The Pursuit of Laughter (3 page)

After the war Nancy was staying in the Isle of Wight with ‘the Wid’, our great friend Mrs Hammersley, an old lady always swathed in black scarves and shawls. Meat was rationed. ‘We went to the butcher and Wid performed the dance of the seven veils before him and he gave us a cutlet,’ she wrote to me. Harold Acton has quoted extensively from her letters, so that one hears her own voice. He has linked them with a clever and
perceptive
commentary. He is the dreamt-of biographer, for he was beloved and admired by Nancy for almost fifty years. So unlucky in many ways, her luck in the world of books has held and her biography is exactly right.

What would she herself have thought of this amusing lively book, full of her stories and inventions, her jokes and loves and triumphs, and ending so sadly with cruel pain and illness? I can picture her expression and hear her laugh at her own extravagancies,
reproduced
by Harold. Like me, she would be deeply touched by his sympathy and affection, and she would shed a tear over her own suffering. After a lifetime of perfect health a rare kind of cancer attacked her. She, who did not like doctors, went from one to another in a vain search for her vanished well-being. Paying one of these doctors his bill she wrote: ‘If I were as bad at writing as you are at curing people I should starve.’ Until the very end, she never lost her love of a sharp joke.

Nancy Mitford: A Memoir,
Acton, H.
Books and Bookmen
(1975)

According to Nancy herself, at the age of three she suffered an appalling tragedy, the birth of my sister Pamela. Hitherto queen of the nursery, and the adored plaything of my
parents
, little Nancy found herself relegated to second place, the first being accorded to ‘a screaming orange in a black wig’, as she later described the baby. The nanny had no idea of the frightful trauma suffered by the three-year-old, and our parents still loved her best, blissfully unaware that she was inwardly boiling with rage.

One day they were walking in the street when she began to scream. They were
embarrassed
and begged her to stop. Passers-by gave them angry glances, as if to accuse them of torturing the dear little curly-haired girl who was making such a noise. A sharp smack might have been a good idea, but my parents would have been incapable of such behaviour. All of a sudden she stopped, stood still and said: ‘The houses are all laughing at me.’ ‘Yes, and can you wonder,’ said her mother, Sydney, ‘so much noise about nothing.’ This was by no means Nancy’s last tantrum, but she had resolved in future to get the laugh in first.

However, her troubles were only just beginning. Next year, and the year after, two
more babies appeared: they were my brother Tom and myself. Our nursery was small, the house hardly more than a doll’s house. The ‘pram in the hall’ (as the writer Cyril Connolly used to describe a baby in the house) became ‘the prams in the passage’. The house is still there: Number One, Graham Terrace, London. Four children squeezed into the doll’s house couldn’t have been very comfortable for anybody.

Fortunately, two changes made Nancy’s life happier. When she was six, a nanny who had been unkind to her was sent away, and our beloved Nanny, Laura Dicks, described by Nancy in
The Water Beetle
, came and stayed until she died years later. At the same time, Nancy was allowed to go to school, the Frances Holland school in our street, in Belgravia. A clever child, she shone at lessons and liked the company of her contemporaries as much as she disliked the babies at home.

School, for her, was synonymous with paradise, and home with purgatory. She prayed every night to be made, in some mysterious way she preferred not to think about, an only child. In case this was too difficult even for God, she had a second prayer. My mother had a rich friend who bought us expensive toys. Nancy prayed that this lady would adopt her.

In 1914, when the Great War began, another baby, Unity, appeared. However, we had by now moved to the country where my father, David, had inherited a large house, Batsford Park in Gloucestershire, from our grandfather, Bertie. Many of the 50 or so rooms were in dust sheets. Any of us who wished to read could choose a room to be alone and undisturbed. I was six, and we were all taught by a French governess we loved and a rather severe English governess. Nancy missed school, but the war was to blame. My father went to the Front, and it all seemed perfectly normal to us, as things do, to children.

Not far away was a military hospital. and the wounded soldiers came to tea, 30 or 40 of them at a time. They were dressed in soft blue clothes with a red cross on an armband. We played cards and puzzles, sang soldier’s songs taught us by our nursery maid.

The idea of a film actor at the Dardanelles was considered very comic by the
wounded
soldiers. Other songs mentioned place names such as Tennessee and Tipperary—we had no idea they were real places you could find on the map. Towards the end of the war, new countries began to be written about in the papers. We thought the name Czechoslovakia incredibly funny, and Nancy pretended to be a Czech lady with a strong foreign accent. We played this Czech game for years; she was a doctor, or perhaps even a surgeon, and tortured our brother by digging her sharp little knuckles into his ribs. I’ve no idea why it amused us so much, but it did.

When Nancy was about 12 an aunt, Lady Blanche Hozier, a great favourite of ours,
had taken her up the hill to my grandfather’s wild garden at Batsford. From this eminence, one could see all Gloucestershire and much of Oxfordshire. My aunt waved her arm and said dramatically, ‘All this belongs to you.’ Nancy rushed to tell our mother the good news. ‘Oh, what utter rubbish,’ she said. ‘
Nothing
belongs to you.’ Nancy told me she was rather relieved. What could she have done with all those fields?

