The Mitfords

by Charlotte Mosley

  Much love, Debo

  Darling Debo:

  To go back to an old letter & subject, Al & Max in the war, of course I absolutely agree that everyone has traumas in childhood, & a fortiori in wartime, when one thinks of whole cities wiped out & the few pathetic children left, & so on. I don’t a bit imagine Al & Max had a very bad time. It was just that it was rather unlucky they went to Woo, & that Woman Mackinnon & her sister also rather loathed children. That’s why I worship Miss Lowry-Corry,1 who used to be so kind & friendly to them & to dear old Nanny. In a way what I regret is the waste of sweetness but probably not many people wd mind that.

  My own childhood was fairly happy, & I was in the ideal position in the family, utterly un-noticed & sandwiched between so many. I preferred Farve to Muv then, & Nanny to either of them. She was my all-in-all. As I got older my all-in-alls were you & Decca. You were like Stella & Willie Whitelaw2 rolled into one, & Decca was lovely too. Well, there we are. We are lucky to be alive, well, with all those grandchildren. I got a letter from Jasper [Guinness]’s Eton tutor saying he will always be grateful to Jasper for making the house such a happy place (!!). Do kindly admit.

  All love darling, Honks

  Darling Honks

  All the programmes about the Dook1 have been tragic in the extreme. Last night we had nearly the whole of the interview with Harris.2 The charm came over anew, & all the more poignant now. The interview with that FOUL Taylor,3 IDOL,4 [Bob] Boothby & that other grey haired effort called something like Coon, no [Colin] Coote, was v. interesting. Coote and Idol were the best, Idol simply said it was no good marrying someone with 2 living husbands & of course that was the beginning & end of it. Earlier in the day Boothby had said what a pity he hadn’t been Viceroy of India-well of course they wouldn’t have had him, just think of the old-fashionedness of the Dominions in 1936 which is another age anyway.

  I said to Andrew but the Honest Injuns all had masses of wives each & he said the English there wouldn’t have had it, & anyway the Indians were so different that one couldn’t compare-it was she who had had the husbands not he wives.

  Do you suppose she has got any friends, real sort of Wives? And I wonder how her illness is? Oh do enlarge.

  Much love, Debo

  Darling Debo

  Dook. Here are my deep thoughts. His marvellousness was wasted, but what could one have done differently? Viceroy of India wd have been hopeless, out of the question. If he’d lived in England with nothing to do they wd probably have been in English café society (have rushed to Aspinalls1 etc) which wd have been much worse in every way than doing it here, or in Florida. He would never have made a ‘country gentleman’ any more than she could have been a farmer’s wife. The whole thing was hateful & tragic yet I can’t see what else could have happened really than what did. It might have been far worse, for example if they’d been poor. They lived in terrific luxury thank goodness.

  I think her choice of Wife for the funeral was perfect; Grace [Dudley] not being English, & Dudley having been a great friend. I am very glad so many people struggled down to Windsor for his lying in state. I think one thing that should have been cancelled (if one was going to pretend to be in mourning) was Pcess Margaret going to a ball at Quaglinos (!!) Trooping the Colour was perfect, & having ‘The Flowers of the Forest’. You know how much I loved him & I can’t think of him without the tears welling up yet, despite all, I think he was rather happy & generally amused & busy, & he really did love & adore her, that was completely obvious the more one saw them. I think the royal family could have been more generous, & probably the theory of their contemporaries that Cake was rather in love with him (as a girl) & took second best, may account for much.

  As to her not being royal highness I think it perfectly absurd & petty & probably quite untrue-I mean I daresay one should have had an Act of Parliament to proclaim that she was only a morganatic wife. Because if she was his wife she was also HRH, as laid down by Q. Victoria, since he was the son of a sovereign. I don’t believe there is any ‘right’ to withhold it. (Walter Monckton’s opinion.) Well darling enough of all that & now he is at this minute being buried at Frogmore. On the whole I think all those arrangements have been decent & right, & shining by his niceness is Prince Charles, who seems to have made things so much easier for the Duchess. I rather dread the future. She is ill, that’s certain. I am glad he died first, he wd have been in total despair without her.

  I have had millions of headaches. I only tell you this in case you find me looking ill. I pin faith on the sun & heat & if it goes on when good weather comes I will try something (‘something must be done’2 ha-ha, easier to say than to find a remedy eh).

  All love darling, Honks

  Oh Derel,

  I feel so sad over you, it really is despairing & unbearable. I shall hear details from Debo tomorrow. (Hear is the operative word because when the line’s bad like just now I can’t.)

  We’ve got the whole of Robert Skidelsky’s book1 now & I rushed through it. Sir Oz hardly allows me to comment because he doesn’t wish it to be considered ‘authorized’. Enough to say that as far as I go the two sources are Decca & Auntie Ni [Ravensdale] (do you remember Auntie Ni’s book2 which you chose for your desert island). The awful thing is, as one grows older one minds less & less & lets everything pass, & as you so truly say, what is between hard covers is considered the truth, later on, but tant pis.3

  Something I mind much more is that the World Service has completely disappeared from its old wavelength, I suppose one must write to the tahsome BBC. When you think how they go on & on boring one with wavelengths & metre bands & mega hertz or what-ever they’re called, yet from one day to next there’s nothing but a sort of drum doing the first bar of the V Symphony. Maddening.

