The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  To achieve a sudden ‘respectability’ after years of being almost a pariah was a heady experience. She began her second book almost immediately. It was a bit ghoulish, she said, but it had important social connotations. It was about the funeral industry in America and for the next few months she regaled her correspondents with gruesome bits of information on embalming. ‘Hen, I’ll bet you didn’t know what is the best time to start embalming, so I’ll tell you: before life is quite extinct, according to a text book I’ve got. They have at you with a long pointed needle . . . with a pump attached.’

  In 1961 Debo visited America (‘for a tête-à-tête with your ruler,’ Nancy wrote to Decca); she admired the President a good deal and it was to be the first of five visits she would make to the White House over a couple of years. President Kennedy made one visit to Chatsworth to visit the grave of his sister, as did his brother Robert. Nancy could not resist writing to tell Debo that the on-dit at the Venice Lido was that if JFK didn’t have sex once a day he got a headache, and to Decca to say, ‘Andrew says Kennedy is doing for sex what Eisenhower did for golf.’ Andrew had recently been appointed Under-Secretary of State for the Commonwealth. There was a row about this in Parliament since his uncle Harold was Prime Minister. The arch anti-royalist and anti-aristocrat MP Willie Hamilton asked a question about nepotism in the Commons. Macmillan replied blandly, ‘I try to make the best appointments I can.’33

  In the following year Dinky showed that she really did have running-away blood in her, and quit college to work for the civil-rights movement. Decca was furious. She travelled immediately to Sarah Lawrence College, just north of New York, and convinced the Dean to give Dinky, who was regarded as an excellent student, an ‘honourable discharge’ that would enable her to return to college at a later date. Then mother and daughter, so much alike in many ways, returned to California. ‘We were on that train together three days and three nights and we barely spoke a word to each other,’ Dinky said. A few months later Decca played at being ‘Lord of the Isle’ (as suggested by Debo) and went to Inch Kenneth for the first time since becoming its owner. ‘Muv was asking me what is to be done with the Isle when she no longer comes here . . .’ Decca wrote to Debo from there. ‘I said, “Where will you be going?” and she went into gales of laughter, saying, “To the next world I expect.” But to my great relief she really doesn’t seem to be departing at the moment.’34 But death was on Decca’s mind for she was taking the opportunity to research her book about the funeral industry, she said, and had just come across a fascinating editorial entitled, ‘Children’s Funerals – a Golden Opportunity to Build Good Will’. ‘Do admit, they are a lark,’ she wrote.

  While Decca was staying with Sydney, Nancy published a little book called The Water Beetle. It was a collection of her essays, including a sketch about Blor, the best description we have of the woman who was so important in the lives of the young Mitfords, but Sydney was also portrayed:

  My mother has always lived in a dream world of her own and no doubt was even dreamier during her many pregnancies . . . when she was young she never opened a book and it is difficult to imagine what her tastes and occupations [were]. My father and she disliked society, or thought they did – there again, later they rather took to it – and literally never went out. She had no cooking or housework to do. In those days you could be considered very poor by comparison with other people of the same sort and yet have five servants . . . Even so she was perhaps abnormally detached. On one occasion Unity rushed into the drawing room, where she was at her writing table, saying, ‘Muv, Muv, Decca is standing on the roof – she says she’s going to commit suicide!’ ‘Oh, poor duck,’ said my mother, ‘I hope she won’t do anything so terrible,’ and went on writing.35

  This was the so-called straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back as far as Sydney was concerned. She and Decca had a blistering row about Hons and Rebels, the education of the Mitford girls, and Decca and Nancy’s literary portrayal of her as a dilettante mother leaving the upbringing of her children to nannies. Sydney wrote in a similar vein to Nancy, deploring the piece. But although Nancy wrote a conciliatory letter saying that she realized that their education had been the product of received wisdom at the time, rather than any whim of their parents, Sydney was not to be pacified and told Nancy what she had already said to Decca: ‘I wish only one thing,’ she said firmly, ‘that you will exclude me from your books. I don’t mind what you write about me when I am dead, but I do dislike to see my mad portrait while I am still alive.’

