Nancy Mitford

by Selina Hastings

  Nancy’s sharp tongue made it impossible for her to be anybody’s favourite sister. The children bored and irritated her, and she let them see it. (Years later Muv came across a home-made badge on which was written in pencil, ‘Leag against Nancy, head Tom.’) In her one fragment of autobiography she wrote, ‘My vile behaviour to the others was partly, I suppose, the result of jealousy and partly of a longing to be grown-up and live with grown-up people.’ She was jealous of the easy alliances forged, broken and re-made among the others, and she longed for the outside world and friends of her own age. She did have one or two: Constantia Fenwick, for example, who lived fifteen miles away in Stow-on-the-Wold, and sometimes rode over for the day. The two girls would organise pet shows with the village children, or would photograph each other covered in exotic draperies and ‘frightfully made-up’. Sometimes, chaperoned by Zella, Nancy was invited to spend a couple of nights with Mrs Godman, a kind neighbour with a house in Moreton-in-Marsh. This was proper grown-up life – no children, late hours and six courses at dinner. ‘Lord & Lady Willoughby de Broke are here,’ Nancy wrote to her mother on one such visit. ‘He has got a naturel wink and at first we thought he was winking at us, but it is naturel … Breakfast is at 9. (oh the joy of living!!) Lunch at 1.30, tea at 5 and dinner at 8. The beds here are most comfortable, & one has nothing to do but sleep or read all day, I never felt more like a boody [sic] hen in all my life … I will tell you what I eat at dinner

  1. Soup

  2. Mutton-on-toast

  3. Fish

  4. Souffle

  5. Sardines

  6. A banana.’

  But most of the time Nancy was at home where, bored and restless, she amused herself by tormenting the others. Pam, the original target, was easy prey: she had none of the vivid imagination of her brother and sisters, and was further hampered by the effects of an attack of infantile paralysis when she was three, which left her physically weak and slow to learn. She was wholly without any power of retaliation or defence, easily overtired and often unwell. ‘You’ve got to be kind to Pam. She’s ill,’ Nancy was always being told; and as a result was at her worst, constantly mocking Pam and spoiling any little treat that came her way. As for the others, Tom escaped much of it by being away at school, while the threat of school was a satisfying way of reducing Diana, who dreaded the idea of classrooms and dormitories and organised games, to a state of terror. ‘I was talking about you to Muv and Farve,’ Nancy would begin, an evil gleam in her eye. ‘We were saying how good it would be for you to go away to school …’ The three youngest girls, unpractised as yet and unsuspecting, could be made to cry about almost anything. ‘Do you realise, you three,’ Nancy would address herself to Unity, Jessica and Deborah (Debo), ‘how awful the middle syllables of your names are – Nit, Sic and Bor?’ Howls. For Debo, the most tender-hearted, easily moved to tears by the pathos of a situation often visible only to herself, Nancy devised a special instrument of torture, one which was instantly effective but which had to be used with care, as Muv was apt to get cross if she saw her youngest in tears yet again, and was quick at tracing the source of provocation. Debo was unbearably moved by a story Nancy invented about a little houseless match. ‘A little, houseless match/it has no roof, no thatch/If it’s alone, it makes no moan/That little houseless match.’ It never failed, and eventually Nancy had only to pick up a box of matches while looking meaningfully at her sister for Debo to be reduced to floods.

  Although often unkind, Nancy’s teasing was very funny, and for those who were not at the receiving end it was the most gloriously enjoyable spectator sport. Best of all was when Nancy took on Farve, for with him she more than met her match. The children found it brilliantly entertaining, and loved the sparring that went on between Nancy and Farve, usually at table – on and on they would go, sniping and firing at each other to the accompaniment of gales of laughter from the others, until either Nancy, provoked beyond bearing, would burst into tears, or Farve would suddenly bellow with rage, signifying that Nancy had Gone Too Far.

