Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (16 page)

XI

Of course she told everybody, not least herself, that she and Hamish (a second son of the Earl of Rosslyn) would be married any time soon. When Hamish came down from Oxford, when they had money, when family opposition dissolved, when Hamish stopped being homosexual... this last was never spelled out. Nevertheless the signs were pretty glaring. Tom Mitford had had a fling with Hamish at Eton, and although Tom now chased girls – which might have encouraged hope – Hamish told Nancy that ‘he didn’t think he would ever feel up to sleeping with a woman’.

It is not uncommon for girls to fall for homosexuals, but it is extraordinary that somebody as intelligent as Nancy would delude herself that she could marry one. Yet in a way it was precisely
because
she was intelligent that she embarked upon this relationship, which worked in the sphere of imagination: as clever girls sometimes do, she was living in her own mind, which was exceptionally interesting to her, and distancing herself from the rather more banal reality. The only problem was that her emotions, based though they were upon illusion, did become real. She suffered terribly over Hamish St Clair-Erskine, which was not worth doing – described by James Lees-Milne as ‘shallowly sophisticated’, he was a smart social animal and very much a snob. Although he undoubtedly strung Nancy along, she herself chose to let this unofficial engagement go on for more than four years. In 1931 she actually tried to gas herself, such was her unhappiness with the situation, although the sincerity of the attempt is doubtful. As for Hamish himself, his motives are mysterious. He may have enjoyed playing the lover – perhaps deluding himself as well as Nancy – and he would certainly have liked the power that she handed him: ‘He was flattered, he was four years younger than she, and she was waiting on him hand and foot,’
⁴⁵
said a friend who observed them. Meanwhile Sir Hugh Smiley, who at the Café Royal offered his orchids, together with what a good many girls would have considered a life worth having, was chucked as Hamish giggled knowingly at a nearby table. One can hardly blame Sir Hugh for his somewhat bitter parting shot at Nancy, that she was on her way to becoming an old maid. In 1929 she had written to Diana that she wanted to marry money but had, most unfortunately, fallen in love with a poor man. This was perverse in the extreme; again, however, it was Nancy’s choice.

Hamish – who could not have been more different from Hugh – was a slightly tarnished example of the Bright Young Thing, whose day had coincided with much of Nancy’s extended adolescence. She herself was a semi-detached member of the clan: her first novel was spiked and gilded with its ironies. A character in
Highland Fling
suggests calling his new baby Morris in order to get a free car, while another declares that English society has ‘no sex or brain left, only nerves and the herd instinct’.
Christmas Pudding
– a much better book, really very funny at times, because closer to Nancy’s natural idiom – is steeped in jibes against Cotswolds manor houses and rural living: ‘Nobody knows how horrible it is to live in the country always, you might just as well be in prison.’ Both books suffer from having a fictionalized Hamish at their centre. Nevertheless one has to thank him in a way for their existence, as Nancy began writing
Highland Fling
– which is dedicated to Hamish – in order to earn money that she would spend in his company (or on him). She made £90 from it, ten short of the hundred she had wanted.

The book, with its modernist aspect and self-conscious cynicism, was very much in the spirit of Evelyn Waugh. Nancy did not imitate
Vile Bodies
, which was published after her own novel was finished (and which she did not admire), but said that she had had to make changes to
Highland Fling
to avoid that accusation. In fact Sydney had suggested calling the novel
Our Vile Age
, which also had to be ditched because of Waugh – although it is worth noting that this apparently critical mother had taken the trouble to come up with a pun. David, conversely, seems to have reacted to the book not unlike his caricatured portrait, General Murgatroyd. It is rather odd: he adored Nancy as a child, and was proud of her as a woman, but the interim period saw them absolutely on each other’s nerves. He hated the publicity that naturally went to an attractive young author. More than anything, however, both Redesdales objected to the dedication, which according to the
Sunday Dispatch
was to Nancy’s ‘fiancé’. They could hardly be blamed, in this instance, for their misgivings. One would almost suspect Nancy of formulating a passion for a gay Roman Catholic with the sole aim of irritating the ‘revereds’, as she called them, were it not that her letters are suffused with the feelings that she misdirected at him. David recognized that Hamish was homosexual, and one assumes that Sydney did also. In 1929, during a visit to Northumberland, Nancy wrote that her grandmother was ‘divine’ about Hamish, despite hating all his forebears (they were both Scottish aristocrats); but the seventy-five year old Clementine would probably
not
have known that he was gay, and on paper, after all, he was a good match.

