Nancy Mitford

by Selina Hastings

  Batsford was bought by Sir Gilbert Wills of the tobacco family, one of the few men Farve quite liked; he even went back to stay with the Willses afterwards for the shooting. Sold also (Farve enjoyed selling almost as much as he enjoyed building) were many of the pictures, a great deal of furniture and, to Nancy’s eternal regret, a large portion of Grandfather’s remarkable library.

  1 The Barony of Redesdale, created originally in 1802, became extinct in 1886, to be recreated for Bertram in 1902.

  2 Now Graham Terrace.

  3 David inherited the title in 1916.

  4 Richard and Anthony, eldest of the four children of Sydney’s sister Weenie (Dorothy) Bailey.

  5 Children of Farve’s sister, Joan Farrer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Childhood

  Asthall is an Elizabethan manor house, grey stone and gabled, overlooking a quiet churchyard comfortably populated by the solid and lichenous tombs of prosperous wool-merchants. The house lies deep in the heart of the Cotswolds, one of the most beautiful parts of the English countryside, a region characterised by its patchwork of small fields with their clumps of beech and elm and great solitary chestnuts; by pretty, golden-stone villages; by hidden valleys and sudden, steep hills, so green and luxuriant in summer, in winter bleak and cold, with only the fragile tracery of Old Man’s Beard to soften the black and thorny hedgerows.

  Farve never cared for Asthall. He bought it because it was near his farms, and the River Windrush where he fished, and because the family had to have somewhere to live while the next house, in the neighbouring village of Swinbrook, was being pulled about and rebuilt. To him Asthall was never more than a temporary resting-place, which did not of course prevent him from building on. He put in panelling and a new ceiling in the main house, and added on a library, converted from an old tithe-barn and connected to the house by a covered walk known as the Cloisters. The garden was divided in half by the road running between Asthall village and Swinbrook; on one side of the road was a walled vegetable garden, on the other the garden surrounding the house. Neither of the Redesdales took much interest in gardening: the gardener looked after the garden and that was that, although every year Farve sowed a few seeds between the paving-stones outside his business-room window, so that he would have something to look at in the spring – ‘my interster seeds,’ he called them.

  The front door opened into a long entrance-hall with a fireplace at either end. On one side there was the dining-room leading into the kitchen, pantry and servants’ hall. On the other was the drawing-room in which were Grandfather Redesdale’s beautiful Chinese screens and all the family portraits, including one by de Laszlo of Muv at the height of her beauty, and a terrible painting of Farve by a Belgian camouflage expert whom Farve, the least vain of men, had considered a good choice for the job. Beyond this was Farve’s business-room, known as the childproof room and fitted with a strong mortice lock. It was here that Farve did his paper-work, smoked and played his small collection of favourite records on a wind-up gramophone – ‘Una voce poco fa’, selections from Iolanthe, and that popular song, ‘Fearful the death of the diver must be/Walking alone in the de-he-he-he-he-hepths of the sea’. Upstairs there were the grown-ups’ bedrooms, the children’s bedrooms and nursery, and on the top floor the servants’ rooms for a now quite substantial household consisting of governess, Nanny and nursemaid, Gladys who did all the sewing, three housemaids, two parlourmaids, a cook and two kitchenmaids.

  Farve was an early riser, always up by five in the morning, prowling round the house in his Paisley dressing-gown, cigarette in hand, and drinking cups of tea out of a Thermos flask. There was little chance of sleep for the rest of the household after this hour as Farve was at his best first thing in the morning, playing his records, keeping a sharp eye on the housemaids to see that they laid the fires exactly to his specifications, or cracking stock-whips on the lawn, a technique he had learned from his prospecting days in Canada. Breakfast was sharp at eight for family and guests alike, and unpunctuality was not tolerated. It was inclined to be a tense meal, as Farve could not bear to see food spilt – ‘Look at that child! Spilling food on the good tablecloth!’ – and his piercing blue eyes were quick to spot crumbs or any messiness with the marmalade. At luncheon and dinner, the family was always required to be in the dining-room a good five minutes before the meal was served, to ‘sit in’ round the table, hands warming on the empty plates in front of them, all eyes hungrily fixed on the door into the kitchen passage.

