A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  Occasionally he took me to see friends of his: Sem, the caricaturist, was one; Troubetskoy the sculptor another. When we were ushered into Troubetskoy’s studio he was at work on a head of Venizelos, the Greek politician. ‘Bonjour, Monsieur, la voici la Grèce!’ cried Helleu in his enthusiastic way, pointing to me. Venizelos turned a lack-lustre eye upon me, and I felt a fool; my exuberant old friend had gone too far.

  ‘Surtout, soyons classique!’ he used to say, and he told me he was le petit-fils d’Ingres, because Ingres had taught the man who taught him. He asked me which was my favourite picture, and did not altogether disapprove when I said it was Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. I have often wondered since why I so loved that picture when I was sixteen. It may have been because of the subject. Just as in what already seemed the old days at Asthall with Jim Lees-Milne, my ideal was bohemian life in a warm climate. In Manet’s picture the people must have been warm enough although it was so green, because otherwise the woman could never have sat so naked and relaxed.

  The flat where I lived was on the ground floor, flush with the street; my bedroom window could only be opened at night, when the shutters were locked, otherwise any passer-by could have stepped in for there was no area such as London houses have. Early in the morning I heard footsteps hurrying past on the pavement close to my bed, and the sound of men clearing their throats and spitting. At night I sat up in bed and wrote my diary.

  The flat had a lavatory at the end of the passage, its only window gave into the kitchen which I thought improper. There was no bath. Twice a week the maid brought a shallow round tin, the same as Degas so often painted, into my room. She poured half an inch of boiling water into it, and left it with a jug of cold water standing by. One had to add some of the cold water in order not to be scalded in the basin, but however little one put in it mysteriously turned from boiling hot to stone cold. It needed courage to wash in this object, and then to dry oneself on a towel the size of a handkerchief. I wrote and complained to Muv, and she sent me enough money for an occasional bath at the Villas St. Honoré d’Eylau, which the old sisters considered perfectly ridiculous, very extravagant and rather insulting to their elegant dwelling.

  They were great despisers, and their worst strictures were reserved for anywhere that was not Paris. Some parts even of Paris itself were not approved of. ‘La rive gauche! Ce que ça fait province!’ they said.

  I loved Versailles, and sometimes went down with Helleu to walk in the wintry park. If I was unwise enough to mention this at dinner they were on to me like a ton of bricks. ‘Vous aimez ça? Ah, ça je ne comprends pas alors. Versailles! C’est d’une tristesse! Et ce que ça fait province!’ they said in chorus.

  One of them did the cooking herself; the food was excellent but there was not enough of it for me. At that time I was always hungry though I ate like an ogre of everything I was given; fussiness had been replaced by greed. The old ladies laughed rather crossly about my insatiable appetite; I suppose I ate more than they had reckoned each child should when they fixed the price to be paid. It was well known that I was hungry; sometimes Helleu or one of my other friends would meet me at the Cours at the end of the morning and take me to Pruniers down the avenue for a sandwich before luncheon. Helleu loved to see me eat: ‘Mais prenez, prenez donc!’ he said when I lunched with them, heaping my plate with heavenly food, roast veal, boeuf en gelée, îles flottantes.

  ‘On ne vous donne pas assez là bas,’ kind Madame Helleu said gently. She and Paulette invited me to their sitting-room for the gouter; we had weak tea and slices of rich black chocolate cake. She was raffinée and elegant, ‘la multiforme Alice’, as Robert de Montesquiou called her, ‘dont la rose chevelure illumine de son reflet tant de miroirs de cuivre.’

  At the Cours Fénelon I no longer found it difficult doing my lessons in French. I even allowed myself to copy the other girls who, the moment Mlle Foucauld’s back was turned, threw open the lids of their desks and got busy with looking glasses and powder puffs. Some of them also used lipstick; but this, in spite of my new freedom, I would not have dared to do. One beautiful creature, as smart as I was dowdy, told me that her mother dressed her at ‘les grandes maisons’; I was still so ignorant of such things that I supposed she was referring to the Galéries Lafayette or the Printemps, shops which were beyond my wildest dreams. All my clothes were still home-made.

