The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  In order to earn some additional pocket money Nancy began submitting items of gossip to Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, and from this graduated to writing the occasional article. The first known to be published was ‘The Shooting Party, Some Hints for the Woman Guest’ by the Hon. Nancy Mitford. She earned twenty-two pounds for each one, which she spent on gifts for Hamish. Her romance with him was going nowhere, although she longed to marry him. Whenever she could she stayed in London, chiefly with Middy O’Neil who had been so helpful in Paris, and Evelyn Gardner, whom she had known for many years. When it was not let, she was occasionally allowed to stay at, and even entertain from, 26 Rutland Gate. She had given a smart little party there for Evelyn Gardner when the latter became engaged to Evelyn Waugh (‘who writes, I believe, very well’) in 1928.18 After the two Evelyns married, the complication of their names was resolved by the simple expedient of referring to them as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn. The marriage could never have worked: Waugh had homosexual urges and was not able to give She-Evelyn the emotional security she needed; as a writer he needed quiet and isolation, while She-Evelyn craved social life.

  That social Season - which heralded the Wall Street Crash and a world depression - and the one that followed it were arguably the most hectic ever known in London. For the privileged few there was a party every night, mostly in costume: clown parties, baby parties, bath and bottle parties, heroes and heroines parties, Roman orgy parties, Russian parties, wear-almost-nothing parties, ancient Greek parties, subject-of-a-book parties. A party where guests attended in ordinary evening clothes was just plain unsmart.

  Diana and Bryan were the acknowledged leaders of London Society. They were rich, young, intelligent and beautiful, and a focal point for various sets: the aesthetes, such as Roy Harrod, Henry Yorke, Harold Acton, Robert Byron and Brian Howard; the pre-jet jet-setters, such as Emerald Cunard, Margaret Mercer-Nairne (Lady Margaret Myddleton, daughter of Lady Violet Astor), and Duff and Diana Cooper; the more cerebral world of Lytton Strachey and his lover Dora Carrington, John Betjeman and Professor Lindemann; and the theatre world of Noël Coward.

  As for the Bright Young People, Diana and Bryan knew many of them, but regarded them as too frivolous. Diana, still not twenty, preferred grand balls especially because Bryan was a wonderful dancer: ‘I loved dining out and dancing . . . we never went to all those [Bright Young People] “parties” except Brian Howard’s Greek party in fancy dress. We had many parties at Buckingham Street, some in fancy dress though the house wasn’t big.’19 One of these was an 1860s party that was grist to Evelyn Waugh’s literary mill. That summer, in ten days, he wrote twenty-five thousand words of a novel about it all: ‘It is rather like a P.G. Wodehouse,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘all about bright young people. I hope it will be finished by the end of the month.’20

  Earlier, in May, She-Evelyn had invited Nancy to move in with her at the Waughs’ house in Canonbury Square, Islington, because He-Evelyn wanted to go away to the country to work on his book. Nancy had been there only a matter of weeks when She-Evelyn bolted with a lover, leaving a note for He-Evelyn breaking the news. Clearly Nancy could not stay with He-Evelyn alone so she had to return home, which at that juncture was High Wycombe, Swinbrook having been let to provide extra income. Leaving the rarefied company of Diana’s social whirl and London’s literati for Old Mill Cottage with its singular delights of ‘the children’, Sydney’s collection of Leghorns and bantams, Unity’s goat, Decca’s sheep and Debo’s guinea-pigs was like an emergency stop in a vehicle that had been racing along deliciously at maximum speed. Nancy was morose and teased everyone more than ever. Friends thought she was just ‘spinsterish’, following Diana’s marriage: it was considered something of a blow to have a younger sister marry first.

  Later that summer Diana and Bryan went to Paris and stayed at the house of Bryan’s parents in rue de Poitiers. Bryan had known Evelyn Waugh at Oxford and wrote asking him to come to stay with them while he completed his novel. Waugh had attempted reconciliation with She-Evelyn but, having at last admitted that divorce was inevitable, accepted the invitation. Later Nancy went over to join them. All her sympathies were with He-Evelyn, and before the Paris trip they had taken to lunching together at the Ritz, where she dispensed emotional sympathy, and he provided advice about her writing after she began working on a novel called Highland Fling.

