Nancy Mitford

by Selina Hastings

  These letters were written on paper Nancy recently had had made especially for taking away with her: no address on the top, but a little mole (the Mitford crest) embossed in gold in the left-hand corner. It was very pretty. Aunt Iris wrote appreciatively on receiving a sample, ‘I have fallen deeply in love with your charming little golden cunt (Glostershire of my young days for moles, few people now know what it means).’ ‘She’s not in the Tynan set, obviously,’ Nancy observed.

  By the autumn of 1966, when The Sun King came out, Nancy was back in rue Monsieur and feeling fretful. Paris was no longer what it had been: for one thing, ‘There are so few agreeable English people here now … they are all true horrors & loathe the French as common English always have. One long beef about plumbers doesn’t make for interesting conversations!’; then there was the noise and the traffic and the shrill voices of the children playing outside her window. (‘When I see fillette dans le coma depuis 4 jours I do so wish it could be all the children in this courtyard’.) Never mentioned but ever present was the tormenting truth that she was seeing less and less of the Colonel: there was somebody else in his life – there had to be, to account for that evasive look on his face, the infrequency, now, of his telephone calls.

  So it was that Nancy left Paris and moved to Versailles. It was what she had always wanted, her friends were told; she had always wanted to live in the suburbs. Number 4, rue d’Artois was a small, two-storey, eighteenth-century house, flat-faced and painted white, standing inconspicuously in a narrow side-street away from the centre of town, with a few shops and a solid grey parish church just round the corner. It was an undistinguished little house, but it had half an acre of walled garden and Nancy thought it complete perfection. By the time she was ready to move in January 1967, she had cut her ties with Paris and could hardly wait to leave. Versailles was superior in nearly every respect, and the Versaillais, it was quickly noted, were much easier to get on with than the cross Parisians. A few days before Christmas she went to the house to see how work was progressing: ‘I went yesterday & made a huge bonfire in the garden (oh how enjoyable) &, in spite of it being Sat afternoon the sweet deaf & dumb painter was there & of course joined in. Nobody ever can resist, can they? Marvellous sunset & rooks flying home & a moon coming up – goodness, I long to move. The old servant of the next door chemist was shutting the shutters, I never saw such a dear old face, like olden times.’

  In spite of her urban way of life and the sophistication of her appearance, Nancy always retained a strong streak of the countrywoman. Rue Monsieur had presented small opportunity either for gardening or for keeping animals – although for some years Nancy and Marie had kept a quarrelsome old cat, Minet, brought over from England by Diana; and there was a hen Marie purchased in the market and which, as neither of them could bear to have it killed, was allowed to live out its natural span in the kitchen, going comfortably to bed every night in the oven. Now Nancy’s half-acre of garden became a passionate and absorbing interest. Debo, herself an experienced gardener, was the main recipient of Nancy’s horticultural confidences. What she wanted at rue d’Artois, Nancy told her, was a wild garden, a ‘champ fleuri’. ‘I want a lot of weed seeds – poppies, valerian, irises, orchids, buttercups, marsh marrow, daisies & hare bells … A dear little boy comes every Thursday & hacks down vile things like budlea copper beech maple japonica & various nameless brutes. There is a thing I recognise as having hideous pink flowers like in London parks. The neighbours beg me with tears to leave it what am I to do. I loathe it. I am going to dot the grass with rose bushes & sow many a weed. I will not mow. I loathe lawns (London parks).’

