The Other Mitford

by Alexander, Diana

  She wrote to Diana in March 1982: ‘For me one great worry has been taken away – Mr Machell [the editor] says the cooking book would be no good. I am deeply relieved and can now really relax, it was such a hideous effort and I had to struggle to find time to do it.’ It was a burden which had been worrying her for some years. As early as 1966 Jessica is recorded as saying to Debo: ‘We must get after Woman about the cookery book.’

  Some years earlier, when commenting to Debo on Diana’s memoirs, she confessed: ‘If I started my memoirs it would be nearly all Food!’ In the very same letter she talks about a lunch where she gave her guests pot-au-feu: ‘I must admit it was delicious and all the guests had a second helping. I might give it to you and Andrew when you come.’

  ‘She remembers meals 40, 50 years ago, even on the boat going to Canada,’ said Debo to Diana; in this she was not entirely accurate for Pam even remembered meals from childhood and was ecstatic when the ‘Super Cinema’ came to Oxford – not because of the films she and her siblings might see, but because they could get supper there. When writing to Nancy for her birthday in October 1966, she says:

  Do you remember 42 years ago on my birthday at Asthall [she was 15] when there was such a heavy frost that the wire on the hen pens was quite closed with frost sparkles and the sun was shining brightly; Farve gave us all enough money to take the bus to Oxford and lunch and cinema. When we arrived we had ages to wait for lunch so as it was icy cold you insisted on going to the Ashmolean Museum, we were against it as it was costing sixpence each and we would not have so much lunch as we had hoped. However we agreed to go as it was the only place to keep warm till lunch time. Then, to our joy, we met Uncle George in the museum and he invited us all to a wonderful feast at Fullers!

  This letter is well worth further examination, not only because it illustrates Pam’s delight in food and her memory for long-ago meals (she could probably remember exactly what she and the others had eaten at Fullers), but because it shows that the sister who was thought not as bright as the others had a wonderful way with words. How easy it is to picture the bright, sharp coldness of the day, the teenage girls in a freezing Oxford street, arguing about what to do next; going into the Ashmolean, meeting Uncle George (their mother’s eldest brother) and enjoying a wonderful warming lunch. Unlike Nancy and Jessica, Pam tells it exactly as it was, not trying to be funny or clever or endeavouring to appeal to a wider audience. What a pity she found writing such a burden because it would be fascinating to read her version of the Mitford childhood – as seen through her wide blue eyes.

  Pam was never happier than when she went to Canada in 1929 with her parents on yet another of their unsuccessful gold prospecting expeditions. She and her mother kept house and cooked in the sturdy log cabin where there were few mod cons, no doubt making appetising dishes which would also be beneficial to the Good Body, including the wholemeal bread made to Lady Redesdale’s own special recipe. She was the only one of the sisters to visit Swastika, since she was the one who most enjoyed both travelling and the simple life.

  In the summer of 1939 Pam and Derek travelled to New York where he was on a high-level mission for the Air Ministry. While there they called in on Jessica and Esmond, who by this time were living in Greenwich; the sisters were delighted to see each other. Although Pam hadn’t seen Jessica since she had run away to Spain almost three years earlier, as usual it was the food which she remembered most vividly. Writing to Jessica forty years later she reminded her that they had eaten roast chicken which Pam had carved and it was so hot that even the effort of carving it had brought her out in a ‘muck sweat’. It was after this visit that Pam and Derek made their epic flight home in one of the first sea plane passenger flights.

  Throughout her life, important events were best remembered by the food that had been made and consumed at the time. Rudi von St Paul, née Simolin, who had been the one to find Unity in a German hospital after her suicide attempt and who subsequently became one of Pam’s closest friends, was equally keen on food and remembered meals which she had enjoyed. This was a trait which led Debo to refer to them as Professors of Past Menus, leading to screams of laughter from the other sisters. Unluckily for Rudi, nature was less kind to her than to Pam and she became very overweight in later life. ‘Poor Rudi,’ said Pam sadly, on hearing of her friend’s death. ‘How she abused her body.’

