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  Don’t Tell Alfred

  Nancy Mitford (1904–73) was born in London, the eldest child of the second Baron Redesdale. Her childhood in a large, remote country house with her five sisters and one brother is recounted in the early chapters of The Pursuit of Love (1945), which, according to the author, is largely autobiographical. Apart from being taught to ride and speak French, Nancy Mitford always claimed she never received a proper education. She started writing before her marriage in 1932 in order ‘to relieve the boredom of the intervals between the recreations established by the social conventions of her world’ and had written four novels, including Wigs on the Green (1935), before the success of The Pursuit of Love in 1945. After the war she moved to Paris where she lived for the rest of her life. She followed The Pursuit of Love with Love in a Cold Climate (1949), The Blessing (1951) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960). She also wrote four works of biography: Madame de Pompadour, first published to great acclaim in 1954, Voltaire in Love, The Sun King and Frederick the Great. As well as being a novelist and a biographer she also translated Madame de Lafayette’s classic novel La Princesse de Clèves into English, and edited Noblesse Oblige, a collection of essays concerned with the behaviour of the English aristocracy and the idea of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’. Nancy Mitford was awarded the CBE in 1972.

  Sophie Dahl’s first novel, Playing with the Grown-Ups, was published in 2007, following her bestselling illustrated novella, The Man with the Dancing Eyes. Sophie was contributing editor for Men’s Vogue for three years and now works for, amongst others, British Vogue, American Vogue, the Guardian, the Telegraph Magazine, the Spectator, The Times, and also writes a regular food column in Waitrose Food Illustrated. In 2009 Sophie published her first cookbook, Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights. She lives in London.

  Don’t Tell Alfred

  NANCY MITFORD

  Introduction by Sophie Dahl

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Hamish Hamilton 1960

  Published in Penguin Books 1963

  Reissued with a new introduction in this edition 2010

  Copyright © the Estate of Nancy Mitford, 1960

  Introduction copyright © Sophie Dahl, 2010

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author of the introduction has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196475-1

  To Anna Maria Cicogna

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Introduction

  I first came across Nancy Mitford at sixteen, rifling through my mother’s bookshelf on a bored rainy Saturday afternoon. The book was The Pursuit of Love, and I plunged headfirst into its satirical embrace, emerging at 3 a.m. on Sunday, a red-eyed, passionate Mitford devotee.

  ‘I’ve begun a novel – still at the sticky stage but I think it has possibilities,’ Nancy wrote to her life-long friend Mark Ogilvie Grant in 1959. She was talking about Don’t Tell Alfred, the novel that was to be her last, published by Hamish Hamilton the following year. Featuring a host of Mitford familiars from The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate – such as the irrepressible Bolter, Uncle Matthew and, one of my favourites, the hypochondriac Davey, whose comic value is ageless – Don’t Tell Alfred is narrated by Fanny Wincham, née Logan, whom we first meet in The Pursuit of Love as a shy little girl, somewhat eclipsed by the colour of her cousins, the Alconleighs. (To the uninitiated, some of the cameo cast of Don’t Tell Alfred may be a touch confusing; they swan in and out of the book with a blithe lack of introduction. Stay with it and be charmed, or if you get too distracted, begin with The Pursuit of Love, and come back to this book with a thirst for more.) Don’t Tell Alfred finds Fanny, a mother of four, married to the bumbling Alfred, who overnight becomes the English Ambassador to Paris, throwing the country Fanny into a life of high-octane glamour with more plot twists than a Restoration comedy.

  The drama begins with the former Ambassadress, Lady Leone, refusing to vacate the Embassy, holding fashionable court to half of Paris from a stronghold within its walls as the uninvited Winchams look on in bemusement. The book’s siren arrives in the form of Northey, daughter of Fanny’s cousin Louisa, employed as a (hopeless) social secretary; a creature who when talking uses the whole of her body, ‘in the concentrated effort of expressing herself, gesticulating, wriggling, as babies and puppies do’. She also cannot help but speak to tabloid journalists to the exasperation of her employers, and in the face of her animal activism the gastronomic interests of the Embassy are compromised to great effect. Northey, Nancy said, was an amalgam of her contemporary, the famous beauty Cristiana Brandolini with the speaking voice of her sister Debo (the Duchess of Devonshire). The character of Northey inspired love and loathing in equal measure among Mitford’s friends who read early proofs of the book.

