by Lisa Hilton
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field,
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.
2
NANCY
In 1956, Nancy wrote to Gaston about a new edition of the peerage which ‘makes everyone out to be utter nouveauxriches’. Her own family origins had been downgraded from the tenth to the fourteenth century, but they were still a great deal grander than the Palewskis’. As Evelyn Waugh relished pointing out, the ‘Honourable’ prefix attached to Nancy’s name was not appended until 1916, when she was twelve and her father succeeded as 2nd Baron Redesdale, but Nancy’s perception of herself was entirely and unapologetically aristocratic. Not that the Mitfords were particularly rich by the standards of their class (one reason Nancy claimed she could never get on with Americans was that they seemed to believe class was in some way related to money), but everything about her upbringing reinforced the notion that she was a member of that tiny elite of the sensible and ample of means who were born to rule wherever the map was coloured red.
Nancy was only just Honourable, true, but her family connections were deeply entwined in the mesh of the British aristocracy. Her great-grandmother Henrietta was the daughter of the 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley, and married David Ogilvy, 10th Earl of Airlie. Henrietta’s eldest daughter, Blanche, ‘Aunt Natty’, was the mother of Clementine Hozier, who married Winston Churchill. Her second daughter, Clementine, was the wife of Algernon Bertram Mitford, the 1st Baron Redesdale. Through the Stanleys, Nancy was distantly connected to the Earls of Derby and Rosebery and the Duke of Manchester. There was also a connection with the Dillon family, which meant that, to Nancy’s delight, she could claim kinship with Madame de la Tour du Pin, the celebrated memoirist of the French Revolution. Unlike Gaston, Nancy was possessed of an unshakeable confidence in her own roots, a sense of security derived from centuries of belonging.
As well as a sense of entitlement, writing ran in the family. Nancy’s paternal grandfather, Bertram, known as Bertie (pronounced ‘Barty’ to confound the Non-U), the great-grandson of William Mitford, a distinguished though now-forgotten historian of Greece, drew on a long career in the Diplomatic Service to produce a translation of Japanese legends, Tales of Old Japan, as well as two volumes of memoirs considered to be among the most authoritative accounts of Japanese culture as it was first exposed to the West. He was inevitably credited, to the glee of his grandchildren, with having also produced two children by a ‘geisha lady’. Lady Redesdale’s origins were not quite so distinguished. On her mother’s side, Nancy was descended from Thomas ‘Tap’ Bowles, the illegitimate son of a Mr Milner Gibson and, according to Cynthia Gladwyn, a cook or a midwife. Tap had covered the 1870 siege of Paris as correspondent to the Morning Post and founded the magazines Vanity Fair and The Lady. Both grandfathers became Conservative MPs in 1892, and in 1894 Bertie invited Tap to speak at a meeting near his home at Batsford in Gloucestershire. Here Tap’s fourteen-year-old daughter Sydney met the seventeen-year-old David FreemanMitford. As the beauty of their children would attest, both David and Sydney were extremely good-looking. David, tall, blond and blue-eyed, was described by Nancy’s friend James Lees-Milne as the best-looking man of his generation. The images conveyed by Edwardian photographs do not resonate with modern ideas of attractiveness, but Sydney, darker, also tall and with huge, dreamy eyes, was considered one of the most beautiful debutantes of her year.
Sydney’s own upbringing was very unconventional. Tap was widowed with four children and though the boys, Geoffrey and George, were sent away to school, their father preferred that Sydney and her sister Dorothy (Nancy’s Aunt Weenie) remain with him. Dressed in stiff, ugly sailor suits specially tailored at Gieves, the girls spent much of their childhood on Tap’s boats, the Nereid and the Hoyden, making a year-long trip to the Middle East and frequent voyages to France. When they returned to live in Lowndes Square, Sydney acted as housekeeper to her father, and though she developed an early dislike of drunken, disobedient male servants and hired only women for her own indoor staff, she became an impressive manager and hostess. She developed a distracted air which puzzled and frustrated her daughters, gliding through life with a seemingly imperturbable serenity that David Mitford, whose own life had been marred by uncontrollable fits of temper, clearly found very appealing. Unlike his favoured elder brother Clement, David had not been sent to Eton, but to Radley, lest his tantrums compromise Clement’s career. He was not nearly so illiterate as his daughters liked to make out, but he was uninterested in much except country sports, so the hearty, games-oriented life of Radley was a torment to him. He did not go on to university, but spent four years as a tea-planter in Ceylon (where he picked up his favourite and most famous term of abuse), joining the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers when the Boer War broke out during his first home leave in 1898.
