Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

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  To my mother, with all my love

  1

  The little grave at Swinbrook church is a sad sight now. One searches for many minutes, eyes wandering over the whiter tombstones, and the shock of finding it is considerable. Can this possibly be right? It is like a grave from two hundred years ago: the grave of a forgotten and anonymous person, of a poor serving girl who died alone and unlamented. It is covered with the thick damp lace of greenish moss, and there are no flowers.

  On it are written, in plain script barely legible beneath the decay, the words: NANCY MITFORD, Authoress, Wife of Peter Rodd, 1904–1973. Above the words is carved a strange fat animal, which is in fact a mole taken from the Mitford family crest. Nancy disliked the sign of the cross because she thought it a symbol of cruelty. So her sister Pamela, also buried in Swinbrook churchyard, chose for her the mole, a neat eccentric image that in later life was embossed on Nancy’s writing paper. An aunt of hers wrote to say how much she loved the letterhead: ‘your charming little golden cunt (Glostershire of my young days for moles, few people now know what it means).’ ‘She’s not in the Tynan set,’ Nancy had remarked. Beneath the earth, then, she may be laughing: her favourite thing in the world.

  Yet as one of England’s most devout Francophiles she had dreamed of a burial at Père-Lachaise cemetery, ‘parmi ce peuple’ – as Napoleon put it – ‘que j’ai si bien aimé.’ She called it the ‘Lachaise dump’, but that was just her Englishness coming out. She loved the place. What she no doubt imagined was lying in florid, elegant state between Molière, La Fontaine, Balzac and Proust: a comforting thought, as if death were merely a continuation of her glittering Parisian middle age. As in Dostoevsky’s story ‘Bobok’, the buried people would simply carry on with the gossipy, deliciously trivial life that they had lived overground. ‘We’ve already passed enough friends to collect a large dinner party, a large amusing dinner party’, says Charles-Edouard de Valhubert in Nancy’s novel The Blessing, as he walks among the graves with his English wife. And then: ‘Is it not beautiful up on this cliff?’

  Nancy dreamed of beauty around her in death. ‘I’ve left £4000 for a tomb with angels and things’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh ten years before she died. ‘Surely it’s an ancient instinct to want a pretty tomb?’ She also dreamed, in a way that would have amused, but irritated Waugh like a verruca, of a heaven that was really like fairyland, full of the people she had loved, along with sexy men such as Louis XV and Lord Byron – ‘I look forward greatly. Oh how lovely it will be’ – and with The Lost Chord playing. ‘And an occasional nightingale.’

  This was something that she said during a radio interview, and obviously it is an enchanting little conversational tease of the kind that she always adored. Yet there is a quality to her voice, as she lingers on those paradisiacal images, that reveals what was always there, and constitutes so great a part of her appeal: the yearning soul within the sophisticate’s carapace: the imagination that can take illusion and make it into something real. Nancy did respond to that idea of heaven as fairyland. And she probably did imagine drifting into death on ‘waves of bliss’, like those which take Polly Hampton up the aisle in Love in a Cold Climate. But Polly, of course, is not really moving towards bliss. She is making a doomed and farcical marriage with that dirtiest of old men, Boy Dougdale, who has been sleeping with her mother and will later turn pederast. This is the truth, which does not mitigate one jot the shining belief in love that has impelled Polly’s actions: for Nancy Mitford is at one and the same time, and in pretty well equal parts, a complete romantic and a complete realist.

  So here is the grave in which she lies. Sombre, dilapidated, rooted in deep unchanging Oxfordshire. No brilliant Père-Lachaise neighbours, no sparkling subterranean potins, just poor brain-damaged Unity Mitford beside her, the sister who put a bullet in her head on the day that war was declared and died from its slow creep nine years later. Some way away from these two, close to Pamela, lie the Mitford parents, David and Sydney, whose only son, Tom, is commemorated by a plaque inside the church. Around that dear little stone doll’s house are scattered most of the remains of that rampaging family mythology. Now birds sing above the stillness; rabbits hop softly between the tombs. It is intensely withdrawn, intensely English: a silent reminder of what lies beneath the fantastical cleverness, the Francophilia, the taste for Boucher and Boulle and les gens du monde.

