Nancy Mitford Read online

  Selina Hastings

  Nancy Mitford

  Selina Hastings is a writer and literary journalist. She worked at the Daily Telegraph before becoming the literary editor for Harpers & Queen. She is the author of Rosamond Lehmann: A Life; Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (winner of the Marsh Biography Award), and The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has been a judge of the Booker, Whitbread, British Academy, Ondaatje, and Duff Cooper prizes, and of the UK Biographers’ Award.

  Also by Selina Hastings

  Evelyn Waugh: A Biography

  Rosamond Lehmann: A Life

  The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2012

  Copyright © 1985 by Selina Hastings

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd., London, in 1985, and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by E. P. Dutton, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., New York, in 1986.

  Vintage and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file

  at the Library of Congress

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94947-9

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Megan Wilson

  Cover painting by Mogens Tvede, by kind permission of Charlotte Mosley

  v3.1

  TO PAMELA

  AND TO THE MEMORY OF DAVID

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  1 The Beginnings

  2 Childhood

  3 Growing Up

  4 Peter

  Illustration Insert 1

  5 Married Life

  6 The War

  7 The Colonel

  8 Paris

  Illustration Insert 2

  9 Rue Monsieur

  10 The Last Years

  Books by Nancy Mitford

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  1 (a) Grandfather Redesdale

  (b) Grandfather Bowles

  2 Nancy with her parents

  3 (a) Farve in uniform during the First World War

  (b) Tom

  (c) Out walking at Batsford. Muv, Tom, Miss Mirams, Nancy, Aunt Daphne, Nanny Dicks with Unity in front of her, Pam and Diana.

  4 (a) Pam, Tom, Diana and Nancy in the garden at Asthall

  (b) Nancy with Constantia Fenwick

  (c) Nanny Dicks

  5 (a) Nancy on the Venice Lido

  (b) Self-portrait

  (c) Nancy photographed by Derek Jackson at Rignell

  6 (a) Hamish St Clair Erskine

  (b) Diana

  (c) Hamish with Nancy and Anne Armstrong-Jones at the Ritz

  (d) Nina Seafield and Mark Ogilvie-Grant

  7 (a) Peter and Nancy on their wedding-day

  (b) Nancy with her French bulldog Millie

  (c) Peter in his role as artist, a portrait by his sister-in-law Mary Rodd

  8 (a) Lord and Lady Rennell of Rodd

  (b) Peter and Nancy on their ill-fated holiday in Brittany

  9 (a) Gerald Berners

  (b) Eddy Sackville-West

  (c) Evelyn Waugh

  (d) Hamish Hamilton

  10 The six Mitford sisters drawn by William Acton:

  Nancy, Pam and Diana

  Unity, Decca and Debo. From the collection of the Hon.

  Desmond Guinness.

  11 (a) Nancy with Anne Hill outside the shop

  (b) Marc de Beauvau-Craon

  (c) Gaston Palewski with the General in Algiers, 1942

  12 (a) Nancy (wearing the New Look) with Alvilde Chaplin in the courtyard of the British Embassy in Paris

  (b) Duff and Diana Cooper

  (c) A letter from Nancy to the Colonel showing him in pursuit of his favourite pastime

  (d) Marie Renard, Nancy’s cook-housekeeper

  13 Portrait of Gaston Palewski, ‘Homme au Gant’, by Nora Auric

  14 (a) Mrs Hammersley at Chatsworth

  (b) Muv on Inch Kenneth

  (c) Nancy and Debo on the Venetian Lagoon

  (d) Nancy and Sir Oswald Mosley in the garden of his house, Le Temple de la Gloire, at Orsay

  15 (a) Nancy at a party in London in 1959.

  (b) Diana, Pam and Debo at Nancy’s funeral at Swinbrook on July 7, 1973

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank first and above all the Hon. Lady Mosley and the Duchess of Devonshire for their kind help, unfailing patience and generous hospitality; and to the Duchess of Devonshire thanks for her permission to quote from the letters and published works of Nancy Mitford. I would also like to thank the Hon. Mrs Derek Jackson for her invaluable recollections; and the Hon. Mrs Robert Treuhaft for allowing me access to her sister’s letters. I owe, too, an inestimable debt to the kindness and co-operation of the late M. Gaston Palewski.

