Nancy Mitford Read online

  At home in Graham Street Sydney had few demands on her time. There were five servants, all female as she refused to employ men after the unpleasant experience of her father’s drunken footmen. This meant that, having seen the cook in the morning, she was free to pay calls, read, and go shopping at the Army & Navy Stores in Victoria Street. This establishment was important in the lives of both Mitfords. When living with Tap in Lowndes Square, Sydney had gone there every Tuesday to order the groceries for the week, afterwards taking the lift to the top floor where she and Weenie had tea. This was a treat; it had made her fond of the place. To David, the Stores were reliable purveyors of those sacred articles, guns, traps and fishing-rods, and to choose these he liked to be there sharp at nine o’clock, before, as he put it, he could be impeded by inconveniently shaped women.

  Occasionally they dined with relations but, although Sydney quite enjoyed social life, her husband did not. There was perfectly good food to be had at home, he said, and he preferred the company of his wife to that of anyone else. His favourite way of passing the evening was with Sydney in the drawing-room with a supper of bread and milk on their laps eaten in their dressing-gowns in front of the fire. Such a picture of domestic peace is hard to reconcile with the known facts of David’s temperament, with David the small boy of violent and unpredictable rages, or, as later portrayed by Nancy, as the frightening and irascible Uncle Matthew, grinding his teeth and bellowing with anger. But in the early days of his marriage, and before the arrival of that large and troublesome family, he was too happy to be anything but calm. And there was another reason for his contentment: within a few weeks of their return from France, Sydney found that she was pregnant.

  David was ecstatic. ‘I never dreamt of such happiness,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘I had never any idea of what it would be like – Now I hardly think of anything else … Sydney will make just such another mother as I had so he ought to be a very happy little boy.’ By the middle of November the birth was due, and at six o’clock in the evening of the 28th, after a difficult labour lasting nearly fourteen hours, the baby was born. It was not a boy: it was a girl. Her name was to be Ruby.

  Sixteen years later, Mabel the parlourmaid knew at once by the grim expression on his Lordship’s face3 that the news was bad, that yet another girl, the sixth, had been born. But, in November 1904, these disappointments were all in the future. Sydney had survived, the baby was perfect, and David, although appalled at the sufferings his wife had endured, was supremely happy. Once he had seen for himself that Sydney was in no danger – ‘I cannot tell you how sweet and brave she has been all through’ – he was able to turn his attention to his daughter. ‘The baby is splendid 9½lbs at birth and the pretiest [sic] little child you could see … Our happiness is very great … Sydney sends her love and Ruby would if she knew.’ Although the birth had left her weak, Sydney was determined to nurse the baby herself in spite of the considerable discomfort this caused, making her dread the frequent intervals at which the child was brought to her. But within a week the pain had subsided and she was sitting up in bed looking pink-cheeked and pretty, and feeling well enough to have second thoughts over the choice of a name. As a boy had been so confidently expected, little time had been spent over the bread and milk considering names for a girl. Ruby she did not care for; she preferred, as a reminder of the sea-faring ballads of her nautical past, that the baby should be called Nancy. And Nancy she was christened on January 26, 1905.

  To look after the baby, Sydney engaged the daughter of Tap’s old sea-captain, a nice, practical girl called Lily Kersey, or Ninny Kudgey as she quickly became known in the nursery. Lily, although untrained, was kind, and soon became devoted to the baby who, with her greeny-grey eyes, fresh complexion and mop of vigorous black curls, was an appealing little girl. ‘Pore gurl, she’s ravenish,’ Lily would coo, rocking the baby energetically in her arms. As was the custom of their class, neither of the Mitfords took much part in the life of the nursery. Sydney, an elegant figure in her big straw hat, long skirts and tightly cinched waist, would sometimes wheel the pram to the park, but for the most part Nancy on the top floor saw little of her parents. As soon as she could walk, she would stagger downstairs twice a day hand in hand with Ninny, once in the morning to see her mother and father reading The Times over breakfast in their pretty white-papered dining-room, and then again at tea-time when she was buttoned into her best frock and taken down to the drawing-room to be left for an hour with her mother, after which Ninny would come and collect her for bed.