  Nancy’s most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love, was the fourth that she wrote but the first in which her voice found full, clear expression, and this is surely because it, too, was rooted in this world, the world of damp and occasionally sunlit country, the world of calmly waiting churchyards set in England’s heart, the world upon which glamour and foreignness impact like a dream of delight. Nancy’s life, then, in a way. When she lay dying in her house at Versailles, whose Frenchness is as absolute as a page in the diary of Saint-Simon, she said to the Duchess of Devonshire: ‘I would give anything for just one more day’s hunting.’

  ‘Now that’s interesting, don’t you think?’ says her sister.1

  Yet it all began in London, where Nancy Mitford was born on 28 November 1904. Until 1911, when the family acquired a little summer cottage in High Wycombe, she hardly left the city. This was the unflashy London of the cash-strapped gentry: of shopping at the Army and Navy Stores, of quiet back streets and confined spaces, of correctness rather than smartness. Love in a Cold Climate’s Lady Montdore, with her staggering house on Park Lane, her pity for ‘the idea that some poor ladies have to live in Chelsea’, would have thought very little of Nancy’s first home: a neat stucco-faced house at Number 1 Graham Street (now Graham Terrace and now, of course, worth a fortune). Technically it was in Belgravia but it had no SW1 swank about it. Nancy later described memories of her early years as being ‘shrouded in a thick mist’ but even so she remembered this house as ‘minute’.

  In 1910 the Mitfords moved to a larger, although not grander, house at Number 49 Victoria Road, one of those long unchanging roads that lead south from Kensington High Street. And so Nancy was a London child through and through, briefly attending Francis Holland School, taking her two daily walks in parks, going to museums and theatres (where during Peter Pan the Mitford children shouted that no, they did not believe in fairies), gazing up at houses on whose scrubbed steps stood nannies in their shiny black straw bonnets, glimpsing through long windows the band-box smart parlourmaids and the women in their clinging, drifting skirts.

  There was no indication, then, of what was to come: of the rich texture of life that would be woven as the family spread like yeast; of the secret, wild intimacy of child-hunts and Hons’ cupboards and homes where ‘the cruel woods crept right up to the house’, as Nancy would later write in The Pursuit of Love. All that was like another, unimaginable world. At the start, the Mitfords were a conventional little unit. There was not much money, there was no prospect of Nancy’s father inheriting the family title2, and so they went about their business like any other straitened upper-class newly-weds: handsome David, working for his daily bread in Covent Garden while dreaming of striding across moors with a shotgun; serene Sydney, desultorily pushing her pretty baby’s pram around pristine London squares; Lily the young nanny; Nancy the blissful sole recipient of love and attention – and then Pamela, the second child, blond and sweet and as different from her sister as two people could be.

  From the moment of Pam’s birth, Nancy seems to have seen her life differently. She later said that it ‘threw me in a permanent rage for about twe
nty years’. Until 25 November 1907, a day on which she was no doubt dreaming of how she would celebrate her third birthday, life was an idyll. Thereafter it was imperfect, irrevocably different, the enchanted London skies covered with clouds. From then on, if she wanted to feed ducks on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, Pamela would have to do so too. If she wanted to read in the nursery, Pamela would be there ‘creaking the rocking-horse’. If she wanted the attention of her nanny, Pamela’s great pale eyes would claim it from her. ‘Why don’t you love me anymore?’ Nancy was heard to say over and over again to Lily, whose treacherous arms were now bound tight around the new Mitford baby. Eventually the girl was dismissed by Sydney on the grounds that her presence was too upsetting; this may have been what Nancy – who even at three years old was no doubt very much all there – had wanted.

