The weekly repeated prayers were not crystal-clear to a seven-year-old. What did ‘dissembleth’, ‘cloke,’ ‘unfeignedly’ and ‘abhor’ mean? And what on earth was the Virgin’s womb? ‘His servant David’ was Farve – though it was difficult to imagine him as anyone’s servant unless it was Lieutenant General Lord Methuen’s; ‘We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep’ brought on Decca’s grimaces reserved for Miranda; ‘And thou, child,’ was Mrs Ham speaking. It was a language that seeped into my subconscious and I cannot bear to hear the new version. Prayers seemed interminable and held up the longed-for freedom when I could be out of doors again. Fidgeting about, I licked the pew beneath my face (the taste of the polish is with me now). I thought everybody did this, but apparently not. Years later I buttonholed a few friends and they vehemently denied such a disgusting habit. I then asked my old friend, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘Did you lick the pews?’ ‘Yes, of course,’ he said without hesitation, his understanding and memory of childhood undimmed.
Farve took the collection and tortured us by stopping twice in front of Aunt Iris, his penniless sister, nudging her the second time round. She used to frown and slap his hand which started us on the peculiar agony of church giggles. Decorating the church for Easter was our job. I never got further than primroses regimented along the window sills in potted-meat jars. If Easter was late, I included a few cowslips (picking these offerings for Our Maker is illegal now). None of us was much good at decorating but at least we tried. We regularly signed the visitors’ book ‘Greta Garbo’ and ‘Maurice Chevalier’. We must have been an almighty nuisance to those in charge.
The poultry farm at Swinbrook was Muv’s one chance of running a profitable business. The man who looked after it was called, unbelievably, Mr Lay. The hen’s food smelt delicious: warm mash in the mornings made of sharps, middlings and household scraps; wheat and maize in the afternoons. I too kept hens for commercial reasons and sold the eggs to Muv to bolster my pocket money. In Honnish, ‘hon’ meant ‘hen’ and had nothing to do with ‘Honourable’, as some ignoramuses later thought. (As the children of a baron ‘The Hon.’ was affixed to our names.) The Honnish Hons were Decca and me; the Horrible Counter Hons were Nancy, Tom and Diana. The Hons’ meeting place was the linen cupboard, private and warm. We spent hours sitting on the slatted shelves writing our rules, enlarging Honnish vocabulary and eating Cadbury’s cooking chocolate from its blue wrapper, wheedled out of Mrs Stobie in the kitchen. Mrs Stobie was a wonderful cook but, like so many of her profession, prone to moods. We knew by the loudness of the banging of pots and pans how she was feeling and kept out of her way when the decibels rose.
Decca and I were by then in the schoolroom where more serious lessons had succeeded my mother’s grounding in reading, writing and sums. I am sorry to say there was not just one governess but a succession of them, and my sisters had already been through a fair few by the time we came on the scene. We were perfectly foul to them and made their lives intolerable, so naturally they left. But awful as we were, some of them were pretty peculiar too and I do not know how they thought they could teach. The usual subjects were a dead loss but one of the governesses, Miss Dell, encouraged us in the difficult art of shoplifting – stealing really. My mother found out (the shopkeepers did not, thank goodness) and Miss Dell disappeared.
Decca and I spent a lot of time answering advertisements and sending off for free samples, anything from shampoo and deodorant to milk powder for babies. Decca let her imagination rip when describing the maladies that affected her non-existent babies and the hopes she held out for the various patented foods and remedies. This made the arrival of the postman, Mr Beckinsale, the highlight of an otherwise dull day. Mr Beck, his waterproof canvas bag slung over one arm, pushed his heavy bicycle up the hill to Swinbrook House. He went straight to the pantry to drink tea and talk to Mabel, while Decca and I hovered until Mabel sorted the post and a little parcel addressed to ‘Mrs Jessica Mitford’ appeared (the idea of an unmarried mother was unthinkable). This meant milk powder.
