Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  Towards the end of Highland Fling, there is one of the first examples of this Mitfordian perception. It comes after Jane attends a private view of paintings by her fiancé Albert (the book’s unintentionally idiotic hero). Jane has been, or so she says to herself, in a torment of anxiety lest the event be a humiliating failure for him. But when, instead, it is a raging success, she finds herself in a despairing temper: ‘she, instead of being his one real friend, the guiding star of his life, would become its rather dreary background.’ Now this is authentic Nancy: unexpected, caustic, utterly true, somehow benevolent in her take on human folly. Even as a girl she knew about people, and about the funny little things that bring them to literary life: she knew, for instance, that lovers do not always behave generously towards each other, that when they should delight in each other’s happiness they find that they are far more worried about how it will affect them – that they are, in fact, deeply put out. ‘I couldn’t feel more jealous... if it were another woman’, says Jane, when Albert’s painting The Absinthe Drinker is bought by the Tate. How clever that is, and how beautifully Mitford too.

  In her second novel, Christmas Pudding, published in 1932, the good things are more apparent still. She had begun the book very soon after finishing Highland Fling, which left her little time to think where she might have gone wrong or might improve; she simply got on with it, which was the best possible thing to do.

  Christmas Pudding suffers from much of the same silliness as her first novel, and many of the same grievances are aired. London is portrayed as a faintly dreary place, with whose rain-grey streets, gracelessness and sexlessness, Nancy was evidently tired. But the country, which is to say the world of Swinbrook, comes across as no better: ‘Nobody knows how horrible it is to live in the country always, you might just as well be in prison’, she writes, a pretty straightforward cri de coeur. A country house dance is described as ‘in no way a riot of joyous and abandoned merriment... the flower of Gloucestershire man and maidenhood climbed into their Morris Cowleys and drove away’. Later, this kind of thing would be rendered with clear-eyed affection, with a writerly love and without the need for scorn, but in 1931 Nancy was too close to it all for that.

  And yet she gives us, in this novel, the first properly Mitfordian character: Amabelle Fortescue, an ex-prostitute of wit and style, who wears her wisdom as easily as her smart clothes, so much so that – as with her creator – it hardly seems like wisdom at all. ‘The trouble is’, she says, ‘that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can’t imagine why, but they do. They are unhappy before they marry, and they imagine to themselves that the reason of their unhappiness will be removed when they are married. When it isn’t they blame the other person, which is clearly absurd. I believe that is what generally starts the trouble.’ It is as if Nancy, by creating Amabelle, has found a way to bring her writing closer to its natural home. Amabelle reads like the older Nancy talking to her youthful self, and she makes it clear that Nancy’s real empathy was with the sophisticated middle-aged, not the shakily arrogant young.

  Nancy seems to sense, in Christmas Pudding, how much better her life would be if she no longer had to pretend that it was all a relentless hoot, or that she would find love among the strutting dandies of SW1. She sees, in her book, the theatrical idiocy of her young hero, Paul, and his passion for a ghastly girl whom everyone hates (‘he thought himself very much in love’). She sees the hilarity of a pompous civil servant throwing himself at the feet of clever old Amabelle (‘“I tell you, you have made life very sad for me, Amabelle” – “Dear Michael”, said Amabelle, stifling a yawn’). She sees the bravery of Sally when Walter – back, and still unfaithful – stays out all night heaven knows where (‘“He must be having a gorgeous time” – “Poor darling Sally”, said Amabelle. “I must say she does behave well on these occasions”.’) Nancy was beginning to understand that marriage is a solution of a kind in women’s lives, and yet almost never the solution that they think it will be. She was realising, too, something very important about love: that most people take it both far too lightly and far too seriously. ‘It’s a funny thing that people are always quite ready to admit it if they’ve no talent for drawing or music, whereas everyone imagines that they themselves are capable of true love, which is a talent like any other, only far more rare.’

  It was as if Nancy was trying to work it all out for herself, this question that preoccupied her of how to live happily with – or without – love. It would always fascinate her: even her historical biographies are profoundly engaged with it, with the nature of Voltaire’s love for Madame du Châtelet or Louis XV’s for Madame de Pompadour. In Christmas Pudding, however, it was her own heart that she was excavating. And she was doing so with a truthfulness which she could not, yet, admit into her life. Like her essentially adolescent novel, she was still stuck in the world of her youth, even though neither of them really wanted to be there any more. But there was a very good reason for it, all the same. The reason was Hamish St Clair-Erskine; the first love of Nancy’s life.