David was much happier in the army, serving as orderly to the commanding officer Lord Brabazon. He was wounded three times, the last a chest wound which put him in a field hospital for four days after which he was hauled back to camp in a bullock wagon. His children relished the description of this journey, particularly the detail of the writhing nest of maggots in his lung. While David was in hospital he dictated a love letter to Sydney to be given to her should he die, and two years after he was invalided home from Africa they were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster. They honeymooned on the Hoyden and in Paris, which they both loved. David spoke French perfectly, as the Mitford boys did all their lessons in the language with a French tutor, while Sydney had known France all her life, and through her father had many French acquaintances, including the painter Paul-Cesar Helleu. Helleu painted Sydney several times, as he was to do with her even more beautiful daughter Diana. In 1964 Gaston Palewski gave Nancy a Helleu as a birthday gift.
Sydney and David’s first home was 1 Graham Street, off Eaton Terrace in Belgravia. David had been given a job by his father-in-law as office manager of The Lady, and for ten years he went to the magazine’s offices in Covent Garden every day. His boss was his brother-in-law George, general manager and co-owner. Although the work was not congenial, George, an ex-president of the Cambridge Union and editor of Granta, found him competent enough. By way of distraction, he hunted a mongoose through the rat-riddled eighteenth-century building. David and Sydney were never society types. David actively loathed company beyond the family and a very few friends and though Sydney was more gregarious, the birth of her first child, Nancy, nine months after her marriage and their relative lack of money (their income of £1,000 per year allowed them to employ five servants, but was not sufficient for serious entertaining), made her content to follow her husband’s preferences.
Nancy was followed by Pamela in 1907, Tom in 1909 and Diana in 1910 before the family moved to 49 Victoria Road in Kensington. One of Nancy’s first letters, dated 1912, is to her mother at the new house:
Dear Muv,
It has been hot and sunny it is now cold and wet. Please tell Farve—
There was an old Farve of Victoria Road which was a
Very nice abode. Four children and a wife who lived a
Happy life such a jolly old Farve of Victoria Road.
Until 1914, Nancy’s life was bounded by the orderly, predictable routine of the Edwardian nursery. The children were cared for by Laura Dicks, ‘Nanny Blor’, who stayed with the Mitfords for thirty years. In her old-fashioned black bonnet and cloak, she walked them to Kensington Gardens and the museums on the Cromwell Road, washed and brushed them for tea in the drawing room and supervised occasional trips to the pantomime or a magic show. Contrary from the fi
rst, the Mitfords despised anything they recognized as patronizing sentimentality. When Peter Pan asked plaintively if all the children in the theatre believed in fairies, they delighted in roaring out ‘No!’. Despite Nancy’s protestations that she never went to school, she attended the Francis Holland school in Belgravia for a few years, and all the girls were well taught at home, first by Sydney (who expected them to be capable of reading the leader in The Times by the age of six, which is more than would be demanded of most modern children) and later by a series of more or less persecuted governesses who followed the PNEU system, an accredited method of home education. After lessons there was a small menagerie of ‘creatures’ to be cared for and played with: the mongoose, three dogs, birds, mice and a pony called Brownie that David had brought home in a cab. He lived in a first-floor boxroom until he could be taken down by train to the cottage Sydney had rented at High Wycombe. Ponies were not allowed to travel first class, so the family bundled into a third-class carriage, with Pamela stuffed in the luggage rack.
