The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  In May we still saw each other nearly every day. At the end of the month we went, after lunching with Eddie Marsh, to look at a life-mask of me. According to Evelyn it was by ‘the German invented by Harold Nicolson. It is very lovely and accurate. She has promised me a copy in white and gold plaster.’ I had allowed myself to be talked into having it done, a disagreeable proceeding and the result dead and mechanical. Oddly enough, it came in handy a few years later. Its measurements were used by the surgeon Sir Harold Gillies when he restored my nose after a motor smash. He said everyone ought to have a life-mask, it would facilitate his work. The copy for Evelyn was never made.

  From now on there is a change in his diary entries. For my twentieth birthday, in June, he gave me a tall, slender umbrella with an ebony crook handle and my name engraved on a gold band. He wrote:

  Dearest Diana

  Many happy returns of today. Here is an umbrella and Mr Brigg said oh how old-fashioned it will be interesting for my men to make one like that. Well I think it will go with your plumed hat.

  I went to a cocktail party and Randolph insulted a young lady by throwing gin in her eye.

  Fondest love, Evelyn

  In his diary he says he gave me a Brigg umbrella which I broke next day. This is untrue; I treasured it for many years, until it was stolen. Perhaps the entry about the broken umbrella shows something of his state of mind when he wrote it. He was highly critical of me, suddenly. It would not be too much to say that he carped.

  We invited him to stay with us in Ireland during August, but he refused. Yet only three months before he had written that if we were all at Knockmaroon ‘we would have fun’. He seemed not to approve the list of guests, all great friends of his: Nancy, Hamish, the Lambs, the Yorkes. But there was also Lytton Strachey, whom he admired. but who was a ‘new’ friend, and disapproved of as such.

  He came down to Pool Place, and he says in his diary that we ‘quarrelled at luncheon and at dinner’ and he left. We may have argued, but we did not quarrel. He remained a great friend of Nancy’s, and they teased each other by post when, after the war, she went to live in France. When his collected letters were published, the best of all were to her.

  Shortly after this rather disastrous visit to Pool Place, Evelyn noted in his diary that we met at a party and I looked reproachfully at him. He says he wrote me a letter, explaining ‘it was my fault I did not like her, not hers. I don’t suppose she will understand.’ This letter has survived:

  Dearest Diana

  When I got back last night I wrote you two long letters and tore them up. All I tried to say was that I must have seemed unfriendly lately and I am sorry. Please believe it is only because I am puzzled and ill at ease with myself. Much later everything will be all right.

  Don’t bother to answer, E.

  This was on 17 July 1930. A week before, he had been to see Father d’Arcy, S.J. ‘Blue chin and fine, slippery mind,’ was his comment. It was the beginning of something much more important to Evelyn than any friendship.

  In August he went to stay with the Yorkes at Forthampton, and he says in his diary: ‘Henry and Dig left for Knockmaroon protesting their detestation of Bryan and Diana.’ Despite the detestation their visit was a success, because Lytton Strachey, a fellow guest, was so greatly appreciated by Henry. That is about all. From time to time he wrote to me; in one letter he says: ‘am a papist now, and quite different.’ Fortunately the statement about being different, like the one about the broken umbrella, was untrue. He was the same witty writer and delightful, funny companion, but his companionship was bestowed on others. He usually sent me his books (not Campion, nor Helena) as they came out; they have disappeared over the years, taken by bibliophiles. I always remained his devoted admirer.

  I should not have written to ask Evelyn what he remembered about the events of 1930 if I had remembered the letters quoted above, or seen the entries in the diary which he began again just then. They answer my question as clearly as possible, but I only discovered them fifteen years after our exchange of letters in 1966, and his diaries were not yet published. I should have reminded him of his own legion of new acquaintances, and of the fact that he had fallen in love, but my memory of all this was vague, and I cast around for something to say in reply.