  Nancy’s great complaint throughout her life, becoming louder as she grew older, was that she had never been allowed to go away to school. The Redesdales strongly disapproved of formal education for girls. Tom, of course, went to Eton; but Tom was a boy. A girl got nothing from going away to school except over-developed muscles and an argumentative disposition, two features unlikely to be found alluring by any marriageable young man. (Unity was the only one to go to school, and she distinguished herself by being expelled – ‘Not expelled, darling,’ Muv would explain, ‘asked to leave’ – the apocryphal reason being that, when required to recite, she had added the word ‘rot’ to the line, ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot’.) Nancy resented this deprivation for the rest of her life, and always attributed to it her lack of mental discipline. In fact, thanks to her grandfather’s library, she was, even when very young, exceptionally well read, and the PNEU1 system by which she was taught by her governesses was thorough and reliable. What she really minded was not the lack of education, but the enforced residence at home.

  But in reality life at Asthall was not too much of a hardship: in many aspects it provided an ideal country childhood, and there was much that Nancy, while still a child and in spite of her longing for the world, enjoyed. In the summer there were tennis-parties, trips to Stratford-on-Avon, and visits to and from the cousins – Rosemary and Clementine Mitford2, Dick and Dooley Bailey, Diana and Randolph Churchill3. In the winter there was coursing and riding and, for Nancy, upright and slender in black habit and bowler, hunting three times a fortnight on a mare called Rachel, which Farve had bought from the army at the end of the war. Nancy loved hunting, and passionately looked forward to those days, even though the wild excitement of the chase usually ended in a long, back-breaking jog home accompanied by Choops, as often as not on an exposed stretch of road and with the rain trickling down the back of her neck and into her boots. Farve never would allow a motor-car either to take her to the meet or to fetch her home.

  On days when there was no hunting or the weather was too bad to go out, there was usually something of interest going on indoors. There was, for instance, The Boiler, a journal edited by Nancy, to which she herself contributed under the pseudonym W. R. Grue. ‘The Horror of the Unknown Man’ is a brief and cheerful murder story in the Gothic mode beginning in typically worldly vein: ‘All was gaiety – laughter – the clatter of knives & forks, it was the luncheon hour at Claridges. The great Charles moved from table to table with the assured air of a made man. In a corner behind a palm tree, scarcely noticing the giddy scene around him sat a languid looking man, solitary & unperceived. Richly yet quietly dressed in a morning suit of grey tweed, a natty pearl tie-pin stuck airily into his chocolate tie the man presented a prepossessing exterior. No longer young (his age might have been anything between 30 & 40) but scarcely yet approaching senile decay, he had the air of a travelled and educated nobleman as he toyed carelessly with an hors d’oeuvre. Suddenly his appearance of noble languor vanished & he sat upright, fork in hand with all the air of one who sees his end approaching. A foreign looking individual of unprepossessing countenance & claw like hands drew near …’

  In 1921, when Nancy was sixteen, her parents at last gave in to her pleading and sent her to school – school of a kind. Hatherop Castle, an Elizabethan manor house extensively rebuilt in the nineteenth century, was just over the border in Gloucestershire, and owned by a Mrs Cadogan who, having several daughters, had decided to educate them at home, and had invited a small number of girls from neighbouring families to join them. The girls lived very much behind the green-baize door, sleeping in the servants’ quarters, two and three to a room, and looked after by the family nanny who acted as matron. Nancy rather enjoyed it, although of those spartan years after the war her chief memory was of the cold: the underfloor heating rarely worked and never penetrated the upper floors, the girls often having to break the ice in their ewers before they could wash, with the consequence
that some of the less hardy never washed at all except on the two days a week on which they had baths. The morning was given over to lessons – French with Mlle Pierrat, everything else taught by an impressive young woman, much loved by her pupils, called Essex Cholmondeley. After lunch Miss Cholmondeley read aloud to them while they rested lying on the floor, and then, depending on the weather and the season, there was either a walk and sketching, or netball with Commander Cadogan, dreaded by the girls, since Duggie, as they called him, was a great bottom-pincher. In the summer there was swimming and tennis. Once a week Nancy had a piano lesson, an instrument for which, unlike her brother Tom who was very musical, she showed no aptitude whatever, yawning her way through the hour spent in a freezing room thumping out ‘The Merry Peasant’ in preparation for her lesson. Much more fun was the Wednesday dancing-class, when Pam and Diana were driven over from Asthall in the Morris Cowley, Turner and Nanny in front, the two children in the dickey, like two blue-eyed little china dolls in their dancing-frocks and sashes, arriving stiff with cold in spite of Farve’s fur-lined trench coats with which they were covered.

