Nancy Mitford

by Selina Hastings

  Back in London she took a job in White City helping to run a canteen for French soldiers temporarily interned after Dunkirk. They were a high-spirited lot, full of jokes and no nonsense about heroics. ‘[I] simply love the frogs more & more … I now give English lessons & am teaching the whole class Come into the garden Maud they like it because of the bit about woodbine which they all smoke. At first they thought it meant “venez dans le jardin maudit.” They are such kittens, I never stop laughing all day … Honestly what shall I do without them life will be a blank & English soldiers or brave de Gaulle ones can never replace these nice lily-livered jokers.’

  On Saturday, September 7, during a period of perfect Indian summer, the Blitz began. The first planes came over at five in the afternoon, and for nearly twelve hours 300 bombers with an escort of 600 fighter planes screeched and dived over London. Nancy at Blomfield Road was in the thick of it. Forty-eight hours after it started, she wrote to Mrs Hammersley, ‘Darling the nights! Nobody who hasn’t been in it can have the smallest idea of the horror one is going through. I never don’t feel sick, can’t eat anything & although dropping with tiredness can’t sleep either. No doubt one will get used to it soon – last night I shall never forget as long as I live … Ten hours is too long, you know of concentrated noise & terror, in a house alone. Thank heaven for Milly (dog) who is a rock. So is Gladys – really a heroine. She arrived back at 6 this morning all smiles & was ready with my breakfast punctually at 8, & when I announced rather hysterically that I intended to spend tonight in my trench in the garden she cheerfully said she would come too.’

  A few days later she wrote again to Mrs Ham:

  This part (Mai Vale) has got it worse than almost anywhere (except the East End of course) as they are trying for Padd. On Sunday night & again Tues: they never let up for 10 hours. Too long you know … I find my nerves are standing up to the thing better now – I don’t tremble quite all the time as I did … NOBODY can have the slightest idea of what it is like until they’ve experienced it. As for the screaming bombs they simply make your flesh creep but the whole thing is so fearful that they are actually only a slight added horror. The great fires everywhere, the awful din which never stops & the wave after wave after wave of aeroplanes, ambulances tearing up the street & the horrible unnatural blaze of light from search-lights etc – all has to be experienced to be understood. Then in the morning the damage – people ring up to tell one how their houses are completely non existant, & in nearly every street you can see a sinister little piece roped off with red lights round it, or roofs blown off or suddenly every window out of a house, & lorries full of rubble & broken furniture pass incessantly. Of course the number of dead is absolutely tiny but everybody now sleeps in the shelters, at about 7 one sees them queueing up with thermos flasks & blankets for the night. People are beyond praise, everyone is red eyed & exhausted but you never hear a word of complaint or downheartedness it is most reassuring.

  I am trying to get some work in the East End – am temporarely rather cross with the frogs who really are behaving like spoilt children, complaining they are kept awake at night & one today started a long histoire about how he hadn’t been taken to the theatre at all. Ça je trouve un peu exagéré quand même.

  Oh dear there are the sirens again What a horrid life.

  As Blomfield Road was such a favourite target of the Luftwaffe (‘Oh the secret weapon every evening one hopes for about 5 minutes until the familiar whizz bang comes in with the soup’), Nancy moved to Rutland Gate, to the mews flat at the back, as the main house had been requisitioned to provide provisional living-quarters for families of Polish Jews evacuated from the East End. Nancy was fascinated by these East End families and took on the job of looking after them with enthusiasm. They were ‘so hard working clean & grateful’, and there was always some interesting drama going on to take her mind off the bombs. ‘Oh dear a little creature here aged 16 is in the family way. I advised her, in the words of Lady Stanley, a tremendous walk a hot bath & a great dose but will this have any effect on a tough little Jewess? Or shall I be obliged to wield a knitting needle & go down to fame as Mrs Rodd the abortionist? (I might join Diana which would be rather nice) Really, talk about big families I feel like the mother of 10 here or old Mummy Hubbard.’

