My father, of course, had what he liked and we used to long for the sausages which he had for breakfast and the cold ham covered in burnt sugar which appeared on shooting days. Once in a while, Mabel used to risk all and let us finish what came out of the dining room, and we danced round the pantry with a delicious end of congealing sausage.
My mother didn’t believe in doctors. Her theory was that if everything was left alone the Good Body would right itself. If we were very ill, a masseuse used to appear. We were the envy of our friends in that we not only weren’t forced, but we were not allowed medicines or, the panacea of all childish ills, Syrup of Figs or, worse still, castor oil.
She wasn’t in the least interested in whether or not we had been to the lavatory. She knew it would happen sooner or later and if it was later, well, never mind. The Good Body would work in the end.
And we were never made to eat food we didn’t want. This was rare in those days and I am always thankful for it. I think it is a refined cruelty to force children to eat what they don’t like or to finish something they don’t want.
Our own curious ideas of food were usually given in to, if rather unwillingly. Bobo lived on little else but mashed potatoes for two years, and I had a passion for bread sauce which I had with every meal, and Bovril spread on bread and butter. My mother tried to put me off this by saying it was made of old horses’ hooves. I suppose it was the equivalent of children nowadays only liking chips and ice cream.
When Jessica had acute appendicitis my mother conceded that her appendix must come out. The operation was done on the nursery table. No one thought it in the least bit odd, having it done at home. We were all a bit jealous of the fuss made of her and there was a great deal of ‘It is unfair’ when the appendix was given to her in a jar full of that stuff that preserves such things.
My mother was before her time in many of her theories. We always had bread made at home out of wholemeal flour. But we longed for, and continually asked for, Shop Bread, though we hardly ever got it.
She and my uncles regularly wrote to the papers on what they called Murdered Food – refined white sugar, white flour from which the wheat germ had been removed, and so much else which is fashionable now, seventy years on. They were considered to be eccentric then.
An instance of her contempt for the scientific was when tuberculin testing for cows came in when I was about eleven. We had Guernsey cows and the butter, milk and cream they produced were wonderfully good. Three cows reacted to the test. My mother was told. ‘Which are they?’ she asked. As always in such cases they were the three best-looking in the herd. ‘What, get rid of those lovely animals? Certainly not! The children can have their milk.’
And have it we did, with no ill effects of any kind, which served to underline her distrust of scientists and doctors.
We didn’t go to school. My father didn’t approve of education for girls. My brother, yes, he went through the conventional programme without question, but the girls, no. He didn’t mind us learning to read and write, perhaps because my mother taught us till we were seven, but the idea of anything more annoyed him very much indeed.
My mother didn’t agree. She hadn’t any money of her own, so she started a chicken farm. Only the cracked and soft-shelled eggs came into the house and my sisters said that the only chickens we had to eat were those which had died. From the small but regular profit, my mother paid for a governess – so, to the schoolroom we had to go. I don’t know if there were Schools Inspectors in those days. If so, would they have got past my father?
I am sorry to say that there was not just one governess, but a succession of the unfortunate women. We were perfectly foul to them and made their lives intolerable, so naturally they left. My sisters had been through a fair few of them before I came on the scene. And we may have been awful to them, but some of them were pretty peculiar too.
Miss Pratt only liked playing cards, so we played Racing Demon from 9 till 10.30, half an hour break, then again till lunch. We became very good indeed at it.
Miss Dell encouraged us in the difficult art of shoplifting – well, stealing really.
None of us ever went in for an exam of any kind. We were spared the torment that children suffer now and I certainly would not have passed any of them.
My best friend during all these years was our old groom, Hooper. Every moment that I was not forced to be doing something else was spent in or around the stables. We understood each other completely, which I suppose was just as well, as he had a terrific temper (which I discovered years after was due to some terrible experiences and shell shock, suffered in the Great War).