  The end of my stay in Paris was made desperately sad by the illness and death of Helleu. When I heard how ill he was I went to the flat; Paulette opened the door. ‘May I see him?’ I asked. ‘Of course not,’ was the reply.

  I felt his death deeply. I was his devoted admirer, and loved his gaiety and liveliness and enthusiasm. I went back to London, carrying the pointe sèche he had done of me. It had been reproduced, a full page in the magazine l’Illustration, and this had put me on the map at the Cours Fénelon. Indulgent Mlle Foucauld said it was ‘trés ressemblant’, but I knew in my heart it was flattering. The old sisters hastened to plant a dart. ‘Helleu?’ they said. ‘Non, Helleu ne me dit rien du tout. Franchement je trouve que ça fait très avant guerre.’

  As I have said, nothing could exceed the slender distinction of Mme Helleu. Everyone knows what she looked like because Helleu loved to draw and paint her. In his life of Proust, George Painter says that Helleu was Elstir in the novel, and from this he deduces that Mme Helleu was ‘a lady of ample charms who was not quite presentable in society’. Mr. Painter here confuses Mme Helleu with Mme Monet; Monet being another artist who was part of Elstir.

  The change of scene, and being back in my usual place in the family soon comforted me for the loss of my old friend; the Easter holidays in London were agreeable, and I was delighted to see the others again. Nanny, in her new nursery, clicked and sniffed rather over my Paris adventures when she bothered to listen at all, but life was pleasant and I looked forward to the summer term at the Cours Fénelon. Then the bomb fell.

  One day Pam and I were out for a walk in the Park. On our way back I stood still and my heart gave a thump. My diary! I had been writing it after breakfast on, of all places, Muv’s writing table in the drawing-room, and I suddenly remembered that I had left it there, lying open, when somebody called me out of the room. I had clean forgotten it, and Muv must have seen it, and most likely read it too.

  Mabel opened the door; ‘Her ladyship wants you,’ she said. A hollow voice rang down the stairs: ‘Diana, Diana, come here at once.’ I was never called Diana in the family, except for scolding purposes. Muv called me Dana, Farve Dina, Nancy Bodley, Pam and Unity Nardy, Decca Corduroy and Debo Honks. The very word, Diana, was in itself sinister. Useless to protest the harmlessness of what I had done; to have been to a cinema alone with a young man, in Paris, even in the afternoon, was a frightful disobedience and an almost unforgivable crime. For two or three whole days nobody spoke at meals; my parents looked too black and threatening. Telegrams flew to Paris cancelling all arrangements for the summer term; there was no question of my going back.

  At first the others were sympathetic to me about the trouble I was in, but as the gloomy days dragged by they turned on me.

  ‘How could you be such a fool! Leaving your diary about! In the drawing-room too. How could anyone be so stupid!’

  I imagine Muv and Farve must have conferred for some time about what they could possibly do with me. I was not yet seventeen, too young to come out, and in any case the summer was already full enough of arrangements for Nancy and Pam. I should be very much in the way at Rutland Gate. The Buildings were not yet fit for habitation; workmen were busy putting the finishing touches to Farve’s house. With all her worries over us to occupy her, Muv still failed to go down and see what he was up to there.

  Finally it was decided that I should be sent to Bucks Mills with Unity, Decca, Debo, Miss Bedell and Nanny, to a cottage belonging to our great-aunt Maude Whyte. It was a pretty cottage in a village near the sea, but I suffered an agony of boredom there, the terrible, deathly essence of boredom. I had not enough
books and no money to send for more. Every afternoon I walked up the hill to the village shop and collected the Daily Mail. It had a serial of The Story of Ivy by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. The moments spent reading about Ivy were the best of the day, but it was a cruelly short extract. On Sundays even Ivy failed me; I ached from morning till night.

  How long were we at Bucks Mills? Two months—three—I have no idea. It seemed an age without a name. Aunt Maude had told some of the neighbours about us, and one of them wrote to me. ‘Dear Miss Mitford’ the letter began—it was from a lady called Mrs. Pine Coffin, and she wrote ‘miss’ with a long s—‘pray use my valley’. We sometimes did use it, to walk in. But I never felt in Mrs. Pine Coffin’s valley as though somebody might come along in a fast car and carry me off. I had lost heart.

