The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  During her time at Hatherop, Nancy was introduced to the Girl Guide movement, and when she returned home suggested to her mother that she form a Swinbrook troop with herself as captain, Pam and Diana as her lieutenants, the members to be recruited from the village girls. Sydney thought it an excellent idea and the good-natured Pam fell in willingly with the scheme. Diana was horrified, which made the project even more attractive to Nancy as a long-running tease on her sister.

  Nancy inspired teasing in her younger siblings to a greater or lesser degree, but she was the Queen of Teasers – ‘a cosmic teaser’, Decca would write. She seemed to know exactly what would irritate her victims most, fastening on any insecurities with devastatingly accurate effect. ‘She once upset us,’ Debo recalled, ‘by saying to Unity, Decca and me, “Do you realize that the middle of your names are nit, sick and bore?”’28 One friend likened her humour to the barbed hook hidden beneath a riot of colourful feathers in a fishing fly. And barbed is an apt word, for there was often a cruel element to her teasing, which caused real distress. For example, while Nancy longed to go to school Diana could not stand the thought of it: she became physically ill at the idea, and was therefore an easy victim of Nancy’s tease that she had overheard their parents discussing to which school they might send Diana. That this might cause her younger sister to lie awake at nights worrying did not concern Nancy. It was ‘a good tease’ and that made it all right. Pam recalled that when they were debs Nancy would find out the name of the young man Pam most fancied and tell her that she had seen him out with another girl.

  Nancy called Debo ‘Nine’ until she married, saying it was her mental age, and she took advantage of Debo’s sentimental nature by writing poems and stories to make her cry. One was about a match: ‘A little houseless match/It has no roof, no thatch/It lies alone it makes no moan/That little houseless match . . .’ So effective was this that eventually Nancy had only to hold up a box of matches for tears to well in Debo’s eyes. Unity caught on to this form of entertainment and invented a story about a Pekinese puppy. Decca retold it in her autobiography: ‘The telephone bell rang. Grandpa got up from his seat and went to answer it. “Lill ill!” he cried . . . Lill was on her deathbed, a victim of consumption. Her dying request was that Grandpa should care for her poor little Pekinese. However, in all the excitement of the funeral the Peke was forgotten, and was found several days later beside his mistress’s grave, dead of starvation and a broken heart.’29 Soon, like Nancy with the box of matches, all the sisters had to do to reduce Debo to floods of tears was to whisper ominously, ‘The telephone bell rang . . .’

  But despite her cruel streak, Nancy’s sheer funniness endeared her to everyone, even when they were the butt of a painful tease, for she went to great lengths to make them laugh. Here, her skill in acting and disguise – learned in countless home-produced plays – came in useful. During the general strike of 1926 Pam helped to run a temporary canteen on the main road to Oxford for strike-breaking truck drivers. According to Decca, Pam was the only one who knew how to make tea and sandwiches, and how to wash up, and she was given the early shift each day because she was an early riser. One morning at 5 a.m., while Pam was alone in the shack waiting for a customer, a filthy tram plurched in from the half-light and asked for ‘a cup o’ tea, miss’. When Pam started nervously to pour it he nipped round the counter, slipped a grimy arm around her waist and thrust his hideously scarred face into hers, slurring, ‘Can I ’ave a kiss, miss?’ Pam screamed, tried to run, fell over and broke an ankle. The tramp was Nancy. On another occasion, when the Redesdales were selling a house, a potential buyer, a fearsomely plump matron with a pouter chest, whiskers and garlicky breath, came to inspect the house. She was shown round courteously by members of the family until she burst into peals of laughter. Nancy again. During both these incidents the sisters were entirely taken in.

