It stopped, suddenly, in June 1933. Hamish realised that it had to. He did Nancy the greatest possible favour, but he did it with cruelty. It is a little surprising to learn that he fought with great bravery in Italy during the war; the manner in which he ended the relationship with Nancy was cowardly. He was young and, of course, probably panic-stricken.
He took the simplest and most dishonest way out and pretended to be engaged to another woman (this mythical fiancée was the sister of a man named Philip Dunn, who had just become engaged to Hamish’s own sister, Mary). He had not intended to tell Nancy directly, but to telephone Diana and allow her to relay the message. Diana was by then living in a little house in Eaton Square – ‘The Eatonry’ – where she had set up as Mosley’s mistress. Nancy visited often, but Hamish might have missed her had he not, unfortunately for him, rung up on the day before Diana’s divorce proceedings. Feeling that their sister needed support, Nancy, Pamela and Unity had gone to stay at the house. Therefore when the telephone call came for Mrs Guinness from Mr St Clair-Erskine, it was Nancy who leapt to the receiver: to be told that Hamish was to marry Kit Dunn.
She took the story at face value. She also, heartbreakingly, tried to stay in Hamish’s good books, after a scene at Diana’s house in which she attacked him mercilessly (and justifiably). In her last letter to him, she wrote:
I can’t sleep without saying I am so sorry & miserable that I was unkind to you just now...
Because I must explain to you that if you had told me you were engaged to Tanis, or Sheila Berry, I could never never have made that dreadful scene. Please believe me. I should have been unhappy for myself certainly but happy for you & as I love you better than myself I would have overcome my own feelings for your sake...
You see, I knew you weren’t in love with me, but you are in love so often & for such tiny spaces of time. I thought that in your soul you loved me & that in the end we should have children & look back on life together when we are old. I thought our relationship was a valuable thing to you & that if you ever broke it you would only do so in order to replace it with another equally valuable. But that isn’t so, & that is what I find intolerable.
Please understand me. Please think of me with affection always & never never blame me for what I may become without you. Don’t think of me as a selfish & hysterical woman even if I appeared so tonight.
God bless you & make her be kind to you. I shall pray always for your happiness...
It is unlikely that Nancy really felt such noble sentiments; how could she have done? Yet the dignity of her letter is such that it may have caused Hamish to feel shame. There is wisdom – ‘I knew you weren’t in love with me’ – beneath the innocence; wisdom enough to make one think that Nancy would, after this, have breathed new air, written another book, learned from her mistake, waited. Not so. Barely a month later, she was engaged to a man named Peter Rodd. At the age of twenty-eight, she was off the merry-go-round at last.
4
‘I hope’, wrote Evelyn Waugh to Nancy in 1933, ‘that Mr Erskine will now disappear from your novels. But listen, I won’t have you writing books about Rodd because that would be too much for me to bear.’ Nancy had learned her lesson. She married Peter, but unlike Hamish he was not allowed to ruin her novels with his presence. What he did to her life was another story, and one that she told in more indirect ways.
It was an odd marriage, no question. It is hard to believe that she would have gone into it, had it not been a way of shoring up the fallout from Hamish. One never knows, of course, and at the start Nancy was bright with the joys of love: ‘I am going to be married to a very divine person called Peter Rodd’, she wrote to Debo, before the engagement was announced in July 1933. Then, in August, to Mark Ogilvie-Grant: ‘Well the happiness. Oh goodness gracious I am happy. You must get married darling [unlikely], everybody should this minute if they want a receipt for absolute bliss... And remember TRUE LOVE CAN’T BE BOUGHT. If I really thought it could I’d willingly send you £3 tomorrow.
‘What I want to know is why nobody told me about Peter before.’ In fact she had known him, slightly, before this effusion of love began to well in her, when she had eyes only for Hamish. Quite simply he made his move at the right time. According to Diana, Peter probably proposed just a week after the dreadful scene in Eaton Square. The story is that he had been proposing to women all evening and Nancy was the one who accepted him (‘the sort of thing he was likely to do’, says John Julius Norwich; ‘he was probably blind drunk at the time’). Shortly afterwards he wrote her a letter implying that the proposal had been a joke. But by that time the engagement was announced and it was really too late for going back; not that either of them appeared to want to go back.