  Among the many people who have given me help during the writing of this book I would in particular like to acknowledge my gratitude to the following: Sir Harold Acton; Mrs Ralph Arnold; Comte Jean de Baglion; Mrs Rosemary Bailey; Mrs Rosemary Baldwin; Mr Frith Banbury; Dr Andrew Barlow; the Marquess of Bath; the late Prince de Beauvau-Craon and the Princesse de Beauvau-Craon; the Duchess of Beaufort; Lady Beit; Mr Alan Bell; Mme Bettine Bergery; the executors of the estate of the late Sir John Betjeman; Mrs Lesley Blanch; the Keeper of Western Manuscripts, the Bodleian Library; Dr Mary Brazier; Lady Brinckman; M. Jacques Brousse; Mr Gavin Bryars; Mrs Handasyde Buchanan; Mrs Rohan Butler; Contessa Anna-Maria Cicogna; Brigadier Archer Clive; Miss R. E. Colvile; Lady Diana Cooper; Helen, Lady Dashwood; Mr Peter Day; Lady Denham; the Duke of Devonshire; Mr Maldwin Drummond; Mme Denise Duchon; Lord Dulverton; Lady Mary Dunn; Viscountess Eccles; Mr Peter Elwes; the Hon. David St Clair Erskine; Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge; the Hon. Mrs Daphne Fielding; the Hon. Mrs Mark Fleming; Mr Alastair Forbes; the Hon. Mrs Derek Gascoigne; Mme Jean Gaudin; the late Mr Geoffrey Gilmour; Dr Henry Gillespie; Lady Gladwyn; Mme Gabrielle Guimont; the Hon. Jonathan Guinness; Mr John Hadfield; Prof. Robert Halsband; Mr Hamish Hamilton; Mr Christopher Hammersley; Mr Charles Harding; Lady Harrod; Mr Derek Hart; Sir Rupert Hart-Davis; Comtesse Gérard d’Hauteville; Miss Alethea Hayter; Sir William & Lady Hayter; Mr Robert Heber-Percy; the late Mr Peter Hesketh; Mr Roger Hesketh; Mr Derek Hill; Mr Heywood & Lady Anne Hill; Mr Bevis Hillier; Mr Anthony Hobson; Mme Paulette Howard-Johnston; the late Mrs Richard Hughes; the Librarian of the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas; the late Prof. Derek Jackson; Violet, Lady Jackson; the late Mr Julian Jebb; Miss Rosemary Kerr; Sir Osbert Lancaster; Miss Margaret Lane; Mrs Joy Law; Mr Valentine Lawford; Mr & Mrs James Lees-Milne; Mr Patrick Leigh Fermor; Mrs Peter Levi; Mrs Joseph Links; Prince & Princess von Loewenstein; the late Mr Roger Machell; Mr Lachlan Maclean; Mr Anthony Mann; the Dowager Viscountess Mersey; Mrs Lewis Motley; Mr Robert Morley; Miss Lucy Norton; Viscount Norwich; Mrs Frances Partridge; Mr Brian Pearce; Mr Michael Pearman; Mr John Phillips; the late Mr Peter de Polnay; Mr Anthony Powell; Mr Stuart Preston; Mr Peter Quennell; Lord Rennell; the executors of the estate of the late Lord Rennell; the late Hon. Mrs Gustav Rodd; Mme Jeanne Rödel; Mrs Joan Rodzianko; Mr Ned Rorem; Mr Richard Shone; Mr Julian Slade; Sir Hugh Smiley; Miss Madeau Stewart; Lady Marjorie Stirling; the late Mr John Sutro & Mrs Sutro; Mr Christopher Sykes; Lord Thomas; Mr Patrick Trevor-Roper; Mr Hugo Vickers; Mr Auberon Waugh; Miss Patchy Wheatley; Mr Sam White; Mr A. N. Wilson.

  Fina
lly I would like to give especial thanks to Mr Stanley Olson for his help and encouragement.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Beginnings

  When Linda, penniless, sinks down on her suitcase in the Gare du Nord and bursts into tears, she knows that nothing so dreadful has ever happened to her before, and that her predicament is hopeless. Then, through her weeping, she becomes aware of somebody standing beside her: a short, stocky Frenchman in a black Homburg hat. And so begins the great love affair of Linda’s life, a love which transforms her existence, breaking her free from the dark and dreary confines of her English past to release her into perfect happiness in Paris, the most beautiful city on earth.

