Читать книгу The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters - Charlotte Mosley - Страница 10

The Mitford children in 1921: Unity, Pamela, Deborah, Tom, Nancy, Jessica and Diana.

There are few letters to record the Mitford sisters’ childhood and early youth, and such letters as they did write were mostly to their mother and father. Nor are there many letters dating back to the eight years covered in this section. By 1925, only Nancy, aged twenty – one, and Pamela, aged eighteen, had gone out into the world; the four youngest children were still in the nursery or schoolroom. Nancy’s main family correspondent at the time was her brother Tom, and Pamela – who confided mostly in Diana – was the least prolific writer of the sisters.

When the letters begin, the family had been living for six years at Asthall Manor, a seventeenth-century house in the Cotswolds, which the sisters’ father, Lord Redesdale, had bought when he sold Batsford Park, a rambling Victorian pile that he had inherited in 1916 and could not afford to keep up. Before the First World War, David Redesdale, or ‘Farve’ as he was known to his children, lived in London where he worked as office manager for The Lady, the magazine founded by his father-in-law. Life in the country was far better suited to this unbookish, unsociable man, whose happiest moments were spent by the Windrush, a trout river that ran past Asthall, or in the woods where he watched his young pheasants hatch. Unluckily for his family, country sports did not exhaust his energies and Asthall, which the children loved, was not to his liking. In 1926, they moved to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, a grim, ungainly edifice that Lord Redesdale had built on top of a hill near Swinbrook village. All the sisters except Deborah, who was six when they moved, disliked the new house, which was cold, draughty and impractical. Worst of all, unlike Asthall where the library had been in a converted barn some distance from the house and where the children were left undisturbed, there was no room at Swinbrook that they could call their own. The younger children found some warmth and privacy in a heated linen cupboard, later immortalized in Nancy’s novels as the ‘Hons’ cupboard’, while the older children had to share the drawing room or sit in their small bedrooms. Lord Redesdale was hurt by the family’s dislike of his dream project and began to spend more time at 26 Rutland Gate, a large London house overlooking Hyde Park that he had bought when Asthall was sold.

The sisters were in awe of their father. Strikingly handsome, with the brilliant blue eyes that passed down to his children, he was kind-hearted, jovial and the source of much of the fun that was had in the family. Deborah remembered him as ‘charming, brilliant without being clever’ and uproariously funny when in a good mood. She wrote that when he and Nancy started sparring they were better than anything she had ever seen on stage, ‘a pair of comedians of the first order’. But he could also be impatient and had a violent temper. The smallest transgression – a child spilling her food or being a minute late – could send him into a towering rage. His anger was all the more alarming for being unpredictable: he would turn with sudden fury on one of his daughters and then, for no apparent reason, decide to single out another. Their way of standing up to him, and of drawing his unwrathful attention, was to catch their father in one of his sunnier moods and tease him, which he took in good part. Jessica used to call him ‘the Old Sub-Human’ and pretend to measure his skull for science or would gently shake his hand when he was drinking a cup of tea to give him ‘palsy practice’ for when he grew old. Nancy’s caricature of him in her first novel, Highland Fling, as the jingoistic, hot-tempered General Murgatroyd – a precursor of the formidable Uncle Matthew in her later novels – was an effective way of reducing this larger-than-life figure to less alarming dimensions. As they grew up, the sisters rarely seem to have resented Farve and looked back on his autocratic eccentricities with affectionate amusement. The inclination to hero – worship is foreshadowed in their relationship with their father; like the other powerful men who were to come into their lives, he could do no wrong.

Their resentment – and that of Nancy and Jessica in particular – against the perceived shortcomings of their upbringing was reserved for their mother. In contrast to her moody, volatile husband, Sydney, or ‘Muv’ as her children called her, was cool and detached. Her own mother had died when she was seven years old and at the age of fourteen she had taken on the responsibility of running her father’s household. This had taught her financial prudence and to be a good manager – qualities that came in useful later when raising a family of seven on never quite enough money – but it also created a certain rigidity in her attitude to her children when they were growing up; an inflexibility that fuelled her daughters’ rebellious behaviour and their desire to shock.

From her father, Lady Redesdale had inherited definite opinions about health and diet, believing that the ‘good body’ would heal itself more effectively without the intervention of doctors or medicine. An early campaigner against refined sugar and white flour, she made sure that her children ate only wholemeal bread, baked to her recipe. Physically undemonstrative, she rarely exhibited outward signs of maternal warmth and seldom hugged or cuddled her daughters, who had to compete fiercely for the scarce resource of her attention. In ‘Blor’, an essay on her childhood, Nancy described her mother as living ‘in a dream world of her own’, detached to the point of neglect. In her fictional portrait of her as Aunt Sadie, she depicted a more sympathetic character but one that was nevertheless remote and disapproving. But the aloofness that some of her daughters complained of also had its positive side, enabling their mother to remain calm in the face of an unpredictable husband and to deal impartially with six boisterous and constantly feuding girls (her ambition had been to have seven boys). She was also fair, principled, direct, selfless and honest to the point of innocence. As the sisters grew up and their escapades sent their mother reeling from one calamity to the next, her unshakeable loyalty and acceptance of their choices in life showed that she cared for her daughters very much indeed.

