It was not all revolution. Pamela behaved herself, as always. In 1936 she married the dashing Derek Jackson: gentleman rider, distinguished physicist, Fascist sympathiser (‘he was marvellous,’ says Diana. ‘Not only brilliantly clever but enormously rich!’). Pam had been engaged before but the attachment was broken off; she then gave her ring to Unity, who gave it to Hitler. Because of her husband, Pam was ranged slightly on the right wing of the family (the name of Derek’s twin brother, Vivian Jackson, was given to Eugenia Malmains’ horse in Wigs on the Green). But it did not interest her much. She met Hitler, as did all of her family except Nancy and Jessica, and in her wonderful calm way described him as ‘very ordinary, like a farmer in his old khaki suit’.13
Lastly there was Deborah, who grew up gorgeous and sensible and unfazed by any thought that scandal might taint her (‘At it Again, the Mad, Mad Mitfords’, was a fairly typical newspaper headline of the time). She came out in 1938, as storms gathered over her ostrich feathers. Before her debut in society she, too, had met Hitler, having attended the tea party at which he was present with her mother (‘Muv asked if there were any laws about having good flour for bread, wasn’t it killing?’). On her return she went to the races and to balls, all the usual stuff in unusual circumstances, and danced with apparent serenity through the family debris that showered about her. She also wrote a letter to Jessica whose comment on the situation was oblique, droll, perceptive and utterly Mitfordian: ‘...nothing has changed much’, it read. ‘Farve goes off to The Lady and the House of Lords, and Muv paints chairs and reads books like “Stalin, my Father”, or “Mussolini, The Man”, or “Hitler, my Brother’s Uncle”, or “I was in Spain”, or “The Jews, by one who knows them”.’
In August 1938, Nancy fell pregnant. She had been trying to conceive for three years or so, but this was difficult for two reasons: firstly there were physical problems that required curettage, and secondly her husband was as often as not making love to another woman. But eventually she wrote to Robert Byron, saying, ‘I am in the family way isn’t it nice. But only just so don’t tell anybody as I don’t want the Rodds to find out, they are such demons of gynaecological enthusiasm. Besides it may all come to nothing. I am awfully excited though.’
Nancy miscarried in September, despite having rested up as instructed. She had in fact told Lady Rennell about her pregnancy: ‘I suppose she is furious at my improvident behaviour’, she wrote, again to Byron. ‘(Of course it is lunatic really I quite see that but one must never be deterred from doing what one wants for lack of money don’t you agree)... Actually if I thought for a minute it would be a boy I should go for a long bicycle ride here & now – 2 Peter Rodds in 1 house is unthinkable.’
As usual, Nancy’s reference to her husband is taut with oddity. It is impossible to know how she felt about the miscarriage, because she made no reference to it; but it appears that she was ambivalent about the prospect of being irrevocably tied to Peter by a child. Also, despite her airy remark to Byron, she would surely have been worried sick about how the baby would be paid for. Peter was out of work again, having been scuppered by his own brother when he tried for a job at the BBC (Francis had advised that Peter was not a responsible employee. ‘I have put F’s name in a drawer and I hope he dies’, wrote Nancy to Robert Byron, probably in real despair). And so, although Nancy – now thirty-four – was told that she would be able to conceive again, lack of money seemed to make it unwise; while the lack of Peter’s presence in her bed made it unlikely.
These, at any rate, may have been her feelings in 1938. Yet had she conceived earlier in her marriage, unequivocal joy might have overridden them. It is impossible to say whether a baby would have made Nancy’s life with Peter happier, more productive. He was unfaithful after only a year or so; had he wanted a child he would surely have tried harder for one by sleeping more often with his wife. Possibly he recognised that he was unsuited to fatherhood, incapable of living up to responsibility. Yet a baby – had it arrived before mutual exhaustion set in – might have made a difference for the better.
‘There’s no doubt’, says Diana, ‘that when she was young she would have liked children. I think it’s something that people do long for really, and then she saw me, very happy’ – in 1938 Diana gave birth to her third son, Alexander – ‘and I think all that was perhaps rather sad.’
