Nancy Mitford

by Selina Hastings

  After this period of darkness the efficient Mlle Delcourt left to be replaced by a young, smiling, curly-haired Moroccan boy. Nancy liked Hassan from the beginning. He was willing, cheerful, and ‘a real cook, absolutely the top – I’m so thrilled. Then so smart & nice, & kind he found one of my hedgehogs & brought it in & so on – you know, the sort of person one can do with’. His single disadvantage was that every Saturday at midday he took off for Paris, not to reappear until breakfast on Monday. ‘On Sunday which is Hassan’s day off the gracious living of rue d’Artois collapses. The butter stays in silver paper for fear of dirtying a plate – I had cheese & brioche for lunch & was to make porridge for dinner shown by Woo [‘Woman’, a nickname for Pam]. But I bought some milk in a sort of celluloid container which I couldn’t open so I drove a nail into it upon which two great jets of milk burst forth like Moses smiting the rock was it Moses? one into my eye the other on the floor neither in the jug … Oh I loathe it all so terribly.’

  In April 1970 Nancy went into the Hôpital Rothschild in Paris for a series of tests. There were no private rooms and the experience was one which left her deeply shaken. ‘On this étage all the patients have got skin diseases & one queues up for the loo with people like that picture of Napoleon at Aleppo – male & female – who have not been trained in use of same by English nannies.’ At first she shared a room with an old Roumanian peasant woman ‘with such an agonizing skin disease that she shrieked & not with laughter for 20 hours a day. For 4 hours she slept & her snores were louder than her shrieks. She allowed no window open you know what that means to me!’ Then for the last week ‘I was cast on my back, no pillow, unable to write & almost unable to read, with, as fellow, the wife of a vigneron from Champagne, & I don’t mean Odette Pol-Roger! … She not only allowed no window but it had to be covered with linoleum & she peed all night into an open pot between our beds.’

  The tests, on the bone-marrow, were painful and made her weak and giddy. But once she was home she felt better, well enough to accept Anna-Maria Cicogna’s invitation to Venice in July in the hope that the strong Italian sun would cure her. Diana saw her off in her wheelchair at Orly, and she arrived in good spirits, staying up till 10.30 on her first evening for dinner with the Clarys. Every morning she was carried like a parcel to the beach, and all afternoon she rested in a pretty bedroom ‘which looks over the Zattere & I see the big ships, bigger than churches, being pulled in & out’. Then there was a frightening relapse. ‘Went out to dine at Harry[’s Bar] & was in too much pain to describe – after, to my horror, we were to go to the Gritti for a boat. After a few yards I began to cry & said to Francis Watson its no good I can’t So he propped me against the wall & dashed off & got the boat faithful soul.’ Anna-Maria called a doctor and not for the first time the result was miraculous. ‘I think I’m cured,’ she told Diana. ‘Dined on the Wrightsmans’ yacht never a twinge & this morning nothing at all … I believe he has done the trick. Imagine if he has!’ Now she was able to enjoy her holiday and take an interest in the people around her. Serge Lifar was one of the new arrivals (‘a most friendly soul, tho like all stage people he has but the one topic’), Cecil Beaton was another: ‘He is fearfully worried about a tiny wrinkle on his cheek. People gaze in the glass & don’t realise that the general effect is 100. I saw the old soul from my balcony – didn’t know he was coming & wondered who the old gentle was until I heard the voice. Nothing to do with the tiny wrinkle.’ But then, bite bite, back came the pain. She was unable to sleep and suffered agonies from constipation. ‘Really doctors how right Muv was one thought her cranky but you see.’ Just before she left for Paris she wrote a despairing letter to the Colonel: ‘Oh dear je suis dans un triste état … Cette douleur qui me ronge m’enlève le goût de la vie je dois dire … Je ne sais pas pourquoi je vous écrire en mauvais français tout à coup ça doit faire partie de l’abrutissement général Do come Love N.’

