Nancy Mitford

by Selina Hastings

  Turning her back on the steely, tubular modernity of the thirties Nancy indulged to the full her love of Victoriana. The house ‘is exactly like a French lodging house,’ she told Golly and her husband Simon Elwes. ‘I see people struggling to say something nice about it & falling back with relief on the canal (which is enchanting) I found a wallpaper for the dining room which consists of swags, roses, urn & bows & is printed on PINK MOIRÉ. So there … Lottie has 2 beautiful puppies which are a great help with the new carpets of course.’

  With her new house and her little dogs and an unaccustomed sense of financial security, Nancy should have been happy; but she was not. Her marriage was going badly: she and Peter were often barely on speaking terms, and Peter’s drinking was beginning to get seriously out of control. It is true that he was holding down a job: ‘Peter is getting awfully nice & rich,’ she loyally relayed to the Elweses. ‘I mean it wouldn’t seem rich to you but I can hardly believe it. Not a bailiff now for months & every prospect of a mink coat next winter (only now I can only think of sable)’; but this hardly made up for the horror of the drunken arguments (‘I know, I know, I am a journalist, a banker, a veterinary surgeon …’); nor for the scenes in public (‘Brenners2 to you!’ he once shouted in the face of a distinguished Italian to whom he had just lost at bridge); nor for the frequent occasions when he and a couple of cronies would reel home in a taxi at four in the morning, completely intoxicated, and hammer at the door until Nancy came down in her dressing-gown to pay off the taxi and cook them all scrambled eggs. Nancy never complained, the shop-front was kept locked into place, but it was obvious to those who knew her that all was not well. She did her best to turn each incident into yet another Prodd funny story, but although that to some extent saved her face, it did not improve relations with Peter. Nor did it help that she was now on bad terms with most of his family. She was irritated by Taffy and his wife Yvonne, found Mary Rodd and her Moral Rearmament ludicrous, had quarrelled with Francis, Mary’s husband, and then – ‘a real sacrifice just before Xmas’ – had rounded off with a steaming row with her mother-in-law. ‘I am no longer Aunt Lily’s pie eyed girl it is a curious change & has its point. We had a terrible quarrel about the King (not Dumbert3 I mean the proper one) So she only gave me a bath salt jar with no bath salts for Xmas & to Yvonne (to show the difference) a necklace made entirely of the insides of watches very Surréaliste.’

  But worse than all this was the fact of Peter’s infidelity. Peter had always boasted of himself as a womaniser, had had a number of love affairs, and now, after only eighteen months of marriage, had fallen in love again, this time with Mary Sewell, daughter of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and the wife of a stockbroker. She and her husband lived a few doors away from the Redesdales in Rutland Gate, and the Sewells and the Rodds used to meet regularly to play bridge. Although in theory the two women had quite a lot in common – only four years younger than Nancy, Mary too was a novelist – they never liked each other. Mary, pretty, sexy and chic, had according to Nancy ‘a spoon face & dresses at Gorringes’; while Mary found Nancy sharp-tongued and sour. Their bridge evenings were characterised by Nancy and Peter sniping at each other, Peter boasting he had made a habit of proposing to every girl he met, but only Nancy had been fool enough to accept him; while Nancy harped on their poverty and the bailiffs coming to the house, with implications Peter did not care for. Peter flirted openly with Mary over dinner, and in retaliation Nancy would stage a faint, which annoyed Peter. ‘She’s only doing it to get attention,’ he would say impatiently, as he carried her upstairs and dropped her onto the drawing-room sofa. Nancy did not like staying up late and the Sewells led very separate lives, which made it easy for Mary and Peter to spend evenings together, as well as meeting nearly every day for lunch at a little Italian restaurant in Maddox Street, in easy reach from the City.

  In August 1936 the two couples had the ill-advised notion of going on holiday to St. Briene in Brittany, together with Patrick Balfour and Decca, then aged seventeen and marking time before coming out. It was not a success. Peter, a keen sailor, arrived by yacht several days after the others, days which he had spent writing love-letters to Mary on lavatory paper, the only paper available on the boat. They all stayed at the same hotel, Peter and Mary meeting secretly on the beach before the others were up. Nancy, miserably aware of the emotional tension between her husband and Mary, sulked through the day and went to bed straight after dinner while the others drove off to a night club. Decca, cheerfully oblivious to these adult complexities, described one such outing to Debo, a visit to a nightclub ‘run by an ex-follies bergère lady called Popo (or Pot-Pot) And there are notices on the walls saying things like “Popo a soixante ans, elle est garantie pour cent” And she did a dance & took off her jersey. Wasn’t it extraorder. And then she waltzed with Mary Sewell. Nancy didn’t come. She thinks nightclubs boring.’

