Shortly after it was published in 2004 I was given Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1907 – 1964 edited by his son Nigel.
I must have dipped into them at the time but now I’m enjoying reading it cover to cover. Harold was born in Teheran in 1886, where his father was serving in the Foreign Office. After Wellington and Balliol, Harold too joined the Diplomatic Service in 1909. An interesting footnote to history is omitted from the book. On 4th August 1914 he handed Britain’s declaration of war to the German ambassador in London, Prince Max von Lichnowsky. Did he not think it worth recording in his diary or did Nigel not think it worthy of inclusion? Much material must have been omitted in a single volume covering fifty-six years. Perhaps the three volumes of diaries that Nigel published in the 1960s did include the event?
Like other diarists and, perhaps, bloggers he is not always candid. In 1917 he contracted VD and confessed as much to his wife (Vita Sackville-West) but let’s move on to more seemly matters. The Paris Peace Conference entries are fascinating and Harold makes time to dine at the Ritz with Marcel Proust. It is this juxtaposition of his diplomatic career and his social and family life that make it such an interesting and absorbing read, the mood ever-shifting. I like his letter to nine-year-old Nigel sent from Teheran in 1926.
I do hope you won’t make Mummy nervous by being too wild. Of course men must work and women use weep, but all the same I do hope that you will remember that Mummy is a frightful coward and does fuss dreadfully about you. It is a good rule always to ask before you do anything awfully dangerous. Thus if you say “Mummy, may I try and walk on the roof of the green-house on my stilts?”, she will probably say, “Of course, darling”, since she is not in any way a narrow-minded woman. And if you say, “Mummy, may I light a little fire in my bed?”, she will again say, “Certainly, Niggs”. It is only that she likes being asked about these things beforehand.
The 3 volume set, published in 1966, ’67 and ’68, covered the years 1930-39, 1939-45 and 1945-62. In his introduction to the first volume Nigel N explains that HN began to keep a regular diary from when he resigned from the Foreign Service in 1929, and that there were no earlier diaries apart from that which he kept in 1919 during the Paris Peace Conference (he later edited this material for publication in ‘Peacemaking’, published in 1933).
Nicolson, like his wife, was a misanthropic snob, perpetually obsessed with his own status. When he failed to obtain a much desired peerage from Clement Attlee he switched to Labour thinking he might gain one there instead. He lost his gamble, and the seat at Croydon in the next election.
Vita said she only wanted Harold to get a peerage so that the boys could be Hon. In the end they had to make do with a mere Knighthood.