The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  In the latter years of the 1980s, Diana and Pam, who was now increasingly lame in the right leg that had been weak since her childhood attack of polio - ‘I’m a bit short in the offside leg,’ she would say in answer to enquiries - spent a number of holidays together, in Switzerland and Italy in the summer, and several winters in South Africa. They had grown very close in the last decade and enjoyed each other’s company. ‘I do hate winters now I’m old,’ Diana wrote to James Lees-Milne. ‘I feel happy in the sun among flowers.’15

  She had endeavoured, in the absence of Mosley, to fill her life with serenity and beauty, but in November 1989 she provoked national controversy merely by appearing as a guest on Desert Island Discs. The BBC had tried to air the programme on three occasions: the first date they chose, 8 October, was changed because someone rang in to say that it was the eve of Yom Kippur, which was surely inappropriate scheduling. It was then announced that the programme would air on 1 October but the schedulers were advised that this was Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year). A third date announced, 19 November, was found to be the date of the annual memorial parade of Jewish veterans, so the programme was rescheduled for a fourth time to 26 November. To Decca, it did not matter when the programme aired: the mere fact of giving Diana an opportunity to speak in public proved that the BBC was ‘deeply imbued with the deep-dyed anti-Semitism that pervades all England’.16

  As always, Diana answered the presenter’s questions frankly, calmly and without hedging or exaggeration. Hitler was, she said, ‘extraordinarily fascinating and clever. Naturally. You don’t get to be where he was just by being the kind of person people like to think he was . . . Of course, at that moment he was the person who was making the news and therefore he was extremely interesting to talk to.’ He had mesmeric blue eyes, she recalled. She had never believed there would be war between England and Germany, ‘I thought reason would prevail,’ she said. ‘Had I the slightest idea I would be imprisoned I would have given up going to Germany. My duty was to be with my children.’ She minded very much that she had missed those vital years of her children’s lives: they had all changed completely by the time she was released.

  According to newspaper reports, many listeners were upset by what appeared to be Diana’s defence of Hitler, but Jewish leaders were infuriated by her championship of Mosley. Denying that he was anti-Semitic, she said, ‘He really wasn’t, you know. He didn’t know a Jew from a Gentile . . . But he was attacked so much by Jews both in the newspapers and physically on marches . . . that he picked up the challenge. Then a great number of his followers who really were anti-Semitic joined him because they thought they would fight their old enemy.’ Yes, she admitted, he had referred to Jews as ‘an alien force which rises to rob us of our heritage’ in a speech in 1936. ‘One of those things which horrified him,’ she said, ‘was that we had this enormous Empire and he did think that the Jews, and the City in general, had invested far too much in countries that had nothing to do with our Empire . . . They were attacked by Communists very often on peaceful marches through east London and in all the big cities, and when there is a fight people are injured of course.’17

  It was undoubtedly insensitive of the BBC to schedule the programme originally so that it coincided with Jewish anniversaries, but equally one senses that the inadvertent clashes of dates merely added another card to the hand of those who opposed the Mosleys, and that Diana would have been attacked, automatically, no matter when the programme went out. A Jewish representative stated, ‘The activities of Oswald Mosley in the 1930s were racial, discriminatory and blatantly anti-Semitic. He capitalized on the economic difficulties of the 1930s attempting to throw responsibility on world Jewry . . . There can be no whitewashing Oswald Mosley today . . . BBC listeners should not be exposed to apologia for Hitler and Oswald Mosley.’18 A BBC statement said that they had received some complaints from Jewish listeners but equally they had received a positive response from people who had enjoyed the programme. Diana had been close to centre stage in world history for a while; therefore, what she had to say was of immense interest.19

  On 12 April 1994 a devastated Debo telephoned Decca to advise that Pam had died from a blood clot after surgery for a broken leg. Although eighty-six, Pam had continued to lead a full life right to the end, having only to curtail somewhat her beloved trips abroad in recent years. As with her sisters, age had made little difference to the way she lived, thought or wrote, and only physical impossibility prevented her leading the life she had lived since she was a young woman. At her eightieth birthday party she had wowed her guests by appearing in a gold lamé coat, and sat radiant with pleasure, her eyes still that amazing shade of blue, which showed no signs of fading to octogenarian paleness.

