Nancy Mitford

by Selina Hastings

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Colonel

  Gaston Palewski was possessed of all the qualities that, to an English eye, epitomise the sophisticated Frenchman: he was charming, he was amusing, he was a great lover of the arts and an incorrigible womaniser. He was also a shrewd politician, with an unswerving loyalty to his country and his cause.

  Born in 1901, he came of a Polish family which had been settled in France since the middle of the nineteenth century. His parents were clever, cultivated people, Palewski père an engineer and one of the pioneers of the aerial navigation industry. Gaston himself was educated at the Ecole du Louvre, the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques and the Sorbonne, after which he came to England for a year’s postgraduate study at Oxford. His political career started early. At the age of twenty-one he was appointed attaché to Maréchal Lyautey in Morocco, and then worked with Paul Reynaud during his time as Minister of Finance under Daladier. It was this period that saw the beginning of Palewski’s lifelong association with Charles de Gaulle, then, in 1934, vainly trying to promote the establishment of a professional army with which to counter the highly mechanised German forces already mobilizing with such sinister intent on the other side of the Maginot Line. At their first meeting Palewski had been overwhelmed by what he saw as de Gaulle’s mastery and vision, and it was he who at once urged Reynaud to recognise his genius. From that moment Palewski’s faith in de Gaulle never wavered, and de Gaulle never forgot what he owed him. (In a letter after the war, the General, not one easily to express emotion, wrote to his faithful supporter, ‘Vous savez combien j’ai d’affection pour vous, sous la cuirasse.’)

  When war broke out Palewski, unable to countenance the pacifist policies of Reynaud, volunteered for the French Air Force’s 34th Bomber Squadron, where he distinguished himself by winning a mention in despatches for valour at Sedan. At the fall of France in June 1940, he was in Tunisia with his squadron and telegraphed at once to de Gaulle in London offering his services. De Gaulle replied with an immediate summons, and from August 1940 to March 1941 Palewski scarcely left the General’s side, his knowledge of the English and his diplomatic skills making him an invaluable keeper of the peace between the somewhat overbearing Allies and his touchy and intransigent chief. In the spring of the following year Palewski left London to return to Africa, this time to Ethiopia, believing that the interests of his country were better served fighting on the field of battle than in the quarrelsome atmosphere of Carlton Gardens and in the organisation of a resistance movement that then seemed premature. He spent six months in Ethiopia commanding the Free French Forces of East Africa before again being recalled to London, arriving in September 1942 to take up the post of de Gaulle’s directeur de cabinet.

  In London Palewski performed an invaluable service. He was a man of the world, at ease in society, accustomed to the manners of the English ruling class. He was delightful company, his conversation brilliant, his knowledge of political affairs profound. He understood the world in which he moved. A subtle and accomplished diplomat, his love of France was fierce, his loyalty to the General absolute. Known among his colleagues (behind his back) as Eminence Grise for the influence he was thought to have with the General, Palewski was careful always to detach himself from the internecine rivalries that were carried on incessantly among the staff and officers of the Free French. Thus he was able to act as a buffer between the General and his quarrelsome compatriots, and also as an emollient between the General and his English Allies.

  When Palewski came back to London he made a point, as he had the year before, of conducting his social life as far away as possible from the enervating dramas at Carlton Gardens. His working day was long (the General arrived at his office at 9.30 every morning and was usually still there at midnight); the news was frequently depressing; the outlook bleak. Moreover the gallant French Colonel, an old habitué of the dining-tables of Ladies Colefax and Cunard, had friends in all the most sophisticated circles in the capital. Shortly after his return it came to his ears that there was a certain Mrs Rodd whose husband was in Ethiopia and who would no doubt be grateful for news of him. It so happened that the Colonel had met both Francis and Peter when he was in Addis Ababa, all three of them having been involved in the Anglo-French negotiations over the Djibouti-Addis Railway. He would be more than happy to make a rendezvous with Mrs Rodd and tell her what he could of her husband’s situation.