I believe people now would think my parents were taking a bit of a risk, allowing a child of ten or so to spend so much time with such an erratic fellow. When Bobo did something which annoyed him, he’d say, ‘I’ll take yer in that wood and DO for yer.’
But he never did.
To me, he was the human end of the horses and ponies I so adored, and the stables were my heaven, as were the woods and the little roads, many of them still untarred, of the few miles round about, which in the days before horse boxes were our boundary.
We went to church of course. My father used to take the collection and tortured us by stopping twice at my aunt and giving her a nudge the second time. She would frown at him and slap his hand, which started us on the peculiar agony of church giggles.
My sisters were all very strong characters and totally different from each other, yet like all families, we still have a strong link which has survived grown-up differences of politics. We were an awful family for nicknames, and all seven children had constantly changing names for one another.
Nancy was a tease on the grand scale, and because she was so much older and so much cleverer we younger ones used to believe her. Nothing was ever dull when she was around.
We were once set a question by my mother of how we would budget if we were to live away from home on a set amount of money – £300 a year, I think it was. We all broke it down most carefully, so much for rent, so much for rates, heat, light, food and clothes. Nancy finished ages before the rest of us. She had just put down – Flowers £299, Everything Else £1.
Her success as a writer was born first of all from her wonderfully accurate observations of my father and our family life, and when she graduated from novels to historical books, their success was due to sheer hard work. Totally uneducated, she applied herself with complete dedication to her subject and set it down as only she could.
The next sister, Pam, was as different from Nancy as you could imagine. Immersed in country life, her animals, her garden and above all her kitchen – she was a wonderful cook – she was the Martha of the family.
My brother Tom was the third child, adored by both parents and all sisters, hardly known to me, as he always seemed to be away at school. Lawyer, musician and soldier, he was killed in Burma at the very end of the war. My parents never recovered from this tragedy.
Diana came fourth, the cleverest of the family and beautiful to look at at all ages.
Then Unity, funny and loyal and brave, bigger than life-size in every way. She died when she was thirty-four.
Jessica was the sixth, the curly-haired favourite of Nanny, and my beloved companion and ally against the others when persecuted. She lived in America and fought fiercely for the cause of the under-dog. Like Nancy, she has a certain reputation as a writer. When she was little, she dreamed of a completely different life to that in which she was brought up. Pocket money and Christmas windfalls from uncles all went into her Running Away Fund. Her sights were set on a bed-sitting room in the East End of London.
A most determined character, she did indeed run away, in 1936, and when we discovered she had gone to fight for the Communists in Spain, all Nanny said was, ‘But she didn’t take any clothes to fight in.’
Nanny was a wonder, really a saint. I never saw her cross or heard her say an unkind word to anyone, and highly tried she must have been. At the same time she di
dn’t mete out any praise, and sat on any signs of vanity which my sisters might have been forgiven for having.
‘Oh Nanny, I can’t go to the party in this AWFUL dress.’
‘It’s all right, darling, no one’s going to look at you.’
This dictum was carried a bit far when Diana, eighteen years old and staggeringly beautiful in her wedding dress, said, ‘Oh Nanny, this hook and eye doesn’t work. It will look awful.’
‘It’s all right, darling, who’s going to look at you?’
The only holidays we ever had (it was the days before everyone had to go away for holidays) were with Nanny’s sister, whose husband had a hardware shop in the main street of Hastings. The wonderful smell of paraffin and polish, the beautiful brushes hanging down from the ceiling, and the freezing cold grey sea, with a ginger biscuit as reward for going in, was lovely in its way, but as we couldn’t take ponies, goats, rats, mice, guinea pigs and dogs, it seemed a waste of a fortnight to me.
I look back on my childhood as a very happy time. It is unfashionable to do so, I know, but the idea of school, so longed for by my sisters, was anathema to me. Spared that horror, I suppose I was conventionally and boringly happy, and thought our upbringing was like everyone else’s.
