The Mitfords

by Charlotte Mosley

  2 John Osborne, A Patriot for Me (1965). A play about Colonel Redl, a homosexual officer in the Austro-Hungarian army.

  3 Robert Morley played Sir Ambrose Abercrombie in the film of Evelyn Waugh’s novel.

  1 Pamela’s dachshunds.

  2 Pamela boasted that she made her soup recipes ‘out of her head’.

  1 Eighteen-month-old Isabel Tennant.

  2 Julie Andrews (1935-). The Sound of Music had been released earlier in the year.

  3 Jessica’s article on Julie Andrews never materialized.

  1 Sally Perry (1911–91). Married the 4th Duke of Westminster in 1945.

  2 Evangeline Bell (1915–95). Wife of US ambassador to London, David Bruce, whom she married in 1945. Author of Napoleon and Josephine, An Improbable Marriage (1995).

  3 Peter Wilson (1913–84). Legendary head of Sotheby’s 1958–80.

  1 1 Deborah had enclosed a cutting from the Sunday Mail showing Madame Ho Thi Que, wife of a South Vietnamese commander, who fought beside her husband and bore a strong resemblance to Deborah.

  2 2 Deborah had been to Argentina to visit her daughter Emma.

  3 3 ‘The Threat of Fascism’, part of a BBC series, The Thirties.

  4 David Lloyd George (1863–1945). The silver-tongued ‘Welsh Wizard’ was Liberal Prime Minister in 1918 when Mosley entered Parliament.

  5 In Friends Apart (1954), a memoir of Esmond Romilly and Jasper Ridley, Philip Toynbee described the ‘exaltation’ of trying on knuckle-dusters before the Olympia meeting and how he and his friends had thrown themselves at the Blackshirt stewards’ backs.

  1 The country’s Prime Minister, Ian Smith, had declared Unilateral Independence on 11 November 1965.

  1 Nancy’s new writing paper was embossed with a golden mole, the Mitford family emblem.

  2 A few weeks previously, Kenneth Tynan had been the first person to use the word ‘fuck’ on British television.

  3 Peregrine’s coming-of-age party.

  1 Nancy was planning to attend Andrew Devonshire’s installation as Chancellor of Manchester University, a position he held until 1986.

  2 ‘One does what one can.’

  3 Malcolm Bullock (1890–1966). MP for Lancashire (Waterloo division) 1923–50 and an old friend of Nancy.

  1 Deborah had been staying with Colonel William Stirling and his wife, Susan. Also in the house party were Colonel Stirling’s mother, Margaret, his son Archie and Archie’s wife, Charmian Scott, whose family had bought Crowood from the Mosleys after the war.

  2 Henry Herbert, 6th Earl of Carnarvon (1898–1987). A brilliant amateur actor. Married, as his second wife, Tilly Losch, in 1939.

  1 Deborah’s daughter Emma and her family were returning from Argentina where Toby, her husband, had been working on a cattle ranch for two years.

  Mosley had applied to the High Court to try to get the BBC committed for contempt of court for continually attacking him and not giving him a right of reply.

  1 Cotswold home of the Duke of Beaufort.

  2 Mosley stood as Union Movement candidate for the East London borough of Shoreditch and Finsbury in the 1966 general election.

  1 Mosley had been canvassing for the Union Movement candidate in the Manchester Ardwick constituency.

  1 The Mosley family had been large landowners in Manchester until the mid-nineteenth century when they let out their property on 999-year leases

  3 Edward Boyle (1923–81). Unmarried MP for Handsworth, Birmingham 1950–70. Minister of Education 1962–4

  4 Edward Heath (1916–2005). Leader of the Conservative Party 1963–70, and Prime Minister 1970–74. He never married.

  5 3rd Viscount Astor (1907–66). Conservative MP who had been involved in the Profumo affair.

  1 Mark Rudkin (1929-). American painter and landscape gardener who moved to Paris in the mid-1950s.

  2 De Gaulle had given NATO forces one year to remove their bases from France.

  3 In Cold Blood (1966). Truman Capote’s classic account of the murder of a Kansas family by two drifters

  4 ‘Graveyard ghoul.’

