Which Nancy, of course, wasn’t. There is escapism, for the modern reader – partly of a nostalgic kind, since the world being described is long gone – and a pleasant sense of becoming historically and anthropologically au fait with the period and its mores; and there are lengthy, heavenly forays into fashion, style and, for want of a better word, glamour. But the reason why these books are so good, so undated, is that they concern themselves with big, universal subjects: family, the past, marriage, love, messy lives, pain. That the people experiencing these things are privileged in the extreme is really neither here nor there; that they’re semi-detached and cope with everything through the medium of jokes ends up seeming like a marvellous way to deal with the perils of life. (Another thing I love about Nancy is her absolute lack of sentimentality. There isn’t one sentimental sentence among these pages, as befits the woman who wrote, ‘I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away’.)
And my goodness, the jokes. Such jokes, even now. I remember moving to England, when I was nine years old, and being utterly baffled by the kind of ‘English humour’ I saw on television – these were the mid-1970s, host to The Benny Hill Show and Mind Your Language (tit jokes and jokes about foreigners, respectively, for those of a younger vintage), which I used to sit and watch po-faced, wondering if anything would ever be funny again. It was, of course, but the real revelation came when I picked up The Pursuit of Love aged twelve or thirteen. I thought I would die laughing. I read it, finished it, turned back to page one and started reading it all over again (not something I have ever done again, thousands of books later). To me, The Pursuit of Love and its siblings remain prime examples of all that is best about English humour – the uncontrollable snort of laughter teamed with the wince, the chuckle alongside the sharp intake of breath. The cruelty, I suppose. There’s straightforward comedy within these pages, but more often than not there is a waspishness, a sly knowingness that makes reading them such a particular delight. And never any sign of contrition, or an attempt at tempering or softening the joke, which sometimes falls like a guillotine.
But Mitford is more than a wonderful stylist with a fine line in jokes. She is forensic in her dissection of relationships, and somewhere – buried quite far underneath, I’ll grant you – she has a proper beating heart. The sudden lump in the throat, the rapid blinking that just precedes tears, the image that stays lodged in your head for years after you’ve read the book in question (Linda on her suitcase at the Gare du Nord, Lady Montdore’s blue curls) … these are her trademarks.
This introduction has taken me a paralysingly long time to write, which is not normally how I do things at all. I know exactly why it happened, though: it is because my love of Nancy Mitford is, of itself, paralysing. My admiration is too great, which actually puts me in the creepy position of a kneeling supplicant: try as I might, I can’t find anything to fault in the later novels. Trenchant critique comes there none. I just read and swoon, filled with love, and feeling ninnyishly excited by the idea of you, dear reader, perhaps discovering her for the first time. You know how you sometimes wish you’d never read something by someone, just for the absolute treat of coming across their work in a virgin state? If there’s one person I wish I’d never read, it would be Nancy Mitford, if you see what I mean. I compensate by foisting her on every new person I meet, like a pimp. Were anyone to say, ‘I tried, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea,’ they’d be culled on the spot. Happily, this has yet to happen.
India Knight,
London, September 2011
HIGHLAND FLING
TO HAMISH
1
Albert Gates came down from Oxford feeling that his life was behind him. The past alone was certain, the future strange and obscure in a way that it had never been until that very moment of stepping from the train at Paddington. All his movements until then had been mapped out unalterably in periods of term and holiday; there was never for him the question ‘What next?’ – never a moment’s indecision as to how such a month or such a week would be spent. The death of his mother during his last year at Oxford, while it left him without any definite home ties, had made very little difference to the tenor of his life, which had continued as before to consist of terms
