The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  Debo met them in London with ten-year-old Emma and eight-year-old Stoker, and they travelled up to Inch Kenneth together. It took only slightly longer to get to the island, Debo told them, than it had taken her to fly to Rio de Janeiro. Sydney was waiting on the dock as the Oban ferry arrived. ‘It was one of the happiest moments of my life,’ Sydney wrote later.17 She and her boatman had brought two cars to drive them across Mull to Gribun, where the launch was waiting for them. ‘The drive was a bit terrifying,’ Decca wrote. ‘We went with Muv in her 1930 Morris, she has bad palsy but drives like a New York cab driver, honking like mad at anything and everything in sight.’ At one point on the single-track road she made a truck driver reverse for over a mile so that they could pass. While they were being rowed over to the island Sydney said to Decca, ‘You and Bob are to sleep in the tent.’ They were aghast, but found later that it was a tented four-poster in a comfortable room. Decca had long been concerned that her mother was living on a bleak island, and had pictured her scraping a lonely living. She was quickly disabused of this idea, as she wrote to friends in California: ‘Muv’s lonely barren life here is relieved, we find, by six servants (a cook, a housemaid, a boatman and three others to take care of the sheep, cattle and goats). The house is large and comfortable (10 bedrooms and four modern bathrooms).’ As usual Sydney had furnished the house simply but with tremendous style, although Decca thought the French furniture out of place on the hauntingly beautiful island.

  Sydney loved her island. To her it was the next-best thing to living at sea, and she was happy pottering with her farm, her animals and her garden, helped by people she knew well and trusted. Although in her seventies she still swam most days in the icy Atlantic waters. ‘I’m just going for a little plonge, dears,’ she would say to guests, and off she would go to Chapel Beach for a health-giving dip. The guests shuddered at the thought.18

  To Decca the whole thing, the trip, the sight of rolling green fields and pocket-sized gardens from the train windows, Cockney voices, seeing her mother and Debo again, all had a curious dreamlike quality about it. For the others it was merely the coming to life of the amusing and incredible stories that Bob had heard from Decca since they first met, and with which Dinky had grown up. When Sydney had visited California in 1948 she had been invited to give a talk to the children of Dinky’s school and chose to talk about her life on the island. One of the children had asked about her neighbours. ‘I don’t have neighbours, only sheep and cows,’ Sydney said. ‘What do you do there?’ ‘Oh, we have the sheep to shear, and we make blankets from the wool . . . and we have the cows,’ Sydney continued. ‘They give us milk . . . and they go to market in Oban.’ ‘How do they get there?’ ‘They swim across. I just take them down to the water and say, “There you are - in you go!”’ The children had been captivated: it was like a fairy-tale, but here were those same cows, and here was the sea they swam across to go to market, and the bull - tethered to the back of the Puffin - swam across to the island each spring to service the cows. At dinner there were no napkins - the penny-pinching peeress still saved money on those - yet she sent all the other linen to Harrods by train in a huge laundry hamper, just as she ordered her groceries from Harrods’ food hall and sent dirty banknotes to Harrods’ bank to be exchanged for nice crisp new ones. She even had her library books sent from London. It was all true.

  The island was said to be haunted, but for Decca on that first trip the ghosts were childhood memories: everywhere she turned there were reminders of Swinbrook and Asthall, from the high-backed Jacobean chairs that used to inhabit the closing room, to the six drawings of the sisters by William Acton all in a line in their red brocade frames, from the old records to which they used to sing and dance, ‘Isn’t It Romantic’, ‘Dancing Cheek To Cheek’ and Unity’s ‘Horst Wessel Lied ’, to the great photograph albums kept religiously by Sydney where those early family groups full of hopes and dreams smiled or glowered at the camera according to whichever phase they were going through. She would never again see Tom and Unity, but she hoped to see Nancy and Pam during her trip. She had made up her mind, however, not to see Diana. She wrote,

  I could not have borne [it]. When I was a small child she, seven years older, was my favourite person in the whole world. She was in all ways marvellous to me; she took me riding . . . taught me to speak French, encouraged me in the forbidden sport of ‘showing off ’ in front of grown up visitors, was my staunch protectress against the barbs of Nancy, my ally in fights with Boud. I could see her in my mind’s eye, a radiant beauty of seventeen shrieking at my jokes. Teaching me, helping me through childhood, in general being the best of all possible elder sisters . . .

