The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  Time had done nothing to lessen Nancy’s attachment to Palewski and she was badly shocked when she learned that he had been involved in a long-term liaison with a married woman who had a son by him. Even this did not affect her love for him. Gradually she became resigned to the situation but she was unhappy that she was ‘no use to you. When things go badly you don’t need me, when they go well you turn to other, prettier ladies,’ she wrote to him. ‘So I seem to have no function . . . we are both trapped and frustrated in our different ways – I must say we take it well, neither of us shows a sad face to the world nor are we specially embittered.’ She had sat by the telephone for three long days waiting for him to call, she told him, only to hear he had called a mutual woman friend ‘for a chat. It was too much to bear.’8

  When David’s will was published his treatment of Decca created more headlines: ‘Redesdale Will Cuts Out Madcap Jessica’ and ‘Red Sheep Cut Out Of Will’ were typical (‘It did so remind me of Miranda,’ said Decca). Nancy was intensely irritated by her father’s ‘mad’ will, considering it unjust. After thinking it over for a few weeks, she decided to give her share of the island to Decca by way of compensation. ‘It seems to me the very least after the way Farve treated her,’ she wrote to Sydney. ‘What does she want it for? She doesn’t say. Atom base I suppose; you’ll probably see Khrushchev arriving any day.’ It was yet another of Nancy’s amazing acts of kindness, and Decca was touched. She had taken no umbrage against her father: as far as she was concerned they had parted ways long ago and she was astonished, while on holiday in Mexico, to be tracked down by journalists and asked to comment. ‘I simply told them I wasn’t expecting to be left anything,’ she wrote, ‘and couldn’t see why it was such staggering news.’9

  Nancy’s gift meant that Decca now owned two-fifths of Inch Kenneth, with Diana, Debo and Pam owning the remainder. After David’s death, Sydney thought she could no longer afford to go on living there and that the island would have to be sold. However, Decca’s Romilly inheritance had now been announced at £11,400, and Dinky begged her parents, with tears in her eyes, to buy the island and let Granny Muv live there. And this is what happened. Because of Nancy’s gift Decca was able to buy out her sisters’ shares,10 and the legal arrangements were finalized during her visit to England in 1959. It was to be a momentous, even life-changing, visit for her in more ways than one.

  Dinky had just started as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College11 and did not accompany Decca and Benjamin, who travelled to England by ship, leaving Bob to fly over some weeks later, after he had completed a particularly important case. A month before Decca sailed, Blor died, a great sadness to Decca because Blor had always represented the one fixed star of her childhood. She had longed to see her again and show her the manuscript. Sydney met Decca and Benjamin at Paddington Station ‘tottering’ down the platform, ‘palsieder than ever,’ Decca wrote to Bob, knowing how he loved to hear Mitford stories. ‘She told me later she had arrived at 1.30, only to find that we couldn’t arrive until 3.30. She wondered how to fill the time and noticed some public baths so decided to have a bath while waiting . . .’ They had driven straight to the mews where Nancy was waiting and they had laughed so much that her face ached.12

  Decca’s family and childhood friends were all convinced that Esmond had been the love of Decca’s life and that her marriage to Bob was a friendly but far less passionate relationship. Her letters to him during this trip and over the years that followed disprove that view. Here were all the same loving phrases she had used in her letters to Esmond: ‘darling angel’ and ‘I so long for you to arrive’ and ‘Goodnight darling . . . do remind me not to plan these long trips without you any more, as I miss you fearfully.’13

  A few days after her arrival in London, while visiting the offices of the Communist Party, she asked one of the lawyers there if he knew of a good literary agent. He recommended James McGibbon at Curtis Brown. She made an appointment and went to see him. They chatted pleasantly until suddenly he floored her with the question: ‘Oh, by the way, were you a member of the American Communist Party?’ From an American this would have been an extremely hostile question, and the precursor to having the manuscript returned across the desk. Decca’s heart thumped, and she flushed, but she looked at his friendly expression and decided to be open about it. ‘Yes,’ she answered, and explained that she had left a year earlier and why. ‘Oh, so was I,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘I left for the same reason.’ Decca thought the conversation ‘superbly un-American’.14

