Nancy Mitford Page 3
In the hot summer of 1911, the first since leaving Graham Street, the new house was let, and the whole family moved to a small cottage which Muv had rented in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. The move was something of an upheaval, with parents, four children, Nanny and nursemaid, immense piles of luggage, and all the animals including three dogs and Brownie. The guard refused to have the pony with him in the van so Farve, without wasting time in argument, changed their first-class tickets for third, and they all, including Brownie, got into the same compartment, with Pam in the luggage rack to make room.
The children loved the Old Mill Cottage and its pretty orchard and garden. Originally it had been two cottages, now joined into one. The mill was at the back and the miller used to show the children round the ancient machinery, which half thrilled, half terrified them – the darkness and the thick soft cobwebs, and the rushing sound of the mill-race below. Muv drove them about in a pony-cart with thin metal wheels, and they went for walks along the lush Thames valley to the hoop and spade factory where they always stopped to watch the electric saws at work. Nancy, aged six, was enchanted by country life. She was given a bantam hen called Specky whose egg-laying she recorded with care, and when her mother was away kept her up to date with what was growing in the garden: ‘My dear Muv … my sweat-pease are so nice, and there is a beatiful popy and our runner is running up the stik … give my lothe to farve and a great many kises Koko.’
Part of the summer Muv and the children spent with the grandparents – with the Redesdales at Batsford, and with Tap at Bournehill, a small eighteenth-century cottage orné overlooking the Solent, belonging to the Drummond banking family. The Mitfords with their cousins Dick and Dooley Bailey4 and the Marconi children, who spent their holidays at Eaglehurst, the next house along the shore, raced along the shingle beach and in and out of the vast coverts of rhododendrons; they sat around under the pine trees, and, perched on the end of the wooden jetty, paddled their feet in the water. In striped bathing costumes, shrieking and splashing, they dared each other into the cold sea, and jumped out again with their teeth chattering, to be rubbed dry on a coarse towel by Nanny and given a petit beurre biscuit to take off the chill. Every day after tea they watched with interest as Caddick the butler walked grandly down to the water’s edge for his swim, his hair in a rubber cap to keep it dry.
One August night in 1915 there was a fire. The house was full–Muv, the children, the Baileys and their nannies and nursery-maids. Pam and Ada the nursery-maid were sharing a bedroom over the boiler-room, and when they were being put to bed Pam said she smelt burning. ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Ada, and took no notice. Some hours later Nancy, who had been put to sleep on her own, woke with a start to find the room full of smoke. She ran in to Nanny, sleeping in the next room with the baby; she in turn woke Muv, and within minutes all the children were safely out on the lawn, huddled in blankets and with jerseys over their nightgowns. They watched enthralled as Tap hurled anything he could lay hands on – clothes, blankets, papers, furniture – out of the window, while Caddick dashed to and fro, his arms full of silver. The remainder of the night was spent at Eaglehurst, and the next day the family returned to London. Farve, home that morning on leave, was greeted by the cook with the news that Bournehill Cottage had been burnt down, and that there was no sign of any survivors. At that moment a taxi drew up, bursting with children and animals, buckets and spades. ‘Yes, everyone is safe,’ drawled Muv, drifting in through the hall, ‘and the dogs, such luck. It was Nancy and Pam who woke up, their room was full of smoke …’
Staying with the Redesdale grandparents at Batsford was usually less eventful. Grandfather, now an old man and almost stone-deaf, passed his days quietly, playing patience, reading Nietzsche and cultivating his garden, his deafness acting as an impenetrable barrier between himself and the rest of the world. To Nancy he was a very distant figure, although he did have the agreeable habit of tipping when it occurred to him, and once gave her half a crown to remember 1453, the fall of Constantinople, the most important date in the history of Christendom. Grandmother was much more approachable. Always dressed head to foot in voluminous and silky black, she, like her husband, had fine blue eyes and white hair, but her face was round and pink. Like so many of her generation, she had become immensely stout in old age, moving, when she had to, with tiny little steps, so that, like the ladies of Versailles, she looked as though she ran on wheels.
