Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  Unlike fickle Sydney, Nanny Blor had no favourites. ‘If she felt on the side of the little ones,’ wrote Nancy, ‘especially her own baby, Diana, against the bully that I was, she never showed it. Her fairness always amazed me, even as a child...’ The essay is a homage to the woman who was, as will be seen, the first of several substitute mothers in Nancy’s life. And the warmth with which Blor is described is perhaps the most deadly shot that Nancy aimed at her real, cool, distant mother. It was not Sydney, so the implication goes, who had ‘mothered’ this particular Mitford.

  Of course, and this Nancy scrupulously reiterates, she grew up in the era of nannies and of parental remoteness (one might say that this era has never ended, although now it is that of childminders and working late at the office). And so it was to be expected that a child of her class and time lived in the way that she describes: ‘we “came down” to see our parents finishing their breakfast and again, dressed up in party clothes, after tea... But we spent the major part of our lives in the nursery...’ What is unusual is that a woman like Nancy saw this as worthy of criticism. She did not object to nannies per se, nor to being left alone by her parents; almost certainly she would have brought up a child of her own in this way. It is a rather more fundamental point that she seems to have been making, about the relative levels of affection that she received from her mother and from Blor. And this, yes, she did mind a good deal. Coming equal first with her nanny was a wonderful compensation, but should compensation have been necessary?

  Indirectly, and perhaps unconsciously, Nancy wrote about this in her four post-war novels. She pulled the same trick that she did in ‘Mothering the Mitfords’, putting into each of these books an image of alternative motherhood: something warm and ‘normal’ and not much like Sydney. For example, the two books in which Aunt Sadie features (The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate) also contain a woman who comes close to being the perfect mother: Fanny’s Aunt Emily, sister to Sadie, an emblem of sanity who believes in education for women and in letting children develop sound instincts in an atmosphere of enlightened freedom. This is how Fanny is raised (having been abandoned by her real mother, the Bolter, the third sister, who sits in a Riviera boîte somewhere at the far end of the maternal spectrum). She becomes just such a mother herself, as Nancy shows in her last novel, Don’t Tell Alfred. Fanny’s three sons are disasters in various ways but her manner of dealing with them – never asking questions, guiding not pushing, hiding their worst fooleries from their father, always keeping a sense of humour – is exemplary, unremittingly kind and sensible. Nancy’s approval of Emily and Fanny, of their ease with the maternal role, is ever present. It sings quietly in vignettes such as the one that shows Fanny starting every day with her son’s adopted child on her bed, finding him ‘delightful company; a contented, healthy baby, easily amused and anxious to please’. It is explicitly stated in the passage in The Pursuit of Love when Fanny is accused, by her Uncle Matthew, of becoming hideously middle-class because Emily has sent her to school: ‘All the same, my aunt was right, and I knew it and she knew it.’

  It is as though, having seen the ways in which – in her opinion – her own mother had gone wrong, Nancy conceived a fully rounded idea of what a mother should be like: and very attractive it is too. For a woman who never bore children, it is in fact remarkable how well Nancy understood motherhood. She portrays good mothers in her novels with absolute naturalness, for all the world as if she had raised a brood herself. At the same time she is wonderful at describing bad mothers, which some people think she would have been herself (children would have been ‘a great pest to her’, says her sister Diana). For example when Linda gives birth to a ‘howling orange’ in The Pursuit of Love, she tells Fanny that it is ‘really kinder not to look’ in the cradle, while Polly, in Love in a Cold Climate, views her pregnancy with a sort of distant horror. But then both these women have been impregnated by men whom they no longer love, which Nancy clearly sees – and probably rightly – as making a difference.

  Conversely, in her novel The Blessing, Grace de Valhubert is so besotted with her husband that her son, Sigismond, is washed in the same happy waves of love: mother and child have a delightful relationship, a charming and funny intimacy. Nonetheless it is interesting that Nancy put a version of Nanny Blor into this novel, with whom Sigi spends much of his time while Grace concentrates on her fascinating man (‘A woman who puts her husband first seldom loses him’). And Sigi is, indeed, shown to crave more attention from his parents. But his attempts to get it are comic rather than pathetic, because it is made wholly clear that there is no lack of love between Grace and her son. Nanny does not, in this case, come first.