  6.

  SWINBROOK

  When at length we left glorious Devon it was to go straight to the new house at Swinbrook. The rest of the Asthall furniture was in it, but we all thought the house monstrous. Muv blamed herself for not having paid more attention while it was being built; the fireplace in the drawing-room, for ex ample, a sort of rustic affair in uncut Cotswold stone, was unnecessarily ugly.

  From our point of view the worst part was that the library books had been squeezed into the business room, where one was not always welcome. There was no distant, solitary library which we could use as our own. The piano was in the drawing-room; Tom hardly ever played; he did not care to when people were dashing in and out, banging doors, as they naturally did in the drawing-room used by us all. In place of the Barn with its peace and delicious smell of books and polished wood where Tom and I had spent so much of our time at Asthall there was a squash court, hardly ever played in and yet impossible to use as a retreat, with its hateful echoes and bare, windowless walls. There were now more of us ‘downstairs’ than ever; only Debo remained to keep Nanny company in the nursery.

  True, we each had a room to ourselves. This boon, however, did not count for very much, because—possibly the newly finished plastering and painting may have been to blame—Swinbrook was always cold, and we were not allowed fires in our bedrooms.

  I only lived there for just over a year, and even during that time we were often in London. I spent hours in the linen cup board, a tiny room with a window; hot water pipes ran to and fro so that it was warm summer and winter. When Annie and Muv found me there: ‘Go out, darling,’ said Muv. ‘Of course you’re cold if you sit indoors reading all day.’ The favourite authors now were Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and J.B.S. Haldane. I loved them for their wit and irreverence and their rejection of accepted standards.

  Farve was much less happy now that he had his wish and lived on the hill near the pheasants. No doubt he felt our heavy disapproval. Children imagine that their parents—at least parents of his sort—are so strong, so impregnable, that they cannot be hurt, however many the pin-pricks. He no longer laughed when Nancy teased him about the Buildings, but roared, perhaps with pain. I think he realized we truly hated our new home; we did not trouble to conceal it. Sometimes a visitor would inadvertently turn a knife in the wound. ‘But it’s charming, Sydney, what a lovely drawing-room. Of course it’s not Asthall, how you must miss it! Asthall was so lovely, but all the same it’s very nice here.’

  Farve would growl that he was thankful to be ‘out of that damned hole’; but he must have minded. Even the pheasants seemed to have lost their savour, and he never fished now. He went away as often as he could; Rutland Gate was let, but he stayed in the Mews at the back of the house and took refuge from us in the Marlborough Club; in the summer holidays he went to Scotland to shoot.

  When I stayed at Chartwell that summer of 1927 Sickert was a fellow-guest. Cousin Clementine told us that as a girl, at Dieppe, she had asked him once: ‘Mr. Sickert, who is the greatest living painter?’ ‘My dear child, I am,’ was the reply.

  He helped Cousin Winston with advice and theories about painting. He said that as the light that came through the studio window from out of doors was always changing, it was best to paint a portrait by artificial light. On lovely summer afternoons they would shut themselves up with blinds and curtains drawn and the electric light on. Randolph told me that when his father was painting Sarah it was so airless that she fainted, I could easily believe it. This pre-occupation with light was new to me; Helleu never seemed to notice whether the sun went behind a cloud or not when he was working in his white drawing-room.

  Cousin Winston asked Sickert at luncheon one day: ‘Suppose you had to send a single work of art to Mars, to show them the very best we could do on earth, what would you choose?’ Sickert thought for a while and then he said he would send Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way. When I got home I asked Tom the same question about music, and he chose Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.