  Once home the search continued for a treatment that would work. She was prescribed Cortisone, but it frightened her and after the first dose she refused to have more. Alphy Clary told her of a doctor in London who had ‘cured’ him of exactly what Nancy was suffering from now. ‘He is English but one hasn’t heard of him actually killing anybody unlike most English drs. The horror of going to London & seeing Knightsbridge barracks which I had hoped for ever to avoid might be compensated for if I could be cured of this grinding pain. I’d really go to Hell – anywhere exc: New York in fact.’ Alphy’s treatment was disagreeable and did nothing to alleviate the pain. While she was in London Frederick the Great came out to reviews that were more respectful than enthusiastic, but Nancy was in no condition to care very much what anybody said. Occasionally when the pain subsided her natural high spirits, that innate love of life that never quite deserted her, rose to the surface. She had ordered for the visit to London a new dress from Saint-Laurent: ‘I love it so much I practically go to bed in it Its a sack coloured sack, to the ankles, hideous & smart beyond belief.’ And in London, the Colonel was told, ‘I bought, in waves of pain, a long black (sham) sealskin coat like Proust’s it is very funny but also very pretty … Ma chère etc I am etc Connaught Hotel Very low.’

  Nancy returned to France at the end of the year. The pain was as bad as ever and she was driven to boosting the analgesics with brandy. ‘When I’m drunk I’m all right but I’ve got a very strong head, it takes a huge amount & the effect doesn’t last very long & then I feel of course liverish as well. Oh bugger it all.’ In January 1971 she went again to London where she underwent an investigative operation at the Nuffield Hospital in Bryanston Square, which left her feeling iller than before. She now weighed less than seven stone and found it almost impossible to eat. Debo and Pam visited her every day as did faithful friends such as Helen Dashwood, Joy Law and Nancy’s cousin, Clementine Beit. Even Colonel flew over from Paris for ‘une petite heure’. In April she was home and in a state of deepest depression, writing to Alvilde, ‘I can’t work & can’t see what is to become of me for the first time in my life I am wallowing in gloom & self pity. Those bull doctors diagnosed what I’ve got as intractable pain. I can tell you there is nothing worse on earth.’

  But there were periods of remission and there were still aspects of her life in which Nancy was able to take pleasure. She was fascinated by the bird-life in her garden, what she could see of it from her bed. There was a family of tits that she fed from her window-sill. ‘The old ones have been coming for ages now there are 3 intensely disagreeable children. My old chums look so tired & battered & the children so fat & pretty it is unfair. They are all in a perpetual rage like an English family on holiday & I’m sure the old ‘uns must wish they had never bothered to breed no gratitude, just like humans.’ There was a hen-blackbird with a torn wing which Hassan rescued from a cat, and which Nancy nursed for two days in the bathroom: ‘I’m getting a water pistol for H would gladly give him a real gun,’ she told Alvilde. And to Debo, the wild-life expert, ‘The blackbird we so dote on has made its nest in the lilac by the drawing room window & there are now three hunting cats never out of the garden – does the team think we could keep them out of the tree which even I could climb with barbed wire? … If it were not for the cats the pleasure of a nest almost in one’s room is great, the beady eye fixed on one in total confidence. I know how they make the nest & every detail of their private lives.’

  Nancy read insatiably, kept supplied by the faithful shop with proof copies of new books which were then discussed at length with Raymond. ‘My consolation these awful days has been Goethe’s Italian journey in a marvellous translation (Penguin) Written in 1786 it describes Italy as you & I have known it. Oh dear that earnest, noble young German how different from Voltaire & the Great King & how much one prefers really those two old sinners! … Then what’s so funny, he keeps describing his own works & makes them sound utterly unreadable … Carrington fascinated & horrified me & oh how I disliked her4. A strong smell of death throughout. Then somebody sent me a dreadfully br
illiant book by Simon Raven then I read Mr Norris which is even more pourri – just as Carrington beats the present day lot for vice, she must, it would be impossible to be more vicious I suppose. The mixture of vice & dowdiness is so unattractive & so is all that sentiment. What a nasty book.’