Like most girls of their class and generation, the sisters were educated at home. Lady Redesdale taught all her children until they were eight, after which the girls moved to the schoolroom to be instructed by governesses and Tom was sent away to boarding school. Nancy and Jessica blamed their mother for this lack of formal education, even though Lord Redesdale was just as opposed to sending his daughters to school. ‘Nothing would have induced him to waste money on anything so frivolous’, wrote Deborah. He also worried that they might develop thick calves from being made to play hockey. Neither parent believed that girls should be educated beyond basic literacy and regarded intellectual women as ‘rather dreadful’. The Redesdales’ views were not uncommon at the time but their children’s response was more unusual. Nancy’s bitterness at not having received what she considered a proper education was enduring and runs as a refrain throughout her correspondence. Jessica wrote that the dream of her childhood was to be allowed to go to school, and that her mother’s refusal to countenance it had burned into her soul.

It is questionable, however, whether the sisters would have been better educated had they gone away to school. At the time, fashionable establishments for girls taught social rather than intellectual skills, preparing pupils for marriage and the drawing-room rather than the workplace. When the Redesdales eventually allowed Nancy, at the age of sixteen, to go to Hatherop Castle, a small private school for girls from ‘suitable’ families, the mainly non-academic curriculum concentrated on music, dancing and French, whereas at home, the sisters were free to make use of their grandfather’s first-rate library and Nancy and Diana became bookworms at an early age. It was perhaps the boredom of being confined at home with only siblings for company that rankled with Jessica and Nancy as much as their lack of formal schooling. Not until they left home and had to earn a living – they were the only two sisters who did not marry rich men – did they have cause to view their rudimentary education as a handicap.

The age gap between the Mitford children meant that they formed almost two separate generations. In 1925, the year that opens this collection of letters, the older children, Nancy, Pamela, Tom and Diana, ranged between the ages of twenty-one and fifteen. The youngest three, Unity, Jessica and Deborah, were aged eleven, eight and five. Nancy had ‘come out’ when she was eighteen and had followed her first season as a debutante with three further years of weekend parties and balls. She had met the right people, made many friends and quite enjoyed herself, but she had failed to do the expected thing and find a husband. With very little money and no immediate prospects, she was living at home, taking out her frustration on her sisters. The three youngest looked up to her like a remote star: her vitality, cleverness and supreme funniness lit up the family atmosphere, as did her determination to turn everything into a joke, but she was too caustic and indiscreet to be the recipient of anyone’s confidences. In Unity’s copy of All About Everybody, a little book of printed questions that she asked her family and friends to fill in, Nancy put as her besetting sin ‘disloyalty’, a trait that could make her incomparably good company but an uncertain ally.

Nancy’s usual victim was Pamela, whose unguarded nature made her an obvious target for teasing. Diana, however, presented more of a challenge; she was fully Nancy’s intellectual equal, with just as determined a character, and was able to stand up to her sister’s bullying. Occasionally Nancy managed to exert her seniority and successfully torment her younger sister. When she was sixteen, she formed a company of Girl Guides, appointed herself captain and tried to make ten-year-old Diana salute her. On another occasion, she pretended to have heard the Redesdales discuss sending Diana to boarding school, an idea that filled her little sister with horror. But they both enjoyed reading, which drew them together, as did a similar sense of humour and a longing to escape the confinement of Swinbrook. As they grew up, they became, according to Diana, great friends. But underlying the friendship was a deep current of envy on Nancy’s part towards a younger sister who was already a great beauty and the instant centre of attention with the undergraduate friends that Nancy brought home. These feelings were exacerbated when Diana, aged eighteen, married the extremely rich and good-looking Bryan Guinness and became a sought-after London hostess.

Shortly before Diana’s engagement to Bryan in 1928, Pamela accepted a proposal of marriage from a neighbour of the Mitfords, Oliver Watney. The prospect of having two younger sisters married before she was may help to explain Nancy’s unwise decision to become unofficially engaged to Hamish St Clair-Erskine, a friend of Tom’s from Eton who was younger than her and homosexual. Her infatuation with Hamish dragged on for five unsatisfactory years, causing her a great deal of unhappiness. During this period she started to write her first articles for Vogue, and in 1930 was taken on as a regular contributor to cover social events for The Lady. This brought in a little pocket money, as did her first two novels, Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding, light satires on upper-class life that sketched out the world she would so successfully depict in her accomplished post-war novels.

Nancy used to say that the first three years of her life were perfect, ‘then a terrible thing happened, my sister Pamela was born’ which ‘threw me into a permanent rage for about 20 years’. Her affront at being supplanted in the nursery was compounded by an insensitive nanny who immediately shifted all her love and attention to the new baby. By the time Nancy was six and Pamela three, they might have overcome their differences and played together, had not Pamela contracted polio which affected her physical and mental development. She was in constant pain from an aching leg, and often tearful and sad. Her illness was doubtless a strain on Nancy: ‘you’ve got to be kind to Pam, she’s ill’, was dinned into her unceasingly. Instead of narrowing, as it normally would, the age gap between the two sisters widened. Pamela, who was the least able to defend herself, became Nancy’s scapegoat. She learnt to keep her head down and seems never to have shown any ill will towards her tormentor. She loved jokes as much as the rest of the family, and laughed about her own limitations, but she refused to retaliate or compete in the teasing. Her sisters nicknamed her ‘Woman’ because, like a symbolic character in a medieval Mystery Play, she epitomized the womanly virtues of simplicity and goodness. From her mother, she inherited dignity, common sense and the talent for making a comfortable home; from her father, a love of the countryside, where she was at her happiest. In 1925, when these letters begin, Pamela was a shy seventeen-year-old debutante, confiding to Diana her nervousness about going out into the world.