  Waugh had taken the world of the Guinnesses as the setting for his novel Vile Bodies, a world he knew intimately, though often he must have been more observer than participant. ‘It is a welter of sex and snobbery,’ he wrote of his novel to a friend, ‘written simply in the hope of selling some copies.’21 For those in the know it was scattered with private jokes, like plums in a rich fruitcake. He even managed to insert one of Decca’s favourite expressions. Because of her love for Miranda she would say, ‘It’s perfectly sheepish’ to describe something that Nancy and Diana would have called ‘divine’, and ‘goatish’ to describe a horror. Waugh wrote, ‘He left his perfectly sheepish house in Hertford St . . .’22 Nancy based her principal character on Hamish, and Bryan, who wrote a novel as tit-for-tat for Waugh’s plot, took as his subject the marriage of a young writer whose wife runs off with a lover, leaving her husband to find out about it in a note. While the three worked at their respective novels, Diana, who was pregnant, sat in bed reading contentedly and making occasional comments on their progress.

  Diana’s first child, Jonathan, was born in March 1930. Unlike Sydney who had dismissed most of her babies as ‘too ugly for words’, Diana was a natural mother, worshipping all her children as babies and as they grew. Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill stood as godparents, and the Churchills’ old nanny, Nanny Higgs, was recruited for the nursery. Despite the world depression Diana returned to Society. The Season was more frenetic than ever with non-stop entertainments every night, if not a dinner, dance or fancy dress ball then a ‘treasure hunt’ in which guests were provided with a list of items they must retrieve, such as a policeman’s helmet or a lamppost or street sign, kidnap a dog, or collect a duck from St James’s pond. There were other pranks too, such as a pretend exhibition of modern works by a fake artist called Bruno Hat, who was in reality Tom Mitford in bohemian clothes and false whiskers.

  Waugh, who spent a lot of time with Diana and Bryan, became curiously disapproving of Diana’s desire to return to the social whirl after Jonathan’s birth. Increasingly he tried to persuade her not to go out, but to stay at home and enjoy quiet conversation. But Diana, just twenty that summer, longed to dance again, and meet clever new people, and thought he was being ‘boring’. It was not that he had suddenly developed a sympathy with those who wrote to the newspapers deprecating a disgraceful flaunting of wealth and privilege in the face of growing unemployment and real poverty, nor with the older generation, like David and Sydney, who could not stomach the frivolity demonstrated by the Bright Young People, with its inconvenience to innocent bystanders. Many years later, he admitted that he had been jealous: he had fallen in love with Diana and wherever they went she was surrounded by a court of adoring young men. While she was pregnant he had her to himself, sharing long hours with her, ‘just sitting with him all day, and dining in bed - I had a table in my room for Evelyn and Bryan . . . which of course was very cosy. But Evelyn didn’t much like new friends such as Lytton Strachey who stayed with us in Ireland . . . Evelyn refused to come.’ During a visit with the couple to their south-coast property, Pool Place, he picked quarrel after quarrel with Diana and left abruptly, sending her only a brief note to apologize for being ‘unfriendly . . . Please believe it is only because I am puzzled and ill at ease with myself. Much later everything will be all right.’ In fact, it marked the end of their friendship and they were only to make contact again in 1966, shortly before his death, when he admitted the true cause of his boorish behaviour. By the time he left Diana had begun to find his behaviour ‘so horrid . . . that one didn’t miss him at all’.23 As the weeks went by she found she missed his conversation and
tried to bring him back, but he refused all invitations.

