Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  On 10th September: ‘Posting letters here is rather like throwing them into the canal but anyway here goes… The doctor here saves me from the very worst by putting my back in when it pops out but he can’t cure my leg and I have as usual varying degrees of pain. I now think of trying the man who indubitably cured Alphy [Clary] and at 83 has turned him into a two-year-old. He is English but one hasn’t heard of him actually killing anybody, unlike most English doctors. The horror of going to London and seeing Knightsbridge barracks, which I had hoped for ever to avoid, might be compensated for if I could be cured of this grinding pain. I’d really go to Hell—anywhere except New York in fact.’

  ‘When not in extremis I’ve adored it here as usual. Anna Maria has shown a new side to her nature, she is extraordinary when one is ill and knows at once when I’m in anguish. The other day she got up at a huge dinner and sent for the motor boat and packed me into it—I thought nobody could have noticed. But that hasn’t happened often and I’ve stood up to the life pretty well… Still hot and lovely and we go to the beach…’

  ‘It seems the Saving of Venice is at last getting under weigh… There’s a government here now which can and does take certain vital decisions. The clever French have bagged the Salute and are doing it up with great placards everywhere Comité Français. The English are relegated to the Madonna dell’Orto and are anyway running out of money…’

  ‘Fanny Botkin’s flat may be for sale, perhaps the nicest flat in Europe. But I couldn’t live anywhere except France and never have much desire for two houses.’

  That she even considered Mme Botkin’s flat shows that Nancy could still look forward confidently to a cure. I saw her at this time as the guest of Contessa Cicogna and the change in her appearance gave me a shock I attempted to camouflage with a gush of gossip. Her emaciation, and the sharp, almost audible twinges of pain as she dragged one poor leg after the other were distressing to witness. Her charming features were tense with anxiety when she fell silent and when she moved one pretended to look in another direction. But having received an advance copy of her Frederick the Great I could tell her honestly of my admiration for what was, after all, a triumph in the circumstances, a tour de force when much of her force had ebbed. Her choice of a hero seemed to me perverse though Nancy doted on military commanders. It was as if she were coming round full circle to her father’s views. Because the corpse-crammed career of her hero was repugnant to my nature she too might brand me a ‘sewer’. Sans Souci and Voltaire and the flute-playing could not obscure for me the reality of Spartan drills, manoeuvres, harsh discipline, carnage and destruction. I failed to warm towards such a martial monarch but I suppose Nancy’s femininity was attracted to his resolute maleness. At times she nearly succeeded in making him sympathetic. Her book betrays no symptom of mental or physical fatigue.

  My young German friend Alexander Zielcke also cheered her with his enthusiasm, and I was amazed when she decided to join us in Anna Maria’s motor boat after luncheon for an excursion to the Madonna dell’Orto, which had recently been restored with the aid of English funds. Together we gazed at Giovanni Bellini’s blithe Virgin and Cima’s elegant Renaissance Saints, and the huge Tintorettos glowed dramatically in the afternoon light, but Nancy had to sit down on the steps of the altar in evident anguish and the desperate swarm of Tintoretto’s Last Judgement alarmed me less than her forlorn figure, though she assured me in a whisper that she would soon be quite all right. Her face had become that of a martyr. Our return to Cà Cicogna through the flickering canals was overcast with sombre premonitions. The lithe Nancy I had known was reduced to a limping shadow yet her keenly observant spirit was still ready to laugh. Though we corresponded frequently I was never to see her again.

  On 17th September she informed Sir Hugh: ‘I am in considerable pain nearly all the time. I go home next week having been here since 10 July… I love this town more and more but haven’t been able to see anything as the only relief comes from lying in the hot sun on the beach. Luckily my room has got a most heavenly view over the Zattere and I can see the huge ships, some even bigger than the churches, going up to the port. It’s very amusing.

  ‘Don’t you think all these men in aeroplanes who let themselves be captured are too feeble for words? I can’t see any of my relations putting up with it for a minute and I despise them from the bottom of my heart. I hope you’ll enjoy Frederick. P.S. A Pakistani went into a wine merchant’s. “Can you recommend a good port?” “Yes, Southampton and now b—off.”’

