21 During the mid-1930s, as Unity began to espouse Fascism with ever greater fervour, Nancy would almost always begin letters to her with this kind of phrase.
22 Quoted in Unity Mitford: A Quest.
Chapter 3
1 From a letter to Lady Redesdale, 8 April 1922.
2 In the 1966 interview for ABC Television’s Tempo.
3 From a letter to Robert Byron, 18 September 1931.
4 Diana was married for the first time, to Bryan Guinness, at just eighteen, Jessica married Esmond Romilly aged nineteen, and Deborah was twenty when she married Lord Andrew Cavendish. Pamela, on the other hand, was twenty-eight at her wedding to Derek Jackson; Unity never married.
5 In fact Esmond was rumoured to be more than that: ‘everyone knows Esmond is Winston’s son’, Nancy once said to Jessica, who apparently also believed this to be true. If so, it would mean that Churchill had had an affair with his wife’s sister Nellie, who was the daughter of the naughty Mitford aunt, Blanche Hozier.
6 In an essay entitled ‘My Friend Evelyn Waugh’, published in Arts et Loisirs after Waugh’s death.
7 Quoted in The Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter.
8 From a letter to Tom Mitford, 27 November 1926.
9 From a letter to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, 20 June 1932. Randolph Churchill made passes at everyone, hence the hilarity. He remained a friend of sorts all Nancy’s life, although she later wrote: ‘There is nothing to be said for Randolph...’
10 Sir Oz was Nancy’s nickname for Mosley. Later she also called him Sir Ogre.
11 All quotations from Viscount Norwich are from conversation with the author.
12 Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) was a dear friend of Nancy’s, although the butt of many of the jokes in her correspondence with Evelyn Waugh. The intense seriousness with which Connolly took himself, his writing and his complicated love life is probably what set them both off. Connolly founded the literary magazine Horizon, was an elegant critic and had an absolute belief in the importance of art and literature, but produced only one failed novel (The Rock Pool, 1936). He always, in fact, threatened to do more than he actually achieved. Perhaps he spent too much time worrying about his contemporaries, his three wives and his self-image; it is not surprising that he was admired by Kenneth Tynan, who similarly promised great things at Oxford and ended up tightly bound within his own incestuous artistic circle. In an essay on Connolly – ‘a part for Charles Laughton at his driest and least expostulatory’ – Tynan wrote that ‘it is difficult to leave his company without feeling determined to repel all forms of literary prostitution, a determination which can lead to inertia’: a clever aperçu. In her more worldly and childlike way Nancy said something similar when she satirised Connolly, in The Blessing, as a man of high ideals let down by his own flabby nature; the portrait was accurate enough to cause great offence.
13 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 30 September 1950.
14 From a letter to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, 22 January 1932.
15 Ibid.
16 From Brian Howard: A Portrait of a Failure, edited by Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster.
17 From a letter to Tom Mitford, May 1929.
18 The Little Hut, by André Roussin, was translated by Nancy, directed by Peter Brook and starred Robert Morley. It opened at the Lyric Theatre in August 1950. The play was set, said The Times review: ‘On a desert island so wittily exotic it might have been designed by Mr Oliver Messel – which has, in fact, been designed by Messel...’
19 From a letter to Waugh’s wife, Laura, 11 April 1966.
20 In the 1966 television interview.
21 In the 1980 BBC documentary.
22 In the 1966 television interview.
23 Ibid.
24 From a letter to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, 10 March 1930.
25 From a letter to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, 15 March 1931.
26 The phrase is from Philip Hensher’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels, published 2000.
27 Indeed Nancy later viewed Hamish with some affection, but as an absolute nuisance and idiot. The two saw each other occasionally. In a 1958 letter to Mark Ogilvie-Grant she described how Hamish had dropped in to her Paris flat: ‘he is so silly. He was sitting here – I said now I advise you to go and catch the train. Oh no, it would mean waiting at the station. So he misses the train. Two expensive taxis, a telephone call to Bourgogne, and another night in an hotel, and another taxi in the morning. Made me cross. Quite a fiver I guess...’ Amazingly, Hamish visited Nancy at the end of her life and said to her: ‘we would have been married now for thirty years.’ To which her reaction, as expressed in a 1972 letter to Deborah, was: ‘Help!!’
