The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  Nancy died on 30 June 1973. By then Decca was back in California and Debo sent her a telegram. ‘By a quirk of time I didn’t get it,’ Decca replied to her, ‘until I’d seen the news in the paper, “Author Nancy Mitford Dies”. A chill, yet blank message since the actual mourning for her has been going on so long.’ Indeed, those who had loved Nancy could only feel relief for, if ever there was an occasion when the overused expression ‘happy release’ was apt, Nancy’s death was it. She had suffered harrowing torments, and when the condition was finally diagnosed as Hodgkin’s disease16 she was not surprised to be told by her doctors that the pain was known to be one of the worst. ‘The very worst is something on your face called tic douloureux,’ she wrote in her customary jokey way. ‘Bags not having that as well!’ Her weight had fallen to under seven stone and her nurses had difficulty finding anywhere to inject morphine. Apart from the fact that the injections hurt, she always held off having morphine as long as possible because she dreaded losing control: ‘I have got a little spot of grey matter & I don’t want to spoil it with drugs or drink or anything else,’ she said. ‘My horror of drugs is the greatest of all my many prejudices.’ But then came the times when she screamed with pain and had to give in; and in the end only morphine, and the quiet ministrations of Pam, with her loving womanly qualities, could really provide comfort. Just as she had with Sydney, it was Pam who saw Nancy through the worst times towards the end. ‘Woman [was] such an utter trooper,’ Decca wrote. ‘Somehow it looked as though she really came into her own re appreciation of her efforts and rare qualities.’17 One of the last things Nancy said to Debo was that she recalled hunting as a teenager. If there was one thing she would like to have done, she said, it was to have one more day with hounds.

  To James Lees-Milne Nancy had written, ‘It’s very curious, dying, and would have many a droll, amusing & charming side were it not for the pain . . . the doctors will not give one a date, it is so inconvenient they merely say have everything you want (morphia).’18 And to her beloved Colonel a few days before the end, her last letter: ‘I’m truly very ill . . . I suffer as I never imagined possible; the morphine has very little effect and hurts very much as it goes in. I hope and believe I am dying . . . the torture is too great. You cannot imagine . . . I would love to see you.’19 He did visit her sometimes, and then, on 30 June, while he was walking his dog, he suddenly had a strong presentiment that he must go to see her. Although she appeared to be in a coma when he arrived, she seemed to smile as he took her hand and spoke to her. The hearing is the last of the senses to fail and it is almost certain that she was aware of his presence. He was the dearest person in the world to her. Soon afterwards she slipped away. ‘Nancy was the bright star of our youth,’ Rudbin wrote to Decca, ‘a gay butterfly fluttering through attainable territories – quite the wrong person to be ill and suffer. A gossamer personality.’20 Diana wrote, too, and her short note survives in Decca’s papers. ‘Darling Decca, I’m staying with Woman. Nancy’s funeral was yesterday. Swinbrook is looking wonderful . . . Debo will send obit from the Times. All love.’

  The cremation was in Paris, and Diana took the ashes to Swinbrook for burial. She encountered typical bureaucracy, and a few days before the funeral service it looked as though the ashes would not be released to her in time. With arrangements already in hand Debo considered using a substitute box and burying the genuine ashes later. But it all worked out and Nancy’s ashes were duly buried alongside Unity. Later, Pam had a headstone erected on the grave, bearing the heraldic device that Nancy had embossed on her writing-paper. It was a little golden mole, a creature included in the Mitford coat-of-arms. Unfortunately, Debo wrote to Decca, the mason concerned was obviously unfamiliar with moles and on the tombstone ‘the result looked more like galloping baby elephants’. The sisters thought it irritating but, still, rather hilarious. Just as they roared when they heard that Nancy had told someone that her coffin ought to be ‘a Mitford’, so that Decca could collect a 10 per cent royalty. It had been a long-running joke between Nancy and Decca that the inexpensive basic coffin she recommended was called ‘a Mitford’, and that she collected royalties on every one sold. Decca did not attend the funeral but Debo told her all about it: ‘green and summery . . . pink and yellow roses all over the grey-yellow stone . . . there were many friends and none of those ghastly people who crowd into Memorial Services’.21 She sent a photograph of herself, Pam and Diana in ‘deepest black’, taken, she said, by a reporter hiding behind a wool merchant’s gravestone. ‘The result is enclosed, of 3 witches to make you scream.’ It was one of those unfortunate pictures when all the subjects were caught off guard looking grim, but James Lees-Milne met Pam at a luncheon party shortly afterwards and she was, he wrote in his diary, ‘looking more beautiful than words can say. Her face radiates light.’22

