Unlike the French, the Scotch will have no truck with any notion about a customer being always right; so wrong, in fact, is the customer that they almost succeed in making him feel guilty as well as hungry. Very grudgingly, a cheese sandwich was produced. I was much too sad and anxious to be cross, and sat in the cheerless lounge, where it was to be broad daylight for many a long hour, trying to telephone for news. The post office lady at Gribun said my mother was no worse.
Next day I arrived at teatime; it was her birthday, the tenth of May; she was eighty-three. She was obviously very ill. She had her four daughters, Madeau Stewart, two nurses and her devoted island people, the boatman and his family, her cook and maid, with her. Two of my grandchildren, Patrick and Marina Guinness, were also there when I arrived, with Nanny Fitzgerald. The children, aged five and six, were beautiful and kind. When taken in to see Muv they spoke loudly enough for her to hear, telling her how they had spent their day. She loved them. One evening I said to Patrick: ‘Perhaps better not go in to see Granny Muv tonight, she’s very poor,’ and he replied in the pretty Irish voice he had when he was a small child: ‘Is it poor she is? She must have been a wealthy young lady once, for she has everything so nice here.’
I repeated his words to Muv, it was one of the last times I saw her laugh, and as the sad days went by she said from time to time: ‘I’m not a very wealthy young lady today.’
The children went back to Ireland, and Desmond came to the island to say goodbye. Dr. Flora Macdonald came over from Mull except when it was too rough, but there was little she could do. Parkinson’s disease had my mother in its grip, she talked with difficulty and could hardly swallow. If one said: ‘How do you feel?’ she answered: ‘I feel like death,’ and she wished to die. We helped her to the window to see her Shetland pony foal, Easter Bonnet, who was destined to become a champion. She could no longer read, or even scrabble.
A very saintly man, Mr. Ogilvie Forbes, came and stayed on the island to help us. He understood the boats. One day he took us across the water to a tiny uninhabited island to see the birds’ nests. When we jumped ashore a cloud of squawking, shrieking sea-birds, every imaginable species of gull and duck, flew into the air and hovered anxiously and noisily about while we picked our way among innumerable nests, thick on the ground. The moment when all the birds flew up in the air put me in mind of when Faust’s old coat gets a shake and the insects and moths fly out all chattering together.
We took it in turns to sit with Muv, she liked to have one of us there and the one she liked best was Pam, calm and practical. Then she fell into the sleep they call coma. When she died, Mr. Ogilvie-Forbes got a piper who played a lament as she made her last journey over the sea to Mull in the Puffin. She was buried near Farve at Swinbrook. We were in the vale of tears, and I felt suddenly twenty years older.
My mother’s loyalty to us was wonderful. She was devoted to M., and he to her. When she was in London, even after she became old and frail, she insisted on going to his meetings. Once in Kensington Town Hall some well-wisher had put tear gas in the heating system; the audience coughed and spluttered and tears poured from our eyes. Muv was undaunted. While the politicians ran the country downhill, she recognized in M. the combination of intelligence and character which could have halted our further decline, despite the war which had proved so costly to Britain. She never forgave the politicians who had imprisoned M. and his patriotic followers during the war; she was outraged when they instituted imprisonment without trial, something previously reserved for Ireland and our colonies, in England itself.
Her intelligence, common sense and uncompromising honesty were out of the ordinary, but it is her love, and her laughter, that make her irreplaceable. Not only did my four sons mourn her but also my grandchildren. Their great-grandmother and her fascinating island had been part of their lives as long as they could remember; for them too it was the end of a chapter.
