The Horror of Love (5 page)

It was not
Debrett’s
that was the source of the Mitfords’ much-derided Society of Hons. The children developed several private languages, including Boudledidge, spoken by Jessica and Unity and understood by the others, and Honnish, the language of the society (members: Jessica and Deborah). In Honnish, ‘hen’ was pronounced ‘hon’, with an aspirated ‘h’, so the club was inspired by chickens, not honourables, as is still assumed by many journalists, although the mistake has been corrected by all of Nancy’s biographers. Tom’s nickname, Tuddemy, was the Boudledidge translation of his name, thought immensely funny as it rhymed, sort of, with ‘adultery’, a subject of intense fascination. It was bestowed on him after he once asked: ‘Grandfather, you know
adultery
…’

It was not until she reached adulthood that Nancy could see the charm in any of this. Despite ‘Farve’s’ explosive rages and ‘Muv’s’ irritating vagueness, the Mitfords, so clever, so lucky, so beautiful, lived a life most children could only imagine. Once Nancy got the point and reproduced them as the Radletts in
The Pursuit of Love
, the world was fascinated, enchanted and disgusted in equal measure with the Mitford childhood, and remained so for fifty years, but to Nancy, ‘longing to be grownup and live with grown-up people’,
²
it seemed terribly tedious. By her own account, she was quite horrid to her siblings. She informed Jessica, Unity and Deborah that the middle letters of their names spelled out ‘sic’, ‘nit’ and ‘bore’. She dressed up as a tramp, going to highly convincing trouble, to frighten her sister Pamela with a demand for a kiss. She forced Pamela and Diana to become girl guides, which she hated as much as they did, just to have the chance to boss them around. She told Deborah that everybody cried when she was born, another unwanted girl. The
weight given to Nancy’s teasing has perhaps been exaggerated – anyone who has spent time with groups of siblings will note their capacity to be astonishingly foul to one another. What made it so memorable in Nancy’s case was that she was so good at it. The reverse of her genius for spite was her funniness. When she and Lord Redesdale teased one another at table, Deborah remembered that it was better than a play, while Jessica recalled that the wildness of the Mitford imagination – the complicated jokes, the passionate rivalries, the insistence that, above all, it was one’s duty to amuse and never to bore – ‘sprang full-blown from Nancy’.

All the Mitford girls claimed to be jealous of Tom’s education. School was tried for Unity, but it didn’t last long (‘not
expelled’
, Lady Redesdale would insist, ‘asked to leave’), and later for Deborah, who hated it so much it made her physically ill. The Redesdales conceded to Nancy’s agitating in 1921, permitting her to attend Hatherop Castle for a year. Hatherop, run by a Mrs Cadogan, was more of a pension-cum-finishing school than a serious intellectual establishment – she took in a few ‘nice’ girls to educate along with her own daughters, with whom Nancy continued the French that, apart from a little piano and gracious deportment, Lord Redesdale considered the only real essential for girls, had her bottom pinched in her netball skirt by Commander Cadogan and worked on her sketching and dancing. Nancy enjoyed Hatherop as, at least, a change from home and was even more thrilled the next year when, with four other girls, she was sent on a cultural tour of Paris, Venice and Florence under the chaperonage of a Miss Spalding, the headmistress of a London girls’ school.

‘Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de la Vallière at the same time; Versailles was the love of his life, ’ Nancy declared in
The Sun King
. Like her beloved Bourbon king, her first great love was for a place. In 1927, she wrote to her brother Tom from Paris: ‘One can be more cheerful there than anywhere else in the world and I have often danced all the way down the Champs Elysées … I think all day La Muette, Place de la
Concorde, Place de l’Etoile, Avenue Hoch, Avenue du Bois, Place des Vosges, Palais Royale, Rue de Rivoli.’ From her first visit to the city until she achieved her dream of settling there over twenty years later, this was her mantra, Paris her promised land.

The beauty of Paris still catches at the heart of even the most sophisticated modern traveller. Hardly surprising, then, that to a sheltered schoolgirl who had spent much of her life, in the words of her friend Brian Howard, ‘hidden amongst the cabbages of the Cotswolds’,
³
it appeared so dazzling. Nancy’s first view of the city was from the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, perfectly placed on the Right Bank of the Seine to offer vistas of four of its most eloquent scences: the Louvre itself, the Opéra Garnier, the Place du Palais Royale and the Comédie Française. Writing once more to Tom, the eighteen-year-old Nancy described an attack of Stendhal syndrome. The Avenue Henri Martin in the sixteenth arrondissement was ‘more perfect and melancholy than any place you’ve ever seen. I don’t know why but I waited for a bus there once and when the bus came I was in tears.’

