by Lisa Hilton
All the Mitford girls claimed to be jealous of Tom’s education. School was tried for Unity, but it didn’t last long (‘not expelled’, Lady Redesdale would insist, ‘asked to leave’), and later for Deborah, who hated it so much it made her physically ill. The Redesdales conceded to Nancy’s agitating in 1921, permitting her to attend Hatherop Castle for a year. Hatherop, run by a Mrs Cadogan, was more of a pension-cum-finishing school than a serious intellectual establishment – she took in a few ‘nice’ girls to educate along with her own daughters, with whom Nancy continued the French that, apart from a little piano and gracious deportment, Lord Redesdale considered the only real essential for girls, had her bottom pinched in her netball skirt by Commander Cadogan and worked on her sketching and dancing. Nancy enjoyed Hatherop as, at least, a change from home and was even more thrilled the next year when, with four other girls, she was sent on a cultural tour of Paris, Venice and Florence under the chaperonage of a Miss Spalding, the headmistress of a London girls’ school.
‘Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de la Vallière at the same time; Versailles was the love of his life, ’ Nancy declared in The Sun King. Like her beloved Bourbon king, her first great love was for a place. In 1927, she wrote to her brother Tom from Paris: ‘One can be more cheerful there than anywhere else in the world and I have often danced all the way down the Champs Elysées … I think all day La Muette, Place de la Concorde, Place de l’Etoile, Avenue Hoch, Avenue du Bois, Place des Vosges, Palais Royale, Rue de Rivoli.’ From her first visit to the city until she achieved her dream of settling there over twenty years later, this was her mantra, Paris her promised land.
The beauty of Paris still catches at the heart of even the most sophisticated modern traveller. Hardly surprising, then, that to a sheltered schoolgirl who had spent much of her life, in the words of her friend Brian Howard, ‘hidden amongst the cabbages of the Cotswolds’, 3 it appeared so dazzling. Nancy’s first view of the city was from the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, perfectly placed on the Right Bank of the Seine to offer vistas of four of its most eloquent scences: the Louvre itself, the Opéra Garnier, the Place du Palais Royale and the Comédie Française. Writing once more to Tom, the eighteen-year-old Nancy described an attack of Stendhal syndrome. The Avenue Henri Martin in the sixteenth arrondissement was ‘more perfect and melancholy than any place you’ve ever seen. I don’t know why but I waited for a bus there once and when the bus came I was in tears.’
Nancy was not yet ‘out’, her black-coffee hair still coiled at her neck, weighty as the Edwardian etiquette under which she had been raised, and her impression of the city on her first trip abroad was one of naive and pure delight. In ecstatic letters home she describes ‘a very scrumptious “croissant”’, her pleasure in the pictures in the Louvre, the ‘heavenly’ shops and the beauty of the Place de la Concorde at night. It is a tourist’s view, but also a sensualist’s, inviting her mother, Lady Redesdale, to share in the soft slip of a perfect omelette aux fines herbes, the airy stickiness of a perfect éclair.
Meanwhile, across town, a young student at the Sorbonne was experiencing a very different side to the city. Paris in the 1920s, Gaston Palewski recalled, was illuminated by the last, dying light of the Belle Epoque. In defiance of the cataclysm of the Great War, the grand houses remained open, the salons still exercised their influence and aristocrats serenely wedded tradesmen’s daughters to provide the funds necessary to maintaining the illusion that nothing much had happened since 1788. Money carried the elite of the Faubourg St Honoré calmly over the waves of social upheaval; patronage of the arts and above all, the belief in douceur de vivre obtained unchallenged: ‘ Le gout du décor ancien, la science d’un certain art de vivre … on pouvait se réunir, se rencontrer, s’apprécier, s’aimer. Charmante epoque!’ Indeed, the great trial of the war had served to stimulate a fever of artistic and literary creation. This was the Paris of Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Picasso. Cole Porter was installed at 17 Rue Monsieur with sixteen dressing gowns and nine cigarette cases, Gertrude Stein with her unrivalled art collection and her moustachioed lover Alice B. Toklas in the Rue de Fleurus; the American colony – Dorothy Parker, ee cummings, John dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Hemingway – who took time off from carousing and creating to meet at Sylvia Beach’s English bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, at the Odéon. A young man possessed of charm, brilliance and a decent suit might go anywhere. Palewski met the celebrated painter Armand Jan, who introduced him to Picasso, and in the studio of Jacques-Emile Blanche he first heard of an extraordinary debutant writer named Proust who, in one flourish of his unknown hand, ‘stole the glory of which his entire generation dreamed’. Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski did not meet for more than twenty years after her first breathless glimpse of the city, but somehow she knew, instinctively, that it was in his Paris she belonged, that he would offer her the key to ‘that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city’.4
3
COMING OUT
Nancy Mitford attended her first ‘grown-up’ dance at Asthall in 1922, the same year that Lady Edwina Mountbatten’s underclothes for her wedding journey were exhibited to the general public. For all that the 1923 debutante season was considered to be the most glittering and glamorous since the war, Lady Edwina’s lace-edged frillies did not invoke a new spirit of liberation among the girls who lined up in their ostrich feathers to curtsey to Queen Mary. As far as the Redesdales and their peers were concerned, it might have been 1903: the aim of the Season was to get a girl respectably married as soon as possible. Then, and only then, might she contemplate any form of adult life. Lady Redesdale took her tiara out of the bank, rented a house in Gloucester Square and, as she was to do for all her daughters, resigned herself to the peculiar martyrdom of women of her class: chaperonage.
