Nancy Mitford Read Online Free PDF Page A

hated the Boer War, whereas he took pride inhaving fought and been thrice wounded in it. A pillar of convention, he was also a jingo—very unlike the English expatriates I had encountered in my native Florence.
    Nancy’s little acts of rebellion must have helped the mellowing process. Her sister Jessica relates that she ‘dimly remembered the hushed pall that hung over the house, meals eaten day after day in tearful silence, when Nancy at the age of twenty had her hair shingled. Nancy using lipstick, Nancy playing the newly fashionable ukulele, Nancy wearing trousers, Nancy smoking a cigarette—she had broken ground for all of us, but only at terrific cost in violent scenes followed by silence and tears.’ Even dimly I cannot remember Nancy doing any of these things. If she used make-up it was barely noticeable, and I never saw her smoking.
    Her sisters were to benefit by Nancy’s boldness, though her effort to break away from the exclusive family circle in order to study painting at the Slade ended in failure. Jessica, who has described the tension caused by Nancy’s resolve, ‘meals eaten in dead silence… the muffled thunder of my father’s voice,’ was ‘terribly disappointed’ when she came home after a month.
    ‘“How could you! If I ever got away to a bed-sitter I’d never come back.”’
    ‘“Oh, darling, but you should have seen it. After about a week it was knee-deep in underclothes . I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away.”’
    ‘“Well, I think you’re very weak-minded. You wouldn’t catch me knuckling under because of a little thing like underclothes.”’
    Jessica was made of tougher material, as she subsequently proved. Lord Redesdale won the first round with his eldest daughter. His aversion to society drew him inwards in a cocoon, remote from contemporary currents. While he and Lady Redesdale were satisfied with their healthy domestic life, their daughters were frustrated by their comparative segregation. In spite of the fun they enjoyed in each other’s company, the girls had yearnings for greater freedom , like Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
who longed to go to Moscow. ‘I ought to have gone to school,’ Nancy wrote, ‘it was the dream of my life—but there was never any question of that.’ According to her, ‘it was not so much education that he [Lord Redesdale] dreaded for his daughters, as the vulgarizing effect that a boarding school might have upon them.’ Here Nancy’s memory was defective, for she did attend the Frances Holland day school in London from about 1910 until 1914, when her family migrated to the country owing to the war.

2
    AT THE AGE of sixteen, Nancy went to a ‘finishing school’ at Hatherop Castle, where she made life-long friendships and whence, with other girls, she was shepherded for the first time to the Continent. Her mother religiously kept her letters from Paris, Florence and Venice. These are too long to quote in full, but a few excerpts convey her intense enjoyment, the freshness of her adolescent outlook.
    From Paris (Grand Hôtel du Louvre, 8th April, 1922) she wrote: ‘Darling Muv, Getting up early I had my bath, took a lift and progressed down stairs to pen this to you. We arrived here at 7, took a hasty but delicious meal and—went to bed? Not at all, we walked round the streets till 10.30, came home to iced lemon squash (we have been forbidden water) and to bed at 11. Brek is in a moment, at 9. It is so lovely here, there are telephones and hot and cold water in our bedrooms. I spend my time telephoning for baths, etc.’
    ‘All the shops look so heavenly and the Place de la Concorde when lighted up is too lovely … Why doesn’t one always live in hotels? It is so lovely… We look out on to the Louvre.’
    ‘There are dozens of sweet little boys here (hall boys) perfect pets, I shall give them my chocs.’
    ‘Marjorie has such lovely clothes I feel like a rag bag… We don’t want to leave Paris at all and