The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family
Page 13
In January 1930 when Waugh published Vile Bodies, the novel he had been working on during the previous year, and which portrayed so graphically the almost demented partying by the young of the upper classes, he dedicated it to Bryan and Diana ‘without whose encouragement and hospitality’, he wrote, ‘this book would not have been finished’.24
6
The Stage is Set
(1930–32)
While Evelyn Waugh was launching Vile Bodies to wide acclaim, Nancy’s manuscript of Highland Fling1 was with the printers. She hoped to make some money from it because David had virtually halved her allowance owing to financial pressures stemming from the depression. Fortunately she managed to talk herself into ‘a job’ with the Lady, writing a weekly column on subjects such as ‘The Chelsea Flower Show’, ‘The Débutante’s Dance’ and ‘The Shooting Party’, at a salary of £250 a year.2 Her contributions are not in the same league as her later bestselling novels but they are pithy and observant. In the following excerpt she advises how to behave during a visit to the photographer.
People about to be photographed are always at great pains to explain that their motives are both noble and unselfish. They never say, ‘I wanted a picture for myself,’ but imply that countless friends and relations are clamouring for one and that it is for their sakes alone that an unpleasant ordeal is being faced . . . Don’t bother to be very natural; it is not an informal snapshot, but a carefully considered portrait . . . and a little affectation often helps to secure a good result. This is why it is important never to take a friend with you. They are so apt to spoil a really good pose by giggling or saying, ‘Darling! What a soulful expression!’3
Meanwhile the rest of the family went to Switzerland. Skating had become a virtual obsession with David, who skated regularly at Oxford, and packed his skates whenever he went up to London. Various members of the family skated almost to professional standard: Tom was able to partner Sonja Henie without disgracing himself, Unity won a bronze medal, and Debo was so good she was invited to join the British junior team, but Sydney – realizing the commitment required for international level competition – vetoed this. The Mitfords usually stayed at Pontresina, close to but less expensive than its fashionable neighbour St Moritz, where they skated on the rink in front of the glitzy Suvretta House Hotel.
Uncle Jack, David’s favourite brother, but better known as the debonair éminence grise of the International Sportsman’s Club, was also a fine skater, but he was more interested in the Cresta bobsleigh run, which attracted a racy international crowd. That year he had brought along an unusual guest. Sheilah Graham was a bright working-class girl of quite extraordinary beauty and at that time was one of ‘Mr Cochran’s Young Ladies’.4 She was married but had been forced to keep the marriage secret (even from Jack) for the sake of her stage career. Years later, when she wrote her bestselling memoir, Beloved Infidel, and recalled that holiday, it was not Jack whom she described but David, whom she likened to a Saxon king: ‘a blond, blue-eyed giant of a man with a striking head, great shoulders, and a hawk-like look to his finely chiselled face’. Sheilah met Tom there and they remained friends for some years; ‘Tom Mitford, a youthful edition of his father and, at twenty-one, one of the handsomest men I had ever seen,’ she recalled. ‘Outrageous fantasies danced through my head. I had always wanted children. And I had not been successful. Perhaps I could found an aristocracy of my own. And I would choose Tom Mitford to be the father, and my sons would look like Saxon Kings . . .’5 As she sat listening to the Mitford family chatting over meals, even the children joining in as the conversation changed effortlessly from English to French, Italian to German, she felt ashamed of her ignorance. Subsequently she began a programme of self-education that changed her life and led to a career as a Hollywood journalist and a love affair with Scott Fitzgerald.
Although Tom was not rich he received a good allowance from David, and made it work for him for he travelled extensively, dined in the best places, was seen in the best company. He was particularly friendly with Winston Churchill, and in one of the longest letters he ever wrote he described a weekend spent at the home of Philip Sassoon. The party, he wrote to Sydney, consisted of Clementine and Winston Churchill, Sir Samuel and Lady Hoare, Tom’s cousin Venetia Stanley and Brian Thynne, ‘and Aircraftsman Shaw [T.E. Lawrence]’.
