Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  The visit to Potsdam Nancy longed for had to be postponed. From Versailles she wrote to Sir Hugh Jackson in September: ‘I had rather an agitating time when I left Venice, trying to get to East Germany. I got as far as Bayreuth, then heard that the hotels were not honouring their vouchers (the rooms full of Russian officers probably). The young people who were to take me in their motor not at all anxious to have a try and in the end I abandoned the idea. I saw Wilhelmina’s pretty little palace at Bayreuth and called on Frau Winifred Wagner who is an old friend of my family’s (Siegfried Wagner an intimate friend of my Redesdale grandfather’s). She is not very old because she married at sixteen when her husband was in his fifties but she seems a sort of historical monument and is now the Queen of Bayreuth. I loved her.’

  ‘Then I went to my sister [Pam] near Zürich and rather fell in love with that part of Switzerland. It is so very clean and unspoilt (not Zürich itself but the country), the little villages looking like Victorian coloured engravings of Switzerland all in points.’

  ‘Now I’ve begun my book. An excellent little book on Frederick has just appeared by a German, Ritter, now dead. I’ve been reading a book about Maria Theresa by an American professor Pick (?) full of interesting things but the English so appalling one often has to read a sentence two or three times to see what he’s getting at. Isn’t it funny that they can’t seem to master the language… All quiet here and the students are behaving themselves again and the workers busy doing over time to make up for May. Thank goodness.’

  ‘There’s a fascinating Exposition Hoche at our town hall here,’ she told Sir Hugh Jackson. ‘He is the local boy who made good. It seems he tried to land an army at Bantry Bay in conjunction with Wolf Tone. Well, in 1920 (note the date) the Irish sent a bronze laurel leaf to the town of Versailles saying Ireland thanks Hoche, and our Embassy made such a song and dance about it that it has been hidden ever since. But it’s the first thing you see at the exhibition! Hoche must have been an enormous man, they’ve got his coat. Next year of course is the bicentenary of Napoleon and great junketings are planned.’

  ‘I must get back to my work, it is very difficult but I begin to see daylight. I think I shall take nearly everything out of his own letters, which are so funny, and let him explain himself. P.S. How do you translate the word esprit? I think it’s impossible. A reviewer once said Miss M. clearly doesn’t know French, she translates esprit (un homme d’esprit) as a clever, amusing person. Honnête homme do you think “gentleman”?’

  In compensation for Potsdam Nancy was able to visit Prague in October as a guest of the French Ambassador. From the Palais Buquoy she wrote enthusiastically to her sister Debo on 6th November: ‘I’m terribly glad I came. You never saw such a marvellous town—I put it after Paris and Venice and only after Paris because I happen to prefer French architecture. Miles before Leningrad. There are acres and acres of marvels and every now and then you turn a corner and there is a forest, a real one, not a public park.’

  ‘The Russians are pathetic and vile. Dreadful stupid-looking very young dwarfs. The shop windows which would be a joke if not so sad—tasteful displays of paper clips or plastic waste paper baskets—simply fascinate the Conquerors, they stand glued. It seems they are told “see how the Czechs live, on your money—Russia has been subsidizing them for twenty years.” As nobody can speak Russian or would speak to them if they could, everything is believed.’

  ‘I’ve seen an incredible lot of people as well as things. Went to call on a professor in Alphy’s mother’s house (Kinsky). “I’ve got all the Clary archives in that cupboard.” “Oh indeed! All the foreigners here love the Czechs, at least the ones I’ve seen do. Our English Ambassador is a nice clever man who speaks Czech so of course is being replaced at Xmas by one who doesn’t.’

  ‘The general level of drabness tells the tale of twenty years of Socialism. I suppose Mr Wilson hopes to make England like that how strange. Everywhere Liberté (in French) is painted on the walls and photographs of Dubcek among the paper clips. The embassies all have little lorries which go to a German market town for food—here there is nothing but red cabbages like in my garden. Smashing food in this house of course. The Ambassador goes out shooting a lot which it seems is marvellous—black with pheasants—and is an invisible export. You can shoot a bear for 4000 dollars. My plane was full of people with guns. Coming?’

