The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  Nancy faced considerable difficulty in spending time with her new friends. Society, and the behaviour of upper-class women, was still governed by a complicated set of unwritten rules, which had remained unaltered since the days of the Regency, and would be difficult now to envisage. No young girl was ever seen out in town without a chaperone, and there were still parts of London - clubland in St James’s, for example - where no respectable lady would be seen at all, even in a carriage. In the country, near one’s own home, different rules applied: girls could walk and ride out alone, without any impropriety, though they were usually cautioned to ride in pairs for reasons of safety. But in London Nancy needed a companion - her mother, a younger sister, a member of staff, or Nanny - to accompany her if she wanted to walk round the corner to Harrods.

  In addition there was David’s hatred of anyone outside the family circle and mistrust of young men in general. ‘According to my father,’ Decca wrote, ‘outsiders included not only Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners but also other people’s children . . . almost all young men - in fact the whole teeming population of the earth’s surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbours to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking.’13 Realizing that David’s bark was worse than his bite (‘we were never punished,’ Diana wrote), Nancy braved her father’s outbursts and his downright rudeness to her friends, and invited them home for tea or dinner, and sometimes even to stay for the weekend. There was only one telephone in the house: it looked like a black daffodil and was installed in David’s study. Debo recalls how on one occasion Nancy’s friend Peter Watson14 ‘was bold enough to ring up and ask to speak to her. Without moving his mouth from the instrument my father shouted into the hall, “Nancy, it’s that hog Watson wants to speak to you.”’15 Nancy’s male guests had to stand firm in the face of being called ‘damned puppy’ if they were unfortunate enough to venture an opinion that disagreed with David’s own (not difficult), and what sounded like ‘sewer!’ for merely daring to exist.16

  In fact the word was not ‘sewer’. Years later Sydney told Decca, ‘I daresay you don’t know that Sewer is really SOOR, or PIG in Tamil. It was all you children who turned it into Sewer and I think Farve was delighted at the idea. But which is worst, Pig or Sewer, is hard to say.’17 The word (more usually spelled sua), was one of the few things learned by David long ago in Ceylon, but before Sydney’s explanation, young male visitors were warned that they might well be described to their faces by Farve as ‘sewers’.18 And terrifying as it was to face David in a temper, before too long men were boasting of being a ‘Swinbrook Sewer’, although this often meant having to outface David who, as dinner ended, was liable to call down the table to Sydney, ‘Have these people no homes of their own?’19

  Sydney enjoyed having visitors to stay, and although of Nancy’s Oxford aesthetes she was often heard to exclaim disapprovingly, ‘What a set!’ she sometimes threw her weight behind Nancy’s requests to entertain her friends, so that David found himself vanquished, and subsided, muttering under his breath. While the aesthetes regarded themselves as sensitive, thinking and amusing, the athletes, their college opponents, considered themselves clean-living and sporty. These opposing legions inevitably contained hooligans on one side and hedonists on the other, so it was not unknown for the streets of Oxford to reverberate with pitched battles between the ‘Hearties’ and the ‘Arties’. The hearty athletes were Conservative, patriotic nationalists, supporting the old order of things, King, country and fox hunting. The arty aesthetes espoused romanticism, Oscar Wilde, pacifism and were often anti-field sports and even (‘heavens!’) socialists.

  Had Nancy’s friends been Hearties, David might have been better able to accept them, but it was an anathema to him to have groups of effeminate young men wearing violet-scented hair cream arriving at his home in noisy open sports cars. They lounged about the house dressed in Oxford bags with 28-inch bottoms, loud Fair Isle sweaters and silk ties, making silly jokes and roaring with laughter at everything that David and his generation regarded as sacred, and speaking at the table in the affected phraseology that appeared to pass for good conversation: ‘how too utterly divine’, ‘not much cop’, ‘good show!’ To them the Boer War, in which David and his brothers had fought and been wounded, was ‘the Bore War’, while Blake’s ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ became ‘Green Unpleasant Land - ha, ha, ha!’ Sometimes, David could stand it no longer and let fly at the unfortunate youths with a barrage of oaths. One male guest was turned out of the house for wearing a comb in his breast pocket (‘a man carrying a comb!’), and on another for venturing an opinion that he thought it was time, more than a decade after the end of the war, that Britain stopped producing anti-German propaganda. ‘Be quiet!’ David roared. ‘And don’t talk about what you don’t understand!’ This was followed by a furious aside: ‘Young swine!’