Like any sensible child, ten-year-old Nancy longed for war. As Sydney awaited the birth of her fifth baby at Victoria Road, the children were sent to stay at their grandfather’s house overlooking Kensington High Street. Kensington Gardens became a camp, and from Grandfather Redesdale’s balcony the children could watch the troops marching past, working at peculiar knitted garments meant for the War Effort. Nancy ‘a miniature tricoteuse’1 made an endless scarf in an unpleasant shade of puce. David Mitford talked the doctors into permitting him to rejoin his regiment and left for the front a month after Unity was born, in September 1914. His health was unable to withstand a winter in the field and he was again invalided home in January 1915. Seven-year-old Pamela remembered being astonished a few months later to see her father weeping. His brother Clement had been killed, leaving his wife three months pregnant with their second child.
David was passed fit to return to France in April. During the second battle of Ypres he served as a transport officer, riding once or twice every evening across the town with the battalion’s ammunition supplies. He accompanied every delivery personally, and with his strategy of bringing the wagon horses up to a gallop and then storming flat out through the town through the Menin Gate, he never lost a man. In October he learned that Clement’s widow had produced another daughter, Clementine, which left him heir to the title and the estates. Sydney let Victoria Road and the cottage and moved into a house on the Batsford estate to economize, but just a year later, Bertie Redesdale, too, was dead, crushed by the death of his beloved elder son. David was invalided home once more in 1917, to be stationed at Oxford, travelling once a week to visit the family in their new home at Batsford Park, where Sydney gave birth to their sixth child, Jessica.
Batsford was the Mitfords’ first real experience of country life. While Deborah (born in 1920) always loved the countryside and Jessica always loathed it, the views of the other sisters were more equivocal. In her memoir Hons and Rebels, Jessica described how, during the ‘interminable’ time it took her to grow up, she became conscious of how monotonous country life was, how distant from ‘anything exciting’. In her second novel, Christmas Pudding, Nancy’s heroine Philadelphia Bobbin is cast into dreariness when her smart London friends depart: ‘Philadelphia found herself once more without any occupations or interests … assailed by the deadly boredom only known to those who live in the country but have no love for country pursuits … And in the clutches of that boredom, too boring even to describe, she remained …’
In her own memoirs, Diana recalled playing a game which made its way into The Pursuit of Love.
‘What’s the time, darling?’
‘Guess.’
‘A quarter to six?’
‘Better than that.’
‘Six!’
‘Not quite so good.’
‘Five to?’
‘Yes.’
Yet all the sisters except Jessica were countrywomen at heart. One of Nancy’s nephews remembered her showing him how to lead a pony, grasping the reins coolly in her Dior-gloved hands, and reminding him that she had, actually, grown up in the countryside. When she was dying, Nancy said that what she longed for was just one more day’s hunting. Even when she became the ‘French lady writer’, she frequently wrote to her mother of her desire to live in the country. Eccentric rural touches, like the pretty white hen that was saved from becoming the colonel’s dinner and lived ever after in Nancy’s elegant Parisian flat, or the wild flower lawn (or seedy hayfield) of her last home at Versailles, which she refused to mow, were always part of her character. Her friends agreed that despite her beautiful French and impeccable couture wardrobe, Nancy remained English to her perfectly straight backbone. She was to write with intense lyricism about the English countryside. The rhythm of her love for its beauty sings through the exhausted jog trot of a pony on a high Cotswold road, in the shrill, jarring whine of a dying rabbit, in the often startling palette from which she conjures its landscape. Nancy was no Romantic: she was aware of the cruelty of nature and the poverty beneath the picturesque, yet it was those very chiaroscuro qualities which for her made the countryside so entrancing. She felt that people of her class had a unique, atavistic relationship with their land, and she mourned its passing even as she despised the boorish, philistine squires among whom she claimed, rather disingenuously, to have grown up.
