A mixed blessing

The Blessing, Nancy Mitford

I was lucky enough to find a first edition of this some years ago - still with its original Cecil Beaton-designed cover - on the "Old & Interesting" shelves at Half Price Books.  Why did it take me so long to read it?  Partly I think because it's a story of an Englishwoman who marries a Frenchman in the midst of World War II, bears him a son, and then goes to live with him in France, where complications ensure.  And I was remembering the story of Linda, in The Pursuit of Love, who meets a Frenchman and bears him a son in the midst of World War II, but doesn't get to live in Paris afterwards; and of course Nancy Mitford's long relationship in Paris with her "Colonel," Gaston Palewski, which feels such a sad one in the end.  But this is a very different story, and now that I've finally read it, it's my new favorite Mitford book.

This is the story of Grace Allingham, who one day receives an impetuous and demanding visitor, a "tall, dark and elegant" officer in the French Air Force.  He is just back from the Middle East, where he met Grace's fiancé Hughie Palgrave.  On the spot he invites her out to dinner, and she accepts without even knowing his name, which she learns later is Charles-Edouard de Valhubert. A month later they are married, in a registry office.  Charles-Edouard goes back to the war, leaving Grace at her father's country place, where she soon learns she is pregnant.  After the birth of the baby, a black-eyed child named Sigismond, the "blessing" of the title, she spends the next seven years in the country, seeing Charles-Edouard only once in all that time.  Then he telephones one day to say he is England, comes down to Bunbury, and announces that they are all going to France the next day.

All this takes place in the first three chapters.  Much of the rest of the book is the story of Grace's adjustment to France, first at the family's country estate in Provence, and then later in Paris, where things become more difficult.  Grace also has to adjust to a different kind of marriage than she expected, one with a husband who, while he loves her, cannot sustain life with just one woman.  Though she honestly believed herself to be free from jealousy, she quickly has that belief tested and tried, under the scrutiny of Parisian society.  Sigismond comes to realize the advantages that fall to the child of divided parents, and in a rather cold-blooded campaign, this little boy of seven does everything he can to keep his parents apart.  At one point, while Grace and Sigi are staying in England, Hughie takes them to visit his nephew at Eton, with an eye to pulling some strings to get Sigi a place.  It is described as a cold dank Dickensian place with iron bedsteads and short rations, and by the end I was hoping that "the blessing" would be sent there for a good long term.

I feel the same kind of difficulty in talking about Nancy Mitford's books as I do P.G. Wodehouse's or Elizabeth von Arnim's.  The plot is the least of their stories, but it's almost impossible to capture the charm of them, so I fall back on details of plot and character. 

I noticed at least two "Mitfordisms" in the book that delighted me.  At one point, Grace asks her old Nanny, now caring for Sigi, "Do you admit," a phrase that pops up constantly in the letters between the Mitford sisters (the editor, Charlotte Mosley, says that "Deborah was instigator of the frequent plea...").  There is also a mention of Heywood Hill's bookshop in London, where Nancy worked during the war.  Alex at Thinking in Fragments recently reviewed The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street, a book of the letters between Nancy and Heywood Hill, and I was lucky enough to come across a copy (also at Half Price Books).  I'm also guessing that the Allinghams' country estate is named for Oscar Wilde's Bunbury.  He is the great hero of Linda and Fanny in The Pursuit of Love, after all, though Uncle Matthew considers him such a sewer.

I still have Don't Tell Alfred on the TBR stacks, so I can look forward to another trip to Paris with Nancy Mitford.

Christmas at Compton Bobbin

Christmas Pudding, Nancy Mitford

I have been saving this book for the holidays, though I knew with Nancy Mitford it wouldn't be a real "Christmas" book.  It was a perfect fit, a light and funny antidote to holiday stress, laced with her trademark cynicism.  As always with her books, I felt like I was missing some of the private jokes, but not enough to interrupt the fun.

The Prologue introduces us, at "Four o'clock on the First of November. A dark and foggy day," to "Sixteen characters in search of an author."  One of these, Paul Fotheringay, has just published his first novel, Crazy Capers, a searing portrait of a young man's tragic struggle with the mysteries of life.  The good news is that the book has become a runaway best-seller.  The bad news is that everyone considers it the comic masterpiece of the year.  Paul, his soul ravaged by this barbarity, resolves to write a serious book that must compel the world's respect.  He settles on literary biography as his genre, and Lady Maria Bobbin, a 19th century poet, as his subject.  Initially refused access to Lady Maria's papers, housed at the ancestral home of Compton Bobbin in Gloucestershire, he enlists the help of his friend Amabelle Fortescue.  She has taken a house near Compton Bobbin for several months, and she knows the Bobbin family.  She secures Paul a position as a holiday tutor to the heir, the frighteningly precocious Sir Roderick (Bobby) Bobbin, currently at Eton.  Amabelle herself is taking a party to the house she has leased, Mulberrie Farm.

Mitford has great fun with Mulberrie Farm, which has been renovated into an "olde worlde" showpiece, and with Bobby's mother Lady Bobbin, obsessed with hunting and the threat of socialism.  Lady Bobbin is also devoted to the proper celebration of Christmas in the true "Merrie Englande" style, gathering the far-flung Bobbin family to the old family home for the feast.  Of the two, I think I'd prefer to spend Christmas with Amabelle at Mulberrie Farm. 

At Compton Bobbin, Paul finds fourteen volumes of Lady Maria's journals, a wealth of resources for his biography.  Mitford includes some extensive quotes from the diaries, which sound amazingly like Queen Victoria's, down to the death of Lady Maria's husband Sir Josiah.  Bobby, who prefers to spend his holiday in gossip and bridge with Amabelle and her friends, is more than happy to leave Paul to his research.  But Paul is somewhat distracted from his poetess by Bobby's lovely sister Philadelphia.  He has a rival in the rich and eligible (but ponderous and prosing) Marquis of Lewes.  Philadelphia, marooned in the country with her trying mother and bored to distraction, ready to fall in love with the first man who offers her a more exciting life, here has two.  Another romance is also blooming, in a quieter way - one that shocks the circle of friends.  The discussion of marriage, of love and of more practical motives, makes up a major theme of the book.  I'm not sure I agree with Philadelphia's final choice, but I do see why she makes it.  I'd love to know how it works out in the end for her.

This was a fun, diverting read, with its sixteen amusing characters, and I really enjoyed it.