The Horror of Love (13 page)

Nancy’s first miscarriage occurred at the same time as the Munich crisis. With the exception of Deborah and Jessica, all the Mitfords were at this point pro-Fascist in varying degrees. Nancy herself was opposed to the Munich agreement, which she discussed in a letter to her friend Billa, the wife of the Oxford economist Roy Harrod, expressing her disappointment at the result of the Oxford by-election where Quintin Hogg had beaten the anti-Munich independent candidate. For someone who was supposedly capable only of making jokes about politics, she was thoughtful about the inadequacy of a strong anti-appeasement figurehead on the liberal left, while her impatience with appeasers is manifest: ‘The young prospective candidate …[said] that he was glad of the Nazis as they will prevent by their menace the young of England from becoming decadent … I think ordinary people are at last getting sufficiently interested in politics to prevent all these half-witted young public schoolers from being returned so easily in the future.’ For all her sisters’ much-vaunted political convictions, it was Nancy, of them all, who engaged most practically with her beliefs in the year before the war.

Peter had failed to get a job at the BBC, his brother Francis having warned the corporation against hiring him (Nancy put
his name in a drawer, the Mitford family curse) and decided to go to France as a volunteer to help the Republican refugees, numbering an estimated half a million, who had fled from Franco over the Pyrenees. Nancy, pretty, frivolous; apolitical Nancy, followed him. In Perpignan, Prod was for once in his element. The French government had no idea how to deal with this sudden mass immigration, so they herded the unfortunate Spaniards into barbed-wire enclosures and more or less left them to rot. When Peter arrived, they were dying at a rate of four hundred a day. ‘The thing that is happening, ’ he wrote to his wife, ‘is so appalling that it amounts to the cold blooded murder of thousands of chaps. It is impossible to get at the mortality figures, but the dying has not even properly begun. They’ve got typhoid and possibly cholera as well now.’

The refugees needed to be fed and provided with medical supplies, dispersed families had to be reunited and boats, tickets and visas arranged to Mexico and Morocco, where those who had relatives there might join them. The situation was utterly chaotic, and Nancy was impressed not only by seeing her husband’s long-wasted abilities finally put into action, but by his deep and sincere concern for the frightened, desperate people he was helping. He worked round the clock, barely seeing Nancy, and she too threw herself into the task, driving a wheezing supply van in a distinctly unchic straw coolie hat and organizing the passengers on a ship for Mexico departing from Sete. A long letter to Lady Redesdale captures the frantic atmosphere, pitched between grief and rejoicing.

Well, we got our ship off … There was a fearful hurricane and she couldn’t get into Port Vendre, so all the arrangements had to be altered … at an hour’s notice, special trains etc etc the result was Peter was up for
two whole nights
… I was up all yesterday night as the embarkation went on until 6am and the people on the quay had to be fed and the babies given their bottles. There were 200 babies under 2 and 12 women are to have babies on board … The women
were on the quayside first and then the men arrived … you never saw such scenes of hugging. The boat sailed at 12 yesterday, the pathetic little band played first God Save the King for us, then the Marseillaise, and then the Spanish national anthem. Then the poor things gave three vivas for Espana which they will never see again. I don’t think there was a single person not crying – I have never cried so much in my life.

Nancy had come to know many of the refugees personally, as some had helped with the office work. Jessica had idolized the working class so long that when she actually met a member of it who didn’t work for her family (during a job as a saleswoman) she was horrified to find them dirty, coarse and unpleasant. Like George Orwell, she felt terribly let down when she saw the noble proletariat close up. Nancy had no such naïve expectations and therefore no such prejudices. She took the refugees as they were, embraced their concerns and understood them – for example, criticizing the Red Cross for issuing shorts, which the Spaniards found undignified and humiliating to wear. Unlike Diana or Unity, Nancy had first-hand experience of the human wretchedness Fascism produced, and Perpignan annealed her hatred for it. To her mother she wrote: ‘If you could have a look, as I have, at some of the less agreeable results of Fascism in a country I think you would be less anxious for the swastika to become the flag on which the sun never sets. And whatever may be the good produced by that regime, that the first result is always a horde of unhappy refugees cannot be denied.’ To Nancy, no ideology was worth the cost she had witnessed. When she returned to England in June 1939, she was more than ever convinced that Fascism had to be fought.