  During the war he had published an unfinished novel, Work Suspended. The heroine was a very dull girl, Lucy Simmonds, who was pregnant, and a young man who was fond of her took her to the Zoo in order to divert her in an appropriately unexciting way. This episode, rather similar to the sort of things Evelyn and I did in the winter of 1929-30, put me in mind of that time, so different from the circumstances I was in when I received his book. I was in Holloway Prison, and to this abominable dwelling he had addressed his gift. Twenty five years later I remembered Lucy and the scene at the Zoo and, with the idea of attack being a good means of defence, I answered with some reference to Work Suspended. I hope I shall not sound too conceited if I say that except for the pregnancy, and the Zoo (I disliked the Zoo almost as much as Bramber), I never for one moment thought Lucy was meant to be a cruel portrait of me. If I had been like her Evelyn would not have wished to spend his leisure hours with me. Had I realized how ill and depressed he was, I should not have written the letter. He replied by return of post, dated 30 March 1966 from Combe Florey House in Somerset:

  Dearest Diana,

  Beware of writing to me. I always answer. It is part of my great boringness, never going out or telephoning. An inherited weakness. My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death. Nancy pretended she was going blind to choke me off.

  But I must not leave you with the delusion that Work Suspended was a cruel portrait of you. It was perhaps to some extent a portrait of me in love with you, but there is not a single point in common between you and the heroine except pregnancy. Yours was the first pregnancy I observed.

  I sent you a copy when you were in jug. Surely you remember me well enough to know I should not have done such a thing at such a time if I thought it a ‘cruel portrait’?

  You speak kindly of my war books. Do you possess them all in a single, final version? If not, I should like to send it to you as an Easter present in case you ever thought of looking at it again. It is not much different but slightly pulled together.

  Easter used to mean so much to me. Before Pope John and his Council—they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy. I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the Faith doggedly without joy. Church going is a pure duty parade. I shall not live to see it restored. It is worse in many countries. Please don’t answer, unless to say you would like the Sword of Honour omnibus.

  All love. Evelyn

  This sad letter appears to have been the last Evelyn ever wrote. He died of a heart attack on Easter Day, 10 April 1966, after hearing Mass said in Latin according to the ancient rite he regretted so bitterly. When I heard the news I went over to see Nancy, who lived not far away in Versailles. We were both very sad. We came to the conclusion that he had had enough. He hated what the world had become; even his Church, which he had always regarded as the last bastion of civilization, had failed him. The Greeks said, ‘All death is good provided it is sudden’; this is not a Christian idea, but Evelyn died, from a Christian point of view, at a perfect moment, immediately after Mass. One of his aphorisms, printed at the end of his Diaries, is ‘All fates are “worse than death”.’ He dreaded the thought that he might have to live for twenty more years.

  Although I hardly knew her I wrote to Laura Waugh, just to say how fond I had always been of Evelyn, and she replied: ‘Thank you very much for your letter. Evelyn had been talking so much about you the [last] few weeks. And I know how fond he was of you even tho you had met so rarely of late years. He was most distressed that you should have in any way connected yourself with Lucy Simmonds and said there had never been any con
nection between you at all.’

  It was now my turn to be distressed. If he had been quite well he would have laughed at my letter, and it never occurred to me that he would give it another thought.

  Among his supposed defects, listed at the beginning, I put rudeness and drunkenness. The two are linked; drunkards are habitually rude. It so happens that, during our year together, he drank very little. Perhaps the Evelyn I knew was not typical. Be that as it may, he was a perfect friend.

  Violet Hammersley

  Mrs Hammersley was a great friend and near contemporary of my mother, and for this reason we never called her Violet. To us as children she was Mrs Hammersley, and remained so, although when I grew up I had friends older than she whom I called by their first names. My brother-in-law, Andrew Devonshire, so much younger than I am, who like the whole of our family found her irresistible, firmly called her Violet.

