Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  For what Asthall had in spades, and Swinbrook had not at all, was any sense of homeliness. Of course this is something that houses acquire, but even the Mitfords would have had a hard job with Swinbrook. The downstairs floors were varnished and slippery; the eighteen bedrooms were whitewashed, their sole decoration a stripe painted round like a cornice just beneath the ceiling; this now sounds rather chic, but was hardly the thing for a country family home. Apart from anything else, it was fantastically cold. The top floor, where the children slept, was arctic: in winter they would sometimes find their sponges frozen with ice. No wonder they huddled with such delight in the linen cupboard, which gave them the delicious, elusive heat they craved. Even more importantly, perhaps, it gave them privacy. In this tiny, darkened space Jessica and Deborah ran their ‘Hons’ Society’ and, sometimes with Unity, spoke to each other in their own languages (sounding, as Hons and Rebels has it, like ‘a lost tribe’). Nancy would visit the cupboard only occasionally, to tell a story or some such thing; nevertheless it became an essential symbolic part of The Pursuit of Love. But for the Mitford children it was a strange substitute, really, for the rich life of the barn at Asthall, so idyllically separate with its quantities of books, its sounds of Handel and Bach coming from Tom’s piano. At Swinbrook the books lined the walls of Lord Redesdale’s Closing Room (so called because, according to Jessica, it was where ‘his old eyes would close, never to open again’). The books were rarely read; while the piano stood in the ‘white, tunnel-like’ drawing-room, and in so public an arena was hardly ever played.

  Swinbrook seems to have drained the vitality from the Mitford family; at least, from the family as an entity. So much that had given life to Asthall was now displaced or removed. Lord Redesdale was deeply hurt by the reception given to his house – he had regarded it as his gift to his family, the home for which they had all been waiting – and perhaps felt guilty when it proved so unbending to live in. His wife, who had fine taste and, as Debo puts it, ‘couldn’t make anything ugly’, filled her new home with exquisite furniture, but even this was defeated by Swinbrook: the pieces stood there, vacantly, like Berninis in an NCP. ‘Muv said of course these pictures look awful in this sort of room’, Nancy wrote to Tom in 1927, ‘so I said why not store them until Tom has made sufficient money to have a proper house. Which is how I think this strikes one, not somehow like a house at all.’ Later she put the ugliness of Swinbrook into her description of Alconleigh, in The Pursuit of Love (‘it was all as grim and as bare as a barracks, stuck up on the high hillside’); but Alconleigh is nevertheless a home, Asthall-like in its essence, a place in which life generates its own warmth and happiness and mysterious beauty. This, Swinbrook never did.

  Everyone, except Deborah, wished themselves elsewhere. Although the family would have been breaking up anyway – Nancy, Pam and Diana were becoming marriageable, Tom was coming to the end of his education – the move to Swinbrook somehow emphasised this fragmentation. Quite simply, the house lacked the enveloping warmth to keep them all together. Later, in the early 1930s, it would become an actual embodiment of family divisions, which by that time were assuming a wider, starker significance. In a second-floor room used by Jessica and Unity, a partition was drawn up the middle. On one side, the room held a bust of Lenin and copies of the Daily Worker; on the other were photographs of Mussolini and Oswald Mosley, and a swastika. Jessica wrote of the room in Hons and Rebels: ‘Sometimes we would barricade with chairs and stage pitched battles, throwing books and records until Nanny came to tell us to stop the noise.’

  Nancy made much play with her yearning to escape from Swinebrook, where she was effectively trapped, penniless, from the age of twenty-four. Because she was protected by privilege, it is hard to realise just how very broke she always was – right up until the post-war success of The Pursuit of Love, in fact – and just how circumscribing this was for her. ‘Gals like us, our allowances were tiny,’ says Diana. ‘My father had nothing to give us.’ In fact from the time she came out Nancy had an income of £125 a year, a governess’s wages, which did not go very far when one was trying to keep one’s end up in society. ‘If I wanted anything extra, to go to the south of France or buy clothes or anything, I had to earn it’2, is how she later described her situation; put like that it doesn’t sound very pitiable, nor did she intend it to, because in reality things were rather worse. Forget the south of France – in 1931 she was writing to a friend and saying, ‘No I shall never be in London again – unless I walk. I can’t possibly afford the train fare & have no clothes to wear even if I could.’3

  ‘It was miserable for Nancy at home really in the end,’ says Diana, ‘because she was far too old. She had nothing to do, and she’d rather given up loving hunting, and all the things she used to do when she was a bit younger, and so her one idea was to get away.’