  She left the manuscript with him and expected to hear nothing for about six weeks, the length of time it had taken to hear back from publishers in the USA. But within days McGibbon had sold the book to Gollancz. Furthermore Lovell Thompson of Houghton Mifflin in New York happened to be in London and he bought the American rights. By then Decca was staying with one of her Farrer cousins, Rudbin – Joan Farrer, now married to Michael Rodzianko, whom Bob and Decca disliked intensely. She returned from a freezing outing with Benjamin on the Thames to find Rudbin jumping up and down screaming that the book had been sold in the UK, with a £250 advance, and in the USA for $1,500. ‘You’ve got to go round there tomorrow and sign the contracts.’ Decca had hoped for five hundred dollars if the book was accepted, and scarcely able to believe it, she cabled Bob. Back came his teasing reply: ‘QUITTING JOB HOLD OUT FOR $2000’.15 Later she wrote that she was so excited her knees buckled and Rudbin had more or less forced a whisky down her throat. ‘To my sorrow Rudbin had to go out,’ she wrote to Bob, ‘but Benjy was a very satisfactory co-celebrant. He really was decent and rushed out then and there to the corner flower stand to buy me a dear little fivepenny orchid! The awful thing was that I had a date with Woman for dinner, so had to bottle all during dinner as of course I didn’t want any of them knowing about it till ’tis actually out.’

  Now, she wrote, there was a lot of work to be done on the manuscript and Benjamin had been invited to stay on with Rudbin while she went to the island to visit her mother. Hearing of this arrangement Diana had sent a friendly message via Sydney saying that she would love to meet Benjy, and would be glad to have him to stay with her while Decca was at Inch Kenneth. Decca refused this offer as she had refused other attempts by Diana to effect a rapprochement.16 She reported to Bob that she intended to finish work on her book while on the island, ‘if I can hide the ms. from Muv, which shouldn’t be too hard . . . I won’t really be in a mood to enjoy anything until you come, so do hurry up.’17

  But she couldn’t keep it to herself. As soon as she had signed the contracts she wrote to Nancy and Sydney to tell them about it. ‘What exciting news,’ Sydney wrote. ‘I believe you all have much talent for writing . . . I thought a lot of yours so good, that you sent me.’ ‘How THRILLING,’ Nancy wrote. ‘What publisher? If I’d known I’d have forced you to go to mine who is a literal saint. You’ll make a lot of money I’m sure.’ Decca’s weeks on the island were busy with fine-tuning, and interrupted only by ghostly noises. ‘Muv . . . told me she had heard distinctly the ring of an anvil. I was terrified,’ she wrote to Bob. ‘There’s also a lady in a white skirt who has been seen in the dressing room. I wouldn’t stay here alone all day for anything in the world. I have spoken to Muv about having them exorcised (often done in these parts) but she seems to like the idea of them . . .’18

  The title was giving her some concern; she rather preferred ‘Red Sheep’ over ‘Revolting Daughters’, but eventually settled on Hons and Rebels.19 ‘Hons comes from Hens, not Honourables,’ she explained to Sydney, who was upset that too much was being made of the family status. ‘James McGibbon thought it up,’ Decca wrote to her friend Pele de Lappe, a professional artist, who at her suggestion was commissioned to design the cover in the USA.

  I don’t think it’s at all bad, and only rather fear that Nancy will think I’m cashing in on her stuff . . . There is a tremendous speculation as to what it will be like (I’m not letting any of them read it . . . except Muv who read the first few chapt
ers and swore not to discuss it with the sisters) . . . Debo keeps saying, ‘Oh Hen, I do hope it’s not going to be frank’ . . .. And the other day . . . in Heywood Hill’s bookshop . . . Heywood told us . . . that Debo, Nancy and Diana were all in his shop twittering and wringing their hands about it . . . We have bought the island. Are you amazed? Nancy has given me her share . . . because I got a raw deal in Farve’s will. As the old saying goes, ‘It’s an ill will that brings nobody any good.’ Muv will continue to live there for as long as she wants. We had lunch with John Betjeman yesterday. He was one of the major ‘damn sewers’ and ‘What-a-set-ers’ of Swinbrook days. Hadn’t seen him since I was about 15 . . . he is now the highest paid poet in England . . . some pewter beer mugs arrived on our table . . . full of champagne . . . we went through two bottles ere lunch was over. Betjeman is really quite a fascinator and a terrific roarer. He has a lot of Red friends and seems quite L[eft] himself, unlike most of the ex damn-sewers.20