Decca also wrote to the agony aunts of women’s magazines with wildly improbable tales, or asking for advice on imagined predicaments. To her delight these were sometimes published. ‘Dear Mag, I have a little plum-coloured silk dress which has gone under the arms, the rest of this garment is fine and I am reluctant to throw it away. Please advise. Worried, Swinbrook House, Burford, Oxon.’ I often wondered if the recipients of these requests ever guessed that they were from an under-employed eleven-year-old, practising the style which was one day to make her fortune.
The first big change in our everyday lives came in September 1929 when Unity went to boarding school. It had been her dream to join our Mitford and Farrer cousins at St Margaret’s, Bushey, a church school in Hertfordshire. As she was so naughty with the governesses (she used to pick up poor Miss Dell, who was rather small, and put her on the sideboard) my parents gave in. She loved the school but her difficult characteristics came to the fore and she was what Nanny would have called ‘her own worst enemy’, longing to be part of school life but incapable of accepting its rules. To Unity’s surprise and sorrow, she was sacked after just over a year. The reason, so she said, was that when reciting ‘A garden is a love-some thing, God wot’ she added the word ‘rot’, but I imagine she also caused general unrest in her class and that the other girls looked on her rebelliousness with some awe. Decca and I were thrilled at the idea of her being expelled but my mother always said, ‘No, children, she was asked to leave’, as though it was quite different.
Unity going away to school brought rumblings of discontent from Decca, who was just twelve and longed to go to boarding school herself. She became moody and critical, no longer the comical, charming little girl she had been. She kicked against anything conventional and eventually took up the politics of malcontents. Although I had her to myself in term time, I was no good as a confidante as I could not understand, nor had I sympathy for, her longing to escape from home. I was pleased with life and the idea of boarding school was anathema. She opened a ‘Running Away’ bank account with her pocket money and the Christmas envelopes from aunts and uncles. It was treated as a joke by the rest of us, but to her it was deadly serious.
My older sisters never stopped saying how much they disliked Swinbrook – Nancy called it ‘Swinebrook’ or ‘The Buildings’ – and this must have been depressing for Farve. Perhaps because I was completely happy there, he was especially indulgent to me when a new entertainment to enliven Sunday afternoons opened in Oxford: the grand ice-skating rink in the Botley Road. Farve and his younger brother, Uncle Jack, were keen on the Austrian instructresses, known as the Ice Maidens, and they were part of the attraction.
Muv and Farve were already proficient skaters; waltzing and elementary figure skating came easily to them, as they did to me. The afternoons on the ice were sheer joy. I had learnt to skate on a family holiday in Pontresina in 1930. We went over to the Suvretta House Hotel in St Moritz and I found an unlikely partner in the Conservative statesman Sir Samuel Hoare. We skated together and even gave a little show one afternoon. Back at the Oxford rink, I improved quickly and ‘they’ (I suppose the 1930s versions of talent spotters) asked Muv if I could be trained for the national junior team. She refused, realizing no doubt that it would be a full-time job. I did not know of this till much later and was sorry not to have had the chance of excelling at something at last.
Our old groom Hooper was my best friend during the Swinbrook years and for a long time afterwards. He had worked for Grandfather Redesdale at Batsford before the war and came back to the family immediately after the Armistice. Farve was aware that he suffered from shellshock after his terrible experiences in the trenches, and that his temper could explode without warning. When Unity’s lack of interest in her horse irritated Hooper or when she made some clumsy gesture that frightened it, he would shout, ‘I’ll take yer in that wood and do for yer!’ But he never did. In spite of these outbursts, Muv and
Farve trusted him. Ponies and hunting were my passions and it was thanks to Hooper that I was able to enjoy them. As soon as I could escape from lessons I was in the stables watching and learning the daily routine. Hooper was the first of several professionals, whose lives were devoted to country and sport, with whom I felt entirely at home and whose companionship I valued.
One of Hooper’s jobs was to drive our horse-drawn float laden with egg boxes twice a week from my mother’s chicken farm to the station at Shipton-under-Wychwood to catch the London train. I went with him and was sometimes allowed to drive. The eggs were packed in wooden boxes that held several trays lined with woolly brown felt, which was all very well until an egg broke. The boxes were padlocked and were treated with respect by the porters, who would have the empties ready for us to take home on the return journey. They had huge labels attached, one addressed to ‘Lady Jean Bertie’ and the other to ‘The Marlborough Club’. I never met Lady Jean Bertie and, of course, never went to the Marlborough Club, but those names are engraved on my memory.
