The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  One illustration shows David, dressed in a suit decorated with arrows with a rope around his neck, escorting Nancy, dressed in flowing bridal clothes, to the altar. Her next letter contained a homemade four-page newspaper:

  Man with Glaring Eyes Caught

  Lord Redesdale is to be tried in the House of Lords for the unnecessary murder of Miss Belle Bathe, a bathing Belle of Totland Bay.

  Lord Redesdale was interviewed today by our special correspondent. ‘I was imagining myself in a skating rink’ he [said] . . . when this damn girl came up and tried to hire out a towel. So I unfortunately trampled her underfoot with my skates.’ Lady Redesdale, when interviewed, merely replied, ‘Ohrrr, poor [darling]’, so we expect she will be tried for being an accessory after the fact.

  Miss Jessica Mitford was also interviewed by our correspondent. ‘I always expected something of the sort’, she said. ‘You see he really is a subhuman and a pathetic old throw-back, so what was one to expect?’ We also learn that Lord Redesdale is a great admirer of Hitler, ‘The fellow has fair hair. Really almost yellow’ he told our correspondent, ‘so of course I admire him.’ Lord Redesdale has narrowly escaped arrest for cruelty to children; loud shrieks have often been heard to come from his house . . .

  [Headline]: Lord Redesdale hanged – last words: ‘Take care of my skates . . .’25

  The letters to David, which accompany these extracts, are alive with love and laughter, and appear to show a child confident in her father’s affection. They are not in any sense demonstrative of an unhappy child. However, Decca did record that Sydney withheld her pocket money on one occasion when she referred to her father as ‘a feudal remnant’. ‘Little D, you are not to call Farve a remnant!’ Sydney ordered. In fact, it was only one of countless names that all the children bestowed upon their parents and which were generally taken with good humour. Sydney became ‘the poor old female’, shortened to TPOF, and ‘the fem’ in conversation, while David was ‘the poor old male’, TPOM, and often ‘the poor old sub-human’. Letters are scattered with references to the parents as ‘the birds’ and ‘the nesting ones’. No one escaped a nickname in the Mitford household.26

  Unity came out in the spring of 1932 and, economically, Sydney brought out Rudbin at the same time, irritated because David’s sister Joan seemed unprepared to ‘do anything’ to launch her daughters into Society. A fellow débutante recalled that as she and Unity were both nearly six feet tall they were made to bring up the rear of the procession.27 Dressed in white and with the regulation ostrich feathers in their hair, they felt ridiculous and rebellious, which created an instant bond of friendship. Invited to stay at Swinbrook, Unity’s new friend was surprised and impressed by the sophisticated and free manner in which the Mitfords talked about their parents. Unity, she said, was quite unlike anyone else, but it was her behaviour rather than her character that was different. Her clothes were outlandish and she brightened up the requisite débutante wardrobe approved by Sydney by adding dramatic flourishes such as velvet capes and flashy jewellery hired from a theatrical costumier.

  Where Nancy enjoyed teasing, Unity liked to shock, though in her teenage years her manner of shocking people was often startling or funny rather than truly shocking. As a débutante she drew attention to herself by taking her pet white rat Ratular to dances and even to a Palace garden party. She would sit stroking it, almost daring young men to speak to her. Sometimes Ratular was left at home in favour of her grass snake, Enid, who performed as an unusual neck ornament. When either of these pets escaped – which was whenever Unity felt that things needed to be livened up – there was a huge amount of shrieking and commotion. Unity was not unattractive; someone said that looking at her was like looking at Diana in a slightly distorted mirror, and she had her own little court of admirers, but no one ‘stuck’. She was too unusual: all photographs of her show her with a sullen expression, but friends say she smiled and laughed a great deal. ‘She was fun,’ one said. ‘She used to giggle and giggle, but in photographs she looks severe because Diana had said that smiling wrinkled the skin, so she put on her photography face.’28