The children loved Batsford. The house, with its smell of wood fires and beeswax, was full of fascinating objects from the East. There was also the farm, and that immense garden with its ornamental dairy like a doll’s thatched cottage, and an oriental rest-house entrancingly decorated with dolphins sporting on a tiled and curving roof. Nancy felt sorry for her father, confined to his office in London, and was diligent in keeping him in touch with what she was doing. ‘Sweet Toad,’ she wrote, ‘I do dare call you a Toad … We went for a drive and saw a hawk, we saw the young swallows peeping out on the stable roof.’
All this changed with the outbreak of war in 1914. The children had come up to London at the end of July to say goodbye to their father, who was on the point of leaving for Canada to do a little prospecting. As Muv, expecting her fifth child, was lying in at Victoria Road, Tom and the three girls were sent to stay at the Redesdales’ town house, just round the corner in Kensington High Street. London was already excitingly different: there were anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park, regimental brass bands and a military camp in Kensington Gardens, and armoured vehicles driving up and down the Broad Walk among the nursemaids and perambulators. The four children sat on Grandfather’s balcony overlooking the High Street, watching the troops march past en route for France, all of them, even Tom, busy with their knitting, turning out scratchy purple mufflers for the soldiers, khaki not yet being available. Soon Belgian refugees began to filter over, and could be seen sitting in the park, easily recognisable by their shabby clothes and strange guttural accents. The war came even closer the night Nanny got them all out of bed in the small hours to see the Zeppelin come down in flames over Potter’s Bar. Next day there were gypsies in the street selling brooches made, they said, from fragments of the wrecked dirigible. It was asking too much of the children that they should pray for peace. Nancy prayed as hard as she could for war, looking forward to the invasion, when, like Robin Hood, she could take to the greenwood and ambush bands of marauding Germans.
On August 8, four days after the declaration of war, Muv gave birth to her fifth child, a daughter (‘This is a boy for certain,’ said the doctor. But it wasn’t.) who was christened Unity, after Unity Moore, an actress Muv admired, and Valkyrie, at the suggestion of Grandfather Redesdale, a lover of Wagner. Farve had gone to join his regiment in Newcastle, and here, as soon as she was strong enough, Muv joined him, in quarters so cramped that the baby had to be laid to sleep in a drawer.
The following month Farve left for the Front, but was soon invalided home again, returning in April 1915 for the second Battle of Ypres. As transport officer, his job was to keep his Battalion supplied with ammunition. Twice every night for a month, he led his convoy of loaded wagons – an easy target for enemy snipers – at full gallop through the centre of the town and out by the Menin Gate. Not once did he fail to get through; but the strain of it nearly killed him. He reached the point where he was no longer physically strong enough to sit his horse, and had to be sent back to England in 1917, suffering from extreme exhaustion.
The children wrote faithfully to their father, and treasured his often brief replies. ‘Dearest Koko,’ ran one to Nancy. ‘Many thanks for your last letter. Much love Farv.’ Sometimes he enclosed a box of sweets or a little envelope of dried flowers, and the children in turn sent whatever they could to cheer up his rations. ‘Dearest Koko,’ he wrote from Belgium a week before the second Battle of Ypres,
Thank you so much for the nice things you sent me in a parcel with some from Muv. It was most amiable of you, and I think very few daughters would give u
p David Coperfield [sic] in order to purchase delicacies for their brutal father. The Germans went over Bailleul last night and dropped bombs from a Zepellin [sic] – they killed an old woman and a boy – so they were not very successful as of course what they wanted to do was to kill a few soldiers.
Give my love to all the others. I hope you are all being good, and not giving Muv any trouble – I am sure you try –
Much love to little missy blobnose from
Farv.’
Sometimes Nancy wrote to her father in French to demonstrate her progress, and her father’s facetious commentaries delighted her:
Il y a un nid de rouge-gorge dans un arbre
J’ai écouté le coucou ce matin.
Votre chien est très sage il est dans la maison
J’aime les lapins de ma tante
De la part de votre affectionée Nancy (blob).
To this Farve wrote in reply:
‘A robin in a tree has built!
The cuckoo has not changed its lilt!
And I have no desire to quench
My child’s desire for learning French.’