  All love derel, D

  Darling Debo:

  I got your long letter written in the train on paper given by a gent, & it may be the last for a bit because I see in the vile paper that the tiresome post here is striking again but please go on writing just the same. Last time I telephoned there was a hint of a laugh from Naunce, the first for weeks. It was about Duckie II asking her whether she wants to live or die, & that she had answered ‘die, of course’. But it’s no laughing matter if she’s really got to live with the pain plus the awful weakness. Poor Naunce. Birthday today. I note you are at Chatsworth & darling I do hope they don’t disturb you, for once.

  Yes isn’t J. Thorpe perfect when he ‘does’ Uncle Harold,1 once in Venice it made me weak with laughing, it was at midnight & passers-by must have thought we were all drunk. He is so clever as a clown & so clownish as a politician, always on the wrong side (except for Common Market that is).

  Kit took me for his favourite daily walk in the wood, oh Debo how you would have laughed. There are enough old stoves thrown away in brambles to furnish a block of flats not to mention tins & reams of paper. He simply doesn’t see all this & says, ‘Percher,2 look at the tops of the birches in the wind, aren’t they beautiful, & look at this glade’ (with a burnt-out car in it) ‘isn’t it like a glade at Wootton, how I hope they won’t spoil it, look at the stream’ (choked with rubbish) ‘sometimes it rushes along, isn’t the sound of it beautiful’ etc etc, one could hug him but I can’t make out whether he just ignores or literally doesn’t see the horrors, I think it’s the latter.

  All love darling, Honks

  Darling Debo

  Yesterday we lunched with the Duchess of W[indsor], pathos personified, about nine people including a nurse (in a green silk dress) & she (Duchess) tried to set the ball rolling by saying nowadays people are only inter-ested in SEX, well as we were all well on the way to the grave the ball refused to roll. However it was all very jolly, & the food to dream of, she is a genius for food.

  We dined with Mona [Bismarck] & the dinner was really foul, money can’t buy good food can it. We also dined with Mogens, he has got a dread talent for finding really dull people & we got 3 total strangers, it’s ages since I felt dinner taking quite
so long. If Kit hadn’t been there ’twould have been better, because one suffered for him, & he tried so hard (because he’s fond of Mogens), he is good in those ways. It probably comes from having been deadly bored in politics in constituencies-don’t.

  I can’t tell you what the stores are like here this year, the hideous drear of what they sell, I’m sure Moscow couldn’t be worse. No wonder people go to London for the shopping. Unless one can afford the grandees there is literally nothing on the clothes front.

  Well darling a dull letter I fear but just to prove I’m still alive.

  All love, Honks

  I sat next a man yesterday who told me that Louise de V said the reason teeth are so important is that they are the only part of the skeleton to show. Rather a bold remark when one remembers her teeth eh.1

  Derel

  I wish you were here I can’t find anything!!!

  I’m rather low with a very bad pain. They say everything is all right now – no more cancer or anaemia or sweating, in short I’m absolutely well but I’ve had a murdering pain all all day. It’s true I have it less than formerly & not every day but I can’t lead an ordinary life when it may descend at any time. This morning it was the crying sort. Oh Woman! & the thousands of pounds I pour out. The drs say I would have died in about three weeks if I’d gone on like in the summer. I rather wish I had. But I suppose one’s hold on life is very strong & the will to live.

  Have you read a fascinating book called Lark Rise?2 If not oi send.

  Oh do give my love to all those kind friends & even strangers who send me theirs. Giuditta must have been pleased to see you.

  My Xmas dinner was Joy’s3 left-overs. I can never tell the deliciosity. She has got a genius for sauce. Ending with gooseberry fool. She is really good to me.

  Keep in touch.

  Love from Naunce

  Pitch dark here the sun never seems to rise.

  Derel,

  Constant’s1 uncle, aged 91, died & he feared it would be un coup dur2 for the old father who is 94. Jean said no it wouldn’t & that when his aunt died aged 88 his mother, who was ninety, only said ‘Elle a toujours été fragile’3 & didn’t care a bit. After 85 one only thinks & minds about oneself. Another way in which extreme age joins up with the first months of life, babies only think of themselves, eh.

  I’m reading the last vol of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography,4 it is rather good but more bitty than the Force de l’age & the Force des choses. It seems too strange that this woman living in the same town as us, & just our age, & loving many of the same things we do (for instance she adored the Orieux Talleyrand,5 loves Rome, Piazza Navona & all the places one loves, thinks Champ de Bataille the most beautiful château of all, & so on) & yet in her opinions about people is so unlike one. All the friends she describes go practically mad in one way or another & are more than pestilential. Then one thinks of Sartre at the tomb of Chateaubriand.6 What a crew.

  All love darling, D

  Dereling,

  This is just to announce that I am now back here at Woodfield. It all seems so nice & I am going to get the inside tidied up a bit & some of the rooms re-decorated. It is badly needed after 12 years!

