Читать книгу The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters - Charlotte Mosley - Страница 7

The correspondence between the six Mitford sisters consists of some twelve thousand letters – over four million words – of which little more than five per cent has been included in this volume. Out of the fifteen possible patterns of exchange between the sisters, there are only three gaps: no letters between Unity and Pamela have survived, and there are none from Unity to Deborah. The proportion of existing letters from each sister varies greatly: political differences led Jessica to destroy all but one of Diana’s letters to her, while the exchange between Deborah and Diana, the two longest-lived sisters, runs to some three thousand on each side.

The Mitfords had a brother, Tom, who was sent away to school aged eight while his sisters were taught at home. Although he composed many dutiful letters to his parents, Tom rarely wrote to the rest of the family. Unlike his sisters, for whom writing was as natural as speaking, he took no pleasure in the art of corresponding. (In 1937, in a brief note added to the bottom of one of Unity’s letters to Jessica, he deplored his ‘constitutional hatred’ for letter-writing.) Perhaps his later training as a barrister also made him wary of committing his thoughts to paper. Nancy often wrote to Tom before she married and although over a hundred of her letters to him have been preserved, as have a handful from his other sisters, the correspondence is so one-sided that no letters to or from Tom have been included in this volume.

Letters make a fragmentary biography at best and I have not attempted to present a comprehensive picture of the Mitfords’ lives; those seeking a more complete account can turn to the plentiful books by and about the family. In order to weave a coherent narrative out of the vast archive and link the six voices, I have focused my choice of letters on the relationship between the sisters. I have also selected striking, interesting or entertaining passages, as well as those that are particularly relevant to the story of their lives. While some letters have been included in their entirety, more often I have deliberately cut them, sometimes removing just a sentence, at other times paring them down to a single paragraph. To indicate all these cuts would be too distracting and they have therefore been made silently.

As in many families, the Mitfords used a plethora of nicknames and often several different ones for the same person. While the origins of most of these are long forgotten, the roots of a few can be traced. Sir Oswald Mosley, Diana’s husband of forty-four years, who was known as ‘Tom’ or ‘the Leader’ before the war and ‘Sir O’, ‘Sir Oz’ or ‘Sir Ogre’ after the war, was nearly always called ‘Kit’ by Diana. In private she admitted that the name came from ‘kitten’ but, realizing its inappropriateness for such a powerful character, she wrote in her memoirs that she could not remember how it had originated. Deborah knew him as ‘Cyril’ because as a young girl she had asked her mother how she should address her new brother-in-law and misheard her terse answer, ‘He’S Sir Oswald to me’. Nancy often referred to Mosley as ‘Keats’, a derivation of ‘Kit’. Deborah’S husband, Andrew Devonshire, was known as ‘Ivan’ (the Terrible) or ‘Peter’ (the Great), according to his mood. He was also called ‘Claud’ because when his title was Lord Harrington, before he inherited the dukedom, he used to receive letters addressed to ‘Claud Hartington Esq.’ To make matters even more complicated, Nancy and Jessica addressed and signed letters to each other as ‘Susan’ or ‘Soo’, for reasons now forgotten; Deborah and Jessica called each other ‘Hen’, and by extension ‘Henderson’, inspired by their passion for chickens; Jessica and Unity were to each other ‘Boud’, from a private language they invented as children called ‘Boudledidge’. Nancy addressed Deborah as ‘9’, the mental age beyond which she claimed her youngest sister had never progressed.

I have left unchanged the sisters’ numerous nicknames for one another as they are intrinsic to their relationships, but for clarity I have standardized other nicknames and regularized their spelling. The only other editorial changes that have been made to the text are the silent correction of spelling mistakes – except in childhood letters; the addition of punctuation where necessary; and the rectification of names of people, places and books. In my footnotes and section introductions, I have referred to people variously by their first name, surname or title, aiming for quick recognition rather than consistency. Foreign words or phrases have been translated in square brackets in the text; the translation of longer sentences has been put in a footnote.

As a child, Nancy invented a game in which she played a ‘Czechish lady doctor’ and adopted a thick foreign accent. This voice endured and the letters are scattered with ‘wondair’ for ‘wonderful’, ‘nevair’ for ‘never mind’, and other phonetic approximations of Mitteleuropean English. After Nancy moved to France, should she ever use a French word in conversation, Deborah, who did not admit to speaking the language, would interject with ‘Ah oui!’ or ‘Quelle horrible surprise’, expressions that have found their way into the letters. Deborah was also the instigator of the frequent plea ‘do admit’ – not something any Mitford did willingly – which was an attempt to catch the attention of one of her siblings and get them to agree with her. The exaggerated style of writing that the sisters used, a continuation of the drawling way in which they spoke, began in childhood and originated in part from their brother Tom’s ‘artful scheme of happiness’, a particular tone of voice that he employed when trying to wheedle something out of someone. ‘Boudledidge’, which Jessica and Unity often used in their letters to each other, was a derivation of this way of speaking. ‘Honnish’, a language invented by Jessica and Deborah, was derived not from the fact that as daughters of a peer they were Honourables but from the hens that played such an important part in their upbringing. Their mother, Lady Redesdale, had a chicken farm from whose slim profits she paid for the children’s governess and the sisters each kept their own birds and sold their eggs to their mother in order to supplement their pocket money.

The Mitford sisters all wrote in longhand, except for Jessica who learned to type at the beginning of the war. Their handwriting is clear and legible, and, as a rule, they dated their letters. Pamela, who was probably dyslexic, kept a dictionary at hand and her spelling is usually accurate. Her occasional use of unorthodox capitalizations and spelling has been retained. The sisters’ letters to each other are held in the archives at Chatsworth, where they have been collected by Deborah, with the exception of those written to Jessica which are in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Ohio State University. The letters in this volume are previously unpublished, except for a dozen that were included in Love from Nancy and three times that number in Decca.¹

At a certain point, the sisters became aware of the value of their letters and of the possibility that they might one day be published. In 1963, Nancy advised Deborah to throw nothing away because the correspondence of a whole family would be ‘gold for your heirs’. Pamela, who until then had discarded most of her letters, began to preserve them, and Jessica started keeping carbon copies of her correspondence in the 1950s. It is nevertheless abundantly clear that the sisters did not write with an eye to posterity; the frankness, immediacy and informal style of their communications bear this out. Only when I had begun editing these letters did the idea of publication at times inhibit the two surviving sisters. A few months before she died in 2003, Diana wrote to Deborah, ‘I’ve started this letter and for the first time in my life I can’t think of anything to say. My old mind is a blank. If this had happened sooner it would have saved Charlotte a lot of trouble.’ Happily, it did not.

1 Love From Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993); Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Y. Sussman (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).