Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (15 page)

As her friend Evelyn Waugh later wrote in
Brideshead Revisited
, the year of Nancy’s debut was perhaps the ‘most brilliant season since the war’ – death had finally fled the scene, money and frivolity were back – although the rhapsodic haze through which Waugh portrayed the summer of 1923 bore little relation to the reality experienced by Nancy. She enjoyed herself, no question. She swam rather than sank. She was extremely popular, especially with other girls such as Mary O’Neill, Mary Milnes-Gaskell, the Countess of Seafield (Nina) and Waugh’s future wife Evelyn Gardner. And then – as with Diana – there was the straightforward ecstasy of being away from home: from the sisters among whom she strode like an elegant virago, making up jokes (informing the three youngest that the middle syllables of their names were ‘nit’, ‘sick’ and ‘bore’) that were increasingly arcane and idiotic; from the parents who had begun to seem like Victorian monoliths in an Art Deco age. Of course, even as she longed to get away so she was drawn to the world of her upbringing, absorbing it, letting every aspect of it sink in; albeit with no thought yet of how it would be re-created as literature.

Nancy was not as naturally daring as Diana. Far from it. Although an agitator, she always instinctively understood that she operated best in the milieu that she knew. She would never have formed that friendship with Helleu, for instance – he would not have seen in her what he saw in Diana, and she would not have wanted him to. On her school trip abroad in 1922 she met a man in a hotel in Florence with whom she had long conversations about John Ruskin – ‘my old man’ as she called him (‘he is really, quite 45’), was clearly amazed that this pretty giggler had actually heard of Ruskin – but the innocence of the episode, as she described it, is overpowering. Nancy’s most significant acts of youthful rebellion were cosmetic only: shingling her hair, for instance, although these alone caused tremors on the Mitford–Richter scale. Nancy, wrote Jessica in
Hons and Rebels
, ‘had broken ground for all of us but only at terrific cost in violent scenes followed by silence and tears’. This sounds exaggerated, as usual with Jessica, and there is a minor inaccuracy in that Nancy is described as cutting her hair at the age of twenty, whereas in fact she did so almost two years later. Nevertheless her various actions – not just the hair-shingling but wearing lipstick, smoking a cigarette, wearing trousers – do seem to have caused a ruckus, not quite on the Diana diary scale but sizeable enough. In late 1926 Nancy wrote to Tom from Paris, begging him to praise her hair as her parents had been so ‘nasty’ about it; true to form, or at least to Nancy’s version of form, Sydney had remarked to her daughter that ‘nobody would look at you twice now.’ Around the same time David wrote to Diana, when she too shingled her hair: ‘Have you or have you not recovered your hair which was cut off. You must not leave it in Paris’ – these words, joking as they were, confirmed that shingling was indeed regarded as a transgression. But Nancy was twenty-two; even by the standards of the time it was extraordinary that the Redesdales should have made such an unholy fuss about something that almost every girl in the Western world was doing. Again one has the sense of them taking silly stands against behaviour that was natural and harmless, because in some indefinable way they feared that these quick shows of lightning were the herald of greater storms. And they were right, although not at all in the way that they imagined.

For Nancy, to put it bluntly, the problem was that she did not get married. This worried her mother, as did the fact that Diana found a husband before her two older sisters; again Sydney was no Mrs Bennet. Actually Pamela, then aged twenty-one, had been due to marry around the same time as Diana.
The Times
had announced that Pam’s wedding to Oliver Watney would ‘take place quietly’ in Oxfordshire on 22 January 1929, but it was later reported that this had been ‘postponed owing to illness’. Watney – who lived near Swinbrook and, like Bryan, was from a brewing family – suffered from chronic TB. He had been obliged to miss his father’s funeral, in September 1928, because he was in a nursing home; as his family had urged the marriage to Pam, the death of Watney senior now eased that particular obligation. The postponement of the wedding became, almost inevitably, a cancellation. Although this was officially described as a mutual decision, it was probably Watney’s. In May 1929 Nancy wrote to Tom that she was ‘simply furious’ about it, but that Pam was behaving very calmly: ‘& anyway what a let off in the way of brother-in-laws’. Pam was left with who knows what emotions – sadness? embarrassment? relief? – and an engagement ring that she passed on to Unity, who gave it to Hitler. Tom meanwhile drove around London in his little car, returning wedding presents.