  This is how Nancy Mitford tells the story in The Pursuit of Love. A novelist who always wrote with a strong element of autobiography, nowhere does she come closer to the truths of her own life. As it was for Linda, her life, too, was transformed by a short, stocky Frenchman in a black Homburg hat, whom she met not in the Gare du Nord, but in the garden of the Allies’ Club in Park Lane. Like Linda, she found in beautiful Paris happiness and freedom of spirit; a freedom, too, from a failed marriage, following years of frustration passed under the iron régime of a tyrannical father.

  Both Nancy’s parents were the children of remarkable men, and in both cases the remarkable qualities of their fathers passed them entirely by, to reappear again, at full strength and in a number of strange permutations, in the succeeding generation. Nancy’s father, David Mitford, second Baron Redesdale, was descended from a long line of landed gentlemen, locally distinguished but of small importance in the history of the nation, whose fortunes were founded in the fourteenth century by one Sir John Mitford of Mitford in Northumberland. To him were granted the lands and tenements of Molesdon in that county, from which was derived the three little moles on the Mitford family crest. David Mitford’s great-great-grandfather was the historian William Mitford, author of The History of Greece, a monumental work now forgotten although much admired in its day. David’s father, Bertram Mitford, born in 1837 and created Baron Redesdale in 1902,1 was the son of Henry Reveley Mitford, of Exbury in Hampshire, and Lady Georgina Ashburnham, daughter of the Earl of Ashburnham, who, after bearing her husband three sons, ran off with the secretary to the British Legation in Frankfurt.

  Bertie (pronounced ‘Barty’), eight at the time of his mother’s defection, was sent to Eton at the age of nine, and from there to Oxford. Before going briefly into politics, he went first into the Diplomatic Service, making a distinguished career for himself in St Petersburg and then in the Far East, in China and Japan. He was one of the first two foreigners to be presented to the Mikado, who awarded him the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun for his translation of a collection of Japanese legends, and in recognition of his knowledge and love of the country. At thirty-seven Bertie married Lady Clementine Ogilvy, daughter of the Earl of Airlie. The Airlies, a grand and old-established Scottish family, were not pleased with the match as Bertie had the reputation of being something of a rake (a reputation not improved by his close friendship with the Prince of Wales), and to the day of her death Lady Airlie addressed her daughter’s letters to ‘Lady Clementine Ogilvy’. When his father died, Bertie inherited land and a large Georgian house, Batsford, in Gloucestershire, where he and Clementine brought up their nine children, and where Bertie established a wild and exotic garden on the bleak Cotswold hillside that rose in front of the house.

  It was at Batsford that Nancy’s parents, David and Sydney, first met, their two fathers, Bertie Mitford and Thomas Gibson Bowles, having become friends when they were both returned as Conservative Members of Parliament in the General Election of 1892. Bowles, or ‘Tap’ as he was always inexplicably known, was every bit as clever as Bertie, and in old age the two men looked rather similar, two handsome old walruses with brilliant blue eyes and thick white moustaches. Tap was born in 1843, the illegitimate son of Thomas Milner-Gibson, a Liberal Member of Parliament, and of Susan Bowles, daughter of a brush-maker from Southwark, who was in service in the Milner-Gibsons’ household. He was sent to school in France, a country he loved, insisting for the rest of his life on keeping French hours, which meant a full déjeuner at 11.30 in the morning and nothing else until dinner. At nineteen, he was set to work by his father as a junior clerk in the Legacy and Succession Duty Office at Somerset House, a job which he hated, abandoning it after six years for a career in journalism. He covered the Siege of Paris in 1870 for The Morning Post, and at twenty-six, with two colleagues, founded the satirical magazine, Vanity Fair, and some years later The Lady, a journal for women still published today.

