by Lisa Hilton
Like Nancy, Gaston was greedy for beauty. ‘I live a great deal by my eyes, ’ she told Evelyn Waugh, and so did he. On his daily walk from Rue Bonaparte to the office on the Rue de Rivoli, where Reynaud succeeded as minister of finance in November 1938, Gaston ‘filled his eyes’ with the vista of the Pont des Arts and the façade of the Louvre. ‘It was, ’ he remembered, ‘the only happy moment of my day.’ That ominous sound of marching was coming inexorably closer, and still the French government seemed incapable of action. Gaston referred to this period as the ‘pre-Resistance’, a political climate in which traditional party lines regrouped according to those who believed on one side in the threat of ‘the monstrous evangelism of totalitarianism’ propagated by Hitler and those who argued that the best defence lay in appeasement and the Maginot Line. Many of the latter favoured the policy of leaving Germany to expand against Russia in the east, ignoring the possibility of a mooted Nazi–Soviet pact. Nonetheless, the Communists, who were now Reynaud’s unlikely allies, agreed with the right that such a thing could never happen, producing dissent even among those who acknowledged the threat of Germany. Pétain, despised by Gaston since his displacement of Lyautey in Morocco, emerged as a popular representative of the conservative view.
Even as he reached out to unlikely supporters on the left, Gaston was making enemies within Reynaud’s circle. The Comtesse de Portes, Reynaud’s mistress, loathed him and plotted with her friend, the sardine heiress the Marquise de Crussol, to have him dismissed. Gaston was in charge of Reynaud’s press campaign, meeting newspaper editors daily to try to place articles linking French financial policy with the need for industrial and military initiatives. Using Reynaud’s funds, he contributed secretly to a daily socialist journal, Populaire, which earned him the hostility of Hélène de Portes and Daladier. The need for reform was blindingly obvious, yet still the nation seemed deaf. Gaston wrote later of how he lay awake at night, maddened by the inability of his colleagues to recognize that invasion was coming. In his view, France was already lost.
7
LOSING
As Gaston embarked on his Gaullist crusade, the Rodds moved back into London, to 12 Blomfield Road, Maida Vale, which was not quite the chic quartier it became after the war. Lord Norwich, who lives there now, recalls that it was ‘brothel, brothel, brothel, Nancy, brothel, brothel, brothel’. Peter was working again, but appeared to be drinking his wages as fast as he earned them, and aside from the attractions of the local amenities, he had found himself a mistress, Mary Sewell, a married writer who lived near the Redesdales in Rutland Gate. Nancy pretended to be insouciante, writing to her brother-in-law Simon Elwes: ‘It’s lovely being in London because now Rodd can go out with his girlfriend who has a spoon face and dresses at Gorringes [a sharp stab – Gorringes was an auction house]. Also I can go out with people like Raymond Mortimer and Willie Maugham who like the sound of their own voices punctuated by giggles, but who hate being told about the origins of toll-gates by Rodd.’ The bridge parties continued, but they were far from gay. Mary and her husband came often, Peter flirted, Nancy sniped and when the atmosphere became too gruesome would pretend to faint, a pathetically desperate way to seize attention. Peter would dump her on the drawing-room sofa and go back to the game and his lover.
For all the sophisticated posturing of Christmas Pudding and Wigs, Nancy was quite unable to distance herself from the embarrassment her marriage was becoming. Rather than leave Peter to get Mary out of his system, she even agreed to a holiday in Brittany with the Sewells, accompanied by Jessica, whose adolescent blindness to the situation could not have been comforting. ‘We went to an extraorder nightclub, ’ Decca wrote from Saint-Briac, ‘run by an ex-Folies-Bergere lady called Popo … And she did a dance and took off her jersey. Wasn’t it extraorder? And then she waltzed with Mary Sewell. Nancy didn’t come because she thinks nightclubs boring and the Sewells (evidently) thought it was because she was shocked by them.’