  As usual Sydney spent the winter months at the mews. To save costs, the island was virtually shut down each autumn, the animals sold off and the house closed except for an occasional cleaning and airing d one by her faithful couple, the McGillvrays. When she returned to the island in the spring of 1963, she was accompanied by Madeau Stewart.36 Madeau, who had trained at the Royal College of Music, had stayed on the island for weeks at a time over several years and loved being there. ‘Sydney played the piano and I played the flute; we used to play Victorian ballads, they were very expressive,’ Madeau said. ‘And there were lots of books to read and so much to talk about.’

  Diana was less enthusiastic about visiting. On one occasion when she travelled back with Sydney they were stuck at Gribun for forty-eight hours in a storm, and finally boarded the Puffin in a grey and troubled sea. Sydney, in her eighties, still loved the sea. Wrapped in her oilskins against driving rain and spray, she shouted back to her daughter, ‘Great fun, isn’t it?’ The lack of news, mail and table-talk also bothered Diana, although she conceded that the beauty of the island was some compensation. During those years she and Debo had a pact to write to each other every day while either was on the island, so that they could be sure of at least receiving some mail while they were there. Often the only visitors were picnickers, whom Sydney spotted through binoculars, and she used to send McGillvray as an emissary to invite them to tea. ‘Such a haphazard choice of guests was, to me, strange taste,’ Diana wrote. ‘It must have been the gambler in Muv which made her positively enjoy . . . the luck of the draw at her tea parties.’37

  About that journey in 1963, Madeau recalled that Sydney was ‘very tottery. We had dinner and a bottle of wine on the train, and we got to Oban. I remember there were screams of laughter when I tried to put on her shoes and got them on the wrong feet. Anyway, the crossing was a bit rough and she said she’d like to lie down. That was unusual. When we got to the island she said she wasn’t feeling very well and she thought she might call the doctor on Monday.’ Alarm bells rang and Madeau decided to get the doctor immediately. She sent for Dr Flora MacDonald, whom Sydney liked. Dr MacDonald recognized that Sydney’s condition was serious: having suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years she was now in the terminal stages of the illness and her condition was deteriorating rapidly. Madeau alerted the sisters, and Nancy, Pam and Diana came rushing up to the island. Debo could not leave immediately but Nancy kept her up to date until she could join them. Two nurses came in to help them with round-the-clock nursing, and though there were several periods when it seemed that Sydney was fading she rallied each time. Curiously, for she had been very deaf for some years, her hearing returned in the last days: they kept a fire burning in her room and she could hear the logs crackling and spitting.

  ‘It is so poignant,’ Nancy wrote to old Swinbrook-sewer Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘She feels so ill . . . two days ago she said, “Who knows – perhaps Tom and Bobo?” . . . She laughs as she always has . . . We long for her to go in her sleep, quietly.’38 A week later Sydney had a minor stroke and slipped into unconsciousness. ‘Before that it was dreadful,’ Nancy wrote. Sydney had been unable to swallow anything but sips of liquid because of throat constriction and was starving to death. Nancy had often claimed that she had never loved her mother but now she found that her feelings for her were stronger than she had suspected. ‘Now she is slipping away and feels nothing . . . the sadness comes and goes in waves. I have a feeling nothing really nice will
ever happen again in my life. Things will just go from bad to worse, leading to old age and death.’39

  Sydney died on 25 May, just after her eighty-third birthday. A carpenter travelled over to the island and made her coffin, and a neighbour said prayers over her body. After a period of fearful storms there was a sudden calm, enabling the coffin to be ferried across to Mull as the sun was setting. The Puffin, flying her ensign at half-mast, was escorted by a small flotilla of local boats, and a lone piper played a lament during the short journey over to Gribun. Friends Sydney had known for many years met them and carried the coffin from the little launch to its overnight resting place before it was driven down to Swinbrook. It was all very moving, Pam wrote to Decca. Sydney had wanted to be buried next to David at Swinbrook where, on what was the first warm day of spring, the Mitford clan gathered. Debo wrote,