Nancy learned to kick out her white satin train, made her curtsey, attended girls’ luncheons, dinners and dances nearly every evening, drank fruit cup and sat out to eat ices, did all that was expected of her as her mother nodded in the corner on a hired gold chair. Her first Season was a success: ‘Yes, she was very pretty, she enjoyed it all, ’ commented Deborah. ‘She was popular, everyone liked her.’1 Deborah’s own picture of a typical ‘deb dance’ is rather more telling:
Rather a small square room to dance in and many too many people in the doorway and on the stairs … My conversation to the debs’ young men goes like this:
The chinless horror ‘I think this is our dance.’
Me ‘Oh yes, I think it is.’
C.H. ‘What a crowd in the doorway.’
Me ‘Yes isn’t it awful.’
The C.H. then clutches me round the waist and I almost fall over as I try to put my feet where his aren’t.
Me ‘Sorry.’
C.H. ‘No, my fault.’
Me ‘Oh, I think it must have been me.’
C.H. ‘Oh, no, that wouldn’t be possible.’
Then follows a long and dreary silence sometimes one of us saying ‘sorry’ and the other ‘my fault’. After a bit we feel we can’t bear it any longer so we decide to go and sit down.
The disillusion of the debutante’s long-yearned-for coming of age in The Pursuit of Love bears out Deborah’s description:
This then is a ball. This is life, what we have been waiting for all these years … How extraordinary it feels, such unreality, like a dream. But alas, so utterly different from what one had imagined … the women so frowsty … the men, either so old or so ugly. And when they ask one to dance it is not at all like floating away into a delicious cloud, pressed by a manly arm to a manly bosom, but stumble-kick, stumble-kick. They balance, like King Stork on one leg, while with the other they come down, like King Log, on one’s toe. As for witty conversation … it is mostly ‘Oh-sorry’, ‘Oh-my fault’.
One of the few truly eligible young men who attended Nancy’s
dance at Asthall was Henry Weymouth, heir to the Marquess of Bath, who introduced her to friends including Brian Howard, one of the models for Evelyn Waugh’s fantastic aesthete Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. Howard was immediately charmed: ‘A delicious creature, quite pyrotechnical my dear, and sometimes even profound.’2 Mark Ogilvie-Grant appeared at a dance given by some local neighbours, the Masons, and soon became a close friend and confidant. Through Howard and Ogilvie-Grant Nancy began to meet the young men who formed her real social circle throughout the Twenties: Harold Acton, diplomat and writer; Robert Byron, the renowned Oxford aesthete and later distinguished travel writer; the film-maker John Sutro, Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh, Oliver Messel, John Betjeman and Henry Yorke (whose novels were published under the name of Henry Green), Tom Driberg. Many of them were homosexual, or flirted with homosexuality; all were clever and witty and beneath their delight in shocking the older generation concealed surprisingly serious ideas about art, about what was valuable and what was not. They represented Nancy’s first exposure to the sort of people with whom she wanted to spend her life, those who recognized the nascent intimation given to Fanny among the floating panels of disillusion at her first ball that ‘the behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected’.