Jessica was preparing an ‘extraorder’ shock of her own for her family. She had come out in 1935 and was mired in the boredom of Swinbrook, waiting for adult life to happen. Now a committed Communist, Jessica was fascinated by the doings of her cousin Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s nephew, who had run away from Wellington, where he had published a leftist magazine, Out of Bounds, and then signed up to the party. In January 1937 he had been invalided home from the front in Spain, where he had joined a unit of international volunteers and seen action against the Fascists. At the time, he appeared to adults the worst kind of self-righteous schoolboy prig. Philip Toynbee described him as an intolerant fanatic, and Nancy, later, as the most horrible human being she had ever known. But to Jessica, frustrated by her family’s concurrent attitude of both evangelism and apathy towards Fascism, he was an idol. They met at a house party in Wiltshire soon after Esmond had returned to England and within twenty-four hours had decided to run away to Spain together. (Esmond appeared less interested at this point in Jessica than in the £50 running-away money she had saved. He was the worst of hypocrites when it came to appropriating other people’s funds.)
In early February, on the pretext of a motor tour in France with two girlfriends (and, of course, a suitable chaperone), she bolted. Esmond declared his love the day after they arrived in France; from then on they travelled as a couple to Bayonne, where Jessica needed to obtain a Spanish visa. After a period of frantic anxiety, the Redesdales learned that they had reached Bilbao and planned to marry. The Mitfords, including Unity, who had rushed back from Munich, assembled at Rutland Gate to consider what should be done. By this time, the elopement was all over the press – ‘Peer’s Daughter Elopes to Spain’, ‘Mixed Up Mitford Girls Still Confusing Europe’. Prod wrote an article for the Daily Mail in which he claimed Jessica had become a Communist only to score points off Unity and suggested that she be made a ward in Chancery to compel her to leave Spain. Prod’s desire to play ‘the heroic brother-in-law’ was a great bore, according to Unity, who had loathed him ever since he had written to her parents pointing out the inevitable disaster that would ensue if they continued to give rein to her obsession with Hitler. Nonetheless it was agreed that he and Nancy, with permission from Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office, should be allowed to travel to Spain to try to talk Jessica out of it.
They arrived on a naval destroyer, disembarking in a cannonade of flashbulbs. Both Jessica and Esmond were adamant that they would be married and would not return home. Nancy pleaded with her sister, describing Sydney and David’s misery, as well as resorting to the codes of their class – English society could ‘make things pretty beastly to those who disobey its rules’. Was she also hoping to prevent Decca from confusing love with her desire to escape, as both she herself and Diana had done? Nancy and Peter left in exasperation the next day. With her usual political sophistication, Unity wrote to Jessica: ‘I naturally wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary for my cause, and I should expect him to do the same to me, but in the meantime I don’t see why we shouldn’t be quite good friends.’ This went further than Nancy’s mealy-mouthed expressions of support for Diana in the Thirties. However, she was now increasingly coming round to Esmond’s position: ‘I realize that there will never be any peace, or any of the things I like and want, until that mixture of profit-seeking, self-interest, cheap emotion and organized brutality which is called fascism has been fought and destroyed forever.’1 Nancy was by this time no fool about Fascism, though when it came to her own sisters she was still unable to reconcile the ever-greater hatred and anger it provoked with her love for them. When, in 1941, she was forced to choose, she did her duty, like Unity, and chose Esmond’s side.
Jessica was soon pregnant and she and Esmond were married on 18 May in Bayonne with Lady Redesdale as a sorrowful witness. The Romillys felt that the Rodds had betrayed them by siding with the grown-ups. Nancy continued to write to Jessica, who was prepared to forgive her, but insisted that she had been rather disloyal in disapproving of her living with Esmo
nd unmarried, or marrying him. Nancy expressed her relief and sent ‘a narst little diamond ring, as I know it is nice to have things of popping value’. She didn’t think Jessica would make much of a mother after her dreadful behaviour, but luckily ‘Aunt Nancy’ would be on hand to help.
