Nancy Mitford

by Selina Hastings

  But, although London was prepared for war, the war had not yet reached London. There were, however, plenty of rumours of what was in store: the Nazis were said to be employing pygmy spies ‘so small they can hide in drawers. I just daren’t open mine now to look for a hanky’; and ‘Hitler’s secret is it seems (I sat next Prof Lindemann at dinner) a bomb which can destroy all life in a radius of 40 miles. The Prof was good enough to add that whilst the bomb can do this on paper practice may not make so perfect a result. We of course have the secret too but nobody can spare 40 sq miles & so nobody knows whether it will work. Delirious suspense prevails.’ Over the previous year Londoners had grown accustomed to gas-masks, the black-out, barrage-balloons, men in uniform, anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park, and the tearing up of iron railings round squares and public gardens. But it was still possible to go over to Paris for the weekend, except for petrol few goods were rationed, and already in the West End black-out regulations were beginning to be disregarded. It was the period of the Phoney War. The air-raids were yet to come. No air-raids, no casualties: and, with no casualties to inscribe with her indelible pencil, Nancy at the hospital had very little to do. She chatted with the other volunteers, sorted the nurses’ laundry, got on with her knitting, wrote letters, read Macaulay’s History of England, and, with the wireless going full blast all day, began work on a novel. It was to be called The Secret Weapon: a Wartime Receipt, a funny story about spies. In a letter to Mrs Hammersley she outlined the plot, supported as usual by private jokes and the personalities of her friends. ‘It is about me married to Francis Rodd & Peter is my lover & Mary Rodd is Francis’s mistress.’ The key character was an easily recognisable version of Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘You,’ she wrote to him, ‘are called Mr. Ivor King the King of Song & your wigless head horribly battered is found on the Pagoda (headless wig, favourite, on Green) so you are presumed dead & there is a Catholic because you are one mem. service at which Yvonne appears as a Fr. widow. Well as you were about to open a great world campaign of Song Propaganda for the BBC SABOTAGE is suspected –

  ‘UNTIL

  ‘Your dreadful old voice is heard in Germany doing anti-British propaganda & singing songs like Land of Dope you’re Gory …’

  The heroine is Lady Sophia Garfield, married to Luke, a rich bore, and in love with a handsome journalist Rudolph Jocelyn. The book opens with the outbreak of war imminent, a situation described in the nursery terms familiar from the introduction to the Stanley Letters. ‘The belligerent countries were behaving like children in a round game, picking up sides, and until the sides had picked up the game could not start. England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. England beckoned to Poland, Germany answered with Russia. Then Italy’s Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn’t play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain’s Nanny said she had internal troubles, and must sit this one out. England looked towards the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except little Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. America, of course, was too much of a baby for such a grown-up game, but she was just longing to see it played. And still it would not begin.’

  But then it does begin. Sophia, returning to London from a visit to the north to take up her voluntary job at a hospital first-aid post, finds that in her absence her husband Luke has installed his dreary girl-friend Florence in the house. Florence is a member of the Boston Brotherhood, a Christian sect from America to which she has recruited Luke. Sophia dislikes her, and is therefore surprised to discover that Florence is secretly keeping a pigeon in her bedroom: anyone who keeps a pigeon as a pet, Sophia innocently thinks, cannot be all bad.

  The crux of the plot is the kidnapping by Florence and Heatherly her American associate of Sophia’s godfather, Sir Ivor King, ‘the King of Song’, a figure dear to the heart of the nation for his lovable personality and for the versatility of his voice: ‘It could reach higher and also lower notes than have ever been reached before by any human being … he was the only man ever to sing the name part in the opera Norma, the script of which had been re-written especially for him, and re-named Norman.’ At first he is believed to have been murdered, his corpse (too battered to be positively identified) and favourite wig (bloodstained) having been found outside his house on Kew Green. But shortly afterwards his voice is heard broadcasting apparently from Germany a series of propaganda programmes devilishly designed to undermine the British fighting spirit. Thus a concert of subversive songs is punctuated with snippets of disquietingly accurate information, for instance that Mr Eden had been seen that afternoon entering the Home Office at 5.46. ‘Now the sinister thing about all this was that Mr Eden really had entered the Home Office at 5.46 on the afternoon in question. How could they have known it in Berlin at 6.30?’