  When, after less than a year, Nancy left Hatherop, she brought back with her a wonderful new tease, with which she was able to torment her sisters for a considerable time to come. Mrs Cadogan had instituted a troop of Girl Guides which both Nancy and her best friend at Hatherop, Mary Milnes-Gaskell, had joined. The high point of this was a one-day camp at Cirencester Park, an experience which Nancy had found so inspiring that once home she announced her intention of starting a company of her own, with herself as Captain and Pam and Diana her patrol leaders. The two younger girls, playing happily with their chickens and their dogs, were appalled; neither of them believed it possible that Muv would let Nancy get away with it. But for once Nancy had Muv’s whole-hearted support: an excellent idea, Muv thought; it would keep Nancy occupied and be so nice for the village children. To her sisters’ dismay, indolent Nancy, usually to be relied upon to prefer spending most of the day on the sofa with a book, became possessed of a demonic energy, ordering them about, making them tie knots, light fires and run a hundred yards in twenty seconds. She coerced them into putting on a play, took them to camp near Witney, and even up to the Wembley Exhibition where, chaperoned by the governess, they spent a miserable night in sleeping-bags on the floor of a youth hostel. Eventually, after more than a year of this persistent lack of enthusiasm, Nancy’s keenness began to lose its edge, and she was at last persuaded to give it up.

  In April 1922, aged seventeen, Nancy with four other girls went abroad on a cultural tour of Paris, Florence and Venice organised by Miss Spalding, headmistress of a school in Queen’s Gate attended by one of Nancy’s friends, Marjorie Murray. It was all very thrilling, and Nancy adored it. She wrote to her mother from their first stop, the Grand Hotel du Louvre in Paris, ‘Darling Muv … it is so lovely here, there are telephones & hot & cold water in our bedrooms. I spend my time telephoning for baths etc. All the shops look so heavenly & the Place de la Concorde when lighted up is too lovely … Oh! such fun.’ She went into raptures over the paintings in the Louvre, and reported in detail her meals. ‘For lunch today we had an omelette aux fines herbes, salade de laitue (too good) & cakes. For tea café au lait & éclairs.’ Without the family and in the company of girls her own age she felt quite grown-up at last. The only flaw in this scheme of perfect happiness was that Marjorie’s clothes were so much smarter than hers – Nancy felt a ragbag in comparison – and that she was the only one not allowed to wear powder. This last was a recurring complaint: it was warm for the time of year, the trains were hot, her jacket and skirt much too thick, and she was uncomfortably aware of her shiny face. But on this Farve remained inflexible: he liked to see female complexions in their natural state; paint, however discreet, was not for ladies. Nancy had been allowed one concession, to wear her hair up, and that was enough.

  From Paris they went to Florence, stopping on the way to see Pisa – ‘too heavenly’ – the Leaning Tower and the Duomo, ‘Too too too heavenly’. In Florence she made her first serious purchase, a couple of strings of corals which reached down to her waist. Within a few days she was writing confidently to her mother, ‘I am quite good at Italian already, as good as Miss S & better than any one else. I get along famously. I do all the bargaining for the others & always get things reduced. I talk as though I had been here a month & indeed I feel like it … As for the hotel the less said the better! I shall say nothing except that we have used Skeatings4 freely but with little effect (I have just caught one on my neck.) … How you would love the blue sky here & the flowers & the oranges! We have them at every meal. NB. Please tell Chunkie [Pam] I couldn’t bear to hear about chickens at present, & ask her to preserve a calm & undisturbed silence on these matters in her letters! Chickens & Florence dont mix.’