  Hamish is partly to be thanked for the fact that Nancy began writing at all. She wanted money to be able to go about with him, occasionally to lend him – he was four years younger than she, a student at Oxford with wasteful habits – or, as she wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant in 1930, to save towards her marriage: ‘Evelyn says don’t save it, dress better & catch a better man. Evelyn is always so full of sound common sense.’

  And Evelyn was right. Hamish was a disaster for Nancy. His effect upon her books was pervasive and entirely deleterious – without his presence in them, they would both be a hundred times better – and his effect upon her life was not much better. He was fatally immortalised as Albert (Memorial) Gates in Highland Fling and as Bobby Bobbin in Christmas Pudding; in each incarnation, he is notable for his stunning lack of likeability. Touchingly and obviously, Nancy thinks that she is giving her lucky, lucky reader a delicious taste of the person she loves. Albert, however, is a rude and humourless aesthete with orange trousers and a passion for Victoriana, while Bobby is a wretchedly precocious Etonian, mercenary and manipulative and, as he is told, ‘a worldly little beast’ (‘Yes, aren’t I? It does pay so much better’). ‘I must say’, Amabelle tells a silly young couple, hell-bent upon doomed marriage, ‘that it would be much easier, more to your mutual advantage and eventual happiness, if you could bring yourselves to part now and lead different lives’; and one can only agree. But that kind of sense is never something that lovers want to hear. Nancy was no exception, even when it was her own self who was telling her.

  The real Hamish must – surely – have had more charm than Albert and Bobby, albeit the hard, young, insouciant kind of charm that impresses at Eton and Oxford and then evaporates. He was, perhaps, what Nancy half wanted to be, someone in tune with their own youth, with all the dismissive confidence that this brings. He was also a member of a rather grand family – second son of the Earl of Rosslyn – whose Catholicism (which, in its snobbish English form, Nancy would later find very hard to take seriously) was no doubt in the full-of-itself Brideshead tradition. His school contemporary James Lees-Milne left an impressionistic, vital yet hollow portrait of a boy with ‘the most enchanting looks although not strictly handsome, mischievous eyes, slanting eyebrows... slight of build, well dressed, gay as gay, always, snobbish however, and terribly conscious of his nobility’. Hamish was, continued Lees-Milne, ‘shallowly sophisticated, lithe of mind [and] a smart society figure’; he ‘loved being admired’.

  ‘Gay as gay’, not to put too fine a point on it, is the unconsciously significant phrase. For Hamish was homosexual, through and through. He had been present at Eton on the famous night when a handful of the smartest boys got drunk with Tallulah Bankhead then – it is implied – slept with her; but Hamish would probably not have partaken even of such a woman. Of course Nancy got on well with homosexuals, and very likely it was the gay in Hamish to which she was responding; unfortunately, and mysteriously, she seems to have t
hought that their love was of the heterosexual kind. Jonathan Guinness, in The House of Mitford, makes the very good point that Albert Gates would have worked much better as a character had he been portrayed as the homosexual that he obviously was. In depicting Hamish, Nancy had depicted a homosexual, but she had not realised it; just as she failed to realise it about her lover in real life.

  But then Hamish himself seems never to have told her otherwise. He did, at one point certainly, say that ‘he didn’t think he would ever feel up to sleeping with a woman’, but apparently in such a way as to leave the question open (Nancy went whining with this to Evelyn Waugh, who then ‘explained to her a lot about sexual shyness’; which would only have encouraged her to wait and hope). Oddly enough, the basic dishonesty between Hamish and Nancy meant that their courtship dragged on far longer than many ‘normal’ ones would do. From 1928 to 1933 they kept up a charade that prevented what might otherwise have been a fond and delightful friendship.