  How indeed? Needless to say, Sophia becomes intricately involved – not always intentionally – in supplying the answer. There is a grand pantomime finale, with Sir Ivor discovered buried in the basement of the FAP by Rudolph in drag, Sophia in hysterics, and a policeman in a tin-hat ready to arrest the German spy. Outside the sky is dark with the slowly-descending bodies of the enemy parachutists for whom, thanks to the timely foiling of the plot, there is a well-prepared reception. ‘Squads of air-raid wardens, stretcher-bearers, boy-scouts, shop assistants and black-coated workers awaited them with yards and yards of twine and when they were still a few feet from the earth, tied their dangling legs together. Trussed up like turkeys for the Christmas market, they were bundled into military lorries and hurried away to several large Adam houses which had been commandeered for the purpose. Soon all the newspapers had photographs of them smoking their pipes before a cheery log fire, with a picture of their Führer gazing down at them from the chimney-piece.’13

  As usual the cast-list is compiled of Nancy’s own acquaintance. Sophia bears a strong resemblance to her author; the pompous Luke is based on Francis Rodd; the dashing, insolent, unreliable Rudolph on Peter; Sir Ivor King, the King of Song, owes everything he has to Mark, from his love of popular music, to his interest in botany, his passion for Greece, and even his sexual preferences. (‘Sophia poured out tea, and asked after his Lesbian irises. “They were not what they seemed,” he said, “wretched things. I brought the roots all the way from Lesbos, as you know, and when they came up, what were they? Mere pansies.” ’) Florence and her Boston Brotherhood are taken straight from Nancy’s observation of Francis’s wife, the plain and pious Mary Rodd. It was to her that Nancy owed the Moral Rearmament scene, with ‘a hundred people to every meal, great jolly queues waiting outside the lavatories, public confessions in the drawing-room, and quiet times in the housemaid’s cupboard’. From Mary, too, came Florence’s frank voice, bright, crucified smile, and her sense of familiarity with God. It had not escaped Nancy’s attention that God ‘is kept awfully busy round the house in Holland Park. Mary behaves rather as though she had a new secretary,’ she told the Elweses. Accordingly, Florence is made to say, ‘Personally the only people I care to be very intimate with are the ones you feel would make a good third if God asked you to dinner.’

  ‘Sophia wished that Florence would not talk about the Almighty as if his real name was Godfrey, and God was just Florence’s nickname for him.’

  Pigeon Pie, as it was finally called, was finished with customary speed just before Christmas 1939. Its publisher was Hamish Hamilton, who had started his own firm nearly nine years earlier. He had seen promise in Nancy’s three novels, and had been impressed by her lively editing of the Stanley letters14. His partner, P. P. Howe, writing to congratulate Nancy on the book, told her that they would try to get it out ‘at the earliest possible moment. It should be just what people are in the mood for, if we are quick’. But they were not quick enough. By the time it was ready for publication, the war had begun in earnest. It came out on May 6, 1940, a month after the invasion of Norway, only four days before the invasion of Holland and Belgium, and less than three weeks before the fall of France. It is n
ot surprising that Pigeon Pie sank almost without trace, as Nancy wrote in her note to the second edition of 1951, ‘an early and unimportant casualty of the real war which was then beginning’.

  In answer to her apologetic letter on the book’s failure some months later – ‘I’m awfully sorry that Pigeon Pie was such a flop’ – Howe replied, ‘Pigeon Pie was not a flop, but wasn’t lucky in the moment of its publication,’ courteously adding that ‘both Hamilton and I … eagerly look forward to its successor’. This, on Howe’s part, may have been more gallant than truthful. Certainly neither he nor Nancy can have foreseen just how well rewarded the firm was to be by its faith in her. Pigeon Pie marks the end of that early period, the decade 1929–1939, of those bright, brittle, essentially ephemeral novels so much a part of the fashion and idiom of the thirties. Nancy was now on the point of change, on the brink of a new maturity. At last she was to find access to her emotions and to her creative imagination – entirely as the result of the influence of a man who, in 1940, she was yet to meet.