  Nancy was not entirely confined to the barracks that Swinbrook resembled. If she could afford it (train fare, tips to staff, clothes that were not an embarrassment), she would stay with friends. And the Mitfords had a London house, 26 Rutland Gate (off Knightsbridge), which they bought when Asthall was sold. An impossibly tall, six-storey, off-white building, dead plain except for a large, stone balcony on the first floor, the house is nowadays empty and shabby; nor was it ever, one imagines, very elegant, although its sheer, monstrous, free-standing scale is impressive. One can see the Mitford girls, successive debutantes, standing in their bare-shouldered dresses at the balcony window, staring eagerly out on to the indigo London sky, waiting to be taken from their protected cul-de-sac on to the glamorous sweep of Knightsbridge. But the house was not often used, except during the Season. Lord Redesdale, countryman that he was, seems to have regarded it as a necessary evil (what else was he to do, with all those daughters queuing up to come out?) rather than a second home, although his wife liked being there. Much of the time it was let or simply empty: even in the pre-war days when ‘poor’ aristocrats could afford gigantic houses in SW7, Rutland Gate would have cost a lot to run, and Swinbrook had taken a disastrous toll upon the Mitford finances. If the family was living in London, then Swinbrook itself was let; and so the juggling act went on.

  Nancy herself did not come out from Rutland Gate. She had her first dance at Asthall in 1922 (‘You’ll be cold,’ said Nanny Blor, when she saw her ball dress) and then, the following year, Lady Redesdale rented a house in Gloucester Square from which Nancy made her debut. Quite possibly this event had been viewed, before the fact, as one that would change her life. Linda Radlett, stewing and steaming through her interminable adolescence at Alconleigh, waiting for the moment of coming out as for a transcendental experience, is not Nancy, but passages from The Pursuit of Love surely describe some of Nancy’s feelings aged sixteen or so, her passionate boredom and despairing optimism: ‘Two years seemed an absolute eternity, not worth ploughing through even with the prospect (which she never doubted, just as a religious person does not doubt the existence of heaven) of blissful love at the end of it.’ Of course Linda does find love – or what she believes to be love – during her first season. It is what she expected to happen, what she cannot contemplate not happening, and it happens. Her marriage is a disaster, and quite clearly should not have taken place; but the book makes it equally clear that it is, nonetheless, a solution to the problem of what on earth Linda would have done with herself otherwise.

  That was Nancy’s problem also. She came out; her life became more interesting, despite the smiling torture of endless fork luncheons and toes crushed by burbling waltzers; yet it did not really change, because she did not move on to marriage. ‘Having done the Season, or possibly two Seasons, that was it,’ says Debo. ‘Nothing to do.’ The line in Love in a Cold Climate about how ‘Aunt Sadie’s girls’ were snapped up as soon as they put their nose out of the schoolroom was true for most of Nancy’s sisters4, but not for Nancy herself. And so having no money, and no independence, she was stuck in the life that she had imagined escaping.

  ‘You see,’ sa
ys Diana, ‘in one way the answer is, why didn’t any of them get work? But in those days it wasn’t like that.’ Debo again: ‘You can’t imagine what it was like for girls from the age of nineteen or twenty, when they had no home of their own, they only had their parents’. Their mother did the house and so there was nothing for them to do in that line. Unless they were terribly fond of sport or something acceptable in those days, they just had twenty-four hours of nothing to do. And you couldn’t go abroad with a friend, or do any of the things that people do now, you just couldn’t, because there were rules and the rules were stuck to.’