  The arrival of spring (‘Oh the spring how could I have lived in Paris all these years!’) brought many an exciting new discovery. ‘I see that this is a most thwarting hobby. For instance, I noted jasmin in a catalogue & ordered it (much of it) Well I thought jasmin was a lovely exotic bloom, like for a Monastery Garden or In a Persian Market, of which scent was made. Well when it came it turned out to be that dismal little yellow flower on a sort of stick insect plant redolent of London parks. My grass is rather tufty so I pretend to be a cow & pluck it with a grazing motion, to a chorus of offers to lend mowing machines.’ With the spring, too, a whole animal world came to life before Nancy’s fascinated gaze. A tortoise crawled out of hibernation: ‘Tortie is sheer therapy. Col, not finding me the other day, said to Marie oh there she is, watching the tortoise;’ so did a pair of hedgehogs, with whose domestic saga Debo was kept well up to date: ‘Hot news here the hedgehogs have had a baby. I saw it last night, drinking the milk we put for them. Oh the sweetness.’ Then there were the bees and the birds, with a different but equally absorbing set of problems. ‘The water I put out for my precious birds is now taken over by bees who sit closely packed round the rim, drinking (or I’m told filling bags to take back to the hive) All right, but there is one horrid bee whose function it is to chase away the birds in which it is only too successful – even the vainglorious black bird flees & all my friends have departed.’ What she longed for, she told Debo, was a pet: a dog was out of the question (‘I crave one dreadfully but its the loo trouble my garden isn’t big enough’); so what about a rabbit? But then ‘I suppose if I had a large white rabbit with pink ears it would entail cleaning out?’ By the summer the garden was in full and glorious flower; to the eyes of her friends it looked a jungle, but to the happy owner it was a ravishing wilderness – ‘My garden looks as if 1000 Edwardian hats had fallen into it (roses).’

  Nancy was now a rich woman2, thanks to the continuing enormous sales of The Sun King. Madame de Pompadour was to be reissued in a new illustrated edition as companion to Louis; and Hamish Hamilton was agitating for another big best-seller. For some time Nancy had been toying with the idea of a life of the Prussian king Frederick the Great, at first glance a bizarre choice of subject for someone on whose personal hate-list the Germans came second only to the unspeakable Americans. The attraction was that Frederick, although German, was an honorary Frenchman: he spoke French (considered the German language fit only for horses), he wrote in French, his culture was entirely French, and he was the friend and patron of Voltaire. Like Voltaire he was an arch-tease. No wonder Nancy found him irresistible. ‘Goodness F must have been funny – that’s why I love him so much. The jokes are perfect.’ Hamish Hamilton, however, was distinctly dubious, while George Rainbird ‘groans at the prospect & longs for Catherine the Great … I’m dreadfully afraid the English only like books about Mary Q of S & Marie Antoinette & that new ground won’t go down – specially German ground.’ Worse than that from a publisher’s point of view was the problem of Frederick’s love-life: there wasn’t any. ‘I don’t think he loved anybody & that whether or not he fondled pretty young officers after breakfast is really immaterial … It’s not that I don’t want to say that Fred: had affairs – I long to (& my publisher turned white to the lips when I said I couldn’t find a scrap of real evidence for any love affair) but the truth is what is interesting about people.’

  However, both Hamilton and Rainbird knew better than to stand in Nancy’s way: she was the goose that laid the golden eggs and the last thing either of them wanted was to stop the laying. It was in her favour, too, that Frederick was a good subject for Rainbird’s format: lots of colour pictures of his collection of paintings and furniture, of his great palaces and his soldiers’ pretty uniforms. The services of the indispensable Joy Law were, at Nancy’s insistence, once again engaged, and in August 1968 she was ready to begin.

  The plan was that Nancy, accompanied by Pam who spoke the language, should go to East Germany to look at what remained of Frederick’s realm; but then the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia which put paid to that. In November she went alone to Prague, staying with the British Ambassador. ‘Nobody in the least bit interested in any historical figures exc: Kafka. I never got to the battlefield of Kollin but you can be sure if Kafka had fought there I wld have been taken the first day!’ Nonetheless she came back excited by w
hat she had seen, her head full of ideas about Frederick. ‘I can never tell you the fascination of the story of Fred,’ she wrote to Professor Robert Halsband, ‘& if I write a rotten book I can’t blame the material. The mystery to me is how other writers have managed to cast such an aura of boredom over it!’ The other mystery remained Frederick’s sex-life: ‘I think perhaps I fail to understand the nature of homosexuality – I am excessively normal myself & have never had the slightest leaning in that direction even as a child. My own feeling about F is that he was almost or quite sexless … The interest of a love affair lies in the changing nature of the relationship & if there is no evidence available how can one describe it? Allez-oop with young officers is really very dull.’