So Nancy set about mating her French bulldog Milly, who in 1939 had four puppies.
5
Towards the end of The Pursuit of Love, when Linda Radlett looks back on her first marriage to Tony Kroesig, she says, ‘The really important thing, if a marriage is to go well, without much love, is very very great niceness – gentillesse – and wonderful good manners.’
She has, in her musing and childlike way, come to understand her marriage very well.
I was never gentille with Tony, and often I was hardly polite to him, and, very soon after our honeymoon, I became exceedingly disagreeable. I’m ashamed now to think what I was like. And poor old Tony was so good-natured, he never snapped back, he put up with it all for years and then just ambled off to Pixie. I can’t blame him. It was my fault from beginning to end.
Nancy is not describing her own marriage, nor is she blaming herself for its failure. After all Peter, unlike Tony, ‘ambled off’ to other women almost immediately and it was Nancy who ‘put up’ with things ‘for years’. Nonetheless by 1945, when she was writing her novel, she had achieved a perspective on her life with Peter. She had even acquired a fondness for him, and this comes through in Linda’s words. Nancy’s marriage, she saw by then, had been contracted ‘without much love’; and, without ‘very great niceness’ to make up the balance, it had been doomed to fail. Not that either Nancy or Linda would have necessarily wanted their marriages to succeed, since both women valued romantic love above all else. Perhaps Nancy realised, through Linda, that this craving of theirs for love fitted them both badly for marriage; however much they liked the idea of it.
What little steam there had ever been in the Rodd marriage had almost evaporated by the time the war approached. The miscarried baby no doubt seemed like a death blow: as if fate, through Nancy’s uterus, was giving the couple a message of doom. And yet not long after this, in early 1939, Nancy and Peter performed a significant act together, perhaps for the first time in their marriage. They travelled to Perpignan, in the south of France, to help with the refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Around half a million Republicans had been pushed over the Pyrenees by the encroachment northwards of General Franco’s army; France did not want them, and they had to be fed and looked after until they could be sent on elsewhere. Peter left for Perpignan early in 1939. Nancy followed in May, having meanwhile tried to bring official attention to Peter’s reports on the refugees. It was not exactly an act of union on their part, but there was something comradely about it, something to imply that the couple did have feelings for each other, although not those that made for a successful marriage.
The Perpignan episode shows both Nancy and Peter in their most serious, perhaps most attractive light. Neither went out there because they were saints, but equally neither had to do it. For all Nancy’s posing as airy-fairy joker in the midst of her politically-minded siblings, it was actually she who engaged most closely – in practical terms, at least – with the international situation of the time. Jessica preached anti-Fascism and made a lot of gestures; Diana did anything that she could to help her husband’s cause; Unity made Nazism the absolute centre of her life. But Nancy rolled up her sleeves and tried to give concrete, dispassionate help to unknown people: she did what many of us think of doing, as we watch the hungry and dispossessed on television, and few of us actually do. She had grit, and a sense of duty, beneath her frivolous languor. No doubt she had personal motives for going to France: she wanted to be with her husband, doing something that she could, for once, honourably share with him, and she also enjoyed standing on the moral high ground and waving down to her ‘fanatical’ family. Nor could she resi
st a dodgy joke when she got out to Perpignan: Unity, she announced to the workers in the refugee camps, was on her way to help. Nevertheless the letters that she wrote from the camps show that she was utterly and genuinely involved with what she was doing, and that she did it with a mixture of practicality, cheerfulness and compassion.
Peter, too, was doing his best for the refugees; even though, to judge by The Pursuit of Love, he was also getting one hell of a kick out of it. The book’s description of the Perpignan episode is pretty much taken from life. Linda arrives to find her second husband (Christian, the handsome Communist) ‘in a whirl of business’, working ‘in an office financed by various English humanitarians with the object of improving the camps, putting refugee families in touch again, and getting as many as possible out of France.’ Christian gives his wife ‘an absent-minded peck on the forehead’ and immediately bustles her into this office; he is, she realises, in his element, dealing with mass misery in an impersonal way, expunging his ‘half-guilty feeling about not having fought in Spain’. Cleverly, without malice, Nancy hints at the self-regarding quality of Christian’s selflessness, the pomposity with which he celebrates his own detachment. This surely came from her observations of her husband. ‘Peter sees to everything’, Nancy wrote to her mother soon after her arrival in Perpignan, ‘even down to how many STs [sanitary towels] are allowed! I believe he will be here for life.’