  Decca stayed on after Bob returned, to see the book through various stages of pre-publication, and complete the transfer of the island. While she was there Sydney was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which Decca had long suspected from the palsied shaking and the increasingly tottering gait. ‘She will never get really weak, not able to dress herself, etc., or become a charge on people because of the shaking,’ the consultant had told Decca. ‘No danger of loss of mental processes memory, etc.’21 By August she was longing to return to the USA, hanging on only because of some delay in signing contracts for the island. She was dismissive of the family solicitors, Hasties, who were taking an age and whom she had taken against ever since they had written to Esmond in 1937 advising him that Decca was a ward of court. ‘All the solicitors seem to have been chosen by horse lovers,’ she commented to Bob. ‘Pam’s is called Withers and Debo’s is Curry. Muv was on at me again for making her out to be a snob [in the book], it really rankles it seems.’22

  Sydney felt, among other things, that having mentioned the unheard-of medical treatment meted out ‘by your eccentric parents, in fairness you ought to [explain] that these methods are now in general use and are the most modern medical treatment for those troubles’. Decca had already removed some references from the book at Sydney’s request, after she read part of the galley proofs; ‘the translation of the nickname for Tuddemy [Decca said it was Boudledidge for adultery] not the name itself of course, but the translation of it, because it seems to give him a bad character’23 was one of these. She said she could not recall the ‘dead silences at meals’, only the great laughter at Farve’s funny sayings and ‘the picture of him always in a rage is not a bit true, but it does make a funny book’.24 Nor was she pleased at the picture that Decca had painted of her – she felt that she was being made a figure of fun. It seemed to her, several nieces recalled,25 as though all those years of bringing up her family, working for them, living for them, were now regarded as a mere joke. She was both hurt and annoyed, though she said nothing at the time to Decca for she was always afraid that Decca would cut herself off again and – despite her anguish – she was pleased for her. By the time the reviews appeared she had decided on the line to take: ‘I read a very disagreeable review,’ she wrote to Decca, ‘asserting that Farve and I were both arrogant and dull. I really could not help a hearty laugh . . . the author of it must be such a dreary object. He could not see that the book is not meant to be taken seriously.’26

  Sydney was not the only one vexed by Hons and Rebels. Many relatives refused to read it, but when they gathered together they discussed it interminably, and commented on the fairness or unfairness of what Decca had written. Idden was tackled by Aunt Joan, who said she had been shocked by what Decca had written about the behaviour of the two girls during their finishing year in Paris. ‘I told her you hadn’t put in the half of it,’ Idden wrote. ‘Answer: “Oh?!!?”’ Rudbin wrote to say she was ‘sorry to see Farve has emerged . . . as a near Moron instead of one of the last giants of originality’. The aunts shouted it down, the uncles huffed that it was ‘greatly exaggerated nonsense’. Before Decca left for California Sydney’s sister, Aunt Weenie, had called round at the mews for tea. After chatting with Sydney and studiously ignoring Decca for an hour, Weenie demanded that she see her to the door with the statement, ‘I want a word with you.’ Decca said she felt about ten years old. At the door Weenie turned on her ‘in a fury. “I for one will never forget the savage cruelty with which you treated your mother and father. And now, you filthy little cad, you come back and write a lot of horrible things about your mother and come and sponge on her . . .” Time I left, I think,’ Decca wrote to Bob. ‘I am longing, panting, sighing, fainting, dying for California & you.’27

  Nancy, whose opinion Decca most wanted and most nervously awaited, wrote to her: ‘I think it’s awfully good, easy to read and very funny in parts. A slightly cold wind to the heart perhaps – you don’t seem very fond of anybody but I suppose the purpose is to make the Swinbrook world seem horrible, to explain why you ran away from it . . . Esmond was the original Teddy Boy wasn’t he, a pioneer of the modern trend and much more terrific than his followers?’28

