The oddly chosen battleground of Nancy’s generation was that of the Athletes versus the Aesthetes – sometimes called the Hearties and the Arties – and the newspapers were full of accounts of pitched warfare staged at Oxford University between these opposing forces.
The Athletes, of course, were direct ideological descendants of past patriots, winners of wars on the playing fields of Eton, Old School Tie men and their horsey-set women.
The Aesthetes laid claim to a more exotic heritage . . . the Romantics, the England of Oscar Wilde, the France of Baudelaire and Verlaine. Most of the Aesthetes were vaguely pro-Socialist, pro-pacifist and (horrors!) opposed to shooting, hunting and fishing on the grounds that these hallowed blood sports were cruel and sadistic. They gaily toppled the old, uncomplicated household gods – England, Home and Glory, the Divine Right of Kings (and hence of the House of Lords), the axiomatic superiority of the English over all other races; they sacrilegiously called the Boer War, in which Farve was ‘thrice wounded’, according to Debrett’s Peerage, ‘the Bore War’; they paraphrased Blake’s ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ to ‘England’s green, unpleasant land’.
At weekends they would swoop down from Oxford or London in merry hordes, to be greeted with solid disapproval by my mother and furious glares by my father.
Boud, Debo and I were on the whole carefully insulated from Nancy’s friends, as my mother considered them a totally bad influence. ‘What a set!’ she always said when some of their more outrageous ideas were expounded by Nancy. They talked in the jargon of their day: ‘Darling, too too divine, too utterly sickmaking, how shamemaking!’ Fascinated, I would hang around the drawing-room as much as I dared, until my presence was noticed and I was chased back up to the schoolroom. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I would be brought in by Nancy and Diana to ‘show off’ with a translation into Boudledidge of some minor English poet, or to play a hand of Hure, Hare, Hure, Commencement. A high point in my life came when Evelyn Waugh, a writer feller and one of the main Swinbrook sewers, promised me that he would immortalize Miranda by substituting the word ‘sheepish’ for the standard ‘divine’ in his forthcoming book, Vile Bodies. I was on tenterhooks until the book was actually printed for fear he might go back on his word. But there it was, in black and white: ‘He left his perfectly sheepish house in Hertford St. . . .’
With Miss Bunting’s help I lifted an extra copy from the Oxford bookshop, and hung it proudly on a tree in Miranda’s field. Since I had no educational yardstick by which to judge ideas and intellect, and was isolated in a world where Muv’s and Farve’s views of life were the only ones I’d ever had a chance to hear – the only ones, indeed, that I’d thought existed – the irreverent outpourings of these attractive, stimulating people made the most profound impression on me. I filched ‘forbidden’ books I’d heard them discussing – Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide – and surreptitiously read them by flashlight under the bedclothes. Weird, undreamed-of horizons began to open up on every side, dozens of possible variations of a non-Swinbrook outlook.
Nancy became a devotee of new trends in art. We rather assumed that at least a partial reason for this interest was to ‘tease the Old Sub-Human’ – and tease him it did, most effectively. The sculpture of Jacob Epstein (‘damned Hun!’ as Farve inaccurately called him), the works of Picasso (‘filthy sewer!’) in turn produced fascinating rows downstairs of which we in the schoolroom heard only small repercussions. The culmination was reached when Nancy brought home a print of Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection. This work, with its portrayal of oddly elongated people in modern dress easing themselves out of their graves, provoked Farve to one of his classic rages, shaking the household from top to bottom.
His fury was redoubled when Nancy announced her intention to move to London and study art at the Slade School. As usual, we got only the echoes of the titanic rows going on downstairs. We came down for meals that were eaten in dead silence and returned to the schoolroom to hear the occasional tantalizingly muffled thunder of my father’s voice. Muv must have interceded, for Nancy finally won her point and went to live in a furnished bed-sitting-room in Kensington. I watched her action with immense interest and was terribly disappointed when she came home after about a month.
‘How could you! If I ever got away to a bed-sitter I’d never come back.’
‘Oh, darling, but you should have seen it. After about a week, it was knee-deep in underclothes. I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away.’
‘Well, I think you’re very weak-minded. You wouldn’t catch me knuckling under because of a little thing like underclothes.’
Dimly, through the eyes of childhood, I glimpsed another world; a world of London bed-sitters, art students, writers . . . a world of new and different ideas . . . a world from which Swinbrook would seem as antiquated as a feudal stronghold. A marvellous idea flashed into my mind – one of those ideas to be cherished, polished, perfected until it can become a reality. I decided to run away from home. Not yet – I knew a twelve-year-old would hardly have a chance to survive for long without being discovered and returned to the family – but one day, when I had worked out a thoroughly satisfactory plan, and had saved enough money to support myself for a while.
Extract from Hons and Rebels
Jessica Mitford © 1960
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