  At the end of that year, 1968, Nancy began to be aware of a distracting pain in her left leg – rheumatism, perhaps, or sciatica. ‘As I am unused to pain it gets me down’, she told Debo. ‘Nothing to be done for it I fear so I don’t bother to try. Besides I’m too busy.’ But the weeks passed and the pain would not be ignored. Her doctor thought it might be a slipped disc, or even something wrong with her kidneys (‘Cancer, I expect,’ Nancy joked), and that she should go into hospital for tests. Meanwhile he advised her to stay at home flat on her back for a fortnight to see if complete rest would effect the cure.

  This was at the end of March 1969. During that fortnight when Nancy was lying supine in her bedroom in the rue d’Artois, a small announcement appeared one morning in the Figaro: ‘Nous sommes heureux d’annoncer,’ it began, ‘le mariage de M. Gaston PALEWSKI avec Violette de TALLEYRAND-PERIGORD duchesse de SAGAN,’ The marriage, the announcement continued, ‘a été célébré dans la plus stricte intimité, le 20 mars’. The event that Nancy had been dreading for nearly thirty years had finally taken place: Colonel was married. For him it was the greatest good fortune: his wife was rich and the owner of one of the most beautiful châteaux in France, Le Marais, only forty kilometres outside Paris. He had been in love with her for years but the affair had had to be discreetly conducted as only recently had her husband consented to a divorce. She had a son, too, of whom Colonel was particularly fond, thus providing him with the sense of family for which he had always felt the need.

  But good fortune for the Colonel heralded the end for Nancy. It was almost literally a death-blow, the bitterness of it exacerbated by the fact that Gaston’s wife was a divorced woman: for years Nancy had accepted the face-saving excuse that he could never marry her because he dare not risk his political career by marrying a divorcée. Now retired from politics, he could marry where he chose, and his choice was not Nancy. She admitted her misery to no one. Those of her friends who enquired about it were told in a manner studiedly casual – all too silly, a marriage for those of mature years, no nonsense about living together, Violette a sort of non-person: ‘I think we’ll see the old boy as per & I don’t think anything will change for better or worse – he’s to go on living in the rue Bonaparte … Nothing changed whatever in other words.’

  In the beginning of April Nancy finally went into hospital, her long rest in bed having done nothing at all to alleviate the pain. She was operated on and a lump the size of a grapefruit removed from her liver. The surgeon told Diana and Debo that the tumour was malignant and that the patient was unlikely to live for more than another four months. It was decided, after much agonising on the part of the sisters, that Nancy should not be told, that she would not be able to accept the nearness of death. She came out of hospital weak and tired but relieved that the pain had gone, and happy beyond measure to be back in her little house. On warm days she sat out under the apple-tree in the garden, feeling so much better than she was even able to think of starting again on her book.

  Then the pain came back, worse than before. It was now not only in her leg but in the small of her back. Strong pain-killers, including morphine, were prescribed, which made her feel stupid, but if she did not take them the pain was unbearable and she was left ‘literally bellowing in anguish … the doctors look at me sadly, because there is nothing wrong with my back whatever, it is pristine. They seem in a sea of total ignorance in fact & fall back on that meaningless word rheumatism.’

  The next four years, the long four years it took Nancy to die, were characterised by weeks of appalling pain interspersed with brief periods of remission, during which she would be convinced that she was cured. It was almost as though the pain were an expression of thirty years of suppressed jealousy, misery and rage over the disappointment of her love for the Colonel, periodically palliated by her own high spirits and enthusiasm for life. Nancy was a difficult patient to treat as she had inherited to the full her mother’s distrust of medicine and of the entire medical profession. She distrusted her doctors, thought them ignorant and avaricious. She believed she had an unusually high resistance to pain-killers, which was not in fact true: the pain itself was so terrible that there was almost nothing that would bring it under control. The cause of the pain was a mystery: contrary to the surgeon’s prediction the operation to cut out the tumour from her liver had been completely successful and the growth did not recur. But the pain continued. In these four years, during which Nancy saw thirty-seven different doctors, she went into hospital for operations both in Paris and London, submitted to tests, X-rays and a blood transfusion, underwent massage and manipulation, and adhered to any number of theories (from a twisted muscle to a too-tight waistband on a pair of trousers) as the cause of the pain. Not until the end was the correct diagnosis made, that Nancy was suffering from a rare form of Hodgkin’s Disease, a malignant enlargement of the lymph glands, in her case rooted, which is rare, in the spine. The pain is known to be one of the two most severe a human being can suffer.