  Rewarding though this was, the work was also extremely hard, and Nancy often felt ill with exhaustion. She was also suffering a private misery over her marriage to Peter. Although on friendly terms, they had been drifting further and further apart. On his few periods of leave in London, Peter usually preferred to stay at his club, asking the friends he ran into not to tell Nancy that they had seen him. But, whether or not Nancy knew of these visits, she did know that her marriage was in all essentials over. In a sad memorandum inside the cover of her appointment diary for 1941, she wrote, ‘Love is a punchy physical affair & therefore should not be confused with any other side of life or form of affection, & while it makes an agreeable foundation from which to begin a marriage the absence of physical love, love in fact, should never be allowed to interfere with the continuity of marriage. Marriage is the most important thing in life & must be kept going at almost any cost, it should only be embarked upon where there is, as well as physical love, a complete conformity of outlook. Women, as well as men, ought to have a great many love affairs before they marry as the most critical moment in a marriage is the falling off of physical love, which is bound to occur sooner or later & only an experienced woman can know how to cope with this. If not properly dealt with the marriage is bound to go on the rocks.’

  Peter was now in Addis Ababa, doing the kind of work he liked best – ‘trying to mend and organise the broken and disrupted lives of wretched people over whom the blizzard of war has passed and left a little stunned and helpless …’ Nancy had offered to join him but his response was not encouraging. Letters took months to arrive, and the cheques he sent home were infrequent and small. She was once again desperately hard-up. Lord Rennell had died in July, and ‘my dear mother in law has stopped my allowance in order to build a ball room in memory of my pa in law. I keep saying how I wish she were religious, a nice marble X would cost far less’.

  But life was not entirely black. At about this time, the Free French under the leadership of General de Gaulle were beginning to arrive in London. In a letter to Mrs Hammersley written in March 1941, Nancy had this interesting piece of news: ‘A friend of mine at the War Office (MI) begs me (this is a secret) to worm my way into the Free Frog Officers Club in any capacity & try to find out something about them. They are all here under assumed names, all splashing mysteriously large sums of money about & our people can’t find out a thing about them. Isn’t it tricky. Seriously I don’t see what I could do & it would bore me to death.’ But, doubtless regarding it as a patriotic duty, Nancy overcame her fear of boredom, and was soon in a whirl, as she called it, of free froggery: ‘very agreeable the way French chaps look at one, kiss ones hand etc without being rendered gaga with love first like the English ones, if you see what I mean.’ Well-connected young officers with assumed names and stories of heroic escape were to be seen at the Allies’ Club in Park Lane or dining with Lady Cunard in her suite at the Dorchester. Nancy with her prettiness, her chic, her high spirits and fluent French, was much in demand, to her great satisfaction as there was nothing she loved more than the frivolity and flirtatiousness of these charming and civilised young Frenchmen, so flattering and funny at the dinner-table, so desperately brave at the front.

  It was not long before one Free Frog in particular swam into prominence. His nomme de guerre was André Roy4. He had arrived in London in October 1940 to join De Gaulle’s Français Libres, and by the time Nancy met him was working as Liaison Officer in the Quartier Général. He was exactly Nancy’s age, tall, slim, charming and clever. With Peter away and in the wartime atmosphere of danger and excitement, Nancy allowed herself to be temporarily swept off her feet. She was lonely, not at all happy, and the feeling of impermanence which the wa
r brought with it made normal life seem a long way off. During the summer of 1941, Roy was the perfect companion. He knew, as most of Nancy’s English men friends did not, exactly how to make love to her: he made her laugh, was not afraid to be romantic, flattered her outrageously while letting her see that underneath it all he meant every word. Although never much interested in the sexual side of a love affair – it was the banter that she enjoyed – this time she succumbed. The result was that once again she became pregnant.