The new Lord Redesdale had inherited a considerable fortune but most of it was tied up in land in Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Northumberland, and it was considered impossible for the growing family to remain at the vast Victorian mansion with which Grandfather Redesdale had replaced his pretty Georgian house in 1880. Batsford was sold in 1919 and the family moved to Asthall, a beautiful sixteenth-century manor house near the village of Swinbrook, where the new Lord Redesdale intended to build a family house. Nancy was already a bookworm – she was reading Walter Scott at six – and she was saddened when David also sold off much of her grandfather’s impressive library. Entering her teens and no longer so enchanted with ‘creatures’ or playing hide-and-seek in the endless, dust-sheeted rooms of Batsford, she had begun there the programme of serious reading she kept up all her life. David was famous in the family for only ever having read one book, White Fang, which he considered so fine he never bothered with another. Sydney tried reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles aloud, but when David, in floods of tears at the hanging scene, learned it was fiction, he was outraged. ‘D’you mean the damn fella made it up?’ Despite this trauma he built his children a new library at Asthall, converting a barn and adding a covered walkway they named the Cloisters.
The library was the children’s territory. Tom played the piano when he was home from school and they all read and read. For a woman who always lamented her lack of a thorough education, Nancy was impressively versed in the English canon and was later more than able to hold her own among some of the most brilliant literary minds of her day. Country life was not quite so grim as Jessica later made it sound. The children were sometimes allowed to follow Lord Redesdale when he went shooting, fishing or coursing, they hunted when they were old enough – Nancy on a smart little mare called Rachel – there were expeditions to the skating rink in Oxford and shopping trips to Moreton-in-Marsh. Nancy founded a family journal, The Boiler, featuring stories by the editor under the pen name of W.R. Grue. Sydney encouraged her children to farm, ‘renting’ land from their father to keep goats, pigs, and chickens. She herself set an example with beehives and eggs, which were sent to London to be sold. With the profits, she paid the governess’s salary. Only Pam was really passionate about her smallholding, insisting on her right to attend the tenants’ dinner, but the others participated too, if only as a means to earn pocket money. Nancy boasted later that there was nothing she didn’t know about chickens.
It was not Debrett’s that was the source of the Mitfords’ much-derided Society of Hons. The children developed several private languages, including Boudledidge, spoken by Jessica and Unity
and understood by the others, and Honnish, the language of the society (members: Jessica and Deborah). In Honnish, ‘hen’ was pronounced ‘hon’, with an aspirated ‘h’, so the club was inspired by chickens, not honourables, as is still assumed by many journalists, although the mistake has been corrected by all of Nancy’s biographers. Tom’s nickname, Tuddemy, was the Boudledidge translation of his name, thought immensely funny as it rhymed, sort of, with ‘adultery’, a subject of intense fascination. It was bestowed on him after he once asked: ‘Grandfather, you know adultery …’
It was not until she reached adulthood that Nancy could see the charm in any of this. Despite ‘Farve’s’ explosive rages and ‘Muv’s’ irritating vagueness, the Mitfords, so clever, so lucky, so beautiful, lived a life most children could only imagine. Once Nancy got the point and reproduced them as the Radletts in The Pursuit of Love, the world was fascinated, enchanted and disgusted in equal measure with the Mitford childhood, and remained so for fifty years, but to Nancy, ‘longing to be grownup and live with grown-up people’, 2 it seemed terribly tedious. By her own account, she was quite horrid to her siblings. She informed Jessica, Unity and Deborah that the middle letters of their names spelled out ‘sic’, ‘nit’ and ‘bore’. She dressed up as a tramp, going to highly convincing trouble, to frighten her sister Pamela with a demand for a kiss. She forced Pamela and Diana to become girl guides, which she hated as much as they did, just to have the chance to boss them around. She told Deborah that everybody cried when she was born, another unwanted girl. The weight given to Nancy’s teasing has perhaps been exaggerated – anyone who has spent time with groups of siblings will note their capacity to be astonishingly foul to one another. What made it so memorable in Nancy’s case was that she was so good at it. The reverse of her genius for spite was her funniness. When she and Lord Redesdale teased one another at table, Deborah remembered that it was better than a play, while Jessica recalled that the wildness of the Mitford imagination – the complicated jokes, the passionate rivalries, the insistence that, above all, it was one’s duty to amuse and never to bore – ‘sprang full-blown from Nancy’.
