Nancy Spain has been having a new lease of life recently, with the re-issue of her detective novels. To a certain generation, she is also remembered as a regular on radio and TV panel shows. For me, I first came across her as a young journalist mentioned in Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne – and I knew that she talked about it in her 1956 autobiography, the eccentrically titled Why I’m Not A Millionaire.
The conceit of the title is that she explains how she has got to where she is – and why that path hasn’t led to untold riches. Along the way she covers her time at Roedean (a posh girls’ school), activities in war service, her big break in radio – adapting a novel by Winifred Watson, of all things, though not Miss Pettigrew – and her much-feted whirl through journalism, novel-writing, and celebrity. It’s such a delightfully insouciant and fun book which manages to bottle why she was so popular with public and stars alike.
We race through childhood rather quickly, though not without a few well-aimed barbs at Roedean and the type of woman who never moves on from her Roedean days. Quickly, we are thrown into her joyful 20s – moving with a wealthier crowd, but nobody appearing to give anything too much serious thought. Spain writes with exactly the right level of self-mockery, so you don’t dislike her younger self but also don’t particularly respect or envy her. Her abiding characteristic throughout the book could be described as ‘giving it a go’, and she doesn’t let experience, ability, or
All the West Hartlepool girls had a lot of money. They lived in big, prosperous houses with a full quota of maids cavorting in the back premises. They drank burgundy and fizzy lemonade for lunch and I was mad about them all. I thought they were a Very Fast Set Indeed. Considering that I was all the time mooning over Paddy or Michael they were very nice to me.
Then one day I ran out of money and couldn’t afford to pay for my round of gins-and-tonics. Bin pointed out in words of one kindly syllable how I mustn’t allow this to happen again. I had already spent the £50 Father had given me on rushing about to Liverpool and so on. (And my share of the petrol.) What was I to do?
Basically, she describes her life like we imagine the Mitford sisters lived (albeit a little earlier). She writes with the same exuberant flippancy of Nancy Mitford. It’s so fun – I wondered if it might get wearing over this number of pages, but I never stopped enjoying it. She’ll start a paragraph with something like ‘It was about this time I discovered all my savings had been swallowed up and I was in an advanced stage of insolvency.’ That might irritate someone who likes their fictional and non-fictional heroines to be sensible and wise, but I am not that person. This isn’t the book to read for soul-searching, but it is a constant delight.
Spain’s multi-faceted rise through the entertainment world is interrupted by World War Two, and it’s the nearest we get to genuine pathos – when she describes some of the men she knew and lost. But mostly she takes the opportunity to be very funny about her experiences in the W.R.N.S – exploring the well-meaning chaos behind the scenes, and her own comic incompetency in the midst of it.
The Recruiting Department was very grand, seeing as how it was all the time in contact with the general public. Recruiting Officers were so terribly smart to look at that it hurt: some of them wore almost royal blue uniform monkey jackets and all of them wore black satin ties bought at Hope Brothers. I joined a circus of Third Officers whose business it was to whip around the London medical boards, making brief notes on the character and personality of candidates in the teeny weeny space provided on the interview form. People who engrave the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin in their spare time might well take lessons from a W.R.N.S. Recruiting Officer. Contrary to general belief, however, all successful candidates for the Service were not (a) titled or (b) the Last First Sea Lord’s second cousin once removed.
Spain’s experiences in the W.R.N.S. were turned into his first book, a memoir (I haven’t read) called Thank You, Nelson. She details its chequered path to publication – and then its unexpected success. A copy was sent to A.A. Milne by some well-meaning publicist, and apparently he was livid at the idea of a woman writing a book about war – then read it, and considered it marvellous. His review in the Sunday Times was apparently responsible for Thank You, Nelson selling out its first and second editions more or less overnight. As Spain writes, “I knew the book must be a success when the Chief Officer Administration at W.R.N.S. Headquarters said, ‘The book was very disappointing after the review.'”
Spain wrote to thank Milne for his review and, in turn, he wrote to invite her to visit him at their home in Sussex. And thus we get the handful of pages which first led me to the book – and how I delighted in them. Not least because Spain is unaffectedly admiring of Milne. Her tone is often so light and unserious that her moments of genuine, unadulterated admiration are particularly noticeable. How I loved this paragraph, and how perfectly it describes any truly perfect, short period of time:
He said a lot more, that darling man, but I have forgotten the details. It has fused, shimmering into the golden light of that magic afternoon in the sun.
Once Spain was established as a successful writer, her adventures still seem surprisingly chaotic – jumping between different newspapers and periodicals, as well as different genres in her own books – the one after Thank You, Nelson was a biography of Mrs Beeton – always (at least in her depiction) moments away from some sort of literary or pecuniary crisis. A lot of 21st-century social media is taken up with self-deprecating humour, pretending that our lives and careers are forever on the point of collapse – and it’s a brand of humour I enjoy. It’s also a brand a humour that we see throughout humorous British writers of the early- and mid-20th centuries – particularly women. Think a more exuberant E.M. Delafield.
Something I particularly appreciated about Nancy Spain’s autobiography is that she is not ashamed to name drop. If you’re like me, you want the celebrity gossip – particularly about the authors and actors of the period. Many memoirists coyly pretend they never meet the great and the good, or treat them simply as everyday friends. Spain is canny enough to know her audience are starstruck by them, and treats each person as the Name they are. And she is delightfully pithy about some of them, without letting herself off the hook – here she is on Eudora Welty:
Eudora Welty still takes high marks as a Remarkable Author. She is very tall, pale, and slender, and she comes from Jackson, Mississippi, in the deep, deep South of North America. She has hands like graceful fish. Her books are always exclusively about those deep, deep parts and I cannot understand one single solitary word of them. In those days that pleased and impressed my very much. I longed to write a book that no one could understand. (Alas, when people read my books they understand me only too well.)
I started the dropped names. Here is an incomplete list of the authors, actors, and others that she writes about – just the ones she spends time with, not including those she relates about at second hand: Noel Coward, Osbert Sitwell, Clemence Dane, Barbara Beauchamp, Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Beverley Nichols, Wolf Mankowitz, Monica Dickens, Dorothy Parker, Cynthia Asquith, Mae West, Vivien Leigh, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Clark Gable, Henry Green, Francis Wyndham, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Joyce Cary, Angus Wilson, Noel Langley, Nancy Mitford, Colette, Christian Dior, Joyce Grenfell and Winifred Atwell. I daresay Spain was discreet, but she gives a wonderful sense of indiscretion – or at least a lack of artifice.
The only really heartrending moment is the final line of the book – which is this:
Whatever the next forty years turn out to be, I am sure of one thing. They couldn’t possibly be more fun than the forty years that have gone before: whether I manage to become a millionaire or not.
When Why I’m Not A Millionaire was published, Nancy Spain was just under 40. She wouldn’t get another forty years – she would, in fact, die in a plane crash at the age of 46. What a lot of life she managed to pack into those few short decades – and what a joyful record of it. Every moment of this autobiography is a breath of fresh air, and I thoroughly recommend you spend the time with her.