During the événements in Paris in May 1968, in what was to prove her last illness-free spring, Nancy and I talked several times a day on the telephone. The troubles had blown up in a storm when the political sky had seemed cloudless. The automatic telephone was one of the few things which still worked, despite the general strike. Trains and buses were at a standstill, there was no post, no newspapers, the petrol pumps were dry. At the height of the crisis, Nancy rang me up to say: ‘The General has left Paris and nobody knows where he is!’ De Gaulle had flown, without even telling his prime minister, Georges Pompidou, where he was going. The moment I heard this piece of news, it came to me in a flash that he must have gone to Germany, where the army was stationed. I said: ‘I expect he’s gone to see the generals,’ and this proved to be the case. As my guesses are often wrong, I cannot resist boasting that just for once I guessed right. After this things gradually went back to normal, the student’s barricades were cleared off the streets of the quartier latin, there was a large all-round increase in wages, and at the elections a big swing to the right; but for de Gaulle it was the beginning of the end.
Nancy’s long and painful illness lasted nearly five years; it began towards the end of 1968. She had moved from the rue Monsieur to a house she bought in Versailles; a house associated in my mind with suffering and misery. Nancy herself liked it, and she loved its little garden. Ever since she had lodged in Versailles while writing Pompadour and The Sun King she had been in love with the place, and made up her mind to live there. She let the garden rip, saying it was a champ fleuri, and so it was in May and June. During the other months it looked rather neglected and tussocky, until in the winter the uncut grass turned yellow and grey. Like Lady Evelyn Guinness forty years earlier, she preferred it so.
Early in 1969 Nancy came up to Paris, and as we often did we spent the day together. Before going back to Versailles she suggested, as it was a mild afternoon, we might sit for a while in the gardens of the Palais Royal.
She said quietly: ‘I’ve got very bad news about Mark. He’s dying.’ Mark Ogilvie-Grant was unique in Nancy’s life; probably he was to her what my brother Tom had been to me. They wrote to one another constantly, and she stayed with him in Athens almost every summer. She used to say: ‘Mark locks me into the house at night while he goes out Jekylling and Hyding,’ and Mark laughed indulgently. Now she was deeply sad. He had been unwell of late, and had gone to London for medical tests. Cancer of the oesophagus was diagnosed; he had an operation and died about a week later. Mark’s death was a cruel blow to Nancy, already feeling none too well herself, and henceforward nothing seemed to go quite right for her.
Her last book, Frederick the Great, she finished when she was already ill. She bravely travelled to east Berlin and Dresden accompanied by Pam and Mr. and Mrs. Richard Law, in order to see Potsdam, Sans Souci, the Neues Palais, and as many places as possible built by or associated with the Prussian king. She had hoped to go to Silesia, but was not well enough. I followed their journey with anxiety, wondering how Nancy would stand the effort involved. She and Pam wrote often, from cheque-point Charlie (Pam’s inspired spelling) onward. Despite bouts of pain Nancy enjoyed everything, including (according to her) delicious food, vegetables and above all potatoes ‘tasting like they did when one was a child’. Apparently this was because they were not grown in artificial manure, and the official in charge of the party told her that before long there would be plenty of fertilizers to make the potatoes taste of nothing; he was quite cross about the fuss the sisters made of the delicious ‘D.D.R.’ potatoes.
In one of Frederick’s castles Nancy became friendly with the learned curator, who spoke French. She promised her a copy of the book, and as soon as it was published she put it in the post. It came back unopened; the curator was not allowed to receive a book from the west.
As Nancy knew no German I translated what was necessary, Frederick-William’s letters to his son, and the replies, for example, and as a reward (and perhaps also because we had both been so amused by Carlyle’s Frederick) she dedicated the book to me. ‘It’s not only the
best book I’ve ever written, it’s the best book I’ve ever read,’ she said.
Reading was her solace during those horrible years of illness. Everyone sent her books, knowing how she dreaded a bookless day; Heywood Hill’s, Hamish Hamilton, friends and relations and writers, but she was not always pleased. ‘I can’t think what’s come over the shop,’ she used to say. (Heywood Hill was always ‘the shop’.) ‘How can they imagine I’m going to read this?’ and into the poubelle went the offerings. The truth was we were all at our wit’s end. In order to satisfy, the book had to interest or amuse, it must not be too dry, or entail too much effort, yet the silly and trivial exasperated her. Trollope was a stand-by, for luckily she had read hardly any of his novels before, but she preferred something to make her laugh aloud. The first volume of Malcolm Muggeridge’s ‘Chronicle of Wasted Time’, The Green Stick, entranced her. ‘It’s dazzling,’ she said; and she loved Girls will be Girls by Arthur Marshall. The only magazine she enjoyed was Private Eye; it made her laugh, though as she seldom read a newspaper one had to explain the background of some of the jokes. Other magazines from England and America lay in heaps, unopened.