  The more helpless Nancy became, the more dependent she was on her sisters. Diana, her main support, drove over nearly every day from Orsay; Debo came when she could and kept in close touch by telephone; Pam, unshakably loyal, repaying hand over fist with kindness all Nancy’s cruelty when they were children, came again and again, acting as matron and housekeeper combined. Women friends, such as Billa Harrod, Alvilde and Cynthia Gladwyn made themselves available to take a turn in looking after the invalid. Friends in England, appalled by Nancy’s agonised letters, besieged her with remedies, everything from ‘green pills’ to acupuncture, holy medals and even a poultice soaked in Lourdes water for her leg. Tom Driberg had prayers said for her, but ‘It’s very sad for me,’ Nancy wrote. ‘I used to believe so unshakeably in God but I can’t any more;’ somebody else sent a faith-healer, ‘a sort of poor man’s Liz Taylor … instead of hymns she fell upon my ill nerve & teased it just as Alphy’s London quack did, so that I’ve had three days of martyrdom, no drug the very slightest use … I know I ought to retire, like Capt Oates, but the mechanics are so difficult.’ During the worst days the only people Nancy would see were her sisters and of course the Colonel who, with his little spaniel Léa, dropped in several times a week on his way from the rue Bonaparte to the Marais. Sometimes she felt better, hopeful that a cure was just round the corner, that after all life was worth living; then she would be overwhelmed by pain, convinced that nobody cared, the doctors (to whom she was often childishly rude)5 were only after her money, and the sooner she could die the better. On days when the pain was under control she allowed Hassan to carry her into the garden where she lay in the sun on a straw mattress. From time to time she even felt well enough to see friends for luncheon. Hamish came – ‘so nice quite like old times I was awfully pleased to see him’ – and so did Cyril Connolly. ‘Cyril did that thing I call rude of, as though one’s entrée were sure to be uneatable, bringing plovers eggs from Hédiard. THEY WERE RAW. So the first ones went over everybodies clothes & the second lot were hot. Col in a hurry was annoyed by all the delays. Then I had opened a bottle of Rothschild Lafitte 1952 & Cyril in a temper because of his old eggs pretended not to like it (it was nectar) so I was put out. Then the pain came down & blacked out everything & I had to creep to the sofa & that was that. By the time they came to the drawing room & Col had gone Cyril had become amiable again I had taken a Palfium which is a good but not lasting drug & I very much enjoyed an hour of chat with the old boy who was suddenly very mellow praised my house & so on.’

  In the spring of 1972 Nancy was at last awarded the Légion d’Honneur, the only honour she had ever wanted. Colonel came down to Versailles to give it to her. Half-carried by Diana, she managed very slowly to come downstairs and stand just long enough for Colonel to pin it to her dress. Afterwards she cried with happiness. Almost at once, as if in counter-attack, came the news from the other side of the Channel (strictly confidential) that she was to be nominated for the CBE. At first affecting indifference, Nancy pretended she had never heard of the English honour, that English honours meant nothing to her. But when a letter arrived warning her that by talking about it she was in danger of losing it (Diana Cooper, who under oath of secrecy had been told, was busily spreading the news round London), ‘then of course I conceived a wild desire for the medal & mum became the word’. She was pleased to discover that ‘it enables me to sit above a knight’s widow so you must find me one to take everywhere with me. (I do, anyway, without wishing to boast, as a peer’s daughter …)’

  Soon after this a pain came like the end of the world, and Nancy was reduced to stuffing her pillow into her mouth to stop herself from screaming aloud. She was given an injection to kill the nerve in her leg, but it had no effect whatsoever. In desperation she agreed to go yet again to London, back to the Nuffield. Cynthia Gladwyn came over to fetch her, bringing a nurse to accompany them in the aeroplane. This time, finally, Hodgkin’s Disease was diagnosed. ‘They hope to cure me,’ Nancy wrote to her friend and translator Jacques Brousse. ‘If not they promise to let me go without the horrors to which American & I believe French doctors submit one. After 4 such years as I have had one looks at death in a very different way.’

  She came back to France in the New Year of 1973, the last year of her life. She now weighed less than six stone, suffering agonies and longing only to die. Her leg was swollen, ‘like Louis XVIII’s & hurts … I’m in worse tortures than I’ve ever had. The pills no good any more & there is no let up day or night … Does one struggle on? I am so fond of life but not this sort … The trouble is I feel no hope.’