  Eddie Marsh was very often at Chartwell. He was kind, gentle and witty, everything he said in his high-pitched squeaky voice sounded specially amusing. He fired us all with enthusiasm for various second-rate painters and some first-rate ones too, but his chief interest was the theatre. The Churchill children said that if he was asked what he thought of the play he would reply: ‘All plays are divine, but some are diviner than others.’ Eddie was the first grown-up person I ever met who treated me as an equal, in the sense of being ready to discuss a subject without the slightest trace of didacticism. This was a result of his exquisite politeness, and of course he taught us far more than do most of the usual run of dogmatic older people.

  Another regular at Chartwell was Professor Lindemann. He was not always busy with Cousin Winston, he found plenty of time to spend with us. We loved his company and his brilliant cleverness. Eddie Marsh had taught us a patience called, like the tea, Earl Grey. Prof would look over one’s shoulder while one was puzzling what to do, and say: ‘That won’t come out. There’s no point in going on,’ or else: ‘You can get that out in three moves.’ He was a real magician, a human ready-reckoner of lightning speed.

  He played a lot of tennis with Cousin Clementine and the other guests; he played to win. There was no thought of an exhilarating volley with Prof about; his method was to drop the ball just over the net with a spin on it to stop it bouncing, if his opponent was on the back line; or if the enemy was up at the net, he would scoop up the ball so that it fell dead on the back line before it could be reached. He must have been most tiresome to play against but it amused me to watch.

  Randolph told of Prof’s brave exploit at Farnborough during the war. Until 1916 if an aeroplane went into a spin it crashed and the pilot was killed. The Prof worked out mathematically how the pilot could get his machine out of a spin. He then learnt to fly, took up an aeroplane, put it into a spin and successfully demonstrated the truth of his theory.

  Another story Prof would neither confirm nor deny; it was that when the Dean of Christ Church reproached him for never going to communion he had replied: ‘I can’t. I’m a vegetarian.’ Randolph insisted: ‘You did say it, didn’t you, Prof?’ The Prof gave his little titter and changed the subject.

  We used to discuss undergraduates I knew; he disapproved of all of them. ‘A dreadful person’ was his usual summing-up, and of one cherished friend, Brian Howard, ‘Oh, you can’t like him. He’s a Jew.’ Unlike Muv, he definitely preferred people to be rich, and looked upon poverty as a fault. Rich himself, he bestowed rich gifts; he gave me a beautiful watch made of three different coloured golds.

  That summer at Chartwell I admitted to the Prof, under questioning, how bored I often was. ‘Why don’t you learn German?’ he said. ‘Learn German and read Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung.’

  When I left and we said goodbye: ‘Come and see me next term at Christ Church,’ said the Prof, ‘and tell me how you are getting on with your German.’

  ‘Oh, she won’t be allowed to,’ said Randolph. ‘Didn’t you know? Cousin Sydney has read her diary.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Randolph,’ I said not for the first time, nor for the las
t.

  When I got back to Swinbrook Farve was there. He looked rather pleased to see me, so I summoned up courage to ask him, ‘May I learn German?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Oh, Farve, why not? After all, Tom’s learning it.’ ‘That’s different. Tom’s a boy.’

  Strangely enough, at that very moment Tom was in Vienna, learning German. Yet Farve could not have been more put out if I had asked to learn the can-can. Tom had gone to Vienna for another reason as well; he thought he could take a final decision in that musical city as to whether he should devote his life to music, or whether he should go to the Bar.

  The Bar was thought to be an excellent profession for Tom because he loved arguing. He loved it so much that he offered a shilling an hour to anyone who would argue with him. By the time we got to Swinbrook we no longer argued; instead, we walked in the walled garden. His favourite flowers were the mallows; they reminded him of a Greek poem he knew. ‘Ay me, the mallows,’ he said, ‘when their pride is gone.’ The summer ended; he went back to Austria, not to Vienna but to Bernstein, a castle in the Burgenland belonging to a Hungarian, Janos von Almasy, a curiously fascinating man who became one of Tom’s dearest friends. He was a perfect companion for a clever boy, intellectually stimulating and with a Don Juan-like temperament. He took Tom to all the neighbouring castles; in one of these, Kohfidisch, lived two sisters, the Countesses Erdödy. Tom at the age of nineteen was rather in love with the younger of the two, Baby; he was also very much in love with German music and German literature.