  To Alvilde Lees-Milne she described her visit to Prague as ‘a huge success’. ‘THE FOREST—real, not Hyde Park, creeping in everywhere,’ delighted her even more than the great Baroque palaces of Italian inspiration which had survived the Seven Years’ War and Russian conquest. ‘I had a lovely time altogether and being the only new face for weeks was made a fuss of! And I feel, for my book, I’ve had a taste of Central Europe.’

  Next year she planned to go to Potsdam and Dresden with her sister Pam, ‘then on to see l’Abbé-Prince Lubomirski who lives in a little country town in the middle of the brave boy’s battlefields… Home via Prague which I long to see in the spring sunshine.’

  13

  ALTHOUGH SHE COMPLAINED of low stamina and ‘a mass of allergics’ Nancy had seldom been seriously ill. Having kept her youthful features and figure, she produced an impression of glowing health.

  Since childhood her mother had inculcated in her a confidence in the recuperative powers of the Good Body and she had steered clear of the medical profession. Commiserating with Sir Hugh Jackson’s arthritis, she had written: ‘Those wretched doctors always go on as if they had conquered pain and illness but really all they can do is to give plastic kidneys to business men or whatever it is. Everybody else has the same diseases as our grandparents—no cure possible.’ When I asked her to recommend a Parisian doctor she replied with a faint air of disgust that she had never needed one. It was if I had asked her for something improper. Of the renowned American Hospital at Neuilly she spoke as of a charnel-house. One could not suspect that her sparkling eyes had given her trouble, but this was probably due to prolonged sessions of reading and small print.

  Reading was Nancy’s sole excess; in everything else she was moderate. Thanking Valentine Lawford for the treat he had given her with his Bound for Diplomacy, she remarked: ‘I am obliged to ration myself for fear of finishing too soon and you don’t know how unusual that is—I generally finish off a book by turning 3 pages at a time and into the poubelle (whence these wretched time-wasters are retrieved by a young student who lives chez Monseigneur à côté and who gives my concierge a box of chocs at Christmas in return). Yours will go straight into the book case I need hardly add.’

  While she had a fastidious palate she ate and drank sparingly. Even in her twenties Evelyn Waugh had remarked to Maurice Bowra that she was a ‘nice cheap girl to take out for the evening. Costs you only eighteen and six for an orangeade at a night club.’ She used to quote with approval Eddy Sackville’s dictum that rich food does nobody any harm: it is poor food that kills people. Generally she tried to avoid late nights. After ten o’clock, as she said, she dropped off her perch, yet she relished the accounts of her friends’ nocturnal outings, of their fancy dress parties and frolics. ‘People come with widely differing accounts of balls and what they must have cost,’ she told Robin McDouall. ‘The giver really ought to chalk it up somewhere as it’s the only feature of the entertainment which really interests the convives. How awful the next day must be, with hangover, filthy house, furious neighbours and the Bill.’

  In spite of low stamina an inner flame of vitality sustained her, whereas most of her friends required some additional stimulant.

  Twenty years previously, on 16th February, 1948, Nancy had written to her mother: ‘I’ve been awfully unwell, better now and up, for the first time for a week, today. I had such ghastly pains all over, specially in my back, that I had to be completely doped for three whole days and nothing makes one feel worse than that… Couldn’t read or write or even turn on the wireless it was such torture to move an inch.’

  ‘I thin
k Evelyn [Waugh] did it—his dedication of his new book [The Loved One] is an urn with N.M. on it—he sent it to me to see and at once I was laid low. The book is a yell… I don’t think I’ve ever screamed more with laughter—can’t imagine what the public will make of it. He has been warned it will ruin him in America.’

  Since then the pains had vanished completely, and all of us who had seen Nancy during the last twenty years were struck by her apparent immunity to disease. In the meantime The Loved One had become a minor classic.