Unlike Nancy, who was a late developer and drew out her adolescence well into her twenties, Diana, by the time she was thirty, had been twice married, given birth to four sons and experienced the most eventful decade of her life. When these letters begin, she was a precocious fifteen-year-old, dreaming of independence. Her closest companion in the family, both in age and interests, was Tom, and when he was home for the holidays the two were inseparable. Diana admired her brother’s musical and intellectual talents and delighted in the company of his sophisticated friends. These glimpses of a world of art, music and intelligent conversation increased her yearning to escape the restrictive family atmosphere. The 1926 General Strike, sparked off by the grim working conditions in the coal mines, made a deep impression on her, kindling her social conscience and fostering a lifelong interest in politics. Whereas Nancy treated the national emergency as something of a joke and disguised herself as a tramp to frighten Pamela who was running a canteen serving food to strike-breaking lorry drivers, Diana felt the injustice of the miners’ situation acutely. Her interest in politics was also fuelled by visits to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s family home in Kent. Churchill’s wife, Clementine, was a first cousin of Lord Redesdale, and two of the Churchill children, Diana and Randolph, were much the same age as Tom and Diana.

In 1927, Diana spent six months studying in Paris, where she said she learnt more than in six years of lessons at Asthall. For the first time in her life she was free of the strict chaperoning imposed by her parents and of having to jockey for position among her sisters. The painter Paul-César Helleu, a friend of Thomas Gibson-Bowles, was an important influence during her visit. He took her to the Louvre and Versailles, introduced her to his artist friends and admired her looks, making her aware for the first time of the effect of her exceptional beauty. When she returned to Swinbrook, Diana was more impatient than ever to get away from its schoolroom atmosphere. The following year, at the end of her first season, a proposal of marriage gave her the chance to escape. Bryan Guinness, the sensitive and diffident elder son of Lord Moyne and heir to a brewing fortune, fell deeply in love with her. A poet and novelist, Bryan was part of a group of Nancy’s Oxford friends that included Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Roy Harrod, Harold Acton, James Lees-Milne, Henry Yorke and Robert Byron, young men whose interests represented everything that Diana aspired to. She and Bryan were married in January 1929 and divided their time between London and Biddesden, a fine eighteenth-century house in Wiltshire, where Diana was able to give free rein to her talent for decorating and entertaining. Unity, Jessica and Deborah often went to stay with the young couple and in 1930 Pamela settled in a nearby cottage to run the Biddesden farm. Nancy was a less frequent visitor. Caught up in her unhappy affair with Hamish and very short of money, it was galling to see Diana settled in a splendid house, surrounded by a loving husband and two healthy babies. However, the picture of happiness that Diana and Bryan presented was not as bright as it appeared. Although they were undoubtedly in love, there was a basic incompatibility between them that soon made itself felt. Increasingly, Bryan wanted to stay at home with only his family for company while Diana, who was eager to travel and fill her house with friends, found this domesticity all too reminiscent of the life she had so recently managed to escape.

In the spring of 1932, Diana sat next to Sir Oswald Mosley at a dinner party in London. The former Conservative MP and Labour Minister, whose New Party had been resoundingly defeated in the previous year’s general election, was preparing to break with parliamentary politics and launch the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Diana fell under the spell of this seasoned womanizer and compelling talker who seemed to her to have all the answers to Britain’s problems. In Mosley, she found the combination of a powerful man she could love and a cause to which she could dedicate herself, a pattern that Unity and Jessica – and to a lesser extent Nancy – were to conform to in their different ways. Mosley was married and made it clear that he would not leave his wife. Undeterred, and encouraged by Mosley, Diana decided to divorce Bryan in order to be available for her lover whenever he could spare the time from politics, family and the other women in his life. By throwing in her lot with Mosley, Diana was prepared to sacrifice her social position, distance herself from her beloved Tom, who disapproved of her leaving Bryan, alienate her parents – who refused to allow her two youngest sisters to visit her – and even risk losing her sons. She once wrote of her decision, ‘I probably ought to have behaved differently but I never regretted it’. Of the family, only Nancy supported Diana’s choice and became a regular visitor to the house in Eaton Square that Diana took after her divorce. It was no doubt easier for Nancy to be close to her sister when she was unpopular than when she was at the height of her success.