One of these journeys took place on 11 November 1927, nine years after the end of the First World War when memories of that terrible conflict were still vivid. Everyone observed the two-minute silence on Armistice Day. Hooper took out his watch and exactly at 11 a.m. brought the cart to a halt, removed his cap and got down to hold the horse’s head. No sooner had he done so than the old mare swayed and fell dead. I suppose she had a heart attack. She had been brought out of the Army at the end of the war, having seen service in France. Her death during the silence made a terrific impression on all us children and Hooper wept for her.
Sunday afternoons meant skating and Saturdays meant hunting. Nothing in this world can touch the latter for excitement: the huntsman’s horn, the shiver of the horse that presages something thrilling, the whimper of the first hound to find a fox and the crashing noise when the whole pack joins in – it has been described ad infinitum, but nothing comes up to the real thing. My father refused to pay more than £35 for a pony but I was lucky to get one of the best for that. Doughnut was everything to me. We had no horse box so I rode to meets, anything up to eight miles away. Coming home on the Stow–Burford road in horizontal sleet (there was nowhere to shelter) I was sometimes joined by Tony Hardcastle, son of the man who had bought Asthall from my father. When the weather was at its worst and we were soaked through and freezing, he would say that he would come back and haunt the road when he was dead. Driving to Swinbrook now, I look for him as we pass the Merrymouth Inn, but he eludes me.
I was always in love with one or other of the followers of the Heythrop. When I was nine Dermot Daley, who wore a swallowtailed pink coat out hunting, was the particular attraction and I came home full of tales about him. Nancy tortured me by saying that she had heard that he was head over heels in love with M., a dreary girl who lived near Swinbrook. Nancy was too clever for words and knew exactly how to pick on what I would mind most.
It was at about this time that Nancy fell in love for the first time. Her affair with Hamish St Clair Erskine was never going to lead to marriage but it simmered on – half-heartedly on his side, wholeheartedly on hers – for several years. My parents could not bear him, especially Farve who realized that he was homosexual. Hamish was also a Roman Catholic, had no proper job and was soon banned from the house. Nancy’s friends included many who were decidedly effeminate and they were usually disliked by Farve. Among them was Mark Ogilvie Grant. Teetering down to breakfast one morning at the dreaded hour of 8 a.m., he was greeted by my father who made a grand gesture of taking the lid off a sizzling dish, ‘Brains for breakfast, Mark, PIG’S THINKERS.’ (Familiarity eventually made Farve quite fond of Mark.)
There were several other young men, however, whom Farve could not help liking in spite of his prejudice, and he excused their lack of interest in field sports with, ‘Well, I suppose he is a literary cove.’ Peter Watson, a gentle, innocuous fellow, was one of these. The only telephone at Swinbrook was in Farve’s business room and it was his property, not to be used lightly for a chat with a friend and certainly not without Farve’s formal consent. If he thought a daughter was taking too long over some arrangement, he cut her short with, ‘Put the telephone down, you’re paralysing the line.’ Peter Watson rang up one day and asked to speak to Nancy. Farve answered the telephone and, without moving the mouthpiece, shouted into the hall, ‘Nancy, that hog Watson wants to speak to you.’ Poor Peter was Hog from then on.
On another occasion Nancy’s friend Mary Milnes-Gaskell came to lunch with her nails painted a dashing blood-red (the first time I had seen newly fashionable nail varnish). My father looked at her. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said, deadly serious. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘I am so sorry to see you have been in a bus accident.’ As I got older and we moved to smaller houses, I was quite pleased that we did not have room for guests because you never knew what my father would say to make them feel uncomfortable.