But, on looking back, I don’t think it was.
Home To Roost
and Other Peckings
To my great-grandchildren born and as yet unborn
Introduction
by Alan Bennett
I knew the minute the call came from Derbyshire that there would be no escape. I had been here before: it was Miss Shepherd all over again.
This might seem unkind, the resemblance between a smelly, deranged and filthily raincoated vagrant and Chatsworth’s fragrant chatelaine emeritus not immediately obvious. But they are the same, both strong-willed single-minded women wanting something out of me: Miss Shepherd a haven for her van, the Dowager Duchess a foreword for her book. ‘Can I bend you to my will?’ sister Nancy used to say. Quite.
Note that I have a difficulty calling her Debo (though nobody else does). My acquaintance with duchesses, dowager or otherwise, is scant and feeling it a bit soon after only one meeting to be on first-name terms I settled for Ms Debo while she in her turn called me Mr Alan. I suppose it’s a kind of nickname and she is well used to that, the Mitfords having so many nicknames for each other one wonders how they could keep track. Her said sister, Nancy, called her 9, a reference to her supposed mental age; the myth of her own stupidity one that has clung to her all her life and which she still expects us to believe.
Famously unlettered, Ms Debo claims to be like her father who only ever read one book (White Fang) and found it so dangerously good he never wanted to read another. And though I feel much the same about opera I don’t believe it of Her Grace. Still it’s ironical that having written a story about Someone who discovers the delights of reading I now find I am writing a foreword in praise of Someone Else who never has.
Among the handful of books the author does admit to having read I am delighted to find Priscilla Napier’s A Late Beginner, a favourite of mine and full of the lost lore and language of nannies. Seeing this recommended, I thought I’d tell her to read Mary Clive’s Day of Reckoning only to turn the page and find that she already had.
Debo’s book ticks so many of my boxes that I’d better start with a mistake (what critics call ‘an egregious error’) so as not to seem sycophantic. The book begins with a lengthy list of the 11th Duke’s offices, appointments and other distinctions ranging from the presidency of Chesterfield and Darley Dale brass bands to being runner-up as White’s Club ‘Shit of the Year’. However, the list omits (entirely understandably to my mind) the duke’s brief sojourn as a governor of Giggleswick School (I think he may have owned the land on which the school is built but that’s by the way). This governorship may be a piece of information his relict wishes to suppress as indeed he only attended one governors’ meeting, afterwards appearing on the platform in (among other things) yellow socks. Now it happened that the previous day a youth in the sixth form suspected of Bohemian tendencies had been bawled out by his housemaster, the proof of his decadence (and a possible portent of future effeminacy) a pair of yellow socks found in his locker. Following the duke’s appearance on the platform, whatever penalties had been imposed were briskly rescinded so there was one boy at least who had cause to bless the name of Cavendish.
Not having read many books has its drawbacks, though it might appal Debo to know that she thereby fulfils one of W. H. Auden’s requirements for a budding writer, namely knowing a few books inside out. He would also approve of her fondness for lists and she of his fascination with lead mining and the geology of Derbyshire.
It’s a county she revels in. Saddled with her irrepressible Mitford voice she enjoys Derbyshire for its dialect, instancing ‘starved’ which in Derbyshire means cold. This usage is not confined to Derbyshire, as my mother, who was originally from Halifax, was fond of it. She took it further and applied it to the weather, which she’d describe as ‘starvaceous’. ‘Mash the tea’ is another Derbyshire expression that’s shared with Leeds, and it’s a handy one too. ‘Make the tea’ is pretty general and might mean ‘Pour it out’. ‘Mash the tea’ is more precise, meaning ‘Put the tea in the pot’. So ‘The tea’s mashed’ means it’s just waiting to be poured.
