Nancy Mitford by Nancy Mitford Read Free Book Online

feminine intellect among contemporaries that I felt it was more than a special compliment. I still wonder how Brian and Lord Redesdale coped with each other, if they were allowed to meet. The contrast between them evoked extreme burlesque , and Brian’s posturings and paradoxes must have helped to stimulate the composition of Nancy’s first novel.
    As a débutante Nancy enjoyed a conventional succession of seasons during that hectic period immortalized by Evelyn Waugh, when Noël Coward represented the younger generation of gatecrashers and jazz was in the air, though it was the genteel jazz of Jack Hylton and Ambrose, less frenzied but more suave than its Afro-American precursors. Nancy attended the coming-out balls as regularly as her coevals but with a colder, more critical eye as time went on. She was too clever to enjoy the platitudes of her callow dancing partners who were a source of disillusion to her, as to Sophia in her novel
Pigeon Pie
. Like Sophia, ‘she was not shy and she had high spirits, but she was never a romper and therefore never attained much popularity with the very young.’
    During the winter she rode hard to hounds, stayed with friends, and invited them to her parents’ house. A nostalgic passage in
Pigeon Pie
betrays her love of hunting: ‘The first meet she ever went to, early in the morning with her father’s agent. She often remembered this, and it had become a composite picture of all the cub-hunting she had ever done, the autumn woods and the smell of bonfires, dead leaves and hot horses. Riding home from the last meet of a season, late in the afternoon of a spring day, there would be primroses and violets under the hedges, far far away the sound of a horn, and later an owl.’
    Until Nancy was twenty-three her parents lived at Asthall in Oxfordshire, about half the size of the 10,000 acres Lord Redesdale had inherited at Batsford Park in Gloucestershire,which he sold in 1919. In 1927 he also sold Asthall and moved to Swinbrook, where he built a house on the site of one of his farms called South Lawn, a name he wished to dispense with. None of his children liked Swinbrook House, described by Jessica as ‘a large rectangular structure of three stories… neither “modern” nor “traditional” nor simulated antique… It could be a small barracks, a girls’ boarding school, a private lunatic asylum, or, in America, a country club.’ To tease her father Nancy used to address her letters: ‘Builder Redesdale, The Buildings, South Lawn, Burford.’ A compensation for Swinbrook was that he bought 26 Rutland Gate, so that the girls could enjoy more time in London.

3
    UNFORTUNATELY, LORD REDESDALE had little flair for finance and his father had been extravagant, like so many denizens of the horse world. Gradually he felt obliged to part with valuable possessions, usually at a loss. His houses were often let, especially the London residence , where upon his family were squeezed into the Mews behind it, or into Lady Redesdale’s cosy cottage at High Wycombe. It was economy rather than a resolve to keep Nancy at home that prevented her from moving into a private flat. Nowadays she would have looked for a job, but such an idea would not have occurred to Lord Redesdale: it was not even discussed. Whatever Nancy could earn from her writings was added to her meagre dress allowance. She chafed under the tedium of rustic life though this impelled her to read voraciously and, eventually, to write her first novel.
    Jessica has related the circumstances with brio: ‘For months Nancy had sat giggling helplessly by the drawing-room fire, her curiously triangular green eyes flashing with amusement, while her thin pen flew along the lines of a child’s exercise book. Sometimes she read bits aloud to us. “You
can’t
publish that under your own name,” my mother insisted, scandalized, for not only did thinly disguised aunts, uncles and family friends people the pages of
Highland Fling
, but there,