By the time she was sixteen Diana longed to be grown up and leave home. She was sent to learn French in Paris where she met the painter Paul César Helleu, a friend of Grandfather Bowles, who had made several portraits of my mother and became an immediate admirer of Diana, the first of many to sit at her feet. Two years later, in 1929, Diana married Bryan Guinness, heir to a brewing fortune. Decca and I missed being bridesmaids because we had whooping cough, but after their marriage we often went to stay with them at beautiful Biddesden House, near Andover. Diana immediately made friends with her neighbours: Robert Byron, a contemporary of Bryan at Oxford, came over from Savernake Forest, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington at Ham Spray adored her, as did John Betjeman, Henry and Pansy Lamb, Augustus John’s daughter Poppet and her younger sister, Vivian, whom I admired as a rider. All these writers, painters and poets were figures of fascination to Decca and me. One of them, Harold Acton, did something that horrified me. He took a log out into the snow, pretended it was a baby and murdered it. So realistic was his performance that the scene haunted me for years.
The enigmatic Carrington fascinated all who knew her and I too fell under her spell. She gave me some fan-tail pigeons which I treasured. I was interested in botany at the time, with the help of Bentham and Hooker’s books on plant classification. One of the volumes described wild flowers in scientific language far beyond my ken, but a thinner one had four line-drawings to a page with every known native variety of flower, tree, grass, fern and sedge in the British Isles. I coloured these in as and when I found them, recording the date and place. Carrington was quite taken with this and I looked on it as a bond between us. She wrote to Lytton saying I had won her by my ‘high spirits and charm’. It was certainly mutual and I was sad when, unable to face life after Lytton died, she borrowed a gun from Bryan, ostensibly to hunt rabbits in the garden at Ham Spray, and shot herself. Her death was a terrible loss for Diana who had become very fond of her.
Tom left Eton in 1927 and decided to study music and see something of Europe rather than go to an English university. He travelled to Italy and Spain, and to Austria, where a series of lucky chances took him to Schloss Bernstein in the Burgenland. The castle had been in Hungary until the end of the First World War when it became part of Austria. It was owned by a Hungarian, János Almásy, who became a friend of Tom and had him to stay for several months as a paying guest.
On his return to England in 1929, Tom settled in London to read for the Bar. His friends included the future politicians Nigel Birch, Jack Donaldson and Viscount Hinchingbrooke, Garrett Moore, who, as Lord Drogheda, became chairman of the Royal Opera House, Robert Byron, the writer, and the film producer John Sutro, as well as Jim Lees-Milne and Basil Dufferin – an urbane and talented collection of contemporaries whom Muv called ‘the Fat Fairs’, as good a description of them as any (with the exception of Garrett Moore who was neither fat nor fair). They started the Worst Play Club and when the actors saw Tom and his friends sitting in the front row of the stalls, they knew how the young and clever rated their production. Alfred Beit
, who was the son of the financier and art collector Sir Otto Beit and who later married our cousin Clementine Mitford, sometimes joined the group. The Club went to Bayreuth and Vienna for opera and concerts (to enjoy, not denigrate) and were amused by Alfred’s meanness over small sums of money – ‘Will you buy the newspaper? I don’t want to break into another sixpence’ – as he was far better off than most of them.
In summer 1929 Tom took part in an art hoax at Diana and Bryan’s London house in Buckingham Street. Two hundred people were invited to meet the self-taught ‘artist’, Bruno Hat, who came from somewhere in Germany. Brian Howard, the poet, and the artist John Banting produced a series of works on cork bathmats framed with rope – pictures of extraordinary ugliness, forerunners of the kind of thing we are asked to admire today. Evelyn Waugh wrote an introduction to the catalogue, ‘An Approach to Hat’, and the party was a great success. Guests inspected the paintings, murmuring their appreciation of the avant-garde. Lytton Strachey bought a picture to please Diana. Bruno Hat was in poor health but managed to make an appearance. Pushed in a wheelchair and muffled in scarves, he wore a black moustache and tinted glasses. After uttering a few words of an unknown dialect in guttural growls he was unmasked as Tom, who stepped out of the chair, threw off his coat, moustache and specs, delighted with the success of the joke. (In 2009 one of Bruno Hat’s pictures was sold at auction for £18,000 – I wish we had kept an outhouse full of them.)
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