  Extraordinary to think that within fifteen years of Nancy’s rigidly governed emergence into society – and within ten years of her being thrown out of the London house of a friend’s grandmother, accused of ‘holding an orgy’ after a party got a bit noisy – Diana would leave her husband and two sons to set herself up as Sir Oswald Mosley’s mistress; Unity would force herself into Hitler’s inner circle; and Jessica would elope with Esmond Romilly, an eighteen-year-old Communist who ran off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. It all fell apart so easily in the end, even though these transgressions were, in their way, carried out within the boundaries of the society that they shook so deeply (Esmond Romilly may have been a rebel but he was a rebel educated at Wellington and a nephew of Winston Churchill5). It was a long way from the days when Nancy was gated because she had been ‘seen’ in Oxford, walking around unchaperoned with Brian Howard (a noted homosexual thus hardly a threat). Lord Redesdale’s consequent verbal assault, in which he roared that had she been married her husband would have had grounds for divorce, became a similar incident in The Pursuit of Love. It also became high comedy – ‘Linda began to say no they couldn’t [divorce their wives]. She knew the laws of divorce from having read the whole of the Russell case off newspaper with which the fires in the spare bedroom were laid’ – but the inflexible reality beneath it, the reality of Nancy’s own life, was clear enough.

  Obviously, had the Redesdales been able to, they would have come down hard on their other daughters too. They tried: the younger girls were banned from visiting Diana after she left her first husband; all sorts of tricks were pulled to prevent Decca’s elopement; and, had they been able to grasp the momentousness of what Unity was doing, they would have done their best to stop her as well. But how could they, really, have prevented any of it? Of course it might be said that, had the Redesdales been less authoritarian in small ways, then their daughters might have felt less of an urge to rebel on the grand scale. In fact there was nothing unusual about the moral strictness of the Mitford upbringing; nevertheless not all nice chaperoned young things slipped the leash to go off to Fascist meetings, or shouted ‘Up the Workers!’ at the hunt ball. The point is that the Mitford childhood – like the Mitford parents – was a heady mixture of the conventional and the unconventional. And something in that mixture produced highly potent results, pushed into explosiveness by the extraordinary times.

  For, unlike Nancy, her sisters Diana, Jessica and Unity were children of the 1930s, and that made a tremendous difference: the General Strike would not, by then, have meant merely an opportunity to dress up as a tramp. But it was more than just changing times. Nancy was not really a rebel. Probably she never would have been. Too lazy, too amused by what others took seriously, too sensible in fact; and also, perhaps, too cautious. When her own behaviour was criticised by her parents, she affected not to mind but in fact it troubled her (‘I had a terrific fight with Muv about staying with Nina,’ she wrote to Tom in 1927; ‘I said I’d go. Do you think it was very nasty of me.’). When Diana left her husband she wrote to her, saying: ‘Darling I do hope you are making a right decision. You are SO young to be getting in wrong with the world’; and to Jessica, on her elopement, ‘Susan it isn’t very respectable what you are doing & I see [our parents’] point of view I must say... Susan do come back. No Susan.’ In her own way – through jokes – Nancy was subversive, but she also liked the accepted order; and understood that she needed it to bounce off. Certainly her books needed it. In her fourth novel, Pigeon Pie, she wrote that her heroine Sophia ‘radiate[d] an atmosphere of security and of the inevitability of upper-class status quo’: an oblique early example of Nancy’s enchanting self-knowledge.

  And her acts of rebellion were therefore small ones, although at the time they seemed like battles in the great war for emancipation. ‘...I dimly remembered,’ wrote Jessica in Hons and Rebels, ‘the hushed pall that hung over the house, meals eaten day after day in tearful silence, when Nancy at the age of twenty had her hair shingled.’ (‘Well anyhow no-one would look at you twice now’ was the casual blow struck by Lady Redesdale; or so Nancy told Tom.) Jessica continues: ‘Nancy using lipstick, Nancy playing the newly fashionable ukelele, Nancy wearing trousers, Nancy smoking a cigarette... she had broken ground for all of us, but only at terrific cost in violent scenes followed by silence and tears.’

