Free Nancy Mitford by Nancy Mitford Page B

Remember ‘tis better to be an old girl’s sweetheart than a young girl’s slave…’
    If ever Nancy woke up to the fact that Peter could become a bore, she was far too loyal to admit it. Yet she must have had Peter in mind when she described a first-class bore as one who ‘had a habit of choosing a subject, and then droning round and round it like an inaccurate bomb-aimer round his target, unable to hit: he knew vast quantities of utterly dreary facts, of which he did not hesitate to inform his companions, at great length and in great detail, whether they appeared to be interested or not.’
    Peter was a compulsive lecturer who enjoyed bombarding one with a miscellaneous jumble of facts: he belonged to the tribe of doctrinaires and he was seldom, as Evelyn Waugh expressed it, ‘disinclined to be instructive’. While he was beaming with youth and enthusiasm these monologues about the Senussi and the Tuaregs and the locality of Atlantis might dazzle and amaze one, but one surmised that Nancy might be surfeited with such volleys of abstruse information. During the war I suspected that many were inventions, as if to prove that he knew more than the rest of us. He sounded plausible: a very superior con man.
    When I returned to England from China with dire forebodings in the summer of 1939 I heard much of Peter’s activities in Perpignan among the refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Nancy had joined him there in May, and Chapter XV of
The Pursuit of Love
is based on her experiences at this time. Christian is a thinly disguised version of Peter: ‘He did not ask how she was or whether she had had a good journey—Christian always assumed that people were all right unless they told him to the contrary, when, except in the case of destitute, coloured, oppressed, leprous, or otherwise unattractive strangers he would take absolutely no notice. He was really only interested in mass wretchedness, and never much cared for individual cases, however genuine their misery, while the idea that it is possible to have three square meals a day and a roof and yet be unhappy or unwell, seemed to him intolerable nonsense.’
    Peter was as much in his element at Perpignan as Basil Seal at the Ministry of Modernization in Azania. He was too concerned with the problems of refugees to pay much attention to Nancy, who for all her kindness of heart was absurdly miscast in the role of social worker. Like Linda in the novel she ‘went to the camps every day, and they filled her soul with despair. As she could not help very much in the office owing to her lack of Spanish, nor with the children, since she knew nothing about calories, she was employed as a driver, and was always on the road in a Ford van full of supplies, or of refugees, or just taking messages to and from the camps. Often she had to sit and wait for hours on end while a certain man was found and his case dealt with… the sight of these thousands of human beings, young and healthy, herded behind wire away from their womenfolk, with nothing on earth to do day after dismal day, was a recurring torture to Linda. She began to think that Uncle Matthew had been right—that abroad, where such things could happen, was indeed unutterably bloody, and that foreigners, who could inflict them upon each other, must be fiends.’
    From Perpignan Nancy wrote to her mother (16th May, 1939): ‘I never saw anybody workthe way these people do [Peter and his associates], I haven’t had a single word with Peter although I’ve been here two days. They are getting a boat off to Mexico next week with 600 families on board and you can suppose this is a job, reuniting these families.’
    ‘The men are in camps, the women are living in a sort of gymnasium in the town, and the children scattered all over France. Peter said yesterday one woman was really too greedy, she already has four children and she wants three more. I thought of you! These people will all meet on the quayside for the first time since