  Sydney was so impressed with the standard of teaching at Hatherop School that she recruited a Miss Hussey, who had been trained in the PNEU programme at Ambleside, as governess. All the younger girls were taught by this system. Far from being a sub-standard education, as some Mitford biographers have suggested, PNEU was and is a highly regarded, reliable and time-tested system of teaching.30 It concentrates on a good basic education but one of its important precepts is to encourage achild to learn through the senses and independent exploration, rather than being spoon-fed with information. Regular, independently marked examinations check the pupil’s progress. If there was a drawback it was that reading was then taught phonetically so that spelling remained a problem for the girls into their teens. And, although this is jumping ahead in the story, the end result of the Asthall schoolroom education speaks for itself. Four of the girls, Nancy, Decca, Diana and Debo, would become bestselling writers and were what would now be regarded as A and B grade pupils, therefore potential university material. Furthermore, educated in such a small isolated group, the children’s personalities were allowed to develop and flower individually, even though they were always inevitably lumped together as ‘the Mitford sisters’. It is clear, with hindsight, that they were gifted children, but one wonders how they might have turned out if they had been educated in the arena of a formal school and taught to a pattern.

  Nevertheless, the standard of teachers in the Asthall schoolroom varied, for not all were PNEU trained, and to one ‘geography’ meant a study of the Holy Land, and tracing the journeys of St Paul in coloured inks.31 Decca claimed to have been bored with the schoolroom from an early age and jealous of the children of literature who had such adventurous lives. Once, it is said, she burst out, ‘Oliver Twist was so lucky to live in a fascinating orphanage.’32

  David had no involvement in his daughters’ schooling. Apart from serving on the local bench and the local county council, David took his seat in the House of Lords regularly and was chairman of the House of Lords’ Drains Committee, which attempted to improve the building’s antiquarian plumbing system. In his spare time he did the things he liked best. He rose at dawn, or before daybreak in winter. The housemaids, scurrying round trying to do their dusting and get the grates cleared and fires lit before the family woke up, would encounter him, in his Paisley dressing-gown, wandering amiably about the house, humming a favourite tune, with his vacuum flask of tea under his arm.33 After breakfast, served promptly at eight-thirty for he could not abide latecomers to the table, he dealt with the running of the farms and the estate. Then, in his habitual corduroy breeches, canvas gaiters and comfortable jacket, thumb-stick in hand, he walked his coverts discussing maintenance with Steele, organized shoots, and went hare coursing or fishing. He no longer hunted, but he usually went to the meets to see his daughters off. There was also the annual rite of ‘chubb fuddling’*, hilariously described by Nancy in Love in a Cold Climate.

  The Windrush is a notable trout river that flows gin-clear through the valley past Swinbrook and below Asthall Manor. David owned fishing rights there, just as the fictional ‘Uncle Matthew Radlett’ owned the rights to a similar trout stream, which flowed beneath his fictional Cotswold home, Alconleigh;

  It was one of his favourite possessions. He was an excellent dry-fly fisherman and was never happier, in and out of the fishing season, than when messing about in the river in waders and planning glorious improvements for it . . . He built dams, he dug lashers, he cut the weeds and trimmed the banks, he shot the herons, he hunted the otters, and he restocked with young trout every year. But he had trouble with the coarse fish, especially the chubb, which not only gobble up baby trout but also their food . . . One day he came upon an advertisement . . . ‘Send for the Chubb Fuddler’. The Radletts always said that their father had never learnt to read, but in fact he could read quite well, if really fascinated by his subject, and the proof is that he found the Chubb Fuddler like this all by himself.34

  The chub fuddler came by appointment, and scattered the river with treated groundbait. The fish came surging to the surface in a feeding frenzy, whereupon every able-bodied
man in the village, equipped with rakes, landing-nets and wheelbarrows hauled them out to be used in chub pies or as garden manure. The annual visit of the chub fuddler was a real-life event, and surely there is a heartfelt memory behind the incident when Uncle Matthew yells at Fanny, the narrator of Love in a Cold Climate, ‘Put it back at once, you blasted idiot – can’t you see it’s a grayling? Oh my God, women – incompetent.’35

