Nancy Mitford (2 page)

IN A LETTER DATED 29th September, 1971, Nancy Mitford wrote to me: ‘I’m going to write my memoirs beginning in ’45 so as not to bore the world all over again with our
childhood
. Tell Vi (Trefusis) that, it will make her vaguely uneasy! But I must get well first—this vile pain has begun again in spite of my new dope. Not as bad as without the dope but nag nag nag, makes it impossible to concentrate.’ Alas, the pain became implacable and one of the most potentially scintillating memoirs of our age was never written. Since 1946, when she decided to settle in Paris, Nancy enjoyed a physical and spiritual rejuvenation until she was stricken with an incurable illness. Her child hood had been evoked in the sprightly pages of her novel
The Pursuit of Love
as well as in her sister Jessica’s
Hons and Rebels
, which reached an enormous public:
The Pursuit of Love
sold over one million copies.

As in a story by Hans Andersen, Nancy Mitford was the eldest of six comely sisters and a handsome brother, the progeny of impeccably English parents attached to family life in the country rather than in the town. Their home was their castle, closely guarded by a Cerberus whose bark was worse than his bite. Only their brother Tom was sent to school like other boys, and he brought back an exciting aroma of the outside world. The girls were consigned to the care of nurses and governesses, of whom Nanny Blor (whose real name was Dicks) had the predominant personality. The memorable Nanny in Nancy Mitford’s novel
The Blessing
was based on the character of Blor and Nancy has also drawn an appreciative sketch of her in
The Water Beetle
: ‘She had a wonderful capacity for taking things as they came and a very English talent for compromise. In two respects she was unlike the usual Nanny. We were never irritated by tales of paragons she had been with before us; and she always got on quite well with our governesses, upholding their authority as she did that of our parents. When we grew up she never interfered in our lives. If she disapproved of something one said or did, she would shrug her shoulders and make a little sound between a sniff and clearing her throat. She hardly ever spoke out—perhaps never—and on the whole our vagaries were accepted with no more stringent comment than “Hm”—sniff—very silly, darling”.’

Though she had the porcelain complexion and slender figure of a country-bred girl Nancy Mitford was born in London at 1, Graham Street, now Graham Terrace, on 28th November, 1904. She has admitted that she could remember almost nothing about her early childhood—‘shrouded in a thick mist which seldom lifts except on the occasion of some public event’. For instance she retained a hazy impression of her parents at break fast, both crying over newspapers with black edges: King Edward VII had just died. More clearly she could remember the dining-room wallpaper, ‘white with a green wreath round the cornice.’ Such seemingly trivial details are often etched on our memories like the flavour of Proust’s
madeleine
, conjuring long submerged emotions. Psycho-analysts might read significant symbols into them: the green wreath might betoken a presentiment of future fame.

The sinking of the Titanic left a deeper impression, for it was accompanied by daydreams ‘of a rather dreadful kind’. With dis arming candour she related that she used to scan Blor’s
Daily News
for an account of a shipwreck in which her parents (who sailed every other year to Canada in order to prospect for gold) might be ‘among the regretted victims’. In spite of what psycho analysts might infer, she loved her parents—with comprehensible reservations in the case of her father—but at the age of seven she nurtured an enterprising ambition to ‘boss the others’. The brood, however, continued to increase, which she considered ‘extremely unnecessary’ at the time.

Her paternal grandfather Lord Redesdale was still alive, and she usually stayed under his roof in Kensington High Street while her sisters were born. Of the first Lord Redesdale, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., one derives a romantically gracious image, or series of images, from the two stout volumes of his
Memories
which had achieved a ninth edition in 1916, when Nancy was twelve years old. The photograph of the author reproduced as a frontispiece to the first
volume
portrays a dapper old Edwardian musketeer with a swirling white moustache. His
gleaming
top hat is tilted at a rakish angle; spectacles hang from a button of his double-breasted overcoat and gloves are tucked under his left-hand sleeve. He confronts the future with
dignified
equanimity. His past had been crammed with episodes of historical interest, all enjoyed with such gusto that one cannot agree with his granddaughter Jessica’s dismissal of his
Memories
as ‘monstrously boring’. Indeed many of his youthful experiences in the diplomatic service were thrilling if not unique.