  The middle years of the seventies were busy and fulfilled for Decca, with curious twists of fate intervening to change the direction of her life. One morning, to her gratified amazement, she opened the mail to find she had been offered the post of ‘Distinguished Professor’ by the Department of Sociology at California State University at San José, on the strength of The American Way of Death. Initially she did not intend to take up the offer, and was content to send copies of the letter triumphantly to her family and friends, but the more she thought about it, the more attractive it sounded. She was offered an honorarium of ten thousand dollars and a faculty house on campus to lecture to ‘a small class of honours and/or graduate students’ between the end of September 1973 and the end of January 1974. ‘We seem to be in a period of rather active intellectual ferment,’ the chairman said seductively, ‘which I suspect would be as exciting to you as it is to us.’23

  Decca took on the task with her customary élan and within days had clashed with the university authorities for describing the college’s loyalty oath as ‘obnoxious, silly and demeaning’. Her refusal to have her fingerprints taken ‘for records’ became a cause célèbre when she instigated proceedings against the university after being told that she either gave her fingerprints or faced being locked out of classes. Her lectures were oversubscribed by many times and two hundred students showed up for the first one in a room designed for thirty-five. Though she treated the responsibility seriously her droll manner kept the students in stitches and she made her points as though regaling dinner guests with anecdotes. Deemed a huge success, despite the ‘ruckus’ over fingerprinting, her time at San José University led to other short-term academic contracts, including periods at Yale and Harvard. In 1974 she was awarded an honorary degree as Doctor of Letters by Smith College. This entitled her, she learned, to the letters D. Litt after her name. ‘Wouldn’t Muv be amazed to find that Little D. has been transformed into D. Litt?’ she wrote to her sisters.

  During a trip to Europe after the term at Yale, Decca and Bob spent a few nights at Debo’s Lismore Castle. ‘Bob’s face when the butler came to the door to ask “Shall I lay out your clothes, sir?”’ she wrote to Pele de Lappe, ‘was worth the detour, as the Guide Michelin would say.’ Debo tried hard to bring about reconciliation between Decca and Diana, but Decca felt she could not oblige: ‘It’s not exactly politics now (except for the feeling one must draw the line somewhere, and you know all that part),’ she wrote. ‘It’s more that having adored her through childhood it makes it 10 times more difficult to have just casual meetings . . . Even our meetings over Nancy’s illness (in which Diana was marvellous) were rather agony.’24

  Still, apart from the coldness between Decca and Diana, the four surviving sisters were closer in the early seventies than they had been at any time since before the war. This happy state was brought to an abrupt end by a biography of Unity, written by David Pryce-Jones, whose father had been a ‘what-a-setter’ of the old Swinbrook days. Pryce-Jones had written several books, which Decca respected, and he had done a good interview with Nancy. He and the Treuhafts swapped homes one summer, when it suited Decca to have a long-term London base, and his inte
rest was piqued by the items of Mitford memorabilia he saw lying around in the Oakland house, ‘some of the Acton drawings of the sisters . . . Coronation chairs with blue velvet seats and the royal monogram, and Lady Redesdale’s set of Luneville china’.25 A copy of Jew Süss with Unity’s signature and the date June 1930 especially intrigued him. Subsequently he approached Decca suggesting that he write a biography of Unity, and she gave him what she said was a noncommittal reply, but which he took to be her approval. ‘It’s not quite like that,’ Decca told Debo later, ‘I told him that while I was not averse to his having a go at it, the other sisters might be. And that I thought it would be hopeless to try to do it in the face of family opposition . . . After that I forgot about it.’26 Debo considered it still too early for a biography of Unity, and that without having known Unity intimately ‘he couldn’t possibly get the hang of the amazing contradictions of her character, nor her great funniness, nor her oddness. Therefore it would miss the point and be Nazis all the way.’27