  When she was presented in May she discovered some Buckingham Palace writing-paper in a waiting room and immediately pocketed it to use as ‘jokey’ writing-paper for thank-you notes. Sydney was aghast, but Unity needed to stand out, to draw attention to herself, to be accounted as someone in her own right, not simply one of the middle Mitford girls. She felt awkward about her appearance, and had endured a full complement of sisterly taunts about her size, but her character and behaviour made her what Decca called a sui generis personality. Her originality made a deep impression on many who were introduced to her then for the first time. Diana’s neighbour, Dora Carrington, for example, met her in the summer before she came out while the Mitfords were visiting Biddesden, home of Diana and Bryan. ‘Dear Lytton,’ Carrington wrote afterwards, ‘I went with Julian to lunch with Diana today. There found three sisters and Mama Redesdale. The little sisters were astonishingly beautiful and another of sixteen (Unity) very marvellous or Grecian. I thought the mother was remarkable, very sensible and no upper class graces . . . the little sister [Debo] was a great botanist and won me by her high spirits and charm . . .’29

  Despite the seemingly ceaseless round of parties, and the trips to Venice, Greece and Turkey that Diana and Bryan made, Bryan must have found time to work for in 1930 he was admitted to the bar. To his disappointment he was offered few briefs and only discovered the reason for this by accident: the clerk considered that others in the chambers were in greater need of the three-guinea fee than Bryan. After that he more or less gave up. In 1931 the couple moved from Buckingham Street to 96 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, overlooking the river. Formerly it had been the house of the artist James McNeill Whistler, and was two doors away from the old London home of Diana’s grandparents, where David had been born. Some time earlier Bryan had purchased Biddesden, a Queen Anne house in the baroque style, set in rolling chalk downland near Andover in north Hampshire. It was a comfortable old property of mellowed red bricks with stone coining, originally built for General Webb, one of Marlborough’s generals. A portrait of the first owner on his battle-charger hung, two storeys high, in the entrance hall. It went with the house and Diana was warned that if it was moved the general’s ghost would make a nuisance of itself by riding ceaselessly up and down the stairs in protest. Her childhood memories of the Asthall ghost made her especially sensitive to this legend and she made no attempt to alter the decoration of the hall, though she stamped her own youthful taste on the remainder of the house.

  That summer Diana was twenty-one and pregnant again, with her second son, Desmond, who was born in September 1931, so she did not travel abroad. When Bryan went away with friends, Sydney and the three youngest girls stayed at Biddesden to keep her company. Even so, and with a veritable army of servants, Diana lay awake at night, frightened of the darkness and listening for footsteps on the paving outside the house – presumably those of General Webb keeping a watch on his portrait. She confided her fears to their neighbour and close friend Lytton Strachey, whose reaction apparently cured her of her apprehensions once and for all. ‘[He] raised both hands in a characteristic gesture of despairing amazement. “I had hoped,” he said, “that the age of reason had dawned.”’30 Nevertheless, the portrait of General Webb remained in situ.

  With a real talent for entertaining and love of good conversation, Bryan and Diana encouraged an eclectic circle of friends from the worlds of politics, literature, art and science to stay at Biddesden for extended periods. John Betjeman was there almost every other weekend, with Augustus John, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. Prof [Lindemann] was another frequent guest, as were the Sitwells, the Acton brothers, Harold and William, and the Huxleys. ‘Randolph Churchill almost lived with us,’ a member of the staff recalled.31

  Biddesden had a 350-acre dairy farm and a herd of fifty cows. Bryan was only too happy to agree to Pam’s suggestion that she manage it and ru
n the milk round for him. There was a farm manager’s cottage built of brick and flint on the property and Pam moved in, but she was often invited to Biddesden for dinner. The farm workers called her ‘Miss Pam’ and had a healthy respect for her as she worked alongside them, invariably dressed in riding breeches and boots, even when, in the early days, she made a few mistakes. For example, she bid at market for what looked to her like a very fine cow, only to discover when it arrived at the farm that ‘the brute was bagless’. She always had an acute sense of humour about her own limitations and was quite unaware of her beauty, which endeared her to everyone who met her.32 Since her broken engagement two years earlier she had formed no emotional attachments, but John Betjeman, who had been a friend of Bryan since 1927 at Oxford when they were successive editors of the magazine Cherwell, became a founder member of what he called ‘the Biddesden Gang’ and fell instantly in love with her. Betjeman, or ‘Betj’, as Pam called him, was on the rebound from a frustrated love affair but his affection for her ran deep. In a letter to Bryan he admitted that all his thoughts were of Pam. ‘I hope I am not a bore. Possibly.’33 Although quieter than her sisters Pam had the same physical beauty of open, regular features and attractive cheekbones, fair hair, with startling blue eyes, the same colour as David’s.