28 Maurice Bowra, Oxford don and later Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Despite Hamish’s attempts to claim Bowra for himself, he was in fact a good friend of Nancy’s.
29 From a letter to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, 10 December 1930.
30 Rosemary Hope-Vere, a friend of Nancy’s.
Chapter 4
1 From Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley.
2 In Diana Mosley: A Life, by Jan Dalley, the author writes of Oswald Mosley: ‘His engagement diary for 6 January 1933 reads: “Lunch Cim [his wife]; Baba 4.15; Dine D[iana]...”’
3 Milly the dog was named, in full, Lady Effie Millington-Drake, after an acquaintance of the Mitfords. ‘Do you remember’, Nancy wrote to her mother in 1947, ‘once when [Milly] was going to be “married” [that is, mated] Monica Winterton bought an awful little wedding cake & sent it to Lady E M D at Blomfield, & the shop most officiously sent it instead to her real address with Mon’s card saying “Best wishes for your future from us both”...’
4 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 23 October 1952.
5 From a letter to Deborah, 1933.
6 In 1949 Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh that she did not like the Elweses – ‘you I believe do’ – but it was not uncommon to find her dancing between opinions of people in this way.
7 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 25 July 1955.
8 Der Stürmer was edited by the rabidly anti-Semitic Julius Streicher.
9 The ‘two old ladies’ were Nancy and Diana, whose great friend was an ‘old gentleman’ based upon Mark Ogilvie-Grant. For some reason Nancy always put Mark into a ‘curly butter-coloured wig’ when she wrote about him: he appears in it again as the character Sir Ivor King in Pigeon Pie.
10 The Stanley family was that of David Mitford’s grandmother, Lady Airlie (1830–1921), who before her marriage was Henrietta Blanche Stanley.
11 Nancy herself did go to Russia in 1954 and wrote a wonderful essay, ‘Diary of a Visit to Russia, 1954’, which was published in The Water Beetle. To Evelyn Waugh she wrote on her return in June 1954: ‘Oh Russia was fascinating. So much more beautiful than I’d expected for one thing... I saw a lady from the State publishing house. I said to her “how many copies would a best-selling novel sell?” She replied 150 million. “Goodness” I said “I can’t wait to come and live here... What is the name of the novel which has sold 150 millions?” “Well there is The Testing of the Steel – &, of course, Cement”. By this time I was distinctly giggly. They are just like Americans just as I knew they would be...’
12 In the 1966 television interview.
13 Pamela’s way of expressing herself was so absolutely earthbound as to become, perversely, as fantastical as that of Nancy. Once, during a wordgame played at Swinbrook by Nancy and her aesthete friends, while everybody was offering extravagant and glamorous words such as ‘chrysoprase’, Pam shouted the word ‘fish’. ‘My dear!’ said Brian Howard to Nancy. ‘Your sister is macabre.’
Chapter 5
1 From a letter to Violet Hammersley, 15 September 1939.
2 Violet Hammersley (1877–1964) was one of Nancy’s closest friends, despite the great age difference which made them more like mother and daughter (‘Horror-Child’ was what Nancy was often called by Mrs Hammersley; Nancy ca
lled her ‘the Widow’). The two women corresponded frequently. Diana considers that some of what Nancy wrote in her letters to Mrs Hammersley – specifically on the subject of Lady Redesdale – was ‘the most awful lies’. But Nancy was not lying when she told Mrs Hammersley that Sydney supported Hitler; nor did Mrs Hammersley think that she was. ‘You Mitfords like dictators,’ she once said, ‘I don’t.’
Mrs Hammersley, who had been left a rich widow then lost most of her money, was of an eccentric character and appearance in which Nancy took great delight. Although it did not mitigate one jot the affection and respect in which she held her, Nancy created a delicious caricature of her friend – as gloomy, self-obsessed and demanding – that featured in many of her letters, such as this written during the war: ‘When the Wid wakes up in the morning her first thought is how does she feel (herself) how did she sleep & her second thought will she get any MEAT?... She longs for meat so terribly that she can’t look at the sheep on the downs, she craves their legs...’
3 This phrase was the title of a book by Apsley Cherry Garrard, a member of the expedition to the South Pole led by Captain Scott. Nancy was fascinated by this to the point of obsession: James Lees-Milne, in his diary for 1942, recorded that she ‘is mad about the Antarctic Expedition and has collected every book about it she can lay her hands on’. Later she would write an essay about Scott, published in The Water Beetle under the title ‘A Bad Time’: ‘I don’t quite know why I have felt the need to write down this well-known story, making myself cry twice...’