The Perpignan experience had also brought about a rare moment of closeness and collaboration in the Rodd marriage. Until Lord Redesdale’s dramatic recantation (‘like Latimer in the
Daily Mirror’)
Peter and Nancy presented a united front against both the milder pro-appeasement beliefs of the Rodd family and
the ever-more obsessive devotion of the elder Mitfords. In the six years between their first visit to Nuremberg and the outbreak of war, Diana and Unity had spent much time with Hitler. Diana’s personal friendship with the Führer was coloured by her practical aims of obtaining help for her husband’s cause; Unity was evangelical. Her life was lived with no other object than seeing Hitler, her time organized around the possibilities of meeting him. Far from heeding Peter’s warning as to the disastrous consequences of her idolatry, the Redesdales had accommodated it, first in visiting Munich and being introduced to Hitler, subsequently in espousing Fascism in both the House of Lords and the British press and attending the 1938 Nuremberg rally. Pamela and Deborah were largely unimpressed by their presentations to the leader of the Reich. Pamela described him as looking like any ordinary farmer while Deborah giggled at her mother’s earnest attempts to engage him in a discussion of laws regulating the quality of bread flour.

In terms of the family allegiances, though, Pamela was ranged on the Fascister side through her marriage in 1936 to Derek Jackson, a rich and distinguished physicist and a supporter of Fascism. Jackson attracted less opprobrium than other sympathizers, both within and without the family, partly because of his extreme brilliance and partly because when the time came he served with great valour in the RAF. Tom’s position was complex. While contemporaries disagree as to whether or not he approved of the Nazis, he was unequivocally pro-German. As a near-professional-level musician he admired German composers above all others and he was an extremely serious student of German philosophy and literature. He had a spiritual affinity with Germany as Nancy had with France. When the time came he elected to be drafted to the East, rather than Europe, because, in the words of his friend James Lees-Milne, he was better able to face killing the Japanese, whom he did not like, than the Germans, whom he did. Of the latterday Mitford conversions to National Socialism, Lady Redesdale’s was the most enduring. It infuriated Nancy that
her mother openly declared she hoped Britain would lose the war, and that she seemed to regard Adolf as her ‘favourite son-in-law’. According to her personal logic, it was British opposition to Fascism that destroyed not only her marriage, but the life of her daughter Unity.

The relationship between the Fuhrer and the young English aristocrat had made Unity the most notorious of the Mitford sisters by the end of the Thirties. She was mentioned a good deal in the press, for example on 18 March 1939, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, in a piece run by the
Daily Mirror
entitled ‘What Miss Mitford Would Like to See’. Lady Redesdale published her own opinions on National Socialism in a
Daily Sketch
article on 10 June, her connection with Unity making for engaging copy. Whatever the reality of Unity’s political influence (which appears, on balance, to have been negligible), it is understandable that the interest and controversy she provoked, which she monitored in fat scrapbooks of press cuttings, not only fuelled her passion for all things Nazi but contributed to a belief that she was possessed of a unique destiny. Rudi von St Paul, a friend of Unity’s, claimed to her biographer David Pryce-Jones that ‘she put her life and ambition into avoiding a war between England and Germany … She could not admit to herself and the public that she had failed to prevent the war. She had been on a pedestal and was therefore mistaken into thinking she had influence.’
²

In 1938, Lord Redesdale had purchased the isolated Hebridean island of Inch Kenneth from a chap at his club. The Redesdales, Nancy and Deborah were summering there when war was declared on 3 September. Nancy immediately set off for London, followed the next day by Deborah, who made the journey to Blomfield Road accompanied by one of her mother’s goats. None of the family could have been aware that Unity was by this time lying in a Munich hospital with a bullet lodged in her brain. During her last visits to England, she had told Diana, Tom, Deborah and Jessica that she intended to commit suicide if war was declared and after leaving a suicide note and a sealed letter
for Hitler had driven to the Englischer Garten and shot herself in the temple.