  Like her father, Sydney had some unusual ideas about health. When she and Weenie were children, Tap had hung on their nursery wall a set of rules, rules which he expected to be unquestioningly obeyed. They were not, of course, but that was beside the point.

  1) The window is to be open day and night six inches at the top (revolutionary then, when most people believed that ‘night air’ was harmful).

  2) The children are not to eat between meals.

  3) The children are to be rinsed in clean water before getting out of their bath.

  4) The children are to have no medicine of any sort.

  Sydney, too, believed that the Good Body would take care of itself, and that the medical profession had nothing to offer but dangerous interference. For appearance’s sake she was prepared to call in a doctor for anyone seriously ill, or if an operation were necessary. When Nancy was two, she had to be operated on for a badly infected foot. The operation was performed by the doctor at home, watchfully supervised by David, the baby being anaesthetised with a handkerchief soaked in chloroform. But the usual practice was to ignore the doctor’s advice and to pour away the medicine prescribed – ‘Horrid stuff!’ – as soon as his back was turned. Vaccination was of course out of the question – ‘pumping disgusting germs into the Good Body!’

  Nancy as the first-born was the subject of an unfortunate experiment in child-rearing undertaken at the instigation of David’s unmarried sister Frances, Aunt Pussy, who held that no child under the age of five should ever be corrected or hear a word spoken in anger. It was better, she believed, to administer a bromide than a slap to put an end to a fit of temper. The result was a very spoiled little girl given, like her father, to uncontrollable tantrums. Nancy’s progress through the first few years of her life was characterised by roaring, red-faced rages: Nancy bellowing in her pram all the way to the park; Nancy on a pony screaming to be put down. Sydney was quite unable to control these fits of temper, the causes of which were often as mysterious to her as their sudden cessation. ‘The houses are smiling at me,’ Nancy would say, suddenly beaming up at her mother from her pram, having screamed with fury all the way from Graham Street to Belgrave Square.

  This state of affairs continued for three years until on November 25, 1907, only three days before her third birthday, Nancy’s life changed suddenly and very much for the worse. A sister, Pamela, was born. This meant that not only was Nancy toppled from her position of adored only child, but faithless Ninny Kudgey instantly transferred her affections from the old baby to the new. Nancy’s pathetic wails in the nursery could be heard all over the house – ‘Oh, Ninny, I WISH you could love me! WHY don’t you love me any more?’ – becoming so pitiful that eventually Sydney could bear it no longer and Ninny was dismissed. But the damage was done. Nancy had been abandoned in favour of Pam, and it was many years before she forgave her. From the day of Pam’s birth, Nancy set out to punish her sister and make her life miserable. When Nancy was around, Pam could usually be found in tears; if something could be spoiled, Nancy spoiled it for her. Throughout their childhood and well beyond, she teased and tormented her with an ingenuity against which poor Pam, a good, rather stolid child, lacking her older sister’s wit and the cutting edge of her tongue, was quite unable to defend herself.

  Lily Kersey was succeeded by a tyrant remembered only as the Unkind Nanny, who established a rule of terror which lasted for three years, during which the only boy, Tom, was born, and Diana, the one flaw
less beauty in that beautiful family. A couple of months after Diana’s birth, Unkind Nanny was discovered punishing Nancy by banging her head against a wooden bedpost. Sydney, unable to face the encounter, retired to bed, and David himself had to come up to the top floor to dismiss her.

  Then came Laura Dicks, who stayed until the last of the seven children had left the nursery. When she arrived at Graham Street for her interview, Sydney’s immediate impression was that Miss Dicks with her pale face and slender build was at thirty-nine too old and too frail to look after four children, even with the help of a nursery-maid. Nanny Dicks herself admitted to quailing at the prospect of pushing that enormous pram to the park and back twice a day. But then she was shown the new baby, Diana, aged three months. ‘OH, what a lovely baby!’ she exclaimed – and that was that.

