A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  What became of the hares we caught out coursing I do not know. They were never eaten in our household, though Farve often said regretfully how delicious jugged hare could be. Muv’s father was a food crank, and she followed his rule for herself and for us by observing the food laws laid down by Moses. Until I was married I was not allowed to eat bacon, ham, lobster, pigeon, rabbit, hare or mackerel, or any of the other meats forbidden to the ancient Israelites. Farve insisted on having bacon and sausages with his eggs at breakfast, but we might not partake. As a result we positively craved for them, and Tom’s first letters from school were full of nothing but sausages. ‘Oh Muv, it’s so unfair. If Tom can have sausage why can’t we?’

  ‘Tom’s a boy.’

  Muv never came coursing with us, or shooting, or hunting, or even hacking. Farve no longer cared for riding, which was a great sorrow to Hooper. ‘If only we could get her ladyship up on a horse,’ he said to us once, ‘perhaps his lordship would play the man.’

  We thought this wonderfully funny, because Farve was man to us, and nobody, not even his brothers, came anywhere near him in manliness.

  Uncle Tommy lived at Swinbrook Mill Cottage; we adored him. He was a sailor, and after the war he became a farmer. His methods, and theories out of books, were scoffed at by the village labourers and the local farmers, or at least greeted with great shakings of the head. Forty years on, I asked him: ‘When you tried those experiments with grass and the Swinbrook farmers were so sceptical, were they right, or were you?’ ‘I was,’ he said. He had sayings that he used over and over again. ‘Nothing perfect! ‘’The best of everything for everybody’ and ‘Be it this or be it that’.

  In common with many people of their generation, Farve’s and his brothers’ conversation abounded in French expressions and idioms. As a small child I did not always understand what they meant. Thinking that they interfered in what did not concern them, Farve always called bishops ‘les touche à tout’, and until I was twelve or so I thought touche à tout was French for bishop. He was not anti-clerical, it was their presence in the House of Lords he disliked.

  In the summer holidays Farve’s old tutor, M. Cuvelier, came to stay. He was a French master at Eton and lived in Slough. He had gone to Batsford in the eighties to teach the family, and I think the fact that they did their first lessons in French may account for the great difficulty Farve always found in spelling English; words which are the same in both languages are nearly always spelt differently. Farve disliked putting pen to paper: when he was obliged to he had the Concise Oxford Dictionary at his elbow.

  We called M. Cuvelier ‘Monsieur’, but Farve and his brothers called him ‘Douze Temps’. This was because when they were boys he used to tell them about his adventures as a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War; loading a rifle was done in twelve movements which he mimed for them. ‘Un! deux! t-r-o-i-s!’ (very slowly) and so on. At one point he had to tear or pull something with his teeth, which fascinated us.

  Douze Temps’ presence always put Farve in the sunniest of moods, and he and my uncles became boys again before our astonished eyes. Farve, who was twice his size, used to pretend to be a wounded soldier to be carried across the Rhine on Douze Temps’ back: this had been one of the sagas. There were cries of ‘Mais non, mais non, mon cher, voyons! C’est ridicule! Ah, non!’ in the old cracked voice and shouts of laughter from Farve and from us.

  When Monsieur was at Asthall we heard tales of Farve’s childhood. He had a violent temper as a boy, and once when he had been locked in his room he made the poker red-hot in the fire, intending to kill his father and Douze Temps when they should come to release him. It was M. Cuvelier’s speed and agility in snatching away the brandished poker which saved them from being, at least, badly burned. Farve was so naughty that it was considered unfair to his elder brother Uncle Clem to send them to Eton together; he went to Radley, where he was bored to death and learnt nothing.