I am a little disappointed with Shaw. He looks just like any other private in the Air Force, is very short and he’s in his five years of service become quite hardened. He isn’t a bit like the Sargent portrait of him in his book.
Last night I sat next him at dinner and he had Winston on the other side. Winston admires him enormously. He said at one moment ‘If the people make me Prime Minister I will make you Viceroy of India.’ Lawrence politely refused and said he was quite happy in the Air Force. When asked what he would do when, in five years time he has to leave, he said simply ‘Join the dole I suppose.’ It is curious that he should enjoy such a life with no responsibility after being almost King in Arabia. Some say it is inverted vanity; he’d have accepted a Kingship, but as he didn’t get it he preferred to bury himself and hide away.
This morning we flew over to see Colonel Gunnes at Olympia, about 80 miles away. We had a 7 man unit and flew in perfect formation over Brighton and the other resorts – very low to frighten the crowd. Lawrence was thrilled at flying; he said Ministry had stopped him flying a year ago.6 Winston drove his machine a little way. I hadn’t realised he had done a lot of piloting before the war.
We flew in arrow-head formation:
Philip
WinstonSam Hoare
MeLawrence
VenetiaBryan Thynne
(each with a pilot)
and landed in [a] field . . . It took about an hour getting there and ¾ hour back, as we didn’t return in formation. It was very amusing flying very low over the edge of the sea and jumping the piers at Brighton and Littlehampton, to the astonishment of the people there.7
That spring Decca realized her dearest wish. The family was living at Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe when Sydney appeared to have a change of heart about schools. In an attempt to get Unity interested in something, and stop her sulks, which goaded David into bad tempers, she allowed Unity to attend a day school at Queen’s Gate near their London house. This experiment lasted only a short time before she was expelled and Decca thought that was that. But Sydney persisted and found Unity a place at a boarding-school, provoking the often-heard cry of the Mitford children, this time from Decca who ached to be allowed to go to school, ‘But it’s not fair!’
After Unity had successfully completed two terms, the unbelievable happened: Decca and Debo were suddenly allowed to attend a small local private day school for by the daughters of upper-middle-class families in High Wycombe. It was no treat for Debo: she fainted in a geometry class because it was so difficult, and the blackberry pie and custard made her sick. After ‘three days of hell’ she was allowed to leave.8 But Decca revelled in it. She was brought up short, however, when after some weeks she asked Sydney if she could invite her ‘best friend’ home to tea. ‘Oh, no, darling,’ Sydney replied. It wasn’t possible because Decca would be invited back to the girl’s home and Sydney ‘did not know’ her mother. Decca knew instinctively that there could be no appeal, and though it seems an insignificant incident it helped to form her personal convictions about class and privilege. At the end of the term she was withdrawn from the school and once again thrown upon autodidactic study to expand the PNEU curriculum available at home.
Her personal research began to take a direction unsuspected by Sydney: social politics. ‘By the time I was thirteen,’ Decca wrote, in an unpublished manuscript, ‘major storms were brewing outside the Swinbrook fortress. Whole population centres were designated “distressed areas” by the Government. I read in the papers of the great hunger marches, the great depression of the early 30s hit the country and police and strikers fought in the streets.’9 Her single term at school was not responsible for, bu
t coincided with, the dawning of self-consciousness that her home-life was exceptional:
The discovery of other people’s reality – more than fifty million in England alone! – is one you can grasp from time to time, only to find it eluding you again, its vastness proving too much for you to handle. You discover suffering – not just your own suffering, which you know is largely of your own making, nor the childhood suffering over Black Beauty, David Copperfield or Blake’s Little Chimney Sweep – but you catch disturbing, vivid glimpses of the real meaning of poverty, hunger, cold cruelty.10
