The dance at Asthall, not a conspicuously successful occasion in itself, did, however, mark the beginning of a distinct change for the better, a definite improvement in the quality of life, underlined the following summer by Nancy’s presentation at Court (chiefly remembered for the long wait in the Mall in a queue of cars on a chilly June day, dressed up in white satin and feathers, and no more sophisticated arrangement offered at Buckingham Palace than a chamber-pot behind a screen). After this she was officially ‘out’. Parental authority was still strictly maintained – no make-up, a chaperon when in mixed company – but there were several important concessions that were now hers by right: she could go to as many balls and parties as she had invitations, she could stay in London during the Season (the Redesdales rented a house for the summer months), and she could entertain men as well as women friends at home in the country.
Nancy’s first London Season, the Season of 1923, took place at a time when the behaviour of the Bright Young Things was reaching its most extreme. For the young of the upper classes, in violent reaction against the war and their parents’ Edwardian attitudes, the Twenties was a period of high spirits and relentless frivolity, rocketing up and beyond all the established boundaries of manners and good taste. The young considered themselves a golden élite to whom nothing should be denied. It was a time when adults acted like children, many of them behaving as though they were still in the nursery, but in a nursery where every licence was allowed. It was an era of parties: baby parties, circus parties, Wild West parties; there were paper chases and scavenger hunts and Follow-My-Leader over the counters at Selfridge’s. In spirit Nancy was very much at one with the Bright Young Things, although in fact she was never really of their world, never really penetrated beyond the sequinned fringes. While Babe Plunket Greene and Elizabeth Ponsonby were hitting the headlines with their madcap escapades, Nancy and her friends were going to the devil in a much more innocent fashion. ‘I must tell you all the fun I have been having of late,’ she wrote to Tom at Eton. ‘On Friday the party arrived & we went to the Masons dance which was great fun but rather stiff … On Saturday we went out shooting & had a dance here in the evening from 9–12. I put the clock back 20 minutes which helped quite a lot! The whole of Sunday we spent in trying to think out charades to act in the evening. They didn’t come off in the end because the plot wouldn’t work out but we had great fun rehearsing. In the evening we made up our faces, which horrified the men especially Farve & Uncs! It did suit me so well but none of the others looked better than they do ordinarily. On Monday we went to the cinema in Oxford which was great fun only we made so much noise we were nearly turned out & then we went to tea at the Trout where we again made hay. Then we went home & shortly after left for Oxford this time to go to the ball in the town hall. It was a marvellous ball. We went & sat out in the court of Justice & found a book with the names of people who were going to be summoned so we wrote remarks such as “marvellous man” under their names until a policeman came & sent us away with a flea in our ear & removed ye booke. We also spilt a lot of ink & poured ink into the judge’s glass of water. It was fun.’
In London the parties were rather more sophisticated; but even here Nancy’s social life was on the whole conducted along modest lines: not for her Paris gowns and balls in the great houses of Park Lane and Belgrave Square; but two or three long frocks cleverly run up at home by Gladys, and small dances in Pont Street, Queen’s Gate and Cadogan Place, escorted by one or other of her parents in full evening dress and struggling to keep awake on a hired gold chair. The day after a dance, Nancy was allowed to sleep late, getting up in time to dress in hat and gloves for a girls’ luncheon, where the unremarkable events of the night before were discussed over lamb cutlets followed by pink jelly served in little glasses with a blob of cream.