  According to Farve, Uncle Jack was Grandfather’s favourite child: ‘Brave as a lion and clever as a monkey.’ Farve’s guns were his holiest possession. The thought of anyone touching them, let alone borrowing them, made one’s blood run cold; of course no one would have dared. Probably Grandfather did not feel so strongly about his guns as Farve, but all the same he was a strict parent of whom his children were very much in awe. According to Farve, le petit Jicksy went to Grandfather’s business room one day in February, when the shooting season was over, and asked if he might borrow a gun to shoot pigeons. Permission was given, for nothing was ever refused him. That night it snowed, and six weeks later, when the thaw came, the gun was found lying beneath a cedar, ruined by rust. But Grandfather did not mind a bit, because of le petit Jicksy being as brave as a lion and clever as a monkey; ‘Don’t think of it again, dear boy,’ he was supposed to have said.

  Possibly this story might not electrify others to the extent it did us. The notion that one of us children could leave one of Farve’s guns lying out in the snow was simply too terrifying to think about.

  We also understood perfectly how brave George Washing ton had been when he did not tell a lie. Farve was not a gardener like Grandfather but he always planted one or two small things to look at from his window. Between the paving stones he put Virginia stocks—‘My interster seeds’ he called them. On the grass bank he had an anenome—only one, so far as I know—which was the apple of his eye. ‘Come and see my fulgens,’ he used to say when a red dot appeared in the expanse of green. ‘It’s out.’ If some rash child had picked the anemone it would have more than equalled any cherry tree.

  Since various legends about Farve’s fierceness have grown up it may be worth saying that not only did he make us scream with laughter at his lovely jokes but that he was very affec tionate. Certainly he had a quick temper, and would often rage, but we were never punished. The worst that ever happened was to be sent early to bed. A reviewer of Harold Acton’s biography of Nancy, judging from a badly-reproduced snap shot, wrote that Farve’s face was suffused with the scarlet of passion and that he must have been ‘a very frightening man indeed’. In fact there was no red, or even pink, in Farve’s face; his skin was a pale uniform beige; it never altered with his moods. Set in the beige were brilliant blue eyes. Muv took him to see her old friend, the artist Helleu, in Paris during the war; he said he was khaki from head to foot ‘only the eyes are not khaki’.

  ‘When your parents were young,’ Farve’s cousin Kitty Ritson told me ages later, ‘they were so beautiful they were like gods walking upon earth.’

  After Bournhill Cottage burnt down we had no seaside of our own to go to; Nanny took us once a year to lodgings at Bexhill. The house belonged to a friend of hers, also a Congregationalist and very interested in missions to Africa.

  The sitting-room we used was hung with spears and shields among the pampas grass, and sometimes one met a negro on the stairs.

  While we were at Bexhill we used to go on a bus to St. Leonards to see Nanny’s sister. They were twins, and very much alike; when I was small it made me uneasy to be with Nanny’s sister unless Nanny was there too, because I got the sensation that Nanny had changed. That she might ever change was my worst nightmare; even a new bonnet took a great deal of getting used to. Pam, Tom and I had terrible nightmares; we bored one another with them in the mornings. Pam’s were about steam rollers. More than once I dreamt that Nanny had grown very tall and thin and brittle; she was like Augustus in Struwelpeter. She wore a tight belt round her tiny waist, in my dream, and all of a sudden she snapped in two.

  When we went to Bexhill these dreams were several years away; we loved our visits to Nanny’s sister, who lived over a hardware shop kept by her husband; she had two clever daughters who passed their exams and became head-mistresses.

  One of the things we looked forward to at Bexhill was the food; particularly the cream, out of cardboard tubs. ‘Bought cream’ was so much more delicious than the ordinary cow’s cream we got at home.

  Our school-room life was humdrum, b
ut the holidays were perfect. Tom came home, and we dashed about to dancing parties in the Christmas holidays, tennis parties in the summer. We had been brought up to despise ‘games’, sport was all my father cared for; golf, and cricket, were considered beyond the pale. Tennis, however, Tom and I played, though not at all well; we did it because it led to endless parties. Our cousins Dick and Dooley Bailey lived fifteen miles away; there was constant coming and going between Asthall and Stow-on-the-Wold. They were much better at games than we were; Dick chose to be a dry-bob at Eton, while Tom thankfully gave up cricket and took to the river.