Prior to this Decca and Unity had squabbled a great deal, and the childish battles between Hons and Counter Hons had been semi-serious at times,11 but when Decca reached adolescence the two became Favourite Sisters.12 Although she was thrown more and more into the company of Debo as the elder girls left home, Debo’s clear enjoyment of her life at Swinbrook made her an unsympathetic confidante for Decca and her newly awakened social conscience. Now in the Hons Cupboard when they talked about what they wanted to be when they were grown-ups, Unity would say, ‘I’m going to Germany to meet Hitler,’ and Decca would say, ‘I’m going to run away and be a Communist,’ whereupon, so Decca wrote, Debo would state that she was going to marry a duke and become a duchess.13
Undoubtedly Unity’s anti-parent stance attracted Decca just when she wanted to expand her personal horizons beyond Swinbrook with its apparently petty restrictions to which she would be subject for ‘years and years’, stretching far off into the future, until that happy day when she finally grew up and could run away. She described Unity as ‘a huge bright glittering personality, [she had] a sort of huge boldness and funniness and generosity – a unique character that is hard to explain to anybody who did not know her in those days. She was tremendous fun to be with. She wasn’t at all interested in politics [then] and she would go off into a dream world . . . of Blake, Edgar Allan Poe and Hieronymus Bosch . . . Oddly enough it was I who first became interested in Politics.’14
In fact Decca became so interested in what she read in the newspapers that she even ‘grudgingly’ spared some money from her running-away account to buy leftist books and pamphlets, and pro-pacifist literature. But the defining moment of her burgeoning political interest came when she read a book by Beverly Nichols. Cry Havoc detailed the worst horrors of the First World War and was an eloquent plea for world disarmament. It appealed strongly to sections of a generation growing up in a world where the existing political systems seemed not to be working, and it gave Decca a focus for what were then no more than rags of political ideas. As she read about the growing social and fiscal problems across Europe she began to define her personal ideology, and a new element was added to her running-away plans. She realized that by instinct she was a socialist, and began to understand why she wanted to run away, what she was running away for and from. What she did not yet know was where she was running to. However, ‘I felt as though I had suddenly stumbled on the solution to a vast puzzle which I had clumsily been trying to solve for years,’ she wrote. Her first reaction was to appeal to Nancy and her pro-socialist friends, but she was disappointed in their reaction: they were thinkers not activists. Moreover, they were too busy attending parties every night to take seriously what Decca began to call ‘the class struggle’.
Unity spent just over a year boarding at St Margaret’s, Bushey (SMB, as it is known to its pupils) in Nicholson’s house. The school was chosen presumably because her first cousins Robin and Ann Farrer, and Rosemary and Clementine Mitford were also there, so she was unlikely to be lonely. But she was remorselessly naughty and was expelled just before Christmas 1930, or rather her mother was invited to remove her – a nice point of distinction to which Sydney adhered stoically – because of her unsettling influence on the other girls. In later years Unity liked to claim that the reason for her expulsion was a single act, on Speech Day when she had to read aloud a quotation that included the line, ‘A garden is a lovesome thing God wot . . .’ to which she claimed she added the word ‘rot’. However, her biographer discovered that this joke was used throughout the school before Unity’s expulsion and one of Unity’s friends at St Margaret’s stated, ‘What she got the sack for was a fine disregard of the rules of the school.’15 Later, when Unity became infamous, pupils at St Margaret’s were forbidden to mention her name and she was, as it were, expunged from the school records. Strangely, Unity was upset at her expulsion: even years later she told new friends how sad it had made her.