  In 1876 Tap married Jessica, the daughter of Major-General Charles Evans-Gordon. They had four children, two boys followed by two girls, before Jessica died at the age of thirty-five. As soon as they were old enough the boys, Geoffrey and George, were sent away to school, but their sisters, Sydney and Dorothy (Weenie), were brought up at home, very much under the eccentric influence of their father. In many ways Tap was a modern father, believing in fresh air and exercise, plain food and natural remedies, unconventional theories for an age in which four large meals a day was the custom, with often a little carriage exercise the only aid to digestion. Even more unconventional, Tap liked to have his daughters with him; cumbersomely dressed in stiff serge sailor-suits made specially at Gieves, Sydney and Weenie accompanied their father wherever he went: shooting in Scotland; on his long and dangerous sea-voyages (sailing was a passion he had inherited from his father); on his yacht during the summer season at Deauville with his artist friends, Boldini, Tissot and Helleu; and back in London, paying calls on the fashionable ladies of Pont Street and Belgrave Square, who were not always entirely delighted to have to receive into their drawing-rooms two quaintly-dressed and silent little girls. From the age of fourteen it was Sydney who ran the household, a responsibility she enjoyed, being good at adding up and keeping accounts, although she hated having to deal with the men servants who were often insolent and drunk.

  It was in the winter of 1894 that Bertie Mitford asked Tap if he would come and speak for him at a political meeting, stay at Batsford, and of course bring the children. The Bowleses went down by train, were met at the station by a waggonette and pair and driven to the house, where they were shown into the library, Tap going first, the two girls in their hated sailor-suits trailing behind. Bertie and Lady Clementine were standing before a blazing fire; and there, with his back to the fire and one foot on the fender, dressed in a shabby velveteen jacket such as gamekeepers wore, was David Mitford. At seventeen, he was already startlingly handsome. Sydney, three years younger, fell in love with him at once.

  David, the second son, was the most wayward of the nine Mitford children. Given to sudden, uncontrollable rages, he also had a habit of falling mysteriously and frighteningly ill whenever he was thwarted in what he wanted to do. His interests were entirely out of doors and it was with great difficulty that his tutor ever persuaded him to open a book. Later he was sent not to Eton with his elder brother Clem, but to Radley, which he loathed, and from where it was intended he should enter the Army. However, when the time came, he failed the examination into Sandhurst, and so was packed off instead to be a tea-planter in Ceylon, an experience which taught him two things: the destructive effects of alcohol (tea-planters were notoriously heavy drinkers), and the word ‘sua’, Tamil for ‘pig’, which, spelt ‘sewer’ and applied to most of the people he knew, became his favourite, and most famous, term of abuse. He was back from Ceylon at the outbreak of the Boer War, when he joined the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, fought gallantly in South Africa, and was invalided home in 1902 with one lung shot away. (Brought back to camp after four days in a bullock-waggon, wound swarming with maggots, was a story much loved by his children.)

  David and Sydney were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on February 6, 1904. There is no question that David was very much in love: there is no knowing what Sydney felt. Having lost her heart to David at the age of fourteen,
she soon fell out of love with him, and as a young girl had had several admirers, the most serious of whom was killed in 1900 in the South African War. She once told her eldest daughter that two years after Nancy was born she had been on the point of running away with another man, but had stayed for the sake of the baby. (‘Which I doubt, since we know what I looked like at that age,’ said Nancy.)

  They were a remarkably handsome couple. David at twenty-five was tall and lean, with a smooth, buff-coloured complexion and fierce blue eyes. Sydney’s beauty had an other-worldly air about it, a vague look, a look of beautiful boredom, as though her own very private life were going on deep inside, leaving her detached from the world and its people. She seemed possessed of the sort of inner tranquillity that comes to those who have risen above the passions of daily life to enter into some personal nirvana. Nothing ruffled her, nothing outwardly disturbed that Buddha-like serenity, a serenity which, however, concealed a strong character and an absolute conviction that whatever she believed was right.

  They spent their honeymoon in Paris, both speaking good French and both having inherited from their fathers a love of France. On their return to London they stayed in Tap’s house in Lowndes Square while their own, No. 1 Graham Street,2 was being prepared. Graham Street, just south of Eaton Square, was then very modest indeed, a Victorian terrace of mean little brick houses, with No. 1, by far the largest and elegantly faced in cream-coloured stucco, the only one of distinction.

  By early summer the Mitfords had moved in, settling down contentedly to a married life that was quiet as much from choice as from necessity. Money was short. They were entirely dependent on the modest allowance Tap made his daughter, and on the income from the job he provided for his son-in-law as business manager of The Lady, a less congenial post than which could hardly have been imagined: David hated being indoors, knew nothing of women’s magazines, and had no interest whatsoever in the printed word. (The only book he admitted to having read was Jack London’s White Fang, which he thought so good he never had the least desire to read any other.) To make his day bearable, he bought a mongoose with which he hunted the rats on The Lady’s Covent Garden premises.