  It was a pity that Rudi did not live to enjoy Pam’s 80th birthday celebrations, arranged for her by Debo’s husband Andrew at Brooks’s club in London, where forty-three family and friends sat down to delicious food and wine in very congenial surroundings. Pam wrote to Jessica:

  The dinner was Borsch soup, Saddle of Lamb, Profiteroles with hot chocolate sauce. Champagne before dinner, a lovely Meursault and then Leoville Barton and Champagne again with coffee. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and were in top form. It was so good of Andrew to give such a party, I had expected to be here quietly.

  Pam was more than capable of giving her own birthday party and cooking it all herself, as she had explained to Diana three years earlier. She had invited her cousins Rosemary Bailey and Madeau Stewart, plus her great-niece Catherine (Jonathan Guinness’s daughter), Catherine’s husband Jamie, Lord Neidpath, and their baby son Richard to lunch to celebrate her 77th birthday. ‘The menu is to be Roast Leg of Lamb (from Chatsworth), chicory and red chicory salad and one other veg, Aura potatoes and then Apple Charlotte and various cheeses and I am already in a worry that it won’t be ready in time! Catherine is such a good cook.’ There is no record of how the party went but there can be no doubt that it was a great success. When Pam dined with the Neidpaths at Stanway House, near Chipping Campden, she always had to remember to wear extra underwear since the dining room was beautiful but very cold.

  Having the butchery at Chatsworth which Debo had recently set up, selling meat from the estate, meant that Pam always had access to excellent fresh meat. The snag was that she had no room to freeze a whole lamb so she would buy one and sell half of it to me. On one memorable occasion we had my mother-in-law, a former lady of the Raj, staying at our house. She then lived in a safe and leafy London suburb where the doors were always kept locked and visitors discouraged. One wet and stormy night she was sipping her first whisky and soda in our kitchen, waiting for the rest of the family to get changed for a visit to the cinema, when through the door burst a soaking wet vision in black mackintosh, black sou’wester, and black wellington boots, leading a black Labrador with one hand and holding a bag of raw meat in the other. ‘Is Diana there?’ asked the vision. ‘Could you tell her it’s Mrs Jackson and I’ve brought her lamb?’ The subsequent cinema visit to an Alistair MacLean wartime adventure story was almost an anticlimax.

  Aura potatoes were often the subject of Pam’s jokes. Always up to date with the introduction of new types of vegetable, when Aura was put on the market, she was delighted. ‘Oh, Diana,’ she said, when I arrived to clean, ‘I’ve always enjoyed Desiree potatoes because they make me think of Dee [Dee Hancock’s real name was Desiree] and Dee’s sister is Aura. Desiree and Aura, both with potatoes named after them!’ This was a very ‘Pam’ joke. It had none of the cleverness of the other sisters but Pam’s delight in it made me laugh and I remembered it thirty years later. It is somewhat reminiscent of a joke Pam heard many years previously at an Eton vs Harrow cricket match, while her brother Tom was still at Eton. In the evening after the match there was a concert, where a comedian regaled his audience with jokes, some about the schools. ‘I’ve Eton College pudding and it’s given me Harrowing pains’ made Pam laugh hilariously, but it would not have raised as much as a smile from the others.

  Stories about Pam and food were wrought in Mitford family history from the time the girls were still living with their parents. On one occasion a friend of Lady Redesdale had turned up unexpectedly for lunch and distracted her from the planning of the day’s meals. The result was that rice was served twice at the same meal, first as risotto and then as rice pudding. ‘It was
ghoul, two rices at one meal,’ Pam told Debo in horror. The incident was never forgotten and any disaster was referred to as ‘two rices’ in Pam’s voice. Her dismay was only matched when instructing her cook on how to make game soup. She related the dreadful event to Debo: ‘You know, Stublow, isn’t GS the loveliest and richest soup you ever laid hands on. Well, a milky affair came up.’

  She must also have been unsettled by a letter she once received from Debo who had ‘Uncle Harold’ Macmillan, the former British prime minister, to stay when he was very old.

  Uncle Harold is being very good, what Nanny would have called No Trouble. Sometimes he gets up, sometimes he doesn’t. When he stays in his room he has bread and butter for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. Yesterday he got up and had 2 helpings of curry at lunch and 2 pancakes after lots of other stuff at dinner. I can’t imagine what his stomach must make of such contrasts.