At home meanwhile, it was becoming harder to make ends meet. Army pay was small, and Tap, owing he said to increased taxation, had decided to economise by reducing Sydney’s allowance. Victoria Road and the cottage at High Wycombe, which Muv had now bought, were let, and the entire family moved into Malcolm House, a square Georgian house belonging to Grandfather in Batsford village.
On August 17, 1916, Bertie Redesdale died. He was suceeded by David, his second son, the eldest, Clem, having been killed in France the year before. Grandfather was buried in the churchyard at Batsford, and soon after the funeral Grandmother went to live in a cottage belonging to the family at Redesdale in Northumberland. Muv, the new Lady Redesdale, found herself in possession of the big house, most of which was shut up and the furniture covered in dust-sheets as it was far too expensive to heat. The children, of course, were overjoyed to have such a marvellous playground, and, free of the daunting presence of their grandparents, with Farve safely across the Channel, and with Muv and the other grown-ups too busy to pay much attention, found themselves free to do very much as they pleased.
The following year Farve came back to England for good. He was appointed Assistant Provost Marshal, in charge of training the Special Reserve Battalion in Oxford, and given rooms in Christ Church, where he installed a Pianola, put trout in the college fountain, and generally made himself at home. From time to time he brought a party of fellow Reservists to Batsford for luncheon, when Muv and the cook had to stretch their ingenuity to its limits, as food, even in the country, was desperately short. The stand-by for luncheon parties was a chicken pie constructed largely out of potato, the morsels of chicken being as rare and as highly prized as sixpences in a Christmas pudding. In spite of the difficulties in feeding her family, Muv was sensible about food. She didn’t believe in forcing the children to eat what they didn’t like, so that during the war they lived mainly on eggs, potatoes and milk, none of them caring for the stringy beef and overcooked liver that was a feature of that period; nor, except for chocolate, were they interested in puddings. Bread, which they all craved, was heavily rationed and there was never enough of it, the cook making do as best she could with potato-cakes and dry little scones made out of maize. Muv kept bees and poultry, but even so there was never quite enough to go round: as well as the immediate family, there were numerous relations who had to be kept supplied with honeycomb, and eggs in boxes home-made out of wattle and felt were posted off almost daily.
All the girls kept animals: Diana and Pam had hens, the sale of whose eggs was an important source of revenue (Muv eventually did so well out of her chickens that she was able to pay the governess – £120 a year – out of the egg money), and Nancy had goats whose milk she sold to the farm. ‘I don’t want to make butter, as it is not profitable enough,’ she explained to her mother. ‘Please tell Farve that he owes me 2½d for the milk that the pigs had.’ There was also Nancy’s terrier Jock, Brownie the pony, who often came along for walks like a dog, and a varying collection of toads, frogs and grass-snakes kept and lovingly tended in the outhouses, while families of mice were reared in pungent little cages in the schoolroom. Pam and Nancy shared an elaborate mouse-house made by the estate carpenter, with several rooms and a staircase, but when Nancy’s mouse, starved and neglected, was found to have eaten Pam’s, the mouse-house was quietly abandoned.
Every weekday morning from nine till luncheon the girls, and Tom before he went away to school, had lessons in the schoolroom. Miss Mirams came to Batsford in January 1917. ‘She seemed very nice – only she wears specs – and can’t play chess, which is a pity,’ Nancy wrote in her diary. First in a long line of governesses, some of whom were to stay no more than a few weeks, she had a difficult job teaching her class of four, with nearly six years between oldest and youngest. Tom, to prepare him for school, had to be given a grounding in Latin and mathematics, subjects which were not considered necessary for the girls; Pam had difficulty with reading and was therefore slow to learn; while Nancy was often impatient at having to listen to the simple material found suitable for Diana. But Miss Mirams was a good teacher and got on well with her pupils, although she told Muv that the Mitford way of talking was impossibly affected. Tom, she said, would be teased when he went to school if he talked like that. ‘Why, what mustn’t he say?’ asked Muv, puzzled. ‘Well, for instance, “How amusing!” Boys never say, “How amusing!” ’ In the holidays Miss Mirams’ place was taken by a French governess, a clever, elegant young woman called Zella, to whom they were all devoted. She gave them an hour’s French reading and grammar in the morning, while Farve and Muv, both of whom spoke French well, made it a rule that during the time that Zella was with them, French was to be spoken at meals – with the result that during Zella’s visits meals were unusually silent.