  For Nancy, of course, she did. Nancy did believe that her mother lacked love for her, and as time went on she found it more and more convenient to blame her for anything that had gone wrong in her life. For example in 1961, in a letter to Diana, she would attribute her lack of physical energy to the assertion that ‘the dentist says I was starved when I was five and having our mater I guess that may be true.’ (In ‘Mothering the Mitfords’ she wrote that Lily Kersey had ‘laid the foundations for the low stamina which has always been such a handicap to me in life’; but then this, too, was an oblique attack on Sydney.) Also, more viciously, she would try to blame her mother for her own inability to have children. She claimed that Sydney had – by her own admission – employed a syphilitic nurserymaid, and that this person had by some mysterious means infected Nancy and rendered her infertile. It is actually impossible to think that even Nancy believed such a story. But it was the kind of thing that she would say within the family.7

  And it must have been hovering in her mind, along with the ‘Mothering the Mitfords’ essay, when Sydney died in 1963: there was painful unfinished business between mother and daughter, and no doubt for Nancy a certain amount of guilt. ‘I think she probably had big regrets,’ says Debo. If so, these could have dissipated her fury; instead, Nancy used them to stoke the fires of resentment. The rage that simmers beneath the ladylike prose of ‘Mothering the Mitfords’ was let loose after Sydney’s death, to the point where, in 1971, Nancy was writing this to her sister Jessica on the subject of their mother: ‘I had the greatest possible respect for her; I liked her company; but I never loved her, for the evident reason that she never loved me. I was never hugged & kissed by her as a small child – indeed I saw very little of her... I don’t believe this really applies to you & Debo? Certainly Debo loved her & Diana did in old age but not when we first grew up. She was very cold & sarky with me. I don’t reproach her for it, people have a perfect right to dislike their children...’

  Poor Nancy – this was real and burning in her at the age of nearly sixty-seven, when the distancing process of adulthood might be thought to have intervened. She was wholly unwilling, or unable, to take a mature perspective of the kind that Jessica displayed in her reply: ‘I actively loathed her as a teenager (especially as an older child, after the age of fifteen), and did not respect her. But then, after getting to re-know her I became immensely fond of her and really rather adored her. She probably didn’t change, as people don’t, especially after middle-age. Most likely we did.’

  Yet if Nancy changed towards her mother it was to become less, rather than more, accepting. And, in her own middle age, she considered giving these feelings some sort of autobiographical expression. Back in June 1962, Nancy had told Sydney that, because she remembered so little of her early life, ‘I could no more write memoirs than fly.’ But although her memories were incomplete they had, as she showed in ‘Mothering the Mitfords’, a force, a shape, an artistic logic: they were a writer’s memories, in fact, and even if they were not literally true they had the power to convince both Nancy and her readers. Certainly the essay that she wrote about her childhood – which she said was one of the best things she had ever done – helped to convince her of how she felt about Sydney.

  Although she had never been introspective (too boring for other people), and ha
d lived her life in a way that was both intensely private and intensely social, from that time onwards the desire grew strong in Nancy to write her memoirs. It was as though she liked the idea of a literary construct that would explain her life to herself. She did not, she said, intend to revisit her childhood in the book; she intended to use it to explain her adulthood, as the 1971 letters between herself, Jessica and Deborah make clear. Their central concern is what Nancy described, to Debo, as the ‘unsatisfactory relationship I had with Muv’; so much so that it is hard not to see the planned autobiography as a kind of J’accuse directed at Sydney. After 1963, when the fear of that brooding presence had been removed and there could be no more sad, disapproving letters in the post, Nancy dreamed more and more intently of writing a book in which she could say exactly what she thought about her mother.