  It might have been possible for her to meet Diana again, she thought, ‘if I hadn’t once, long ago, adored her so intensely. To meet her as an historical curiosity on a casual acquaintance level would be incredibly awkward, on a basis of sisterly fondness, unthinkable. Too much bitterness had set in, at least on my part.’19

  From Inch Kenneth they all went down to stay with Debo and Andrew at Edensor House. Naturally they wanted to see Chatsworth, where an army of painters, plumbers and decorators had taken over prior to the proposed move there of Andrew and Debo, now the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. ‘Chatsworth is only slightly larger and grander than Versailles,’ Decca wrote to her friends in California, ‘[with] 178 rooms and no baths. Because of the Death Duties the poor dears cannot afford to live in Chatsworth, so they live in “the lodge” (which they own) in the village (which they own) and they make do by opening the house to trippers . . . This year they had 250,000 trippers at 2 shillings and sixpence a head. ’20

  Joking apart, the death-duties question still exercised Andrew’s mind. He plotted and planned and worked for years to resolve the conundrum of how to pay the tax bill while keeping the house and at least part of the estate in the family. Speculation, both at national and local level, about the future of Chatsworth had acted as a spur. There was talk in the newspapers that it should become a branch of the National Gallery. So many old estates and so much family wealth were affected by the new taxes; fine old houses were left to moulder into ruins because institutions had neither the knowledge nor the resources to care for them. It took decades for the public to recognize that in keeping these magnificent buildings intact, functioning properly as the living heart of a country estate, for the public to view, the old families were almost performing a public service. When families were turfed out - one newly inherited duke was reduced to living in a terraced house on the south coast - the best that could happen to a great house would be for the cash-impoverished National Trust to take it on, when so often it became a sterile museum21 with many of the treasures sold off to pay the Treasury and fund maintenance, or it would be sold, converted into apartments and lost for ever to the public.

  As part of Andrew’s plan, sales of Cavendish land began immediately after the death of his father. The 12,000-acre estate in Dumfriesshire went first, followed by 42,000 acres in Derbyshire, woodlands and property in Sussex, and a house in London. All were all handed over willingly to save Chatsworth. The nine most valuable paintings and art treasures, works by Rubens, Holbein, Rembrandt and Van Dyck among them, also went to pay off part of the crippling debt, then 141 precious books, 60 of which had been printed before 1500. Two years before Decca’s visit Andrew offered the house where the Cavendish family’s fortune had been founded, and Bess of Hardwick’s beautiful Hardwick Hall (‘The most beautiful house in the world,’ said Debo) was tipped into the maw of the Inland Revenue. Painful though this was, the sacrifice of Hardwick secured Chatsworth - and the family could no longer have supported two great estates anyway. As it was, money that should have been used for the upkeep and repair of Chatsworth, now regarded as a national treasure, had been lost for ever, and the Devonshires still faced an uphill battle. Not until 1974, twenty-four years after the death of Andrew’s father, were all Revenue debts settled. In addition, Andrew had worked to change the public perception of
houses and properties like Chatsworth. In the early days the county council had wanted to drive a major new road through the estate. Today the destruction of such beautiful parkland, always open free of charge to the public, would be termed vandalism, but Andrew had to work hard to prevent it in the post-war years.