  I was so pleasure-loving and got so excited at the thought of some particularly glamorous party that often when the great day came I had to go to bed with a high temperature. Muv sent for Dr. Cheatle. He prescribed three days in bed; when he first came to us he sometimes gave medicine, but chancing to see a row of unopened bottles in Nanny’s cupboard he laughed and ceased to make suggestions which involved swallowing anything. Muv believed the good body would cure itself; she only got Dr. Cheatle just in case one had been struck by dire disease.

  When I was dressed for a party I looked in the glass and disliked what I saw.

  ‘I can’t go,’ I used to say to Nanny, ‘everything’s wrong.’ ‘Never mind, darling,’ Nanny always had the same answer. ‘It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to look at you.’

  Tom invited friends to stay. ‘Would you like to hear me play?’ he began, as soon as a friend arrived. They went straight to the library, followed by me, and Tom played to us. Even when he was at his private school he played to his guests; he must have picked them with care, for it is not every ten-year-old boy who would want to sit indoors all day listening to classical music. Jim Lees-Milne was the friend I preferred. He hated games just as much as we did, and when Tom had finished playing we used to talk. Jim made us read Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, and we agreed that when we were grown up we would scorn material things and live on a handful of grapes near the sea in Greece.

  Since the days of the children’s service and the stamps, church-going had altered its aspect. We were made to go to church every Sunday; this was one of the firmest family rules. We tried to put off going until evensong—after all, the world might come to an end at lunchtime, and then one would feel a fool to have wasted the morning in church. This argument played constantly in my mind; it was the best reason for procrastination.

  There was a choice of services—matins at Swinbrook with Farve, who liked us to go with him, or evensong at Asthall with Muv. Farve never set foot in Asthall church, although it was ten yards from our house. The living was not in his gift, and he took no interest whatever in Asthall affairs although most of the village belonged to him.

  Mr. Ward, the clergyman, generally used to scold his tiny ‘congregation’ in his sermon; it was most unfair, but they got the scolding due to the rest of the village for laxity about church attendance. He read his sermons, and propped the sheets of paper on a brass lectern attached to the pulpit. One could see light through the last two sheets, and by this one knew when the hour of delivery was at hand.

  Mrs. Ward was a tremendous singer; she could fill the church with her powerful contralto, which made us scream with laughter. Of course the screams were stifled, but we shook and heaved with the effort. Once Mr. Ward preached against profane persons who ran and shouted with their dogs through God’s holy acre. This was meant for us, because the churchyard path was our short cut to the stables. Farve was amused when we told him, but did not mend his ways.

  Until I was eleven I hated going to church; it almost spoilt Sunday for me. Then, under the influence of an Anglo-Catholic governess, I became for about a year a subject of religious mania. A service a week was not half enough for me; I consi dered that one should go to church every single day, or, better still several times a day. Hours spent anywhere but in church, or praying in my room, were so many wasted hours.

  I was terribly concerned about Muv and Farve, and what might happen to their immortal souls. True, they went to church on Sundays; but did they believe? Uncle George said that Muv went to church as a patriotic duty; if this were true it would be fatal.

  The thought of converting Muv occupied me for months. She must be made to believe in transubstantiation, original sin, the immaculate conception as well as the virgin birth, and the real presence. She must be persuaded to turn to the east and curtsy at the right moment during the creed.

  Miss Price taught us the New Testament, the lives of the saints, the history of the early church and the meaning of the sacraments. Our only geography was a study of the Holy Land; and the journeys of St. Paul which we traced and coloured with different inks. She stayed with us four terms, about the limit of time any governess could abide us for. Then she packed up her shrine—crucifix, brass candlesticks, brass vases always kept bright and full of flowers—and went away. After she left I drifted back into a mild agnosticism, but I shall always be grateful to Miss Price because she made me understand, from the inside as it were, what religion can mean to a person.