  Farve took his responsibilities seriously: he was a good landlord, the tenants’ cottages were always kept in repair; a pillar of the church, he attended Matins every Sunday, reading the lesson himself, choosing the hymns and taking round the bag for the collection; he sat on the local Bench, was a member of the County Council and while Parliament was in session, regularly went up to London to attend the House of Lords. He was particularly interested in, and passionately opposed to, the proposals to reform the Upper Chamber, in particular that Peeresses in their own right should be allowed to sit, according to the children because he could not bear the thought of women using the Peers’ lavatory.

  But although he did his duty in such matters, Farve was essentially an outdoor man. He hated paper-work and was not interested in books. Muv once tried to convert him to literature by reading aloud Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a story Farve found so moving that he began to weep. ‘Don’t be so sad,’ said Muv. ‘It’s only a novel.’ ‘What! not the truth!’ shouted Farve. ‘The damned feller invented all that!’ and he never looked at another work of fiction again – until his daughter began to write it and he found himself seduced by his own portrait. Farve disliked any form of society outside that of his immediate family and one or two tweedy neighbours who could be relied upon to hold the same philistine views as his own. What he lived for was sport. He fished, he shot, he coursed hares, before the war he had ridden regularly to hounds. Summer and winter he could be found, invariably dressed in the same costume of corduroy jacket and breeches, canvas gaiters and a moleskin waistcoat, cigarette in hand, furthering the pursuit of one of these sports. A day’s shooting was what he loved most in the world, and his guns were his most sacred possessions. Although he maintained a state of constant warfare with most of the servants, Steele, the head keeper, could do no wrong, and Farve spent many of his happiest hours with Steele up on the hill above Swinbrook, leaning on his thumb-stick watching the pheasant-chicks feeding. Steele’s hut, a dilapidated old railway-carriage stacked round with packing-cases full of traps from the Army & Navy Stores, was situated among the ferns and primroses of a woodland glade, as sinister a sight to the children as, in Beatrix Potter’s story, Mr Tod’s dreadful dwelling deep among the foxgloves. On shooting days the children knew to keep well out of the way: Farve was always at his most irritable, so anxious was he that nothing should go wrong and spoil the day’s sport. As soon as breakfast was over, he would begin striding about the hall, bellowing at the dogs – ‘Come here, blast you! Get off that coat!’ Kick. ‘Stop that noise, blast you!’ – shouting for his loader, damning and blasting anyone rash enough to cross his path.

  The fishing-season, on the other hand, saw Farve amiable and relaxed. He was an excellent dry-fly fisherman, and much of the year was spent happily preparing for those few weeks in summer when the trout were rising. In winter and spring, on days when it was too wet to go out, he spent hours in his business-room oiling his lines and looking through his boxes of flies. The section of the Windrush that flowed through his land was a famous trout-stream, and he was never happier than when messing about in the river in waders inventing glorious improvements for it, the small boy’s dream come true. The reward for all this strenuous effort came in early June with the cry, ‘The mayfly’s up!’ when Farve and a couple of carefully selected cronies would spend all day from dawn to dusk on the river-bank, cheerfully returning for a late dinner of asparagus, baby peas, tiny new potatoes, thick mayonnaise and trout en gêlée. In the long, light eveni
ngs, after they had been sent to bed, the children listened to the men talking and laughing on the lawn, could smell the smoke from their cigarettes, and hear the reels whirring as they pulled out their lines to dry.

  The children’s world revolved around their father and his varied and fascinating occupations, in which they always hoped to be included. But he was a man of chancy temper, given to sudden and terrifying rages. They never quite knew where they were with him, were never sure quite how far they dared go. They played a perpetual game of Tom Tiddler, dodging nearer and nearer their dangerous goal, ever on the alert, tensed for flight. Sometimes they got very near indeed; at other times they were pounced upon with a bellow of rage almost before they had crossed the border. This violent, unpredictable man was subject to fierce and irrational prejudice: like Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love, he ‘knew no middle course, he either loved or he hated, and generally, it must be said, he hated’. There was always one child who was the favourite, allowed every licence, while another for no visible reason was regarded by Farve as beyond the pale, and could do nothing right. Rat Week, this treatment was called, and nothing the wretched victim did could ameliorate Farve’s loathing. Tom, of course, was always in favour – but Tom was a boy: the girls had to take their chance as it came. The switch from Rat Week to favourite was made with dramatic suddenness, and even after years of experience was impossible to predict.