4 Pamela Churchill (1920–1997) later Hayward, later Harriman, married extremely successfully for status and became a dazzling hostess in Washington. She was a woman of the kind that Nancy admires in her novels: clever in a wholly feminine way, ravishingly attractive, powerful without ever being humourless or sexless. Her last coup was to be appointed US Ambassador to Paris by Bill Clinton.
5 Lady Pamela Berry (1914–1982) was a highly attractive woman, a hostess of renown, whose husband, Michael Berry (later Baron Hartwell), became editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph. Both Nancy and Evelyn Waugh delighted in her charm and verve in the post-war years but, again for both, this fondness wore thin after a while: ‘Pam joins Randolph [Churchill] among the legion of the damned’, Waugh wrote of her in 1962, after she had betrayed a private conversation with Waugh by using it in the Telegraph.
6 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 25 November 1951.
7 From a 1962 review of The Water Beetle. In this teasing, prickly and perceptive Sunday Telegraph essay Waugh wrote of Nancy: ‘Her conventions are of her own devising; she attributes them to a world of her own imagination... But her essential quality is that she can write.’
8 From a letter to Jessica, 7 October 1940.
9 Quoted by Diana in the 1980 BBC documentary, Nancy Mitford: A Portrait by her Sisters.
10 Gladwyn Jebb, later Baron Gladwyn, was a distinguished diplomat and appointed Ambassador to France in 1954. He and his wife Cynthia had known Nancy before the war – ‘I’m in love with Gladwyn’, she wrote, not wholly seriously, in a letter from 1936 – and the friendship grew when all three were living in Paris. Lady Gladwyn wrote a charming appreciation of Nancy after her death: ‘A happy memory springs to mind of Nancy at a party, entrancing with a beautiful arrangement of roses and ribbons round her neck such as the great Mistress [Madame de Pompadour] wore...’
11 This was Diana’s striking, opening remark in the 2001 BBC Omnibus programme about Nancy.
12 From a letter to Violet Hammersley, 20 December 1940.
13 From a Sunday Telegraph interview, published 2002.
14 From Jan Dalley’s biography of Diana.
Chapter 6
1 Billa (Wilhelmine) was a friend of Nancy’s from the early 1930s and is said to have contributed to the character of Fanny, narrator of three of Nancy’s novels. Like Fanny, Billa was happily married to a don: Roy was University Lecturer in Economics at Oxford, where the Harrods lived.
2 This was an especially favoured Mitford joke, which came from Diana’s time in prison: according to her husband’s autobiography, My Life, she had said, ‘It was still lovely to wake up in the morning and feel one was lovely One.’ In 1948 Nancy wrote a letter to Diana saying that John Julius Norwich (then aged nineteen) ‘nearly died when I told him about Isn’t it bliss to be ONE’.
3 From Waugh’s review of The Water Beetle.
4 Diana had four sons: Jonathan and Desmond Guinness, and Alexander and Max Mosley. Deborah had three children: Lady Emma Cavendish (now Tennant), Peregrine, now the Duke of Devonshire, and Lady Sophia Cavendish (now Topley).
5 Deborah’s son was always known as Stoker, after a family friend named Adrian Stokes.
6 In a review of Nancy’s collected letters.
7 In the index to The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, there are twenty-one entries under ‘Waugh, Harriet Mary; presents from NM’.
8 From a Spectator review of Nancy’s collected letters, written by her friend Alastair Forbes. In fact this wonderfully amusing article is more like a brief and idiosyncratic memoir of Nancy’s life, complete with several mentions of the part played in it by Forbes himself. ‘I was naturally rather pleased to read... that, in a 1947 letter to her sister Diana, Nancy had written: “I really love Ali Forbes and so does the Col [her lover, Gaston Palewski, was also a good friend of Forbes]. I think he is the only clever young man I know with a heart...”’