  1 Mosley had received just .5 per cent of the vote.

  2 Catherine (1952-), Jasper (1954-) and Valentine (1959-): children of Diana’s son Jonathan Guinness.

  3 Mark Girouard (1931-). Writer and architectural historian.

  1 David Garnett (1892–1981). Bloomsbury author and critic. Married, as his second wife, Angelica Bell (1918-), daughter of Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa and the painter Duncan Grant

  2 Dora Carrington’s affair with fellow Slade student Mark Gertler ended in 1917 when she took up with Ralph Partridge, whom she married in 1921. No sooner married than she started an affair with the writer Gerald Brenan. Her deepest feelings, however, were for the homosexual Lytton Strachey with whom she fell passionately in love in 1915 and after whose death in 1932 she committed suicide.

  1 4 rue d’Artois, which Nancy bought and moved to the following year.

  1 Evelyn Waugh had died of a heart attack on 10 April.

  1 Louise de Vilmorin (1902–69). French woman of letters. Married to the American Henry Leigh Hunt 1925–37, and to Count François-de-Paule Palffy 1938–43

  2 The Struggle for Survival 1940–65 (1966). A biography of Churchill’s later years by his doctor.

  3 Robert Kee’s history of Irish nationalism, The Green Flag, was published in 1972

  1 Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986). The Indian spiritual teacher, darling of the Theosophists, was on a speaking tour of Europe.

  2 Lydie d’Harcourt (1898–1988). Wife of the Marquess of Pomereu, whom she married in 1919. They were close friends of the Mosleys and lived at the Château de Daubeuf, Normandy.

  3 Emily Lutyens, Candles in the Sun (1957). An account by a member of the Theosophical Society of her disenchantment with the movement.

  4 & ‘Quite difficult to understand.’

  1 Wendy Russell (1916–2007). Texan-born ex-model, married to Emery Reves, Winston Churchill’s literary agent and publisher of his war memoirs. In the late 1950s, Churchill was a frequent guest at La Pausa, the Reveses’ palatial villa on the Riviera.

  1 Diana Churchill (1–63). Winston’s eldest daughter suffered several nervous breakdowns before committing suicide at the age of fifty-four. Married to Duncan Sandys 1935–60

  3 Sarah Churchill (1914–82). Winston’s actress daughter was an alcoholic.

  1 & ‘I’ve got a friend I love called Rachel Labouch&ère. She’s exactly like the Wife-same dreary clothes, uninteresting appearance & swinging bag. Same heavenly sense of humour, same English ladylikeness, same thin hair, same poor health. Same slim but bad figure & long feet.’ (Nancy to Deborah, 14 June 1966

  2 David Carritt (1927–82), art historian and dealer, and Brian Sewell (1931-), outspoken art critic for the Evening Standard, were both working for Christie’s at the time.

  1 Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976). The Field Marshal was an admirer of Nancy’s novels; they exchanged Christmas cards and met occasionally. His only son, David (1928-), was a director of Yardley International 1963–74

  1 Fulco Santostefano della Cerda, Duke of Verdura (1898–1978). Jeweller who trained with Chanel before setting up his own company in New York in 1939.

  2 Rudolf Nureyev (1938–93). The Russian-born dancer was starring in an historic production of Romeo and Juliet with the British prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn (1919–91).

  1 Sir Robert Abdy (1896–1976). Collector and art dealer. Married, as his third wife, Jane Noble in 1962.

  2 Thomas Beecham (1879–1961). The British conductor and impresario was the love of Emerald Cunard’s life.

  1 Viscount Weymouth (1932-). Unconventional heir of Henry, 6th Marquess of Bath, who had recently turned the grounds of his Wiltshire family seat, Longleat, into a safari park.

  1 Jessica had put Inch Kenneth on the market because she was too busy to spend any time there. It was eventually sold in spring 1967.

  2 Gerald Wellesley, 7th Duke of W
ellington (1885–1972). A friend of Nancy since the 1930s.

  3 Field Marshal Montgomery.

  1 ‘It’s a nice little house.’ ‘Little? Heavens-I get lost in it.’

  2 Jessica denied knowing Mr Boland and accused Nancy of having invented him.

  1 The telephone exchange at Chatsworth was ‘Baslow’.

  2 Iris Mitford, the sisters’ maiden aunt.

  1 Neither General de Gaulle nor Field Marshal Montgomery believed that a military solution would work in Vietnam.

  1 The Sun King, an illustrated life of Louis XIV.

  1 Nancy was a guest at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair.

  2 In fact, In Cold Blood sold well in Britain and was warmly praised, except by Kenneth Tynan who attacked Capote in the Observer, accusing him of having done less than he could have to save the two murderers from execution.