Unity was described by her mother as a sensitive, introverted little girl, who used to slip under the dining-room table if anything was said at meals that upset or embarrassed her. By the time she was eight, and had graduated to the schoolroom, she had become naughty and disruptive, her shyness concealed beneath a tough shell of sullen defiance. More solemn than her sisters, she lacked their quick wit and enjoyed practical rather than verbal jokes. In an effort to stand out, she behaved outrageously. When she was fourteen, partly because she was so difficult at home and partly because she wanted to go away, Lady Redesdale decided to make an exception among her daughters and sent Unity to boarding school. The three establishments she attended were no more successful at controlling her than her governesses had been and she was expelled from all of them. In 1932, she followed her older sisters and was launched into society: ‘a huge and a rather alarming debutante’, according to Jessica. Social life bored her and she had not grown out of the need to draw attention to herself. The only party she enjoyed was a Court ball, where she distinguished herself by stealing Buckingham Palace writing paper. In early 1933, to fill in the months before another Season, she enrolled at a London art school. Diana’s house in Eaton Square was forbidden to the two youngest Mitfords because of the scandal of her divorce and involvement with Mosley, but Unity, freed from parental supervision, was able to call on her sister whenever she liked. On one of her visits she met Mosley and became an instant convert to his ideas. The fascist cause had the attraction of being disapproved of by her parents, as well as providing her with the thrill of being connected to its charismatic leader. For Diana, who at the time was cut off from most of her family, Unity’s enthusiastic support was reassuring.

During the eight years covered by these early letters, Jessica, the second-youngest sister, went from being a cheerful, mischievous eight-year-old to an angry, rebellious adolescent. While there was nothing unusual about this – her sisters had also gone through periods of teenage moodiness – the boredom of home life and the frustration of not being allowed to go to school instilled in Jessica a lasting sense of grievance. Although in her memoirs of 1960, Hons and Rebels, she may have exaggerated the fortress – like aspect of Swinbrook and overlooked the laughter and genuine companionship that existed between herself, Unity and Deborah – whom she likened to ‘ill-assorted animals tied to a common tethering post’ – there is no doubt that life there for the three youngest Mitfords was more circumscribed than Asthall had been for the eldest four. A few months after Diana, who had always been her preferred older sister, left home to get married, twelve-year-old Jessica’s determination to rebel took a tangible form and she opened a ‘running-away’ account at Drummond’s Bank. In her memoirs, she recalled that by this time her social conscience had been awakened by newspaper accounts of the economic depression gripping Britain. She dated her interest in socialism to reading, at the age of fourteen, Beverley Nichols’ pacifist novel, Cry Havoc!, and noted that it was she, not Unity, who first became interested in politics. Nichols’ book was not in fact published until 1933, the year Jessica turned sixteen, by which time Unity had taken up fascism and the struggle between the two ideologies was already being played out on a wider stage than the Swinbrook schoolroom. But no matter which of them was the first to take up an extreme position, Unity and Jessica had, like many sisters, quarrelled relentlessly as children and their political disagreement was in many ways a continuation of earlier squabbles. Beneath their rivalry, however, was a deep and lasting affection which remained intact, even after they had embraced diametrically opposite sides in the conflict of the day.

After their disappointment at her birth – the Redesdales had been hoping for another boy – Deborah was the only one among the sisters never to cause her parents any heartache, and was probably their favourite daughter. She was a contented child with a loving nature, for whom the idea of school was anathema. She was happy so long as she was with the ponies, dogs, goats, guinea pigs and other animals that were as important to her as the human inhabitants of Swinbrook. While she possessed just as passionate and resolute a nature as her sisters, the key to Deborah’s well-adjusted disposition was the ability to accept life as she found it. The youngest of a large family, she soon learnt, as she wrote in a memoir of her childhood, that ‘as everything in life is unfair, perhaps the sooner it is realized the better’, and unlike her politically engaged sisters she never felt the urge to go out and right the injustices of the world. Unencumbered by spite or malice, Deborah possessed a cheerfulness and buoyancy of spirits that never deserted her. As a small child, she worshipped Nancy and sought out her company, only to be teased or treated with amused condescension in return. Her staunchest ally against her eldest sister’s persecution was Jessica; the two remained very close throughout childhood and adolescence, when they shared an easy, happy relationship, expressed through ‘Honnish’ jokes, songs and poems.

My dear Diana,

You must have had an awful time poor dear!¹ Didn’t it hurt most horribly? Anyway I am sure you will be very happy at Bexhill-on-Sea. We have just got the telegram to say that you got there alright, not that I quite see what could have happened to you unless it might have been a train accident. But it is the custom to send telegrams whenever one arrives safely anywhere.

Pat² has arrived, he came at tea time. Mary³ came yesterday and so far no one else has arrived. I do so wish that you were here. You see I feel so stupid because every one invited Togo⁴ to tea on Sunday to play tennis and Mary keeps telling everybody that she has asked him for me and that everybody is to fade away and leave us two together! If you were here you would of course also join in and I should not feel so young. However I shall have to get over feeling shy and this weekend is sure to help me in doing so. I should really much prefer to be at Bexhill with you.

We want to do some table turning one night but we are so afraid that Farve⁵ might find us at it. That would be awful of course.

Much love from Pam

Dearest Ling

Isn’t this too grand?¹

So awful, I ought to be drawing but the professor has been so beastly to me in a piercing voice, everyone heard & I rushed away to hide my shame in the writing room. Very soon I shall have to go back & face my brothers & sisters-in-art.