  It is precisely because Nancy Mitford was so adept at recycling her own experiences, weaving the often improbable eccentricities of the real-life Mitfords with the slightly mad fictional Radletts, that the lines between fact and fiction became so indistinct, and helps to explain why the Mitfords were destined to become almost a national institution. In reality the Mitford family did not lead a truly exceptional life. They lived in what they regarded as a sort of upper-class poverty, with parents who were apparently unable to show overt affection to their children. ‘Muv’, with her strong sense of the work ethic, her dutiful local charity work and keen interest in the Women’s Institute, appeared preoccupied to her children, but this was probably because she was always busy. ‘Farve’ was an eccentric country squire with loudly expressed jingoistic opinions. Like the fictional Uncle Matthew he ranted about ‘the Hun’ and ‘bloody foreigners’, believed that ‘wogs begin at Calais’, and that it was not necessary for women to be highly educated. All these traits were shared by many others of their class, described by one friend, Frank Pakenham,* as ‘minor provincial aristocracy – the same as us’.36

  What lifted the Mitfords from the ranks of the ordinary among their peers were not their lifestyles but their exceptional personalities: David’s utterances make him appear eccentric by today’s standards but he was essentially a kind man. Sydney’s ‘vagueness and preoccupation’ veiled a deep love and sense of responsibility to her children. Far from drifting about in a haze she was a hard-working chatelaine, in every way involved with village life and always sympathetic to the problems of those less fortunate than her own family. As a result she was highly valued locally. ‘She used to say,’ Debo recalled, ‘that the people who deserved praise, medals or whatever successful people got were the women who brought up families on the tiny amounts of money their husbands earned.’37 But what chiefly made the Mitford family ‘different’ were the girls.

  Nancy’s brilliance as a novelist is arguably the primary reason why the Mitford family is still remembered, and is constantly being rediscovered by new readers. But the Mitford girls were first noticed publicly before Nancy’s most famous books were written, when three of them, Diana, Unity and Decca, independently made newspaper headlines. In itself this was shaming for David and Sydney, who believed that the name of a decent woman should appear in the newspapers only twice: first on her marriage, and second in her obituary.

  Nancy’s private correspondence, and memoirs and letters written by Diana and Decca, show that despite their constant gales of laughter there was an incipient unhappiness among the Mitford girls as they grew up. This seems to be centred in a discontent with Sydney as a mother: they wanted more from her than she could give, or knew how to provide. Probably they wanted more physical contact, to be praised and told that they were loved, and the lack of this bred in them a basic insecurity, which lurked beneath their exuberant display of self-confidence and high spirits. But, again, Sydney was not unusual in her class and in that era.

  Years later Nancy would say, ‘I had the greatest possible respect for her; I liked her company; but I never loved her, for the evident reason that she never loved me. I was never hugged or kissed by her as a small child – indeed, I saw little of her . . . when we first grew up she was very cold and sarky with me. I don’t reproach her for it, people have a perfect right to dislike their children.’38 Decca agreed, claiming that it was her mother’s implacable disapproval of her as a child that hurt most. ‘I actively loathed her as a teenager (especially an older child, after the age of fifteen), and did not respect her. On the contrary I thought she was extremely schoopid [sic : a family spelling] and narrow minded – that is sort of limited minded with hard and fast bounds on her mind. But then, after re-getting to know her [as an adult] I became immensely fond of her and really rather adored her.’39 Decca was fair minded enough to add, ‘She probably didn’t change, as people don’t, especially after middle age. Most likely we did.’ This sounds rather like Mark Twain’s comment that when he was fourteen his father was so ignorant that he could hardly bear to be near him. ‘But when I got to twenty-one I was astonished at how much he had learned in only seven years.’ Diana, too, felt this childhood estrangement from her mother, though Debo never did, perhaps because as the last child left at home she received the full share of attention from both parents.