  They met on a warm September evening in the garden of the Allies’ Club, that most congenial meeting-place for officers in exile established in the old Rothschild house at the corner of Hamilton Place and Park Lane. They talked first about Peter and Ethiopia, and then of France, of French literature and history, for which this pretty grass widow had a most gratifying enthusiasm. The Colonel was very taken with her, so amusing and high-spirited; her clothes (though clearly not expensive) were (for an Englishwoman) elegant, and most beguiling of all was her evident love of France and in particular of Paris, that lost paradise, ‘la cité du bonheur parfait’. Nancy was equally entranced. She saw before her a small, stocky Frenchman in early middle-age with a face like an amiable toad, dark hair and moustache and a badly pitted skin, by whom she unaccountably found herself powerfully attracted. He charmed and flattered her; he gossiped, joked and made her feel every minute she was with him that she was the centre of his undivided attention.

  A few days later she invited him to dine with her in Blomfield Road. The Colonel enjoyed himself; as an enthusiastic amateur des jolies femmes he knew very well how to conduct a flirtation. Women were his greatest weakness; he could not see a pretty woman without wanting to make love to her and Nancy was no exception. As far as Palewski was concerned, charming Mrs Rodd – so sophisticated on the surface, so delightfully naive beneath – provided the opportunity for a most agreeable interlude, a welcome respite from the austere atmosphere surrounding his single-minded chief. The pattern was quickly established between them that several evenings a week he should dine with her at Blomfield Road, arriving usually very late straight from Carlton Gardens in a taxi, and signalling his presence by whistling a few bars of a Kurt Weill song popular that year. Sometimes they dined at the Connaught, where the General always ate his luncheon, or at 25 Eaton Terrace, the house Palewski had taken, belonging to Anne Rosse, sister of Nancy’s old friend Oliver Messel – a most unlikely setting for a Colonel of the Free French Forces, who often woke in the morning bewildered to find himself in that very pretty lady’s bedroom with its pink walls, frilled pillows, and all the little devices to protect the sleep of a fashionable young woman. Nancy enchanted and entertained him. He adored her stories about her eccentric family: ‘Racontez, racontez,’ he would say, his dark eyes shining with amusement, ‘la famille Mitford fait ma joie.’ Whenever he could, he spent the night with her (‘J’ai horreur de coucher seul’), getting up at seven, dressing and returning to Eaton Terrace in time to be brought his breakfast and the papers at eight o’clock. Then he telephoned Nancy to chat for a few minutes – ‘Allons, des histoires!’ – before he left for his office and she for the shop. Sometimes he dropped into the shop during the day: for the General’s birthday she sold him a copy of the Memoirs of Saint-Simon.

  But what was a pleasant pastime for Palewski soon became the very breath of life to Nancy. Like her heroine Linda, she was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and for the first time in her life knew that this was love. She was drunk with excitement, lived only for her meetings with the Colonel, and in between those meetings for their long, teasing chats on the telephone. Thanks to his year at Oxford the Colonel spoke excellent English and had an easy familiarity with English literature, giving him immediate access to Nancy’s terms of reference. ‘Do I not know wonderful English? Do I not know a lot of English poetry? … Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – am I not brilliant to know that?’ There was nothing in the least effeminate about this small, swarthy Frenchman, but as up to now had been the case only with her homosexual men friends he was a lo
ver of art and beautiful things, witty, worldly and frivolous, with an insatiable appetite for gossip, an ebullient joie de vivre, and a pleasure in the company of women incomprehensible to the average Englishman. For Palewski adored women, preferably young, preferably pretty, but almost any woman was better than none. He awoke Nancy, whose sexual nature had until then lain restfully dormant, to a profound awareness of sexual love. She felt for him a deep and overwhelming physical attraction which at times frightened her, in a way almost shocked her, and she had never in her life been so happy.

  The first person to be told of this new love affair was the widow on the Isle of Wight, who took it to be no more than a passing fancy, another admirer to make miserable, all part, was it not, of the tantalising game? ‘Colonel Palewski sounds enchanting,’ wrote Mrs Hammersley, ‘and very entreprenant – But what of Roy?’ It was no game, however. Just before Christmas 1942, spent with Maurice Bowra in Oxford, Nancy brought to an end her affair with Roy. She wanted no one but the Colonel.