Nancy was not yet ‘out’, her black-coffee hair still coiled at her neck, weighty as the Edwardian etiquette under which she had been raised, and her impression of the city on her first trip abroad was one of naive and pure delight. In ecstatic letters home she describes ‘a very scrumptious “croissant”’, her pleasure in the pictures in the Louvre, the ‘heavenly’ shops and the beauty of the Place de la Concorde at night. It is a tourist’s view, but also a sensualist’s, inviting her mother, Lady Redesdale, to share in the soft slip of a perfect
omelette aux fines herbes
, the airy stickiness of a perfect
éclair
.

Meanwhile, across town, a young student at the Sorbonne was experiencing a very different side to the city. Paris in the 1920s, Gaston Palewski recalled, was illuminated by the last, dying light of the Belle Epoque. In defiance of the cataclysm of the Great War, the grand houses remained open, the salons still exercised their influence and aristocrats serenely wedded tradesmen’s daughters to provide the funds necessary to maintaining the illusion that nothing much had happened since 1788.
Money carried the elite of the Faubourg St Honoré calmly over the waves of social upheaval; patronage of the arts and above all, the belief in
douceur de vivre
obtained unchallenged: ‘
Le gout du décor ancien, la science d’un certain art de vivre … on pouvait se réunir, se rencontrer, s’apprécier, s’aimer. Charmante epoque!’
Indeed, the great trial of the war had served to stimulate a fever of artistic and literary creation. This was the Paris of Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Picasso. Cole Porter was installed at 17 Rue Monsieur with sixteen dressing gowns and nine cigarette cases, Gertrude Stein with her unrivalled art collection and her moustachioed lover Alice B. Toklas in the Rue de Fleurus; the American colony – Dorothy Parker, ee cummings, John dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Hemingway – who took time off from carousing and creating to meet at Sylvia Beach’s English bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, at the Odéon. A young man possessed of charm, brilliance and a decent suit might go anywhere. Palewski met the celebrated painter Armand Jan, who introduced him to Picasso, and in the studio of Jacques-Emile Blanche he first heard of an extraordinary debutant writer named Proust who, in one flourish of his unknown hand, ‘stole the glory of which his entire generation dreamed’. Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski did not meet for more than twenty years after her first breathless glimpse of the city, but somehow she knew, instinctively, that it was in his Paris she belonged, that he would offer her the key to ‘that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city’.
⁴

3

COMING OUT

N
ancy Mitford attended her first ‘grown-up’ dance at Asthall in 1922, the same year that Lady Edwina Mountbatten’s underclothes for her wedding journey were exhibited to the general public. For all that the 1923 debutante season was considered to be the most glittering and glamorous since the war, Lady Edwina’s lace-edged frillies did not invoke a new spirit of liberation among the girls who lined up in their ostrich feathers to curtsey to Queen Mary. As far as the Redesdales and their peers were concerned, it might have been 1903: the aim of the Season was to get a girl respectably married as soon as possible. Then, and only then, might she contemplate any form of adult life. Lady Redesdale took her tiara out of the bank, rented a house in Gloucester Square and, as she was to do for all her daughters, resigned herself to the peculiar martyrdom of women of her class: chaperonage.

Nancy learned to kick out her white satin train, made her curtsey, attended girls’ luncheons, dinners and dances nearly every evening, drank fruit cup and sat out to eat ices, did all that was expected of her as her mother nodded in the corner on a hired gold chair. Her first Season was a success: ‘Yes, she was very pretty, she enjoyed it all, ’ commented Deborah. ‘She was popular, everyone liked her.’
¹
Deborah’s own picture of a typical ‘deb dance’ is rather more telling:

Rather a small square room to dance in and many too many people in the doorway and on the stairs … My
conversation to the debs’ young men goes like this:

The chinless horror ‘I think this is our dance.’

Me ‘Oh yes, I think it is.’

C.H. ‘What a crowd in the doorway.’

Me ‘Yes isn’t it awful.’

