To faithful Alvilde Lees-Milne who offered to visit her she replied: ‘No, don’t come, it’s five to one I shouldn’t be able to see you, much as I’d love it… I ought to kill myself but truly don’t know how. One doesn’t want to wake up with a damaged brain and odd as it may seem I get a lot of happiness, notably when the pain stops! The garden is already very nice.’
‘Then there is Gibbon, not a great English classic for nothing, simply not to be put down… Then there are the jokes of Mme Guimont and the goodness of Hassan (and of Hassan’s food). So you see, but when the pain is awful nothing seems worth it. It’s been so long my nerves are no longer very good but this, shut up with Mother Gamp, is far the worst.’
And to her sister Debo she confided on 15th April: ‘The awful thing about my situation is I can’t live or, as I long to, die. What is to kill and what is to cure me?’
To her lifelong friend James Lees-Milne, alias ‘Grumpy’, ‘Old Furious’, or ‘Grumpikins’, she sent one of her last long letters (8th May, 1973): ‘When not asleep (morphia) I like writing letters. Oh dear… I am one of the few people on whom morphia has a very limited effect, so like one’s luck. When I complained to the doctor he said any doctor on earth would tell you you are under morphia now. Then why does it not take the pain away? I don’t believe doctors mind about pain a bit, only life and death. Curious race… About books. They are for reading in the night so must be either Penguins or Oxford or World… Gibbon kept me going until they got to Constantinople when I bogged down as I got weaker and sadder and in much more pain. I now require nursery food—it’s the morphia I suppose and one of the reasons why they quite rightly refuse to let one have it. Indeed they say so.’
‘They say my garden is dazzling, indeed if the flowers they bring are anything to go by it must be, so the torment of being unable to see it is very great. I can’t move further than my arm can reach because I’m all swollen up like Louis XVIII, oh what a fate. Then there is some sort of crise not understood by me among the servants. Let’s hope it won’t faire tache d’huile, that side has hitherto been so perfect. Mme Costa used to say, when mes serviteurs fall out I never listen, I just sack them all. Yes, but then she used to send her old coachman Charles into Meaux to come back with the required substitutes. I doubt if that would work in these days.’
‘Many thanks for your good offer of books. You do see that the sort I write are not really wanted, could not in fact be faced, but something far more humble—How sad Kurtz (Harold Kurtz, author of The Empress Eugénie and The Trial of Marshal Ney, had just died) couldn’t finish his Kaiser Bill. I was longing for that.’
Nancy’s will to survive—what philosophers would call her Life-Force—was evidently powerful, while she must have realized that she was condemned and no doctors could save her. All they could do was to try and alleviate her suffering. For the final diagnosis was Hodgkin’s disease, the same which was to kill President Pompidou.
‘Keep in touch’—how many of Nancy’s letters ended with these poignant words. When she had not the strength or the desire to see friends for fear of harrowing them by the spectacle of her agony, she wrote more and more letters in progressively weaker calligraphy, petitions for news, pathetic substitutes for conversation.
In spite of the strong sedatives her mind remained lucid. So long as she could work she needed periods of seclusion, but when it was forced upon her she missed the pleasures of social intercourse, of intelligent and amusing conversation. Her only real happiness was with her sisters and ‘the Colonel’, but she was afraid of depressing and boring them. Much as they loved her they had their own lives to lead. No sisters could have been more tenderly devoted: they gave her all the time they could spare. Her sister Diana lived within convenient distance by motor at Orsay in the Chevreuse valley, some 90 kilometres from Paris, and it was her misfortune as Nancy’s chief link with the outside world to witness almost day by day the desolating stages of Nancy’s decline. Her other sisters Pam and Debo also took turns to tend her when the professional nurse was unavailable. Jessica made the long journey from California for a final glimpse. Nancy had floated so lightly on the crest of the wave that it was terrible for them to watch her sink by such slow degrees.
Nancy, who had loved life so intensely and communicated her joy to a myriad readers besides her coterie of friends, left it peacefully on 30th June, 1973, worn out by her cruel illness. At least she was granted one consolation. ‘How I hate hospitals and hope to be allowed to die here,’ she had written. She had always dreaded becoming an incubus to her sisters and friends.
