Nancy Mitford Read Free Page B

wedlock; the senses are enthralled, and the world bows before the great wizard.’
    Lord Redesdale’s grandchildren inherited many of his gifts, and in perusing his suave autobiography one is often reminded of this inheritance. Nancy’s eyes resembled his, and a drawing of his profile at the age of twenty-eight by Samuel Lawrence resembled her brother Tom. In fact her generation appear to have had more in common with their grandfather than with their father and mother. One seems to hear Nancy’s voice in his lighter anecdotes. She has related that when her fourth sister was born, on 8th August, 1914, just when war had been declared, ‘she was christened Unity, after an actress my mother admired called Unity More (an early Peter Pan), and Valkyrie after the war maidens. Unity herself always spelt it Walkfire. This was Grandfather Redesdale’s idea; he said these maidens were not German but Scandinavian. He was a great friend of Siegfried Wagner’s and must have known.’ Eventually the actress and the war maiden were combined in Unity with tragic results.
    Since the betrayal of Denmark in 1864, when the ‘scrap of paper signed by Prussia in 1852, assuring the inviolability of Denmark, was torn up’, Grandfather Redesdale had foreseen a calamitous general war, the outbreak of which was ‘by far the most vivid’ of Nancy’s fitful recollections. ‘When it appeared to be imminent,’ she wrote, Blor told me to pray for peace. But I thought, if we had war, England might be invaded; then, like Robin Hood, one would take to the greenwood tree and some how or another manage to kill a German. It was more than I could do to pray for peace. I prayed, as hard as I could, for war. I knew quite well how wicked this was: when my favourite uncle was killed I had terrible feelings of guilt.’ Thus the ten-year-old innocent shared the private sentiments of many a grizzled soldier and politician .
    Little Nancy’s prayers were answered but ‘the war turned out to be less exciting than I had hoped, though we did see the Zeppelin come down in flames at Potters Bar. I fell in love with Captain Platt in my father’s regiment, an important General of the next war, and crocheted endless pairs of khaki mittens for him—I am not sure that they were inflicted on him. In any case, all this crocheting was the nearest I ever got to killing an enemy, a fact which I am still regretting.’ She retained a lifelong interest in battles which I could not share, though I admired her per severance in trying to follow the campaigns of Frederick the Great when she was already an invalid.
    Another memory which made an indelible impression on Nancy at the age of seven, was of Captain Scott’s tragic expedition to the South Pole. She devoured every book obtainable on the subject and would have won an examination on all its harrowing details
summa cum laude
. The hut under the active volcano of Mount Erebus where the Polar party were installed; Dr. Wilson’s appalling winter journey sixty miles along the coast to Cape Crozier in utter darkness and a freezing temperature to find the egg of an Emperor Penguin; the ascent of the dreaded Beardmore glacier towards the Pole; Seaman Evans’s death of frostbite and concussion ; the suicide of Captain Oates who staggered into the blizzard with frostbitten feet ‘to try and save his comrades, beset by hardship’; and the final discovery of ‘Birdie’ Bowers, Dr. Wilson and Scott, all dead in their sleeping bags—every circumstance engraved itself on Nancy’s young imagination.
    Captain Scott was to remain her hero of heroes, and the fact that he and his comrades ‘really wanted to prove to themselves how much they could endure’ haunted her till the end. The recollection of their sufferings often gave her courage to bear her own. Frequent references to Beardmore and Captain Oates cropped up in her letters, and she recounted their story in 1962, ‘fifty years to the day that Scott died.’ Paradoxically