  Now towards the end of January 1969 she began to suffer from excruciating pain. The cause was mysterious and there were many conjectures—sciatica, rheumatism, spinal arthritis—but the pain was lancinating, ghoulish. During rare intervals of relief she unburdened herself in letters to her sisters and closest friends. Her work on Frederick was suspended. That it ever came to fruition was a triumph of her will power and a proof that Clio, the muse of history, was a guardian angel who never failed her in sickness as in health. Gleams of stoical humour broke through the dense clouds of her suffering. Hope was often deferred yet ‘against hope she believed in hope’. All her friends conspired to persuade her that a cure would soon be found. The death of her old friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant at this time was a cruel blow. He died of cancer but at least he was spared the prolonged agony to which Nancy was condemned. In Mark she had lost a confidant who for his sympathy and instinctive understanding almost replaced her beloved brother Tom. His influence on her early life cannot be overestimated.

  Nancy’s letters from now on are a chronicle of suffering endured with a determination to see the funny side of even the most harrowing experiences. Were it not for the flashes of her gallant spirit I would forbear to quote them. Perhaps having known her I hear her laugh through her misery. She still took pleasure in so many of life’s hors d’oeuvre, and this makes her letters all the more poignant. Those to women friends are the most vivid and revealing: she thought aloud in them—they are letters of flesh and blood. To Alvilde Lees-Milne for instance, 24th March, 1969:

  ‘Yes I’ve been on my back for a month with a colonne vertébrale dégradée in such pain that I only longed to SPEAK. Stop stop I’ll tell you everything. However, I managed not to be lugged off to a hospital but to stay in my own pretty room. Then just as I was (am) much better they have dis covered a lump on my liver and lights which has got to be investigated (THE END of course) this week in circumstances of barbaric torture including 24 hours without drinking. So for about a week I prepared to meet my God and then THEY seemed very much surprised that I harboured such gloomy thoughts (screaming with laughter actually of course) and said nobody who looks as well as I do could be on the way out. They might have said so in the first place. But they want to know exactly what it is. Anyway I adore the doctor who is young and charming and the whole neighbourhood here has been so angelic sending fresh eggs and things. I think the Versailles people are the very nicest in the world. Then I’ve had Diana [her sister] daily and of course old Marie and Colonel the regulars—I haven’t felt up to anybody else. But have managed to work a bit.’

  ‘So—all very dull I fear, it’s awful what a bore one becomes. I bore poor Diana to death. I mean hot news is whether I have or have not taken a drug.’

  ‘Excuse writing I’m upside down. I must say nobody could mind a month in bed less than me, it’s the pain I object to.’

  ‘I do hear lovely things on the English wireless viz. England is now the abortion centre of the world and we can earn millions, more than Fords, in foreign currency from it.’

  ‘Oh Mark. I mind terribly—it was cancer. He was taken to England where the doctors killed him in about a fort night. Anna Maria says why can’t we all go together, how I agree.’

  To Geoffrey Gilmour, with whom she usually spent Christ mas in the rue du Bac after Marie’s retirement, she wrote on 29th March: ‘I did the tests yesterday. The comic relief was so great I hardly minded them it was like a horror film of the worst variety. One was constantly left, naked, in the dark while they developed the films, like children with a Brownie, in a sort of kitchen sink next door. Everybody divine like they are here at Versailles. Of course now we have les fêtes so I shan’t know my fate I suppose for another age but the lump remains mysterious, nothing to do with kidney (said to be très joli) and the radiologist wouldn’t hazard a guess. I wonder if it’s my twin brother one has heard of that: a little old man with a white beard. Little Lord Redesdale, shrieking away, might be an addition to rue d’Artois and Diana’s dinner parties—la coqueluche de Paris. Anything for a new face.’

  To Sir Hugh Jackson, who had become her literary arbiter, she wrote: ‘As a matter of fact what I’ve got is painful but not dangerous. I’ve had it since Christmas and when finally last week I went to the doctor the following dialogue took place. “Why didn’t you come sooner?” “Because everybody told me it would go away.” “Who is everybody?” “Oh, the femme de ménage and so on.” “Funny sort of professors you have.”’

