The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  When the war ended there was general rejoicing but there was a sting in the tail for the Mitford children. They had hoped the war would go on for ever for they had been told repeatedly that when it was over Batsford would have to be sold because they were too poor to live there. Almost their last memory of life at Batsford was a fête held by Sydney to raise funds for wounded soldiers. Just before it was due to be opened Sydney looked at her white elephant stall and thought it was understocked. She rushed into the house and began to gather ‘odds and ends’ to fill up the gaps. Most of these were priceless Oriental antiques brought back from the Far East by Bertie. David and the children managed to buy a few back, but the rest were snapped up by villagers and antiques dealers for coppers. The children learned from this: in subsequent years when it came near the time for summer fêtes they hid their toys.

  In 1919 Batsford was sold, and David bought Asthall Manor near the Cotswold village of Swinbrook in Oxfordshire. He never intended the house to be their permanent home for he owned some hillside land on the other side of, and overlooking, Swinbrook, where he planned eventually to build a house for his family close to his pheasant coverts. But far from pining for Batsford, Sydney and the children fell in love with Asthall, a generous Jacobean gabled manor house, in a gentle green valley amid rolling hills. Only David, Pam and Diana were made uneasy by the ghosts of Asthall, for no one else appeared to see or sense them, or if they did they ignored them like the family in The Canterville Ghost. The haunting took several manifestations: footsteps could be heard at night on the paving stones around the house, and sometimes the trickle and drip-drip of non-existent water. The nursery windows overlooked the churchyard, and although they were forbidden to watch funerals, they did. It was fertile soil in which Nancy could plant her own brand of scary ghost stories. Once, Decca and Debo fell into a newly dug grave and Nancy told them it meant ‘bad luck, forever’.8

  The elder children agreed that the best thing of all was the library. It was housed in a converted barn linked to the main house by a covered way, which they called ‘the cloisters’, and contained a good collection of books from Grandfather Redesdale’s library at Batsford. The volumes had been chosen mainly by ten-year-old Tom, at his father’s request, for David did not feel competent to make the selection himself. Furnished with comfortable armchairs and a grand piano, it was a desirable place to the children for they were hardly ever bothered by grown-ups there, and provided they behaved reasonably, replaced any books where they found them, and did not make too much mess, they were left alone. On the other hand, if they tried to read a book in the house, Nancy once said, it was almost guaranteed to attract a remark from David such as, ‘If you’ve got nothing to do run down to the village and tell Hooper . . .’ Hooper, called by the children ‘Hoops’ or ‘Choops’, was the groom, much loved by Pam and Debo despite a fearsome temper which, Sydney later told them, was due to shell-shock and bad experiences during the First World War. ‘When Bobo once did something to annoy him, something with one of the ponies,’ Debo wrote, ‘he yelled at her, “I’ll take yer in that wood and do for yer!”’9

  The old Lords of the Manor of Swinbrook were the Fettiplaces. They had bought the estate in 1504 and their manor house was said to be ‘one of the glories of Elizabethan England’. The family died out at the end of the eighteenth century, and the manor was purchased by a Mr Freeman of London. He lived quietly enough according to locals but he was, in fact, an infamous masked highwayman who even stooped to robbing his own guests as they rode home. Apprehended by Bow Street Runners, he was hanged at Tyburn in 1806; his estate became Crown property and the glorious manor house was demolished. Earl (the uncle from whom ‘Bertie’ inherited his fortune, but not the title of earl) Redesdale bought the Swinbrook estate, sans manor house, in 1810 for its sporting interests, and did little beyond collecting rents on the farms, building a few cottages and using the property for shooting parties.

  When David inherited it, the village of Swinbrook was no more than a hamlet of 150 souls. Apart from a scattering of cottages built of honey-coloured stone and a few farmhouses, mostly owned by the estate, it consisted of the twelfth-century church, a village school, the Swan Inn on the very edge of the village, and the shop, which doubled as a post office and ‘sold four kinds of sweets – toffee, acid drops, Edinburgh rock and butterscotch’.10 Acid drops cost a penny-ha’penny a quarter, were weighed on the same brass scale as letters, and were sold in squares of paper deftly twisted into a cone by the postmistress.