  In January they dined together several times before Palewski left on the 21st to accompany the General to the Allied Conference in Casablanca. In Nancy’s appointment diary for that day is written, ‘Bridget’s party. Gone.’ A month later he was back, now referred to in the diary not as Palewski, but as Colonel, his rank in the Air Force but also Nancy’s private name for him. They had dinner together on February 21, lunched on March 7, visited Hampton Court on the 13th, a Saturday, and the Sunday Colonel spent according to established custom at Blomfield Road. The following weekend, they dined at the Connaught on Saturday, were together all Sunday, lunched the following Tuesday and Wednesday, and were together from dinner on Saturday at Eaton Terrace to seven o’clock on Monday morning when Colonel left Blomfield Road for his own quarters. This blissfully happy state of affairs continued until the end of May 1943, when, on the 28th of that month, Colonel left to join General de Gaulle in Algeria. He was unable to tell Nancy when, if ever, she would see him again.

  By this time most of Nancy’s friends knew that this was something serious. Mrs Hammersley, worried that she might in desperation take some irrevocable step which she would later regret, offered a word of caution. ‘I feel rather anxious about you darling. I must tell you that I never would have thought your heart would prevail over your reason. I still can hardly believe it, not because you haven’t got a heart, but because just something (I hoped) in your temperament. Also of course your humour gets in the way … Perhaps its a good thing P. will be absent for a bit. I don’t mean to be harsh but, at one remove, you will be able better to take stock of the future and of your own feelings. It’s important in life to keep balanced.’ Mark, too, having heard of the Pretty Young Lady’s situation, wrote reprovingly from his prison-camp in Italy: ‘I am glad your Frogs are friendly – there is one in my room, though not, Alas, Free – But I am not sure that I can approve the gay goings on in the P.Y.L.’s1 bed …’ Only Peter was cheerfully unaware of his wife’s affairs, writing from Asmara with typically Proddish swagger: ‘I am doing or trying to do everything myself and am now a building contractor and a farmer as well, as I have had to make sure of my meat supply by buying a lot of live cows, rather nice cows with humps. Besides that I am Cooks Tours, Carter Patterson, Somerset House, the Passport Office and Customs and Excise, with a spot of Treasure Cot, Heppels and Fortnum and Mason thrown in.’

  Meanwhile Nancy, careless of the advice of well-meaning friends, went on from day to day as best she could, waiting for those letters from Algiers on which it seemed her life depended. They arrived at long and infrequent intervals, a meagre ration on which to support existence. Every morning she looked for that longed-for envelope with the General’s stamp forwarded from Carlton Gardens and enclosing another envelope, inside which was a single sheet of the thinnest airmail paper, paper so thin it was almost transparent. Sometimes the contents were typed by a secretary, sometimes, much worse, written by Colonel himself apparently using a rusty pin – ‘l’épingle d’Alger’, she called it despairingly – and in a tormentingly illegible hand. The letters, those that she could decipher, were friendly but cautious: in no sense could they be described as love-letters. But then the Colonel was not in love. Moreover he had his position to consider: any scandal concerning a married woman, a married Englishwoman, would not be regarded with favour by the General. He was careful always to address her as ‘vous’, usually beginning ‘Ma chère amie’, so much more impersonal than ‘Chère Nancy’, and signing himself with all the elaborate epistolary flourish in which the French delight: ‘Agréez, je vous prie, ma chère amie, l’hommage de mes sentiments bien fidèlement dévoués et respectueux Gaston Palewski.’ He wrote of the terrible difficulties facing the General; of the discomfort of Algiers, ‘ce trou méditerranéen’; of the ‘climat étouffant; gens horribles; bourgeois repus … Horrible war’; of how he dined once with Prodd: ‘Il est en bonne forme’; of the exigent nature of his work and of his long hours: ‘Je travaille depuis 7h du matin jusqu’à 8h 30 du soir et je prends tous mes repas avec le gén. Je n’ai donc jamais un moment de liberté.’ Now and again there is a glimpse of a fondness to which in the circumstances it was difficult to give expression: he had to be wary of what he might inadvertently reveal in the way of war news, and dictation to a secretary was hardly conducive to intimacy. ‘Je m’excuse de cette lettre pratique et dactylographiée. Les interlignes sont écrites à l’encre sympathique,’ he added once in his own hand. If he were feeling particularly warm towards her, he would add after his signature the words ‘Connaught Hotel’, a private reference to an occasion when he had tried to take her upstairs after dinner at the Connaught. To Nancy’s embarrassment, they were stopped by a stern-faced receptionist who told them that ladies who were not guests of the hotel were never allowed in the bedrooms.