They are so awful to you, they come up & say What a very depressing drawing, I wonder how you manage to draw so foully, have you never had a pencil in your hand before. They burble on like this for about ½ an hr & everyone else cranes to catch each word. Luckily they are the same to all. I now burst into loud sobs the moment one comes into the room, hoping to soften them.

Very soon it will be lunch time & then I shall be seated between an Indian & a Fuzzy-Wuzzy² degluting sausage & mash oh what a treat. I’m learning Italian here now which I enjoy. In fact I love being here altogether, it’s the greatest fun.

I hope you are in rude health & enjoy your matutinal cold bath.³

So awful, the head of the whole university had us all up the other day & said there is a lady thief among us. I tried not to look self conscious but I’m sure they suspect me. I now leave my old fur coat about everywhere, I long for the insurance money.

Love, Naunce

Dear ould ’Al,

I expect you wonder why I haven’t sent you that Toblerone? Well, you see, it is like this: I bought a 4/6d dove, in a 16/6d cage, which made £1 1s, and I only had £1, so I had to wait two weeks without pocket-money! and so forgot about the toberlerone. But as perhaps you’ll forgive me.

We have started an ‘Industry Club’ and we’ve got a Mag, called the ‘Industries’, and I pronounce it ‘industries’ which annoys Boudle.¹ But I wondered if you’d like it whenever it comes out; and if you would please write and tell me, and I’ll send you one.

Yours fairly affectionately, DYAKE

¹

Darling Cortia,

Thank you SO much for that marvellous little satin bed-coat, it has been my one prideandjoy. Nurse and Nanny² simply love it, too, and actually let me wear it sometimes instead of keeping it up and hoarding it in drawers. I had my stitches out yesterday (one of which I enclose). There were five altogether. Debo has bought one for 6d, I’ve sent one to B. Bamber, a school friend. I’m keeping my appendix in methylated spirits to leave to my children.³

I hope poor little Bryan⁴ is better, give him my love & show him the enclosed stitch. He can have half of it.

Love from Decca

Darling Pam

Oh I am so sorry how beastly for you poor darling.¹ Never mind I expect you’ll be rewarded by marrying someone millions of times nicer & obviously Togo would have been a horrid husband. Are you going to Canada? I hope so, that would be lovely for you.²

Best love & don’t be too miserable, I am, dreadfully, about it but one must make the best of things.

Heaps of love, Naunce

Darling Pam,

Thank you so much for the letter. I am so glad you did not feel sick on the ship. The parrot is very well, and is often let out in the garden. We are going to stay with Diana¹ at Littlehampton a week yesterday, and will probably be there when you get this letter. Nancy is staying in London with a person called Evelyn,² and they will do all their own housework like you and Muv.³

Love from Jessica

Dee Droudled Boudle,

It is rather fun here, but it is a bore having to miss ½ term in London. Debo has been rather cross part of the time. Day before yesterday at lunch she told the maid she wanted ‘a very little ham’, and she was furious with Nanny for saying afterwards she wanted ‘a very, very little ham’. She said ‘What’s the use of my saying I want a very little ham if you go and say I want a very, very little ham?’¹

Yesterday morning, too, she wanted to go out directly after breakfast, but poor Nanny had to go to the lavatory, and Debo was furious again, and said ‘When Muv was here we didn’t have to do all this silly going to the lavatory’. Nanny said very crossly ‘I shall go to the lavatory when I want to’.

Love from DECCA Je Boudle

I swear it’s quite true about the ham & lavatory, don’t believe Debo.

Darling Bods

After 2 hrs solid of thinking I have at last analysed my feelings.

I am in love with H² but as you know the one thing in the world I admire is intellect so I am in the position of someone who is out to marry money & falls in love with a poor man.

I think this is quite the true state of my mind & sounds more sane than my rather hysterical conversation this evening. So frightfully tired.

Love, N

¹

Dear Nancy & Corbish,

Last night I went to a party & danced with M. Chaliapine.² He IS so sweet he jumped about with me and hummed in a sweet voice to the band. I have struck up an acquaintance with his two daughters at the Pontresina Hotel. They are good and nyang [sweet] – aged 8 and 17. It is snowing and a blizerd today.

Love from Decca

Deborah, Tom, Pamela, Unity, Jessica and ‘Muv’, in one of the rare photographs of Lady Redesdale smiling. Pontresina, 1930.

Darling Honkite

We were so excited when Nan woke us up at six o’clock to tell us about Baby G.¹ What is his name? We are coming up to see him as soon as nurse lets us. Won’t it be fun? There isn’t much more to say except to heartily congratulate you!

Much love (and to the baby) from Debo

Darling Bodley¹

Oh I am having such an awful time. First poor little Decca who happily does seem to be more or less all right.² Now today a huge picture of me in the Sunday Dispatch saying that my book³ is dedicated to Hamish who I’m engaged to. And there is the most appalling row going on. Muv & Farve spent the whole morning telling me that my friends are all drunkards, that I’m ruining my health & my character, hinting that I have taken to drink myself. I simply don’t know what to do. They say if I go to London this summer it will be the end of me & I’ve practically promised not to go.