  To her correspondents Nancy was more scathing: ‘She has quite unconsciously copied from my book instead of real life, & various modifications of the truth demanded by novel form are now taken as true,’ she wrote to Heywood Hill. But Nancy was wrong in her supposition when she wrote:

  I believe her husband has re-written it, or helped a good deal as it is his voice if you know them both. My mother stood by her through thick and thin . . . my sisters mind more than I do . . . It is rather dishonest for an autobiography because she alters fact to suit herself in a way that I suppose is allowed in a novel. (But as I have taken full advantage of that I can hardly blame her I suppose!). She is beastly about aunts & people who used to give us huge tips & presents & treats. Diana is outraged for my mother – I had expected worse to tell the truth – & of course minds being portrayed as a dumb society beauty. Altogether there is a coldness about it which I find unattractive, but of course made up for by the great funniness.29

  To Evelyn Waugh, she explained that she couldn’t review it:

  What I feel is this. In some respects she has seen the family, quite without knowing it herself, through the eyes of my books – that is, if she hadn’t read them hers would have been different. She is absolutely unperceptive of my aunts and uncles, Nanny, and Dr Cheatle [the doctor at Burford] & the characters whom I didn’t describe & who could have been brought to life but simply were not . . . Esmond was the most horrible human being I have ever met . . .30

  In general, my research for this book tends to support some of Nancy’s comments that Decca has exaggerated certain facts. Some of these are a matter of written record, and others have been confirmed by a number of surviving family members and friends who remember how things were at Asthall and Swinbrook. Decca was distanced from her family for so long, at a vulnerable time, when she was totally obsessed with Esmond, and subjected to his critical hard-boiled dislike of them. ‘From what Decca told me,’ Bob Treuhaft said, ‘Esmond was completely devoid of sentimentality of any kind. I don’t know about a sense of humour, but he would not have understood Decca’s residual fondness for her family. They were “the enemy” . . . It’s quite clear he kept her from visiting Unity.’31 It appears that Nancy’s myths and half-facts had become genuinely interchangeable with real memory in Decca’s mind. Then, too, she was such a good storyteller and a natural clown, and after telling exaggerated versions of Mitford stories for years to appreciative listeners in California, the jokey versions probably became what she remembered.

  Despite this fluttering in the family dovecote, however, Hons and Rebels was a resounding hit. Decca showed that she could be as funny, ironic, deft – and waspish – as Nancy, and that she had huge ability as a writer. It seemed that people could not get enough of the eccentric Mitfords, and pre-publication sales in the UK alone netted more than double Decca’s advance. As any
author with a first book, Decca was nervous about the reviews, but on the whole they were amazingly good. In interviews she enjoyed playing to the gallery, and pulled no punches when asked about Diana: ‘I haven’t seen her since I was nineteen. We’re completely on opposite sides of the fence. Her husband stood for Parliament in the last election and I’m glad to say lost his deposit. His programme was to send all the coloured people to Africa and then divide Africa into two parts, the northern part white and the southern part black. My idea was to form an organisation of “In-laws against Mosley”, led by my husband who is Jewish.’ Her mother, she told one interviewer, was especially fond of her because, unlike most of her sisters, she had never been divorced or to jail. Her sister Pam, she said, ‘used to be married to a jockey’.32

  With ten thousand dollars assured within a month of US publication, the Treuhafts moved to a new house at 6411 Regent Street, still in the ‘old-fashioned neighbourhood’ that they so enjoyed in Oakland, but with plenty of space and a garden. At the age of forty, somewhat to her astonishment, Decca found herself successfully launched on a new career with offers flooding in for articles and lectures – Life offered her five hundred dollars for five hundred words and Esquire offered six hundred dollars for a piece on civil rights in the South. She used the opportunity to go to Montgomery, Alabama, to hear Martin Luther King speak at a Baptist meeting and she became trapped in the church overnight while the Ku Klux Klan and a mob of 1,500 whites hurled tear gas through the open windows. The uproar had been caused by the surprise appearance at the event of the Freedom Fighters, a sort of flying squad of black youths on motorcycles, who were much feared by whites in the Southern states. Next morning when Decca was finally able to leave she found that her car had been burned out. Needless to say the article she turned in after this experience, cleverly titled ‘You-all and Non You-all’, was rather more controversial and interesting than the one she had originally intended to write.