Nancy Mitford Read Free

King Edward VII had just died. More clearly she could remember the dining-room wallpaper, ‘white with a green wreath round the cornice.’ Such seemingly trivial details are often etched on our memories like the flavour of Proust’s
madeleine
, conjuring long submerged emotions. Psycho-analysts might read significant symbols into them: the green wreath might betoken a presentiment of future fame.
    The sinking of the Titanic left a deeper impression, for it was accompanied by daydreams ‘of a rather dreadful kind’. With dis arming candour she related that she used to scan Blor’s
Daily News
for an account of a shipwreck in which her parents (who sailed every other year to Canada in order to prospect for gold) might be ‘among the regretted victims’. In spite of what psycho analysts might infer, she loved her parents—with comprehensible reservations in the case of her father—but at the age of seven she nurtured an enterprising ambition to ‘boss the others’. The brood, however, continued to increase, which she considered ‘extremely unnecessary’ at the time.
    Her paternal grandfather Lord Redesdale was still alive, and she usually stayed under his roof in Kensington High Street while her sisters were born. Of the first Lord Redesdale, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., one derives a romantically gracious image, or series of images, from the two stout volumes of his
Memories
which had achieved a ninth edition in 1916, when Nancy was twelve years old. The photograph of the author reproduced as a frontispiece to the first volume portrays a dapper old Edwardian musketeer with a swirling white moustache. His gleaming top hat is tilted at a rakish angle; spectacles hang from a button of his double-breasted overcoat and gloves are tucked under his left-hand sleeve. He confronts the future with dignified equanimity. His past had been crammed with episodes of historical interest, all enjoyed with such gusto that one cannot agree with his granddaughter Jessica’s dismissal of his
Memories
as ‘monstrously boring’. Indeed many of his youthful experiences in the diplomatic service were thrilling if not unique.
    As second secretary of the Embassy at St. Petersburg during the winter of 1863–64 he was able to see the Russia of Czar Alexander II under favourable auspices. Even then the Ambassador Lord Napier warned him to send all his letters in the Foreign Office bag—‘none by the Post Office, where all our letters are opened.’ ‘Surely,’ he replied, ‘they would not dream of opening the correspondence of so humble a person as myself.’ ‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ broke in Lady Napier. ‘The other day my children’s governess received two letters by the same post from different parts of England. Each contained a photo graph. The two letters came in one envelope, the two photo graphs in the other!’ His account of Court ceremonies and balls; of Prince Gortchakoff and Princess Kotchoubey’s political salon; are as vivid as that of the fanatical piety of the people and of their saturnalia during the week before Lent in AdmiraltyPlace, perpetuated in music by Stravinsky’s
Petroushka
. His life in Peking during 1865-66 was described in greater detail in his delightful book
The Attack at Peking
. His next post in Japan was the most exhilarating. ‘Suddenly coming in full view of Mount Fuji, snow-capped, rearing its matchless cone heaven ward in one gracefully curving slope from the sea level,’ he was caught by the fever of intoxication which, as he wrote, ‘will continue to burn in my veins to the end of my life.’ Not only did he meet Prince Tokugawa Keiki, the last of the Shoguns, ‘a great noble if ever there was one. The pity of it was that he was an anachronism’—he and the dynamic British Minister Sir Harry Parkes were the first foreigners to be presented to the sacrosanct Mikado and I am tempted to quote his entire account of the episode but will restrain this to a single paragraph:
    ‘As we entered