This is a lady who will have seen plenty of teas in her time, teas on terraces, teas in tents, teas with farmers, teas with tenants. She’s someone who knows about gooseberries and can discriminate between parsnips. She’s on first name terms with her hens, up to the minute on sheep, and pigs, I’m sure, eat out of her hand (which incidentally requires nerve).
To my surprise she’s quite charitable about flower arranging, a hobby in my experience that’s prone to turn its votaries into hell-hags. ‘If you think squash is a competitive activity,’ says one of my characters, ‘try flower arrangement.’
Though I don’t know why I should think it’s just flower arrangement: rhubarb growing may be equally cut-throat and I’m sure there’s no love lost over leeks and marrows. This is a world Debo has seen much more of than me, having trailed round more than her share of village fêtes and local shows with their ancient categories: ‘Three tarts on a plate’, ‘An edible necklace’, or (a favourite, this) ‘A garden on a tray’, the pond invariably represented by a bit of silver paper.
But there are worlds elsewhere and, surprisingly, one of the most interesting pieces is an essay on tiaras which is not a topic to which I’ve ever given much thought: I didn’t even know that diamonds could be dirty. It’s a lovely essay, the kind of vignette you might well have found in the old New Yorker. Debo remembers once having to don the family diamonds, tiara, necklace, stomacher and all, in order to play the lead in the local WI’s The Oldest Miss World in the World (‘My hobbies are hens and world peace’). One just wonders whether she told the insurers.
Both of us having been despatched round provincial book-shops, we share memories of that shaming humiliation of the writer’s life, the book-signing.
Writer (pen poised): To whom shall I put it?
Reader (brightly smiling): Me!
Bolder and more pedantic than I’ve ever dared to be, Debo baulks at signing a book ‘To Granny’ when it’s not her granny, a detail I never let trouble me at all. But I agree with her that anyone who skips a dedication and just wants a signature almost deserves a kiss besides.
Faced with a queue, the staff of the bookshop can get quite bossy (‘Her Grace will not be signing bus-tickets’). I’m so anxious to be liked I’m happy to sign bus-tickets and even betting slips if it helps. On one occasion a young man, not having bought the book or anything else, turned round and told me to sign the back of his neck. Which I did. When he next washed I don’t like to think.
Deborah Devonshire is not someone to whom one can say, ‘Joking apart…’ Joking never is apart: with her it’s of the essence, even at the most serious and indeed saddest moments
. At the heart of this collection are three pieces of a different order and all remarkable: diaries of the inauguration of President Kennedy in 1961, of his funeral two years later and an account of the ‘Treasure Houses of Britain’ exhibition in Washington in 1985.
JFK was a family friend not because famous people know other famous people but through his sister Kathleen (Kick) Kennedy’s marriage to Andrew Devonshire’s brother, Billy, who was shortly afterwards killed in Belgium. A few years later Kathleen herself died in a plane crash and is buried at Edensor on the edge of Chatsworth Park. Jack Kennedy was therefore a friend of the family in good times and bad and this brought an invitation to his inauguration as president in January 1961. Reluctant to go (the call of the moors) DD kept a diary of the proceedings, which in their cheerful chaos seem more like India than any English ceremonial.
At one point the newly elected president calls her over to stand beside him while the parade goes by…the president having a cup of coffee and a biscuit in gaps between contingents of the three-hour procession. At one point one of the marching troops breaks ranks to take a snap of the president on the podium. Trooping the Colour it certainly wasn’t.
What’s winning is the fun she gets out of it, and a component of the fun she gets out of life is that she seems to have no sense of entitlement. Standing next to the newly inaugurated JFK she thinks of it as an enormous treat and when later he climbs over seven rows of chairs just to have a word, though frozen to the marrow she is in total heaven.
That she is a natural diarist is plain from the oddities that catch her eye, the piece ending as she drifts off to sleep in the British Embassy while outside in the bedroom corridor her husband whispers to the ambassador Sir Harold Caccia the secrets Prime Minister Macmillan had entrusted him to bring over.
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