  When I was eleven Muv took us to Dieppe for the Easter holidays; she rented Aunt Natty’s house and we had a French cook. For the first time in my life I realized how delicious food could be. I doted on Dieppe. A few years afterwards I went back there and found a quite ordinary sea-side town; it was nothing like the fairyland of my memory. Just before we left for home a frightful thing happened: Bill Hozier, Aunt Natty’s only son, shot himself. Muv got the telegram, and she had to break the news. Bill Hozier was an inveterate, penniless gambler; his debts had been paid several times by his brother-in-law Winston Churchill, and now he was in debt again and decided to end his life. We knew something sad had happened but were not told exactly what it was; we cannot have under stood much about it, for my memories of Dieppe are of unclouded happiness.

  Aunt Natty stayed with us quite often at Asthall, and when a few years later she died I was very sad. If one could summon the departed from the shades, she would be among the first I should choose.

  Three or four times a year we motored over to Stratford for the Shakespeare plays in the nice, hideous old theatre before the fire. We got there so early that we sat gazing at the safety curtain for at least half an hour; on it were the words; For Thine Especial Safety, and round the ceiling something about the poet’s pen, which gave to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.

  We knew the actors and actresses by heart, and were quite accustomed to one of the merry wives of Windsor turning into Desdemona overnight, but I was always shocked by what seemed to me their extreme old age. It was not quite easy to see good old Baliol Holloway as the ne’er lust-wearied Antony, or his elderly leading lady as a lass unparalleled. Nancy and I so often began to shake with silent laughter that Muv forbade us to sit together. On the other hand we thought them quite suitable as the Macbeths. It was the same thing with Shaw’s St. Joan. Sybil Thorndike, in grey wrinkled stockings, with ancient, knobbly knees and affected moaning and bleating ‘I hear my VOICES’—was too far removed from my idea of Joan of Arc. Yet not long ago, when she died aged ninety, I read eulogies of her in the part, for which she was chosen by Shaw himself. As a child I was either deficient in imagination or else saw things too plainly in my mind’s eye.

  Some of our governesses were cleverer than others; none of them was exactly a Hobbes. Counting French govs we had in the holidays there were about fifteen in all. By modern standards our curriculum had disastrous gaps. Nobody thought of giving us lessons in sex, for example, now considered an essential subject. I wish its importance had been discovered sooner; it would have made our childhood hilarious, to see Miss Smith or Miss Leach at the blackboard conscientiously showing us what we must do. Modern state schools recently appealed for volunteers to teach school leavers to read. What can they have been at, for a whole decade at school? They should try to fit in a reading lesson occasionally between the sex classes, for as Goethe said: ‘Kannst du lesen, so sollst du verstehen,’2 though obviou
sly sex is more fun than anything as humdrum as reading.

  Early in June the cry of ‘The mayfly’s up’ set Farve in excitement and the business room in a buzz. For weeks he had been oiling his lines and looking through his flies; he had also fished, with a wet fly. I often went with him. According to Farve, if one trod on a twig, or sneezed, even a hundred yards from the bank, every trout heard it and swam away for miles, even perhaps to a stretch of river belonging to somebody else. I hardly breathed during our fishing expeditions; I loved being with him, and considered it an honour to be allowed to go.

  During the mayfly season there were carefully chosen men guests at Asthall. Meals were irregular, and there were all the things I liked best—asparagus, tiny peas and beans, mayonnaise, cold soufflé, trout en gelée.

  At night, when Pam and I were in bed, Farve and his friends were still on the lawn at half past ten and after when it got too dark to fish. We could hear them talking and laughing, and the whirr of the reels as they pulled their lines out to dry.

  Farve was as happy when he was fishing as he was nervous and short-tempered when he had a shoot. On shooting mornings we kept well out of his way. We could hear him from the schoolroom window: ‘Where’s that infernal feller Forester?’ ‘I’m here,’ said a mild voice. Major Forester had been doing up his bootlace behind one of the cars; he never came again. People did not want to be cursed when they were on pleasure bent.

  I was sorry about this because I was deeply (though of course secretly) in love with Lady Victoria Forester. She had slightly protruding front teeth, and I used to sit by the hour pressing my teeth with my thumb in the vain hope of growing more like her.