  3 George Rainbird (1905–86). Publisher and inventor of the coffee-table book, who co-produced The Sun King.

  4 Macmillan’s first volume of memoirs, Winds of Change, had just been published.

  5 Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, A History of Warfare (1968).

  1 David Scherman; photojournalist and associate editor of Life magazine who had been a friend of Jessica since her arrival in America.

  1 Old francs. On 1 January 1960, the value of the French franc was divided by a hundred; 100 old francs thus equalled one new franc.

  2 At the time Nancy was planning to make Deborah’s son, Peregrine, her heir.

  1 Elizabeth Stuart-Wortley (1896–1978). First cousin of Peter Rodd. Married the 8th Earl of Abingdon in 1928.

  1 A list of possessions belonging to the sisters’ Aunt Iris, who had recently died.

  1 Lady Maclean’s Cook Book (1965), to which Deborah had contributed a recipe for chocolate cake.

  2 Cecil Beaton.

  3 Torrential rain had caused terrible floods in northern Italy where Prince Clary’s daughter lived.

  4 Mary McCarthy (1912–89). The American novelist and critic married, in 1961 as her fourth husband, James West, a US diplomat.

  SEVEN

  1967–1973

  Letter from Diana to Deborah.

  Nancy’s move to Versailles at the beginning of 1967 was a change she had been contemplating for a long time. Over the years she had viewed many houses but the one she finally settled on was a small, undistinguished town house a mile and a half from the Chateau. The front gave on to the street but at the back was a large, sunlit garden where she was able to create a wild meadow of cottage flowers – a contrast to the elegant formality of the garden at the rue Monsieur – and where she took great delight in watching the birds, field mice, hedgehogs and other wildlife that it attracted. She had barely two years of contentment in her house before being seized with severe pains in her back and legs. These were initially diagnosed as sciatica but in the spring of 1969 she was operated on for a malignant tumour on the liver. The doctors advised her sisters not to tell her that she had cancer and that they expected her to live only a few months. In the event Nancy survived for over four years, much of the time in excruciating pain. She underwent many tests and several useless operations and it was not until a few months before her death that Hodgkin’s disease was at last correctly diagnosed. She did not give up hope of being cured until very shortly before her death and, despite the terrible pain and strong drugs that she took to alleviate it, she managed to finish a life of Frederick the Great of Prussia. The book did not sell as well as her previous biographies but she considered it her best work.

  In 1969, Gaston Palewski married Nancy’s old rival, Violette de Pourtalès. It is difficult to know how much Nancy minded. Diana believed that she had lived through the worst of the sorrow long before and was only mildly upset; certainly she made light of it to her sisters and friends and hid her feelings as carefully as ever. The announcement of the Colonel’s marriage coincided with the onset of Nancy’s illness, which may have lessened its impact, but it is difficult to believe that she was not distraught at the news.

  Nancy’s long illness dominated the sisters’ letters over this period. She was too weak to work for much of the time and letters helped to take her mind off the pain. Her sisters wrote to keep up her spirits and took it in turns to stay with her, corresponding with one another at length about the tortuous progress of her disease. In 1971, Nancy’s plans to start writing her memoirs stirred up the smouldering resentment she still felt towards her mother and resulted in an exchange of letters with Jessica about their childhood that is one of the few times when the two sisters unburdened their deeper feelings.

  In 1972, Pamela decided to move back to England; her dachshunds had died and she was growing bored with Switzerland. Since her Gloucestershire house was let, she moved into a flat at Chatsworth before settling at Woodfield in 1973, where she remained until the end of her life. During her illness, Pamela was the sister Nancy most wanted at her side, partly because she had no husband or family to worry about, but mainly because her calm and capable presence was the most reassuring, and her simple nature allowed Nancy to be more herself than she could with the others. When she was in pain, which was much of the time, she was often cross and took out her irritation on those around her. Pamela disliked staying at the rue d’Artois, which she found uncomfortable and claustrophobic, but nevertheless made the long journey to Versailles many times.