  ‘Ninny’ – as Lily Kersey was called – ‘was quite untrained and knew nothing about babies.’ So Nancy wrote in an essay about her childhood, published fifty-five years after the birth of Pamela. ‘I think she was also partly responsible for my great nastiness to the others...’ By her own admission, Nancy’s memories of the past were hazy, and so in order to draw this conclusion about her first nanny she had to rely, as she said, on ‘family hearsay’. All the same her sister Diana thinks that there is probably something in it. ‘Simply she was the only child until she was three, and then she was jealous of the baby. Especially as the nanny was very very silly, and made a fuss of the baby and not of her. Well everybody knows not to do that now – people are so careful with their second baby, not to push the other one aside. But you see the nanny they had was aged eighteen or something, and hadn’t read Freud...!’3

  The shock of Pam’s appearance was compounded, or possibly neutralised, by the birth of Tom in 1909 and Diana in 1910. Around this time – ‘a kind of Mitford dark ages’, as Nancy wrote – a woman arrived in the household known as ‘the Unkind Nanny’, of whom it is said that she was once found banging Nancy’s head against a bedpost. Again Nancy says that she recalls nothing of this (‘Did the Nanny beat us or starve us or merely refuse to laugh at our jokes? I shall never know’). And so she does not appear remotely traumatised by this demon’s short reign. Yet the actions of her first, loved nanny stayed with her, even though she had to be reminded of them: ‘You were terribly spoiled as a child, and by all,’ her mother would later say to her. ‘In fact until Pam was born you reigned supreme.’ And hearing this seems to have struck, in Nancy, a reverberating chord of memory: years after the event, she decided to see its intense significance.

  Rather a strange way, incidentally, for a mother to address her daughter? It certainly has an air of detachment. Yet that was quite usual between these two; with them, there was a directness unsoftened by affection, and a distance uneasily bridged by duty. Indeed the strongest feeling one gets, reading this essay on Nancy’s childhood, was that its real target was not the nannies but Sydney. The point of shooting these darts at Lily Kersey and the Unkind Nanny was surely, in part at least, to make the reader wonder what kind of woman would employ such people to look after her daughter.

  Nancy’s dislike of her mother peeps out from between the careful barbs of her sentences, which Lady Redesdale must have read like someone picking roses without gardening gloves. Not so much when Nancy describes a ‘delightful day dream’ of longing to hear that her parents had gone down on a ship, leaving her to ‘gather up the reins of the household in small but capable hands and boss “the others”’. That is mere childish fantasy (oddly enough it nearly happened: the Mitfords booked passages on the Titanic but did not take the trip). But when she writes about the sacking of the Unkind Nanny, for example, she begins to twist the knife in earnest: ‘My mother retired to bed, as she often did when things became dramatic, leaving my father to perform the execution...’ And here the blade gleams more visibly:

  So what did my mother do all day? She says now, when cross-examined, that she lived for us. Perhaps she did, but nobody could say that she lived with us. It was not the custom then. I think that nothing in my life has changed more than the relationship between mothers and young children. In those days a distance was always kept. Even so she was perhaps abnormally detached. On one occasion Unity rushed into the drawing-room, where she was at the writing-table, saying: ‘Muv, Muv, Decca4 is standing on the roof – she says she’s going to commit suicide!’ ‘Oh, poor duck’, said my mother, ‘I hope she won’t do anything so terrible’, and went on writing.

  It is a good story (corroborated? Unity couldn’t, and Jessica didn’t) and well told in the way that Nancy steps lightly between judiciousness and condemnation. If true, it does say something about Sydney, not least that living with six daughters might lead a mother to treat them like so many tempestuous divas: let the storms break, knowing that they will blow over. Ironically, it is just the kind of reaction that Nancy would normally have admired. Yet when it came from Sydney, she elected to resent it. Later in her essay she recalls how Sydney would transfer her affections between her daughters – ‘She was entirely influenced by physical beauty; those who were passing through an awkward or ugly age were less in favour than their prettier sisters’ – and, again, how lethally this reads.

  So it was not surprising that Lady Redesdale reacted badly when this essay appeared. ‘Oh goodness I thought it would make you laugh’, Nancy wrote to her mother in August 1962, after its publication in The Sunday Times under the title ‘Mothering the Mitfords’. Clearly she was concerned, and yet in another way she was not concerned at all, else why would she have done it? She must have known exactly what she was saying, and that her mother would know it too, but she had apparently been unable to stop herself. ‘All I can say is you must forgive & I’m very very sorry if you are annoyed, because I can’t stop it unless I stop the whole book5 which would cost thousands of pounds. Oh dear it has cast a cloud...’ A couple of weeks later Nancy’s fractious perturbation has increased. She sounds about fifteen years of age, as if guilt were driving her into an ever deeper tantrum; and how she must have resented this. ‘But the person who appears completely vile is me!!... No more efforts at autobiography I’ve learnt my lesson.’