  But Colonel was under no obligation to conceal how much he enjoyed Nancy’s letters to him. ‘Ecrivez, écrivez’ was the constant cry, ‘vos lettres sont mes ballons d’oxygène … Rien ne donne la température de Londres comme vos lettres, et j’ai besoin de pouvoir évoquer le passé pour me consoler du présent … Surtout continuez à m’écrire.’ And continue she did, entertaining him with funny stories and all the gossip of the town. Already she was beginning to realise that, if she wanted to hold on to this very fascinating, very slippery man of the world, she must, like Scheherazade, beguile him with stories: her hold on him depended on her ability to entertain; she must be gay, always there must be something amusing to recount. The Colonel did not care for the melancholy nor the mundane; he did not wish to know if she were sad or cold or worried about money. That was not what life was for. And so she spun her tales, regularly posting off her grey Harrods envelopes to their unseen destination. Colonel made the error once of light-heartedly referring to ‘la charmante avalanche grise’, a phrase which wounded Nancy and for which he was obliged hastily to apologise: ‘J’avais employé le mot “avalanche” pour des raisons de style mais non pour me plaindre de l’abondance de vos lettres …’

  All this was meagre enough, and on her near starvation rations Nancy came close to despair. She was pining for the Colonel, to such an extent that for one wild moment she even considered trying to get to Algeria – before commonsense and Mrs Hammersley prevailed. ‘Venez donc pour l’hiver,’ he had casually thrown out, knowing he was safe, for how could she possibly leave the country, let alone travel to North Africa? ‘On serait ravi de vous voir.’

  Meanwhile there was little to look forward to at home. The only pieces of good news were the release of the Mosleys in November (Diana now received letters from her waggish sister sealed with stickers issued by the Daily Worker reading ‘Put MOSLEY back in GAOL!’), and the arrival of Hamish, returned from Italy in time for Christmas, very thin but otherwise well. The work in the shop was becoming more and more arduous – ‘I’m going to try & leave the shop if the Labour Exchange will allow,’ Nancy wrote to Muv in a thoroughly bad mood. ‘I think its making me ill & I shall have a breakdown if I go o
n never seeing daylight’ – and the money shortage was once again acute, with nothing at all coming in from Peter. He and Francis were now together in Calabria working for AMGOT2 after the collapse of Italy (‘AMGOTterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Rodds’ was Maurice Bowra’s joke on the subject). Here he was having a wonderful time reconstructing life for thousands of destitute peasants to whom, naturally, he was able to speak in their very own dialect, while rebuilding their bridges, organising boar-hunts to provide them with food and, under the Rodd family ensign, running a pirate fleet up and down the coast plundering the German fuel supplies. Peter was of course the only man on the spot who knew what he was doing: the British, a lot of rip-snorting shits buggering about and getting in the way; the Americans, prep-school children, a far greater handicap to the troops than the enemy; and the Italians, ‘a band of wets. I am sick of teaching them to blow their noses and wipe their bottoms.’

  This was all a tremendous lark but little consolation to Nancy, tired, depressed and suffering almost physical pain from the absence of Palewski. The New Year of 1944 saw her at her lowest ebb. It was the fourth year of the war and the shortages were worse than ever. There was almost nothing to buy in the shops, travel virtually impossible, everyone suffering from cold and exhaustion. There were times when there was not actually enough to eat, and even the ducks in Hyde Park looked appetising on her walk to the shop in the mornings. (When in later years she used to boast of how much she had enjoyed the war, this period cannot have been uppermost in her mind.) In January she wrote to Muv, ‘You never saw anything like the burning – I pack a suit case every night & always dress which I never did before, but the raids are very short, exactly one hour so that’s no great hardship only chilly … I spent the morning looking at clothes – the most utter horrors (dresses) you ever saw for £23 cheap & dreadful looking what is one to do. Then I tried to get a suspender belt – they have wooden suspenders. So the squander bug went hungry away. It makes the burning even more of a bore doesn’t it. The last straw is Harrods don’t stamp ones note paper any more.’ And always, as for everyone else, food was very much on her mind. ‘Picture my joy when I found a chicken chez Jackson & my despair when on presenting this much heralded fowl to Gladys she immediately discovered it to be crawling with maggots! Really you wouldn’t expect Jacksons to sell you a maggotty hen. So we all cried a great deal, the disappointment was dreadful.’