  The offender on this occasion, James Lees-Milne, was a meek, sensitive young man, who had been a friend of Tom from their first months at Eton, and whose parents lived at Broadway, a nearby Cotswold town. Although quelled and terrified by David’s tirade, he held no grudge and remained a friend of the family for the rest of his life. David was not a grudge-bearer either and soon welcomed him back. Later Lees-Milne fell secretly in love with Diana, but he always had a particular affection for Sydney:

  She presided over her wilful, and be it said, deeply devoted family, with imperturbable serenity, pride and sweetness. It was often my privilege to stay at Asthall and later Swinbrook . . . To their callow and unsophisticated guests their home seemed a perfect Elysium of culture, wit and fun. The source of those cloudless days was . . . that enigmatical, generous, great-minded, matriarchal figure, with her clear china blue eyes and divinely formed, slightly drooping mouth, which expressed worlds of humour and tragedy.20

  Of David he wrote that, although he had a dual personality, ‘I cannot see that the children had in him much to complain about. He was to them Dr Jekyll, indulgent and even docile. He submitted placidly to their ceaseless teasing, particularly Nancy’s with its sharp little barb, barely concealed like the hook of an angler’s fly beneath a riot of gay feathers.’21

  Nancy was not so forgiving and viewed David’s outbursts with dismay, sometimes trembling with despair and rage at the indignities heaped upon her guests. As an elderly woman she recalled that one young man had been picked up and shaken like a rat by her father, who growled through clenched teeth, ‘I’d rather take a housemaid shooting than you, Lord Clive.’22 ‘Really,’ she complained to Tom, over the Lees-Milne incident, ‘parties here are impossible . . .’23 Unity, Decca and Debo could be relied upon to make any discomforted guest feel even more uneasy: if applied to for advice (‘What do you think I should do?’) they would invariably break into a well-rehearsed chorus of one of the popular songs of the First World War - ‘Oh we don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go . . .’ When David took an occasional liking to one of Nancy’s visitors it was almost as bad as being disliked, for the hapless guest was then expected to be at the breakfast table, bright and shining, at eight-thirty sharp - not regarded as a ‘reasonable’ time by Nancy’s contemporaries. And, worse, one was likely to be greeted by a cheery David rubbing his hands and sharing the information that one of his favourite dishes was on the menu: ‘Brains for breakfast, old chap . . .’ This information had such a particular effect on one young man that Unity, Decca and Debo made it the subject of yet another refrain, the words of which rang merrily: ‘Brains for breakfast, Mark, Brains for breakfast, Mark, Oh the damned sewer, Oh the damned sewer . . .’

  Nancy was being paid back handsomely for her years of teasing the others, for all this terrorizing, offence and ridicule made it difficult for her to pursue her Oxford friendships. Outside débutante dances - which were not an all-year-round activity, and which were not top of the list as entertainment for aesthetes - and home, she had few ways of meeting them. At one point sh
e found a way of circumventing the system. On the pretext of spending a day with a girlfriend visiting Tom at school the two girls would take the train to Eton, drop off some small treat for him, then take the next train to Oxford where they would spend the rest of the day with Nancy’s friends. It was all quite innocent, and the young people met in tea-rooms for amusing conversation, but on one occasion a neighbour of the Redesdales spotted Nancy and Brian Howard walking in Oxford without a chaperone. There followed, Nancy wrote to Tom, ‘a hell of a row’. David was furious and roared at her that her reputation was ruined and that no respectable man would marry her. He told her that had she been a married woman her action would have been grounds for divorce. She was condemned to house detention and missed several balls.