Whether Nancy was
really
simply furious about Pam being dumped is another story. Her teasing of ‘Chunkie’ was not quite over – for instance she would find out which young men her sister fancied, and report seeing them with other girls – but far more to the point was that she, Nancy, had not come within even a mile of an altar. The Hon. Mr Right had not emerged from the pack. And when that did not happen, a girl – however attractive – was left mysteriously high and dry. For Nancy it was an odd prospect: returning for season after season, moving into the danger years of her mid-twenties, like an over-bright flapper in a short story by Fitzgerald; showing up at balls in dresses that grew a little more raggedy every year, dyeing her Ascot outfit so that it could be worn for another Gold Cup day; and in between times the retreat to Swinbrook, with its drawing room filled with girls, always girls. In early 1927 Nancy enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art – after another fight with her parents – and wrote to Tom, rather poignantly, that if she could exhibit her paintings in Paris ‘the family would have no more hold over me at all’. She was already far too old to be talking that way. But without money or a husband she had no real notion of how to escape: a job, in the modern sense of the word, was simply not an option. During her unsuccessful studies at the Slade she took a bedsit in a boarding house in South Kensington; this lasted about a month. Not only did Nancy have no clue as to how to look after herself, she did not actually much like it. Again, her desire for freedom was kept within very particular limits.

It is possible that what Nancy craved, during her protracted girlhood – she did three debutante seasons proper, but was roaming around ‘society’ for eleven years – was the tension between rebellion and restraint: a writerly attitude, although she would not yet have known that. Sometimes her letters read like a child trying to shock, as when she writes that she is very drunk and must give up cocktails or she will end up running around Swinbrook with delirium tremens. One has the impression that this image is not unappealing to her, and that being drunk would be far less fun if there was nobody there to object to it. At the same time, and rather more nebulously, there is the sense that she is putting on an act altogether; that dashing about on semi-hysterical japes is not really her thing – that she was quite good at being young, but that being older would be infinitely better. Her last two novels,
The Blessing
and
Don’t Tell Alfred
, are underpinned by a belief that civilized middle age is far superior to silly youth, something that Nancy absolutely believed and may have intuited early on.

This was especially the case with regard to men. Naturally she had suitors, looking as she did – her letters allude to a soldier named Archer Clive; a friend of Tom’s, Nigel Birch; a well-to-do landowner named Roger Fleetwood Hesketh – but she seems to have taken none of them truly seriously. In her late twenties, however, she was courted by a different kind of man, a Grenadier Guard named Sir Hugh Smiley who was nothing if not serious, and who, as she put it, ‘laid his ginger bread mansion at my feet’. He proposed on three occasions, in fact. The first time Nancy answered that she was in the middle of writing her novel,
Highland Fling
, and could not think properly about anything else. This was a reasonable excuse, so Sir Hugh tried again, twice: the second time with orchids at the Café Royal. By 1932 one might have thought that Nancy would be more than glad to accept. Here was a man who could effect a Bryan Guinness-type transformation on her life, who offered wealth and escape, the things that Diana had. Yet she could not quite do it. She was simply not that kind of girl, the kind that makes a marriage with a hard head. She admitted that Sir Hugh was nice, she knew that he was rich, but she feared that their children would be ‘blond & stupid’. There were elements of
The Pursuit of Love
’s Tony Kroesig in Sir Hugh – the heroine Linda marries him in a state of romantic agitation, but quickly finds him to be hopelessly pompous. With Sir Hugh, Nancy did not even have the illusion of being in love. Nevertheless he was the best offer that she had in ten years.