  Perhaps one must allow for a certain, Jessica-ish exaggeration. Yet it is perfectly possible that the Redesdales saw the end of the world as they knew it in a cigarette held between rouged lips at the dinner table, but reacted as if stupefied to the image of Unity and Diana attending the 1933 Nuremberg rally. It is also possible that Nancy’s tiny bids for flapper freedom helped to open the way for her sisters. No doubt she liked the idea of herself as a pioneer in this way – when it came to it, though, she lacked the fight for anything much more than gestures. For example, rather as she had pleaded incessantly to be sent to school so, as a young woman, she yearned to be allowed to study at the Slade and, even more excitingly, to live alone in London rooms. ‘I thought I’d like to be a painter,’ she said on television in 1966. ‘I loved doing silly little drawings. And Professor Tonks [then director of the Slade] put an end to it by saying I had no talent whatever.’ At first she stayed at the Women’s Union Society in London’s University College, but she hankered after a bedsit and eventually someone – presumably Sydney – realised that the best thing was to let her get on with it. Accordingly in mid-1927 she moved into a boarding house in Queen’s Gate, South Kensington. Within a month she was out again (and out of the Slade not much later). The story is that she had been unable to cope with the growing piles of underclothes on the floor: ‘I just didn’t know what to do with them,’ she said in her television interview, shrieking with unapologetic laughter.

  Really, of course, even Nancy (a woman who loathed and feared all housework – ‘one’s poor hands’) would have had some idea. Really, she just didn’t like living the ‘independent’ life – latchkeys and laundries, all the faint sordidness of London on no money – which nowadays girls leap at so eagerly. No doubt they would see Nancy through the eyes of the adolescent Jessica, who according to Hons and Rebels flew at her sister, saying, ‘I think you’re very weak-minded. You wouldn’t catch me knuckling under because of a little thing like underclothes.’ All the same, one rather likes the plaintive honesty of Nancy’s admission about her experience of bedsit land in SW7: ‘I just couldn’t bear it.’

  She was no martyr to the cause of freedom. In many ways she was a typical debutante. With her frothy chatter, her weightless frame, her determined effervescence, she was equipped to pass herself off as a Bright Young Thing, and did so merrily enough. The 1920s were an especially amusing time to be a posh girl, if one could cope with the constant pressure to sing at top pitch: ‘The young English upper-classes lived a life of total frivolity,’ Nancy wrote in 1966.6 ‘The young today seem to me sobriety itself compared to what we were like then’ (and this at a time when gilded youth was supposedly tuning in and dropping out to its heart’s content). ‘We hardly ever saw the light of day, except at dawn; there was a costume ball every night: the White Party, the Circus Party, the Boat Party, etc... .’ If not all of these parties was as amusing as everyone hoped and pretended (‘looking back upon them now, they appear like a Jerome Bosch hell’, spat one ex-reveller7), there was a perpetual exuberance that kept everything going
, as if all concerned were on a determined and constant high.

  They got tremendous newspaper interest. ‘Between the wars’, wrote David Pryce-Jones in his biography of Unity, ‘the space devoted to society news was out of all proportion to the events’: the doings of the upper-classes had, for the first time, become currency in the wider world, written about in the same light-headed spirit as today’s flutterings over anorexic A-listers and reality television ‘stars’. No wonder the Mitford Girls were soon to find their antics dissected throughout Fleet Street; after all, it had made the papers when Lady Redesdale ditched her napkins, rather as it would nowadays if Victoria Beckham were seen coming out of Lidl.

  There was a significance to all of this, however trivial it seemed, and however mocked-up a lot of the stories undoubtedly were. In a way that would not before have been possible, it scratched away at aristocratic mystique, while at the same time proving its power: the stories were underpinned, as indeed they still are, by a kind of obsequious savagery. Whether people in the 1920s read about the Marchioness of Queensberry driving herself to Rome in a two-seater sports car, or the letting of a house in St James’s Square for £1,000 a week during the Season, in a spirit of envy, contempt, irony or adoration – who can say? The point is that they apparently wanted to read this stuff. Similarly, as Pryce-Jones wrote, ‘Gossip columnists complicitly vied to appoint one or two Debutantes of the Year’, and accordingly debs became much more like public property than they had been before the war. Jessica describes in Hons and Rebels how crowds would turn up to watch the girls, in their Daimlers and ostrich feathers, as they inched slowly down the Mall towards their presentation at Buckingham Palace. Judgments would be shouted – ‘Ain’t the mother an old battle-axe!’ – through the car windows.