In her letter to Diana about the publication of
Highland Fling
, which ought to have been celebratory, Nancy wrote instead about the great row that it had precipitated with the Redesdales, as if the book had become a symbol of everything that agitated them about their daughter. They accused her of mixing with ‘drunkards’, of ruining her health and her character. She should not, they said, go to London for the summer. In fact, given her advanced age (twenty-six!) she should stop going out altogether and simply live in the country. Allowing for the usual exaggeration, one can again imagine that her parents were genuinely concerned. David had cut Nancy’s £125 a year allowance, partly because of his own money troubles, partly out of exasperation. What they really feared, who can say – given Hamish’s proclivities loss of virtue was unlikely – although, later, Nancy’s future sister-in-law would call her ‘shop-soiled’, implying that she had had love affairs (with whom? Sir Hugh Smiley?) There is absolutely no evidence for this. It sounds like bitchiness – a snide aside about the overlong stay on the social stage – and it almost certainly was. The fact is that Nancy’s failure to marry, in a world where girls did not have careers and could not wave feminist literature at their critics, made her vulnerable. Nor did she have the Diana-like assurance to carry it off. Despite her class confidence Nancy was a nervous filly. She had, she wrote to Diana, more or less agreed to her parents’ demands that she stay in Oxfordshire for the summer.

What a paradox she was – this mulish child, this sophisticated talent. But then she had had the escape route – Sir Hugh – and did not take it. How fortunate for her therefore that she had friends (her gift for friendship was lifelong), and that some of them happened to be the most amusing men of their generation.

Hamish, as in her deepest soul Nancy probably knew, was really the least important man in her circle. The people who mattered were a collection of sublimely clever aesthetes – for convenience’s sake one calls them Bright Young Things, although with the odd exception they had more staying power than that – whom she had begun to meet in her early debutante years, and who by the end of the 1920s had become a group of enduring friends. She saw them in London and in Oxford, where, like Hamish (who was sent down), they had mostly been undergraduates. Again like Hamish, they were mostly homosexual; and they were completely unfazed by Nancy’s cleverness. On occasion they would visit Swinbrook, where they would droop about in their giant trousers, craving a
cachet faivre
while being offered instead what David referred to as ‘thinkers’ (pigs’ brains), and generally staggering him with their otherness. ‘At weekends they would swoop down from Oxford or London in merry hordes’, wrote Jessica in
Hons and Rebels.
‘Boud [Unity], Debo and I were on the whole carefully insulated from Nancy’s friends, as my mother considered them a totally bad influence. “
What
a set!” she always said... They talked in the jargon of the day: “Darling, too, too divine, too utterly sickmaking, how shamemaking!”’

And how dull they sound, in that description, like actors in an amateur production of
The Vortex
; except that they weren’t. They must have been marvellous, suited to their time and to each other in a way that happens rarely. Of course they didn’t have
television
, or indeed the internet. This is so obvious that it should hardly need saying – yet it is a central factor to the whole Mitford story, this absolute need to amuse, to push one’s personality outwards for the benefit of society, to fill the hours with efforts of one’s own: the possibility of turning on a screen and letting it take the strain simply did not exist. Which would have made the days more tiring, sometimes more boring, but in the end much more fun; and
real
.

Nevertheless Nancy’s friends were peculiarly well equipped to deal with the
longueurs
of life without Instagram. They included Brian Howard (an inspiration for Anthony Blanche in
Brideshead Revisited
), Harold Acton (also part-Blanche, and according to Diana ‘the cleverest of our friends’), his painter brother William Acton (who famously sketched the Mitford girls), the designer Oliver Messel, the future film producer John Sutro, the writer Robert Byron (another homosexual to whom Nancy was attracted) and Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who illustrated
Highland Fling.
Diana described Mark as ‘almost like a brother to Nancy’
⁴⁶
and he received most of her outpourings about Hamish. Probably Nancy knew that Mark was too kind to say the unsayable. Robert Byron, she told Mark, had laughed himself sick over the suicide attempt.

Mark was a cousin of Nancy’s close friend Nina Seafield (despite being gay he had thought of marrying Nina; one does see in a way why Nancy thought homosexuality was a state to be entered and left at will). So it was mainly through Mark that all these connections began, although there were other felicitous links: for instance Acton knew Tom Mitford from Eton. Then there were other friends, who did not visit Swinbrook but became very important to Nancy: John Betjeman and, especially, Evelyn Waugh, whose first wife – ‘She-Evelyn’ – had been a fellow deb. In 1929 the Waughs were living in Canonbury Square and offered Nancy their spare room; this would have probably worked rather well, but the arrangement lasted just a month. That summer the marriage broke down – ‘Evelyn has been pleased to make a cuckold of me with [John] Heygate,’ Waugh wrote tersely to Acton. After the separation Nancy took Waugh’s part, and their friendship – luckily for posterity, kept up chiefly through some of the funniest letters ever written – later developed into one of the most significant of her life.

With these young men Nancy began to bloom in her true colours, which were not those of the Cotswolds, nor of London, but something more cosmopolitan and rococo. The frivolity described by Jessica was only a part of the picture. Men like Messel and Sutro were not dilettantes. True, Brian Howard was the kind of person who flowers early and withers fast:
⁴⁷
gifted in a vague way, he painted the pictures for the spoof ‘Bruno Hat’ exhibition staged in 1930. He was intensely camp – ‘now dear, you’re not
putting out a fire
’, he once remonstrated with a boyfriend, who was spraying scent on himself at Guerlain – and self-consciously eccentric, as when, in Nancy’s company, he used a small Picasso wrapped in pyjamas as protection against a snowstorm (hats were ‘so expensive’). But he was also sharp, sensitive and rigorously intelligent. When he informed Harold Acton that his new friend Nancy was ‘a delicious creature, quite pyrotechnical my dear, and sometimes even profound’, Acton knew that his judgment could be respected.

As for Acton himself, socially speaking he was the leader of the pack. He too specialized in effeteness: when a fellow dinner-party guest, a brusque female whose car had broken down nearby, snapped ‘you’re not the kind of young man one can imagine doing things under a car’, he answered smoothly: ‘Well, it depends who with.’ (His brother William was even more
recherché
: Diana saw him in 1940 and asked what he was doing in the war, to which he replied: ‘Learning Urdu.’) Harold Acton was a gloriously stylish figure, a magnet to his friends, a champion of the new (as referenced when Anthony Blanche recites
The Waste Land
to a bunch of Oxford oarsmen), and personally a great influence upon Waugh: ‘What, I think, we had in common was
gusto
in the English use of the word; a zest for the variety and absurdity of the life opening to us...’
⁴⁸
Waugh was the talent – Acton published a novel,
Hum Drum
, at the same time as
Decline and Fall
, and suffered by comparison – but Acton’s genius was in his life, in what Diana called ‘the brilliance and charm of his personality, unequalled in his generation’. He had Anthony Blanche’s refined critical faculty, and he appreciated Nancy. Years later he wrote her first biography, full of delicate yet tough-minded perception. Among his
aperçus
was this: that Nancy’s non-judgmental portrayal of homosexuals – especially the wildly camp Cedric Hampton in
Love in a Cold Climate
–
contributed to the removal of ‘social stigma’ around sexual orientation. Homosexuality was still then illegal, but one would certainly never have known it from Nancy’s joyful Cedric. (‘I shall never write about normal love again,’ she wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, ‘as I see there is a far larger and more enthusiastic public for the
other sort
.’)

Nancy’s ability to hold her own with people of this kind drew her, to a degree, into the
Vile Bodies
world that now seems to typify 1920s high society: ‘Oh, Nina,
what a lot of parties
,’ as the central character says. Or, as Nancy later put it: ‘We hardly ever saw the light of day, except at dawn.’ The novel contains a scene in which the older generation sit together at a formal London dance, speculating as to the behaviour of the young: ‘I mean,
do
they... ?’ ‘My dear, from all I hear, I think they do.’ So perhaps that is what the Redesdales thought about Nancy.