The C.H. then clutches me round the waist and I almost fall over as I try to put my feet where his aren’t.

Me ‘Sorry.’

C.H. ‘No, my fault.’

Me ‘Oh, I think it must have been me.’

C.H. ‘Oh, no, that wouldn’t be possible.’

Then follows a long and dreary silence sometimes one of us saying ‘sorry’ and the other ‘my fault’. After a bit we feel we can’t bear it any longer so we decide to go and sit down.

The disillusion of the debutante’s long-yearned-for coming of age in
The Pursuit of Love
bears out Deborah’s description:

This then is a ball. This is life, what we have been waiting for all these years … How extraordinary it feels, such unreality, like a dream. But alas, so utterly different from what one had imagined … the women so frowsty … the men, either so old or so ugly. And when they ask one to dance it is not at all like floating away into a delicious cloud, pressed by a manly arm to a manly bosom, but stumble-kick, stumble-kick. They balance, like King Stork on one leg, while with the other they come down, like King Log, on one’s toe. As for witty conversation … it is mostly ‘Oh-sorry’, ‘Oh-my fault’.

One of the few truly eligible young men who attended Nancy’s dance at Asthall was Henry Weymouth, heir to the Marquess of Bath, who introduced her to friends including Brian Howard, one of the models for Evelyn Waugh’s fantastic aesthete Anthony Blanche in
Brideshead Revisited
. Howard was immediately charmed: ‘A delicious creature, quite pyrotechnical my dear, and
sometimes even profound.’
²
Mark Ogilvie-Grant appeared at a dance given by some local neighbours, the Masons, and soon became a close friend and confidant. Through Howard and Ogilvie-Grant Nancy began to meet the young men who formed her real social circle throughout the Twenties: Harold Acton, diplomat and writer; Robert Byron, the renowned Oxford aesthete and later distinguished travel writer; the film-maker John Sutro, Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh, Oliver Messel, John Betjeman and Henry Yorke (whose novels were published under the name of Henry Green), Tom Driberg. Many of them were homosexual, or flirted with homosexuality; all were clever and witty and beneath their delight in shocking the older generation concealed surprisingly serious ideas about art, about what was valuable and what was not. They represented Nancy’s first exposure to the sort of people with whom she wanted to spend her life, those who recognized the nascent intimation given to Fanny among the floating panels of disillusion at her first ball that ‘the behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected’.

In 1926 the Mitford family moved to Swinbrook House, the hideous modern home Lord Redesdale had built for them and which he was greatly hurt to discover all of them except Deborah loathed (Nancy called it ‘Swinebrook’). The friends she asked to stay became the ‘Swinbrook Sewers’, derived from Lord Redesdale’s favourite insult,
‘sua’
– ‘pig’ – picked up in Ceylon. Jessica recalled them ‘sweeping down in merry hordes’ with their smart jargon – how too, too divine, how sickmaking, darling, how shamemaking, how bogus. If the Redesdales didn’t exactly approve, Nancy’s friends were tolerated – indeed, Mark succeeded to the dubious honour of favourite. His rewards included the pleasure of eating sweetbreads at eight o’clock sharp with Lord Redesdale. ‘Brains for breakfast!’ became a maxim of their letters.

Much as she loved her new friends, Nancy could not really follow them to the darker side of the Bright Young scene. Although her life was now much less restricted, Edwardian
standards still pertained. Leaving the house in London without a chaperone was virtually impossible and even then certain areas, such as the clubland of St James’s, were off limits. The seedy nightclubs of Soho and Fitzrovia were banned, and even something as innocent as having tea in Oxford with Brian Howard was treated as a crime. When she was caught in the act, Lord Redesdale bellowed at his grown-up daughter that were she married this would give her husband grounds for divorce. At the age of twenty-two, Nancy dared to cut her long hair, to which Lady Redesdale responded that she would never get a husband now, and the minor transgressions of her generation – slacks, lipstick, the odd cigarette – were treated as major offences. So although Nancy was mixing with some of the most brilliant young men of her generation, there remained an innocent quality to her which she retained all her life (later, in Paris, she still seemed ‘almost virginal’,
³
capable of discussing the necessity of breaking with her family to become a painter with Brian Howard, but simultaneously enjoying fancy-dress parties and the shocking pleasure of an occasional cocktail.