  Back at home, the unhappy situation continued until the beginning of the following year, 1937, when it was overshadowed by yet another colossal Mitford crisis. In January Nancy, who had been feeling depressed and unwell, had gone without Peter to stay with Aunt Vi in the Rennell appartment in Rome. (Peter wrote unconvincingly from London that he was ‘not doing anything except going to bed early’.) From there she described to Decca the uneventful social life, ‘as dreary as could be’, that Aunt Vi went in for. It is a childish letter, deliberately so, to appeal to the second youngest member of the family, hardly out of the schoolroom and still, presumably, interested exclusively in animals.

  Darling Sooze4 Thanks oh thanks for all those delishwish long letters you keep writing me evidently you quite realise how much one likes getting letters when abroad. (This Susan is called irony & it means that the iron of yr unkindness has entered/is entering into my sishwish or soul)

  Susan this is a place. Not one FR bulldog have I seen since I got here. Not a Dollie not a Millie not a Lottie & alas not the merest shadow of a creech have I set eyes on. No wonder the Italians feel so low, talk so loud & sing all those screaming songs. The low crooning of a creech at their fireside is absent from their lives. I pity them …

  Give my love to Tiny Swine5 & ask her why the poor thin Roman cab horses won’t eat the delishwish apples I keep buying for them? Surely horses used to like apples in my young day? …

  The verbs of this lingshwish are nearly impossible & are breaking my heart I have a lesson every day with a lade who keeps telling me that of course Hitler is a great man but M.6 is greater because the germans only fear H while the ice creamers love M with a spiritual & mystic love. I seem to have heard this before only the other way round eh what

  ‘Well Sooze tinkety tonk tiny tot from Susan.

  But Decca had grown up more quickly than Nancy or anyone else had realised. Of all the sisters she was the one who had resented most bitterly her parents’ refusal to send her to school, had suffered most from the boredom of Swinbrook. At first in childish reaction to Unity’s Fascism she had declared herself a Communist. The two of them divided their shared sitting-room down the middle, Bobo’s half decorated with Fascist insignia and photographs of Mosley, Hitler and Mussolini, while Decca in her half had a hammer-and-sickle flag and a small bust of Lenin. By the time she had gone through her first London Season, Decca was smouldering: she hated the world she had been born into and she could not wait to leave. It was at this precise moment that she met for the first time her cousin Esmond Romilly. At nineteen Esmond was already a committed left-winger and rebel (founder of a subversive magazine, run away from school, six weeks in a remand home), recently invalided home after fighting on the Loyalist Front in the Spanish Civil War. A born anarchist, belligerent, bullying and brave, he was possessed of that useful combination of intelligence and insensitivity that meant he was adept at getting what he wanted with not very much regard to the methods employed. He could have been made for Decca, and by the time they actually met, in the house of an elderly cousin, she was more than ready to follow Esmond to the ends of the earth �
� or rather to Spain, where he intended as soon as possible to return. With a degree of ingenuity and brazenness that surprised even herself, Decca deceived Muv into believing she had an invitation to spend a couple of weeks with friends in Dieppe. Instead she and Esmond ran off together, making their way through France to Bilbao in the Basque Republic.

  When the fortnight of the mythical holiday in Dieppe was up and it dawned on the Redesdales that Decca had disappeared, the effect was shattering. Muv sat in the drawing-room at Rutland Gate wringing her hands and being comforted in turn by Diana, Unity and Tom; Farve was beside himself with anger; Nanny Dicks was in tears; and Aunt Weenie added to the general turmoil by unhelpfully turning on Diana and accusing her of having ‘set the example’. Nobody knew anything except that Decca was not and never had been in Dieppe with the Paget twins. Eventually she was traced, and Muv, realising that it would be pointless for Farve to go out to Spain – he was far too angry to be rational and, used to being obeyed, would be incapable of conducting what might be a lengthy and delicate process of negotiation – and knowing that Nancy would soon be on her way back from Italy, she turned to her eldest daughter for help.