  ‘I suppose though I greatly fear it will be the usual story: one thinks one is cured for a bit then all begins again,’ Nancy confessed to Alvilde Lees-Milne. However, she made an appointment with a London specialist recommended by Prince Clary. ‘Perhaps he will cure me at once. Alphy swears he will,’ she told Princess Loewenstein, who had invited her to stay during the ordeal. ‘If he doesn’t cure me I think I will mettre fin à mes jours but how?,’ she asked Raymond Mortimer. ‘It’s so difficult, because I can’t see the point of its being a punishment. I think I’ve been punished enough. Après rack very soon ended in a nice little hanging after all… English doctors have killed three quarters of my friends and the joke is the remaining quarter go on recommending them, so odd is human nature. We have seen the same thing with Louis XIV and Fagon. You may say I long for death, well yes, but I long even more to be cured. Dr. S. hasn’t killed anybody known to me and has cured three, so I don’t mind trying him… My good doctor here says “il faut frapper à toutes les portes.” I shall get to know Europe. I haven’t been to England for three years and had hoped never to go again…’

  ‘If I hadn’t been so unwell I would have enjoyed my visit to you more than any for years—even with the racking pain thrown in I absolutely loved it,’ she wrote to Prince Rupert Loewenstein on 8th November. ‘Now I am far worse—can hardly crawl and the pain is horrible. But oddly enough I still have confidence in S. and a speedy cure… I’ve seen nobody. I’m too bad to and have no desire to bestir myself. Sister Pam is here thank goodness.’

  ‘Useless to pretend that I am any better,’ she wrote again on the 13th. ‘I only hope Dig [Mrs. Henry Yorke, whom she had invited to stay] won’t have too dull a time but of course the awful truth is she will. I had the romantic idea that I should be leaping about and able to go sightseeing with her but all I can do is limp round the garden looking for my tortoise who, like Captain Oates, has gone out into the cold and disappeared… Lesley Blanch came just now. She is writing a book on Pavilions of the Heart and wants to turn the Monster of Glamis into a Demon Lover. I said, but Lesley he was a poor old thing with an elephant’s head who lived on worms. She is the archetype of the Lady Writer and I love teasing her.’

  During Dig Yorke’s visit Nancy felt that ‘on the whole there is progress. Dig is being too lovely. We sit all day chatting and I’m being put in the picture about my contemporaries: N. Then what about So and so? D. Haven’t you heard? And what I haven’t heard is never that they have won the Irish Sweep.’

  After Dig left, Nancy had a fearful relapse, ‘mostly in tears of pain mixed with rage and despair… Oh the world! how much better off we shall all be in the next one. And yet one’s pretty house, the sunshine, the bird’s moving in for the winter, Hassan and his niceness and all one’s friends can’t but attach one to it. If only somebody would invent a pain killer which killed pain, everything would be so delightful.’ But her doctor would only allow brandy for the time being. ‘I never expected to be an old lady with a tell-tale bottle in the bathroom. The worst of it is that while I’m drunk I’m all right but I’ve got a very strong head, it takes a huge amount and the effect doesn’t last very long and then I feel of course liverish as well…’

  ‘No words to describe what I’m enduring now,’ she told Raymond Mortimer. ‘I don’t ask anybody here unless they suggest coming as I’m so dull. The Brandos and various regulars appear, but it worries them and tires me though I expect it’s a good thing sometimes… My consolation—these
awful days—has been Goethe’s Italian journey (Penguin). Written in 1786, it describes Italy as you and I have known it. Oh dear that earnest, noble young German, how different from Voltaire and the Great King and how much one prefers really those two old sinners! His great hope in Italy is that he may find the Primal Plant, whatever that may be! But his descriptions of landscapes and buildings and Vesuvius erupting are masterly. Then, what’s so funny, he keeps describing his own works and makes them sound utterly unreadable.’

  Brief periods of hope alternated with black despair. It was a distraction and a relief to write letters and she wrote a great many to her friends in a script always clear even when tremulous. Those to Raymond Mortimer and myself prove that books were the most effective adjutants to pain killers: ‘I read about a book a day.’ And she envisaged writing her memoirs:

  ‘My souvenirs will have the piquant originality of starting poor. They nearly always start rich, don’t they!’

  She tried to count her blessings: ‘I can’t go downstairs but the garden is divine to look at from my room and my servants so infinitely good and kind (Hassan and the daily), and I’ve found a dear little Portuguese for Sundays. All that is a great great comfort.’