After the war she was allowed to go to a boarding school, which predictably she loved, and then she was grown up. I think Nancy herself began the legend of having been a tease, almost a bully, to us all. She probably was quite horrid to Pam, but my brother and I had nothing to complain about as children. She was very good company, very funny, rather spiteful perhaps. Her novels abound in wit and jokes, and are enjoyed today as much as 50 years ago. They are Nancy’s gift to humanity.

When she died in 1973, our friend Harold Acton suggested writing a memoir. They had been friends for 40 years and nobody could have done it better. He was the cleverest of our friends, who had been an enormous influence on what has been called the
Brideshead
Generation at Oxford. Like Nancy herself, he was reserved. In his memoir, he refers to her love affairs in his own way. They were not happy, and he preferred to leave them to a future biographer; he would never have been able, or willing, to do the research. She therefore comes to life in
A Memoir
as the amusing, rather frivolous person she more or less pretended to be, and, to a great extent, really was.

Nancy Mitford: A Memoir
, Acton, H.
Daily Mail
(2001)

If I have got an ‘old home’, I suppose it is Asthall. Our family lived there from when I was nine until I was 16, all my schoolroom years. No longer in the nursery when we arrived, I was almost grown up when we left.

Asthall is very far from being a stately home. There is no park, no drive, no view in any direction. It is a charming old manor house, with gables and leaded windows, roofed with Cotswold stone tiles, such as you find in most Cotswold villages. It lies between a hill and the churchyard, the ancient church only yards from the drawing-room windows.

It was rather strange that we lived there so long, since in my father’s eyes it was a
temporary
dwelling. During the First World War he had inherited a large house with a good deal of land in Gloucestershire. Even we children knew it was to be sold at the end of the war, as we were too poor to live there. And sold it duly was. My father’s dream was to build his own house, on a hill above Swinbrook in Oxfordshire. The village and land belonged to him, and the coverts and shooting he loved were nearby.

Meantime, while the building was going on, we were to live at Asthall, which adjoined his land and was conveniently on the market. Although we were six children, and soon to
be seven, we could perfectly well have squeezed into Asthall for a couple of years. But no sooner were we installed than he began to build at Asthall. He built stables, garages, kennels. He built ‘cloisters’ that joined it to the old house. He put more bedrooms there. He made a great barn in the garden into a library and music room. This large room, furnished with hundreds of old books, a grand piano and sofas, with high windows looking south and east, was all the world to my brother Tom and me at Asthall. He played all day, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and I lay on a sofa, reading and listening. The room was far enough away to disturb nobody. We were allowed to read anything, provided we put the book back where it belonged.

The chief beauty of Asthall was a long, panelled hall with windows on both sides and a fire at each end. We were sheltered from draughts by Chinese screens, black lacquer with enormous white lacquer characters, very old and beautiful. In the dining room were
seventeenth
-century Japanese screens depicting eagles and other birds of prey on palest gold background. These treasures had been brought from the Far East by my grandfather.

The other end of the hall led to my mother’s drawing room, with my father’s business room beyond. We often sat with him listening to his gramophone.

Our schoolroom was at the bottom of the oak staircase; it faced south, but was always cold. We had an English governess in the term and a French one in the holidays. In the evenings our governess read us one of the
Waverley
novels, or
Bleak House
, or
The Mill on
the Floss
. The nursery was upstairs; it was a haven, with our darling Nanny and beloved little sisters. My worst dread was that I might be sent to school, away from ponies, dogs, guinea pigs; above all away from the nursery and its denizens, but I never was.

In the holidays we were supposed to speak French, which resulted in a perhaps not unwelcome silence in the dining room. Visiting children considered us a noisy family, there was no question of being seen and not heard. We argued, teased, screamed with laughter at family jokes, the funniest my father’s.

Sometimes gloom and quiet descended for a while, when my father used to tell us he was ruined. We wondered anxiously where the next loaf of bread would come from. He lost a lot of money trying to farm, but during the Asthall years he also made many
disastrous
investments, generally the result of talking to some brilliantly clever cove at the Marlborough Club, his London resort. Building was his expensive hobby.

‘You realise you children will have to earn your own livings, don’t you?’ he would say. ‘I can’t give you anything.’ This made our blood run cold. We couldn’t imagine that
anyone
would wish to employ us. For one thing, we did everything badly. We rode every day, but we didn’t ride well. We played tennis, and went to tennis parties given by children in the neighbourhood, but they played far better than we did. We had music lessons in Oxford, and we went to a dancing class, with mediocre results. Could we even type?

When my father said he could give us nothing, my mother always said: ‘Of course not. Girls don’t expect it.’

It was my mother who made Asthall perfectly lovely inside, she who defended us from
my father’s vagaries. He usually disliked our friends, but she was welcoming.

On Sundays my father liked us to go with him to matins at Swinbrook, we preferred evensong at Asthall. Mr Ward, the Asthall vicar, once preached a sermon scolding my father: ‘People who run shouting with their dogs through God’s holy acre,’ he said
crossly
. (We went coursing on Sundays and fetched the dogs from the kennels; the churchyard was a short cut). We told my father about the sermon but he only laughed.