In 1926 the Mitford family moved to Swinbrook House, the hideous modern home Lord Redesdale had built for them and which he was greatly hurt to discover all of them except Deborah loathed (Nancy called it ‘Swinebrook’). The friends she asked to stay became the ‘Swinbrook Sewers’, derived from Lord Redesdale’s favourite insult, ‘sua’ – ‘pig’ – picked up in Ceylon. Jessica recalled them ‘sweeping down in merry hordes’ with their smart jargon – how too, too divine, how sickmaking, darling, how shamemaking, how bogus. If the Redesdales didn’t exactly approve, Nancy’s friends were tolerated – indeed, Mark succeeded to the dubious honour of favourite. His rewards included the pleasure of eating sweetbreads at eight o’clock sharp with Lord Redesdale. ‘Brains for breakfast!’ became a maxim of their letters.
Much as she loved her new friends, Nancy could not really follow them to the darker side of the Bright Young scene. Although her life was now much less restricted, Edwardian standards still pertained. Leaving the house in London without a chaperone was virtually impossible and even then certain areas, such as the clubland of St James’s, were off limits. The seedy nightclubs of Soho and Fitzrovia were banned, and even something as innocent as having tea in Oxford with Brian Howard was treated as a crime. When she was caught in the act, Lord Redesdale bellowed at his grown-up daughter that were she married this would give her husband grounds for divorce. At the age of twenty-two, Nancy dared to cut her long hair, to which Lady Redesdale responded that she would never get a husband now, and the minor transgressions of her generation – slacks, lipstick, the odd cigarette – were treated as major offences. So although Nancy was mixing with some of the most brilliant young men of her generation, there remained an innocent quality to her which she retained all her life (later, in Paris, she still seemed ‘almost virginal’, 3 capable of discussing the necessity of breaking with her family to become a painter with Brian Howard, but simultaneously enjoying fancy-dress parties and the shocking pleasure of an occasional cocktail.
The painting idea never came to much. Nancy, astonishingly, was permitted to attend the Slade, but realized very soon that she had absolutely no talent: ‘What a very depressing drawing. I wonder how you manage to draw so foully, ’ was her teacher’s comment. Even more astonishingly, the Redesdales allowed her, at the age of twenty-three, to move into a bedsit in South Kensington. Much to the dismay of Jessica, who was already saving up to run away, this lasted a mere month. The advancing heaps of underclothes on the floor just became too menacing (‘No one to pick them up, you see.’). Nancy wanted freedom, but not the kind that came with a basin in the corner.
Writing began to look like a serious way out. If one were posh but poor, gossip-writing was a useful source of pocket money. Nancy had paid for a visit to her friend Nina Seafield at Cullen Castle in Scotland by photographing the party for the Tatler. She went on to produce occasional pieces for Vogue – the plight of the bridal confidante in ‘The Secret History of a London Wedding’, tips for the lady guest in ‘The Shooting Party’ (‘it is advisable to wear a little coat over your dinner dress … there are few houses where it is considered good form to rise during dinner and beat the breast in order to stimulate circulation’) – and then, through her family connection with the magazine, she secured a weekly column on The Lady, for which she attended the regular events of the Season, a Commem. Ball at Oxford, the Chelsea Flower Show, the Fourth of June. In the first three months of 1929, she had made a very respectable £22, and decided to try a novel.
As a debutante, she was well past her sell-by date, yet Nancy needed money for something other than the maintenance of her self-respect. In 1928, she had met Hamish St Clair Erskine, then in his first year at New College. The second son of the notorious roué the Earl of Rosslyn, Hamish, in James Lees-Milne’s words, was possessed of ‘the most enchanting looks, though not strictly handsome, mischievous eyes, slanting eyebrows. He was slight of build, gay as gay, always snobbish and terribly conscious of his nobility.’4 The fact that Hamish was ‘gay as gay’ didn’t put Nancy off falling in love with him, even though he had had a sexual relationship with her brother Tom at Eton. Hamish’s one object in life was admiration, but along with his vanity he was endowed with huge charm and the ability to make his friends laugh until they wept, the best possible quality in Nancy’s eyes. She convinced herself that his heavy drinking, his love of sleazy nightclubs, his selfishness and irresponsibility needed only a firm, loving hand, and after five increasingly frustrating years on the deb circuit she was sure she was the woman to reform him. Flattered by her unconditional devotion and the regard in which she was held by her brilliant homosexual circle of friends, Hamish went along with the idea that they were engaged, sentencing Nancy to five years of humiliation and wretchedness.