  Swinbrook looked perfectly magical. The birds singing so loud, and the churchyard was full of cow parsley and brilliant green grass. The sight of Choops,* Mabel . . . and all the aunts, so ancient now, and Honks [Diana], Woman and Nancy in deepest black . . . the feel of the pews, not to mention the taste when licked (do you remember) . . . When ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ started Honks and I were done for; it was too much. We had ‘Jerusalem’, as well. Afterwards we thought we ought to have had ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ . . . Hen it was all fearfully upsetting and sad. The beauty of the place and the day and the flooding memories of that church and village . . .40

  Decca, who was inexpressibly sad, for in latter years she had learned to value her relationship with Sydney, sent a subdued answer: ‘I should have felt very lonely if it hadn’t been for your letters (and Nancy’s) . . . Thanks so much for sending flowers from me. (By the way my new book is all about the ridiculous waste of money on funeral flowers and an attack on the Florist Industry for inducing people to send flowers. But I can see not, in this case).’ Decca was nothing if not irreverent.

  In the aftermath of the funeral another Mitford story emerged. Weenie and Geoffrey were the only survivors of Tap’s four children as George had died before Sydney. (‘What did he die of?’ Decca had enquired. ‘A nasty pain,’ Sydney replied.) When she returned to London from Swinbrook Weenie telephoned Geoffrey. ‘George is gone and now Sydney is dead, don’t you think we should meet?’ ‘But we have met,’ he replied, puzzled.41

  That summer Dinky was invited to Chatsworth for the wedding of Emma (Debo’s eldest child) to Toby Tennant, the youngest son of Lord Glenconner. To Dinky’s horror everyone kept telling her she looked just like Diana, a compliment in any other branch of the Mitford family but Decca’s. ‘Silence was the only possible response,’ she decided. Like Bob, she was unsure of herself in the big house, though not overawed; if anything her reaction was one of amusement. Invisible hands unpacked her luggage and her laundry was whisked away and reappeared looking fresh and new. ‘They keep referring to Kennedy as Jack,’ she wrote to her parents, ‘and there is an autographed portrait of him in Debo’s drawing room.’ She found Nancy ‘cold and aloof’ and Diana ‘trying to pretend there was no reason for there to be any unfriendliness between us’. Pam was ‘relaxed and ordinary’ and Debo ‘so sensitive and welcoming’. In an odd sense, because she knew so much about the sisters, she felt like one of them, rather than a niece.42 By the end of her trip she had reassessed some of her first impressions and thought Pam somewhat uninteresting, but she felt sorry for the way the sisters teased her, constantly making fun of her lack of sophistication and ‘basic non-fascination’. Dinky thought this ‘cruel – it was as though Pam came from a different family from the rest of you,’ she told Decca. She was scared of Nancy at first until she realized that she was meant to be scared: it was Nancy’s shell. Andrew’s sister told her later that Nancy was actually quite shy.

  Decca’s book on the funeral industry was published in the summer of 1963; she had worked on it, on and off, for five years. It was Bob who had sparked her interest initially, before the publication of Hons and Rebels. He handled the estates of trade-union members and noticed, to his great irritation, that the hard-fought-for union death benefit, intended for widows, often end up in the coffers of undertakers. It didn’t seem to matter whether the benefit was a thousand or three thousand dollars, the amount always seemed to be the exact cost of the funeral. As part of his job he attended fortnightly meetings of the local Funeral Society and Decca used to tease, ‘Off to meet your fellow necrophilists again?’ Having made a few enquiries he suspected that funeral directors used the natural distress of the widows, and their desire to ‘do something’ for the loved one, by persuading them into buying caskets, flowers and services they could not afford and which, in normal circumstances, they would probably not have considered. Decca, in sore need of a cause and sensing here not just one underdog but a whole pack, took up the matter with alacrity and began her lengthy research. Later she would say that at her age it was easier to sit down at the typewriter and work at being a rebel than going out into the streets and getting her head beaten in by police. An article, which she provoked, was published in the Saturday Evening Post in the late fifties, titled ‘Can You Afford to Die?’ It brought in more mail than any other in the magazine’s long and distinguished history.