  By now, though, Nancy was virtually inured to rows at home about her friends and continued to invite them, despite her father’s snarls, teeth grinding and insults. In fact, she was not above engaging David, head on, in rows that caused furious silences at meals. In 1924, aged twenty, she went so far as to have her long hair bobbed without permission (‘Well, anyhow,’ commented Sydney briefly, ‘no one will look at you twice now’), and to wear trousers at home, which made David apoplectic with rage. When he was cross with Nancy, he would be out on the lawn as soon as it was light, cracking his stock-whip in impotent fury. Visiting cousins found this frightening. But the rows were only the tip, as it were, of the real relationship between Nancy and her father, who sparked each other off, provoking the hilarious repartee that listeners found so amusing.

  When Tom began to invite his Oxford friends - ‘the Fat Fairs’, as Nancy called them - David found them more acceptable, but Nancy had broken the ice, just as she made things easier for Pam, who came out in 1924. Pam, however, was never a rebel and her year in France in 1923, where she was sent to improve her French, was incident-free. Unlike all of her sisters (except Debo, much later), Pam loved the country and for her it was not just ‘a nice place to live’, she felt a positive affinity with farming and animals and eventually made a semi-career of it. It was her undisguised enjoyment of domesticated pursuits such as cooking, which the others regarded as boring and ‘womanly’, that led to her lifelong nickname in the family, Woman, sometimes shorted to Woo. But though she lacked Nancy’s vivacity, Pam’s sense of humour was as well developed as that of any of the Mitford girls and she had her own court of admirers. She was always known as ‘the quiet sister’, but her letters to Sydney from France are full of her excitement about the invitations she had received to balls and dances and with pages of detailed discussion about the clothes she would need: ‘. . . a blue-mauve is very fashionable now and it is such a lovely colour . . . I ought to have that colour or a white but I think white rather dull, don’t you? Besides my coming out dress will have to be white . . .’ She describes a ride in a tank with gusto: ‘. . . I should love to do the whole thing over again. I hardly think I have ever enjoyed anything so much,’ and she made a lot of a fancy-dress party to be held later in the week when all her group had decided to dress as Arab women. ‘What fun,’ she wrote, ‘the wretched young men won’t be able to know which is which of us.’24

  Each débutante had to have her own social function so during the London Season there would be a dinner-dance or ball every night from Monday to Thursday. The whole point of the Season was, of course, to find a husband. It was a way of introducing well-bred girls to eligible and suitable young men. Newspapers gave amounts of space to Society activities that today would be considered disproportionate, and journalists were quick to nominate a girl as ‘Deb of the Year’, and an event as ‘the Ball of the Season’ or ‘the Wedding of the Year’. It was regarded as a triumph for a girl to find a husband in her first Season, or at least receive a few marriage proposals, and it goes without saying that beautiful heiresses were the first to be snapped up.

  Nancy was attractive, and her sharp wit was a great asset for those intelligent enough to appreciate it. She took up the ukelele, on which she would sing popular new songs such as ‘Conchita’, ‘... she was the child of a hidalgo/and he called her Conchita . . . Sitting by the open casement/There was Conchita the fair/And Count Don Fernando seeing/Ventured to approach her there . . .’; and ‘Ukelele Lady’, ‘If you like-a ukelele lady, ukelele lady like-a you . . . If you like-a linger where it’s shady, ukelele lady linger too . . .’ in her light plummy voice. Her gaiety made her popular, although not necessarily marriageable, but unlike other girls she never took offence at being ‘looked over as though in a horse market’, or rebelled against the system; she enjoyed herself, noted everything from the good to the absurd and filed it away in her memory for later. Nothing was wasted.

  With Nancy’s first Season Sydney had embarked on what was to be her role for many years, as each of her girls came out. She was the chaperone. By 10 p.m. she would have eaten a light supper, and - in evening dress - she would turn down her bed, collect the girls, check them over and take them to whatever function they were attending. While her daughters enjoyed the dinner, and the dancing that followed, Sydney would sit on one of the ubiquitous hired gold chairs that lined the walls of the ballroom, along with the other chaperones. At first she probably enjoyed this, and sometimes David accompanied her to the more important functions or even, rarely, went in her place. She would have met many mothers or aunts she knew, all doing the same thing, and unlike David she had always enjoyed meeting new people and ‘chatting’. Often a ball would go on until the early hours before the girls reappeared, glowing with enjoyment, and though Sydney hated late nights, this was reward enough for her. She never discovered, apparently, that sometimes her daughters slipped out of the back of a house through french windows and a garden exit, to visit nightclubs before returning to a party that had become dull.