  ‘Don’t speak of birds’ nests. From where I sit I’ve actually seen three gobbled by crows and one father blackbird eaten by the neighbours’ vile hateful cat. I’m getting a water pistol for Hassan, would gladly give him a real gun.’

  ‘… I’m going to plant masses more roses as I see they are perfectly happy in my long grass. Do tell the names of those you mentioned which begin later. Mine will be over next week. I can hardly bear it… Roses again. Do you know one called Queen Victoria? It’s a very pretty little thing, like the one Pompadour was always painted with, lovely smell. But prettiest of all is out of Marie’s garden—it’s beginning to take in mine. Like a Redouté, pale and delicate. It seems a lady driving by stopped and begged old Marie for a cutting, saying impossible to get it any more. I rather love this lady for noticing. Perhaps Marie’s ancestor the Grognard1—she has got his medal—planted it. I read somewhere that in Louis XIV’s reign there were only ten varieties of roses but by the time of Josephine hundreds. Marie’s is only at one remove from the wild rose—double, heavenly smell which fills the room.’

  Nancy kept rotten apples for the blackbirds: ‘They like them better than anything.’ ‘Do you know of a good but extremely simple bird book?’ she asked Alvilde. ‘I get a bird’s eye view of birds from my window, what mysterious little things they are. Thank goodness baby time is over so I am less agitated—they don’t seem to try again and I’m really worried about the black bird population so sadly diminished.’

  She was to experience the whole gamut of treatments medical, spiritual and spurious: a major operation with cobalt rays and cortisone: acupuncture, osteopathy, a faith healer, and all sorts of drugs. After the failure of the operation in February 1971 the pain was more intense. ‘I have to take a strong drug which makes me idiotic,’ she wrote to Princess Loewenstein from Versailles; ‘If I’ve got to have my neck cut I’ll have it done here, they are much more used to doing it (their old guillotine) and I’ve lost all faith in English doctors dressed as for White’s. The bills! And I keep reading that English doctors are under paid. All I can say is Coo!’

  And to James Lees-Milne (29th May, 1971): ‘Doctors! Don’t make me laugh. I got two letters by one post from London medicos. (1) If you are feeling better it is because of the cobalt rays—the result will last several more weeks. (2) The agony you are in at present is due to the cobalt rays and unfortunately the result will last several more weeks. As the Americans say, peeriod.’

  ‘Lewes (G.H. Lewes’s Life of Goethe). Well I lived in it—perhaps the contrast between Goethe and Voltaire tickled me and then the jokes! When he fingered the metre of his verses on his wife’s body in bed! You know it must be rather good still to be in print. Voltaire used to say a book that is out of print is a rotten book. As for the greatness I suppose if one doesn’t know German one must take it on trust. I was listening to Werther on the French wireless the other day when I heard Gladwyn’s unmistakable laugh breaking in—I too gladly twiddled the knob and switched from the wild complaints of Werther to an urbane description of Ernie Bevin. That Duke of Weimar was Frederick’s favourite great-nephew—he said (when Weimar was 14) that he was the cleverest of his generation. Those possibly innocent homosexual relationships were so strange in those days (I mean Goethe and the Duke)… Here comes Sister Woman for a few days oh the joy—nobody knows what she is when one is ill, complete perfection…’

  Eventually she was informed that there was no cure for her disease, diagnosed as fibromyositis, ‘awfully rare in our countries, much more prevalent and equally incurable in America… As for the intense pain, there is nothing but an injection of morphia which must be given by the doctor, who of course when one rings up—I tried it once—is out until six.’

  ‘I think the worst feature of this horrible disease is that one is no longer a pleasure to one’s friends but a worry and a bore,’ she told Alvilde (27th July, 1971). ‘I know I ought to retire like Captain Oates, but the mechanics are so difficult—poor Hassan, really I think fond of me, would hate to find me stiff in the morning. As I said in one of my books, it’s bad enough finding a white mouse dead in its cage. But I am a fearful burden, to Diana notably and my saintly femme de ménage. I won’t let anybody come to see me, except Colonel, I can’t count on not bursting into tears…’ Yet the second flowering of her roses was almost lovelier than the first: ‘I gaze and gaze and the smell comes into my bedroom. Oh dear, the world is so agreeable…’

  ‘If I hadn’t lost all sense of humour I should think it funny,’ she remarked when an inspired friend sent her a faith healer. Others sent Lourdes water and had masses said for her recovery. Fortunately her sense of humour never deserted her: ‘Tom Driberg’s Mass, owing to a deaf priest taking my name, was offered for Pansy Todd.’ ‘I don’t quite know how I’m expected to earn my living,’ she told Raymond Mortimer, ‘but for the moment I am kept, like many another lady, by the Sun King (350,000 copies. Can you tell me why?)’