  John Betjeman and she ‘walked out’ for a while. ‘He was mad on kite-flying at the time,’ Pam would tell Betjeman’s biographer. ‘He used to bring his kite down for the weekend.’ Sometimes they drove around Hampshire and Wiltshire together, exploring old churches and villages, picnicking on the downs, visiting his (hated) old school, Marlborough. On Sundays they always cycled down to the old church at nearby Appleshaw for matins, with the glorious ancient liturgy and hymns that David had insisted on at Swinbrook. Once Pam persuaded Betjeman to ride, putting him on a reliable old pony and sending him off into the woods behind the house where he would be ‘safe’. Unfortunately, the local hunt was drawing there: at the sound of the horn the reliable old pony reared with joy, and happily decanted its passenger before galloping off to join in the fun.

  Betjeman was too shy to advance his suit aggressively but he persisted quietly for over a year. ‘My thoughts are still with Miss Pam,’ he wrote to Diana in February 1932 from a hotel in Devon. ‘I have been seeing whether a little absence makes the heart grow fonder and, my God, it does. Does Miss Pam’s heart still warm towards that ghastly Czechoslovakian [sic] Count? . . . I do want . . . to hear whether this severe test has improved my chances and done down my rival. I have written a confession of my tactics to Miss Pam today. Was that wise?’34 Diana encouraged him, and Betjeman continued as a frequent weekend visitor. He recalled that after dinner Bryan did conjuring tricks and guests used to gather round the piano for parlour songs, and ‘rounds’, but the absolute favourites were the old evangelical hymns. Diana’s parlourmaid, May Amende, disapproved thinking that they were mocking them, but they were not, Betjeman insisted, ‘We sang them in the car, too.’35 Unity’s favourite was also Sydney’s, the old Moody and Sankey hymn about the lost sheep, which was almost prophetic.

  There were nine and ninety that safely lay

  In the shelter of the fold

  But one was out, on the hills away,

  Far off from the hills of gold . . .

  Betjeman proposed twice. Pam turned him down flat the first time but on the second occasion he asked her to take some time to think it over. A month later, however, he was writing to an old friend, ‘I suppose you have heard about the death of poor old Lytton Strachey [of cancer] and how about a fortnight later [sic] Carrington borrowed Bryan Guinness’s gun and shot herself down at Biddesden. You may have heard too that I fell slightly in love with Pamela, the rural Mitford. I don’t know whether I still am . . .’36 Later still, with no favourable reply from Pam, he added a light-hearted PS in a letter to Nancy: ‘If Pamela Mitford refuses me finally, you might marry me – I’m rich, handsome and aristocratic.’37 Finally he wrote to Diana that Pam’s fondness for the Austrian count, Tom’s friend Janos von Almassy, ‘that “Austrian Betjeman” about whom I am continually hearing, and about whose success I have had little reason to doubt’ had killed his love for her and that he was now interested in ‘another jolly girl’.38 Years later Pam told Betjeman’s daughter, ‘Betj made me laugh. I was very, very fond of him, but I wasn’t in love with him . . . He said he’d like to marry me but I rather declined.’39 The future poet laureate, first person to use the term the Mitford Girls – in print, at least – consoled his disappointment by writing a ditty ‘in honour of The Mitford Girls, but especially in honour of Miss Pamela’:

  The Mitford girls! The Mitford Girls

  I love them for their sins

  The young ones all like ‘Cavalcade’,

  The old like ‘Maskelyns’40

  SOPHISTICATION, Blessed dame

  Sure they have heard her call

  Yes, even Gentle Pamela

  Most rural of them all41

  Betjeman and the girl who subsequently became his wife, Penelope Chetwode, were frequent visitors to Biddesden over the years that followed despite the effect of the house on him. Like Diana, he was affected by the supernatural ambience and on one occasion had a disturbing dream in which he was handed a card inscribed with a date. He declined to reveal the details but said he was convinced it was the date of his death.