  How true it would all have been is another story altogether: ‘oh I hope I shall be honest’, Nancy wrote to Jessica in 1971 about the autobiography, but where her mother was concerned there are doubts as to Nancy’s honesty. She decided to believe that Sydney did not love her. This does not mean that what she believed was true.

  Deborah instantly admits that Nancy felt this way but says: ‘I don’t know why it was. We had this wonderful nanny – but she didn’t come until Nancy was six. And you know people now, all these psychiatrists say that a nanny and a mother must be enemies – what rubbish. We loved them both. I mean the more people you have to love the better.’ Deborah’s own feelings towards her mother are those of straightforward affection, but she was born sixteen years after Nancy – was the last rather than the first child – so her relationship with Sydney would undoubtedly have been very different. And even Deborah once admitted that her mother ‘could come down like a ton of bricks and it was then awful’.8

  Meanwhile Diana’s feelings on the subject are intense, not least because she considers that Nancy was not honest about Sydney, and indeed wrote a great many downright lies about her, especially in letters. ‘I can never forgive that.’ Therefore her tendency is to blame Nancy for disliking Sydney rather than the other way about. ‘No, I don’t think they loved each other much. I adored my mother. She was so marvellous. I wouldn’t say she was a great one for hugging or anything like that, but she wasn’t cold, not at all. And it takes two –! Nancy was very reserved, you see...’ To be fair, Nancy herself said something along these lines when, in a letter to Deborah in 1971, she wrote: ‘I would vaguely like to try & find out if this relationship [between herself and Sydney] was one’s fault or hers.’ But beneath the attempt at rationality it is pretty clear that Nancy did not actually think it was her own fault. In Nancy’s opinion, Sydney deserved all that she got from her.

  Now these contradictory perceptions are not so surprising, yet they do illustrate an intriguing difficulty about the Mitfords. Sometimes, recollections of the family’s past differ according to whether or not members actually want to agree with one another. For example Diana tends not to agree with much of what Nancy says, and regards a good deal of it as either myth-making, mischief-making or both. She would probably say that, in the writing of ‘Mothering the Mitfords’, Nancy’s pen had been flowing pleasurably with glittering spite, that she had been relieving some frustration of her own by using her mother as material: doing so, indeed, with all the cool detachment of which Sydney herself was accused. This is a valid point of view. Nancy was extremely hard on her mother in her essay, to the extent that the blood does chill a little: right down to freezing point if what she had been writing was fundamentally untrue.

  Yet why should it have been? Nancy may have revelled in exaggeration, she may have had a writer’s facility for bending truth to her imaginative will. But there is no reason whatsoever for inventing the lack of love that she felt from her mother. It would be wholly pointless. And indeed, a comment like ‘until Pam was born you reigned supreme’ does read wintry and non-maternal, like a report from a headmistress upon a difficult pupil. Nancy might well have believed from it that the flow of motherliness towards her was not instinctively there, that from the first there had been a cool judgmental eye upon her.

  And it is odd that Sydney should have given birth to this pretty, pert little thing (Nancy was no ‘howling orange’, she was a gorgeous-looking child, with her cloud of black hair and her mother’s down-turning mouth); should have done so in the earliest days of her marriage, when all was meant to be sunlight and bliss; and yet should have created this impression of remoteness, indeed of dislike. David Mitford’s joy at Nancy’s arrival seems to have been boundless: ‘I never dreamt of such happiness’, he wrote to his mother when Sydney fell pregnant; and, after the birth – at which, most unusually for the time, he was present – ‘our happiness is very great’. Sydney’s own feelings are not recorded.