  Realizing from this reaction that there was probably a good book in the subject, she had initially contacted James McGibbon and her American publisher, and suggested that she and Bob would write it. The book was commissioned, but on the condition that it appeared as a work by Jessica Mitford not a joint work on the grounds that ‘co-signed works’ never sold as well as one by a single author. Bob was a practical man and had no literary ambitions, having already achieved a successful reputation built on his legal career. However, he took a leave of absence from his law firm to work with Decca since the project was so huge and Decca did not feel she could cope with it alone. They shared the research: Bob went off to the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science to learn about the technical side of the industry, such as embalming processes. Decca posed as an about-to-be-bereaved relative with a limited budget, and set out to find how the industry operated in general terms. She was fascinated to see how she could be talked up from the cheapest pine coffin to an elaborate bronze casket, from simple flowers to great floral tributes, to embalming, even when there were no facilities for the family to view the dead body, the hundreds of extras such as Ko-zee shoes (open at the back to allow them to be fitted easily) and cosmetic enhancements. One young salesman advised Decca seriously that they recommended silk for the coffin lining, ‘because we find rayon so irritating to the skin’. A grieving widow who absolutely insisted on the least expensive casket was told, ‘Oh, all right, we’ll use the Redwood, but we’ll have to cut off his feet.’43

  Nothing was too grisly, sacred or funny for Decca: the cost of dying, she said, was rising faster than the cost of living. Her investigation was savagely incisive and for half a decade she rollicked through funeral parlours opening wide her large blue eyes and asking innocently droll questions that trapped her victims like flies on sticky paper, without their even realizing they’d been had. She used her family as unpaid researchers in England and France, sending them questionnaires to answer about their experiences of funerals. Debo complied willingly, but Nancy balked, writing to explain that she was unable to call on the local pompes funèbre. ‘I walk past there every day,’ she said, ‘but I fear I have the superstitious feeling of an old horse passing a knacker’s yard.’44

  Bob also shared the writing process, and the couple had tremendous fun choosing the title, oscillating between such gems as ‘The High Cost of Leaving’, ‘Remains to be Seen’ and ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Mausoleum’. Eventually they settled on the harder-hitting The American Way of Death, and despite its subject the book soared effortlessly to number one in the bestseller charts, as Decca’s savage yet hilarious analysis of the practices of America’s funeral industry both shocked and struck chords with the public. Decca dedicated the book to Bob, ‘with much
gratitude for his untiring collaboration’, and it earned her a place in a publication called Women Who Shook the World.

  The American Way of Death was a publishing phenomenon, holding the number-one position in the bestseller charts for months. The publishers were amazed, and so were Decca and Bob. But it was not simply a well-written and interesting read: it made a genuine impact on the way in which Americans regarded funerals. So much so that when President Kennedy was assassinated in November that year, Robert Kennedy chose the least expensive classically designed coffin on offer for his brother’s funeral because he had read The American Way of Death and had been impressed by what Decca had to say.45 ‘Of all my writings,’ Decca once said in interview, ‘I’m most proud of The American Way of Death.’

  Within the first year the book had netted over a hundred thousand dollars in royalties. From now on, like Nancy, Jessica Mitford was a media personality. That is not to say she was popular with everyone: America’s funeral industry regarded her as a sort of Lucifer sent to torment them, and they paid her the compliment of referring to her simply as ‘Jessica’ in their trade papers. They made strenuous attempts to damage her credibility by dredging up her political affiliations, intimating that by damaging the funeral industry she was helping to destroy the American way of life, that she was trying to substitute the American funeral service ‘with that practised in Communist countries such as the Soviet Union’. But too many people had been stung and there was enormous support for her demand that some federal controls be instigated to protect vulnerable people. To her amusement Decca found that clergymen were among her staunchest supporters in this.46