  She had written about Sydney already, in a sense, when she portrayed her as Lady Alconleigh, or Aunt Sadie, in The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. And she used this portrait as a sort of (pretty poor) defence: ‘In any case everybody knows you are Aunt Sadie who is a character in the round & is you in middle age exactly as you were.’ Actually there is not much similarity between the woman described in Nancy’s essay and the one in her two great novels. Sadie has charm to burn, whereas Sydney – according to this portrait, at least – had none; but then Sadie, unlike Sydney, is very much a Mitford. Like almost all of that family she is tremendously funny, even though she does not necessarily mean to be (‘Always remember, children, that marriage is a very intimate relationship, it’s not just sitting and chatting to a person, there are other things you know’, is her way of trying to put Polly off her engagement to Boy Dougdale in Love in a Cold Climate). Her tremendous vagueness is not a product of innate detachment, more a poetic retreat from the demands of her relentless family. And she is generally greatly adored: her husband only wants to be with her, sensible Fanny thinks the world of her, her younger children are nearly obsessed with getting her attention.

  Linda, though... Sadie’s daughter Linda is the heroine of The Pursuit of Love and, as such, she inevitably holds something of Nancy’s fundamental self. Somehow, no doubt without being aware of it, Nancy conveys a wariness in Linda’s relationship with her mother. When Linda takes up her life of Parisian ecstasy with her great love, Fabrice de Sauveterre, a pervasive note in the narrative – so constant as to be almost unnoticeable – is her real dread of Lady Alconleigh’s disapproval:

  She hadn’t liked it when Linda had committed adultery with Christian, but he, at least, was English, and Linda had been properly introduced to him and knew his surname... how much less would Aunt Sadie lik
e her daughter to pick up an unknown, nameless foreigner and go off to live with him in luxury... [Lord Alconleigh] would disown her for ever, throw her out into the snow, shoot Fabrice, or take any other violent action which might occur to him. Then something would happen to make him laugh, and all would be well again. Aunt Sadie was a different matter. She would not say very much, but she would brood over it and take it to heart, and wonder if there had not been something wrong about her method of bringing up Linda which had led to this; Linda most profoundly hoped that she would never find out.

  This is infinitely more sympathetic, again, than the portrait of the real mother, but there is something similar. That delicate, sorrowing ability to induce guilt was pure Sydney, as is the very faint sense, in Aunt Sadie, of something kept hidden within herself, withdrawn even from her children; which is not quite what one wants from a mother. In some mysterious way Linda feels like a motherless child, a rootless girl. Despite her large family, despite her wild capacity for joy, there is something sad and solitary in her, and this has surely seeped into Linda from Nancy herself.

  So it was as though Nancy had felt a chill coming off her mother, against which she could not warm herself. And it is all too easy to predicate from this her later failures in relationships with men – ‘I think that all her love affairs were unhappy,’ says her sister Diana – and the growth of her spiky carapace, her laughing defence against hurt. Easy to see a pattern established in the birth of Pamela: the definitive example of Diana’s remark that ‘the trouble with Nancy’s life is she doesn’t come first with anybody’.

  Which sounds terribly sad, indeed quite pitiable, until one then starts to wonder how much it actually means. As Stephen Spender would later ask, in his Listener review of the 1985 biography of Nancy by Selina Hastings: ‘how many of us can be certain that we are first with anybody?’ Equal first perhaps, but being all things to another person is pretty rare. And certainly – to go back to the formative years – Nancy came equal first with her Nanny Blor, who is the heroine of her Sunday Times essay. Blor (real name Laura Dicks), a robust nonconformist of natural and unstinting kindness, arrived at Graham Street in 1910 as a sweet solution to the problems created by her predecessors. From the first, she gave and inspired love in equal measure. She was, says Nancy’s sister Deborah, ‘a complete saint’.6