  Mrs Hammersley’s mother, Mrs Williams-Freeman, was the wife of a diplomat, and Violet was born in Paris in 1877 at a flat in the Avenue d’Iéna. Later the family moved to the Avenue de l’Alma (now George V) where they lived until Violet was grown up.

  She often spoke of her Parisian childhood. She and her brother played in the Tuileries gardens, still a children’s playground a hundred years later, with sweet stalls and donkeys to ride and a pond for sailing toy boats. One of her companions was Somerset Maugham, ‘Willie’, who was to be a lifelong friend.

  Even as a little girl she had a love of self-dramatization. She managed to impress her governess with her dramatics, and one day when she was playing the piano and her mother came into the schoolroom she heard the governess say in a low voice: ‘Vous savez, Madame, cette enfant m’inquiète. Elle a des idées de suicide!’ [Madame, this child troubles me, she thinks of suicide.] Violet heard, and she played very softly, hoping for an interesting reaction from Mrs Williams-Freeman. At the very least she expected to be folded in her mother’s arms and comforted. But all she got was a box on the ears. Although she told us this story as a joke, it is nevertheless true that in after life she was quite often the victim of irrational fears and nervous depression. Perhaps her ‘idées de suicide’ as a little girl were the forerunners of nervous breakdowns still in the distant future, one of which I was myself to witness.

  Violet’s mother had a very rich and fascinating French friend: M Aubry-Vitet. When he was coming to dinner there were important preparations in the kitchen, and the butler polished the silver for hours. ‘Monsieur A.V. vient diner ce soir,’ he told Violet mysteriously when she visited him in the pantry. Until she was much older she imagined her mother’s friend’s name was Harvey, or Ave as in Ave Maria. M Aubry-Vitet had a little daughter Jeanne, who looked much more like Violet than did her own sister Agnes.

  When Violet was eight there was a children’s party at the Embassy. She and her brother Ralph were sitting side by side for the sumptuous tea. The huge table, covered with a white damask linen cloth, was decorated with bright crackers and in the warm dining room there was the scent of angelica and crystallized cherries and little iced cakes. There were twenty beautifully dressed children, the little girls in frills and lace, the boys in dark velvet with silk stockings and buckled shoes. The door opened and the butler announced: ‘Mrs Gladstone’.

  ‘Under the table, quick!’ said Violet’s brother seizing her hand, and they slid down and hid beneath the long tablecloth.

  After a minute or two their absence was noticed. ‘Where are the Freeman children?’ asked the ambassadress, and out they had to come. ‘Why did you hide?’

  ‘Well,’ said Violet’s brother, ‘we know Mr Gladstone is a murderer, and I thought Mrs Gladstone might be one too!’

  ‘Home politics!’ said the unfortunate hostess. It was 1885, and every Conservative, including Queen Victoria, firmly believed that the death of General Gordon at Khartoum had been entirely Gladstone’s fault for not sending the relief expedition up the Nile much sooner, in time to save him.

  A few years after Mr Williams-Freeman died, the family left Paris and went to live in London. Mrs Williams-Freeman was remembered by my mother as a friend of her own Frenchified father, Gibson Bowles, at the turn of the century.

  Doubtless influenced by M Aubry-Vitet, she had become a Roman Catholic, and so had Violet and Agnes; this, added to the fact that they had always lived in Paris, made them seem quite foreign. Violet was one of my mother’s greatest friends before either was married, and she sometimes stayed on board Mr Bowles’s little yacht at some French port, usually Trouville. ‘We shan’t want any tea,’ my mother called down to the galley, but Violet hurried to call firmly, ‘I shall.’ She was always a demanding guest, but so clever and amusing that my grandfather was pleased by her company.