Of course Nancy didn’t. Peter’s proposal must have rained upon her like water on a parched throat. Her one chance of emerging from the humiliating Hamish débâcle with dignity intact was to swan off with another man, instantly and bindingly. There is nothing wrong with me, her engagement said to the world, I just moved on to a better prospect! ‘It really was the classical thing of someone who is rejected, and then on the rebound they fall for somebody else,’ says Diana. ‘And it happened incredibly quickly, I mean before my very eyes.’
What else was Nancy to do but accept this bizarre proposal? She could hardly have drifted on as before; she was coming up to thirty. Nevertheless the marriage was a perversion of her true instincts, which – as so often happens – had become lost in a muddle of emotion. Nancy had turned down Sir Hugh Smiley because of her infatuation with Hamish, but she had also, deep down, been nervous of the whole idea of ‘marriage’ for its own sake. ‘Nannies, cooks, the endless drudgery of house-keeping, the nerve-racking noise and boring repetitive conversation of small children’ is how Fanny describes her (happily) married life in The Pursuit of Love. ‘Alfred’s not infrequent bouts of moodiness, his invariable complaints at meals about the pudding, the way he will always use my toothpaste and will always squeeze the tube in the middle...’ Like Fanny, Nancy knew that there was more than this to marriage, yet something in her saw it as terrifying: the attraction of Hamish was partly that he kept the prospect in never-never land. And so the complicated irony was that because the marriage to Hamish didn’t come off – was revealed to be the unreality that Nancy had subconsciously craved – she felt herself obliged to get into a marriage for real. Despite her free-spiritedness, she was in the end too conventional to shun that path altogether (and, perhaps, too closely surrounded by nubile sisters).
So the irruption of Peter on to the arid scene that was Nancy’s life in June 1933 was an almighty relief; a solution, a way out, an ego-restorative; it would have been surprising had she not, as Charlotte Mosley put it, ‘decided to fall in love with him’.1 The whole story was a skewed fairytale for the depression years: the pity of it was that the man cast as prince should have been the Hon. Peter Rodd (or Prod, as Nancy called him; even lovers were lassooed by the Mitford tease). That was bad luck indeed.
Falling for Peter was, of course, far more about Hamish than about Peter himself. It was behaviour of which Amabelle Fortescue would have roundly disapproved (‘People should take themselves off to Antarctica, or some other place cooling to the brain, and remind themselves that sudden new loves may act as salt, rather than balm, upon a wound’ is the kind of thing that beacon of sense might have said). But Nancy was going to do whatever it took to feel better, and who can blame her? Part of her pleasure may have come from the idea that she was triumphing over Diana, in whose house she had been so ridiculed by Hamish, and who cut a scandalous figure at this time in her role as Sir Oswald Mosley’s mistress. Diana was ostracised less than almost any other young woman would have been. She was simply too remarkable for other people to bear to leave her alone. But in 1933 she was in a very odd position. Mosley’s wife Cynthia had died unexpectedly in May, yet this had not brought him closer to marriage with Diana; rather the reverse. It had thrown him into a turmoil of embarrassed guilt and back in
to the arms of his sister-in-law, Baba, with whom he had also been having an affair.2 Really it was only Diana’s formidable sense of purpose (‘I was convinced of the permanency of what I had decided to do’) and her Mitfordian freedom from bourgeois shame (‘I never thought of it as risky, or as a great gamble’) that allowed her to sail, beautiful brow clear, through this period of her life. And so Nancy – who four years earlier had been obliged to traipse behind Diana at her marriage to eligible Bryan – might have been forgiven for gloating a little, as she merrily made plans for her own wedding.
And Peter Rodd had qualities, albeit of the kind that showed best at early viewings. He was extremely good-looking, for a start. Everyone remembers this about him. Waugh, who was fascinated by him in an appalled sort of way (Basil Seal, the wayward chancer in Black Mischief, was very much based on Peter), wrote that he had ‘the sulky, arrogant looks of the young Rimbaud’; and photographs show his physical glamour, the dashingly handsome face, the thick swoop of fair hair, the aspect of a chorister on his way to a brothel. Nancy, beside him, again seems to be with her grown-up son; she is at least as tall as he and looks older, although she was the same age. Presumably his appearance pleased her, or at least emphasised the fact that he was a catch (although her later passion for Gaston Palewski, whose face was like an unpeeled King Edward, showed that attraction for Nancy did not lie in good looks).