  So what was Nancy thinking of? Her own brother had had an affair with Hamish at Eton and warned her off him; but she either didn’t listen, or failed to understand what he was telling her. Yet she was surrounded by men like Brian Howard, Robert Byron, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, Tom Driberg – how could she have failed to grasp the fact that Hamish was, according to John Julius Norwich, ‘as gay as a coot’? ‘Nobody could have kidded themselves that Hamish was straight,’ he says. ‘Nancy wasn’t that innocent. She was just a terrible picker.’ Her sister Deborah disagrees: ‘I don’t think she understood – you know, those days, I don’t think she knew he was queer. I doubt it very much, because otherwise why would she have said she was engaged to him? I’m sure she didn’t. You’ve no idea of the difference – it wasn’t like now. A girl brought up as she was, totally innocent. Why should girls ever know such things? She learned about homosexuals later on, no doubt. I think so. And you know the subject of sex then wasn’t like it is now, the only thing that is thought of and talked of.’

  And yet – Nancy was surely not, by that time, completely innocent. She had been brought up to be, but the circle in which she now moved would have enlightened her quickly enough. Perhaps part of the problem was that so many of the men she knew (Waugh, Tom) had homosexual inclinations yet slept with women; even so, there was a hell of a difference between a wobbling Charles Ryder and an upfront Anthony Blanche. And Nancy did apparently understand this. ‘I’ve just been lunching with your mama’, she wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant in 1930, ‘& inadvertently gave her a letter of yours to read in which a lift boy is described as a Driberg’s delight. “What is a Driberg’s delight? Dear Mark has such an amusing gift for describing people!”’ More to the point, Nancy was always attracted to Robert Byron – ‘I would have liked to have married [him]’, she wrote to Jessica in 1971 – but knew very well that this was a non-starter. The conclusion, therefore, is that it was Hamish who was responsible for Nancy’s absurd predicament. Robert Byron would never have allowed her to drag on in a state of pointless hope; Hamish seems to have done exactly that, advancing and retreating in a sinister little dance, for reasons that can only be guessed at. Did he like playing the role of Nancy’s lover in the eyes of the world? Was he unwilling to admit, even to himself, that he was incapable of fulfilling this role? Did he fear ending an amusing relationship? Was he impelled by a kind of manipulative sadism? All of these, perhaps; Hamish was very young and uncertain beneath his aristocratic, peacock assurance. Strongest motive of all, however, was probably a willingness on his part just to let everything drift, which it therefore did for five years, in and out of a state of unofficial ‘engagement’ that must have later struck Nancy as quite absurd27.

  But if Hamish let things be, Nancy undoubtedly drove them along. One feels for her, reading her letters from that time: for her lack of assurance, which could not deal with the same thing in Hamish; for her almost repellent eagerness; for the naïvety that lay beneath her new-found worldliness. She would always do, she was living in a world of her imagination, but without the foundations of adult realism that would later underpin it. ‘I’ve got a job offered to write a weekly article for £3 a week’, she wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant in 1930, ‘& I keep putting off & putting off but can’t start this evening as I’ve just spent the day in Oxford with you know who & that always stops me working. He’s going to Canada in March for ever [he didn’t of course], & we’re both so unhappy about it specially me, isn’t one’s life perfect hell, that beastly old Harry [Hamish’s father] has found a job for him... which looks as though he’ll be able to support me & our 5 children jolly soon doesn’t it.’ One can wonder what Mark made of this; he surely only recognised his own predilections in Hamish, but whatever he said or thought would have made no difference to Nancy (Tom was the person whose opinion she most respected and she had completely ignored him). No – she was on a high-speed train, smiling brightly into the roaring wind, utterly incapable of jumping off.

  Yet her early mentions of Hamish are perfectly normal. She describes to Tom, for example, a house party at Nina Seafield’s in September 1928: ‘Nina, Mark and Hamish are civilised, so am I & so are you.’ By June 1929, the tone has changed, and another letter to Tom makes it clear that she is dangling on Hamish’s pointed little hook. ‘Hamish was funny yesterday... he had 5 glasses of brandy & crème de menthe (on top of sherry etc) & then began to analyse himself. He said, “The best of me is that I can talk Homer to Maurice28 just as well as Noël Coward to you, in fact I am clever enough to amuse everybody.”’ This brief, grim taste of Hamish is pure Bobby Bobbin, but Nancy’s critical faculty – usually so acute – had fled the scene.