  Derel, I do hope you will be better by the time you get this, I gather from Nard & Cynthia [Gladwyn] that you were very bad this last week, I am so sorry. If you need help you must let me know.

  Much love from Woman

  Dear Miss

  Woman with her own little house she must long for is doing filthy things for me like bedpans without anything but smiles, how can she be so noble? What can I do for her? You must think & tell me.

  I am in horrid pain from the leg perhaps the very worst ever though one can’t say that & I imagine it is really the same old pain I’ve always had.

  Such beautiful P.C.s from Joy [Law] in Peking-no wonder our grandfather was utterly bowled over by what he saw there.1

  I’m very unhappy, so so grateful to Woo, I feel I’m a burden to all, it is part of the horror.

  Best love, Lady

  Darling Honks

  I had such a nice letter from Decca, saying she’d drop everything & come to Versailles if it wd be any help to Nancy or to us. I’ve written & tried to explain to her that it is v. v. kind but it wouldn’t really be worth the terrific effort (because I absolutely know she would only get a luke-warm welcome & that in itself wd be so depressing wouldn’t it).

  So it is just a question of waiting & I quite realize, & said so to Hen, that it may be ages. I feel it is all putting an awful lot on you. This last week must have been a monster effort-I do hope your voice is back & that you aren’t whacked to the last, but I know you must be. Oh Honks it is ghoul.

  You would think the Palfium would have sort of poisoned her by now. Henderson says why on earth not heroin in your own home. Think of addicts-quite true. Anyway we just know nothing is possible until she demands something more & different.

  Well Honks I am so sorry for all you’ve got on hand.

  Much love, Debo

  Derel,

  When next you come you must tell the old woman I am not as tough as I look. I can’t bear to be shouted at & last night I wept sadly thinking what it would be like to have somebody like Marie at one’s deathbed. She roars into the room & always has something to scold me about. I don’t always even know what it is & in my weak state haven’t got any comeback. I’m very miserable though I know with all the advantages we must CLING. But if she could be a little politer like she was in the beginning & fear of you might do the trick!

  Mrs Hadfield I am told died quietly in the night why can’t I. Quite unexpectedly, you couldn’t say that of me.

  Love, N

  Dearest Hen,

  I’m not at all sure how well I am doing as Sis-in-residence. I feel always either too-little-and-too-late, or too-much-too-early. Two examples (& remember this is my first day on the job, always fraught with awkwardness in my experience): Hassan brought in massive vases of roses soon after I came, whisking away the old ones.

  Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears & she said, ‘everyone says there are masses of roses in the garden, why doesn’t anyone bring them up here?’ So I said I’ll dash & get some, which I did. As you may have noted, it does take a few minutes to get them, & I raced back with 3 more vases. So N., in cuttingest tones: ‘I see your life does not contain much art and grace.’ Too true, but Hen! So I got lots more & put ’em round. Nancy: ‘I can’t think why you didn’t get them earlier, you haven’t got anything else to do’. In other words, I think she’s rather taken against me. Yet I can’t make out whether me sitting in her room & reading or writing letters as distinct from you, Woman or Diana doing ditto pleases or annoys.

  Diana rang up & I told her all the part about the roses, saying I long for advice & instructions; turns out one was automatically supposed to do the roses each day, so now I shall, but one can’t exactly guess these things. Of course Diana pointed out, which I absolutely do see, that she’s not herself etc, so one must just get on with it-which I am totally willing and longing to do, Hen.

  Goodnight, Henny. Think of me sometimes in these foreign parts,

  Yr loving Hen

  Darling Debo

  We are only here one night. This is just to tell you Naunce has been so foul to Decca, don’t let Decca know that I said, but it is really so dreadful when she came so far, it made me cry & still does when I think about it. You see I telephoned last night (as she’d been so bad in the morning when you were with me)&asked for the nurse&Decca came&apparently Liliane de Rothschild1 was visiting (after a lot of on&off&finally on from Naunce)&in the morning, no doubt on that silly account, Naunce said,‘Why can’t I have any roses in here?’&Decca went&picked them&put them in vases&Naunce said,‘Anyone can see you’ve never had anything gracious in your life’ (those were the words Decca told me),&Decca said to me‘So you can imagine how useless I felt’.

  Well darling I can’t get over this piece of horridness. How could one say that to someon
e of whom it’s vaguely true, it literally gave me a (physical) pain in my heart. Decca is so wonderful&tough that possibly it isn’t as bad as one thinks. I kept on saying,‘One must just remember that it’s not her any more’,&Decca,‘Of course I know it isn’t, it’s only that I want to find out what to do, for instance does she like one to sit quietly in the room or does she prefer to be alone?’ I said,‘I think she rather likes to open her eyes&see a person sitting there.’

  The fact that Decca told me the saga may show she didn’t mind too much but I think she did mind – not about not being an expert rose-arranger but the unkind tone of her voice&real rudeness after that endless journey, not to say expense&so forth. Oh Debo, it has upset me so much, it’s the sort of thing one can’t bear. How well I understand your feeling for your Hen. I said to her can you stick a week&she said she could.