On 15 September, Nancy wrote to Violet Hammersley that Unity ‘on fairly good authority is in a concentration camp for Czech women which much as I deplore it has a sort of poetic justice’. Peter, she claimed, would use his diplomatic connections to have her released when she had come to her senses. The first real news came on 2 October, but it was not until December that Lady Redesdale and Deborah were able to set off for Switzerland, where Hitler had arranged for Unity to be transferred, to bring her home. They arrived back in England in early January to a hostile furore in the press. Unity was to live for another eight years, an overblown, incontinent wreck, unmanageable, pathetically furious and piteously needy. Lady Redesdale sacrificed herself to her care and her condition dealt the final blow to the Redesdale marriage. After Unity’s return the Mitford parents chose to live apart. Nancy later described her ‘beautiful, charming, odd’ sister as a ‘victim of the times’. ‘Am I mad?’ Unity had asked her plaintively. ‘Of course you are, darling Stonyheart, ’ Nancy replied, ‘but then, you always were.’ Unity was the first family casualty of the war, her lumbering ghost the nexus for all the guilt and grief that no amount of Mitford jokes could ever quite appease.

8

WAR

N
ancy began her war work the day she returned to London. Peter was already commissioned in the Welsh Guards and while waiting to be called up joined a first-aid post in Chelsea. Nancy was to drive an ARP van every night. Driving in the blackout was not a success – she crashed almost immediately – so she found more suitable work at a first-aid post in Praed Street, near Blomfield Road. Sitting around rolling bandages in anticipation of casualties, indelible pencil poised to write on their foreheads, she began her fourth novel,
Pigeon Pie
.

The satirical effect of inverted context had already been exploited by Nancy in
Wigs on the Green
, where Fascism is parodied by its transposition to rural England. The technique owes something to Pope’s
Rape of the Lock
, where a petty society squabble is elevated to mock-Homeric epic; in
Pigeon Pie
Nancy did something similar, reducing the paranoia of the ‘Phoney War’ to a spy story set in a Mayfair drawing room. Considering the novel later with Evelyn Waugh, Nancy thought it ‘extremely evocative’ of those first tense months of the conflict, when no side seemed anxious to begin.

England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. England beckoned to Poland, Germany answered with Russia. Then Italy’s Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee … England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain’s Nanny said she had internal troubles and must sit this one out. England looked towards
the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except little Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. America of course, was too much of a baby for such a grown-up game, but she was just longing to see it played. And still it would not begin.

This approach, it has been suggested, is ‘horribly compromised by its flippancy’. Nancy ‘simply does not know how to respond to an event of this magnitude’; hence
Pigeon Pie
is ‘less an exercise in detachment than straightforward evasion, an attitude to life forged in that artificial late-Twenties crucible in whom the events of a decade later can only raise a kind of forced inanity’.
¹
That the Twenties produced a generation incapable of coping with war seems a fairly specious point, given that they fought it, but the critic is completely missing Nancy’s technique. Comparing the first months of the war to a children’s round game captures exactly the horrible diplomatic team-picking of those first months. It was not Nancy but the governments of Europe who were unable to contemplate the magnitude of what they had done. The consistent theme of the novel is the error of appeasers, those English people (like Nancy’s acquaintance Henry ‘Chips’ Channon and indeed her own parents) who were flattered by ‘being made a fuss of’ and trips in Mercedes–Benzes into believing the Nazis fundamentally benign. Nancy does not gloat, rather it is the childish, the blind, the venal, the conceited, who have brought Europe to this pass and it will be up to the adults, like her pretty, dizzy but ultimately sound heroine Sophia Garfield and her soldier lover Rudolph, to get it out.