Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (17 page)

Yet the sense is that their concern centred upon Hamish, and the madness of their daughter’s association with him.
Vile Bodies
was a fantastical satire on the era, which like a Vorticist painting captured a splintered, uncertain mood. The fact is that Nancy may have attended nightclubs and the odd dubious party enlivened by ‘naughty salt’, but she was also at society weddings, a dance in Belgrave Square, all the usual things that kept
The Tatler
trading and comprised the world of her class. Nor were her clever friends truly threatening to the Redesdales. Of course they could, as and when, be used as a weapon to attack Nancy. Nevertheless they were invited often enough to Swinbrook; despite appearances they were the kind of people who wrote thank-you letters and knew how to ride to hounds. David was appalled when a comb fell out of the pocket of one particular young man, and to another, who proved incompetent with a gun, he said: ‘I’d rather take a housemaid shooting than you.’ But the incident at which he lost his temper with James Lees-Milne was unusual; his manners, in the main, were better than that. He had a great liking for Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who – as Nancy later told Sydney – during his time as a POW dreamed of the layer-cake with jam served at Swinbrook. ‘The Mitford family are very amusing,’ wrote Robert Byron to his mother about a stay with the Redesdales, ‘and I enjoy being here.’ Not much sense there of a fight to the death between Uncle Matthew and the modernist tendency.

These men were also friends of Diana and Bryan Guinness. Indeed from the time of Diana’s marriage, in January 1929, they began to congregate at the Guinnesses’ lovely Lutyens home in Buckingham Street. Diana later disclaimed any real connection with the Bright Young Things – such as they were – but she was, as it were by divine right, placed instantly at the centre of London’s artistic life. Acton, Byron, Howard; Henry Yorke, who wrote novels under the name Henry Green; Lytton Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington; the magnificently eccentric musician Gerald Berners; the Sitwells; Lotte Lenya – they all headed for Diana’s drawing room and, in one way or another, paid homage to the young woman who looked like a dream yet was in such admiration of their talent. ‘Writers and painters and composers seemed to me then the princes of mankind,’ she would later write. Bryan was an artistic type himself, who had courted Diana by taking her to the theatre almost every night. Although a qualified barrister he wrote good, rather tortured poetry and, in 1930, an unsuccessful novel called
Desires and Discoveries.
⁴⁹
He enjoyed the company of his guests. Nevertheless his idea of marriage had been to have Diana to himself, rather than to watch her poised at the epicentre of fashionable London. ‘I too could be arty, I too could get on/With Sickert, the Guinnesses, Gertler and John,’ as John Betjeman wrote, in acknowledgment of the Buckingham Street salon
.
The Guinnesses also owned Biddesden, a wonderful Queen Anne house in Wiltshire whose interior design was described fulsomely in January 1932 by the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘Mrs Guinness during the last six months has taken enormous trouble to bring out the exquisite grace of the rooms by the use of clear pastel colours used in a simple youthful way.’ This house, too, was filled with people and parties. At twenty-one Diana was ‘already something of a legend’, wrote her future stepson Nicholas Mosley, astutely noting her very Mitfordian ‘ability to seem both conventional and unconventional at the same time’.
⁵⁰

Nancy, naturally, was a frequent visitor to Diana and Bryan, not least because she could see her friends at their house. After the breakdown of Evelyn Waugh’s marriage, which deprived Nancy of her room in Canonbury Square, she was offered an alternative bolthole at Buckingham Street. She lived there on and off, and was visited by Waugh, who soon started coming to the house most days.

‘Do you... share my admiration for Diana?’ he wrote to Henry Yorke in September 1929. ‘She seems to me the one encouraging figure in this generation.’

In fact Waugh, who dedicated
Vile Bodies
to the Guinnesses, had fallen head over heels for Diana. She had not, she said, realized this at the time; but given her history, the way in which she cast a trance-like spell over almost every man she met, it is difficult to believe that she had no inkling when, during her first pregnancy (with Jonathan, born in 1930), the brilliant young novelist chose to sit on her bed every morning like a prospective doula.

And Nancy, for all her obtuseness about her own affairs, would have seen this very clearly. She would have also noted Diana’s gilded life, the money, the Paris clothes, the babies (Desmond was born in 1931), the adoring husband: the more obviously enviable things. Yet what may well have been harder to take was watching Evelyn Waugh behave like a suddenly bewitched Lysander in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Not that she wanted him for herself, at least not as a lovestruck admirer. But it was a symbolic shift of allegiance, like Robert Byron’s (whom Waugh, pierced by his own shaft of jealousy, would accuse Diana of preferring to himself). After all the years that Nancy had spent collecting friends, those people who would lighten the burden of parental pressure and unrequited love, to find that in the blink of an eye they had placed Diana at the centre of their lives... This was the first major move in the relationship between these two Mitford sisters, the white and black queens who dominated the rest, and who each would have dominated outright had it not been for the other.

PART II

‘We’ll have a crack

At Captain Jack

Because we think

His heart is black.’

From
Wigs on the Green
by Nancy Mitford (1935)

I

On 7 July 1932, Diana gave a London ball for Unity, who was then almost eighteen. A couple of months earlier the Guinnesses had moved to 96 Cheyne Walk, formerly the home of Whistler. The magnificent riverside house had a giant ballroom that could accommodate 300 guests. Among them, and the real reason why the party was being held, was Sir Oswald Mosley.

‘You were dazzling as the presiding goddess,’ wrote the society hostess Emerald Cunard to Diana, ‘fresh and dewy from Olympus.’ Robert Byron said: ‘It was the best party ever given, even by you. I feel as if I had been raised from the dead by it.’ Many years later, the artist Osbert Lancaster
¹
– another guest – gave a slightly different view. He recalled arriving at the party with James Lees-Milne. It was the time of a famous murder trial, in which a young society woman, Mrs Elvira Barney, was accused of shooting her lover in a Knightsbridge mews, and acquitted thanks to her extremely expensive defence. ‘It was also the slump,’ said Lancaster, ‘and there was a nasty feeling about the upper classes. The crowd outside the dance was not in a pleasant mood, their remarks were all about Mrs Barney...’

As with the parade of debutantes along the Mall, people at the time would congregate outside society parties to observe the guests arriving (or, in the case of the Cheyne Walk ball, to watch Augustus John being carried out raging drunk by two footmen). Lancaster’s remarks about the mood of this particular crowd were telling. The contrast between a Guinness and an average Londoner enduring the Great Depression was dangerously glaring, in a way not unfamiliar to us today. Diana, one might say, led the life of a non-dom bride. It was more refined – wealth was not expressed by heating empty houses or by throwing children’s parties on Necker – but it was still, somehow, almost vulgar in its relentless gratifications. The worshipping husband, the worshipping friends, the articles in
Tatler
and
Bystander
cooing over her every move (a new hairstyle, her habit of wearing trousers in the garden), the offer of the part of Perdita in C. B. Cochran’s new production of
The Winter’s Tale
(refused: Diana never did that kind of thing). How easy it was, to have the world at one’s feet at the age of twenty-two! And then the summers in the Mediterranean, the magnificent Stanley Spencer given by Bryan for the birth of Jonathan, the Aubussons in the children’s nursery (‘so good for them to see pretty things when they’re crawling about’), the two bathrooms deemed necessary to civilized life by her father-in-law (this at a time when a tin bath and an outside privy were quite normal), the Biddesden gazebo lined with mosaics by Boris Anrep, including Diana as Erato... The only rugged thing in her dreamlike world was her great Irish wolfhound, Pilgrim, who ate raw meat from her hands.

Yet from the time of the first hunger marches Diana had been politically aware; at least as much as Jessica, who made more noise about it. Many years later she reviewed a book about the Labour movement and wrote with astringent compassion of ‘[Stanley] Baldwin’s wicked deflation in 1926, the starving of the miners into submission after the General Strike collapsed... the grinding poverty, the bitterness of unemployment, the frightful conditions of those days’. And there was no doubt in Diana’s mind where the blame lay for all this post-war suffering. ‘The Tories were in power and they did nothing.’ To Deborah she later wrote that she had been ‘violently anti-Tory’ since the age of sixteen. Nor did the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, commend himself to her: the emergency National Government that he led between 1931 and 1935 was ‘Tory in all but name’. In young adulthood, and in so far as she had any allegiance – she voted only once in her life – Diana described herself as a ‘Lloyd George Liberal’. Later Lloyd George would speak in favour of Sir Oswald Mosley, and against war with Germany: both causes dear to Diana. Nevertheless he had previously dedicated himself to removing power from a body, the House of Lords, that gave protection and status to the Mitford family. This may seem like a pretty substantial irony; as does the disconnect between the succession of mansions in which Diana lived, the priceless possessions that glided easily into her hands, and her robust antipathy to the party of wealth. But she was not a champagne socialist – that particular breed would have aroused her contempt also. She was, more particularly, an instinctive radical; perhaps one that lived in the wrong time.

‘In 1932 we all – everyone with the slightest intelligence – thought about politics,’ she later wrote. ‘We believed that our parents’ generation had made the war, that by
will
plus
cleverness
its horrible legacy could be cancelled out, and the world could be changed...’ Ah: the belief in change. So seductive, especially to the young. So unaccountable, in that the changes are rarely the ones that were intended.

The boredom that Diana had begun to feel with Bryan Guinness – which came to a head at Unity’s dance – was in some way allied to this radicalism. The complacency that she saw in the British political system was linked to that of her feather-bedded marriage. The perfection was simply
too
great
– ‘dead perfection, nothing more’, as Tennyson writes in
Maud,
whose heroine bore such a resemblance to the Diana of this time: ‘You have but fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of life.’ Of course she did not want to be down and out, sharing the miseries of poverty like Gordon Comstock in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
But she wanted
more
. After the birth of her first son, in March 1930, she was champing at the bit. Not against the fact of motherhood, which she adored – Deborah later described her sister as a ‘specially maternal sort of bloke’ – but simply to be back in the world, feeding off new experiences. Evelyn Waugh had been so upset by this (‘pure jealousy’, he later admitted) that their friendship foundered. ‘After Jonathan’s birth you began to enlarge your circle. I felt lower in your affections than Harold Acton and Robert Byron and I couldn’t compete or take a humbler place.’
²
He refused an invitation that summer to Knockmaroon, the family house just outside Dublin. Bryan had probably hoped to have his wife to himself, but Diana invited a house party including Nancy, Hamish and Lytton Strachey: ‘there is nothing to do,’ she wrote to Strachey, ‘but go to the Abbey Theatre and see sickening Irish plays.’ During their courtship she had relished Bryan’s theatregoing habit as a totem of civilization. Now, on one particular evening, she swept out of the Abbey during a performance with the rest of the party scurrying behind her like supplicant pages.

Diana fell pregnant again at the end of 1930, which she had not intended. ‘Of course we’d have had you one day, darling,’ she later told her son Desmond, ‘but not
just
then’. Would they, though? By this time, when the marriage was barely two years old, the constant presence of Diana’s husband was becoming oppressive. Bryan had been called to the Bar, but had pretty much given it up (‘Mr Guinness doesn’t need three guineas,’ said his clerk, as he gave out briefs to other junior barristers.) He was at Buckingham Street continually. After a life spent surrounded by other people, in which privacy had been the most valuable commodity of all, it was alarming for Diana to find that Bryan was just as demanding of her company as her chattering, attention-seeking sisters had been. Freedom, for which she had longed, now became a desperate craving. Bryan did leave her to visit Austria with Tom Mitford – he liked Tom, as did everybody – but wrote a forty-page letter saying: ‘I lie awake thinking and worrying about you.’
Why?
she would have longed to ask (Mitfords did not do that kind of sentiment). His manner with Diana, an uneasy mixture of pleading and insistence, was as wrong-headed as Nancy’s with Hamish St Clair-Erskine: like Nancy, Bryan handed over all the power in the relationship and expected the other person (
l’un qui se laisse aimer
) to handle it with care. This is not, sad to say, what people do. A woman such as Diana, whose extraordinary strength was tensile and vibrating beneath the Madonna smiles, would have felt only a kind of contempt, all the more so because she knew that Bryan did not remotely deserve it. But he was on her nerves, and there is no answer to that other than a serious change of tactics. Worship was what she had in spades; she needed something more bracing; a man as intelligent as Bryan should have realized this.