  Peter, meanwhile, confronted with an unparalleled opportunity for knowing best, had proved himself ‘a great prop & stay’, coming up with the one plan most certain to antagonise Esmond – that of making Decca a Ward in Chancery so that she could be legally extradited, sent home and placed under court supervision. Esmond, more than a match for the Bilbao Consul, rose effortlessly to the challenge and defied the order to send Decca home, agreeing only to leave Spanish soil. He and Decca then sailed to St Jean de Luz where they found Nancy waiting for them on the dockside with Peter square and stocky beside her, his hands thrust into his pockets in his usual tough-guy attitude. Pushing through the crowd of reporters and press photographers, the four of them got into a waiting taxi and went straight to the hotel where Nancy had taken rooms for the night – and the arguing began. But the harder the Rodds talked, the more obstinate the runaways became. Nancy, a former ally, had betrayed Decca by going over to the enemy and siding with the grown-ups; Peter, too, previously so much looked up to (Decca was the only one of the Mitfords not to find him a bore: she had been entranced by his bragging talk of joining the International Brigade and of starting revolutions in South America), had also shown himself a turncoat by a display of governessy behaviour of the worst kind. Nothing the Rodds could say had any effect, and the following day they returned to England alone.

  From Blomfield Road, Nancy wrote to Decca, more from a sense of obligation to register her rather half-hearted disapproval than with any conviction that she could change Decca’s mind. ‘Susan it isn’t very respectable what you are doing … after all one has to live in this world as it is & society (I don’t mean duchesses) can make things pretty beastly to those who disobey its rules … Susan do come back. No Susan. Well Susan if anything happens don’t forget there is a spare room here (£4.10. bed) Love from Sue.’ Although shaken by the sight of her parents’ distress, and a little shocked by Decca’s brutal disregard for convention, Nancy could not help sympathising: always on the side of love, and understanding only too well the stifling quality of life under the Birds’ wings, she was unable to be more severe than she felt her duty required. Esmond she frankly loathed, but he was Decca’s choice, and it was up to her to lead her life as she pleased.

  Decca, however, had taken offence. She was furious at what she saw as Nancy’s disloyalty, furious with her letter, and with the one accompanying it from Peter in which, as one black sheep to another, he advised her seriously to consider the consequences of her behaviour. But she eventually calmed down, and on May 18, 1937, she and Esmond were married in the presence of Muv and Mrs Romilly in Bayonne, after which Nancy was able to turn back with relief to the old bantering, childish tone that with Decca she never afterwards varied. Writing to her sister in July of that year to congratulate her on the news of her pregnancy (‘Susan fancy you with a scrapage’7), she talks to her exactly as though she were still in the nursery, telling of the hedgehog bought at Harrods (‘we call it hog watson & give it bread & milk’), the sweetness of Millie who had just won 4th prize in a dog show, and the fact that Dolly (Lottie’s daughter) has ‘just been on heat so I covered her with Keep Away & she went round saying

  I do not like the ‘Keep Away’

  Because it keeps the dogs at bay

  The dogs with whom I wish to play

  Are kept away by ‘Keep Away’.

  You must say not bad for 9 months I bet your scrapage won’t make up lovely poems like that …’