  Apart from the closure of the village shop, little has changed, and Swinbrook today still has a timeless, left-over-from-yesteryear ambience. Its narrow lanes, leading to the tiny village green, are still bordered with willows, beeches and silver birch, and in the spring its verges are full of primroses and blue cranesbill. The rolling hills are dotted with sheep and, apart from the occasional car passing through – there are faster routes to the comparative metropolis of Shipton-under-Wychwood than via Swinbrook – the prevailing sounds are birdsong, sheep, the trickle and splash of water from myriad streams, the shrieks of swallows and house-martins wheeling furiously overhead, and the far-off echoing ring of a horse’s hoofs on a paved road. As a child Decca always thought that when William Blake penned, ‘. . . up in the sky the little birds fly, and the hills are all covered with sheep . . .’ he was writing about Swinbrook.11

  When they moved to Asthall the family was almost complete, but Sydney had one final attempt at producing another son, and in 1920, when she was forty, her seventh and last child was born. As usual David was present at the birth, and as he came out of the room Mabel the parlourmaid was waiting anxiously for news. ‘One look at His Lordship’s face,’ she said in later years, ‘told me everything.’ It was another girl. They called the baby Deborah, quickly shortened to Debo. Many years later Mabel would gloat that ‘His Lordship’s face was like thunder. I don’t think anyone looked at Miss Debo for three months . . . but she came up trumps in the end, didn’t she?’12 In the meantime, Nancy saw a tease in the situation. For years she tormented Debo with the line, ‘Everyone cried when you were born.’ She was sixteen, and Sydney asked her to be godmother to the new baby, fearing that she herself might not live to see Debo grow up. Pam was now thirteen, Tom eleven, Diana ten. Unity was six, and Jessica three.

  As well as attending lessons, the older children rode out every day except Sunday with Captain Collinson, the agent, or Hooper. Although most of the children regarded Hooper as a grumpy old devil, Pam always referred to him as ‘Hoops. Sweet Hoops . . .’13 David could no longer ride: in the early days at Asthall his horse had reared up and fell on him, breaking his pelvis and afterwards riding became too uncomfortable. Sydney, who as a débutante had been a keen rider, had long ago given it up, but Nancy, Diana and, later, Debo were good horsewomen, and hunted side-saddle with the local pack of foxhounds, the Heythrop. They were joined by any visiting cousins on the daily rides, Rosemary and Clementine Mitford (daughters of the late Uncle Clement), for example, who often stayed at Asthall while their mother spent the winter in the Sudan, where her second husband was a government game warden. ‘I remember riding a huge horse as a small child,’ Clementine wrote, recalling a less than happy incident sixty-five years earlier when she was eight and Nancy was eighteen, ‘and Nancy and Pam cantering ahead; Nancy looking like a Constantin Guys drawing, and Pam – not so glamorous but kinder to poor me. And Hooper, so disapproving (almost like a male Blor) I suppose because my riding clothes were all wrong. I remember the torture and embarrassment of the stirrup leathers biting into one’s legs because I was wearing socks and thin knickers . . .’14

  Neither Tom, Unity nor Decca ever took to hunting, though Diana tried patiently to teach Decca to trot round a field on her little pony Joey. On Sundays they all went out coursing with David and one of his brothers, ‘Uncle Tommy’, who came to luncheon and brought his whippet. They enjoyed these physically active days, beating through fields of winter crops to put up hares. When one jumped
up, the whippet and David’s lurcher would be unleashed, while David and Uncle Tommy leaned on their thumb-sticks and watched with countrymen’s interest in venery. Since Sydney would never allow hares to be eaten, the children could never think what happened to those killed by the hounds after David popped them into the hare pockets he had designed into all his country clothes. Probably they were presented to his workers or tenants.

  The children’s enjoyment of field sports, which bred in most of them a oneness with the annual rhythms of their environment, did not stretch to condoning the traps set in the pheasant coverts by David’s gamekeeper, Steele, who regarded anything that was not a pheasant as ‘vermin’. As well as stoats, weasels and foxes, the bloody victims of these monstrous contraptions sometimes included hedgehogs, badgers and even the occasional feral cat. All the children made it a point of honour to visit the traps regularly and spring the captives, to the fury of the gamekeeper whom they all hated.