  They visited the Uffizi, the Duomo and the Pitti, made a day-trip to Fiesole, and were serenaded every evening by a man with a guitar. It was too lovely, too romantic – those beautiful palaces along the Arno, the roses and wisteria, the deep blue of the sky, and, above all, the pictures. ‘How I love the pictures,’ she wrote. ‘I had no idea I was so fond of pictures before, especially Raphael, Botticelli & Lippi … I find to my horror that there are lovely pictures in London, Italian ones & lots of good ones, I have only ever been to the Tate Gallery. This must be remedied! Marjorie knows the National Gallery by heart. I don’t think it is too late to devellop a taste in pictures at 17 do you?’

  Venice, if anything, was even more marvellous than Florence. As a rest from sight-seeing, they spent a day on the Lido, where they took off their stockings to paddle and ate oranges as they walked along the beach. Nancy bought presents for the family – bronze lizard for Pam, Leonardo print for Tom, crystals for Diana and ‘Deb’, corals for Bobo; and for herself a Spanish comb for her hair. ‘I did a most rash thing yesterday,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘spent nearly all my worldly on a Spanish comb, knowing full well that you won’t let me wear it, altho’ Marjorie says all girls do. It is so nice, not carved & looks rather like a shoe horn … I do look so nice in it (ahem!) & wore it yesterday evening for dinner. It looks most habillé. Now I am absolutely broke …’ Nancy felt she had become very grown-up during her foreign tour, and was anxious that her mother should recognise the change. ‘I hope you will let me wear that comb, it grows on me (this is not to be interpreted literally) I really look quite old in it, a femme du monde you know, especially when I wear a fur. I really am a femme du monde now.’ The image of the femme du monde did occasionally slip: there was, for instance, that hilarious evening when Marigold was prevailed upon to throw her asparagus stalk over her shoulder at dinner!! And the last night in Venice saw some very unsophisticated ragging in the dorm: ‘Turnip [Elsa, the Swedish girl] jumped very hard on Marigold’s bed & burst her hot bottle. Such a mess!’

  On the long train journey home Nancy felt she had nothing more to look forward to, nothing but England, cold and grey, and with all her money spent: ‘It is a dreadful feeling only have 1/3 & an English shilling in the world.’

  But in fact there was something to look forward to. In November Nancy would be eighteen, and the Redesdales planned a dance. ‘The difficulty’, as Muv so rightly said, ‘seemed immense.’ The library would serve beautifully as a ballroom; but whom to ask? With the exception of one or two boys from local families, like Togo Watney and Michael Mason, Nancy knew no young men. Tom was only thirteen, so his friends were no use, and Farve’s unwelcoming manner ensured that few members of the opposite sex ever stepped inside the front-door. The situation was horribly similar to that ‘horrible situation’ described in The Pursuit of Love when for Linda’s first dance Uncle Matthew had to go to London to round up aged partners in the House of Lords: ‘Ten females, four mothers and six girls, were advancing from various parts of England, to arrive at a household consisting of four more females … and only two males, one of whom was not yet in tails.

  ‘The telephone now became red-hot, te
legrams flew in every direction. Aunt Sadie abandoned all pride, all pretence that things were as they should be, that people were asked for themselves alone, and launched a series of desperate appeals …

  ‘Elderly cousins, and uncles who had been for many years forgotten as ghosts, were recalled from oblivion and urged to materialize …

  ‘At last Uncle Matthew saw that the situation would have to be taken in hand …’

  The occasion was not perhaps as glamorous as Nancy had hoped, but her parents had done their best: partners, even if middle-aged and married, had been produced; there was champagne, a band, and the house filled with flowers; and Farve had been persuaded to get in twenty coke braziers to place along the Cloisters so that, although the guests choked with the smoke as they ran between the house and the library-ballroom, at least they were warm. Nancy, her dark hair in a bun, and wearing a silver dress with a beaded belt, must have found this, her long-awaited entry into the world, about as disillusioning as Linda found hers – the dowdy clothes and red, shiny faces of her parents’ friends, the smell from the stoves, the stilted conversation and the stumbling dance-steps: ‘It is not at all like floating away into a delicious cloud, pressed by a manly arm to a manly bosom, but stumble, stumble, kick, kick. They balance, like King Stork, on one leg, while, with the other, they come down, like King Log, onto one’s toes. As for witty conversation, it is wonderful if any conversation, even of the most banal and jerky description, lasts through a whole dance and the sitting out.’