Back at Asthall life was much livelier than it had been before. During the Christmas and Easter holidays there were dances at the houses of local families: the Watneys, Mrs Godman and the Masons at Eynsham Park. It was at the Masons’ dance that she met a young man who was to become one of her closest friends and confidants, Mark Ogilvie-Grant. He was charming, amusing and silly, with an appetite for playing the fool equal to Nancy’s own. He had a pleasant voice, and could accompany himself on the piano for hours, his repertoire full of the sort of romantic Victorian songs that Nancy loved: ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, ‘I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls’, and, in imitation of Dame Clara Butt, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. ‘Mark Ogilvie-Grant is the most amusing creature I have met for ages,’ she wrote to her brother, ‘fearfully vulgar & talks with a comic drawl. He has got the most cherubic face & whats known as a disarming smile. He & Johnny Drury-Lowe don’t dare show their faces in Eton on account of certain episodes which I can’t write but will recount when I see you!’ She had met Johnny Drury-Lowe through Henry Weymouth5, one of the few presentable young men to come to her dance, and it was Henry Weymouth who introduced her to his Oxford friends: Billy Bathurst, Michael Rosse, David Herbert and Brian Howard6. Oxford was easily reached from Asthall, and these new friends made a great difference to Nancy’s life at home. At weekends during the term, she often asked three or four over for lunch. ‘We have 4 Oxford people to lunch at Asthall on Sunday, Mary [Milnes-Gaskell] was there too, we had an uproarious lunch table in the Cloisters while Muv & Co had lunch in the dining room which was just as well! Afterwards we played tennis & bathed & they didn’t go till 7. It was marvellous fun. I’m going to the House [Christ Church] ball on the 22nd. They are going to have a floor all over Peck, it will be too divine as I know thousands of people at Oxford & love them all dearly.’
Sometimes Nancy went away for the weekend. In June 1925, she was staying at Oare with the Frys, sister and brother-in-law of one of her girl-friends, Evelyn Gardner. ‘It is being great fun here, the house belongs to Evelyn Gardner’s brother in law & the party consists of Lady Burghclere Pansy Pakenham Evelyn & me & four v. nice men, 3 of them secretaries to Stanley B.… There is a lovely bathing pool in which the water yesterday was 78. Last night we motored in a Bentley & a Rolls to Savernack forest where we wandered for about an hour getting home at 11. It was the most beautiful place I have ever been in, & a marvellous sunset was going on, all most romantic. On the other side of the house there are rolling downs full of the ancient dead & terribly haunted. I hope we shall go there tonight after dinner.’
This new-found freedom was immensely enjoyable, and no one loved a good time more than Nancy; but the restrictions imposed by her parents chafed her. Before she came out, there was no question, and she knew there was no question, of any but the most circumscribed form of existence. Now, however, she had glimpsed freedom, and she longed to be off, off with her new friends having fun. Instead she was kept on a very short rein indeed. That she never had enough money could not be helped: Farve had seven children and was not a rich man; but on an income of £125 a year, which had to cover clothes, laundry-bills, travel and tips to other people’s servants, she had little to spare for extravagance. ‘I have got masses of shopping to do & as usual no money to do it with,’ she complained to Tom. ‘I keep asking everyone for money all to no effect. Bobo [Unity] gave Iain Hay a birthday & Xmas list beginning Two Pounds, a guinea etc. Don’t tell Muv as she would be furious.’ Even more frustrating were the rules governing her behaviour. Nancy was not allowed to powder her nose or shingle her hair; there were certain streets in London where it was not proper for her to walk (Sloane Street was proper; Pont Street was proper; Jermyn Street was improper); and, most resented of all, the rule that, except when with the family, she had to be chaperoned at all times in mixed company, a rule that was, of course, broken at every possible opportunity. Whenever they thought they could get away with it, Nancy and Mary Milnes-Gaskell, under pretext, say, of visiting Tom at Eton, would make a rendezvous to have tea with a couple of young men. ‘I was sorry not to see you the other day when I left strawberries on you,’ wrote Nancy to Tom on one such occasion, ‘but Mary & I wer
e meeting two Oxford chaps in Rowlands at 4.30 & then had to come straight back! Don’t tell anyone, I mean about us meeting them as although I don’t think it matters much for tea, least said soonest mended as the old saw hath it.’ But it did matter; and inevitably one day they were caught.
What happened was this: Nancy and Mary had announced that they would be coming down from London on an evening train. In fact they went to Oxford in the morning, lunched in college with Johnny Drury-Lowe, went to the cinema, and were spotted on their way to tea with Brian Howard by Mrs Cadogan. This responsible person wrote immediately to Muv, and the next day Nancy heard the words most instantly guaranteed to bring her heart into her mouth: ‘Farve wants you in the business-room.’ Farve was very angry indeed. ‘Do you realise,’ he roared at his terrified daughter, ‘that if you were a married woman this would have given your husband grounds for divorce!’ He and Muv then went up to London and interviewed Mary in her parents’ house, Lady Constance, Mary’s mother, making it clear that she held Nancy as the elder responsible for most of the blame. Oxford was declared out of bounds. ‘There has been a hell of a row,’ Nancy wrote to Tom. Muv and Farve were ‘absolutely horrified, they thought it was the most awful thing to have done etc! … We have both had to promise never to do it again which is sad as it was such fun, & Farve is furious with the chaps, most unfair as it really wasn’t their fault. I’m not allowed to go & stay with Johnny now for his balls which is too maddening.’