  Pam must have been horrified even to think of such a diet.

  When travelling in Austria she remembered the food as clearly as the magnificent scenery. ‘We had a most wonderful first course. It wasn’t a soufflé and it wasn’t an omelette, in a dish about that high,’ she said, measuring two or three inches with her fingers. ‘It was so delicious.’ While staying with Diana in Paris she gave her neighbouring dinner table guest the benefit of her cooking knowledge by telling him in detail, in her rather halting French, how to deal with a certain cut of pork. To prevent any misunderstanding as to which cut should be used, she stood up and pointing to her own body pronounced: ‘Il fait le couper LA.’ (‘You must cut it HERE.’) During the same stay, Diana heard her advising other guests on the treatment of potatoes – ‘Then you smash the potatoes in some of the best olive oil.’

  ‘Isn’t she one in a million?’ wrote Diana to Debo.

  Food was so much her domain among her less domestic sisters that Pam could be quite bossy about it. Diana was somewhat daunted by the idea of spending time with Pam when cooking was involved. In a letter to Debo in 1982, she wrote:

  I’m longing for my visit to Woman, but also terrified because she suggests we each cook every other day. First of all I can’t, and second, imagine how I’d do every single thing WRONG, wrong times, wrong ingredients, wrong casseroles (the latter bound to be ruined if I cook them). Oh Debo do you think she would take me to Marks and Sparks and I could secretly buy all? … Can’t you picture Woman and Beetle back from a walk and Woman saying ‘I smell burning’ or ‘Nard, you should have put the potatoes on long ago.’ It really will be the agony and the ecstasy because I love Woodfield and Woman and all but am not house trained.

  However much they might laugh among themselves about Pam and her domesticity, they all enjoyed her cooking. Nancy, for instance, told Debo that Pam had cooked trout, chicken and sugared ham for various meals during a visit to Woodfield, and Debo later enthused to Nancy about a meal she and Diana had had with Pam as ‘SUPREMO. Head Soup (out of) and Scotch Collops [were they scallops or a rare cut of meat?], no pouding [pudding]. Huge coal fire. Bottle of wine she had smuggled from France [more smuggling] …’ Nancy, however, was lucky to get any wine with the trout during her gastronomic visit. When Pam collected her from the station, she asked Nancy, ‘Naunceling, air u toird?’ (Nancy, are you tired?)

  Nancy said, ‘Oh, well, only rather.’

  ‘Because if you’re very tired I shan’t give you some really lovely wine, it wouldn’t be worth it.’

  Nancy let out such a bellow of rage that Pam nearly ran into the ditch. But all was well. They drank the lovely wine and the dinner was wondair.

  Head Soup which Debo had so enjoyed before the Scotch Collops was not made of a ‘ghoul’ (Pam’s own word) collection of animals’ brains as its name suggests. It was simply ‘soup out of my head’, as Pam would tell those who wanted the recipe; she could not give it to them because it was never quite the same – it depended what she decided to put in it or what she had in her larder and kitchen garden, but it was always delicious. She usually made the stock from a chicken carcase or a ham or lamb bone, but if she had none of those things to hand she would add water to what she called a ‘K-norr stock cube’. To this would be added all manner of seasonal vegetables and herbs from her garden and the seasoning would often include Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, nutmeg, lemon juice and a variety of other spices depending on the ingredients. When she was making it a most enticing smell pervaded her kitchen and it was always eaten with Lady Redesdale’s wholemeal bread.

  Her nephew, Max Mosley, has vivid childhood memories of her excellent cooking and also of her ‘out of my head’ recipes:

  If one asked her where she got the recipe, she would usually answer ‘I made it out of my head’ which used to mean that as children, none of us dared catch the other’s eye for fear of starting to laugh. And of course, we always asked for the recipe just to get her to say that, even in later life.

  My principal memory of her is that she was a full-on food enthusiast. She would come back from a trip abroad and regale everyone, particularly my mother, with what she had eaten. ‘The menu, Nard, was the following …’ was heard so often that it became a sort of catchphrase.