  The accident occurred during ‘a jolly weekend in London’. She had spent the day shopping, and after dinner with friends was invited next door for drinks. Despite her usual care (she had written to Decca a short time earlier advising her to be careful about breaking legs or hips), she fell down some steep steps and suffered a clean fracture below the knee in her weak leg. She was taken to hospital where the bone was successfully pinned, and on coming round from the anaesthetic her first words were ‘Who won the Grand National?’ Within twenty-four hours she was sitting up in bed entertaining visitors, such as Debo’s granddaughter, Isabel, with her new baby, and several other callers, and being her usual ‘terribly funny’ self. Debo was in Ireland and spoke to Pam on the phone. She had just arrived in London when she received a message to go directly to the hospital. Pam died ten minutes before Debo could get there.

  ‘But imagine how she, of all people, would loathe a life confined to a wheelchair with somebody to look after her,’ Decca wrote. ‘And - God forbid, to do the cooking! (how I’d hate to be that somebody, come to think of it).’ The last time Decca had seen Pam was in the previous autumn when Decca was a guest speaker at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. She and Bob had taken several people to Pam’s cottage (‘neat as a pin’), which was near by, and Pam had cooked ‘the most delicious 3-course lunch . . . completely single-handed’.20 The scrapbook row, which Decca had not forgotten but had decided to overlook, was long behind them.

  Hosts of friends attended the funeral at Swinbrook to sing the hymn sung at all Mitford funerals, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. Today, a small oak planted by Pam on the village green is as much a memorial to ‘the quiet Mitford sister’ as is her headstone in that peaceful place, which held so many childhood memories. Although she had no children of her own Pam’s many nieces and nephews were left feeling bereft: ‘Tante Femme’s’ maternal and caring qualities were unique in the family, and of all Sydney’s daughters she was the most like her mother. A friend who attended the funeral wrote and told Decca that Debo had forbidden the vicar to preach a sermon - ‘So like Farve with his stopwatch set for ten minutes,’ Decca commented.

  In November that year Decca was staying at Dinky’s apartment in New York. She tripped on the hem of her long skirt as she and Bob were leaving to go out to dinner and suffered multiple fractures in her ankle. After a cast was fitted she and Bob were able to fly back to California where she was cared for by Benjamin’s Korean wife Jung Min. Decca wrote to Debo that she was well aware that the accident had been caused by clumsiness because she had had too much to drink. She had broken her wrist a year earlier in the same way. She knew she had become far too dependent on alcohol to get her through difficult times, to enjoy good times, and increasingly simply to get her started in the morning. She considered all this and made a decision to give it up, cold turkey.

  Dinky was now a highly qualified nurse. At one point she had been appointed a director of the hospital but found she disliked being away from the bedside: her vocation was nursing, not administration. She asked to be returned to nursing, offering her resignation if this could not be arranged, and was subsequently responsible for establishing an acute-pain and palliative-care clinic where she still works. The caring characteristic that Decca had noted in her infant daughter,
which had so reminded her of Pam, had never faded, and as a professional Dinky was intensely aware of how difficult it was going to be for Decca to give up drinking. She considered it could not be done without help. ‘She drank heavily for years and I do want to mention it because the way in which she gave it up shows the strength of Decca . . . When she tripped on the hem of her skirt she had been drinking and had had too much. It wasn’t unusual. She could be very mean when she’d had too much to drink. A different person altogether . . . I never preached to my mother, but she suddenly realized what it was going to mean if she continued drinking as she got older, for example if her drinking caused another stroke . . . she couldn’t stand the thought of being alive and dependent.’21

  Decca confounded Dinky, remaining calm and showing none of the usual symptoms of withdrawal distress. ‘She is positively amazing,’ Dinky wrote to Maya Angelou. ‘She’s now [gone] 18 days without a drink. She fired the substance abuse psychiatrist after he droned on about residential treatment, group therapy, AA etc. She just looked at me with her blue, droopy eyes, and said, “I’ve decided to give it up, that’s all.”’22 Dinky said she had never been prouder of her mother than during those early weeks when Decca turned her back on drinking. When she was mobile again, Decca attended AA meetings and Dinky acted as her ‘friend’. ‘She only ever called me three times,’ Dinky said. ‘She did it by sheer will-power. Once she gave up drinking she became a different person. A new and softer Decca emerged. All the crossness and meanness disappeared.’ Bob agreed with this: it was a return to the old Decca and the Treuhafts’ relationship benefited.