  Also appearing in great comic swathes, and loosely based on friends and family are Fanny’s four sons: Basil, David, Charles and little Fabrice. It is in Mitford’s portrait of these sons that the obituary for the bright young things of the 1920s is written, and the birth of a new, confusing anti-establishment era at its most evident. To Fanny’s horror Basil, or ‘Baz’ as he wishes to be known, has thwarted his parents’ plans for a life in academia and set up a business as a cut-throat package-tour operator. David, a Zen Buddhist, replete with ‘scrubbing-brush beard’, rocks up with a wife and a baby named ’Chang. The little ones have absconded from school in a Rolls-Royce over the ‘ghoulishness’ of the food. Sitting at an Embassy dinner, a despairing Fanny says to the French Prime Minister, ‘To our own children we must be the norm, surely. They may react from our values for a while but in the end they will come back to the
m.’ Later she concludes, ‘If you ask me they’ll all come out of these silly phases. They are nothing new – my cousins and I were quite idiotic when we were young. The only difference is that in those days the grown-ups paid no attention, while we concentrate (too much probably) on these children and their misdoings.’

  There are many instances in the book where there is a general disconnect between Fanny and her children; she is benevolently baffled by their vernacular and choices, which seem another country from her youth. Was this also true of Mitford? Although she did not have children, she inhabited a world of them, since by 1959 British adolescents finally had their own identity due to the saturation of American pop culture. Appearing in the guise of rolling slang, quiffs and Edwardian jackets, and christened six years earlier by the popular press, anyone with a leer and an attitude was a Teddy boy. The quintessential Ted icon appears in Don’t Tell Alfred as Yanky Fonzy, a singer and ‘hobbledehoy with a pasty face, sloppy look about the mouth, and hair done like Queen Alexandra’s after the typhoid’. Given that she was such a product of her time, Lord knows what she would have done with glam rock and punk. I’m guessing it would have been yet another juicy thing for her to satirize, all the while gently deprecating her own wide eyes and class. Mitford clearly has great affection for every one of her characters, even the ghastly journalist, Mockbar, and you can almost hear the ghost of her laugh rolling through the pages as she tars the teenagers with her tongue firmly in cheek.

  While happy to poke fun at her characters, the biggest love story in the book is one of geography. Don’t Tell Alfred is a love letter to Paris, where Mitford lived for over twenty years until her death in Versailles in 1973. The city transcends her customary sharpness, and instead we have Fanny by the fire surrounded by a ‘curious’ December light, bringing out all the shades around her ‘from primrose to navy blue, implicit in the beige and grey of the landscape and buildings’. Similarly, on a drive to the country Fanny has not seen ‘so white a road and such scarlet berries’ since she was a child. The Americans in Paris are not exempt from a derisive shake of the head, but the architecture, the river, the light and the mysterious French always get her approval. This was a pattern throughout her writing, and after the publication of her essays, The Water Beetle, a French friend joked to her that the English would never join the common market if they believed the lives afforded to the French in Mitford’s books. ‘Don’t worry at all,’ she said, ‘the English don’t believe a word I tell them; they regard me as their chief purveyor of fairy tales.’

  She was recognized as chief purveyor by the realm in 1972 when she was awarded a CBE. In typical Nancy style she wrote to Cyril Connelly on 7 July that year, ‘I’d never heard of a CBE but I’m told it’s a good sort.’

  Very much like Nancy herself.

  Sophie Dahl

  Chapter One

  ON the day which was to be such a turning-point in my life, I went to London by the 9.7.I had planned to do a little shopping; somebody had told me of Chinese robes in the sales, perfect for dinner at home since they would cover up everything. I was also going to see my naughty boy, Basil, a perennial worry to me; Aunt Sadie begged me to look in on Uncle Matthew and there was something I had long wanted to put to him. I had appointments to lunch with the one and to have tea with the other. It was a Saturday because that was Basil’s half-holiday – he was cramming for the Foreign Office. We were to meet at a restaurant, then go back to his lodgings, what used to be called ‘rooms’ and is now called a ‘service flat’. My idea was to do a little, surely much needed, tidying up there, as well as to collect some dirty clothes, and bring them back with me to have them washed or cleaned. I took a large canvas hold-all to contain them and the Chinese robe, if I bought it.

  But, oh dear, I don’t think I’ve ever looked such a fool as I did in that Chinese robe, with my brown walking shoes, enormous beneath the hem, hair untidy from dragging off a hat, leather bag clasped to bosom because it had £28 in it and I knew that people snatched bags at sales. The assistant earnestly said think of the difference if I were carefully coiffée and maquillée and parfumée and manicurée and pedicurée, wearing Chinese sandals (next department, 35/6) and lying on a couch in a soft light. It was no good, however – my imagination could not get to work on all these hypotheses; I felt both hot and bothered; I tore the robe from me and fled from the displeasure of the saleswoman.