  In January 1930 when Waugh published Vile Bodies, the novel he had been working on during the previous year, and which portrayed so graphically the almost demented partying by the young of the upper classes, he dedicated it to Bryan and Diana ‘without whose encouragement and hospitality’, he wrote, ‘this book would not have been finished’.24

  6

  THE STAGE IS SET (1930-32)

  While Evelyn Waugh was launching Vile Bodies to wide acclaim, Nancy’s manuscript of Highland Fling 1 was with the printers. She hoped to make some money from it because David had virtually halved her allowance owing to financial pressures stemming from the depression. Fortunately she managed to talk herself into ‘a job’ with the Lady, writing a weekly column on subjects such as ‘The Chelsea Flower Show’, ‘The Débutante’s Dance’ and ‘The Shooting Party’, at a salary of £250 a year.2 Her contributions are not in the same league as her later bestselling novels but they are pithy and observant. In the following excerpt she advises how to behave during a visit to the photographer.

  People about to be photographed are always at great pains to explain that their motives are both noble and unselfish. They never say, ‘I wanted a picture for myself,’ but imply that countless friends and relations are clamouring for one and that it is for their sakes alone that an unpleasant ordeal is being faced . . . Don’t bother to be very natural; it is not an informal snapshot, but a carefully considered portrait . . . and a little affectation often helps to secure a good result. This is why it is important never to take a friend with you. They are so apt to spoil a really good pose by giggling or saying, ‘Darling! What a soulful expression!’3

  Meanwhile the rest of the family went to Switzerland. Skating had become a virtual obsession with David, who skated regularly at Oxford, and packed his skates whenever he went up to London. Various members of the family skated almost to professional standard: Tom was able to partner Sonja Henie without disgracing himself, Unity won a bronze medal, and Debo was so good she was invited to join the British junior team, but Sydney - realizing the commitment required for international level competition - vetoed this. The Mitfords usually stayed at Pontresina, close to but less expensive than its fashionable neighbour St Moritz, where they skated on the rink in front of the glitzy Suvretta House Hotel.

  Uncle Jack, David’s favourite brother, but better known as the debonair éminence grise of the International Sportsman’s Club, was also a fine skater, but he was more interested in the Cresta bobsleigh run, which attracted a racy international crowd. That year he had brought along an unusual guest. Sheilah Graham was a bright working-class girl of quite extraordinary beauty and at that time was one of ‘Mr Cochran’s Young Ladies’.4 She was married but had been forced to keep the marriage secret (even from Jack) for the sake of her stage career. Years later, when she wrote her bestselling memoir, Beloved Infidel, and recalled that holiday, it was not Jack whom she described but David, whom she likened to a Saxon king: ‘a blond, blue-eyed giant of a man with a striking head, great shoulders, and a hawk-like look to his finely chiselled face’. Sheilah met Tom there and they remained friends for some years; ‘Tom Mitford, a youthful edition of his father and, at twenty-one, one of the handsomest men I had ever seen,’ she recalled. ‘Outrageous fantasies danced through my head. I had always wanted children. And I had not been successful. Perhaps I could found an aristocracy of my own. And I would choose Tom Mitford to be the father, and my sons would look like Saxon Kings . . .’5 As she sat listening to the Mitford family chatting over meals, even the children joining in as the conversation changed effortlessly from English to French, Italian to German, she felt ashamed of her ignorance. Subsequently she began a programme of self-education that changed her life and led to a career as a Hollywood journalist and a love affair with Scott Fitzgerald.

  Although Tom was not rich he received a good allowance from David, and made it work for him for he travelled extensively, dined in the best places, was seen in the best company. He was particularly friendly with Winston Churchill, and in one of the longest letters he ever wrote he described a weekend spent at the home of Philip Sassoon. The party, he wrote to Sydney, consisted of Clementine and Winston Churchill, Sir Samuel and Lady Hoare, Tom’s cousin Venetia Stanley and Brian Thynne, ‘and Aircraftsman Shaw [T.E. Lawrence]’.

  I am a little disappointed with Shaw. He looks just like any other private in the Air Force, is very short and he’s in his five years of service become quite hardened. He isn’t a bit like the Sargent portrait of him in his book.