  Although Nancy has traduced life in the country and portrayed it in novels as boring, and even Diana was less than complimentary of it when she was a teenager, waiting endlessly for escape into the glittering world of grown-ups, all the children had a happy childhood – even Decca who, though she never took to riding like the others, only became truly unhappy when she reached adolescence. There were always cousins and family visiting, always ‘something going on’, their cousin Rosemary recalled, far more so than in other houses that she and her sister visited.15 Apart from endless games that the children themselves thought up and organized, in the summer there were tennis parties and trips to Stratford about once a month. There was the annual ‘Bailey Week’ at the Stow-on-the-Wold home of their four Bailey cousins, Richard, Anthony, Christopher and Timothy, the sons of Aunt Weenie and Colonel Percy Bailey. Bailey Week included cricket, tennis, walks and riding, picnics and dancing. It was like a mini Season, and the girls enjoyed it immensely. Even years later when Pam was a débutante and in the full throes of a London Season she wrote to Sydney of how much she was looking forward to Bailey Week. During the winter there was hunting and coursing, weekends when the house was full of guests for one of David’s shoots, weekly trips to Oxford, where they skated at the rink behind the Regal cinema and browsed the latest books at Blackwell’s, and the ever-popular rainy-day occupation of dressing up and putting on plays.

  Church attendance on Sunday was compulsory for the Mitford children. Although the church at Asthall adjoined their home, the living of that parish was not in David’s gift,16 so he preferred to attend the church at Swinbrook where he could keep the clergyman in check. Here, with his family ranged beside him in a pew he had donated after a significant win on the Grand National in 1918, David watched hawk-like to see that the vicar did not stray from the wonderful liturgy of the prayer book with an extempore petition, or try to slip in a modern composition among the favourite traditional hymns he chose himself (‘We don’t want any of those damn complicated foreign tunes’), and that the sermon was kept to ten minutes, timed to the second by his stop-watch. Invariably, David also read the lesson and took the collection.

  Despite the short sermons and the fascinating tombs of the long-dead Fettiplaces, the girls were bored in church and spent their time trying to make Tom ‘blither’ – giggle. Later, after Tom got his own flat in London and returned for weekends this mainly consisted of emphasizing certain words in prayers or psalms to try to make him react. From what they overheard of their brother’s bachelor life it was considered especially important by his sisters that he be reminded often of the seventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ Often it worked, and Tom giggled helplessly to the delight of the girls. Occasionally, he got his own back. When she was nine Decca had discovered a good wheeze where she would apply to manufacturers for free samples of products. One she particularly enjoyed was Benger’s baby food. ‘It was lovely,’ she recalled. ‘It tasted like Horlicks.’ After a gap of about six months she sent off for another sample, which duly arrived, and then one day there came a loud knock at the door, and ‘that awful Tuddemy [Tom] caused Mabel to call me, saying that the Benger’s man was at the door wanting to see the baby. Total terror! [I had] visions of life imprisonment for fraud . . .’17

  At Asthall Christmas was kept in the old-fashioned way with a party for the children of the tenants (still recalled by some who attended), and a fancy-dress party for the family and guests. There was a huge dressing-up box, from whose contents everyone had to concoct a character. For many years Pam was the fair Lady Rowena (Ivanhoe’s betrothed), while Nancy, who began as the tragic bride in the mistletoe-bough legend (an incident said to have taken place at nearby Minster Lovell),18 progressed as she grew older to a tramp who used to chase ‘Lady Rowena’ around the house lifting up the skirt of her red dress ‘to see her knickers’.19 The various characters of those long-ago parties are preserved in photographs in the Chatsworth archives: headless men, cavaliers, nurses, pierrots, gypsies and French aristocrats.20

  Secret societies were much in vogue among the younger children, and Unity and Decca, who called each other Boud (pronounced ‘Bowd’ not Bood), developed their own secret language called Boudledidge in which they became so fluent that they could tell rude stories to each other in front of unsuspecting grown-ups. Another of the societies was the Society of Hons formed by Decca and Debo, later made famous by Nancy in her novels. The two youngest children were keen on chickens – it was how they earned their pocket money – so they originally called their club the Society of Hens and began to call each other ‘Hen’ (and did so until Decca’s death in 1996). The change from Hens to Hons came about, Decca explained, from a poem culled from two sources: one was a Burns poem, in which the line ‘John Anderson, my Jo John’ became ‘My Hon Henderson my Ho Hon’ and the second, ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium’, which spawned the ‘Honnish lines’: ‘Hon Henderson my Ho Hon/By the nine gods she swore/That the great house of Henderson/Should suffer wrong no more’. So the Society of Hens became the Society of Hons, with its carefully written-down set of rules – to break one made one a Counter Hon – and initiation tasks that included frog-hopping across the tennis court, turning two somersaults while running forward and answering a series of general-knowledge questions.21 The H was always pronounced in Hon, as it is in hen. It was never, as later came to be believed, a society for girls entitled to the prefix ‘Honourable’.