  1 Demolished after the war.

  2 The Brenner Pass was the scene of an Italian defeat during the First World War.

  3 This was the year of the Abdication and Nancy had taken against George VI, ‘Dumbert the Slow’, and his family: everything they did annoyed her, even, or especially, the doings of the little Princesses—‘I believe somebody will have a pot shot at them if they go to church in white gloves much more often you can’t imagine what a bad impression it makes.’ It made an excellent tease, and it was typical of Nancy’s contrariness that she should make a point of taking against the most popular members of the royal family at the height of their popularity. Thus when the entire nation was oohing and aahing over Lilibet and little Margaret Rose, or Princess Elizabeth on her wedding-day (the Corgi Wedding, as Nancy referred to it), or the newly-born Prince Charles (‘I say what a beastly little face that Prince Charles has – really frightening … And maquillé to the eyes to boot’) for Nancy it was a matter of principle to find them ridiculous or offensive.

  4 Nancy and Decca always addressed each other as ‘Susan’.

  5 Debo.

  6 Mussolini.

  7 Baby.

  8 The Ladies of Alderley published in 1938, The Stanleys of Alderley in 1939.

  9 Nancy’s great-great-grandmother, Blanche Airlie, was the daughter of the second Baron Stanley of Alderley and Henrietta Maria, one of the two ladies of the first volume.

  10 It was a favourite superstition of Farve’s that, if you wrote somebody’s name on a slip of paper and put it in a drawer, that person would die within the year.

  11 The occasion turned out to be something of an anti-climax: ‘I was much disappointed,’ Muv wrote to Debo. ‘Instead of the wonderful looking boys of 17 & 18 I expected to see, a party of intensely dreary looking & ugly young men of at least 30. I then realised how very sensible it is of H to put all Germans into uniforms, as they have such terrible other clothes …’

  12 Duke of Aosta, member of the Italian royal family and a friend, of course, of Lord Rennell’s.

  13 There is, perhaps it should be mentioned, one serious flaw in the plot: one morning, after the disappearance of Sir Ivor King, Sophia sees faintly pencilled on her breakfast boiled egg the words, ‘Agony 22.’ She knows it must be a code message but cannot for the life of her puzzle it out. Even when she turns to that morning’s Times, and sees in the Agony column under Box 22, ‘Poor old gentleman suffering from malignant disease would like to correspond with pretty young lady’ (Poor Old Gentleman and Pretty Young Lady were Mark’s/Sir Ivor’s, Nancy’s/Sophia’s names for each other) she makes no connection. The reader, however, has been alerted: this must be an important clue. What can it mean? And the disgraceful answer is, nothing. Nancy abandons it, shamelessly brushing it out of sight on almost the very last page. ‘Sophia asked Sir Ivor about Agony 22, but he was quite as much in the dark about the great egg mystery as Heatherly had been.’

  14 Published by Evelyn Waugh’s firm, Chapman & Hall.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The War

  Disappointment over the failure of Pigeon Pie to attract significant notice on publication was quickly submerged in larger events. In the second week of May, Peter was warned for overseas. He had been in Cambridge for training (‘Prepare to laugh. It seems he is to do German local government with a view to becoming a gauleiter when the war is over’), but was now back in Colchester in command of his own company, about to leave for France and in a heroic frame of mind. ‘It is perhaps something to be destined to fight in the biggest battle since the world began,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘I don’t pretend not to be frightened, but duty and destiny are all so clearly defined that it will be easier to take a proper part …’

