Nancy Mitford (3 page)

Captain Scott was to remain her hero of heroes, and the fact that he and his comrades ‘really wanted to prove to themselves how much they could endure’ haunted her till the end. The recollection of their sufferings often gave her courage to bear her own. Frequent
references
to Beardmore and Captain Oates cropped up in her letters, and she recounted their story in 1962, ‘fifty years to the day that Scott died.’ Paradoxically for a person with a
frivolous
façade, she admired sheer grit above other virtues. Most of her friends were epicurean but in a few instances she may have divined courage under the glossy surface, for it is a
quality
latent in the most unlikely people.

Of Blor’s predecessors, the nannies who were employed to look after her during infancy, she tells us that the first one ‘was quite untrained and knew nothing about babies; she laid the foundations of the low stamina which has always been such a handicap to me in life. I think she was also partly responsible for my great nastiness to the others.’ No doubt she
exaggerated
this nastiness. Celestial harmony is rare in any crowded nursery, and close proximity to boisterous infants is bound to cause friction. Conscious of her seniority and precociously sophisticated, there must have been moments when, as her sister wrote in
Hons and Rebels
, her tongue became sharp and sarcastic. ‘She might suddenly turn her penetrating emerald eyes in one’s direction and say, “Runalong up to the schoolroom: we’ve all had quite enough of you,” or, if one had taken particular trouble to do one’s hair in ringlets, she was apt to remark, “You look like the oldest and ugliest of the Brontë sisters today.”’ Fundamentally she was devoted to her younger sisters, who were very blonde while she was comparatively dark.

Her attitude towards her irascible father was ambivalent. Thanks to her strong sense of
humour she was able to laugh at his foibles with a secret admiration for the vigorous
eccentricity
of his character, the externals of which she borrowed for ‘General Murgatroyd’ in her early novel
Highland Fling
, and again for the unforgettable ‘Uncle Matthew’ in
The Pursuit of Love
: ‘Much as we feared, much as we disapproved of, passionately as we sometimes hated Uncle Matthew, he still remained for us a sort of criterion of English manhood; there seemed something not quite right about any man who greatly differed from him.’ Uncle Matthew ‘never altered his first opinion of people… his favourites could commit nameless crimes without doing wrong in his eyes… He always liked people who stood up to him.’ An ardent chauvinist, he declared: ‘I loathe abroad, nothing would induce me to live there, I’d rather live in the game keeper’s hut in Hen’s Grove, and, as for foreigners, they are all the same, and they make me sick…’ His fits of temper were profitable to dentists as he invariably ground his false teeth. ‘There was a legend in the family that he had already ground away four pairs in his rages.’ Apparently his addiction to literature was limited; ‘I have only read one book in my life, and that is
White Fang
. It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.’

An endearing quality of Lord Redesdale was that far from being offended by this caricature, he was amused by it. Jessica Mitford’s portrayal of him in
Hons and Rebels
is more severe. She regarded her family home at Swinbrook in the Cotswolds as a medieval fortress. ‘From the point of view of the inmates it was self-contained in the sense that it was neither necessary nor, generally, possible to leave the premises for any of the normal human pursuits. Schoolroom with governess for education, riding stables and tennis court for exercise, seven of us children for mutual human companionship, the village church for spiritual consolation, our bedrooms for hospital wards even when operations were necessary—all were provided, either in the house itself or within easy walking distance. From the point of view of outsiders, entry, in the rather unlikely event that they might seek it, was an impossibility. According to my father, outsiders included not only Huns, Frogs, Americans, black and other foreigners, but also other people’s children, the majority of my older sisters’ acquaintances, almost all young men—in fact, the whole teeming population of the earth’s surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbours to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking.’ This is more than an exaggeration due to bias, for as her sister Diana reminded me: ‘We had guests every Saturday to Monday chosen by us. Farve didn’t care for them but put up with it.’

In
Another Self
, James Lees-Milne’s hilarious account of his juvenile vicissitudes, he relates that he had an Elysian impression of Nancy’s home life at Asthall Manor, ‘where this large and united family then lived.’ Let us stress ‘united’, for the children were clannishly devoted to each other. For all their similarity in voice and feature their minds were not stamped in a single pattern: each personality had the advantage of free development.