Gated and in disgrace, Nancy had time on her hands, much of which she spent in writing letters to her brother. Nancy was a compulsive letter-writer: writing letters was the most important occupation of her life. As a child she had kept a diary, but had given it up because a diary was unresponsive. Nancy needed a correspondent, whom she could tease and entertain, and whose existence would give a purpose to the highly selective, often fantastically exaggerated version of whatever she chose to recount. At this period, Tom was the ideal recipient: although four years younger than she, he was clever and precocious, in many ways more grown-up than his sister; he spent most of the year away from home, and yet was familiar with all the dramatis personae; and most important of all, until Nancy was eighteen, Tom and his Eton friends were the only ambassadors from beyond the family enclosure, the only contact she had with the masculine world outside. His own letters are dull, convey nothing of his dry, sardonic humour, but hers are full of wit and fantasy. ‘My dear Fatty,’ she would teasingly address him. ‘My dear great fat brother … If you keep my letters posterity will think you fairly bulged, & won’t probably realise that I refer to fatty degeneration of the old brain.’ When the events of the day were too dreary to describe, she made up for it with her own inventions, one of which was an imaginary language, Checkan, its origin a nursery game inspired by the names of the new countries – Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia – formed from the old Balkan Kingdoms after the end of the war. ‘Most Magic Yea I have just come across the most charming poems composed by a Checkan deaf mute employed in a stay making factory. The poor girl died not long ago (she was run over by a steam roller) & left the poems to me in her will. They are most delightful, realistic & yet never heavy. Take for example And puisache tie/ Affa ogc iens/ Imp outo ne/ Fillie fie pines/ Juir liga fro ‘All day I sit/ Wasting my youth/ Making stays/ For fat old women/ Who overeat.’
When her source of ancient Checkan manuscripts dried up, she told Tom about the country where he and she would spend the rest of their lives. Kr was somewhere on the Mediterranean coast, its only inhabitant apart from Tom and Nancy was Ux, an Ethiopian mute with a mechanical crane (the crane of all work), to lift heavy weights and to bring on shore the few carefully vetted visitors. ‘Nothing ugly will ever enter into our lives at all except when we leave Kr … All the intelligentsia from every land will flock to climb the 7000 steps or, if we know them & like them, to leap lightly into the c.o.a.w. with their luggage. When guests come we will go to greet them & say a few polite words & then they will be removed by Ux & thoroughly washed that no impurities many enter Kr.’
In 1926,’ Asthall was sold. The plan was for the female members of the family to spend the last three months of that year in Paris, while Farve saw to the preparation of the new house, Swinbrook, and completed the purchase of a house in town: with four out of the six daughters still to come out, and possibly six weddings to follow, it made sense to buy a London house rather than be obliged to rent one every season.
In October, Muv and the girls settled in to a modest hotel in the Avenue Victor Hugo, chosen for its proximity to the Helleus, with whom, since the days of Tap and the yacht and summers at Deauville, there had been a warm friendship. His younger daughter Paulette got on well with the Mitford girls: and Helleu himself, whose violent and tyrannical temperament made Farve seem a model of tolerance and calm, was always strongly influenced by his visual sense, and greatly admired this handsome English family. With the beautiful Diana, aged sixteen, he was half in love, drawing her classical features again and again. ‘Voici la Grèce!’ he would proclaim as he led her into the room, a flattering change from Nanny and ‘Nobody’s going to be looking at you, darling.’
The two eldest girls did not, like the younger ones, have to do lessons. Nancy took art classes – oils in the morning, drawing in the afternoon – and spent the rest of her time sightseeing and shopping (‘I bought myself a dress today in which I look exactly like one of Napoleon’s young officers – too divine’). She and Pam enjoyed a rather more glamorous social life than they were used to at home. One of Nancy’s girlfriends, Middy O’Neill, was in Paris staying with her grandfather, Lord Crewe, the British Ambassador, so there were invitations for the Mitfords to luncheons and dinners at the British Embassy, as well as music parties, dancing at the Florida, and grand soirées at the Robert de Rothschilds’. At weekends the two girls went several times to stay with a French family with a château just outside Paris where, Nancy boasted to Tom, ‘I completely got off with a young Frenchman who is said to be le jeune homme le plus séductif du pays’.