It was a perfect job for Peter. It demanded energy and initiative, as banking had never done; it suspended him from having to deal with dreary real life; and it was never going to go on beyond his dwarfish boredom threshold (happily for him, there was no question of having to be there ‘for life’). If only Peter’s existence could have given him more such occasions to rise to, he might have been a better and a happier man. This, after all, was the age of political engagement, which should have been a godsend to someone so lost and feckless.
But although Peter could embrace a cause at a distance and in the short term, a lifetime’s commitment was beyond him: to a woman, to a job, probably to a child. His problem was that he was too clever not to know that he was wasting his time, and too clever not to feel that most things were a waste of time. Like his wife, he had a degree of detachment; but whereas Nancy’s clear-eyed view of the world brought her mostly pleasure, Peter’s led to frustration. He must surely have dreamed of a Perpignan to seize him by the scruff of the neck and force him into action, even for a brief period of time. Almost certainly he felt – as Christian did – that he should have gone off like Esmond Romilly to fight in the Spanish Civil War, since the Republican cause was indeed one that he believed in. Yet he had stayed in London instead: got drunk at the Savile Club, slept with Mary Sewell, made Nancy fruitlessly pregnant, wasted another couple of years.
One wonders how Nancy felt out there in Perpignan, seeing her husband busy and authoritative. Was she taken with this different Peter, or did she see through him to the man she knew, all too well, beneath? Both, probably. One also wonders how bothered Peter was about whether Nancy turned up or not. He was on the go all the time and they saw little of each other: ‘I haven’t had a single word with Peter although I’ve been here 2 days’, Nancy wrote to her mother, not quite truly as in the next paragraph she is quoting him. There is no rancour in what Nancy says, she is simply making the point that Peter is working fantastically hard; but – like Linda – she did spend more time with his two charming young helpers than with her husband. They were ‘2 chaps who talk the “New Statesmans” English which is always a comfort abroad I find’. These two chaps – Donald Darling and Humphrey Hare – no doubt found her a refreshing and elegant presence; and while Peter strode about, too busy doing everything to delegate any of it, they found her work. She delivered supplies and messages and – again like Linda – assigned cabins to the Spanish families, who were sailing off to what they hoped would be safety (Linda gives all the best accommodation to the labourers – ‘most democratic’ – because they have the word labrador by their names).
So Nancy and Peter were apart, but together. They were sharing something that mattered, even though they hardly spoke to each other. It was a contradictory situation, companionable and distant, and this is echoed in The Pursuit of Love. When Linda goes to see Christian in Perpignan, she is hoping simultaneously to save her marriage and to be confirmed in her instinct that it is over. This was not quite the case with Nancy; she did not, as Linda does, arrive in France to learn that her husband had become deeply attached to another woman. Yet she rarely invented in her novels: she took the stuff of her life and transmuted it into something that had truth at its heart, the kind of truth that one only understands at a distance. And so, perhaps without even realising it at the time, she may well have felt something of Linda’s ambivalent sadness: watching the husband she does not really love behave so admirably, knowing that their life together will almost certainly end, when peace and normality return.
What she certainly felt – and this too comes across in her book – is pain and outrage at the suffering of the refugees: ‘the sight of these thousands of human beings, young and healthy, herded behind wire away from their womenfolk, with nothing on earth to do day after dismal day, was a recurring torture to Linda.’ In The House of Mitford Jonathan Guinness makes the point that the refugees were not all as innocent as their vulnerable state made them appear to be – ‘there were certainly some with crimes on their personal conscience’ – and implies that Nancy, suffused as she was with rage against the kind of political system supported by half her family, was unable to grasp this ambiguity. This is probably true; although helping the guilty along with the innocent is an occupational hazard for aid workers, whether they are aware of it or not.