  Decca’s smoking was another matter. She had given up years earlier, ostensibly. While she had even given a series of lectures on ‘giving up smoking’, her biggest problem during these lectures, she wrote to Debo, was finding the time to run to the ladies’ room ‘to have a quick puff every now and then’. She chewed nicotine gum at the rate of six packets a day. ‘She was so fastidious and it was quite uncharacteristic of her to chew gum,’ Bob reflected. He genuinely believed she had given up smoking. One day, however, she was discovered in flagrante delicto: ‘Dinky caught me and told Bob,’ Decca wrote to a friend. ‘How awful of her . . . So I suppose I will have to give up for real now.’ And she did so, though she never got over the craving for cigarettes. ‘Oh how I should like a puff,’ she wrote wistfully, in letters to her many correspondents.

  Now in her mid-seventies Decca kept up a pace that would have punished someone twenty years younger. She was still in demand for lectures and public appearances, even appearing tremulously, on one occasion, side by side with Maya Angelou as they rode two elephants at the head of carnival procession. In June 1996 her broken ankle was giving her trouble; in compensating for it she had thrown out her hip, causing enough pain to make her consult a doctor. She also mentioned to him that she had been coughing blood for a few days. A series of X-rays and blood tests carried out subsequently provided a shock diagnosis: she had lung cancer.

  ‘It’s a bit of a facer, Hen,’ she wrote to Debo, but she said that she and Bob had decided to go ahead with plans for a holiday in Cape Cod in August. It was a place she had always loved since her time there with Esmond. In recent years she and Bob had visited the resort every summer as guests of Jon Snow, the Channel 4 news anchorman who had become a close friend after helping Decca with some awkward packing after a long visit to London. Decca instantly bestowed upon him the soubriquet ‘Packer’ Snow. Meanwhile, she said, she was determined to finish her present commission. It was an up-to-date revision of The American Way of Death or - as she referred to it in correspondence - ‘Death Warmed Up’. She also amused herself by writing to ‘Miss Manners’, a San Francisco newspaper column on matters of etiquette. Was it, she asked, contrary to the rules of etiquette for a dying person to exploit the pity of their friends to make them do what she wanted?

  In July she went into hospital for further tests pending a course of chemotherapy, and the results were even worse than anticipated. The cancer had spread to her liver, kidneys and brain and was thus inoperable. The doctors recommended her to forget chemotherapy and to have radiation of the brain, to conserve its function for as long as possible. With her years of experience at the highest levels of nursing, Dinky was the family spokesperson, 23 and though the prognosis was difficult for the rest of Decca’s family to take in, it was perhaps worse for Dinky, who knew precisely what it meant, clinically, for her mother. Decca took it in the way she had always taken bad news: on the chin. ‘You’re so brave, Little D,’ Sydney used to say. Even so, Decca asked Dinky to pass on the news to Debo, Maya and the people closest to her. The one thing she had never been able to face was sympathy.

  Writing on 11 July to Debo, to thank her for contacting Jon Snow, Decca said, ‘The Packer wrote such a funny fax, saying he’d never heard a Duchess say Bugger so much . . .’ Her situation was curious, she said. She was suffering no headaches or even malaise following the radiation, just some pain in her thigh. Meanwhile life was quite pleasurable with innumerable friends rallying round, bringing in food and gifts, and she was working on the book. Although she had been given a prognosis of only three months, she found it difficult to believe this could be correct and was half convinced that a major mistake had been made in the diagnosis.

  There was no mistake. Within days of writing this letter Decca began to suffer paralysis in the right side of her body and was admitted to hospital. Though concerned, when they ascertained that she had not suffered a stroke, the doctors agreed that she could still go to Cape Cod in a few weeks’ time. From then on, however, her deterioration was rapid. ‘It seems that one of the cancer lesions in the brain may have swollen or bled a bit,’ Dinky reported. A week later Decca was being fed through a tube but after a few days she asked for this treatment to be withdrawn. ‘Yesterday she told Bob . . . she wants to come home to die,’ Dinky advised Debo. ‘She looks pale and tired . . . she wakes up and smiles and tries to talk. She’s very clear about what she wants, knows who everyone is. Bob asked her if she wants you to come, and she says she doesn’t see the point . . . Who could have imagined this would go so fast?’