  For Bob, the sense that he had fallen down the White Rabbit’s burrow in Alice’s Wonderland was heightened at Chatsworth. It was not just the sheer size of the house, for, as he said, if he had been invited to the White House he would have known how to behave: at Chatsworth he wasn’t even sure which century he was in. On looking through the visitors’ book he noticed that many of the guests had signed with their surname - ‘Salisbury’, ‘Antrim’, ‘Denham’ and he did the same, then wondered why this caused such an outburst of merriment.9 Even away from Chatsworth there were surprises. Both Decca and Bob were amazed at the freedom and openness in which the Communist Party operated in England, ‘so accustomed had we become to the semi-outlaw status of Communists in America,’ Decca wrote. When he tried to get a telephone number from the operator, Bob couldn’t make sense of what he was being told and had to hand the phone to Decca. ‘What is the matter?’ she asked him. ‘She’s saying perfectly plainly that the number is Steeple Bumpstead 267.’ ‘That’s what I thought she said,’ Bob answered miserably, ‘but I thought she was pulling my leg.’ At the mews he ‘discovered swastikas and hammer-and-sickles cut in the windows with diamonds when we used to live here. We did roar,’ Decca told Sydney.

  From England Bob and Decca went to Vienna as a staging post for a proposed visit to Hungary. Bob’s family had Hungarian roots; he had visited the country in 1937 and spoke a little of the language. But they had no luck in getting visas from the consulate in Vienna until Bob mentioned that Nebby Lou was the niece of Paul Robeson. Instantly, visas were produced and everywhere they went in Hungary they were welcomed by fellow Communists in the Peace Committee and treated as VIPs. Robeson was not Nebby Lou’s uncle, simply a close friend of her parents, and she was rather put out at the deception, although as Decca pointed out to her, ‘You’ve called him Uncle all your life.’ The connection opened endless doors, and Nebby was loaded down with gifts - ‘They even gave her an instrument that had once belonged to Bartók,’ Bob recalled.

  The VIP tours impressed Bob and Decca - here was the epitome of the triumphant success of socialism - in much the same way, it must be said, as Sydney and David were convinced about the success of Fascism when shown the prescribed sights of pre-war Germany by Hitler’s adjutants. In both cases the visitors saw only what they were meant to see, showcase exhibits. Bob and Decca were thrilled with the neat collective farms, a workers’ rest home, a new steel factory. Only two minor incidents bothered them, and they could not quite explain them or get them out of their minds. One day they were dining in a restaurant when their waiter asked them, in an urgent whisper, if they would post a letter to America for him. When they asked why he couldn’t post it himself, he became flustered and looked over his shoulder. ‘He was evidently in great distress,’ Decca recalled. ‘However, we regretfully decided we could not perform his mission. What if he were a spy, or an opponent of the Government?’ A similar thing happened when a teacher invited them to her house only to send them an urgent message at the last minute. ‘Nicht kommen, Magda, teacher,’ it read. ‘We had naturally assumed there was vestigial opposition to the Communist Government, yet these two encounters coming . . . within a few days of each other would seem to point to a greater disaffection than we had supposed existed.’22 They asked one of their guides, who told them that since they had accepted the hospitality of the Peace Committee it would be better if they avoided such contacts. Decca wrote an article about the visit for the People’s Weekly when she returned to California. Although the remainder of the article was published intact, the stories of the waiter and the teacher were edited out, ‘for reasons of space’.23 A year later, reading about the remorseless suppression of the Hungarian uprising by Russian tanks, Decca and Bob remembered the waiter and the teacher and fidgeted unhappily.

  The grand finale of their European tour was a trip to Paris to visit Nancy after they had dropped off the two girls at a school for a few weeks. Decca had looked forward to this with tremendous enthusiasm. Nancy was her socialist sister, and they corresponded warmly and regularly. Nancy was not at home when they arrived in Paris, having had reservations at the last minute about Decca’s politics. She had told a number of friends about Decca’s impending visit, describing her to Raymond Mortimer as ‘my Communist sister . . . Eton crop, pince-nez & men’s trousers. She is in London with husband and child. Child has been told that Debo’s money comes from selling slaves. Debo says, “Goodness, if we had any slaves we wouldn’t sell them.” I don’t die for her as much as I pretend to when I write.’24 ‘Decca arrives with her children end of the month. I’m half delighted, half terrified,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Seventeen years . . .’25