  As the sister living closest to Nancy, Diana bore most of the daily burden of caring for her during her illness. The strain of juggling the demands of her husband and sister was greater than ever and gave her almost daily migraines and a duodenal ulcer. Nancy’s illness brought Diana and Jessica together for the first time since 1937. When they first met again, in May 1969, Deborah and Pamela were also in France so there are no letters to record the estranged sisters’ impressions of each other, but in her diary, Diana noted, ‘Our meeting yesterday … seemed completely easy & natural because we were both thinking only of Naunce. Decca has kept her childlike face but her voice has changed, not the accent but the tone of voice. I felt an unexpected sympathy, even affection, for her, & was surprised.’ Jessica sent her impressions of Diana to friends in America: ‘She looks like a beautiful, aging bit of sculpture (is 59), … her hair is almost white, no make-up, marvellous figure, same large, perfect face and huge eyes. We don’t, of course, talk about anything but the parsley-weeding and Nancy’s illness. God it’s odd.’ Two weeks before Nancy’s death, Diana and Jessica met a second time. ‘I felt very drawn to Decca,’ Diana wrote, ‘I felt all my old love for her come flooding back & have quite forgotten her bitter public attacks on me, or at least quite forgiven them.’ The sisters even exchanged a letter, the first in thirty-six years. Jessica’s began ‘Darling Cord’, her childhood nickname for her sister, and Diana’s ‘Darling Decca’; but the temporary thaw did not last and after Nancy died they never met or spoke to each other again.

  Jessica’s crusading writing career flourished during the 1970s and 1980s. The success of The American Way of Death led Time magazine to dub her ‘The Queen of the Muckrakers’, a title she relished and lived up to with her next two books: The Trial of Dr Spock, an account of the US government’s prosecution of Benjamin Spock, the famous childcare expert who was indicted on charges of conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft, and Kind and Usual Punishment, which took a critical look at American prisons. Nancy’s illness drew Jessica closer to Deborah and Pamela, and fuelled their correspondence, but differences were never far below the surface. In particular they disagreed about the decision not to tell their sister that she had cancer. Jessica felt that it was wrong to withhold the truth, while the other two believed that if Nancy knew how ill she was she would lose all hope of recovery.

  Deborah’s role at the heart of the family was confirmed during Nancy’s final years. In her will, Nancy left all her papers to her youngest sister and appointed her literary executor of her estate. Lady Redesdale’s papers had already been sent to Chatsworth for safekeeping, and Deborah gradu
ally began to build up a Mitford archive, assembling letters, photographs and other memorabilia relating to the family.

  Dereling,

  The Lull before the Storm. It’s bitter,-5, & la laitière tells Marie it’s going to be much colder next week. Wireless says-16 tomorrow! Aie! Marie goes about with her pessimistic Norman face I know so well-yesterday she had a ringing row with Marguerite, old friend of 20 years, whom she now accuses of every devilry under the sun. In short, nerves are frayed. Oh dear. As the packing doesn’t begin until Wednesday I see a very testing week ahead.

  I dined with Raymond [Mortimer] (or at least he with me on acc/of the £50)1 at Pauline’s. Goodness it was cheap. I’d come armed with thousands-we had bilibi, quenelles, pineapple wine & coffee, well under 50.

  Horse has got his Légion d’Honneur2-he saw it in the Figaro list. I then put my foot right in it by saying ‘In England they ask you first-I well remember Evelyn refusing the OBE’3 & of course Horse has got the OBE. I’m lunching with them now.

  Later. Well, walking to the Ritz (absolutely bitter), crossing the footbridge I saw a well dressed man in a fur hat very slowly getting down some steps into the turbulent freezing river. I shouted, forcefully, ‘sortez tout de suite, Monsieur’,4 which he slowly did, soaked to the waist & stood gazing at the water. So I rushed to a copper in the Tuileries but he evidently thought I was the International Gang & coldly said he was guarding the pictures at the Orangerie but I could tell my tale to his collègue-miles away. I rushed & the collègue came at once-man back in river to the waist. Collègue gently pulled him out & led him up the steps to the quai-talking very kindly & there I left them – ¼ of an hour late for lunch. Wasn’t it odd? Not a person in sight except a nice girl who came to support my tale. It would have been a bore to have to go in after him. Oh yes, the first copper said he was probably débarbouilling [washing] himself-if you could see the very yellow waves!

  Then I went to Village Suisse for fire irons. Dereling-shovel & tongs, no poker – 150 francs. I had to get them as I need them. A little wire fireguard 350 which I fained tho I also need it.