  When she was 24 she married a rich widower, twice her age; he had grown-up children. Mr Hammersley loved hunting and shooting, and for him the best moment of the year was August in Scotland. He was also a great gardener. Although I never knew him, for he died in 1913, I can well imagine him from a portrait by Henry Tonks, a well-built blond man with a cheerful, rubicund face under a straw hat; the picture was like an Impressionist’s version of a seedsman’s catalogue, so sunny and bright, with so many flowers. Nothing, neither the man nor the scene, could have been more unlike Mrs Hammersley. Theirs must indeed have been the attraction of opposites.

  She was rather small and very dark, with black hair and huge dark eyes, and she had an expression of deep gloom. She had a rather low, hollow voice, and although she often laughed it was as if unwillingly. Her garden, at least the only garden of hers I ever saw, was a discreet green. When I first knew her she was already a widow, and widow’s weeds became her. To the end of her life she was swathed in black scarves and shawls and veils; in later years not exactly in mourning, because many of her clothes were dark brown, but the whole effect had something more Spanish than French about it. Once when she was slightly annoying my sister Nancy, who used the powder and lipstick universal among our generation, by saying: ‘Painters don’t admire make-up at all,’ Nancy retorted: ‘Oh well, Mrs Ham, you know it’s all very well for you, but we can’t all look like El Greco’s mistress.’ Mrs Hammersley gave her hollow, unwilling laugh.

  She had the most beautiful, delicately made hands, and she was a talented pianist. Her long drawing room had a grand piano at each end and she loved to play duets with musical friends. On one slender, ivory finger she wore a diamond and emerald ring shaped like a fleur de lys. We all craved it, and I am sorry to say we never hesitated, as children, to exclaim, ‘Oh Mrs Ham! Your ring! You are so lucky,’ or even, ‘Mrs Ham, when you die will you leave me your ring? Please do.’ At a very early age we discovered the potency of the word ‘lucky’ when applied to Mrs Hammersley. She considered herself the unluckiest person alive, and reacted accordingly to our reiterated cries.

  She had perfect taste, and no doubt the London house with the two pianos must have been delightful. I never saw it, but she told me that when it was finished she took her butler all over it. Clean and shining, with whatever labour-saving devices existed in those days, it was convenient, bright and beautiful. The butler said nothing; she had hoped for a word of praise. When every corner had been visited, he spoke: ‘No boot hole,’ was his only comment.

  The Hammersleys had three children, Christopher, David and Monica. Mr Hammersley (like Mr Williams-Freeman) was a Protestant, but he said his wife could bring the children up as Catholics provided the boys went to Eton, and this is what happened. The sons were aged ten and eight when their father died of Bright’s disease. They were all the world to Mrs Hammersley, handsome and intelligent.

  She paid much less attention to Monica. The nanny reported that Monica had no appetite, she would hardly eat, and seemed unable to swallow. The nanny coaxed her; but everything appeared to be too much—even a teaspoon was too enormous to go into her little mouth, the smallest ever seen. Finally a mustard spoon was used, but hardly an ounce of Benger’s Food a day could Monica eat. When Mrs Hammersle
y told us this, years later, she was able to laugh about it because the story ended in such an unexpected way. The whole family went for their annual visit to Fontaine-les-Nonnes, the farm near Meaux where Jeanne Aubry-Vitet, now Comtesse Carl Costa de Beauregard, lived with her son and daughter. Monica was brought into the dining room and sat at the end of the table with the other children and without her nanny. When her mother glanced down the table to see how she was getting on, Monica was polishing off a plate of rognons au vin blanc, after which she had some cheese and then oeuf à la neige. The whole mustard spoon episode was supposed to have been the fault of the nanny, who had in some way made Monica believe that to eat was beyond her powers, but although Mrs Hammersley herself obviously never thought of it, I have sometimes wondered whether the little girl might have been in the early stages of anorexia nervosa, and that the welcome company of other children combined with the delicious Fontaine food brought to an end a potentially dangerous situation. Monica was a friend of my sisters and myself and often stayed with us at Asthall, but by then the mustard spoon was a tale of long ago.