  ‘The faith healer!’ she exclaimed to Alvilde. ‘You see I had envisaged a motherly soul who would sing a few hymns. Not at all. A sort of poor man’s Liz Taylor loomed, accompanied by French husband. I loathed them on sight. Then, instead of hymns, she fell upon my ill nerve and teased it just as Alphy’s London quack did, so that I’ve had three days of martyrdom, no drug the very slightest use. Like all quacks (I’m beginning to know the breed) she says I won’t feel results for a week or two. Today I’m vaguely back to normal, viz. not crying all the time, drugs functioning more or less. What a joke it will be if she cures me! I can’t help a sneaking hope—she said she would get my digestion working and I’m bound to admit she has… Oh what a dull letter but what can I tell? I see nobody. I’m fascinated by the idea of X running away with a man over seventy. I don’t think running is the right word after one is forty and absolutely not at seventy. Y proposes “to go and live either in Ireland or in Morocco”. She never reads the papers so is not aware of the barbarities which are perpetrated in those lands she thinks they are quiet, cheap and full of highly trained servants. To my mind the worst barbarity in Ireland is the climate.’

  Wasting away to under six stone, unable to move, fed with little squares of cheese by Hassan, Nancy’s condition became so desperate in August that she ‘came off her high horse’, as she put it, and implored the London doctor she despised for some thing to stop the agony ‘or suicide would be the note’. ‘Well, he posted me a magic pill and after three days I could sit up and after six days I was in the garden planting wallflowers. For three weeks never a twinge but you see one gets used to these medicines and now twinges have rebegun, quite a lot of pain but nothing to what it was… Hassan, having offered to forgo his holiday, went off to Morocco and writes votre fidèle serviteur, at least the scribe does. So Zara, a Portuguese with small baby,
came to cook—she’s the nearest thing to Marie only a much better cook. Diana says I rang her up to say Hassan has gone, what shall I do? and the other day she said, only a week now before Hassan comes back and I said don’t remind me, what shall I do without Zara? When one’s so ill it’s comfortable to have a woman but I really love the old swashbuckler… The Bismarcks have offered material if I want to write about the Pilot, do say a good joke… I think I shall write my memoirs beginning in 1945 when I first lived in France. That cuts out Uncle Matthew and so on, already overdone. But I must get well first.’

  This was dated October 1971: in November she ‘slid back a little’ and it was ‘wriggle wriggle and cry cry’. She found a sympathetic new doctor: ‘he is serious, good, kind, and takes a wild interest in what I’ve got. I really loathe those young money grubbers dressed for White’s. New doctor said what did the English surgeon operate for? I said £200. He said you mustn’t talk about doctors like that. I said you don’t know English doctors.’

  *

  The saga of her sufferings meandered on with relatively calm intervals until she died but even the increasingly potent pain killers—and she clutched at every available straw—failed to dull her wits. Her sympathies and antipathies, often violent and unfair, were, like her indomitable sense of fun, tokens of her youthful spirit. Intellectually she was never detached. Her curiosity about life was too vibrant to succumb to accidie or melancholia. She was certainly preoccupied with the anticipation of her Souvenirs, ‘under which sweet title my memoirs will appear,’ as she told Princess Loewenstein, and I imagined that their composition might become a more solid and engrossing distraction.

  In January 1970—her first fiancé Hamish Erskine came to stay with Nancy for two nights: ‘very bitter about having been penniless until over sixty. He said, “we would have been married now for thirty years.” Help!! He is very dull and might have been more difficult to get rid of than poor Prod was. I don’t like being married. I suppose too selfish. Anyway it would have been far worse for me, this illness, with some wretched old husband hanging about and either telling one one hasn’t got anything or forcing one into ever more hospitals.’ Written to her sister Debo, this shows that Nancy had ceased to contemplate marriage even, as many surmised, to her adored Colonel. She remained in love with him to the end; he had been the principal go-between in her long liaison with France; and his visits and telephone calls were still her chief sustenance.