  In November she was staying with Roy Harrod and his wife Billa in Oxford, and while there was taken ill with severe abdominal pains. Fearing the worst but telling Billa only that it was probably an attack of appendicitis, she got herself back to London, carrying her suitcase to the bus for the station as she was determined not to let on how ill she felt. In London she went straight into University College Hospital, where it was found that the foetus was lodged in the fallopian tube, and must be immediately operated on. Nancy begged the surgeon to leave her with the chance of having children, but when she came round from the anaesthetic it was to be greeted with the news that a complete hysterectomy had been unavoidable. It was a crushing blow, and brave though she was this time the keeping up of the shop-front was almost more than she could manage. Doing her best, she wrote to Diana, ‘I have had a horrible time, so depressing because they had to take out both my tubes & therefore I can never now have a child … The Rodds have been wonderfully true to form – my mother in law was told by the surgeon I shld be in danger for 3 days, & not one of them even rang up to enquire let alone sending a bloom or anything. I long to know if they bothered to look under R in the deaths column, very much doubt it however.’ Even more true to form was Muv, who when told by Nancy that both ovaries had been removed exclaimed, ‘Both! But I thought one had hundreds, like caviar!’ ‘Then I said how I couldn’t bear the idea of a great scar on my tum to which she replied “But darling who’s ever going to see it?” ’

  Nancy left hospital in December, and at the invitation of Helen Dashwood went down to West Wycombe to convalesce. The Dashwoods’ beautiful Palladian house was one of the few big private houses still run very much as it had been before the war, as Helen was allowed to keep her servants in exchange (‘war-work’) for filling the house with evacuees, strangely enough nearly all of them personal friends of Helen. On her arrival Nancy found an exceptionally congenial company: Jim Lees-Milne and Eardley Knollys, as part of the National Trust secretariat, her cousin Clementine with her husband Sir Alfred Beit, and at weekends frequent visits from, among others, Cecil Beaton, Sibyl Colefax and Eddy Sackville-West5. In the evenings Eddy and Jim sat side by side in front of the fire in a pair of Chinese Chippendale chairs working at their knitting and ripping to pieces the reputations of their friends, egged on by Nancy, mocking everything and everybody in her witty, restless, high-pitched way. She revived a girlhood passion for Captain Scott, reading everything she could lay her hands on, and insisting that the others should read about him too. (‘Thank goodness I have at last finished Scott’s lengthy journals,’ Jim wearily recorded in his diary.) The polar expedition was her favourite topic of conversation: she christened the upstairs lavatory the Beardmore after the famous glacier, as it faced north, the window was jammed permanently open, and there was often snow on the floor. ‘Must dash to the Beardmore,’ Nancy would say before lunch, a joke that quickly palled with Helen. But it helped to pass the time.

  In March 1942 Nancy, recovered in body if not altogether in spirit, returned to London and, at the suggestion of Jim Lees-Milne, took up a new job, working as assistant at a bookshop in Curzon Street for a salary of £3.10s a week. Heywood Hill was a bookshop of distinctive character specialising in early Victorian toys and automata, in embroidered pictures and unusual prints, rare first editions and old folios, as well as offering a good selection of recent publications. The books were displayed almost as if in a private house, not only on the shelves but piled in disorder on a couple of tables, and collapsing in heaps on the carpet. Conveniently placed in the centre of Mayfair, an easy walk from the clubs of St James’s and, a short way down the street, from Trumper’s, the gentlemen’s barber, it had become a favourite stopping-place among the fashionable and literary intelligentsia for browsing and gossip, even more since the arrival of the new assistant, whose enthusiasm for the latter pastime occasionally annoyed those rare customers who came in only to buy a book – ‘A little less “darling” and a little more attention, please!’ a cross voice could now and again be heard cutting through Nancy’s drawling tones. Evelyn Waugh, when in London, was a regular patron, so was Raymond Mortimer6, the Sitwells (‘my spiritual home’, Osbert called it), Gerry Wellesley7 and Gerald Berners8.

  When Heywood Hill was called up in December 1942, Heywood’s wife Anne and Nancy ran the business on their own. Nancy, in a neat uniform of black velvet top and woollen skirt, was surprisingly proficient: she enjoyed the business of selling and not only had an excellent memory for titles, publishers and prices, but was more than willing to do her share of the hard labour, packing and unpacking books, sorting out orders, and lugging heavy parcels to the post office. She walked to the shop every morning from Blomfield Road, a distance of over two and a half miles – down the Edgware Road, across Oxford Street at the Marble Arch, down Park Lane – and very often walked back again in the evening. As she and the Hills lived near each other in Maida Vale, Nancy and Anne took it in turns to arrive first at the shop in the morning, the one whose turn it was not dropping the key into the letter-box of the other on her way home at night. It was not an entirely fool-proof system. ‘What do you think I did?’ a horrified Nancy wrote to Muv one weekend. ‘I decided not to come here Sat: morning as I was really tired, & forgot to lock the door on Friday so the shop was full of wandering people trying to buy books from each other. Wasn’t it a nightmare. By the mercy of Providence Heywood was passing through London & happened to look in HE WASN’T BEST PLEASED. And I don’t blame him.’

