The Horror of Love by Lisa Hilton Read Free Book Online

and on the stairs … Myconversation to the debs’ young men goes like this:
    The chinless horror ‘I think this is our dance.’
    Me ‘Oh yes, I think it is.’
    C.H. ‘What a crowd in the doorway.’
    Me ‘Yes isn’t it awful.’
    The C.H. then clutches me round the waist and I almost fall over as I try to put my feet where his aren’t.
    Me ‘Sorry.’
    C.H. ‘No, my fault.’
    Me ‘Oh, I think it must have been me.’
    C.H. ‘Oh, no, that wouldn’t be possible.’
    Then follows a long and dreary silence sometimes one of us saying ‘sorry’ and the other ‘my fault’. After a bit we feel we can’t bear it any longer so we decide to go and sit down.
    The disillusion of the debutante’s long-yearned-for coming of age in The Pursuit of Love bears out Deborah’s description:
    This then is a ball. This is life, what we have been waiting for all these years … How extraordinary it feels, such unreality, like a dream. But alas, so utterly different from what one had imagined … the women so frowsty … the men, either so old or so ugly. And when they ask one to dance it is not at all like floating away into a delicious cloud, pressed by a manly arm to a manly bosom, but stumble-kick, stumble-kick. They balance, like King Stork on one leg, while with the other they come down, like King Log, on one’s toe. As for witty conversation … it is mostly ‘Oh-sorry’, ‘Oh-my fault’.
    One of the few truly eligible young men who attended Nancy’s dance at Asthall was Henry Weymouth, heir to the Marquess of Bath, who introduced her to friends including Brian Howard, one of the models for Evelyn Waugh’s fantastic aesthete Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited . Howard was immediately charmed: ‘A delicious creature, quite pyrotechnical my dear, andsometimes even profound.’ 2 Mark Ogilvie-Grant appeared at a dance given by some local neighbours, the Masons, and soon became a close friend and confidant. Through Howard and Ogilvie-Grant Nancy began to meet the young men who formed her real social circle throughout the Twenties: Harold Acton, diplomat and writer; Robert Byron, the renowned Oxford aesthete and later distinguished travel writer; the film-maker John Sutro, Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh, Oliver Messel, John Betjeman and Henry Yorke (whose novels were published under the name of Henry Green), Tom Driberg. Many of them were homosexual, or flirted with homosexuality; all were clever and witty and beneath their delight in shocking the older generation concealed surprisingly serious ideas about art, about what was valuable and what was not. They represented Nancy’s first exposure to the sort of people with whom she wanted to spend her life, those who recognized the nascent intimation given to Fanny among the floating panels of disillusion at her first ball that ‘the behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificiality and art more or less perfected’.
    In 1926 the Mitford family moved to Swinbrook House, the hideous modern home Lord Redesdale had built for them and which he was greatly hurt to discover all of them except Deborah loathed (Nancy called it ‘Swinebrook’). The friends she asked to stay became the ‘Swinbrook Sewers’, derived from Lord Redesdale’s favourite insult, ‘sua’ – ‘pig’ – picked up in Ceylon. Jessica recalled them ‘sweeping down in merry hordes’ with their smart jargon – how too, too divine, how sickmaking, darling, how shamemaking, how bogus. If the Redesdales didn’t exactly approve, Nancy’s friends were tolerated – indeed, Mark succeeded to the dubious honour of favourite. His rewards included the pleasure of eating sweetbreads at eight o’clock sharp with Lord Redesdale. ‘Brains for breakfast!’ became a maxim of their letters.
    Much as she loved her new friends, Nancy could not really follow them to the darker side of the Bright Young scene. Although her life was now much less restricted,