Her faithful friend the Colonel was the last person to see her alive. Passing through Versailles and propelled by a strong presentiment, he had called at 4 rue d’Artois that very morning. Though Nancy appeared to be unconscious he could observe the shadow of a smile on her features, as if she were aware of his presence.
Her sister Diana wrote: ‘She would have been such a marvellous sharp old lady, dealing out snubs and jokes to new generations. Her life seems almost too sad to contemplate, despite great successes with the books. And the end of it this cruel illness.’
Perhaps deep down below the surface her life was sad, but she had the courage to banish melancholy and all that was life-diminishing. Had Falstaff known her he would have said: she was not only gay in herself, but the cause that gaiety was in other men. As Anne Thackeray Ritchie wrote of the author of Our Village: ‘Certainly few human beings were ever created more fit for this present world, and more capable of admiring and enjoying its beauties, than Miss Mitford,’ and unlike her estimable namesake, Nancy was beautiful herself.
1 Veteran of the first French Empire.
A short list of French words
assomante staggeringly boring
coquelicots poppies
coqueluche whooping cough
corroucer enrage
rendez-vous clandestins secret assignations
étincelle spark
laitues lettuce
perron doorstep
potager vegetable garden
rusé crafty
veinard ucky devil
Acknowledgements
Above all I wish to express my profound gratitude to the Duchess of Devonshire, to the Hon. Lady Mosley and the Hon. Mrs. Derek Jackson, who have shown me every sort of generosity and helped me to sort out Nancy Mitford’s letters preserved at Chatsworth. Without their bountiful co-operation this biographical memoir could not have been written. My particular thanks are also due to Mr. Heywood and Lady Anne Hill: the former transcribed excerpts from Nancy Mitford’s letters in his possession, lent me the manuscript of her Tour de France sketch, and both have supplied me with relevant anecdotes; to Mr. and Mrs. Handasyde Buchanan, who have also supplied me with letters and anecdotes of Nancy as a bookseller; to Mr. and Mrs. James Lees-Milne for putting a large selection of letters at my disposal and for allowing me to reprint a vivid recollection from Mr. Lees-Milne’s Another Self; and to ‘the Colonel’ for his moral support. I hope the many kind friends who provided me with letters and reminiscences, or both, will excuse me if I waive protocol and name them in alphabetical order, though some should be distinguished by stars, as in a Michelin guide, for taking so much trouble. Besides those above mentioned my warm thanks are due to Sir Cecil Beaton, M. Jacques Brousse, Mr. Donald Darling, Mme. Rita Essayan, Mme. Romain Gary (Lesley Blanch), Dr. Henry W. Gillespie, Mr Geoffrey Gilmour, Lord Gladwyn (for allowing me to quote from his Memoirs), and Lady Gladwyn, the Hon. Desmond Guinness (for the photo graphs of Nancy’s wedding and William Acton’s portrait), Mr. Hamish Hamilton, Lady Harrod, Sir Hugh Jackson, M. Philippe Jullian, Lord Kinross. Mr. Valentine Lawford. Mr. Patrick Leigh Fermor, Prince and Princess Rupert Loewenstein, Mr. Roger Machell, Mr. Robin McDouall, Mr. Peter Mitchell, the Hon. Jessica Mitford (Mrs. R. Treuhaft) and Victor Gollancz Ltd. for permission to quote from her Hons and Rebels, Mr. Raymond Mortimer C.B.E., Sir Oswald Mosley (for permitting me to quote from My Life), Mr. Brian Pearce, Mr. Stuart Presto
n, Mr. David Pryce-Jones, Mr. Peter Quennell, Mrs. John Sutro, Mr. Christopher Sykes, Professor Hugh Thomas, and Mr. Mogens Tvede. As I did not aim at a definitive biography I made no application to the Press, though this might have produced a richer harvest. In most instances Nancy Mitford’s underlinings, capitalizations, gallicisms and punctuation have been respect fully retained. I am also indebted to my good friend and publisher Hamish Hamilton and to his partner Roger Machell for their fraternal encouragement.
Copyright
This edition published for the first time in 2010 by
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The moral right of the Estate of Harold Acton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publisher. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress and the British Library. The Estate of Harold Acton, 1975.
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