Free Nancy Mitford by Nancy Mitford Page A

the second son of the highly cultivated ambassador, Lord Rennell, was a young man of boundless promise, and one could visualize him as a future cabinet minister, a law lord, or a prominent editor . He had abundant qualifications for success in any profession he deigned to choose. So farhe had chosen none. His intellectual range and his knowledge of languages had been impressive as an undergraduate at Balliol. With his devil-may-care manner and handsome features, the more handsome by contrast with a bohemian unkemptness, he had an alluring panache, and his self-assurance was superficially convincing.
    Nancy craved adventure and Peter invested his slightest activities with an aura of risk. His background was cosmopolitan-romantic. His father, Sir Rennell Rodd, later Lord Rennell, had been so popular as ambassador in Rome during the First World War that he had been presented with a fine property near Naples by the Italian government. While at Oxford, where he had been a friend of Oscar Wilde, he had also won the Newdigate Prize, and in 1882 Wilde wrote an ‘envoi’ to Rodd’s book of poems
Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf
, for which he had suggested the title. 1 Having arranged for its publication, Wilde had brazenly inserted a dedication to himself as ‘heart’s brother’ which embarrassed Rennell Rodd at the time, and even more during his diplomatic career. Peter was said to have hunted for rare copies of this volume and sold them profitably to his parent. This was quite in character, for Peter was the model for Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal.
    I never encountered Nancy and Peter together but I imagine they provided plenty of amusement for each other during the early years of their marriage. That Nancy had fallen in love with Peter more seriously than with Hamish, who seems to have prolonged her adolescence, is apparent from her letters to Mark Ogilvie-Grant. On 14th August, 1933, she wrote: ‘Oh goodness gracious I am happy. You must get married darling, everybody should this minute if they want a recipe for absolute bliss. Of course I know there aren’t many Peters going about but still I s’pose everybody has its Peter (if only Watson). So find yours dear the sooner the better. And remember true love can’t be bought. If I really thought it could I’d willingly send you
£
3 tomorrow . What I want to know is why nobody told me about Peter before—I mean if I’d known I’d have gone off to Berlin after him or anywhere else. However, I’ve got him now which is the chief thing… We are going to be married early in October and then live at Strand on the Green… We’re going to be damned poor you see.’ And later: ‘I have no news, the happiness is unabated at present and shows no immediate signs of abating either… I don’t expect we shall be married much before November which gives you plenty of time to save up for a deevy presey … We think of living in a house called Glencoe at Chiswick.’
    Of her honeymoon in Rome where the Rennells had a house on Via Giulia, Nancy wrote to her sister Unity, 8th December, 1933: ‘Why do people say they don’t enjoy honeymoons? I am adoring mine.’ A week later, however, she was writing to Mark, on a postcard of the garish Victor Emmanuel monument: ‘This of course is much the prettiest thing in Rome. I go and look at it every day. I am having a really dreadful time, dragging a badly sprained ankle round major and minor basilicas and suffering hideous indigestion from eating goats’ cheese. However, I manage to keep up my spirits somehow.’
    Back in England, she wrote from Rose Cottage, Strand on the Green, Chiswick: ‘I am awfully busy learning to be a rather wonderful old housewife. My marriage, contracted to the amazement of all so late in life, is providing me with a variety of interests, new but not distasteful, andbesides, a feeling of shelter and security hitherto untasted by me. Why not follow my example and find some nonagenarian bride to skip to the altar with.