As second secretary of the Embassy at St. Petersburg during the winter of 1863–64 he was able to see the Russia of Czar Alexander II under favourable auspices. Even then the Ambassador Lord Napier warned him to send all his letters in the Foreign Office bag—‘none by the Post Office, where all our letters are opened.’ ‘Surely,’ he replied, ‘they would not dream of opening the correspondence of so humble a person as myself.’ ‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ broke in Lady Napier. ‘The other day my children’s governess received two letters by the same post from different parts of England. Each contained a photo graph. The two letters came in one envelope, the two photo graphs in the other!’ His account of Court ceremonies and balls; of Prince Gortchakoff and Princess Kotchoubey’s political salon; are as vivid as that of the fanatical piety of the people and of their saturnalia during the week before Lent in Admiralty
Place, perpetuated in music by Stravinsky’s
Petroushka
. His life in Peking during 1865-66 was described in greater detail in his delightful book
The Attack at Peking
. His next post in Japan was the most exhilarating. ‘Suddenly coming in full view of Mount Fuji, snow-capped,
rearing
its matchless cone heaven ward in one gracefully curving slope from the sea level,’ he was caught by the fever of intoxication which, as he wrote, ‘will continue to burn in my veins to the end of my life.’ Not only did he meet Prince Tokugawa Keiki, the last of the Shoguns, ‘a great noble if ever there was one. The pity of it was that he was an anachronism’—he and the dynamic British Minister Sir Harry Parkes were the first foreigners to be presented to the sacrosanct Mikado and I am tempted to quote his entire account of the episode but will restrain this to a single paragraph:

‘As we entered the room the Son of Heaven rose and acknowledged our bows. He was at that time a tall youth with a bright eye and clear complexion; his demeanour was very
dignified
, well becoming the heir of a dynasty many centuries older than any other sovereignty on the face of the globe. He was dressed in a white coat with long padded trousers of crimson silk trailing like a lady’s court-train. His head-dress was the same as that of his courtiers, though as a rule it was surmounted by a long, stiff, flat plume of black gauze. I call it a plume for want of a better word, but there was nothing feathery about it. His eyebrows were shaved off and painted in high up on the forehead; his cheeks were rouged and his lips painted with red and gold. His teeth were blackened. It was no small feat to look dignified under such a travesty of nature; but the
sangre Azul
would not be denied. It was not long, I may add, before the young sovereign cast adrift all these worn-out fashions and trammels of past ages, together with much else that was out of date.’

With Sir Harry Parkes he narrowly escaped murder by reactionary samurai for his support of the reformers. His early book
Tales of Old Japan
(1871) has deservedly become a classic, and as a child I longed for more stories of the same kind, where blood was mingled with haunting poetry.

After fourteen varied and adventurous years in the diplomatic service he resigned in 1873. Meetings with Sir Richard Burton and Abd el Kader in Damascus, with Garibaldi in self-imposed exile at Caprera, with Brigham Young in Salt Lake City—the rest of his
autobiography
is sprinkled with dramatic encounters and anecdotes of historical personages. Disraeli appointed him Secretary to the Board of Works in 1874—ten days after he had
purchased
a black opal which a friend had prophesied would bring him luck precisely within that period. At the end of the same year he married Lady Clementine Ogilvy, a daughter of the seventh Earl of Airlie, and there is reason to believe that it was a happy marriage though he maintained that ‘the veil of sanctity should mask the wedded life of even the humblest
individual
’.

During his twelve years with the Board of Works he was responsible for many
improvements
in Hyde Park, Hampton Court, Kew Gardens, and other neglected beauty spots. He then decided to turn country squire, which led to being ‘mixed up with the horse world,’ notably as judge and director of the International Horse Show at Olympia, and succumbed
dutifully but reluctantly to membership of the House of Commons for three years. English to the core, he was yet a cosmopolitan polyglot in culture and his
Memories
reveal the
multifaceted
type of
milordo inglese
now almost obsolete. ‘Looking back,’ he asserted, ‘I claim the privilege of the sun-dial, and among the hours record only the serene.’

