Nick Imrie’s Reviews > Modern Classics the Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh > Status Update

One is sadder when pathetic people die who had wretched lives. I minded far more about Bobo than about Tom though of course I miss her less.

Bobo was Nancy's sister who botched her suicide; Tom her brother who died in the war.

I was confident they both enjoyed my visit. I talked loud & long & they laughed like anything. Now I find I bored them. Well of course everyone is a bore to someone. One recognizes that. But it is a ghastly thing if one loses the consciousness of being a bore. You do see it mean I can never go out again.

Poor old Waugh is more and more becoming my sentiment.

The story of Momo is heartrending. Five weeks ago her secretary said it will be over in a few days. She is in tortures. The whole thing is a lesson never to get in the power of doctors - but for them she would have died 6 months ago at least. They drove her mad with the treatment & have kept her hanging on, half drugged & in pain, all the summer.

Still relevant to debates around medicine now.

My daughter Teresa is squat, pasty-faced, slatternly with a most dis-agreeable voice - but it is true she talks quite brightly. Margaret remains the star of my existence. I took her to stay at Lady Pam's ornamental villa but she was not in good form as I had struck her the evening before so she sulked all the week-end.
Waugh displaying all the virtues of the RC patriarch. 😂

Honks has had a tooth out and gone to Loelia. Ann telephoned to Loelia to say she would arrive in a weakened state and would need some nourishing broth. Loelia replied: 'I have sent my cook on a holiday. I made it quite clear there would be no meals.'
I keep sending notes to the chef 'Don't put cornflour in the sauce' etc. Now he comes up and glowers at me in his white hat from behind a screen in the dining room.

Prod lives on a small yatch, tied up at Golfe Juan. He looks exactly like some ancient pirate - bone thin, pitch black, white hair & beard & dressed in literal rags. He has a villainous Spaniard who does the chores - when, on one occaison this feelow displeased Prod he ran up a signal 'Mutiny on board'. However nobody in the modern world, except Prod, can read these signals any more so nobody came to the rescue.

No one knows a thing about the classes except those immediately above & below his own. Everyone was convinced that there was a great impassible line between 'gentlemen' and 'the lower classes' and everyone drew that line immediately below his own feet. 'You're no lady' was the traditional battle cry between two drunken charwomen scratching out each other's eyes in a pub.

Getting into the great U non-U debate!

I think Mauriac is on the right lines but he has a subconscious snobbery (Frog sense) which prevents him telling the truth - that the painting of this century is not just a different species of the same genus as, say, Botticellli & Veronese. The cubists etc are just anti-painters. They are only bought by jews and lunatics.

An impressive jumble of prejudices from Waugh here.

Now for one or two criticisms. The Captain doesn't ring true to me. The harem is oriental and can only be maintained by flabby dependent men. Not brisk men of action.

I have felt so very feeble in recent weeks that at last I called in a doctor who took my blood-pressure & pronounced it the lowest ever recorded - in fact the pressure of a 6 months foetus. In an access of sudden hope I said: 'Does that mean I shall die quite soon?' 'No. It means you will live forever in deeper and deeper melancholy.'

Poor old Evelyn!