  The biography went ahead, and was published in 1976. Though she wrote to Pryce-Jones saying that she thought the epilogue ‘really terrific’, Decca refused to allow it to be dedicated to her. Even so, her connection with the author caused a great deal of bother between Decca and her family and Mitford friends in England. Pryce-Jones did a huge amount of new research, tracking down childhood friends, people who had known Unity in Germany in the late thirties, and even medical staff who had nursed her after her attempted suicide. The result, which contained verbatim transcripts of interviews with Unity’s German connections, and snippets of information gleaned from cousins and family connections, was poorly received by Unity’s loved ones, who tended to blame Decca for its publication. It is true that she helped the author with advice and information, telling him on a number of occasions that he must keep her assistance confidential, as she knew her family would disapprove. She hated the thought of losing contact with her family in England (‘I dread losing Debo for ever’), but that rebellious streak still ran strong and she gibed at the fact that Debo had made herself the ‘self-appointed arbiter of all that concerned the family (especially as I am three years older than she is)’.28 But not all the family information in the book came from Decca. Diana gave the author a very long interview telling him things of which Decca had not known. This, he told Decca, led him to believe that if he worked at it he could make Diana ‘an ally’. He underestimated Diana. She was never in favour and wrote ‘an extremely hostile review’ in Books and Bookmen. Several people made a determined attempt to have publication stopped, the Devonshires, Lord Harlech and the Mosleys among them. This rebounded on them for, although undoubtedly upsetting to the author at the time, it nevertheless gave the book much valuable pre-release publicity. Diana states that she wrote to fourteen people who were interviewed and quoted in the book and received back thirteen replies claiming they had been misquoted. One interviewee, Paulette Helleu, daughter of the painter, was prepared to take legal action through French courts.

  But the author’s claims were only half the problem as far as the family were concerned. It was what was perceived as Decca’s disloyalty that most offended. And when some photographs, which Pam recalled having last seen in Sydney’s photo album, appeared in the plate section, she wrote to Decca in cold anger: ‘I suppose you gave them to him, you could have asked us first. The album . . . that Debo always had in her drawing room is missing and can’t be found anywhere. Did you borrow it perhaps, as I believe you are writing your own life? If so we would all like to have it back.’29 Decca was livid and wrote a furious reply, which put her and Pam on ‘non-speakers’ for more than a year.

  Decca had not provided the pictures, and it is clear from correspondence between her and Pryce-Jones that a cousin had supplied the items in question from her own collection. When her immediate anger subsided Decca wrote in hurt tones to Debo, the only sister with whom she was still in regular contact: ‘I don’t know where we stand . . . [and] I am terrifically sad to think that perhaps this means it’s curtains for us.’ Lots of old hurts were aired, including the fact that Decca had been totally excluded from any contact with Harold Acton when he was writing his biography of Nancy (published a year previously). ‘He asked if he could quote from Hons and Rebels, & I said of course and he did, extensively, but only to contradict everything I’d said. You and Woman were closeted with him . . . but not me. I admit that at that point a certain stubbornness set in. I mean, why should you be the final arbiter of everything about the family?’ On and on, the letter went, listing the hurts and slights. ‘Not only didn’t I steal your photo album, I sent you all the Muv letters from the island . . .’30

  Debo was equally upset by the episode. ‘For goodness’ sake don’t let’s quarrel,’ she begged. ‘Here we are getting old, I couldn’t bear it . . . I suppose what we must do is face the fact that we are deeply divided in thought about many things, but that underneath our ties are strong.’ Nevertheless, she was deeply unhappy about the book, and felt she must state her case before the matter was shelved. She deprecated the Pryce-Jones portrait of Unity, and like Diana, Pam and the cousins she blamed Decca for co-operating in its production. Mainly, though, she said, she was deeply saddened that none of Unity’s good qualities were revealed: ‘her huge, bold truthfulness, funniness, generosity, honesty and courage’. She explained that, like Diana, she had been contacted by many of those interviewed, claiming to have been misquoted in the book, and particularly offensive, to those who had sight of the manuscript, had been a claim by one interviewee that Unity had performed a lewd sexual act. ‘How can you, as Muv’s daughter, condone such writing?’ Debo asked sadly. In the event Andrew persuaded the publishers to remove this paragraph before publication.