  I had made my plan with Basil some days before, on the telephone. Like all the children he is quite incapable of either reading or writing a letter. I was rather more worried about him than usual; last time he had come to Oxford his clothes had been distinctly on the Teddy side while his hair combed (or rather pulled) over his forehead and worn in a bob at the back gave him a curiously horrible look. This, no doubt, is now the fashion and not in itself a cause for alarm. But when he was alone with me he had spoken about his future, saying that the prospect of the Foreign Service bored him and that he thought he could put his talent for languages to better account in some other career. The sinister words ‘get rich quick’ were uttered. I was anxious to see him again and ask a few questions. It was a blow, therefore, though not a great surprise, when he failed to turn up at the restaurant. I lunched there alone and then went off to find his service flat. The address he had given me, in Islington, turned out to be a pretty old house, come down in the world (soon no doubt to come down altogether). There were five or six bells at the front door with cards attached; one bell had no card but somebody had scribbed Baz on the wall beside it. I pressed it, without much hope. Nobody came. I went on pressing at intervals.

  A sharp lad in Teddy costume was lounging in the street, eyeing me. Presently he came up and said, ‘If it’s old Baz you’re after, he’s gone to Spain.’

  Rain, rain, go to Spain. ‘And when will he be back again?’

  ‘When he comes for the next batch. Old Baz is a travel agent now, didn’t you know? Joined up with his Grandad – some people are lucky in their relations. Baz herds them out to the Costa Brava, goes into hiding while they live it up there and brings back the bodies a week later. Or that’s the general idea – he’s only just started the work.’

  Travel agent – Grandad – what did the child mean? Was not this a line of talk intended to keep me here until a man who was walking up the street should be out of sight? There was nobody else about, this dread Teddy, armed, no doubt, with blades, was clearly after my bag and the £28. I gave him a nervous, idiotic smile. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said, ‘that’s just what I thought. Good-bye and thank you.’

  Upper Street was near and very soon I was in a good old No. 19 sagely ambling towards Piccadilly. This sort of thing always happened when I tried to see Basil. Oh well, one must put oneself in his shoes. Why should he want to spend his Saturday afternoon with a middle-aged mother? What a bore for a young man, on his own for the first time, to have to watch this elderly woman messing about in his room and taking away his suits. All the same, it was not like him to throw one over quite so callously; what could have happened? How could I find out? Meanwhile here I was in London on a Saturday afternoon with nothing to do until tea-time. We were passing the National Gallery, but I felt too dispirited to go in. I decided to walk off my bad temper in the Park.

  Though I have lived in London for longish periods at various times in my life, I have never been a Londoner, so that its associations to me are more literary and historic than personal. Every time I visit it I am saddened by seeing changes for the worse: the growing inelegance; the loss of character; the disappearance of landmarks and their replacement by fiat and faceless glass houses. When I got off my bus at Hyde Park Corner, I looked sadly at the huge hotel where Montdore House used to be, in Park Lane. When first built it had been hailed as a triumph of modern architecture, but although it had only stood there for three years it had already become shabby, the colour of old teeth, and in an odd way out of date. I stumped off towards Kensington Gardens. Somebody had told me that Knightsbridge Barracks were soon t
o go, so I said good-bye to them. I had never looked at them very carefully – I now saw that they were solid and well built in a pretty mixture of brick and stone. No masterpiece, but certainly far better than the glorified garage that would replace them. Wendy’s Wishing Well is horribly altered, I noted, and what has happened to the trees in the Broad Walk? However, Kensington Palace is still there, though probably not for long, and eccentric old men are still sailing boats on the Round Pond, which has not, as yet, been dried and levelled and turned into a car park.

  Presently, drops of rain began to falL It was half past three. Uncle Matthew never minds one being early; I decided to make for his mews at once. If he were in he would be pleased to see me, if not I could wait for him in a little sheltered place where the dust-bins are kept.

  Uncle Matthew had handed over Alconleigh to his only surviving son, Bob Radlett, keeping a small Regency house on the estate for himself. Aunt Sadie was delighted by this exchange; she liked being nearer the village; the new house got sunshine all day and it amused her to do it up. Indeed, newly painted from top to toe and containing what little good furniture there had been at Alconleigh, it had become a much more desirable residence than the other. But hardly had they moved into it than my uncle fell out with Bob: the eternal story of the old king and the young king. Bob had his own ideas about shooting and estate management; Uncle Matthew disagreed violently with every innovation. His son-in-law, Fort William, his brother-in-law, Davey Warbeck, and such neighbours as were on speaking terms with Uncle Matthew had all warned him that this would happen; they had been invited to mind their own business. Now that they had been proved right he refused to admit the real cause of his chagrin and persuaded himself that Bob’s wife, Jennifer, was to blame. He pronounced his intense dislike for her; her vicinity, he said, was not to be endured. Poor Jennifer was quite in offensive, she only wished to please and this was so obvious that even Uncle Matthew, when asked to explain the reason for his hatred, found himself at a loss. ‘Meaningless piece of flesh,’ he would mutter. Undeniable; Jennifer was one of those women whose meaning, if they have one, is only apparent to husband and children, but she certainly did not I deserve such a torrent of hatred.