In short, Paris was a success. Nancy loved the social life and the comparative liberty; she loved meeting new people and had revelled in her own conquests, her ‘getting off’, as she so elegantly described it. But more importantly these three months marked the beginning of a life-long love affair with France. From this time onwards France, and Paris in particular, represented to Nancy everything that she loved, and England, increasingly, everything that she did not love. France was freedom, elegance and sophistication; it was delicious food, sparkling conversation, prettiness and warmth. The French were frivolous and fun, and pleasure to them was a reason for living, rather than something to be treated with disapproval and distrust. ‘Have you noticed the country round Paris,’ she wrote to Tom on his first visit there a year later ‘… & have you been to the Avenue Henri-Martin? Don’t go on purpose but if you are there tell me if you don’t think it more perfect & melancholy than any place you’ve ever seen. I don’t know why but I waited for a bus there once & when the bus came I was in tears. At Versailles I always cry buckets its really most embarrassing to go there with me as I sob most of the time. I hope you walk about the streets of Paris waving a large & wet pocket handkerchief. And then one can be more cheerful there than anywhere in the world & I have often danced all down the Champs Elysées & no one notices they are so used to that sort of thing … Oh, I’m so excited, I think all day La Muette, Place de la Concorde, Place de L’Etoile, Avenue Hoch, Avenue du Bois, Place des Vosges, Palais Royal, Rue de Rivoli … Oh how divine.’
1 Parents’ National Educational Union, a system of education by correspondence.
2 Daughters of Farve’s elder brother, Clement Mitford, who was killed in 1915.
3 Their mother, Clementine, wife of Winston Churchill, was the daughter of Grandmother Redesdale’s sister Blanche Hozier.
4 Keatings’ flea powder.
5 Viscount Weymouth, heir to the Marquess of Bath.
6 Poet and one of the most extrav
agant of the aesthete-homosexual circle at Oxford.
CHAPTER THREE
Growing Up
By Christmas the family were back in England and settled into their new town house, 26 Rutland Gate, an imposing, cream-coloured Victorian residence in a tree-shaded-square facing Hyde Park. Muv had been responsible for the decoration, and with her Frenchified taste had made it into a house of which even the critical Nancy approved. It was a large house of six storeys, with a ballroom on the first floor and a spacious drawing-room in which Muv had put her French furniture from Asthall. Downstairs on the ground floor was the dining-room, and Farve’s study, for which he had chosen the curtain material himself, a dark tapestry of dingy foliage which the children hated, but through which he imagined he saw birds and squirrels peeping.
For Nancy the return to England was marked by some important concessions. She was now twenty-two; her début was four years ago, and several of her contemporaries were already married. Childish she may have been, but she was no longer a child; and, as a sign of her adult status and in the face of stony-faced opposition from Muv, she had, greatly daring, gone to a coiffeur in Paris and had her hair shingled. She was thrilled with the result but, as the time drew near for her to go home and face Farve, she wrote nervously to Tom: ‘Tom, when you see my shingled hair you are to say – in front of the Birds1 – how you simply adore it etc even if you think its too beastly … Muv said the other day “well anyhow no one would look at you twice now.” As a matter of fact I’ve been much more admired since I cut it off & everyone else says they like it much better! So lovey your role in this matter has now been indicated.’
With the confrontation over her hair behind her, Nancy then went on to wrest from Farve, after a couple of stupendous rows and much shouting and banging of doors, his agreement that she should enrol for a course at the Slade, and not only that (extraordinary in itself, given Farve’s derisive opinion of modern art), but also permission to live away from home in a furnished bed-sitting room during the week. This last tremendous achievement was, however, completely wasted. Nancy abandoned her liberty – a small room in a boarding-house in Queen’s Gate – after only four weeks, explaining to her sisters (who had been beside themselves with envy and correspondingly shocked by her failure) that it was no good: too squalid, the room knee-deep in underclothes, because, you see, no one to put them away.
Nancy Mitford Page 6
