Mitford Nancy - Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford: The Biography

ALSO BY LAURA THOMPSON

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LIFE IN A COLD CLIMATE

Nancy Mitford

THE BIOGRAPHY

LAURA THOMPSON

L IFE IN A C OLD C LIMATE

Pegasus Books, Ltd.
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New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2019 by Laura Thompson

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition January 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN: 978-1-64313-303-4

ISBN: 978-1-64313-377-5 (Ebook)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

To my mother, with all my love

This book was written when two of Nancys sisters were alive, and I remain hugely grateful to Lady Mosley and the Duchess of Devonshire, both of whom received me with great kindness. I shall remember our conversations with enormous pleasure. Without Lady Mosleys initial help which was offered freely and unquestioningly, to a person of whom she knew nothing I doubt very much that my book could have been written; I am deeply indebted to her for such generosity.

I should like to thank Alexander Mosley, who has also sadly died, and Viscount Norwich; Fran Blackwall, Peter Brook, Jacques Brousse, Lord Dulverton, Natasha Fairweather and Helen Marchant; the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, which was quite wonderfully helpful to me; the Bodleian Library; Bristol University Library; Cambridge University Library; the London Library; the Public Record Office at Kew; and the Taylor Institution in Oxford for showing me the correspondence between Nancy Mitford and Theodore Besterman.

I owe a huge debt to Selina Hastings for her 1985 biography of Nancy Mitford: although our interpretations of Nancys life differ in several ways, I could not have written my book without reference to this earlier work. I am also greatly indebted to the work of Charlotte Mosley, wonderful editor of Nancys extensive correspondence.

My thanks to my original publishers, Headline. Lastly I am hugely grateful to all at Head of Zeus, and to my agent Georgina Capel, for enabling this book to appear in a new edition.

The little grave at Swinbrook church is a sad sight now. One searches for many minutes, eyes wandering over the whiter tombstones, and the shock of finding it is considerable. Can this possibly be right? It is like a grave from two hundred years ago: the grave of a forgotten and anonymous person, of a poor serving girl who died alone and unlamented. It is covered with the thick damp lace of greenish moss, and there are no flowers.

On it are written, in plain script barely legible beneath the decay, the words: NANCY MITFORD, Authoress, Wife of Peter Rodd, 19041973. Above the words is carved a strange fat animal, which is in fact a mole taken from the Mitford family crest. Nancy disliked the sign of the cross because she thought it a symbol of cruelty. So her sister Pamela, also buried in Swinbrook churchyard, chose for her the mole, a neat eccentric image that in later life was embossed on Nancys writing paper. An aunt of hers wrote to say how much she loved the letterhead: your charming little golden cunt (Glostershire of my young days for moles, few people now know what it means). Shes not in the Tynan set, Nancy had remarked. Beneath the earth, then, she may be laughing: her favourite thing in the world.

Yet as one of Englands most devout Francophiles she had dreamed of a burial at Pre-Lachaise cemetery, parmi ce peuple as Napoleon put it que jai si bien aim . She called it the Lachaise dump, but that was just her Englishness coming out. She loved the place. What she no doubt imagined was lying in florid, elegant state between Molire, La Fontaine, Balzac and Proust: a comforting thought, as if death were merely a continuation of her glittering Parisian middle age. As in Dostoevskys story Bobok, the buried people would simply carry on with the gossipy, deliciously trivial life that they had lived overground. Weve already passed enough friends to collect a large dinner party, a large amusing dinner party, says Charles-Edouard de Valhubert in Nancys novel The Blessing , as he walks among the graves with his English wife. And then: Is it not beautiful up on this cliff?

Nancy dreamed of beauty around her in death. Ive left 4000 for a tomb with angels and things, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh ten years before she died. Surely its an ancient instinct to want a pretty tomb? She also dreamed, in a way that would have amused, but irritated Waugh like a verruca, of a heaven that was really like fairyland, full of the people she had loved, along with sexy men such as Louis XV and Lord Byron I look forward greatly. Oh how lovely it will be and with The Lost Chord playing. And an occasional nightingale.

This was something that she said during a radio interview, and obviously it is an enchanting little conversational tease of the kind that she always adored. Yet there is a quality to her voice, as she lingers on those paradisiacal images, that reveals what was always there, and constitutes so great a part of her appeal: the yearning soul within the sophisticates carapace: the imagination that can take illusion and make it into something real. Nancy did respond to that idea of heaven as fairyland. And she probably did imagine drifting into death on waves of bliss, like those which take Polly Hampton up the aisle in Love in a Cold Climate . But Polly, of course, is not really moving towards bliss. She is making a doomed and farcical marriage with that dirtiest of old men, Boy Dougdale, who has been sleeping with her mother and will later turn pederast. This is the truth, which does not mitigate one jot the shining belief in love that has impelled Pollys actions: for Nancy Mitford is at one and the same time, and in pretty well equal parts, a complete romantic and a complete realist.

So here is the grave in which she lies. Sombre, dilapidated, rooted in deep unchanging Oxfordshire. No brilliant Pre-Lachaise neighbours, no sparkling subterranean potins , just poor brain-damaged Unity Mitford beside her, the sister who put a bullet in her head on the day that war was declared and died from its slow creep nine years later. Some way away from these two, close to Pamela, lie the Mitford parents, David and Sydney, whose only son, Tom, is commemorated by a plaque inside the church. Around that dear little stone dolls house are scattered most of the remains of that rampaging family mythology. Now birds sing above the stillness; rabbits hop softly between the tombs. It is intensely withdrawn, intensely English: a silent reminder of what lies beneath the fantastical cleverness, the Francophilia, the taste for Boucher and Boulle and les gens du monde .