In 1906 he accompanied Prince Arthur of Connaught on a mission to invest the Mikado with the Order of the Garter in Japan—how transformed since his previous visit in 1868 when the juvenile Mikado, regarded as a demigod, ‘had descended from the clouds to take his place among the children of men, and not only that, but he had actually allowed his sacred face to be seen by, and had held communion with, “The Beasts from Without”.’ Since
capturing
Port Arthur and annihilating the Russian fleet in 1904 Japan had become one of the great powers and there was a general imitation of everything European—to the detriment of many an indigenous art and craft. In lieu of their former elegance crude European dress was prescribed for officials. The rapid metamorphosis was prodigious even then, and Lord Redesdale had been lucky to witness the feudal status quo. ‘Tell us how it was in the olden time,’ the courtiers begged him, curious to hear of their bygone ceremonial from this
venerable
foreigner.

The second volume of his
Memories
ends with a rhapsody on Wagner: ‘poetry and music are united in an indissoluble wedlock; the senses are enthralled, and the world bows before the great wizard.’

Lord Redesdale’s grandchildren inherited many of his gifts, and in perusing his suave autobiography one is often reminded of this inheritance. Nancy’s eyes resembled his, and a drawing of his profile at the age of twenty-eight by Samuel Lawrence resembled her brother Tom. In fact her generation appear to have had more in common with their grandfather than with their father and mother. One seems to hear Nancy’s voice in his lighter anecdotes. She has related that when her fourth sister was born, on 8th August, 1914, just when war had been declared, ‘she was christened Unity, after an actress my mother admired called Unity More (an early Peter Pan), and Valkyrie after the war maidens. Unity herself always spelt it Walkfire. This was Grandfather Redesdale’s idea; he said these maidens were not German but Scandinavian. He was a great friend of Siegfried Wagner’s and must have known.’ Eventually the actress and the war maiden were combined in Unity with tragic results.

Since the betrayal of Denmark in 1864, when the ‘scrap of paper signed by Prussia in 1852, assuring the inviolability of Denmark, was torn up’, Grandfather Redesdale had
foreseen
a calamitous general war, the outbreak of which was ‘by far the most vivid’ of Nancy’s fitful recollections. ‘When it appeared to be imminent,’ she wrote, Blor told me to pray for peace. But I thought, if we had war, England might be invaded; then, like Robin Hood, one would take to the greenwood tree and some how or another manage to kill a German. It was more than I could do to pray for peace. I prayed, as hard as I could, for war. I knew quite well how wicked this was: when my favourite uncle was killed I had terrible feelings of guilt.’ Thus the ten-year-old innocent shared the private sentiments of many a grizzled soldier and
politician
.

Little Nancy’s prayers were answered but ‘the war turned out to be less exciting than I had hoped, though we did see the Zeppelin come down in flames at Potters Bar. I fell in love with Captain Platt in my father’s regiment, an important General of the next war, and crocheted endless pairs of khaki mittens for him—I am not sure that they were inflicted on him. In any case, all this crocheting was the nearest I ever got to killing an enemy, a fact which I am still regretting.’ She retained a lifelong interest in battles which I could not share, though I admired her per severance in trying to follow the campaigns of Frederick the Great when she was already an invalid.

Another memory which made an indelible impression on Nancy at the age of seven, was of Captain Scott’s tragic expedition to the South Pole. She devoured every book obtainable on the subject and would have won an examination on all its harrowing details
summa cum laude
. The hut under the active volcano of Mount Erebus where the Polar party were installed; Dr. Wilson’s appalling winter journey sixty miles along the coast to Cape Crozier in utter
darkness
and a freezing temperature to find the egg of an Emperor Penguin; the ascent of the dreaded Beardmore glacier towards the Pole; Seaman Evans’s death of frostbite and
concussion
; the suicide of Captain Oates who staggered into the blizzard with frostbitten feet ‘to try and save his comrades, beset by hardship’; and the final discovery of ‘Birdie’ Bowers, Dr. Wilson and Scott, all dead in their sleeping bags—every circumstance engraved itself on Nancy’s young imagination.