  This of course made life with Farve very exciting. To his children, their handsome and irascible parent was the epitome of English manhood. They delighted in his great charm, his dry sense of humour, in the wild, romping games, and although he frightened them with the violence of his rages which struck like sheet-lightning, they knew that at such times they were at least the focus of his undivided attention. They loved it when he allowed them to follow the shoot, or when he took them in to Oxford to skate (he was an expert skater and President of the Oxford Ice Skating Rink), and they loved those winter Sundays which Farve and Uncle Tommy spent coursing hares, the children hopping and stumbling after them across the muddy furrows while the dogs shot ahead to Farve’s cry of ‘Loo after it!’ Greatest treat of all was the child-hunt, Farve’s variation of Hare and Hounds in which he hunted the children over the countryside with his bloodhound and a mongrel terrier called Luncheon Tom. The hares never succeeded in outwitting their pursuers, and were caught usually about half a mile from home, when the dogs would be rewarded with hugs and kisses and juicy gobbets of meat.

  Farve no longer hunted – the war had left him permanently weakened in stamina – but he still enjoyed riding. He had two huge horses, a bay and a grey, and on these he led the older children out for a morning’s ride. If they were caught in the rain and had to shelter in the trees, he entertained them by standing up on his saddle and singing comic songs learned in the trenches: ‘You could have seen the wall in China/If the weather had been finer/And it wasn’t for the houses in between.’ But soon after the move to Asthall, one of his horses reared up in the stable-yard and fell back on top of him, breaking his pelvis and making it impossible for him ever to sit in the saddle again. After this the children rode either with the agent, Captain Collison, or with Hooper the groom, nicknamed Choops, who suffered from shell-shock and was subject, like Farve, to uncontrollable rages. ‘I’ll kill yer!’ he’d shout, brandishing his riding-crop at the offending child.

  Muv was a very different proposition. Where David was dangerously unpredictable, Sydney was always the same – calm and remote, apparently unaware of the existence of any world outside the parochial and domestic. She was an efficient housekeeper and kept a good table; the food was of the nursery variety, plain and wholesome, but of first-class materials and perfectly cooked; she even went to the trouble of baking her own stone-ground bread, since a firm belief in the health-giving properties of wheat-germ was a basic tenet of her philosophy. Conscientiously she fulfilled her duties towards the church, the village, and the local branch of the Conservative Party, although she had no more than a mild interest in politics, and any discussion of religion she found positively distasteful.

  Towards her family her manner was absent-minded and detached, perhaps something to do with the fact that her own mother had been an invalid and had died when Sydney was only seven. Muv rarely hugged or kissed her children or held them on her knee. That sort of thing was left to Nanny. She seemed to float through the day in a cloud of vagueness, apparently noticing nothing, her beautiful blue eyes hazing with boredom at the smallest provocation. But this absent-mindedness could not be entirely relied upon: it was never safe to assume that she was wholly unaware of what was going on around her. She could come to with an unexpected fit of severity, a couple of sentences of whiplash sarcasm which could be extremely cutting. In her very different way she was every bit as strict as her husband, and her brand of biting irony was just as much to be feared as his roaring, raging, whacking rampages.

  As husband and wife David and Sydney suited each other remarkably well, her severity ideally complementing his explosive, emotional temperament. Like him she found domesticity satisfying, and although on occasion she enjoyed a little quiet social life, which he would happily have done without, she did not care for staying up late and was happy only in the company of people she knew well: strangers bored and fatigued her. Her husband’s devotion she accepted without appearing to notice it: the way his eyes followed her as she went out of a room, the habit he had in the evenings after dinner of standing by her chair, literally falling asleep on his feet like an old horse, waiting for the moment when she was ready for bed and he could go upstairs and run her bath.