  To celebrate Diana’s twenty-second birthday in June 1932 the Guinnesses held a party at Cheyne Walk. She was then at the height of her beauty, had been painted by half a dozen leading portrait artists and her face – which had become virtually an icon for the era with its classical planes – carefully composed, so as not to encourage wrinkles, appeared in newspaper Society columns regularly. She was the woman who apparently had everything: youth, riches, a happy marriage, a charming husband who worshipped her, and two healthy children. For her party she dressed in pale grey chiffon and tulle, and wore ‘all the diamonds I could lay hands on’.42 Their guests included Winston Churchill, Augustus John, first-time visitor Oswald Mosley, and ‘everyone we knew, young and old, poor and rich, clever and silly’. It was a still, warm summer night and dancing went on until the glassy surface of the river was gilded with the pink and orange of sunrise.

  There was a singular significance to this one party out of all the others for Diana, which is no doubt why she recalls it so graphically. A short time earlier, during the spring of 1932, she had met the dashing and dangerous Sir Oswald Mosley and had fallen madly in love with him. It was the real thing, a love that would triumphantly defy the world no matter what the cost, and endure for the rest of her life, but she could not have known that then, only wonder, perhaps, at the intensity of her feelings.

  They met first at a dinner party, and little could the hostess have realized the part she was playing in history by seating them next to each other. Diana was not especially impressed with him that evening, but she found what he had to say interesting. Although he had not been previously introduced to her, they moved in the same circles and he had certainly noticed her on several occasions. The first time had been at a ball given by Sir Philip Sassoon at his magnificent Park Lane home. ‘She looked wonderful among the rose entwined pillars,’ Mosley wrote of Diana in his autobiography, ‘. . . as the music of the best orchestras wafted together with the best scents through air heavy laden with Sassoon’s most hospitable artifices. Her starry blue eyes, golden hair and ineffable expression of a Gothic Madonna seemed remote from the occasion but strangely enough not entirely inappropriate . . .’43 He spotted her again during a visit to Venice but they did not meet then either. At the back of Diana’s mind was the knowledge that Mosley had a reputation as ‘a lady-killer’, which did not dispose her to favour him.44

  It was only a matter of time, however, for soon the popular princess of London Society was completely under the spell of the man who was rapidly earning for himself a reputation as the enfant terrible of British politics. They met everywhere, trying to discover which function the other
was attending – such as the coming-of-age party thrown by the Churchills for Randolph – seeking each other out at every opportunity, trying to suppress their feelings but unable to draw back from the delicious thrill of being in each other’s company. As the attachment deepened they were both aware of the need for discretion, and of the furore there would be if word of their attraction got out. Also, Diana genuinely cared for Bryan and was mindful of how she could wound him. But when she compared what she felt for Mosley with her affection for Bryan it was as the sun to a candle. At her birthday party Mosley declared for the first time to Diana that he was passionately in love with her. On the following morning Diana’s parlourmaid, May Amende, answered the phone. With his customary impatience, Mosley paused long enough only to identify the voice as female before he asked, ‘Darling, when can I see you again?’45

  Prior to meeting Mosley, Diana had been miserable following the deaths of Strachey and Carrington; Carrington’s upset her particularly, because she had innocently loaned her the shotgun. Diana has a good mind, and during this period she began to use it. On the face of it she had everything, just as the papers simpered, but she concluded that, with the exception of the birth of her babies, her existence since her marriage to Bryan had been trivial and that there must be more to life. She began to recognize dimly that much of what her parents had said was right, and that she had really married ‘in order to escape the boredom, and sort of fatal atmosphere that families make when too cooped up together’.46 She also began to notice the world outside her cosseted existence.