The Farrer girls who were at school with Unity were daughters of Aunt Joan, the third of David’s four sisters. Joan had married Major Denis Farrer, a distant Redesdale kinsman who had been David’s companion during his long-ago attempt at tea-planting in Ceylon. The Farrers had five children but it was the three girls who played a major part in the lives of the Mitford sisters. The eldest, Barbara, was the same age as Pam, while Ann and Joan (called Robin by her parents) were contemporaries of Unity and Decca. Major Farrer and David often shot together and there were exchange visits between Asthall and the Farrer home, Brayfield, on the Bedfordshire–Buckinghamshire border. Miss Hussey took some of the girls to Brayfield on several occasions, so it is something of a surprise to read in a letter between Decca and Ann that they ‘never really met’ until 1930 when Ann and Robin were invited to Swinbrook for the summer holidays.16 Ann became known as ‘Idden’ and Robin as ‘Rudbin’ (their names in Boudledidge),* but after seeing Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest in Oxford, Idden and Decca took to calling each other ‘Sister’ in correspondence.17 They became instant best friends, and Idden was Decca’s first real confidante outside her immediate family.18
Two or three times they walked together to Chipping Norton – ten miles each way – to a shop where they could buy homemade sausage rolls (strictly forbidden under Sydney’s Mosaic regimen) and fizzy lemonade (also forbidden at Swinbrook). It was to Idden that Decca revealed her concern about the have-nots in society. In return Idden told Decca about their Romilly cousins. The Mitford children had never met Esmond and Giles Romilly. Sydney disapproved of their mother, Nellie, because of her reputation and feckless nature, although Nellie was David’s first cousin, and sister to Clementine Churchill. The two boys were not much welcome at the Farrers’ home at Brayfield either, and they spent most of their summer and Christmas holidays at Chartwell with the Churchills. The Farrers had met them at Chartwell a couple of times and it seemed that no matter how naughty the Mitfords were, and it was inevitable that bright children thrown so much on their own devices would be mischievous, Esmond outdid them by miles. He held the head of Mary Churchill19 under water until she conceded that there was no God, he smoked in his bedroom, and – a cardinal sin – he dared to appear once at dinner without a black tie.20
Although, according to Decca, it was her interest in politics that stimulated Unity’s, the surviving evidence tends to show that Unity, three years older than Decca, had already become interested in pseudo-Fascist literature in 1930 a year or so before Decca’s first political stirrings. Unity’s biographer, David Pryce-Jones, came across a book she had owned. Autographed by her and dated 1930, it was a copy of Jew Süss, the novel by Leon Feuchtwanger about an eighteenth-century Jewish financier-adventurer. Because of its stereotypical Jewish characters, it was used in Germany to fuel and unify disparate elements of anti-Semitism. Pryce-Jones, whose father had been a Swinbrook Sewer at roughly the same time that Unity would have been reading this book, thought it an unusual choice of reading matter for a fifteen-year-old girl21 and it set him on a course of research that led to the only biography written about Unity, whom he described enigmatically as ‘a comet, blazing a trail too erratic to be charted’.22
But no matter which of the two came to politics first, it was typical that although Unity and Decca became emotionally close to each other at this time, they opposed each other ideologically. Decca was toying then with socialism before becoming, as Farve would have put it, ‘a Bolshie’, and Unity had an initial sligh
t interest in Fascism. ‘When Boud became a fascist I declared myself a Communist . . . thus by the time she was eighteen and I was fifteen we had chosen opposite sides in the conflict of the day’ was how Decca put it.23 As they egged each other on and their interest grew, a line was drawn down the centre of the DFD, and it became a miniature battleground of contradictory political fervour with the respective literature of each side crowding every surface, posters of Hitler and Lenin adorning opposite walls, swastikas, hammers and sickles scratched into the glass of the windows.
Yet if Decca was truly unhappy, as she claims to have been, it was not obvious to her family. Her letters sparkle, almost as much as Nancy’s, with fun and enjoyment of her life, especially her friendship with Idden, and her beloved pets, the spaniel, Spanner, and Miranda, who loved chocolate. Her relationship with her father is nowhere better illustrated than by letters she wrote to him in 1932 from holiday on the Isle of Wight containing a series of spoof newspaper articles about him, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings. David took these letters in great good humour, but apart from the closeness of Decca’s relationship with her father these ‘articles’ also showed a basic understanding of the journalism for which in later life she would become renowned:
Peer Had up for Murder – and Rightly
Lord ‘Sheepbrain’ Redesdale, well known to all committee frequenters such as the skating committee . . . was had up yesterday for assaulting and injuring Mr Adolphus Jones who afterwards died of shock.
He is to be hung tomorrow as soon as possible [inset: ‘his daughter’s remarkable spaniel who has got mange’]. The Hon. Nancy Mitford, another daughter, whose engagement to P. Rodd was announced in these columns, is being married in the prison chapel so that her father can give her away before the hanging . . .24