On Sundays there were no lessons. On Sundays there was church with Nanny. ‘14 January Went to church,’ Nancy wrote in her diary. ‘Pam, Tom and Diana quarrelled the whole time. Nanny said she’d never spent such a miserable Sunday.’
For the New Year of 1917, they all went to stay with their Farrer5 cousins in Buckinghamshire, and Farve organised a paperchase, precursor of that thrilling variation which the children loved so much when the ‘hares’ were hunted with a real bloodhound. For Tom’s birthday on January 2 there was a fancy-dress party. ‘I was a bacchanti,’ Nancy recorded, ‘and won the prize for the best dress. It was a lovely party’.
In 1918 when the war ended, Farve decided to put Batsford up for sale. Even with six children (Jessica, always known as Decca, had been born in 1917), it was far bigger than they needed and costly to run. When he succeeded to the title, Farve inherited 36,000 acres of farmland in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, and a large estate at Redesdale in Northumberland, but he was by no means a rich man. The land itself was nothing like as valuable as modern farming methods have made it today, rents were low, and the tenants’ cottages were constantly in need of repair. It also has to be said that Farve was not sensible about money: he did not understand how to make it work for him and, although a man of inexpensive tastes, he indulged in one ruinous extravagance. Like his father, he had a passion for building, on which, like his father, he spent most of his income and a large part of his capital. Grandfather Redesdale had pulled down the Georgian villa at Batsford, and built in its place a vast modern mansion, the cost of which virtually ruined him. Farve sold Batsford just after the end of the war, when nobody had any money, and bought the next house, Asthall, in which to put the family while he was rebuilding the third house, Swinbrook, at the height of a boom period when labour was expensive. Nancy used to tease ‘Builder Redesdale’, as she called him, with their descent in the world, from Batsford PARK to Asthall MANOR to Swinbrook HOUSE. Financial crises were an integral part of Nancy’s childhood, the grown-ups spending hours closeted in Farve’s business-room, after which some wholly inadequate economy
would be imposed on the household – Bronco instead of Bromo in the lavatory, and the disappearance of napkins at meals. (This last measure caught the attention of the press: ‘Peeress Saves Ha’pence’ ran the story in the Daily Express.) But somehow ruin was always averted and life went on exactly as it always had. ‘The family are in a terrible financial crisis,’ Nancy wrote to her brother on one of these occasions when bankruptcy was looming. ‘However we continue as before to eat (however humbly) drink and drive about in large Daimlers. Mitfords are like that.’
That last summer at Batsford Nancy was thirteen, a slender girl who already managed to look elegant, with her thick black hair tied back in a great brush behind her neck and her enviable height, even in the cut-down, worn-out clothes that had had to last the war. Her colouring was quite different from that of the rest of the family: the other children had blonde hair and blue eyes whereas Nancy’s hair was black and her eyes a greenish grey. At thirteen she had already grown out of the childish world of chickens and goats and pet mice in cages, preferring instead to read, to read voraciously and for hours on end, sunk deep into one of the sofas in Grandfather’s well-stocked library. Reading was not an occupation her parents encouraged. Reading in bed was forbidden, novels were not allowed before luncheon, and library books were to be read only in the library. ‘If you’ve got nothing to do,’ Farve would say, finding his daughter absorbed in a book, ‘run down to the village and tell Hooper …’ But Nancy became adept at reading in secret and avoiding her father’s eye. In the library at Batsford were laid the foundations of her intellectual life. Here she read most of the English classics, as well as French and English biography, history and belles lettres. Tolstoy was her great passion, Anna Karenina inspiring in her a longing to visit the opera, the very word signifying the grown-up world in all its wickedness and glamour. Eventually Muv was prevailed upon, and Nancy, accompanied by Nanny Dicks, went into Oxford for a matinée of Faust. It was not at all as Tolstoy had led her to believe.