What she did like were good brains; and these Peter also had. He was not, like Hugh Smiley, ‘blond and stupid’, but blond and erudite. He went to Balliol (where he was apparently beaten up by Evelyn Waugh; why is not known), from where he was sent down for having a woman in his rooms after hours. His mind was exceptional, as it had to be then for Balliol. He could pick up a language in days, could retain facts to an encyclopaedic extent; in fact there was nothing he did not know. John Julius Norwich – who met Peter after the war – recalls, ‘when I started writing my first book, which was about the Norman kingdom in Sicily, which nobody knew about at all – Prod knew everything. And where that came from...? Because there were no books, certainly not in English, written about it.’ Jessica Mitford – who liked Peter, not least because his politics leaned leftwards, remembered that the family used to call him ‘the old Tollgater’, because he knew everything about the tollgate system in England and Wales. He had given Lord Redesdale chapter and verse about tollgates in between asking for Nancy’s hand. ‘Talks like a ferret with his mouth sewn up’, was David’s judgment upon his future son-in-law, whom he nonetheless regarded as an improvement upon Hamish St Clair-Erskine.
This erudition of Peter’s may have impressed Nancy, a woman always conscious of the gaps in her own learning. She may have enjoyed luxuriating in a sense of her lover’s superiority (she would later, in Madame de Pompadour, express the view that ‘in every satisfactory union it was the man who kept the upper hand’; not the sort of thing one is supposed to say, but not without its gritty little pearl of truth). But there was a downside to Peter’s elite computer brain: it had no notion of when to switch itself off. ‘He had’, says Alexander Mosley, ‘this awful habit of spilling out everything he knew.’ Consequently the other thing that everyone remembers about him, besides his good looks, is that he was outstandingly boring. ‘He was very handsome when he was young,’ says Diana, ‘but the incredible thing is that he was just such a bore. And you’d think she’d simply hate that.’ Quite so: nothing, for Nancy, was worse than a crasher.
‘I remember going to these nightclubs with him in Paris,’ says John Julius Norwich, ‘and you know when you’re eighteen and someone asks you to go to a nightclub you’re rather flattered, and this was a man of fifty. But then at five o’clock in the morning Prod was still telling me about the Normans in Sicily.’
In the first flush of love, however, nobody is boring. There was a converse quality to Peter, what Lord Norwich calls ‘the rapscallion in him’: his devil-may-care nonchalance about life, his gleaming confidence, his sexiness (‘oh Prod was extremely heterosexual’). So perhaps he was not such a bore with Nancy: at least not at the start. In the novel that she wrote early in her marriage, Wigs on the Green, a character bearing a close resemblance to Peter is portrayed as enormous – if dangerous – fun: ‘you are the only person I’ve ever met who makes me laugh all the time without stopping’, says the girl who decides to marry him. One example of his humour – he was sent an invitation from von Ribbentrop to a party at the German embassy, and replied to it in Yiddish – has a distinctly Mitfordian flavour.
Above all, what Nancy probably felt was that Peter was carrying her off to a new life: an adventure and an escape. Not a life that would rob her of autonomy, put her in a different kind of trap, as Hugh Smiley’s would have done, with its dinners full of guardsmen and its joke-free parties; but one that would allow her to blossom freely, as she so much longed to do. ‘I think it’s top-hole about you and Rodd and I foresee a very wild and vigorous life in front of you’, wrote Evelyn Waugh. It was an affectionate blessing; yet in that ‘wild and vigorous’ there sounded a warning note, faint as the bailiff’s knock when the champagne corks are being popped upstairs.
For there was a downside to the ‘rapscallion’ in Peter Rodd. He was, in fact, one of the world’s great wastrels. ‘Peter was a wild, wild man,’ says Diana, echoing Waugh. It is unusual for a black sheep to manage the simultaneous feat of being a bore, but Peter was both. Nancy failed at first to see that her beloved lacked, as Debo puts it, ‘the backbone that would make anybody a husband’. Had she waited before plunging in, even she might have been unable to ignore the signs, which were already grimly plentiful.