  At Easter, and much against Nancy’s will, a nurse was brought in to live in the house: she could no longer sit unsupported, nor eat nor wash herself. Swallowing pain-killers by the handful6, she was also having daily injections of morphine; but the effect was short-lived, and the injections themselves were a torture: she was so thin it was difficult to find a place in which to insert the needle, and even the gentlest pressure hurt her. The only people she would see were her sisters and Colonel, although through all the agony and horror she continued to write letters, now in a tiny, cramped hand at times barely legible. Her letters were her life-line. To Cynthia Gladwyn she described the nurse, Old Gamp she called her. ‘If you ask her to brush your hair she gives you two sharp blows with the brushes – the bed pan is an all-in wrestling match at which I am, screaming with pain, the loser & as for washing, one is the kitchen floor … Oh I can’t go on, so sorry this pain is nag nag nag.’ Every part of her body was now agonisingly sensitive and she could hardly bear to be touched; the vibration of a heavy van going down the street would hurt her, and the effort of turning her head to look out of the window was almost too great to make. She so longed ‘to see the blackbird in the Montana & the tits in that yellow stuff on the wall’. The water bloating her legs had now reached her chest which, she said, felt as though it were full of heavy stones, and her liver was painfully enlarged. She was eating almost nothing, one or two tiny biscuits topped with a prawn and a spot of cream cheese.

  On June 8 she wrote to the Colonel, ‘Dearest I’m truly very ill … Je souffre comme je n’avais pas imaginée la morphine fait très peu d’effet … Je pense et j’espère mourir, mais le docteur ne croit pas ou pas encore – s’en trop la torture vous ne savez pas …’ It was her last letter.

  Decca arrived from California on the 13th, making herself useful as an interpreter between the French doctor and the two new nurses, a couple of cheerful Australian girls brought in to replace ‘old Beastie’. ‘Je veux me dépêcher,’ Decca heard Nancy murmur in the doctor’s ear. After a week Decca left to go back to America knowing she would never see her sister again. On the evening of June 24 Diana and Sir Oswald came in to visit Nancy on their way to a dinner-party in Paris. She felt miserable, she whispered, but was no longer in pain. ‘Anne (the nurse) thinks it might go on like this for ages,’ Diana wrote to Debo, ‘but I somehow felt last night it couldn’t be much longer.’

  On the morning of June 30, as the Colonel was driving through the outskirts of Versailles on his way in to Paris from Le Marais, he was overcome by a strong presentiment that he should go at once to see Nancy. Arriving at the rue d’Artois he went straight upstairs, his little dog running ahead of him as she always did. He found Nancy apparently unconscious; but she smiled as he took her hand.

  A few hours later she died. Her body was cremated at Père Lachaise, after which her ashes were flown to England. She was buried next to her sister Unity in the churchyard at Swinbrook, on a cloudless summer day when the green Cotswold countryside was looking its most beautiful.

  1 A quarter of a million copies within two years, earning over £350,000.

  2 Her income in 1
968 was £22,000.

  3 Alvilde Chaplin had married Jim Lees-Milne in 1951.

  4 Raymond had loved Carrington and therefore Nancy knew this would tease and could not resist it.

  5 To one of her English specialists she sent a picture-postcard of a graveyard, and written on the back, ‘No wonder these places are full up, with people like you about.’

  6 French law prohibited doctors from prescribing unlimited quantities of the pain-killing drug Nancy needed, so secret supplies had to be smuggled over by friends coming from London.

  Books by Nancy Mitford

  Highland Fling 1931

  Christmas Pudding 1932

  Wigs on the Green 1935

  Pigeon Pie 1940

  The Pursuit of Love 1945

  Love in a Cold Climate 1949

  The Blessing 1951

  Madame de Pompadour 1954

  Voltaire in Love 1957

  Don’t Tell Alfred 1960

  The Water Beetle 1962

  The Sun King 1966

  Frederick the Great 1970

  Edited by Nancy Mitford:

  The Ladies of Alderley 1938

  The Stanleys of Alderley 1939

  Translations:

  The Princesse de Clèves 1950

  The Little Hut 1951

  Contributed to: