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Authors: Laura Thompson

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical

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When he returned home from his diplomat’s life, Disraeli gave him responsibility for London’s parks and monuments: plenty there to get his hungry teeth into, vast refurbishments of the Tower of London and so on. He also acquired a wife, Lady Clementine Ogilvie. This was a very good match; so much so that his mother-in-law, the Countess of Airlie, refused to acknowledge the marriage and always addressed her daughter by her maiden name. She knew all too well – possibly, it was said, from first-hand experience – that Bertie was a womaniser, like his friend the Prince of Wales. It is almost certain that he had an affair with his sister-in-law, Lady Blanche Hozier, whose daughter (also named Clementine, later the wife of Winston Churchill) was said to resemble David Mitford.
9
Blanche’s marriage to Colonel Hozier was unhappy and she solaced herself with at least nine lovers, conducting her affairs with shameless aplomb. She was given to robust pronouncements – ‘I love privilege!’ – that remind one of the terrible, irresistible things that Lady Montdore says in
Love in a Cold Climate
(‘I love being so dry in here’, she remarks from the inside of her luxurious motor car, ‘and seeing all those poor people so wet’). Still, Blanche and the rest notwithstanding, the sweet-natured Clementine Mitford bore her husband six children in twelve years, of which David was the third.

The move to Batsford Park, near Moreton-in-Marsh and deep in the damp, rich, honey-coloured Cotswolds, came in 1886. Bertie inherited the large estate from a cousin named Freeman, whose name was thereafter joined to that of the Mitfords: Nancy’s full name was Nancy Freeman-Mitford. Now he embarked upon the third part of his life, throwing himself with absolute intensity into the part of a country squire, becoming a magistrate, a horse breeder, a deputy Lord Lieutenant and MP for Stratford-upon-Avon. He also became a builder. He pulled down the original house at Batsford, a delightful Georgian oblong, and put in its place what now stands there: a child’s dream of Rapunzel’s castle which, against the sombre English sky, gives an impression of near unreality. Its colour is old gold, its shape fantastical. The main door is like a fortress, with above it an enormous Redesdale coat of arms and one vast, painted window; the other windows are small and leaded, made for the imprisoning of beautiful Gloucestershire princesses. There are gargoyles, and little turrets, and all the thrilling paraphernalia of fairytale, and so although it is conventional to lament the destruction of the symmetrical Georgian house, one cannot help but be glad that someone dared to build such a place as this. It is a work of the imagination, glowing deep ochre in the dark countryside. As such it is a magnificent one-off, testament to the vitality and – why not? – the arrogance of the man who conceived it.

Yet David Mitford cried when the old house was pulled down. Inside his very masculine exterior he was a sensitive soul. And he must, surely, have suffered from the fact that his older brother was so very much the golden boy. Clement was loved and confident, he attended Eton where he was clever and popular; in his ability to achieve he resembled his father, although he may have been more likeable, whereas David was a rather different proposition. Handsome, strong and tough all right, but in no other way very satisfactory to a man such as Bertie Mitford.

David was the only one of the four sons to be sent to Radley, which has a reputation anyway for putting chips on the shoulders of people who had hoped to go to Eton (David’s own son, Tom,
did
go there, which was perhaps David’s way of righting a ‘wrong’). And then he hated all the things that one is supposed to love at such places, for example team games; he had, wrote his grandson Jonathan Guinness, ‘no trace of the conventional public school man’s heartiness’
10
, being like his daughters far too much of an individualist. His discomfort at the school must have been worsened by the fact, which nobody seems to have hidden from him, that he had been sent there in order that he should not be an embarrassment to Clement. For David, with his ‘tempers’, his sudden ‘illnesses’, was regarded as a bit of a liability. If the illnesses were psychosomatic, brought on when he felt thwarted in any way, there is no denying that the tempers were real: once, having been locked in a room by his father, he attacked him with a poker that he had been steadily heating on the fire. But were they also a product of his frustrations? It has been suggested that he may have been dyslexic, as he found reading and academic work difficult – he failed the written exam into Sandhurst – and yet spoke perfect French. Meanwhile his brother and father were highly literate, competent men, to an extent that must have made him feel excluded. And even though he himself worshipped Clement, indeed seems really to have loved him (as did all the family – he was Nancy’s favourite uncle), there is a limit to how much anyone can stand being held up for comparison with a paragon.

Of course David Mitford, who was born in 1878, was a product of the Victorian upper-classes, and unlikely therefore to have been susceptible to theories about ‘inferiority complexes’ and other such feeble modern tosh. But he had his areas of uncertainty, all the same (as did his future wife). Being sent off as a tea-planter to what was then Ceylon was so very much the kind of thing that one did with a tricky second son. What else was there for him?

The Boer War came to his rescue, in a way. He wrote of General Brabazon, whose orderly he became, ‘He is a soldier and a gentleman, and that is the most you can say for any man’. Military life gave him a sense of purpose and pride. He was decorated in the campaign, from which he returned in 1902 with only one lung. Two years after that he married Sydney, having dictated a love letter to her from his hospital bed to be sent in the event of his death. Although, when she had seen him standing like a young god up against the Batsford fireplace, all he had probably seen was an odd, sombre little creature in a sailor suit, by the time she grew up he was clearly head over heels. Her calm remoteness, which Nancy found so difficult, was just what he was looking for. He did not much care for working at his father-in-law’s publication
The Lady
throughout the first ten years of his marriage – the real David was expressed through the mongoose that he took into the office and let loose on the rats in the cellar – but his letters from the time exhale the undeniable scent of true happiness.

What he liked, above anything, was to be at home with his wife, eating bread and milk in his dressing-gown. After work every Friday he would go, with his pay packet, to the market at Covent Garden and find a perfect peach for Sydney which she would eat, ceremoniously, after dinner. For a couple on barely £1,000 a year, this small gift served a sweetly symbolic purpose. It was not until twenty years or so later that David learned that Sydney hated peaches. Although she herself had never told him, there is a little paradigm for their early marriage in that story: he eager, almost unbearably so, to please; she smiling and swallowing and calmly thinking – what?

This is hardly the ‘roaring, raging’ Uncle Matthew of
The Pursuit of Love
. There is actually something very touching about David Mitford, with his beautiful patrician face and his huge peasant’s hands, a man who had the energy of his father but not the accomplishments through which to channel them. He was a schemer and a dreamer. He had gone prospecting for gold in Ontario as a very young man and went with Sydney on what sound like very romantic little voyages, in the first years of their marriage; he got tangled up with a dubious wheeler-dealer selling papier mâché covers for wireless sets; he moved house several times, and like his father had the urge to build; these are restless activities, really. Nancy was later to say, and it is one of her most perceptive remarks, that the trouble with her father was ‘he simply hadn’t got enough to
do
.’
11

She went on to tell the story of how, on her birth certificate, she had found that in the space beneath the word ‘Occupation’, her father had written: ‘Honourable’. One would have thought that when, in 1916, he became Lord Redesdale, a landowner and a member of the House of Lords, he would have had more than enough on his plate, what with seven children and so on; but until old age and sadness quenched him this was not the case. Owning land anchored him, as his marriage had done, but it did not calm him. He fought staunchly on one lung in the First World War, although he was invalided home twice; the second time, in 1917, saw him return a thirty-nine-year-old wreck. He was never again able to ride to hounds, which must have been a terrible blow. But whereas a lesser man might have seized the opportunity to take things easy, bodily frustration had the opposite effect upon David Mitford and made him ever more wildly alive.

And this, when one thinks about it, is very much the key to the character of Uncle Matthew. He is not just an assemblage of hilarious eccentricities and sayings, although he has been seen as such; he is, as E.F. Benson wrote of a character in his Mapp and Lucia books (deeply loved by Nancy, incidentally), ‘a hot coal thrown from the furnace of creation’. He is a striding mass of continually thwarted vitality. All that tooth-grinding, the obsession with punctuality (‘in precisely six and three-quarter minutes the damned fella will be late’), the rising at 5 a.m. and prowling around ‘clanking cups of tea, shouting at his dogs, roaring at the housemaids, cracking the stock-whips he had brought back from Canada on the lawn with a noise greater than gun-fire, and all to the accompaniment of Galli-Curci on his gramophone...’, the constant rages which rub against his knowledge that they should be suppressed – this is all unspeakably vivid stuff. But it rings true beneath the theatricality, the cardboard dimension, because it is informed by Nancy’s instinctive understanding of her father: a man who was so magnificently all that he seemed, and yet more than he seemed. Even his buried vulnerability is there in Nancy’s portrayal. It is delicately implied in Matthew’s doglike worship of silly Lord Montdore, in his blustering hatred of leaving the domain in which he feels secure, in the security he gains from the presence of his wife. His loathing of foreigners, too (‘they are all the same, and they all make me sick’), is on one level the knee-jerk jingoism of unassailable English self-confidence: somehow, Nancy implies that it is also a defence, against what is not understood. This is why, when she is writing at her best, David/Uncle Matthew is her best subject, for like any mythical creation he works on two levels: the archetypal and the particular.

In the television interview that she gave in 1966, Nancy was asked if it was true that her father, like Uncle Matthew, had read only one book –
White Fang

which he had found so good he never bothered to try another. ‘Well he read my books,’ she said, her mouth twisting rather wryly. ‘He liked them very much.
Madame de Pompadour
he didn’t like, he was furious because he wasn’t in it. But he loved the books about himself.’

Now this remark of Nancy’s is reinforcing the idea of her father as a pantomime eccentric – how could he reasonably expect to feature in a book about the court of Louis XV? She was making him react to Uncle Matthew as if he were Uncle Matthew. At the same time, of course, she was saying that David delighted in the idea of his fictional self. It has been suggested that this was not in fact the case, that it was merely convenient for Nancy to think it, and that her father had been hurt rather than enthralled by her portrayal of him. The evidence for this is fairly flimsy, however. It seems to rest upon a remark made in a letter to Sydney, written in 1954, in which David said that Nancy’s perception of him ‘shows how savage I must have been, but without knowing it’ – which could just as easily read as an apology, rather than an accusation.

Of course being written about
does
give rise to ambivalent feelings; but David’s pride in what Nancy had done would surely have overridden sensitivities. How could he not have been proud, having earned such a magnificent tribute merely by being himself? Occasionally, in letters to friends, Nancy would describe him reading her novels, lost in childlike absorption: ‘Uncle Matthew sat with his nose in the book & grunted out various corrections: “Never got the stock whips in Canada, a bloke from Australia gave them to me” & so on’; ‘the only letters I get now are from chubb fuddlers saying that you can’t fuddle chubb in Feb (already pointed out with cold fury by Uncle Matthew himself)’. It was as if the books had a complete reality for him, as if it were a wholly natural miracle that his life should appear in them in this way. For David and his daughter, fantastical Mitfords both, fact and fiction danced together in simple harmony. Why else would Nancy, post-
Pursuit of Love
, almost always refer to her father as ‘Uncle Matthew’, as if the two men were indeed one and the same?

To Sydney, however, her fictional self was a separate and unwanted creature. ‘I wish only one thing, that you would exclude me from your books’, she wrote to Nancy, admittedly just after reading the dread portrait of herself in
The Sunday Times
. But then she must have realised that, even as Aunt Sadie, she had been rendered with less love than her husband. Nancy and David had a very particular bond: as Deborah says, they were like a comic double act when they got into their stride: ‘Better than anything I’ve ever seen on the stage. They were fantastic together, because they hit each other off.’ Their sense of humour was ineffably similar. As a girl of fourteen, Nancy wrote a letter to her mother describing a performance of Gounod’s
Faust
that she had attended, saying, ‘Valentino... sang a lot of stuff after being stabbed, which is more than I could or would do’: the simplicity of this joke, with its skewed clarity of the kind that most people recognise when they hear it, but do not see for themselves, is typical not just of the adult Nancy but of David also (‘All the fault of that damned padre’, as he says in the person of Uncle Matthew, after a performance of
Romeo and Juliet
). At the same time, and for all their mutually fascinated closeness, Nancy and David were very much father and daughter, never ‘friends’ in the way that parents and children often are today. It was always as if a barrier of respect was being daringly breached by Nancy: even when she created the character of Uncle Matthew, which unlike that of Aunt Sadie is definitively a portrait by a daughter.

BOOK: Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters
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