  The initial raison d’être of the society was to wreak vengeance on ‘the Horrible Counter Hons’, chief of whom, at the time of founding, was Tom, for some now-forgotten misdemeanour during his school holidays. Decca recalled that Nancy was elected Head of the League against Tom and badges were made, emblazoned with ‘League against Tom. Head: Nancy’.22 But empires crumble, and among Sydney’s effects was also found a small homemade badge in Debo’s childish hand, ‘Leag against Nancy; Head Tom’.23 The Society of Hons even had its own Honnish language; this was not so comprehensive as Boudledidge and borrowed freely from it.

  In her memoir Decca recalled the inevitable squabbles that occur between a group of lively siblings with significant age disparities. The anti-Tom, or anti-Tuddemy (his name in Boudledidge)24 campaign was merely ‘the curious Honnish mirror-world expression of our devotion to him’, she explained. ‘For years he was the only member of the family to be “on Speakers” with all the others.’ In spite of temporary alliances, which were generally formed for the purpose of defeating a governess, Decca wrote that her real childhood enmities were not with her older sisters but with her near contemporaries, Unity, who was three years older, and Debo, who was three years younger. ‘Relations between Unity, Debo and me were uneasy, tinged with mutual resentment,’ she recalled. ‘We were like ill-assorted animals tied to a common tethering post.’25 Elsewhere she would write of the boredom of the endless years of the schoolroom where she felt she had learned nothing. ‘The one advantage was unlimited time to read. The library with Grandfather Redesdale’s collection was for me a heavenly escape . . . it never occurred to m
e to be happy with my lot.’26

  The only survivor of these three youngest children, Debo, cannot recall any of this smouldering resentment during their childhood, and believes it was something that occurred much later, after Decca grew up and became a rebel. But there is no doubting that Unity, Decca and Debo were all worlds apart in opinion, even at a young age. The squabbles and teasing that went on almost continuously were dealt with summarily by Nanny Blor or Sydney, with the quelling put-down, ‘You are very silly children!’

  Nancy ‘ached’ to learn more than was available to her at home. But though she could wheedle David in most things, he always turned sticky when she brought the subject round to education. He feared that if they went to school his daughters would meet the wrong sort of girls and would be made to play hockey and develop thick calf muscles. Any such outburst as ‘It’s not fair, Tom has been allowed . . .’ usually received the unanswerable reply, ‘Tom’s a boy.’ She never stopped pleading, though, and at last, in 1921, when she was sixteen, Sydney sent her as a boarder to nearby Hatherop Castle School to be ‘finished’. Although it subsequently became a formal educational establishment, Hatherop Castle then took about twenty of ‘the right sort’ of pupils, the nucleus of whom were the children of the family who lived in the Elizabethan manor house that housed the school. Lady Bazely, a widow who later married Commander Cadogan, had one Cadogan daughter and two Bazely daughters. Like the Redesdales she would not have dreamed of sending her daughters to public school, so she set up a small PNEU (Parents’ National Education Union) school and invited the daughters of suitable neighbouring families to attend.

  Nancy thoroughly enjoyed her time at Hatherop. The main curriculum, as well as sport (tennis, netball and swimming), was taken by the formidably able Miss Essex Cholmondeley, whom the girls adored. Mademoiselle Pierrat taught French, and there was an unnamed music teacher who gave them piano lessons. Once a week, on Wednesdays, there was dancing. It was important to young women with a London Season to face that they danced well. They all looked forward to this class and it was especially pleasurable for Nancy because Nanny brought Pam – now sufficiently recovered from polio to dance, although she never shone at the classes – and Diana from Asthall in the outside dickey seat of a Morris Cowley to join in the lessons. In the winter months, in their dancing dresses, the two younger girls arrived blue with cold, despite being wrapped up in David’s old trench coats. Afterwards they travelled home in the same way through the bitter darkness. ‘Strangely enough, we looked forward to these outings,’ Diana recalled.27 But while she enjoyed the dancing classes Diana shuddered at the idea of being sent away from Asthall to school like Nancy.