  In the end she decided she was more terrified than delighted and flew to England to stay with Debo, thinking that Decca would be put off. In the event Decca had lost Nancy’s phone number and the Treuhafts made their way straight to 7 rue Monsieur, the address to which Decca had been writing for years. She was a little surprised when the maid said that Nancy had gone to visit her sister ‘la duchesse’. Nevertheless, when they explained who they were, the maid let them in, made them welcome and lit the fire. Relaxed after helping themselves to Nancy’s whisky, they telephoned her. It was sixteen years since the sisters had heard each other’s voice, and Nancy made her excuses, chatting easily until she asked, ‘But where are you staying?’ and Decca said, ‘We’re in your flat.’ Whereupon Nancy flew into a rage, accused them of running up a huge phone bill and slammed down the phone. Decca and Bob found this behaviour so ‘utterly mad’ that they laughed until tears ran down their faces. After a while Nancy phoned back, and they had a long conversation. When Decca put the phone down and asked Bob what he made of it he pointed out that Debo was paying for the second call.

  A few days later Nancy returned to Paris ‘in the sunniest of moods’, and quietly pressed fifty pounds on Decca, which she said was to pay for books and furniture that she had taken from their flat after Decca and Esmond left for the USA. Decca remembered those books: tattered old left-wing volumes not worth five shillings. The fifty pounds, then, was an outright gift, given in such a way as not to cause embarrassment or give the impression that Nancy was dispensing charity. ‘Nancy’s extraordinary contradictory attitude to money,’ Decca wrote, ‘her excessive small meannesses alternating with bursts of lavish generosity, never ceased to baffle me.’26 After Decca left, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh that, after all, she had enjoyed the visit. ‘Decca is . . . unchanged and so sweet. Also her Romilly daughter . . . is a beauty. I very much hope she’ll send her here in a year or two to learn French & then I must find her a French husband (recipe for happiness).’27

  Decca and Dinky stayed on for a few weeks after Bob and Nebby Lou returned to the USA, to see Mrs Hammersley, who was living on the Isle of Wight, and Pam, who was about to return from Switzerland. Bob wrote to warn Decca that despite a fight on his part, he had been forced to surrender his passport in New York, and she could expect the same thing. Decca’s letter to Bob reveals that her relationship with her family remained fragile: ‘Woman was here to lunch (second sight . . . calling her Woman, since she’s become a you-know-what-bian) 28 . . . After lunch we tried to teach her Scrabble but she never scored more than 4 on any one play and even Muv got a bit restive with her when she said, “What does I-C-Y spell?” after I’d put it down for a score of 35.’29 She reported a terrific argument which had occurred when she happened to see on Sydney’s engagement pad that she had invited the Mosleys to lunch in the following week. Decca had said that she and Dinky would not eat with ‘murderers’ and Sydney had been furious that Decca would refer to her ‘own sister’ as a murderer. All things considered it was time for Decca to return to California.<
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  The passports were confiscated in New York as Bob had warned, but there was a warmer welcome when they arrived in California. Virtually all their friends turned up to meet the train, complete with a mock brass band of children’s drums, trumpets and homemade banners, ‘The sort of thing they put on here for returning prisoners of war or football teams,’ Decca wrote to Sydney. All their friends and even Dinky were fascinated by Decca’s voice. For years, although noticeably English, she had allowed her accent to become more relaxed, like that of an upper-class American dowager. ‘After our trip,’ Dinky recalled, ‘her accent became very British. Benj and I could hardly believe our ears.’30 The return to crisp Mitfordian English remained, despite teasing by the family.

  There was an anticlimax to the excitement of homecoming: Decca learned that during her long absence the FBI had staged a huge anti-Communist sweep of the area, visiting the employers of party members and anyone associated with the CRC, asking pointed questions about the person concerned. In many cases the employer did not know that the employee was a Communist or a Communist sympathizer. There were no charges, FBI officers said, but they would appreciate hearing that the person had changed his or her job. These surprisingly Gestapo-like tactics worked. Even those employers who considered that a person’s political affiliation was a private matter were intimidated. Small businessmen could not afford bad publicity, or to court the disfavour of either those in government departments or their customers who regarded Communism as a threat to the country. As a result many family breadwinners lost jobs and were forced to go underground or resign from the party.31