  In August Nancy went out to Posilipo where, she informed Decca, she was writing a play: ‘It is about a Communist who is the Bowd [Unity] so I expect I shall catch it from all.’ But in fact her next piece of work, started at the end of that year, was something quite different. This was an edition in two volumes,8 of nineteenth-century family letters belonging to her cousin Ed Stanley9. The Stanleys were a lively, funny, querulous lot. ‘Their common characteristics were a sort of downright rudeness, a passion for quarrelling, great indifference to public opinion, an unrivalled skill in finding and pointing out the weak points in other people’s armour, thick legs and eyebrows, lively minds and a great literary sense.’ Their letters give a vivid picture of that safe, rich Victorian upper-class life that Nancy found so attractive. The upper-classes of those days were so enviably secure, never questioning ‘the fact that each individual has his allotted place in the realm and that their own allotted place was among the ruling, the leisured and the moneyed classes’, sentiments with which Nancy whole-heartedly identified. Indeed for all her protestations of Socialism, her view of English history as here expressed reveals nothing more nor less than a traditional, true-blue, schoolroom Conservatism, full of nostalgia for The Past as a kind of Gilbertian golden age in which every Englishman knew his place, the lord, a sensible man of ample means and a classical education, living in perfect harmony with the commoner at his gate. ‘During the whole of the nineteenth century,’ Nancy explains with a courageous disregard for historical fact, ‘the English and their rulers were in perfect accord, they understood and trusted the integrity of each other’s aims and methods, and consequently this country was enabled to achieve a greatness, not only material, but spiritual, which has never been equalled in the history of the world.’ She laments the coming of ‘the terrible twentieth century’, cruelly driving the lord from his God-given land, thus resulting in ‘the segregation of the classes’ and a loss of the trust between ruler and ruled. In those days statesmen were men of noble bearing whose ‘pronouncements were elegant and exact, such words as jitterbug were not a part of their vocabulary nor were they often photographed having breakfast in bed’. They ruled England and England ruled the world. ‘The proudest title we can acquire is that of “a nation of governesses”. We are the only adult nation and until the others come of age we must be their governess, lecture them at all times, put iodine on their knees when they fall down and graze them; when we see them torturing a kitten we must slap them hard and take away the kitten.’

  This preface was not included when the book was reissued after the war. The opinions in it nevertheless remain at the basis of Nancy’s understanding of her social position. No wonder the twentieth century seemed so ‘terrible’, brutally destroying the order established over centuries of the divine right of the upper classes to live in beautiful old houses set in beautiful old parks, and waited on by perfectly sweet members of the lower orders.

  Nancy found the research immensely congenial, sorting through the mass of papers in the attics at Alderley, and bringing to the subject her love of history as well as her novelist’s shrewd eye for character. She wrote to Robert Byron who had shown a sympathetic interest in the project, ‘It is like being under chloroform. I feel in another world while doing them … I do long to talk about the letters … Rodd is so discouraging.’

  It was one of the ironies in the worsening si
tuation between Nancy and Peter that, while neither was happy with the other, each resented it when one went away or was otherwise absorbed. She resented his late nights and philandering; he resented the fact that when he was at home she was too interested in her work to pay him any attention. Then in the summer of 1938 Nancy found she was pregnant.

  She had wanted a baby for the last three years, and when she failed to conceive her gynaecologist recommended curettage, after which he declared her perfectly fit, with no reason why she should not safely have children. As she was told this just before leaving for the ill-fated holiday in Brittany, when it seemed that the sexual side of her marriage was finished for good, the news did little to raise her spirits. In spite of her frequently aired views on the disgustingness of babies (when Decca was expecting hers, Nancy wrote encouragingly, ‘One has to do such awful things to scrapages I saw one being put to bed the other day & oh sooze the smell first its nappy then its potty ugh –’), she had nonetheless always looked forward to having a family of her own. Now to her joy she was pregnant, and all seemed to be well – provided, her doctor warned her, she spend the first few weeks in bed.

  The summer of 1938 was hot, and in August Muv took Nancy down to stay with the Dashwoods at West Wycombe, Peter being on holiday with Ed Stanley somewhere in France. After a couple of weeks, she went back to London, first to Rutland Gate, then at the beginning of September to Blomfield Road, where she was looked after by a nurse and her Norwegian maid, Sigrid. She wrote happily to Robert Byron that all was well, she was still ‘fostering the foetus’, and had just broken the glad news to her mama-in-law but so far had received no reply. ‘I suppose she is furious at my improvident behaviour. (Of course it is lunatic really I quite see that but one must never be deterred from doing what one wants for lack of money don’t you agree.) Aunt Vi wrote that she hoped it would be a boy “as you know I don’t like R.C.s & I should hate Rennells well earned honours to go to one” I replied that I could not wish for a boy even in order to keep Ld R’s many titles from falling into the clutches of the Scarlet Woman … Actually if I thought for a minute it would be a boy I should go for a long bicycle ride here & now - 2 Peter Rodds in 1 house is unthinkable.’ But such precautions were unnecessary: in the middle of the month the nurse left as everything seemed to be going so smoothly, and Nancy returned to Rutland Gate. There, perhaps as a result of the move, she almost immediately suffered a miscarriage.