Then dear Uncle George,⁴ to whom I sent an advance copy, has written to Muv saying it’s awfully indecent but he hopes it will sell & I gather Aunt Iris⁵ wrote in the same vein. Farve says it is killing Muv by inches.

Why did I dedicate the beastly book at all, as I said to Muv other people can dedicate books without this sort of thing happening but she & Farve appear to think I did it to annoy them. Then they say that as I’m nearly thirty I ought to stop going out at all. Why? And what should I do if I did stop. I can’t make out what they really want me to do. Live permanently in the country I suppose.

Oh dear I do feel miserable.

Best love, N

Darling Bodley

I am so unhappy for you on account of this terrible tragedy.¹

I can’t help thinking that for her it must have been best, as she didn’t do it on an impulse when he died it shows she must have considered it & decided that life without him was & always would be intolerable. But for you & all her friends it is a terrible loss, I am so so sorry darling.

Please give my love & sympathy to Bryan.

V. best love, Naunce

Darling Nard

I thought I would just write & tell you that I went to court last night & enjoyed it very much, though when I came into the PRESENCE my heart failed me & I was almost too nervous to curtsy, though I managed to in the end.¹ Everyone admired my dress, and it really is too lovely, how can I ever thank you enough, I shall never wear anything else at dances now. I was entirely dressed by you – dress, bag, fur coat, & bracelet. It was great fun waiting in the Mall, we waited about two hours. I shouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much if I hadn’t had such a lovely dress.

Please give my love to Bryan & Tom.²

Best love from Bobo

Unity, ‘a huge and rather alarming debutante’, dressed for presentation at court, 1932.

My Darling Bodley

Thank you for the lovely week I had, I enjoyed myself to the full.

Mitty¹ & I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon discussing your affairs² & are having another session in a minute! He is horrified, & says that your social position will be nil if you do this. Darling I do hope you are making a right decision. You are SO young to begin getting in wrong with the world, if that’s what is going to happen.

However it is all your own affair & whatever happens I shall always be on your side as you know & so will anybody who cares for you & perhaps the rest really don’t matter.

With all my best love, Nance

Darling Naunce

You are divine to me, I don’t know what I would do without you.

I have read your book¹ and it is simply heavenly and beautifully written and I read a lot of it to the Leader² and we laughed so much we couldn’t go on reading.

Bryan has now arrived and is in a state of airy bliss and longing for me to start work on his flat.³ He is in a magnanimous mood and I told him about the stock of country shoes and crepe de chine⁴ I am laying in and he was all for it. He says I can have the pick of Cheyne Walk furniture and in return I am giving him two or three pictures. The future appears to me to be roseate specially now he is so gay and bright.

I ought to get you a diamond necklace – last chance!

All love, Diana

Darling Bodley

Oh I feel as if I were sitting on a volcano (thank you, by the way, a million times for the life saving gift of £5 THE LAST). You know, back in the sane or insane atmosphere of Swinbrook I feel convinced that you won’t be allowed to take this step. I mean that Muv & Farve & Tom, Randolph,¹ Doris,² Aunt Iris, John,³ Lord Moyne⁴ & in fact everybody that you know will band together & somehow stop it. How, I don’t attempt to say.

Oh dear I believe you have a much worse time in store for you than you imagine. I’m sorry to be so gloomy darling.

I am glad you like the book, so do Robert⁵ & Niggy,⁶ it is a great comfort. But so far there’s not been one single review – is this rather sinister? I think I had quite a lot in the first week of H. Fling.

Mitty says £2,000 a year will seem tiny to you & he will urge Farve, as your trustee, to stand out for more.

Do let me know developments, I think it better in every way that I should stay here at present but if you want me at Cheyne Walk I’ll come of course. Only I think I can do more good down here. I wish I felt certain it was doing good though, it would be so awful later to feel that I had been, even in a tiny way, instrumental in messing up your life. I wish one had a definite table of ethics, for oneself & others like very religious people have, it would make everything easier.

Much love always darling, Naunce

Darling Naunce

The detectives are extraordinary and just like one would imagine.¹ It is really rather heavenly to feel that they are around – no pickpockets can approach etc. Isn’t it all extremely amusing in a way. I mean there is such a great army of them and it is all so expensive for Lord Moyne (may he burn in hell).

I have shirked the Grosvenor Place party² because I was advised it would be better not to go. They ALL cried when I wouldn’t & I gave as an excuse ‘Grosvenor Place is such a big house to surround so thought it more friendly to save half a dozen men & stay at home’.

Darling you are my one ally. But it is vastly lying to suggest you encouraged my sot [foolish] behaviour;³ you always said it would end in TEARS.

Do come here soon. I am not hurrying to leave because if Bryan leaves ME the onus is on HIM and so he will.

All love darling, Diana

Darling,

At last a moment to write you – & now my fingers are too cold to hold the pen! Oh the cold is awful, luckily the ’tectives have made themselves an awfully cosy little wigwam outside with a brazier & are keeping themselves warm & happy taking up the road. Bless them.

Saw Bryan yesterday, he was pretty spiky I thought, keeps saying of course I suppose it’s my duty to take her back & balls of that sort. Henry Yorke¹ told him you had gone to Mürren with Cela.² Would I either confirm or deny? I said I thought it very doubtful if Henry knew anything about it & that I would forward a letter to you if B cared to write one.