In the late Thirties, Nancy was hopeful that she might have a baby of her own. Childbearing was not easy for all the Mitford women. Pamela, rather unkindly described as the least maternal of the sisters, in fact underwent several operations in an attempt to have a child. Deborah, as she has recently recorded in her memoirs, suffered a stillbirth and Nancy herself was treated with curettage in an effort to help her to conceive (hence, perhaps, the rather bald Mitford slang for babies – ‘scrapages’). Despite her fastidious warnings to Jessica about the horrors of nappies, Nancy was not, as has sometimes been surmised from her novels, hostile to children. Quite the contrary. That some were unloved and unloveable, like Linda Radlett’s first daughter Moira Kroesig in The Pursuit of Love, or Polly’s baby in Love in a Cold Climate which, according to the Radletts, took one look at its father and died in despair, she recognized. She was realistic, too, about the drudgery and boredom involved in bringing up young children, to a degree which reads as shocking in our own late-breeding, child-fetishizing culture. Nevertheless she writes with great sympathy of the physical satisfaction mothers derive from their children when small and equally of the sometimes bewildering transformation of this relationship as they grow.
Nancy was very fond of her friend Billa Harrod’s son Henry, and proved a ‘perfect’ godmother to Evelyn Waugh’s daughter Harriet when she was young, choosing just the sort of charming, imaginative, ‘grown-up’ presents little girls adore. Perhaps she liked small children best – heaven from two to six and then rather dreary until they become civilized adults – but again this is a not uncommon, if unfashionable view. That Nancy acknowledged later in life that she might not have become the writer she did had she had children does not mean she didn’t want them, though her comment to Evelyn that her infertility was ‘God’s idea, not mine’ is maybe the nearest she got to expressing her sadness on the subject. Inevitably, her infertility coloured her relationship with Gaston, though initially not negatively; indeed, the fact there was no risk of pregnancy might well have lent a certain abandon to the proceedings. But Nancy was later forced to confront her belief that since a child was one thing she could not give him, he was entitled to look elsewhere.
In the summer of 1938, though, Nancy was thrilled to find herself pregnant. To Robert Byron she wrote that while it was madness from the financial point of view, ‘one must never be deterred from doing what one wants for lack of money’. Nancy had been warned to rest in bed, and the first weeks of her pregnancy proceeded calmly, first with her friend Helen Dashwood at West Wycombe and then in London, where she was cared for by a nurse. Despite these careful precautions, in September she lost the child. In 1941, she conceived again, though by this time proof that the Rodd marriage had broken down irrevocably was provided by the fact that the father was not Peter. Much of Nancy’s attitude to suffering, her immense personal courage, is shown in her behaviour as she lost this second baby. The pregnancy turned out to be ectopic, and she began to suffer pain during a visit to her friends the Harrods in Oxford. Dismissing it as possible appendicitis, she carried her own suitcase to the bus stop, rode to the station and returned to London, where she checked herself in to the University College hospital. Before the anaesthetic, she apparently asked the surgeon to preserve her fertility, but he had no choice other than to perform a hysterectomy. When Nancy came round, it was to the news that she would never now have a child.
Lady Redesdale was in no position to be supportive. She produced her airy remark about ovaries and then, when Nancy said she was saddened by the scar on her abdomen, wondered why she minded, as nobody was ever likely to see it. To Diana, Nancy wrote of this ‘horrible’, ‘depressing’ experience, but outside the family the ‘shop-front’ was strictly maintained. Nancy went to beautiful West Wycombe to recuperate, where she found her friends James Lees-Milne and Cecil Beaton in a lively house party of ‘evacuees’ which also included her cousin Clementine, Sibyl Colefax and Eddy Sackville-West. As at other times of great stress in her life, she took refuge in somewhat hysterical and savage teasing. James Lees-Milne’s diary is rather impatient with her incessant ‘shrieking’, but then he did not know the physical and mental agony she was trying so bravely to conceal. The operation had taken place in December and Nancy was too unwell to return to London until the following March, but with the exception of her letter to Diana, she made no fuss and demanded no special treatment. Peter showed very little concern for his wife’s health, as had been the case when she had lost their first baby. The Rodds, Nancy wrote, had been ‘wonderfully true to form – my mother-in-law was told by the surgeon I should be in danger for three days and not one of them even rang up to enquire, let alone send a bloom or anything. I long to know if they bothered to look under R in the deaths column – very much doubt it however.’