  On the occasions when Anne Hill had to be away from the shop, Nancy remained in charge, running the business with the help of a new assistant, Mollie Friese-Greene, who had been taken on mainly to cope with the accounts, for which neither Nancy nor Anne showed much aptitude. ‘All is much slacker,’ Nancy wrote to Diana, ‘& Miss Freeze-Greene (well named I consider when you think where she’s going to sit) will provide further alleviation.’ Nonetheless the work was hard and Nancy, never strong, began to feel run down. ‘I feel very old, going grey & bald & look terrible. I’ve been doing far too much & need a week in bed.’ Her only break had been a few days in August helping to look after Unity at Swinbrook. It had been bliss to be out of London and away from the stuffiness of the shop, away from the bombs and the bad food and the endless queueing, but it could hardly be described as a holiday. The news from abroad was not encouraging either: Tom was fighting in Libya, Mark was now a prisoner of war, and Hamish had just been captured after an action of outstanding bravery resulting in the blowing up of a German tank at Tobruk. Now he was in a prison camp in Italy (the story going round was that the one message he had been able to get through was an urgently scribbled note to his mother, ‘Send Almanach de Gotha’)9. In November, in order to give Muv a few days’ respite, Nancy had the obstreperous Unity to stay with her in Blomfield Road, and exhausted though she was pulled herself together sufficiently to throw a party, which she afterwards described to Diana. ‘Bobo enjoyed my party. She brought a ghastly old dress full of moth holes so I crammed her into my only good black one which we left undone all the way down the back & she kept on a coat so all was well but it was rather an awful moment when I saw what she did propose to wear. Then she refused to make up her face but the adored Capitaine Roy took her upstairs & did it for her. So in the end she looked awfully pretty.’

  For the adored Capitaine Roy the evening may not have been so agreeable. Nancy had recently met someone else, a man who appeared to be making a considerable impression on her, a few years older than Roy and a Colone
l in the Free French Forces. His name was Gaston Palewski.

  1 For the past three years, Diana’s visits to Germany had been on business: she and Mosley wanted to set up a light-music radio advertising-station in order to raise money for the Party. They had licences for receivers in France and Ireland, and negotiations were in progress for a third to be set up in Germany.

  2 Later it became clear that it had been the Government’s intention all along to arrest Diana: Nancy’s evidence was contributory, not crucial.

  3 Staying at Highcliffe, Nancy was unable to resist teasing Mrs Hammersley with the difference in the standard of living between the widow’s little villa at Totland Bay and the grandeur and security of Highcliffe Castle: ‘Butlers are the great problem – impossible to find & Mr Fife has not brought a man. Nevertheless, clattering tea on silver tripods is succeeded by 4 course dinner & how can one help but enjoy it … I insist on getting up for breakfast & this is well received, so the war effort goes on.’

  4 In reality Roy André Desplats-Pilter, of a Huguenot family, son of a French father and English mother.

  5 Novelist, critic and musician, he succeeded as Lord Sackville in 1962.

  6 Literary critic and author.

  7 Gerald Wellesley, succeeded as seventh Duke of Wellington in 1943.

  8 The fourteenth Baron Berners, author, painter, composer, eccentric and wit.

  9 Hamish’s courageous war continued with his escape from the camp just before the Germans arrived to take it over; dressed as a woman – ‘the Marchesa della Piccola Mia, I suppose,’ Nancy knowingly remarked – he made his way up through Italy, moving from one ducal house to another until he was eventually picked up by the British and repatriated, whereupon he immediately returned to Italy to organise an escape route for other prisoners on the run.