  Last night I sat next him at dinner and he had Winston on the other side. Winston admires him enormously. He said at one moment ‘If the people make me Prime Minister I will make you Viceroy of India.’ Lawrence politely refused and said he was quite happy in the Air Force. When asked what he would do when, in five years time he has to leave, he said simply ‘Join the dole I suppose.’ It is curious that he should enjoy such a life with no responsibility after being almost King in Arabia. Some say it is inverted vanity; he’d have accepted a Kingship, but as he didn’t get it he preferred to bury himself and hide away.

  This morning we flew over to see Colonel Gunnes at Olympia, about 80 miles away. We had a 7 man unit and flew in perfect formation over Brighton and the other resorts - very low to frighten the crowd. Lawrence was thrilled at flying; he said Ministry had stopped him flying a year ago.6 Winston drove his machine a little way. I hadn’t realised he had done a lot of piloting before the war.

  We flew in arrow-head formation:

  and landed in [a] field . . . It took about an hour getting there and 3ł4 hour back, as we didn’t return in formation. It was very amusing flying very low over the edge of the sea and jumping the piers at Brighton and Littlehampton, to the astonishment of the people there.7

  That spring Decca realized her dearest wish. The family was living at Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe when Sydney appeared to have a change of heart about schools. In an attempt to get Unity interested in something, and stop her sulks, which goaded David into bad tempers, she allowed Unity to attend a day school at Queen’s Gate near their London house. This experiment lasted only a short time before she was expelled and Decca thought that was that. But Sydney persisted and found Unity a place at a boarding-school, provoking the often-heard cry of the Mitford children, this time from Decca who ached to be allowed to go to school, ‘But it’s not fair!’

  After Unity had successfully completed two terms, the unbelievable happened: Decca and Debo were suddenly allowed to attend a small local private day school for by the daughters of upper-middle-class families in High Wycombe. It was no treat for Debo: she fainted in a geometry class because it was so difficult, and the blackberry pie and custard made her sick. After ‘three days of hell’ she was allowed to leave.8 But Decca revelled in it. She was brought up short, however, when after some weeks she asked Sydney if she could invite her ‘best friend’ home to tea. ‘Oh, no, darling,’ Sydney replied. It wasn’t possible because Decca would be invited back to the girl’s home and Sydney ‘did not know’ her mother. Decca knew instinctively that there could be no appeal, and though it seems an insignificant incident it helped to form her personal convictions about class and privilege. At the end of the term she was withdrawn from the school and once again thrown upon autodidactic study to expand the PNEU curriculum available at home.

  Her personal research began to take a direction unsuspected by Sydney: social politics. ‘By the time I was thirteen,’ Decca wrote, in an unpublished manuscript, ‘major storms were brewing outside the Swinbrook fortress. Whole population centres were designated “distressed areas” by the Government. I read in the papers of the great hunger marches, the great depression of the early 30s hit the country and police and strikers fought in the streets.’9 Her single term at school was not responsible for, but coincided with, the dawning of self-consciousness that her home-life was exceptional:

  The discovery of other people�
��s reality - more than fifty million in England alone! - is one you can grasp from time to time, only to find it eluding you again, its vastness proving too much for you to handle. You discover suffering - not just your own suffering, which you know is largely of your own making, nor the childhood suffering over Black Beauty, David Copperfield or Blake’s Little Chimney Sweep - but you catch disturbing, vivid glimpses of the real meaning of poverty, hunger, cold cruelty.10

  Prior to this Decca and Unity had squabbled a great deal, and the childish battles between Hons and Counter Hons had been semi-serious at times,11 but when Decca reached adolescence the two became Favourite Sisters.12 Although she was thrown more and more into the company of Debo as the elder girls left home, Debo’s clear enjoyment of her life at Swinbrook made her an unsympathetic confidante for Decca and her newly awakened social conscience. Now in the Hons Cupboard when they talked about what they wanted to be when they were grown-ups, Unity would say, ‘I’m going to Germany to meet Hitler,’ and Decca would say, ‘I’m going to run away and be a Communist,’ whereupon, so Decca wrote, Debo would state that she was going to marry a duke and become a duchess.13