What Nancy minded most was the affront to the refugees’ pride: ‘The Red X are not much help’, she wrote to her mother in late May, ‘they issue shorts which Spaniards abominate, having a sense of dignity, & refuse to help with special diet for the many cases of colitis in the camps.’ This letter is proof of Nancy’s hands-on engagement. She describes getting off ‘our ship’ after a hurricane had forced a change of port – ‘at 3 hours’ notice special trains had to be changed etc etc the result was Peter was up for 2 whole nights, never went to bed at all. However he is none the worse; I was up all yesterday night as the embarkation went on until 6am & the people on the quay had to be fed & the babies given their bottles. There were 200 babies under 2 & 12 women are to have babies on board’ (what did the barely fertile Nancy make of this fecundity all around her: did it pain her? did she feel relief, not to suffer appalling anxiety for another human being?). ‘One poor shell-shocked man went mad and had to be given an anaesthetic & taken off, but apart from that all went smoothly and slowly.’ There is a real sense, from this letter, of how hard it all was: the endless petty organisational details, the patience of the helpers, the stoicism of the refugees, Nancy’s bright and exhausted smiles. As the boat sailed off, ‘the pathetic little band on board’ played the Spanish national anthem, and ‘the poor things gave 3 Vivas for España which they will never see again. I don’t think there was a single person not crying – I have never cried so much in my life.’
Nancy goes on to say there is no guarantee that the ship will elude Franco and make it to Mexico. And this, perhaps, is the real point of her letter, to show her mother (who ‘seems to regard Adolf as her favourite son-in-law’1) the disgusting truth about the political creed that Sydney now so calmly supported. ‘If you could have a look, as I have, at some of the less agreeable results of fascism in a country I think you would be less anxious for the swastika to become a flag on which the sun never sets. And, whatever may be the good produced by that regime, that the first result is always a horde of unhappy refugees cannot be denied.’ This last remark was key: while her sisters Unity, Diana and Jessica (and, according to Nancy, her mother) were apparently prepared to accept the consequences of pursuing an ideological goal, Nancy quite simply was not. ‘I would join hands with the devil himsel
f to stop any further extension of the disease [of Fascism]’, she wrote. This, of course, could lead to terrible consequences in itself: but the point is that the war against Fascism was necessary and Fascism, in Nancy’s opinion, was not.
By 1939 she was digging her heels hard into the middle ground, holding to her pinko stance with a frankly humourless tenacity. The days of Wigs on the Green were over; at last, Nancy agreed with Diana that here was where the jokes stopped. She had been deeply shocked by Perpignan, and by the human cost of political ideology. Yet it is impossible to resist the thought that it was, in fact, her family who had pushed Nancy into this ferocious position as: if she was, au fond, in violent reaction against them, rather than against their strange beliefs.
There were principles involved. Yet there is also a strong sense that Nancy was guided by the personal: by the tense dealings she had had with Diana and Unity over Wigs on the Green, by the cool obduracy shown by Jessica when Nancy had gone to see her in France, by the lack of affection she felt from Sydney. The family’s wild political allegiances had, yes, forced Nancy to take a stance against them. That was what principle could do in the 1930s. And although this was painful it was also, perhaps, rather liberating. It allowed Nancy to detach herself. It gave her a certain freedom, to stand apart and watch them all fly off so blindly to right and left. Lady Redesdale was damning herself quite wonderfully in Nancy’s eyes with her dread of going to war with her friend Hitler: from this point on, Nancy seems to have felt justified in the dislike that she had for her mother. There may, too, have been satisfaction in the spectacle of Jessica’s antics, since Nancy’s feelings for her least Mitfordian sister were, in adulthood, very much at one remove (‘I don’t die for her as much as I pretend to’, she later confessed). And then there was the pleasure of being able to condemn Diana, the sister for whom her feelings were decidedly not at one remove. Hard to think that Nancy took no secret enjoyment in watching the immaculate Diana go so spectacularly wrong.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 17