  ‘Frederick was excessively odd but not bad. Of course he was Voltairean though I think he believed in God more than Voltaire did—probably in predestination. He became a Free-mason early in life to annoy his father and soon dropped it saying that it was great rubbish. He loved his friends deeply, it is quite untrue that he behaved badly to them—they nearly all died young, to his despair. In the end he was left with the old Earl Marischal and he too died before Frederick who then became a real hermit.’

  ‘I can’t imagine that he would have wanted a revolution anywhere—he was all for order and quite clever enough to see that one revolution leads to another. The odd thing is that, although he lived until the Affaire du Collier he never seems to have realized that things were so dicky in France. But then, did anybody? We should have loved him, if only for the jokes.’

  ‘I’ve just finished with the Seven Years War and am au bout de souffle not quite knowing how to deal with the last years—23 of them. Carlyle drops him like a hot potato at this point and so, I see, do most biographers. The Partition of Poland daunts me. I must confess the Seven Years War is completely fascinating.’

  ‘I’m supposed, in May, to go to Dresden, Potsdam and the battlefields. I’ve got an old friend Lubomirski, a Jesuit (I call him l’Abbé Prince) who lives at Kalisz and will escort me to the Silesian points of interest. If I can’t go owing to health it will kill me with disappointment mais n’anticipons pas.’

  On 1st April: ‘My health drags on the same. I did all the tests and am now waiting to hear what is thought of them. If I can’t go to Germany, where Pam and I and Joy Law are to be the guests of the Communist government!!! (screams, as all will be so furious) I shall die of disappointment that’s all. It’s now five weeks I’ve been in bed being a nuisance to everybody—though apart from that fact none could mind less than I do. It’s the pain that I object to. The doctors never loom, they are far too busy injecting blood into the lunatics who kill and maim thousands every day on the roads. I said to Marie this morning how nice it was in the old days when doctors used to look in to see how you were and she says even in her village, where things were far from perfect, the doctor would come along in his gig and see what was up. Oh gig oh isn’t the world vile. Now you telephone and some horrid secretary says she will faire la commission. No doubt they think at one’s age it’s hardly worth bothering—but then they ought to finish you off. I’m told they do in England.’

  23rd April: ‘I’m in a perfectly heavenly clinic—view on trees—dead quiet—huge old-fashioned room—nuns and three-star food. I’m to be cut up tomorrow. The surgeon is a very cold man of few words. He said, Madame vous êtes un mystère. Si vous permettez je vous opérerai jeudi matin. They haven’t the faintest idea what IT is, won’t they be surprised when little Lord Redesdale makes his bow! The bore is it probably won’t cure my back, though it possibly may.’

  ‘Oh servants—X has got a very grand expensive couple, the woman says my husband’s in the toilet and he says the puppy has had a mot
ion in the hall. It transpires that they are debtors how sinister. I can’t understand why those thousands of unemployed we hear about don’t queue up for a spot of gracious living… instead of hanging about the empty mines… Diana comes tomorrow to hear Famous Last Words.’

  May Day, from Clinique Georges Bizet: ‘They literally sawed me in half… and the appalling pain in my back has gone and it was nothing to do with rheumatism (I was dreading a rheumy old age) but caused by a large lump exactly in my waist. How odd! The pain was bottom of my back and one leg, so much time was wasted on X-raying, etc., all that… Debo and Diana sat and listened to my ravings after the operation all day—if that’s not faithful!’

  6th June, home in Versailles: ‘I’m very miserable. The pain has come back worse than ever and I have the choice between the drugs they give me which make me stupid and give me a headache—make me feel as if I’d been in a night-club, or literally bellowing with anguish. In neither case can I work. The doctors look at me sadly because there is nothing wrong with my back whatever, it is pristine. They swim in a sea of total ignorance in fact and fall back on that meaningless word rheumatism.’

  ‘Poor Marie is so affected seeing me like this that it makes her ill, so I’m sending her home to prendre sa retraite. I’ve got a very nice person (I think and hope) to replace her, a doctor’s daughter who is fed up with working in offices. She perhaps won’t mind the moans and groans of a stranger. Marie literally suffers herself she minds so much. I must say it’s an appalling pain… I’ve had to chuck Venice.’