During those terrible years I realized that laughter can, up to a point, chase away pain. Often when I arrived to sit with her she would be lying in misery, and after a while she could sit up and be as funny and brilliant as ever. My theory was that this had a physiological reason: the blood ran faster and the pain diminished. This is probably nonsense, medically speaking; but what do doctors know about pain? (Or care, one might add. It sometimes seems to be the last thing that worries them.)
Yet except for a few great friends and her sisters, Nancy dreaded the company that might have cheered her. She feared the onset of her pain, and that she would be obliged to send people away when they had made the effort to come down to Versailles. This made me regret the rue Monsieur.
The pain (it was an ache, a cramp, in her back and her leg, and was thought to be rheumatism, or something to do with her spine) generally came on in the morning, and it was then that she wrote innumerable letters to sisters and friends. Upon receipt of these letters, a pathetic mixture of jokes and despair, the friends would write to me. Surely, they would say, something could be done to help her? The truth was that, until very late in the day when it was discovered that she was suffering from a rare form of cancer, all the things we did and all the miseries she submitted to simply made her worse. The diagnosis, when it came, was too late to save her.
Almost the worst of the miseries of those years were endured in the Rothschild hospital in Paris, where she had painful tests. There were no private rooms and she was obliged to share a double room; during her stay she had three different roommates; unluckily they went from bad to worse, and the last of the three did unmentionable things which drove Nancy into the depths of depression. I am not at all sure that, if one cannot be alone, a ward is not preferable to sharing a room with one insensitive and stupid person. When the day of deliverance came I fetched her in an ambulance, which tore along the road to Versailles at top speed ringing its alarm non-stop, a thrilling race which she very much enjoyed. M. and I interviewed the hospital doctors. The tests had shown nothing at all, so that the whole uncomfortable sojourn had been useless. The pain went on as before.
The same uselessness applied also to the quacks and the real doctors she consulted, the former recommended by friends as healing wonder-workers. We spent our lives in waiting-rooms, nervously looking at Match or Elle and hoping against hope for the cure that never came. Although these outings combined the maximum of boredom for us both with exhaustion for Nancy, I believe they were worth while. It was important to be able to hope, and to be trying to find the cure which eluded her. Strangely enough, both the quacks and the doctors shared the same formula. When she telephoned after a week or so to tell them there had been no improvement in her condition since the new treatment, and that the pain plagued her as before, they always had the same answer.
‘Ah! You must give it time! At least three weeks!’ After twenty-two days she would say sadly: ‘The three weeks are up.’ I went away to Venice each summer, and Debo, Kitty Mersey, Pam, Cynthia Gladwyn, Billa Harrod or Dig Yorke came over from England in turns to be with her, also Decca from America. I must have told Nancy in a letter that, arrived in Venice, I had slept the clock round, for she wrote back: ‘Why were you so tired? You haven’t been doing much, have you?’ She had no notion of the anxieties, the telephonings, the conferences with doctors, the emotional wear and tear of being a helpless onlooker while she suffered. It is a terrible thing to see a person close to one gripped in incurable disease.
Occasionally I felt almost sorry for the doctors, upon whom she could not resist pouring out witty sarcasms. Bedside manner is more important than healthy people realize, and attempts at a sort of hearty familiarity mixed with an implied: ‘Don’t worry, leave it all to me. I know best’ attitude infuriates a clever though medically ignorant patient who is getting steadily, and visibly, worse day by day. To one of her doctors she wrote: ‘If I were as bad at writing books as you are at curing people I should starve.’
During several months when she was in a London hospital Pam and Debo took over. Once when I visited her there she asked me to get her an alarm clock. She wanted to set it so as to be sure not to miss a wireless programme: ‘All gas and gaiters.’ No visitor, nurse or doctor was allowed into Nancy’s room when ‘All gas and gaiters’ was on the air.