This tight-lipped, very English stoicism is now viewed as a perverse suffocation of healthy emotion; sentimentally, at least, we’re all American now. Yet to Nancy’s generation, the generation of the war, it was a badge of honour, a conquest of the self based on not imposing one’s own suffering on others. In his diaries, Cecil Beaton writes admiringly of their mutual friend, the famous hostess and musical connoisseur Emerald Cunard, when she learned that her long-term lover Sir Thomas Beecham, on whom she had spent much of her life and fortune, had married a Miss Betty Humby, despite having denied the engagement to Emerald’s face just two days before. Beaton comments on how bravely she rallied, never showing her pain or speaking ill of the man who had hurt her so profoundly. When Nancy was told of the death of her brother Tom in 1945, she was staying with Lord Berners at Faringdon. After he had broken the news, her friend kindly asked if she would prefer to remain upstairs, but Nancy appeared, immaculately made up, to sit through dinner with no outward show of grief. Similar examples abound among Nancy’s peers – the ‘shop-front’ was by no means unique to her – but there is no reason to mistake the want of manifest pain for its lack. In the case of her infertility, there is no doubt that Nancy minded deeply. But the codes of her time and class provided a means of coping with grief, a certain grim courage, which later generations have been perhaps too ready to misread or dismiss.
Nancy’s first miscarriage occurred at the same time as the Munich crisis. With the exception of Deborah and Jessica, all the Mitfords were at this point pro-Fascist in varying degrees. Nancy herself was opposed to the Munich agreement, which she discussed in a letter to her friend Billa, the wife of the Oxford economist Roy Harrod, expressing her disappointment at the result of the Oxford by-election where Quintin Hogg had beaten the anti-Munich independent candidate. For someone who was supposedly capable only of making jokes about politics, she was thoughtful about the inadequacy of a strong anti-appeasement figurehead on the liberal left, while her impatience with appeasers is manifest: ‘The young prospective candidate …[said] that he was glad of the Nazis as they will prevent by their menace the young of England from becoming decadent … I think ordinary people are at last getting sufficiently interested in politics to prevent all these half-witted young public schoolers from being returned so easily in the future.’ For all her sisters’ much-vaunted political convictions, it was Nancy, of them all, who engaged most practically with her beliefs in the year before the war.
Peter had failed to get a job at the BBC, his brother Francis having warned the corporation against hiring him (Nancy put his name in a drawer, the Mitford family curse) and decided to go to France as a volunteer to help the Republican refugees, numbering an estimated half a million, who had fled from Franco over the Pyrenees. Nancy, pretty, frivolous; apolitical Nancy, followed him. In Perpignan, Prod was for once in his element. The French government had no idea how to deal with this sudden mass immigration, so they herded the
unfortunate Spaniards into barbed-wire enclosures and more or less left them to rot. When Peter arrived, they were dying at a rate of four hundred a day. ‘The thing that is happening, ’ he wrote to his wife, ‘is so appalling that it amounts to the cold blooded murder of thousands of chaps. It is impossible to get at the mortality figures, but the dying has not even properly begun. They’ve got typhoid and possibly cholera as well now.’
The refugees needed to be fed and provided with medical supplies, dispersed families had to be reunited and boats, tickets and visas arranged to Mexico and Morocco, where those who had relatives there might join them. The situation was utterly chaotic, and Nancy was impressed not only by seeing her husband’s long-wasted abilities finally put into action, but by his deep and sincere concern for the frightened, desperate people he was helping. He worked round the clock, barely seeing Nancy, and she too threw herself into the task, driving a wheezing supply van in a distinctly unchic straw coolie hat and organizing the passengers on a ship for Mexico departing from Sete. A long letter to Lady Redesdale captures the frantic atmosphere, pitched between grief and rejoicing.