I may say that the Lambs³ seem to have turned nasty, apparently they told B they were nearly certain you had an affair with Randolph [Churchill] in the spring.

Lunched with Dolly [Castlerosse] & Delly.⁴ Delly said I don’t mind people going off & fucking but I do object to all this free love. She is heaven isn’t she?

I had a long talk with Mrs Mac⁵ who refuses to stay with Bryan. She says you are the one she is fond of. I told her it would mean no kitchen maid but she doesn’t seem to mind that idea at all. You must see her as soon as you get back. B & Miss Moore⁶ both told her (a) you couldn’t afford her & (b) you wouldn’t be entertaining at all, but living in a very very quiet retirement.

Rather wonderful old ladies in fact.⁷

John [Sutro] had a long talk to the Leader & is now won over. Next tease for John, ‘Why even Mosley can talk you round in half an hour’.

Best love darling, Nancy

1 Diana had just had her tonsils out and was convalescing at the seaside.

2 Patrick Cameron; a dancing partner of Nancy and Pamela, and a frequent visitor at Asthall.

3 Mary Milnes-Gaskell; a friend of Nancy from schooldays. Married Lewis Motley in 1934.

4 Oliver (Togo) Watney (1908–65). Member of the brewing family and a country neighbour of the Mitfords. He was briefly engaged to Pamela in 1929. Married Christina Nelson in 1936.

5 David Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878–1958). The sisters’ father believed that Asthall was haunted by a poltergeist, which was one of the reasons he eventually sold the house and built Swinbrook.

1 After much wrangling with her parents, Nancy had been allowed to enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art. She had little artistic talent, received small encouragement from her teachers and left after a few months.

2 University College London, of which the Slade is a part, was the first university in England to welcome students regardless of their race, class or religion.

3 Diana was in Paris learning French and staying in lodgings where the only bath was a shallow tin of water brought to her room twice a week.

1 Unity in ‘Boudledidge’ (the first syllable pronounced as in ‘loud’), the private language invented by Jessica and Unity. This was incomprehensible except to themselves and Deborah who, although she understood it, would never have dared venture on to her older sisters’ territory and speak it.

1 A weekend cottage that Lady Redesdale had rented before the First World War when the Mitfords were living in London. After the war, she bought it and the family lived in it during the Depression while Swinbrook was let.

2 Laura Dicks (1871–1959). The daughter of a Congregationalist blacksmith who went as nanny to the Mitfords soon after Diana’s birth in 1910 and stayed until 1941. Known as ‘Blor’ or ‘M’Hinket’, she provided a steady, loving presence during the sisters’ childhood and was the model for the nanny in Nancy’s novel The Blessing (1951).

‘Blor’, the Mitfords’ much-loved nanny, Laura Dicks. c.1930.

3 In her memoirs, Jessica remembered selling her appendix to Deborah for £1 (£50 today) and that it was later disposed of by their nanny. Hons and Rebels (Victor Gollancz, 1960), p. 39.

4 Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne (1905–92). Diana had finally overcome parental opposition and became engaged to Bryan in November 1928. He trained to be a barrister but left the Bar in 1931 when he realized that his wealth was preventing him from being given briefs. His first novel, Singing Out of Tune, was published in 1933, followed by further volumes of poetry, novels and plays. Married to Diana 1929–34, and to Elisabeth Nelson in 1936.

1 Pamela’s engagement to Oliver Watney had been broken off shortly before they were to be married. Pamela was not in love, and Togo was tubercular and probably impotent, but it was a disappointment nevertheless.

2 To help her get over her broken engagement, Pamela accompanied her parents on one of their regular visits to prospect for gold in Canada where Lord Redesdale hoped, in vain, to restore the family fortune.

1 Diana and Bryan had been lent Pool Place, a seaside house in Sussex belonging to Lord Moyne.

2 Evelyn Gardner (1903–94). Married to Evelyn Waugh in 1928. Nancy’s spell as her guest was short – lived; soon after her arrival the two Evelyns separated and later divorced.

3 Sydney Bowles (1880–1963). While they were prospecting for gold, Lady Redesdale and her husband lived in a simple cabin where she did the cooking and cleaning.

1 Lady Redesdale, whose father brought her up according the dietary laws of Moses because he believed they were healthy, forbade her own children to eat rabbit, shellfish or pig. ‘No doubt very wise in the climate of Israel before refrigeration, but hardly necessary in Oxfordshire,’ Deborah wrote in a childhood memoir, Counting My Chickens (Long Barn Books, 2001), pp. 168–9.

Pamela with Lord and Lady Redesdale at ‘the shack’, prospecting for gold in Swastika, Ontario. 1929.

1 Diana and Bryan’s London house.

2 James Alexander (Hamish) St Clair – Erskine (1909–73). Nancy’s unhappy relationship with the flighty, homosexual son of the Earl of Rosslyn was in its second year and although she considered him her fiancé, they were never officially engaged.

1 All the sisters except Nancy and Diana were on a winter holiday with their parents. The Redesdales were both keen skaters and used to take the family to the Oxford ice rink every Sunday. It was once suggested that Deborah should train for the British skating team, a proposal that Lady Redesdale immediately rejected.