There were two things going on here: first, Nancy was simply not as attractive to men as she should have been, given her entrancing appearance. She was not especially
good
at men. It is a gift like any other, and she did not have it – she laughed when she should have sympathized, she gave way when she should have held off, and so on – it took an extremely confident suitor to see past this and appreciate her, and he was still some way in the future. In truth all her sisters (but especially Diana and Deborah) were better at handling men than Nancy. When the men in question include Adolf Hitler, one might justifiably say that this was not a gift worth having. Nevertheless it is fascinating that Unity
could
talk to Hitler, then a demi-god in his homeland, and talk to him as a man; partly this was the Mitford confidence in action, but it was also some feminine instinct at work.

Nancy’s problem was her intelligence, of course, which at some point or another riled most of the men she knew (honourable exceptions included her brother and Evelyn Waugh). This would probably be true today – feminism notwithstanding, female cleverness is still most acceptable when it spouts orthodoxies, or in some way conforms to a type. Nancy, with her spry chic and lethal tongue, was a one-off. As such she was certainly never going to flower fully among the men of her youth. They could accept Diana’s brain because it came within the packaging of a goddess, and because – crucially – she knew how and when to show off or shut up. With Nancy, if a witticism came to mind then it also came out of her mouth, and damn the consequences. Her cleverness was rooted in her humour; indeed the two were completely intertwined, both deriving from the childlike clarity of vision that enabled her to perceive what most people leave unseen and unsaid. This, too, is not a quality made for the enhancement of love affairs.

The second, related point is that deep down she probably did not
want
to get married, although she thought that she did. In one way, yes, she wanted a husband – there was never a less bohemian iconoclast than Nancy, her
côté convenable
always required fulfilment – and she probably felt the need to dispel the memory of being Diana’s bridesmaid. However, and despite her liking for Bryan Guinness, Nancy was not entirely convinced by that particular coupling. As Randolph Churchill did, she saw a mismatch. And her novels, from the first, were essentially engaged with the question of what constitutes a successful marriage: the question that plagues most thinking people, in fact, of whether it is possible for love and reality to coexist.

One of Nancy’s most sharply-realized characters was created for the little-known 1932 novel
Christmas Pudding
: Amabelle Fortescue, a sleek and worldly former prostitute (‘in her young days a woman either had a good reputation or an international reputation’). At forty-five she is rather wise, the first example of Nancy’s belief that the middle-aged had more to offer than the young. She says: ‘The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can’t imagine why, but they do. They are unhappy before they marry, and they imagine to themselves that the reason of their unhappiness will be removed when they are married. When it isn’t they blame the other person, which is clearly absurd...’ Like most writers Nancy understood life better on the page, and at the age of twenty-seven, when she wrote those words, she knew little of that kind of truth. Nevertheless it shows that she had, even in relative youth, a degree of healthy scepticism about ‘happy ever after’. At the same time she was intensely romantic. These two qualities could embrace each other, without being exactly reconciled, in a novel like
The Pursuit of Love.
In life, not so much.

Diana, writing later about this limbo period of her sister’s twenties, saw it as a veritable hell in which Nancy was trapped, penniless, disliking her parents but unable to leave them – ‘Why was she so utterly stuck, poor Naunce.’ The answer was that she did not get married. But Diana’s view was partial, seen through the prism of her own ideas of happiness, seen also – perhaps – through an odd desire to
believe
that Nancy had been unhappy. The truth was more complicated than that, as it usually is with creative people. Nancy was not, in her own head, stuck. How could she be, when her writing career began at this time? From 1929 she was writing her social columns for
Vogue
and
The Lady.
Aged just twenty-five, without benefit of a degree in creative writing, or even an A level in English literature, she produced a callow, derivative but supremely accomplished novel –
Highland Fling
– followed almost immediately by another –
Christmas Pudding
: books that were not a patch on what would follow, but which sold respectably, were well received, turned her into a minor celebrity and were, in truth, a phenomenal achievement.

And anyway: if Nancy had truly wanted to be married, if that had been her dearest deepest wish, then why – at around the same time as she started to write – did she decide to be in love with Hamish St Clair-Erskine?