  Muv took little part in the children’s activities except, when necessary, to express disapproval; rarely joined in the jokes and the teasing, except to put a stop to it when it got out of hand – ‘Don’t be silly, children!’ – and she remained unruffled by even the most frightful of schoolroom crises. Once Unity rushed in shrieking for help when Muv was writing letters in her sitting room. ‘Muv, Muv, come quickly! Decca’s climbed up on the roof and says she’s going to commit suicide!’ ‘Oh, poor duck,’ said Muv without looking up, ‘I do hope she won’t do anything so terrible’, and went on with her writing.

  Vague in manner though she may have been, Muv had firm ideas about her children’s upbringing. From her father she had inherited an unorthodox attitude towards health and diet: any form of medicine, of course, was poison. And, to keep the Good Body in the best working order, strict rules of diet had to be followed. It was a favourite theory of Tap’s that the Jews owed their survival to the foresight of the Mosaic Law; and Muv was determined that her children should have as good a chance of survival as the Jews. This meant that certain foods were forbidden. Pork, rabbit, hare, and shellfish were never to be eaten, nor was tinned food, the canning process not having been revealed to the wanderers in the Wilderness, which no doubt went further to explain, as Muv absolutely believed, that Jews never suffered from cancer. The pasteurisation of milk was also highly dangerous, anathema, because the process – obviously, how could it not? – removed all the Goodness from the milk. But it was the prohibition of pork that caused the children the greatest suffering. Farve, while doing nothing to contradict his wife’s authority, saw no reason to apply her rules to himself. Morning after morning the children went through agonies as they smelt the bacon sizzling in the silver chafing-dish and watched their father tucking in to bacon and eggs, cold gammon, sausages or stewed pigs’ brains. The first letter Tom wrote home from his private school stated simply, ‘We have sossages every day’ (‘Oh, Muv, it’s so unfair,’ wailed the others when they heard this. ‘If Tom can have sausage, why can’t we?’ ‘Tom’s a boy.’) And Decca, when staying with a friend and allowed for once to relax the rule, wrote with mouth-watering gratitude, ‘Darling Muv. Thank you so much for pemission to eat SAUSAGE. We loved them. I cut mine open and put butter and Devonshire Cream inside, and closed it, and put it in my mouth.’

  The relationship between Muv and Nancy
was never an easy one. Although he was too alarmingly unpredictable to get close to, Nancy adored her father, whose dry wit was the perfect foil for her sharp-tongued teasing. But with her mother she had little in common. Muv’s domestic activities held small interest for her eldest daughter, whose high-spirited frivolity was, in turn, distrusted by her mother. There was no proper meeting ground, and Muv lacked the imagination to enable her to sympathise either with her daughter’s intelligence, or with her strong desire to break away from the restricting Victorian world in which both her parents had been born. As a child Sydney had been obliged to grow up before her time. In charge of her father’s household at fourteen, she was left with little time for the insecurity and silliness of adolescence, and in spite of her unusual upbringing, she herself was profoundly conventional. She may have had some strange ideas about health, but at heart she was a loyal member of the middle-class establishment.

  Any real intimacy between Nancy and her mother had come to an end with the birth of Pam: from that time on, Nancy was on her own; she came first with nobody. The other children found companionship among themselves, but Nancy as the eldest was left out of this; for her there was no one within the family, no particular friend and ally in whom she could confide – Pam was too slow, Diana too young, Tom nearly always away. The result was that from an early age Nancy learned to conceal her emotions, to develop that highly polished veneer with which she confronted the rest of the world. Her defence – and her weapon – was the tease. Everything, however sad, painful or dispiriting, had instantly to be turned by Nancy into a joke. The only acceptable response to misfortune was to ‘shriek’ with laughter – ‘How we shrieked!’, ‘Did you shriek?’ – an ugly word with its underlying implication of distress. By quickly converting unhappiness or hurt into comedy, you anaesthetise the pain. The unendurable can be borne, the unpleasant made palatable or dismissed. And because you are on your own, and therefore none too secure, you must be sure to be the attacker. This way, you will be feared. This way, you win.