  Sydney’s actions and reactions, as her daughters made their own adult lives, show that far from being uninvolved she was deeply loving. Children sometimes appear to believe that parents have an inbuilt guide to perfect parenting and that an inability to deliver what they want or need is a deliberate act of neglect. But parenting is a hit-and-miss affair, depending on many ingredients: the age of the parents, the relationship between them, the behaviour of their own parents towards them and their reaction to it, and also the demeanour of the child. Parents, too, apparently, often have an inbuilt confidence that their children, given the same upbringing they themselves received, will grow up with the same values and beliefs. But there is no magic formula to good parenting and parents get only one crack at it with each child. They cannot rehearse and go back, learning from past mistakes if they get it wrong. Invariably, too, children grow up with a ragbag of selective memories.

  In 1921 Sydney took the children to Dieppe for the summer, renting Aunt Natty’s house there. The children adored it and were so busy with seaside activities that they hardly noticed two major family tragedies that traumatized the grown-ups. One day Sydney received a telegram advising that Natty’s only son, Bill, had shot himself because of his debts. He had been an addicted gambler and had been bailed out several times by his brother-inlaw, Winston Churchill. This time he felt he could no longer carry on and it fell to Sydney to break the dreadful news of his suicide to his mother, who was staying near by. A pall of sadness hung over the holiday but the children, it seems, were not aware of it. Decades later Sydney told Decca how Natty’s daughter Nellie, then in her early twenties and unmarried, had once come to her in Dieppe in deep despair and begged for the loan of eight pounds. It was a gambling debt, she said, a debt of honour and must be paid. ‘Muv went straight to Aunty Natty,’ Decca recalled disapprovingly. The debt was honoured, ‘and Nellie was bitterly punished. Muv told me this, but simply couldn’t see what a vile thing it was to have done. I guess it’s that awful disapproving quality that I always hated about her.’40 Decca was four at the time of Bill’s death, and probably seven when Nellie begged Sydney for help. In writing as she did many years later, Decca made no connection between the two incidents.

  The other bad news received on that holiday concerned Sydney’s father, Tap. He was in Spanish Morocco at Algeciras on holiday when he died suddenly. He had been a former member of the parliamentary committee on Gibraltar, so it was deemed appropriate that he should be buried there with full naval honours. His estate was just under £60,000, almost twice what Bertie Redesdale had left, and Sydney inherited just under a quarter of it, including a 19 per cent share in the Lady.41

  4

  Roaring Twenties

  (1922–9)

  In a sense, Nancy’s seventeenth birthday in November 1921 was a watershed in the life of the family. She was the first to leave the nest, and her flight heralded the beginning of the end of an era of comfortable and inconspicuous family life. Although it would take another fifteen years to reach a nadir, change took place inexorably as, one by one, the girls reached adulthood and went out into the world.

  But this was still in the future when Nancy set out on a school trip with immense excitement. A friend of hers, Marjorie Murray, attended a scho
ol in Queen’s Gate, whose headmistress had arranged to take a group of four girls on a cultural tour to France and Italy. Europe had only recently returned to some semblance of normality after the 1914–18 war, and somehow Nancy contrived to be in the party. It was her first experience of being free of the family and she found it intoxicating.

  Her letters home are full of enthusiastic superlatives: Paris was ‘heavenly . . . we don’t want to leave . . . Why doesn’t one always live in hotels? It is so lovely . . .’ Pisa was also ‘too heavenly . . . the buildings . . . so white in the middle of such green grass’, and Florence ‘too lovely, too romantic . . . quite beyond description . . . last night we went for a walk on the river and a man with a guitar and a girl with a heavenly voice serenaded us. I gave them two lire . . . and they went on for hours. It was too delicious . . .’ The art galleries were beyond words: ‘How I love the pictures. I had no idea I was so fond of pictures . . . if only I had a room of my own I would make it a regular picture gallery . . . how shall I tear myself away? Thank you so much for sending me. I have never been so happy in my life before, in spite of minor incidents such as fleas . . .’ The colours in Florence were ‘marvellous’ and ‘the blue sky is heavenly. I can’t like Venice as much as this.’1 But she loved Venice too, ‘quite heavenly . . . in a quite different way to Florence. Here it is more the place that one likes, there it is the things, statues, pictures and buildings . . .’