  An uneasy truce followed with Debo and Decca trying hard in their correspondence to act as though the accusation of theft of the scrapbook did not lie between them. Decca visited England in early December in connection with a television documentary. She and Debo enjoyed a pleasant dinner together but they did not touch on the subject of Unity; nor was the joint letter, which Pam, Debo and Diana sent to The Times on the eighteenth of that month, mentioned. The letter alleged that the book was at best an inaccurate picture of Unity, and stated that they held letters from a number of interviewees who claimed to have been misquoted. Also they had Unity’s papers, including her diary, to which the author had not had access. Cousin Clementine, daughter of the long-dead Uncle Clement, David’s elder brother, now Lady Beit, wrote to Decca to say that the biography, when it was released, ‘did not cause as much fuss a s the scrapbook! The hysteria about the PJ book was violent and did untold harm to the sisters’ cause . . . It was difficult to be objective about the book when it appeared. It was as if Bobo just lay there inert, with mud flying and her tragedy totally misunderstood. The book, for me, started as a quest and turned into a witch hunt and I felt David [Pryce-Jones] grew to hate her . . . I felt he did not want to understand her.’31

  Perhaps at the heart of the matter was that Decca had long ago crossed an invisible line of behaviour acceptable to her family in England. People of her parents’ generation, and even most of her own, lived by a strict code that Decca never accepted, hardly recognized. By running away, by treating her parents as she and Esmond had done, by her active Marxism, by the hurtful, small exaggerations in her book, funny though they were, she had broken this code and although she was still loved and welcomed back, her loyalty was never entirely trusted.

  The row rumbled on until, in December 1977, the scrapbook was discovered, unaccountably where it was always supposed to have been, in Debo’s drawing room. No one knew how it had been missed in the searches. It was ‘very strange,’ Decca wrote pointedly in answer to Pam’s explanation for ‘it was the size of a table’. But she also noted that ‘there was never a word of apology’, for the inference that she had stolen it. Nevertheless, after relieving herself of a few home truths, she said she was prepared to forget the whole unpleasant matter. She was goi
ng to be in London for a few nights on her way to Egypt where she was to write an article on the tomb of King Mut (‘an ancient forebear?’ she joked). ‘Perhaps we could meet on neutral ground? (“But we have met,” as Uncle Geoff said to Aunt Weenie.)’

  When she tried to pin people down about what so offended them about Hons and Rebels she was given nebulous answers about old annoyances. There was the grass snake round the lavatory-chain story that was ‘a complete invention’, the grave with railings at Swinbrook church in which Decca claimed she had left her pet lamb Miranda while attending Sunday services – ‘impossible for the purposes of enclosing a lamb,’ said her siblings. She had tried, she told Debo, ‘to explain about Boud; a near impossibility to get her down as she really was, so no doubt I failed. To this day I dream about her, arriving fresh from Germany in full gaiety, with all her amusingness etc. but Hen, don’t you see how awful it all was?’ The trouble was that they could all see how awful it was, but they wanted the awfulness to be left to history and remember the bold, lively, inventive Unity in private; they did not want her life continually disinterred. Nor, since most of them had either actively fought or opposed Hitler from the grimness that was wartime England, did they especially care for Decca’s general dismissal of them all as Fascists.

  Despite all the squabbles and period of non-speakers Decca remained in touch, mainly due to Debo who, following Sydney’s death, became the heart of the immediate family. Decca regarded Debo as ‘over-protective’ of the family story, without realizing, probably, that Debo had been the sister most affected by everything that had happened. As the youngest child, Debo’s adolescence had been rocked by the scandals of Diana’s divorce and remarriage, Decca’s elopement, Unity’s involvement with Hitler and her subsequent suicide attempt. At each crisis David decreed that the sister concerned must not be visited or contacted. The others all had homes of their own in the years when the ideological quarrel between Sydney and David was as its height; Debo was the only one left at home to watch the painful disintegration of the marriage. And during the war, Unity’s behaviour made it impossible for Debo to remain with her mother in the year before her marriage to Andrew. It is hardly surprising that she was unhappy at having it all regurgitated. But it is clear that Debo’s strongest desire was to keep the family together.