2 Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938). The great Russian operatic bass had left the Soviet Union in 1921 and was based in Paris.

1 Jonathan (Jonnycan) Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne (1930–). Diana’s eldest son became a writer and banker. Author, with his daughter Catherine, of The House of Mitford (1984), a history of three generations of the family. Married to Ingrid Wyndham 1951–63, and to Suzanne Lisney in 1964.

1 When she was a baby, Diana’s head was thought to be too big for her body and was nicknamed ‘The Bodley Head’ by Nancy, after the publishing company of that name.

2 There is no record of what was wrong with Jessica.

3 Nancy’s first novel, Highland Fling (1931).

4 George Bowles (1877–1955). Lady Redesdale’s elder brother was manager of The Lady, the family magazine to which Nancy contributed her first articles. Married 1902–21 to Joan Penn and to Madeleine Tobin in 1922.

5 Iris Mitford (1879–1966). Lord Redesdale’s younger sister was the archetypal maiden aunt, loved by all but very censorious. General Secretary of the Officers’ Families’ Fund, she devoted her life to charitable works.

1 Dora Carrington (1893–1932). The Bloomsbury painter, a friend and neighbour of Diana at Biddesden, had shot herself with a gun that Bryan had lent her to hunt rabbits. Two months previously, Lytton Strachey, the love of Dora’s life, had died aged fifty-one.

1 The London Season opened with a ball at Buckingham Palace at which debutantes were presented to the King and Queen. Unity would have been required to walk up to the royal couple, curtsey twice and retreat backwards gracefully.

2 Thomas (Tom) Mitford (1909–45). The sisters’ only brother, nicknamed ‘Tud’ or ‘Tuddemy’ (to rhyme with ‘adultery’ because of the success his sisters believed he had with married women), was studying to be a barrister in London.

1 Tom Mitford.

2 Diana had told her family that she was planning to leave Bryan.

1 Nancy’s second novel, Christmas Pudding (1932).

2 Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980). Diana’s affair with the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) had begun earlier in the year. Mosley was married to Lady Cynthia Curzon 1920–33 and to Diana in 1936.

3 Bryan was so distraught by the break-up of his marriage that he could not face the resulting upheaval in domestic arrangements. He asked Diana to pack up their London house in Cheyne Walk and find him a flat.

4 Diana had joked to Nancy that she was going to stock up on ‘a trousseau’ of expensive clothes while she could still afford them.

1 Randolph Churchill (1911–68). Winston Churchill’s only son was related to the Mitfords through his mother, Clementine. He was a great friend of Tom and had a crush on Diana as a teenager. In 1932, he began his journalistic career covering the German elections for the Sunday Graphic. Married to Pamela Digby 1939–46 and to June Osborne 1948–61.

2 Doris Delavigne (1900–42). Beautiful, uninhibited daughter of a Belgian father and English mother. Married the gossip columnist Viscount Castlerosse in 1928.

3 John Sutro (1904–85). Talented mimic, musician and film producer from a well-off Jewish London family. A lifelong friend of Nancy and Diana, he was best man at Nancy’s wedding and Jonathan Guinness’s godfather. Married Gillian Hammond in 1940.

4 Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne (1880–1944). Diana’s father-in-law, a distinguished soldier and politician, was assassinated in Cairo by members of the Stern gang, a Jewish terrorist group.

5 Robert Byron (1905–41). Travel writer whose best-known book, The Road to Oxiana (1937), was a record of his journeys through Iran and Afghanistan. Nancy counted him as one of her dearest friends and mourned him for many years after his death at sea.

6 Nigel Birch (1906–81). A tart and witty friend of Tom who became a Conservative MP after the war. Married Esmé Glyn in 1950.

1 Diana’s father-in-law had hired private investigators to gather evidence that could be used in the divorce hearing.

2 A Christmas party at the Moynes’ London house.

3 The Redesdales and Tom blamed Nancy for supporting Diana’s decision to leave Bryan.

1 Henry Yorke (1905–73). Author, under the pseudonym Henry Green, of nine highly original novels, including Blindness (1926), Living (1929) and Doting (1952). Married Adelaide (Dig) Biddulph in 1929.

2 Lady Cecilia Keppel (1910–2003). A childhood friend of Diana. The Redesdales had asked her to invite their daughter to Switzerland in the hopes that removing her from Mosley would make her change her mind.

3 Henry Lamb (1883–1960). A founder member of the Camden Town Group who had painted a portrait of Diana the previous year. Married, in 1928, to Lady Pansy Pakenham (1904–99).

Diana (right) with her childhood friend Cecilia Keppel in Mürren, Switzerland, 1933.

4 Adele Astaire (1897–1981). Older sister and original dance partner of Fred Astaire with whom she starred on stage until 1932, when she married Lord Charles Cavendish, second son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire and uncle of Deborah’s future husband.

5 The cook at Biddesden.

6 Bryan Guinness’s secretary.

7 At about this time Nancy wrote a privately circulated short story, The Old Ladies, loosely based on herself and Diana. The two old ladies lived in Eaton Square and had a friend, the Old Gentleman, who was based on Mark Ogilvie-Grant.