  ‘I do worship that child’, the letter ends. An interesting aside, as it has been suggested (by Diana, for one) that Nancy’s love for Hamish was essentially maternal. There is something of mummy in the way she describes how she ‘curled Hamishes hair with tongs, he looked more than lovely’; or the way she discusses him with his real mother, the two of them shaking their heads over his hopeless behaviour. ‘I had a perfectly heartbroken letter from Lady Rosslyn’, she wrote to Mark in April 1930, ‘...saying that Hamish is going to the bad as fast as he can, can’t you advise me what can be done? So in a white heat I took my pen & said “The bottom of all this is Oxford – Hamish at Oxford doesn’t lead one day of ordinary normal life – these parties which are incessant etc etc.”’ Again this is slightly painful to read: its pseudo-mature tone, the self-important delusion that Hamish is a boyish riddle just waiting to be solved by his saviour. And a photograph of Nancy and Hamish together does indeed give the strange impression of a young woman with a wayward grown-up son. But the deeper impression, from the letters and events of this bizarre love affair, is that neither of them had made it out of the nursery. Nancy may have indulged or scolded – ‘awful the way everyone treats me as Hamish’s nanny isn’t it’29 – but this was simply the role into which she was forced: theirs was a kindergarten romance, on both sides.

  And that seems to have been what she wanted. One sees this, sometimes, with highly intelligent but emotionally immature women. They deliberately hurl themselves into relationships that have no basis in truth. It is as though they prefer to love in the sphere of imagination; which would be fair enough, except that their feelings tend to move, painfully, into the sphere of reality. It is true to say, as John Julius Norwich does, that Nancy was ‘a bad picker’. It is also true to say, as Diana does, that ‘quite a lot of women do fall for homosexuals. And of course, if they do, it’s just very sad.’ But the real question, surely, is why Nancy would have done such a thing? She met hundreds of men. It was not love at first sight with Hamish, as her letter of September 1928 makes clear. But her feelings developed and, as is so often the case with ‘love’, she decided to urge them onwards. The fact that they were continually thwarted – not just by Hamish himself, but by both the Rosslyns and the Redesdales, who thought the whole affair a destructive nonsense – naturally intensified them; to such a pitch that, in February 1931, Nancy wrote to Mar
k Ogilvie-Grant saying: ‘I tried to commit suicide by gas, it is a lovely sensation just like taking anaesthetic so I shan’t be sorry any more for schoolmistresses who are found dead in that way, but just in the middle I thought that Romie30 who I was staying with might have a miscarriage which would be disappointing for her so I got back to bed & was sick.’ The absurdity of this suicide attempt (‘The gas story is quite true, it makes Robert laugh so much’) does not alter the fact that Nancy’s unhappiness must have been real, although Amabelle Fortescue would undoubtedly have said that it was not real at all, and she would have been quite right.

  But this sort of ‘love’ was what Nancy had chosen; and yes, one does choose, in a way. She had listened to a proposal from Sir Hugh Smiley while, at a nearby table in the Café de Paris, her little-boy lover sat watching and giggling – not wanting her himself, but not wanting her to do better elsewhere – and at the end of the evening she left to go to a nightclub with Hamish. This is not to say that Hugh would have made her happy. The point is that she chose, instead of him or someone like him, a man who could never make a husband. She called it love, of course she did. She rationalised her feelings in letters, usually to poor Mark Ogilvie-Grant (with Tom, she would not have been able to sustain the illusion): ‘if anybody was ever worth a struggle it is Hamish because you know that underneath that ghastly exterior of Rosslyn charm etc he is pure gold, at least I think so, in fact I’d bank everything on it’, she wrote in 1930, and was still banging on in this deluded vein in 1932: ‘Hamish’s character is so much improved, we travelled from Scotland in a 3rd class sleeper with 2 commercial travellers overhead & he never murmured once! He is a sweet angel isn’t he!!!’ Meanwhile the Earl of Rosslyn (‘Harry’) would try to send Hamish abroad, or the ‘engagement’ would be broken off, or it would be started up again, and in effect nothing really happened except that Nancy remained trapped: an adult whirling faster and faster on a child’s merry-go-round.