  Nanny Dicks was a success from the start: all the children adored her. Even Nancy, aged nearly six, whom Nanny found on her first day in the nursery with her head buried in Ivanhoe refusing to look up, was won over, although, having already started school, she was inclined to consider herself too grown-up to be counted as one of the babies. Nanny Dicks’s rule in the nursery was kind but firm. She never showed favouritism, never boasted of the paragons she had looked after previously, and later always maintained the authority of the many governesses who held brief but turbulent sway in the schoolroom. She didn’t agree with all of Sydney’s eccentric theories of health and diet, but loyally carried them out in so far as seemed practical, never betraying her feelings by anything more than a sniff and a shrug. With the children, her strongest expression of disapproval was ‘Hm’ – sniff – ‘very silly, darling.’ Although she always accompanied them to church on Sundays, she herself was ‘Chapel’, and on her day off joined the local Congregationalists, after which the nursery would ring with ‘Shall we gather at the river?’ and ‘There were ninety and nine who safely lay in the shelter of the fold’. She encouraged the children to collect farthings for the poor lepers, and silver paper which she moulded into a ball and sent off when it weighed a pound. They had to be careful that the paper was not smeared with chocolate; chocolatey paper was no good to lepers. She had a strong puritan streak which led her to distrust pleasure on principle: ‘Don’t expect ME to be sorry for you’ – sniff, shrug – was what she always said when anyone came to her ill with the effects of over-indulgence. None of her charges suffered from vanity if Nanny had anything to do with it. A little girl dressing for a party, found staring miserably into the glass knowing that everything was wrong, would be consoled with, ‘Don’t worry, darling, nobody’s going to be looking at you.’ (When the beautiful Diana at eighteen married Bryan Guinness at the society wedding of the year, in a frenzy of nervous despair at an ill-fitting veil, she turned to Nanny. ‘Never mind, darling,’ said Nanny soothingly. ‘Nobody’s going to be looking at you.’)

  The Easter before Nanny Dicks’s arrival, Nancy aged five and a half began as a pupil at the Francis Holland School, a Church of England foundation whose tall, dark-red building stood so conveniently at the other end of Graham Street, on the same side as No. 1 and immediately opposite the Pine Apple public house. Assembly was at a quarter to nine in the high gas-lit hall with its stained-glass windows depicting the female virtues. The Headmistress, Miss Morison, took prayers, accompanied by the Head Girl on the organ, whose playing was not infrequently interrupted by the hissing and explosions from the commercial laundry at the back of the building. The girls were taught all the usual subjects – English, History, Scripture, French and Mathematics – and as well as singing lessons and dancing classes there was Swedish Drill with Miss Carlsen for the whole school every day. Games took place on playing-fields at Richmond, with a Sports Day in the summer term; while Prize Giving was in the spring, an occasion rather dreaded by the younger girls who, in their best white dresses, found it difficult to sit still on forms covered only with green baize, while Princess Marie Louise, the school’s patron, was fulsomely welcomed, and the Bishop of Southwark gave his customary jovial address.

  Later that year, 1910, the house in Graham Street was sold, and the Mitfords moved to 49 Victoria Road, a much larger house in a pretty tree-lined street just off Kensington (Kensy, Nanny called it) High Street. The household now consisted of David and Sydney (known to the children as Farve and Muv); Nancy (nicknamed ‘Koko’ after the character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado, whom it was thought at birth she rather resembled with her dark hair and that oriental look common to many young babies), Pam, Tom and Diana, with Nanny and Ada the nursery-maid to look after them; cook, housemaid, two house-parlourmaids, and Willie Dawkins the hound-boy in charge of the animals. By now there was quite a menagerie, with Farve’s mongoose, two bloodhounds, a dachshund, a varying population of mice and birds, and, until the move, a tiny pony called Brownie. Farve, on his way to work one morning, had caught sight of the diminutive Brownie being led under Black-friars Bridge with a child on his back. This had tickled Farve’s fancy and he made an offer for him there and then, bringing him home that same evening in a hansom cab, to the intense delight of the children. There was a small box-room on the first floor which nobody used, and here Brownie was installed, with hay and straw conveniently provided by the mews abutting the back of the house.