  He also recalls that while living in Ireland, Pam would drive for miles to get the right pig’s head with which to make brawn, one of her specialities.

  Pam was never one to resist a challenge where cooking was concerned. While still living in Ireland she turned down an invitation from Debo to visit her at Lismore Castle because she was making egg mousse for sixty people, who were invited to the Tullamaine point-to-point. This could easily have been on the menu at the Royal Show in 1969 when Debo hired a stand and introduced her Haflinger horses, newly imported from Austria, to an admiring public. ‘My sister Pam and I hired a caravan, parked it behind the horses’ stalls and spent a week there. Pam made lunch for crowds of friends; we sat on straw bales and were entirely happy.’ This would not have been regarded as fun by any of the other sisters, but for Pam and Debo it was exactly what they most enjoyed.

  Both Debo and Pam were equally thrilled when Debo introduced the Duchess of Devonshire line of groceries to the Chatsworth shop and various other outlets early in 1987. Debo wrote to Pam:

  I’m longing for you to see and taste the FOOD. We had 38 distributors (commercial travellers really) here on Wed, lunch for all, a tour in the freezing cold of the State Rooms etc, to try and show the fellows what we have to look after here … Then we went to the Stag Parlour set up with chairs like a school room & THE PRODUCT was unveiled, along with various pots and tins from rival firms to show how much better ours are! I long to know what you, specially, will think of them.

  Pam’s main experience of brand products had been in 1976 when the village shop in neighbouring Brimpsfield had closed for good and she had bought all the remaining contents at a knockdown price – which must have pleased her greatly. But even she didn’t get round to using everything up, because when Debo and one of her staff from Chatsworth went to clear her house after she died in 1994, they found and threw away many items from the larder, the oldest of which had a sell-by date of 1977. Of that time, Debo told Diana:

  Arriving here was awful … It’s odd beyond anything not to find her here. I’ve been faithfully round the garden plant by plant and am glad she can’t see the precious new tree peony (expensive) which has been struck by a frost and the new growth hangs in that horrid way. I’m also glad she can’t see the way we treat the water and the electric light, wickedly extravagant.

  All through her life Pam just couldn’t resist a bargain. In 1968 she announced to Nancy that she would be arriving for Christmas laden with household goods for her store cupboard. These included two 5kg drums of soap powder for the laundry machine, and she could, if necessary, get hold of first-class soap powder for the dishwasher, bird seed and maize, envelopes, floor cloths and loo paper (very soft) from Switzerland at much cheaper prices than in France. Nancy, who found simple domestic tasks like boiling eggs and washing saucepans quite beyond he
r capabilities, must have shuddered at the thought of all these bargains arriving at her elegant Paris flat, but it is most unlikely that she managed to deter Pam from her mission.

  Pam’s careful nature was at its peak many years earlier when Debo needed a cot and blankets for her youngest daughter Sophy when she went to stay at Lismore Castle for the first time. She felt sure that Pam would have not have thrown away the baby items she had acquired when she had had the Mosley boys to stay during the war, and she was right! Pam wrote from Tullamaine:

  Of course I will get you a cot, blankets, sheets & all. I have a perfectly good cot that Al and Max used at Rignell. If painted would it not save a lot for you to borrow it while here? I think it may need a new mattress also a pillow. I have some perfectly good blankets which have a few moth holes; if Frau Feens [the seamstress at Lismore] cut them into the right size leaving out the eaten parts she could put some pretty ribbon to bind them and this would again save a lot. Then what kind of sheets, linen or cotton? If linen, I have some large double bed ones which are rather worn but here again Frau Feens could find plenty left to make cot sheets.

  Debo forwarded the letter to Diana underlining the words now in italics. This was their sister at her ‘make do and mend’ best, the true heir to their mother Lady Redesdale.

  Just occasionally, however, Pam was persuaded to part with some of her most elderly belongings: in the spring of 1989 she told Diana about a list of items she was having specially collected by the district council since they were too heavy for the usual dustbin round. It was a very long list ending with ‘old metal feeding troughs, rusted and holy’.