  No sooner had Peter left than the news came that Sir Oswald Mosley had been taken to Brixton Prison under arrest. Nancy’s reaction to this was curious. She had seen nothing of Mosley and not much of her sister Diana since the row over Wigs on the Green four years earlier; but with Nancy, as with all the Mitfords, family feeling ran deep, and she was fonder of Diana than of the others. Perhaps for this reason, Diana’s defection was particularly painful. ‘I am thankful Sir Oswald Quisling has been jugged aren’t you,’ Nancy wrote to Mark, ‘but think it quite useless if Lady Q is still at large.’ And, to make certain that Lady Q got her just deserts, Nancy went to the trouble of going in person to the Home Office where she was interviewed by Gladwyn Jebb, then Principal Private Secretary to the Under-Secretary of State. She told him that in her opinion Diana was as dangerous as her husband, that her frequent visits to Germany1 were sinister and suspicious, and that no time should be lost in putting her under arrest. ‘Not very sisterly behaviour,’ as Nancy uneasily admitted, ‘but in such times I think it one’s duty?’ Nine days after Nancy had given her testimony Diana was indeed arrested2 and committed to Holloway Prison, where she remained for two years on her own before Mosley was given permission to join her in married quarters. Nancy was intrigued, rather than harrowed by her sister’s unpleasant predicament. ‘What can Holloway be like?’ she asked Mrs Hammersley. ‘I would die of the lights out at 5.30 rule wouldn’t you? I suppose she sits & thinks of Adolf.’ To Diana herself, meanwhile, Nancy said nothing of this, but behaved as any affectionate sister would, writing chatty letters, visiting Diana’s children, and keeping her supplied with interesting new books.

  Diana may have been the chief offender, but at this period there was no single member of the family on whom Nancy looked with approval. As in childhood at Asthall, it was Nancy versus the rest. Even Debo, recently engaged to Lord Andrew Cavendish, second son of the Duke of Devonshire, ‘has become simply horrid … a very exigeante little creature & dreadfully spoilt’. As for her parents, Nancy was in ‘a spit of hate’ against both: Muv, in love with Adolf, was being too beastly for words, and Farve was a monster of selfishness, when in London rampaging about the house and ‘roaring like a bull because everything is not just as he always has it’.

  Indeed the Redesdales’ situation was wretchedly unhappy. Unity was in a pathetic state, confused, bad-tempered and physically incontinent. The Redesdales, cooped up together in the Old Mill Cottage, under surveillance all the time by newspaper reporters, were tense and angry, quarrelling with each other over the war news they listened to every evening on the wireless. Nancy reported to Mrs Ham that things were terrible there, Muv and Farve absolutely at loggerheads. ‘Muv goes so far as to say now “When the Germans have won you’ll see, everything will be wonderful & they’ll treat us very differently to those wretched beastly Poles.” It drives poor Farve absolutely dotty & can you wonder … He says he can’t live with her any more – I really think they hate each other now. He is more violent now against Germany than anybody I know, & against any form of peace until they are well beaten.’ Eventually, to the relief of the rest of the family, they did decide to part: the quarrels were too terrible and, for a man of Farve’s emotional temperament and fastidious nature, Bobo’s
state of near-idiocy, her damp sheets flapping on the line, were too painful to bear. So Farve went up to Scotland, to Inch Kenneth, his Hebridean fastness, where except for the occasional visit to London he remained for the rest of the war. Muv and Bobo moved to the cottage next to the Swan at Swinbrook, much less vulnerable than High Wycombe to the prying eyes of the press.

  This was a particularly depressing time for Nancy: Peter, Tom and many of her closest friends were overseas – Evelyn Waugh was in Crete, Hamish and Mark were in Egypt, from where they sent off bulletins of their war. ‘Darling,’ wrote Hamish, ‘who d’you think is my great company commander here Johnny Drury-Lowe – isn’t it heaven? Though I suppose in a trivet my tiny bayonet will be whistling through those beastly German tummies and I shall see him no more;’ while Mark reported from GHQ, Cairo, that ‘the erstwhile songster has turned into a tired old typist, but it doesn’t prevent him letting out a periodical bat-like trill as he patters away at the keys … How is Bobo? better I hope. Give her my love and say that not long ago, I went to the most heavenly town called Tel Aviv. Both sexes always wear crumpled shorts just long enough to cover their tails.’ Then came the news that Robert Byron, on his way to Cairo by sea, had been torpedoed and drowned. He was the first of Nancy’s friends to die in the war, and his death shook her badly.

  And Nancy herself was far from well. In April, she had again found herself pregnant (news acknowledged by a courtly letter from her father-in-law signing himself ‘Devotissimo, Rennell’) and had again suffered a miscarriage. To recuperate she spent a few days on the Isle of Wight with Mrs Hammersley – full of moans about food shortages and the dangers of invasion – and then on to Aunt Vi at Highcliffe, where she stayed on for a few weeks to help with an early consignment of evacuees3.