  Decca’s last four days were spent at home: her hospital-type bed was installed in the spacious sitting room she loved, surrounded by her books and pictures, Mitford memorabilia, closest friends and members of her family. Maya Angelou came every day and while Decca could still laugh they laughed together. At the end ‘Maya was the real doctor,’ Bob said. ‘Decca was not reacting to anything. She could hardly swallow and barely recognized people. Maya would come in each evening and stand by Decca’s bedside and sing to her . . . bawdy songs, romantic songs and Decca would finally react and realize, “Oh, it’s you.” And she would even open her mouth and try to sing along. Her last words were really songs that Maya started her singing . . . I’ll never forget Maya for that. It was one of the great moments of my life learning what true sisterhood is all about.’24 Decca died on 22 July less than six weeks after being told she had cancer.

  Her funeral was minimal. She organized it herself from hospital: a no-frills cremation with her ashes to be scattered at sea, at a total cost of $475. Yet her host of friends wanted to mark the memorial service with something more fitting to her huge personality. Once in an interview she had been asked what sort of funeral she had in mind for herself and she had replied wryly, ‘Oh, I’d like six black horses with plumes, and one of those marvellous jobs of embalming that take twenty years off . . . The streets to be blocked off, dignitaries to declaim sobbingly over the flower-smothered bier, proclamations to be issued, that sort of thing . . .’ In a remarkable tease on Decca, that is almost what happened at the memorial service. More than five hundred people attended the service at a hall in Delancy Street, San Francisco. Tributes from friends were interspersed with old hymns from Decca’s childhood, and the service finished with a band playing ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’. As they spilled out on to the street, those who attended were greeted by the sight of
six black horses wearing plumes and harnessed to an antique glass hearse that had been drawn up outside the hall. Inside it were copies of all Decca’s books and articles.

  A few months later there was a memorial service in London. It was held in a theatre, for it would have been hypocritical to hold it in a church, although this is the more usual venue in England. Debo had intended to go, and to speak, but press reports that it was to be ‘a circus’ with ‘sideshows’ of funeral directors showing their wares worried her. At the last minute she decided not to attend. However, a huge number of media personalities did go. Packer Snow compèred and Maya Angelou stepped in to pay the main tribute in place of Debo. It was a warm occasion, full of laughter, in celebration of the life of a woman who was brilliant, feisty and surprisingly complicated.

  Decca did not live to finish her revision of The American Way of Death, but Bob completed and published it, using Decca’s notes. ‘I tried to preserve as much as possible of Decca’s inimitable way of putting things,’ he said. He still lives in their family home in the pleasant traditional ‘neighbourhood’ in Oakland. The house is old-fashioned, shingled, and has a generous front porch. Scented red and white roses planted by Decca flourish by the front steps. At the rear is a small enclosed garden of Californian flora, alive with humming birds, and squirrels scampering across the rails of the decked patio. When I last saw him in October 1999 Bob had just taken delivery of a new computer after organizing a website for Decca’s books. ‘We’ve had 1,300 hits already,’ he told me gleefully, and gave me some instruction on using e-mail, a technology that I had yet to tackle. ‘Decca had no idea of technology,’ he recalled, but she had been thrilled by the instant communications provided by her fax machine. Shortly after she started using it she came downstairs on Christmas Eve to find that the messages received overnight had a red border. It did not occur to her that this was a warning that the paper was running low: ‘She thought it was a delightful festive touch provided by the manufacturers,’ he said, smiling at the memory, ‘so of course she let the paper run out.’ One day he brought her home a packet of yellow Post-it notes, which he thought would be useful for her to mark references in books. Next evening, he asked how she was finding them but she said she couldn’t make them work. ‘Well, how are you using them?’ he enquired. ‘Well I lick them like this and stick them down . . . look,’ she demonstrated, ‘but they keep falling off.’