She came back to France to die. When spring came we moved her bed to the window so that she could see her champ fleuri, at its very prettiest with moon daisies, buttercups and poppies under the apple blossom.
Nancy’s illness taught me many things, of which the gloomiest is that the theory that doctors have mastered pain is rubbish. ‘With these marvellous new drugs, nobody need suffer now,’ people say. Nancy had all the marvellous drugs, in ever-increasing quantities, and until she entered the final coma and life was slipping away, she suffered. As with my mother’s last illness, when it was obvious that she could not recover and her miseries became too great to be borne, the bitter moment came when I found myself wishing she could die; her own reiterated wish. The unfairness of it overwhelmed me; why should she die when she enjoyed life so much, and gave pleasure to millions with her books? I felt, like Simone de Beauvoir and her sister when their mother died (‘Une mort très douce’), that were it not for the fact that it happens to every one of us soon or late, the ‘injustice’ of it would be beyond bearing.
She died on the last day of June, 1973, and we took her ashes to Swinbrook, where the little church was full of friends and relations, many of them the very same as had come to Unity’s funeral twenty-five years before. The liturgy is, miraculously, unchanged. It is a marvel that somebody has not improved upon ‘the twinkling of an eye’, substituting ‘one-tenth of a second’ in place of the beautiful, imaginative words. And the vale of tears? Yes, up to a point, Nancy’s life had its share of tears. But in her books, and for her friends, she invented wonderful laughter, and the longer I live the more I value this gift. It is a sign of sharp intelligence, and it gives endless pleasure. Yet I believe I said, when she died, her life has been too sad to contemplate. I was thinking of her unlucky love affairs. In truth, her great success as a writer was an enormous compensation.
Nancy’s first biographer was her old, much-loved friend Harold Acton. He sat at a great table in a disused room at Chatsworth, it was smothered in her letters: to Muv, to Mark, to Alvilde Lees-Milne, Mrs. Hammersley and many more. He wrote Nancy Mitford: A Memoir, using these letters in such a way that one hears her voice all through his book. Pam and Debo and I went in and out, disturbing him, my sisters accompanied by enormous dogs whose wagging tails swept the letters off the table and on to the floor. Harold worked for long hours, and renewed himself among the beauties in which Chatsworth abounds: pictures, books, gardens and the wintry park with its huge and aged oaks. He took his choice of letters back to Florence, and soon his bo
ok was ready.
28.
LAUGHTER AND THE LOVE OF FRIENDS
At the end of a long life it seems to me true that Belloc’s ‘laughter and the love of friends’ are indeed among the things that have made it worth living; friends, and relations. Although I believe in Wahlverwandtschaft, elective affinity or the relationship of choice, which has given me a supremely happy marriage, I treasure my sisters, children, step-children and grandchildren, and the amusement of shared jokes with clever descendants. Tolstoy says happy families are all alike, but it should never be forgotten that luck can change overnight. It can happen to anyone, as it happened to Balzac’s Curé de Tours, that a seemingly perfect and well-regulated life quite suddenly begins to unravel and disintegrate. Therefore a wise person will cherish every moment of contentment, amusement or ecstasy as it comes.
I have written pages here about Nancy and Unity and almost nothing about my other sisters, but since they are such an important part of my life I must try to sketch them in, however superficially. Pam’s kindness to M. and me at various dire moments in the past I have already described. There is nothing she would not do for a sister; she is boundlessly staunch and generous. Pam is a real country person, like Farve. Like him, she prefers animals to people, and woods and fields to any town. She lives in a charming house in Gloucestershire with a Beatrix Potter view, not one ugly thing in sight. Her food is perfection. She has got an unrivalled memory for the food of long ago, and can describe a dinner eaten in 1930 as though it were yesterday. Her descriptions are idiosyncratic: ‘Nard, isn’t hare soup the richest, loveliest soup you ever laid hands on?’
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 32