  Nancy was not an especially easy child (she was not even easy in the producing: Sydney’s labour lasted fourteen hours). Cleverness often leads to frustrations, and according to her mother she was given to uncontrollable tantrums: ‘you used to get into tremendous rages, often shaming us in the street’, Sydney would later tell her daughter, again in the detached and deadly tone that Nancy found so difficult. David had gone in for tantrums as a child, so possibly he understood and indulged Nancy in a way that irritated his wife. He also had a sister who tried to force Sydney to bring up her daughter in a new-fangled, give-her-anything manner, which was no doubt an added annoyance: ‘She said you must never hear an angry word and you never did...’ (more’s the pity, runs the subtext). Essentially it seems that David was completely entranced by Nancy – he called her ‘the pearl of the family’ – and that her mother was therefore left to take a more distanced role. It is said that Sydney wanted and fully expected a son, and this might have suited her better. Possibly she felt ambivalent about the whole experience of bearing this first child, especially when those around her – not least her husband – assumed her to be delirious with joy.

  She may, very simply, have been jealous of Nancy, not least because of her daughter’s extreme closeness to David. The age gap between a mother and her eldest daughter is often not so great as to preclude the possibility of competitiveness. Sydney was a clever and attractive woman, and the flowering of these qualities in Nancy – her, more than the younger girls – may have given rise to tricky emotions. And Nancy would not have been someone to break through these. Diana is quite right to say that it cuts both ways. Certainly the relationship between these two women was not really like that of a mother and daughter: even at its best, it was more like that of England and France, wary and respectful enemy-friends.

  It is certainly unusual for a mother to tell her daughter that she had wanted to run off with another man when the daughter was aged just two, but felt herself obliged to stay for the sake of the child. Yet according to Nancy, Sydney told her exactly that; although it must be said that both Deborah and Diana consider this to have been an invention (to what purpose, however, it is again hard to say, unless malice itself was purpose enough; contrary to Nancy’s ‘agenda’, the story shows Sydney in a selfless light with regard to her daughter).

  And it does square with another story, which sprang up amongst Sydney’s contemporaries and had her walking up the aisle of St Margaret’s, Westminster, weeping for a man called Jimmy Meade. He had been her suitor before David Mitford, but she had supposedly broken off the attachment on account of his womanising reputation (one cannot help but wonder whether it was the other way about). Again, proof of this is scant, but the story must have come from somewhere. Sydney had certainly had her share of suitors before her marriage (at the age of twenty-four, which was not so young in 1904), including a man who was killed in the Boer War. David Mitford may not have been the absolute choice of her heart.

  Of course there is no way of knowing the feelings of this very secret woman, at the start of her life as a wife and mother. Yet there may have been unfinished business in Sydney when she married; which was still unresolved when Nancy was born, barely ten months after th
e wedding. And for that, in some obscure way, Sydney may have blamed her daughter, who definitively closed the door on a life half-reluctantly left. Here, perhaps, lies the source of that radiating chill.

  Sydney Mitford was not really a conventional woman, although she has been viewed as such: ‘full of the domestic virtues and good works, with enough dottiness to stop her being insipid’, was David Pryce-Jones’s judgment in his biography of her daughter Unity. ‘Knowing nothing of the world at large in all its complexity, they [she and her husband] had neither the inclination nor the intellectual means to find out about it. They preferred their home, and its pursuits. They expected their children to be like themselves. Faced with originality, they were defenceless.’

  Now this is true to an extent – true of most people? – but it is also reductive. And it does not take into account the fact that Sydney may have striven for an appearance of conventionality because her own upbringing had been so very bizarre for its time. Her father, Thomas Gibson Bowles (‘Tap’), was illegitimate, the product of a liaison between a Liberal MP and one of his servants. Tap was taken into his father’s household but educated in France, and became a man of very considerable, if eccentric, force. He founded the magazine Vanity Fair aged twenty-six, and later The Lady; he married into a military family, living with his wife Jessica in a house near the Albert Hall in which he kept chickens (Nancy later did the same in her London home, and also had a white hen in her Paris flat); he became MP for King’s Lynn having fought his electoral campaign from his yacht; after his wife’s death, when Sydney was aged just seven, he had three children by his children’s governess, whom he made editor of The Lady. He retired finally aged around seventy-six – ‘the capacity of man for work is almost unlimited’, he had said – and died in 1921. ‘I believe I was born in 1841. I am no more certain of it than I am of the birthday of Julius Caesar...’ he wrote at the end of his life.