  On the morning after a party the débutantes were allowed to sleep in, to recover for the following evening. Sydney, however, was always up and dressed and at the breakfast table by eight-thirty carrying out her daily routine of menu planning and making up the daily shopping list, for even in town she always insisted on good, plain, fresh food. The younger children clamoured for attention, too, and although Unity had now graduated to the schoolroom, Sydney still gave a full quota of daily PNEU lessons to Decca and Debo. It was she, too, who arranged the considerable wardrobe needed by a débutante, and planned the dinners or dances for her daughters, which would have taken considerable organization although the girls thought it was simply a matter of opening up the ballroom, arranging a few flowers and cooking lots of kedgeree. Then, too, as spring ran into summer, when she longed to be at Swinbrook for the loveliest part of the year, she was stuck in London. By the time Debo came out in 1938 Sydney must have been heartily tired of this punishing routine, yet she never complained. It was a refined and rather unusual kind of martyrdom and, it goes without saying, was taken for granted by the girls.

  Pam’s coming-out dance was a fancy dress and Pam was attired as Madame de Pompadour: ‘. . . I felt very self-conscious because I was rather fat,’ she told a niece. ‘In fact I did not enjoy any of the dances I went to when I came out, though I used to write in my diary what a good time I had had. I suppose I wrote it with an eye to be read in the future, and I did not want to be considered a failure at parties.’25 Diana blamed Nancy for this: ‘She was very unkind to Pam and undermined her self-confidence.’26 The greatest preoccupation for both Diana and Pam in 1925 was to get permission to have their hair bobbed like Nancy. Even the younger sisters were recruited to bombard the parents: ‘Darling Muv,’ the eight-year-old Decca wrote, when their parents went off to Ontario, ‘I hope you had a good crossing? Diana and poor Pam want more than ever to have their hair off and Pam did not enjoy her visit at all because everyone says, “Oh yes I like short hair best” and “Why don’t you have your hair off?” Please do let them have it. Please. Love from Eight.’27

  Decca’s best friend at that time was not a sister, or even a brother, but a pet lamb called Miranda. All the children had dogs and Mi
randa was treated like one of these: she went everywhere with Decca, to church, for walks, to bed sometimes, if she could be smuggled in without Nanny noticing. She was terrified for her pet when sheep-dipping time came round: ‘I used to go in with Miranda because I feared her eyes would be damaged by the virulent poisons in the dip, so I’d hold a hanky over her eyes.’ Nanny used to get cross because her bathing suits got full of holes from the chemicals and she was covered in huge welts from the thrashing animal, but she said, ‘Miranda was the light of my life.’28 She even wrote a poem for her:

  Me-ran-der is my little lamb

  She is a ewe and not a ram

  Me-ran-der, Me-ran-der,

  She has such lovely woolly fur.

  Soon we’ll have to cut off her tail

  When we do she’s sure to wail

  Me-ran-der, Me-ran-der

  But I’ll love her just the same, Sir.

  Once I took her for a walk

  My only complaint is she cannot talk,

  Me-ran-der, Me-ran-der

  Soon to the butcher I must hand her.

  In the summer of 1926 to Decca’s delight - she was always trying to get away from home - she was allowed to join dancing classes held in the homes of neighbours. Unity, who was more interested in her new pet goat, did not wish to go, and Debo was too young, so Decca, dressed in organza party frock and cashmere shawl, was taken to classes by Nanny every Wednesday. This pleasant occupation came to an abrupt end when she took the opportunity between dances to tell some of her contemporaries how babies were conceived and born. ‘The telling was a great success,’ she recalled, ‘particularly as I couldn’t help making up a few embellishments as I went along.’ A week or so later Sydney sent for her, having received complaints from parents that their children were disturbed by what Decca had told them. ‘Just retribution, ’ Decca wrote, ‘quickly followed. It was clear to everyone, even to me, that I couldn’t be considered fit company for nice children after that. The enormity of my ill-advised act . . . was such that years later, when I was a débutante of seventeen, I learned from an older cousin that two young men of the neighbourhood were still forbidden to associate with me.’29