  But this, in the summer of 1969, was still in the future. Nancy was in pain, but for the moment it was not unendurable. Decca came over from California for a visit, and was relieved to note that her sister was as sharp-tongued as ever. In June the saintly Marie, now in her seventies and no longer able to toil up and down stairs with laden trays several times a day, left to return to her family in Normandy. Nancy missed her ‘more terribly than words can say … The spiritual nourishment I got from old Marie can’t ever be replaced & everything is much duller – viz I never look at the télé now, it bores me.’ Marie’s replacement, a Mlle Delcourt, was efficient but a bore; she was, however, an excellent cook, ‘& she is very very well disposed & anxious to please. The kitchen is so tidy it looks like a kitchen in a play.’ Even more marvellous, ‘the new lady, (new Marie) seeing me writhing about in true agony said I could cure you. Me, rather bored, looking out of the window … I doubt it. N.L. May I try? Me Oh all right – no no no you mustn’t touch my back. N.L. touches it, terrifies me, grip of iron. Cured. Period. Can you beat it? She says I had a twisted muscle which she has straightened up.’ It seemed too good to be true, the first time Nancy had been free of pain for seven months. Now she was out of bed (‘no more bed at all in fact it is made, with its cover’); she had walked to the hairdresser, and she told Diana, ‘I am so cured I can’t remember being ill.’ Now she was impatient to get on with her book.

  This posed a new problem: if Nancy were to follow the schedule she had planned for herself the probability was that she would not live to finish it. Diana wrote to Debo, ‘N says she has got on so well with the book that there is absolutely no hurry … This kills one with guilt, in case finally she reproaches & says I could have gone quicker & finished if I’d known. So I have got a plot to ask the man they all like at Rainbird to ask her as a great favour to let them have it a bit sooner – telling him why.’ Nancy swallowed the ploy, writing to Joy Law that she was having to hurry on with ‘Fred’ as ‘it seems Hamilton has got a poor list for ’71’.

  She was so much encouraged by the apparent improvement in her health and the interest shown in her book that she now felt able to undertake the long-postponed expedition to see Frederick’s Prussian palaces and battlefields before finishing the book. In October 1969 Nancy and Pam with J
oy Law and her husband flew to East Germany as guests of the government. They were provided with two chauffeur-driven limousines and an English-speaking guide who escorted them round Potsdam, Dresden and East Berlin. It was Pam who kept Nancy going, getting her up every morning at eight and seeing that she had a chair to sit on in museums. When they got back Nancy reported on the trip to Alvilde Lees-Milne3 : ‘The journey was simply amazing & I’m thankful I went … I had a lot of pain but no worse than when I’m here & they were so kind about bringing chairs & bringing the car to forbidden places & so on. The only thing was no baths only showers & I depend greatly on lying in a hot bath so that was rather a blow. Food delicious because they haven’t got round to broilers & so on & the taste was what one has forgotten but of course if you say so they are deeply offended & say by next year all the farms will be factories. Like in all commy countries nothing works & the first evening I was stuck in a mad lift which whirled up & down for 35 minutes. I thought I was for it & Woman thought I’d been kidnapped … I thought East B vastly preferable to West which is like a huge Oxford Street. The people so much nicer wherever you look … I’ve seldom enjoyed myself more. I’ve finished the book which is now being typed & my health has taken a distinct turn for the better, so everything seems rosy again.’

  The turn for the better was short-lived. Immediately after Christmas Nancy succumbed to a bad attack of influenza, so did Mlle Delcourt, and so did Mme Guimant, the nice charwoman who lived in the same street and came in every day to clean. Pam was appealed to for rescue, but she, too, was ill. Diana at Orsay was looking after Sir Oswald just out of hospital after an operation. For three days nobody at all came to the little house in the rue d’Artois. For three days Nancy, unable to go downstairs, had nothing to eat. Never had she felt so wretched. She lay on her unmade bed all day crying and hungry and longing for Marie. Her loneliness appalled her sisters: as Diana said, ‘The awful thing is, she doesn’t come first with anybody.’