9 Nancy’s sister-in-law, Gloria Elwes.
10 From a letter to Violet Hammersley, 26 December 1940.
11 Osbert Lancaster, who would later illustrate Noblesse Oblige and The Water Beetle, was best known as cartoonist on the Daily Express and creator of Maudie Littlehampton, glorious snob and would-be social barometer. Nancy wrote to Lancaster praising Maudie: ‘Oh she is lovely... and then of course she is always right about everything.’ Maudie in her turn devoured Noblesse Oblige and, in Lancaster’s collected cartoons for 1957, was depicted eating off her knife saying: ‘Oh, to hell with Nancy Mitford! What I always say is – if it’s ME it’s U!’
12 From Harold Acton’s Memoir.
13 So Deborah described her sister’s instinct towards fidelity, in the 1980 BBC documentary Nancy Mitford: A Portrait by Her Sisters.
14 West Wycombe Park was the home of Nancy’s friends Sir John and Lady Helen Dashwood. Nancy called Helen ‘Hell Bags’ and indeed she was disliked by many people (James Lees-Milne referred in his diaries to her ‘extraordinarily unadult character’). Nevertheless it was to West Wycombe that Nancy went to recuperate after her hysterectomy: this would have been wonderfully comfortable, and agreeably full of friends like Cecil Beaton, Eddy Sackville-West and Lees-Milne himself. During the war the Dashwoods were allowed to run West Wycombe with all its servants, the deal with the authorities being that the house would be filled with evacuees: ‘strangely enough nearly all of them friends of Helen’s’, wrote Selina Hastings in her biography of Nancy.
15 From the letter to Diana, 22 November 1941, written by Nancy from her hospital bed (Charlotte Mosley, editor of Nancy’s collected letters, adds that this letter was ‘passed by prison censor 28/11/41’: Diana had then been in Holloway for seventeen months).
16 From a letter to Diana, 28 November 1942.
17 The brothers of Dame Edith Sitwell, with whom they formed a fey, somewhat self-mythologising but civilised triumvirate: the Sitwells all wrote (Osbert no less than five volumes of autobiography), while Edith was very much in the tradition of the grand, rich, literary lioness. ‘Every magazine has six pages of pictures of them headed “The Fabulous Sitwells”’, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy, from New York, in 1948. ‘They have hired the Philharmonic Orchestra... to play while they recite poetry. Goodness how they are enjoying it. I said “Is Sachie joining you?” “Alas. Sachie is High Sheriff of His County and therefore unable to leave the United Kingdom.”’
18 This nickname for Connolly has been attributed to Virginia Woolf, but Nancy and Evelyn Waugh certainl
y picked it up and ran with it (indeed Waugh called it ‘our joke’). The very word ‘Boots’ seems to have set them off. In 1954 Nancy began a letter to Waugh with this:
‘Since Bonny-boots is dead
That so divinely
Could foot it & toot it
(Oh he did it finely)
Say, lusty lads, who now shall
Bonny-boot it?
I found this in a book of English madrigals – are you shrieking?’
19 The 14th Baron Berners (1883–1950) was the model for the refined, shrewd and urbane Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love. Lord Merlin’s exquisite house full of Watteaus and dyed pigeons, his two black whippets with their diamond necklaces, his aesthetic sensibility and love of practical jokes – these attributes were all those of Gerald Berners, as was the incongruity that placed Lord Merlin slap bang in the middle of rugged Gloucestershire hunting country, with Uncle Matthew as his nearest neighbour. Lord Berners’s own house, Faringdon in Oxfordshire, was similarly close to the Mitfords.
A writer, painter and musician, Gerald Berners was originally a friend of Diana’s, and was one of those homosexuals who, as she now says, were ‘God’s gift to women like Nancy and me.’ He also had the guts, insouciance and loyalty to stick by Diana when she was sent to Holloway (‘Are you burrowing under your cell with a teaspoon?’ he wrote to her on the day of her arrest). Then he became close to Nancy also, and Faringdon provided her with a glorious oasis in wartime. A year before his death she dedicated Love in a Cold Climate to her friend.
20 Lady Cunard and Lady Colefax were the two great London hostesses of the war years, by which time both were in their seventies. Their styles contrasted a good deal. Emerald (née Maud) Cunard was a rich American: James Lees-Milne described in his diaries one of her parties at the Dorchester, into which she ‘darted like a bird of paradise... we dined off expensive, pretentious food which lacked the necessary refinements of good cooking.’ Lady Colefax, on the other hand, he described as ‘totally without ostentation. Because she is quite poor and inhabits a small house this is not allowed to interfere with her mode of living. She gets people just the same...’
Life in a Cold Climate Page 52