Nancy’s evocation of the Hon. Society of Alconleigh, huddled up in the disused linen cupboard at the top of the house, talking for hours about life and death, especially about childbirth, is one of the evergreen passages in
The Pursuit of Love
, and it rings absolutely true. One shares the bright children’s excitement over their discoveries; one hears their giggles. The
time for jokes never seemed to run out, and a good joke for Nancy was one of the highest forms of praise. She and her sisters revelled in private nicknames, some of which are baffling to an outsider. For instance Lord Redesdale, ‘Farve’, was also known as T.P.O.M. (The Poor Old Male) and Morgan; Lady Redesdale, ‘Muv’, as T.P.O.F. (The Poor Old Female) and Aunt Sydney or Syd. Diana had at least half a dozen alternative nicknames: Honks, Nard, Bodley, Cord, Dana, and Deerling. Pam was Woman, Wooms, and Woomling; Tom, Tuddemy or Tomford; Unity, Bobo, Birdie, and Bowd; Jessica, Decca, Hen, Henderson, Little D., Squalor, and Susan; Debo was Stubby, Stublow, Miss, and Nine (since even after marriage she was not supposed to have grown older—in ancient China nine was an auspicious number). Nancy was Koko to her parents and usually Naunce to her sisters. Such nicknames—all so English—
create
an atmosphere of youthful gaiety.

A school friend of Nancy’s brother Tom, Jim Lees-Milne, describes Lord Redesdale with intuitive sympathy although he suffered from one of his alarming rages. He has kindly allowed me to quote the relevant passage, which would suffer from being summarized. Lady Redesdale ‘presided, for that is the word, over her beautiful and eccentric brood with
unruffled
sweetness, amusement and no little bewilderment. Lord Redesdale was admittedly a dual personality. I cannot see that his children had in him much to complain about. Towards them he was Dr. Jekyll, indulgent and even docile. Although not a cultivated man he tolerated their intellectual pursuits and allowed them to say and do whatever they liked. He submitted
placidly
to their ceaseless teasing, particularly Nancy’s with its sharp little barb, barely concealed like the hook of an angler’s fly beneath a riot of gay feathers. To Tom, whose straight forward nature he understood better, he was touchingly devoted. The devotion was returned and they were like brothers, sharing each other’s confidences.

‘To outsiders, and particularly his children’s friends, Lord Redesdale could be Mr. Hyde with a vengeance. But then he resented and hated outsiders for daring to intrude upon the family circle. He referred to one of their friends, a shy and diffident boy, as “that hog Watson” in front of his face, threatened another with a horsewhip for putting his feet on a sofa, and glowered at those who had done nothing wrong with such vehemence that they lost their nerve and usually broke things, thus provoking a more justifiable expression of his distaste. I was naturally terrified of him, but respected his uncertain temper. I made myself as
inconspicuous
as possible whenever he was in the room. The golden rule was to keep opinions to oneself in his presence, a difficult rule to observe in this house hold where the children spent their time arguing and discussing every subject under the sun from religion to sex.

‘Unfortunately during dinner on the evening of my arrival I unwisely disregarded this rule, with distressing consequences. Lord Redesdale was in a sunny mood, chaffing and being chaffed by the children. Mouselike I ate in silence, smiled when I was spoken to and
contributed
nothing to the conversation. The cinema was being discussed which led to someone remarking that a film, called
Dawn
, about the shooting of Nurse Cavell was being shown in London. I had actually seen this film and was unduly proud of the fact. Casting discretion to the winds I raised my voice. “It is an anti-German film,” I said. “It is high time that we put a
stop to anti-German propaganda, now the war has been over for eight years. Instead, we ought to make friends with the Germans.” These or similar words, tendentious but not
altogether
reprehensible, were what I uttered. The effect was electric. The smile on Lord Redesdale’s face was switched off as though by a current. His proud and remarkably
handsome
features flushed scarlet. The scowl instantly appeared and threw a thunderous shadow across the table. “You damned young puppy!” he shouted, as he thumped the surface so that the plates and glasses clashed together like cymbals. “How dare you? You don’t know what the bloody Huns are like. They are worse than all the devils in hell. And you sit there, and have the damned impudence”… Lady Redesdale with a pained expression on her dear face put a hand on his arm, and just said in her plaintive, drawly voice, “David”. He stopped, threw down his napkin, rose from the table and stalked out of the dining room. For a second or two there was a chilling silence, then a chorus of breath let out of girlish lungs. “Oh gosh!” I said, “what had I better do now?” The six sisters from Nancy, aged twenty-one, down to Debo, aged six, looked at one another and then chanted in unison:

‘Only Tom did not join in this rather callous couplet from the Great War music-hall song. He merely nodded assent. “What? Now?” I gasped, appalled, for it was already half-past nine, pouring with rain and getting dark. “We’re afraid you simply must,” they said. “Otherwise Farve really might kill you. And just think of the mess he would make.” There was nothing else to be done. I sloped off into the night.’

Jim had propped his motor scooter under a tree while the weather was clear, but during the deluge water had got into the petrol and the machine refused to start. Drenched to the skin, he could only return to the house and a maid let him in by the back door. While she went to fetch Tom, Lord Redesdale appeared and took pity on his plight. ‘To my amazement he put his arm round my shoulders, practically embraced me, and said that I was the most splendid boy he had ever known, that my courage and perseverance were exemplary… Eventually I went upstairs to a hot bath and bed in the belief that Lord Redesdale was to be my lifelong friend and mentor. At breakfast next morning he was as cold and distant as ever. But I was allowed to remain at Asthall for a week.’

The second Lord Redesdale had mellowed, at any rate on the surface, when I met him in 1928. Privately he may have regarded me as a ‘sewer’, since he was reputed to abominate
aesthetes
but in spite of an aggressive glare he spoke to me amiably in an agreeable voice. One could not help appreciating his supreme Englishness. To all his children except Jessica he was ‘one of the funniest people who ever lived with a genius for making them laugh’. His
periodical
rages were the other side of the medal—thunderstorms to clear the air. Probably he chuckled at them in retrospect. He lacked his father’s cosmopolitan sympathies. Old Lord Redesdale had been a friend of Whistler, who hated the Boer War, whereas he took pride in
having fought and been thrice wounded in it. A pillar of convention, he was also a jingo—very unlike the English expatriates I had encountered in my native Florence.

Nancy’s little acts of rebellion must have helped the mellowing process. Her sister Jessica relates that she ‘dimly remembered the hushed pall that hung over the house, meals eaten day after day in tearful silence, when Nancy at the age of twenty had her hair shingled. Nancy using lipstick, Nancy playing the newly fashionable ukulele, Nancy wearing trousers, Nancy smoking a cigarette—she had broken ground for all of us, but only at terrific cost in violent scenes followed by silence and tears.’ Even dimly I cannot remember Nancy doing any of these things. If she used make-up it was barely noticeable, and I never saw her smoking.

Her sisters were to benefit by Nancy’s boldness, though her effort to break away from the exclusive family circle in order to study painting at the Slade ended in failure. Jessica, who has described the tension caused by Nancy’s resolve, ‘meals eaten in dead silence… the muffled thunder of my father’s voice,’ was ‘terribly disappointed’ when she came home after a month.

‘“How could you! If I ever got away to a bed-sitter I’d never come back.”’

‘“Oh, darling, but you should have seen it. After about a week it was knee-deep in
underclothes
. I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away.”’

‘“Well, I think you’re very weak-minded. You wouldn’t catch me knuckling under because of a little thing like underclothes.”’

Jessica was made of tougher material, as she subsequently proved. Lord Redesdale won the first round with his eldest daughter. His aversion to society drew him inwards in a cocoon, remote from contemporary currents. While he and Lady Redesdale were satisfied with their healthy domestic life, their daughters were frustrated by their comparative segregation. In spite of the fun they enjoyed in each other’s company, the girls had yearnings for greater
freedom
, like Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
who longed to go to Moscow. ‘I ought to have gone to school,’ Nancy wrote, ‘it was the dream of my life—but there was never any question of that.’ According to her, ‘it was not so much education that he [Lord Redesdale] dreaded for his daughters, as the vulgarizing effect that a boarding school might have upon them.’ Here Nancy’s memory was defective, for she did attend the Frances Holland day school in London from about 1910 until 1914, when her family migrated to the country owing to the war.