  Until the outbreak of war in 1914, life on the top floor at Victoria Road went on very much as before. ‘Dear Muv,’ wrote Nancy one day in October 1913, ‘It is a horrid afternoon, it is raining, this morning it was foggy. The little ones have been singing, but I have been reading Little Folks. Pam is creaking the rocking-horse.’ The two eldest girls shared a bedroom, Nancy as usual taking every opportunity to score off the unsuspecting Pam. She offered her a penny a month if she would get out of bed first every morning and draw the curtains. Just before the first month was up, Muv got to hear of the scheme and put a stop to it: Pam wasn’t being paid nearly enough, she said, for the work involved. Nancy tried to renege – ‘unfair’ was the word used – arguing that, as Pam had not completed the month, she hadn’t earned the penny. But Muv stood firm, and Pam got her money.

  The nursery day revolved around the two daily outings to the park. As soon as breakfast was over, out they would all go, with Nanny in her shiny black bonnet and streamers pushing the big black pram with the baby in it up Victoria Road, across Kensy High Street, past the old balloon woman at the gate and into Kensington Gardens. As they went, Nancy kept Pam and Tom fascinated with long complicated sagas about witches and goblins and fairy princesses. When they got home it would be time for lunch, usually some kind of stew followed by a milk pudding which none of them would eat. In the afternoon there was another walk or an excursion to one of the South Kensington museums – the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert, or their favourite, the Natural History Museum, where the children were happy to spend hours gazing at the stuffed elephant and the unbelievable skeleton of the dinosaur. The day ended with tea in the drawing-room with Muv; and at bedtime, when Farve came home from the office, there were rough, noisy romps and games of ogres up and down the stairs. Sometimes they played with the Norman children, Hugh, Mark, Dick and the high-spirited Sibell, nephews and nieces of Montagu Norman, future Governor of the Bank of England, whose house was opposite No. 49, so near that the children were able to construct between their nurseries a ‘telephone’ made out of string and a couple of empty cocoa tins.

  At Christmas the children were always taken to the theatre, to Gilbert and Sullivan, which they loathed, to Bertram Mills’s circus at Olympia, and to Peter Pan, which they rather despised, making a point, when the question was put from the stage, of loudly denying a belief in the existence of fairies. Best of all was Maskelyne and Devant’s Magic Show. Farve and Uncle George Bowles, keen amateur conjurors and members of the Magic Circle, would go every week during the Christmas season in the hope of improving their technique and enlarging their repertoire. They were always the first to volunteer when members of the audience were invited to come up on stage, particularly for
the Vanishing Lady: there they would stand holding tightly on to her hands; but they never discovered how the trick was done – a little tug and she was gone.

  Once every two or three years Farve and Muv sailed to Canada, following in the footsteps of the millionaire adventurer Harry Oakes who, during a period of near insolvency, had decided to try his luck prospecting for gold. Farve knew Oakes and, always attracted by a hare-brained scheme, went out to join him, staking his claim on a patch of rough bush country near the small mining town of Swastika, Ontario. Oakes’s mine became the second richest in the western hemisphere, but needless to say on the Mitford patch no gold was ever found. Nonetheless the prospector’s life was an attractive one, and living rough in a wooden shack miles from nowhere made an agreeable change from office routine at The Lady. They were there in 1913, when Nancy wrote dutifully to her parents, ‘Dear Muve and farve, is the shack nice?’, while nursing the secret hope that they, like the ill-fated passengers of the Titanic, on which the Redesdales originally had booked passages and which had gone down the year before, would be lost at sea, thus leaving the reins of the household in her small but capable hands, an unparalleled opportunity to boss the others. Every morning she scanned Nanny’s Daily News for a report of the wreck. Toiling up Victoria Road after Nanny and the pram holding Pam and Diana, she would ask, ‘How big is the Titanic?’ ‘As big as from here to Kensy High Street,’ Nanny would reply, leaving in the child’s mind an impression that would remain for life of the Titanic as Victoria Road, houses, trees and all, steaming through the icebergs.