The sending down from Balliol was inauspicious, as were subsequent events. In the manner of the times, when unsatisfactory young men (like David Mitford) were foisted upon hapless foreign lands, Peter was packed off to work in a bank in Brazil. There he was eventually arrested for being destitute. He was sacked from a job in the City, then from The Times in Germany. Drink was the problem; but drink is always a symptom of a problem, and the real trouble with Peter was – what? His mysterious, restless self. It has been said, as with the Mitfords, that his upbringing was the cause of his troubles. Really, though, Peter simply was what he was: ‘a wild, wild man’.
Which is not to say that his background didn’t encourage the urge to rebel. His older brother, Francis, was a paragon of sense and success against whom Peter refused to measure himself, and to whom he had constantly to be grateful (it was Francis’s position in the Foreign Office that helped to bail Peter out of overseas holes). The Rodd parents, too, embodied an impregnable righteousness that sent him off as far as possible in the opposite direction. Lord Rennell of Rodd was a diplomat who, in 1908, became the Ambassador to Rome. He was a perfect, courteous gentleman of the Lord Montdore variety (described in Love in a Cold Climate as ‘a wonderful old man, in short, who nothing common ever did or mean. My cousin Linda and I, two irreverent little girls whose opinion makes no odds, used to think that he was a wonderful old fraud’). Meanwhile Lady Rennell, a forceful, eccentric presence whom Nancy viewed with fascination and dislike, bore a distinct similarity to Lady Montdore. Although rich, she was peculiar about money (in 1936 she gave Nancy ‘a bath salt jar with no bath salts for Xmas’), and she kept Peter very short (‘Oh you always manage to keep alive somehow’, Nancy reported her saying to him). This may not have been a good idea. Certainly he would have wasted what he was given, but deprivation fired in him a sense of grievance, a desire to become as bad as his parents believed him to be. Meanwhile his father sighed – ‘all the rest of the family are only joy to us’ – and his mother huffed and puffed, and neither had the least idea how to deal with the renegade in their midst. ‘I think he was the despair of his father and mother, and his older brother,’ says Diana.
Peter, as much as Nancy, craved the idea of marriage. Lost soul that he was, he perhaps saw in her a solution; just as she did in him. Here was a pretty woman, a clever companion, who took him seriously and loudly proclaimed h
ow wonderful it was to be in love with him, whose good humour may (wrongly) have seemed like maturity. There must have been something to turn that sudden impulse of his into an engagement announcement in the Daily Telegraph. Although it may have been something as cruelly simple as the judgment of his sister-in-law: ‘...marriage is the only thing he has not tried’.
No doubt it is significant that he did not, until the formal announcement, see fit to inform his parents that he was to marry the Hon. Miss Mitford. Whether this reluctance was about his relationship with them, or with her, or with both, who can say. The sainted Rennells were not especially overjoyed (‘The whole thing has its inexplicable side’, said Lord Rennell, in his Montdore idiom, ‘and it worries me not a little’) but this may have been because Nancy had no money: it was a fight between the two sets of parents as to which could be the most tight-fisted. But Peter, by July 1933, was suddenly galvanised by the new turn that his life had taken. In his swooping way he too decided to be in love and began to deluge Nancy with letters, including one which read: ‘My darling I am glad that this all started as a joke... I should like to see your head lying on your pillow. This Peter who loves only you.’
The wedding was postponed twice, but finally took place at St John’s, Smith Square, on 4 December 1933, when Nancy had just turned twenty-nine. It must have been a pretty affair, despite the wintry day: the details given in The Times paint a picture delicately suffused with Nancy’s impeccable taste. ‘The bride... wore a gown of white chiffon, trimmed with narrow frills of the same material’ (this dress was a present from kind Bryan Guinness); ‘her tulle veil was held in place with a wreath of gardenias’ and she ‘carried a bouquet of white gardenias and roses’. Peter looked remarkably good in his tails. Eleven pages, including Diana’s tiny sons Jonathan and Desmond, followed in white satin.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 13
