The Horror of Love by Lisa Hilton Read Free Book Online Page B

reform him. Flattered by her unconditional devotion and the regard in which she was held by her brilliant homosexual circle of friends, Hamish went along with the idea that they were engaged, sentencing Nancy to five years of humiliation and wretchedness.
    Hamish’s sexuality was in some senses typical of the times. Many of Nancy’s contemporaries, including Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly and her brother Tom, had experienced intense emotional and sexual relationships with men at school anduniversity before turning wholeheartedly to women. In his Eton memoir, Nancy’s great friend Lord Berners conceded that ‘a good deal of this sort of thing went on, but to speak of it as homosexuality would be unduly ponderous. It was merely the ebullience of puberty.’ 5 Since homosexuality was never spoken of, there was no pressure to nail one’s colours to the mast by ‘coming out’ and it was perhaps more acceptable for some young men to pass through this phase without defining their sexuality when they were still emotionally immature. Many others, however, were definitely ‘so’ and happy to remain that way, though beyond the safe nurseries of the public school and universities they had to contend with both crushing prejudice and fear of the law. One historian of Nancy’s generation has commented on the fact that ‘no English youth movement … has ever contained such a high proportion of homosexuals or – in an age when these activities were still illegal – been so tolerant of their behaviour’. 6 Jessica Mitford, recalling the homosexual culture of the all-male environments in which her peers spent their youth and early manhood, remarked that ‘some stuck to it, some didn’t, but nobody paid much attention either way’.
    It was difficult for an inexperienced young woman to judge whether a wavering young man might not yet turn out to be good husband material, but Nancy was not entirely naïve. Evelyn Waugh gave her an embarrassed lecture at the Ritz about ‘sexual shyness’ in men after Hamish confessed that he didn’t think he would ever be capable of sleeping with a woman, and one of James Lees-Milne’s lovers agonized for months to prepare himself for the great event. The Duchess of Devonshire suggests Nancy was quite unaware that Hamish was thoroughly homosexual. ‘Those days, you know, I don’t think she knew he was queer … otherwise why would she have said she was engaged to him?’ 7 Nancy was certainly sophisticated enough to make jokes about ‘pansies’ in her letters: to Mark Ogilvie-Grant she wrote that she had had tea with his mother ‘and inadvertently gave her one of your letters to read in which a lift boy is described as a “Driberg’sdelight”’. Mrs Ogilvie-Grant had no idea what this meant – ‘Dear Mark has such an amusing gift for describing people’ – but clearly Nancy did. Or did she? She might have been able to find her friends’ pashes on boys amusing without really considering or knowing what was involved. Certainly her relationship with Hamish could not have been more asexual. She described an evening staying with Nina at Cullen Castle, when she and Hamish draped themselves in chiffon and put vine leaves and roses in their hair. Nancy curled Hamish’s locks with tongs and ‘he looked more than lovely’. Assuming Nancy wasn’t simply stupid, was she playing along with Hamish’s tendencies in the blind hope that he would grow out of them? Or was there something about cavorting in fancy dress that appealed to her own undeveloped and apprehensive sexuality?
    Hamish was safe in a way that other suitors weren’t. Nancy had one serious admirer, Sir Hugh Smiley, who was everything a debutante’s anxious mother could wish for. Sir Hugh, of the Grenadier Guards, proposed several times during 1932. Nancy considered it, but couldn’t talk herself into pretending to love him. The prospect of his ‘gingerbread mansion’ was tempting – ‘one could be so jolly well dressed