Highland Fling
) quite a lot as it is so like Evelyn’s in
little
ways, such a bore.’

From Redesdale Cottage again on 8th January, 1930: ‘I’ve been here nearly a fortnight, and apart from missing Hamish dreadfully have enjoyed every minute of it, such beautiful
country
—I’ve been desperately trying to finish the book, which has improved a lot since you heard parts of it… The sweet angel [Hamish] is always so sensible about everybody but him self isn’t he. Poor Hamish was in a fearful state when his brother-in-law died suddenly because it was the third sudden death in his family this year which I must say is dreadful for them.’…

Later: ‘I’ve got a job offered me to write a weekly article for
£
3 a week and I keep putting off and putting off but can’t start this evening as I’ve just spent the day in Oxford with you know who and that always stops me working. He’s going to Canada in March for ever, and we’re both so unhappy about it, specially me. Isn’t life perfect hell, that beastly old Harry has found a job for him at
£
100 a year with a rise of
£
10 every six months which looks as though he’ll be able to support me and our 5 children jolly soon doesn’t it. However, he’s being such an angel about it that one simply must not put him off and it may be the making of him yet I suppose… You won’t know Hamish again, he’s a reformed character, gets up at 9.30 every morning and has quite given up drink and intends to work like a slave in Canada. I love him much more than ever.’

From Old Mill Cottage, High Wycombe, 1st February, 1930: ‘The children [her sisters] have a hen called Mongrel Child, but when they are feeling pleased with it Golden Eagle. They also have one called Double She because it lays double yolked eggs. I fear these farmyard details are
likely to bore.’

‘Lunched with Hamish on Thursday and arriving at one o’clock found him in pyjamas having breakfast so I hounded him into his bedroom and finished up his grapefruit and coffee. He has no money until the end of the term and daren’t run into debt again. I must say he’s being an angel about it and we gnaw chicken bones for lunch now instead of oysters… Hamish is going to ride in a grind on Saturday, simply awful for me but I’m behaving like a mem sahib about it and pretend to be pleased…’

19th February, 1930: ‘Thank Heaven Canada is off for the moment. I really think it would have killed me… Will Hamish ever grow out of liking all these painted dolls I wonder, and will our house overflow with them always? I’ve just finished Maurois’
Byron
, very readable. Byron is so like Hamish in character, the other day Hamish said to me in tones of deepest satisfaction, “You haven’t known a single happy moment since we met have you.” Very true as a matter of fact, what he would really like would be for me to die and a few others and then he’d be able to say “I bring death on all who love me”. It’s so sad, when you’re away there’s nobody I can laugh about Hamish with and he is such a joke isn’t he?’