Hamish’s sexuality was in some senses typical of the times. Many of Nancy’s contemporaries, including Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly and her brother Tom, had experienced intense emotional and sexual relationships with men at school and university before turning wholeheartedly to women. In his Eton memoir, Nancy’s great friend Lord Berners conceded that ‘a good deal of this sort of thing went on, but to speak of it as homosexuality would be unduly ponderous. It was merely the ebullience of puberty.’5 Since homosexuality was never spoken of, there was no pressure to nail one’s colours to the mast by ‘coming out’ and it was perhaps more acceptable for some young men to pass through this phase without defining their sexuality when they were still emotionally immature. Many others, however, were definitely ‘so’ and happy to remain that way, though beyond the safe nurseries of the public school and universities they had to contend with both crushing prejudice and fear of the law. One historian of Nancy’s generation has commented on the fact that ‘no English youth movement … has ever contained such a high proportion of homosexuals or – in an age when these activities were still illegal – been so tolerant of their behaviour’.6 Jessica Mitford, recalling the homosexual culture of the all-male environments in which her peers spent their youth and early manhood, remarked that ‘some stuck to it, some didn’t, but nobody paid much attention either way’.
It was difficult for an inexperienced young woman to judge whether a wavering young man might not yet turn out to be good husband material, but Nancy was not entirely naïve. Evelyn Waugh gave her an embarrassed lecture at the Ritz about ‘sexual shyness’ in men after Hamish confessed that he didn’t think he would ever be capable of sleeping with a woman, and one of James Lees-Milne’s lovers agonized for months to prepare himself for the great event. The Duchess of Devonshire suggests Nancy was quite unaware that Hamish was thoroughly homosexual. ‘Those days, you know, I don’t think she knew he was queer
… otherwise why would she have said she was engaged to him?’7 Nancy was certainly sophisticated enough to make jokes about ‘pansies’ in her letters: to Mark Ogilvie-Grant she wrote that she had had tea with his mother ‘and inadvertently gave her one of your letters to read in which a lift boy is described as a “Driberg’s delight”’. Mrs Ogilvie-Grant had no idea what this meant – ‘Dear Mark has such an amusing gift for describing people’ – but clearly Nancy did. Or did she? She might have been able to find her friends’ pashes on boys amusing without really considering or knowing what was involved. Certainly her relationship with Hamish could not have been more asexual. She described an evening staying with Nina at Cullen Castle, when she and Hamish draped themselves in chiffon and put vine leaves and roses in their hair. Nancy curled Hamish’s locks with tongs and ‘he looked more than lovely’. Assuming Nancy wasn’t simply stupid, was she playing along with Hamish’s tendencies in the blind hope that he would grow out of them? Or was there something about cavorting in fancy dress that appealed to her own undeveloped and apprehensive sexuality?
Hamish was safe in a way that other suitors weren’t. Nancy had one serious admirer, Sir Hugh Smiley, who was everything a debutante’s anxious mother could wish for. Sir Hugh, of the Grenadier Guards, proposed several times during 1932. Nancy considered it, but couldn’t talk herself into pretending to love him. The prospect of his ‘gingerbread mansion’ was tempting – ‘one could be so jolly well dressed and take lovers’ – but behind her attempts at sophistication, there was a real fear of the confinement marriage could bring. She had had relationships with at least three other quite eligible young men, but she stuck with Hamish, who made her miserable, giggling with him over poor Sir Hugh’s shoulder as he sat at a nearby table at the Café de Paris. She had written to Tom: ‘If only I had any real talent I would so much rather remain single like Edith Sitwell.’ Then, immediately, she backed out: ‘No, I think it would probably be nicer to be married really or shall I become a celebrated demi mondaine, one of the really snappy ones?’ To Mark Ogilvie-Grant she explained that she thought financial independence was the greatest human happiness, and even at the lowest points of her relationship with Hamish she kept working away at it, grasping faintly but firmly at the prospect of another life, one that could be lived on her own terms.
