by Leslie Brody
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
PART TWO
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
PART THREE
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
AFTERWORD
Acknowledgements
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Copyright Page
For Gary
Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
—OSCAR WILDE
PART ONE
Two miles up the hill from the village is Swinbrook house, built by my father in 1926 to satisfy the needs as then seen, of a family of seven children plus two indoor servants, governess and nanny. We can look from the outside—but don’t let’s try to go on in. A nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.
—JESSICA MITFORD, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, MARCH 24, 1985
CHAPTER 1
SOON AFTER JESSICA Mitford moved with her family to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, she began to plot her escape from it. She was twelve years old, already an autodidact well aware of world events and with a practical sense concerning certain economic currents. That year—it was 1929—she wrote a letter to her family’s London bank, requesting that a new kind of account be opened on her behalf, and she provided specifications. In reply, she received the following, written in handsome script by an unknown clerk:Dear Madam, We are pleased to acknowledge receipt of your ten shillings to open your Running Away Account. Passbook no. 437561 enclosed. We beg to remain, dear Madam, your obedient servants, Drummonds.
Later in life, she would recite those phrases as evidence of another world. Few things must have seemed less Californian than that letter. She delighted in the contrast between the ways things were done and said during her youth among the British aristocracy, including their “obedient servants,” and her more than fifty years in the American West. “Bank of America’s not your obedient servant,” she once cracked on camera in her best Lady Bracknellat-the-Kremlin-on-hashish tone of voice. “Rather marvelous, isn’t it?”
“I was never at all attracted to the life my mother imagined for us,” she said in the same interview. Her running-away fund began as a direct response to her mother’s refusal to let her attend the local grammar school. She kept that Drummonds account active for seven years, applying to it any gifts, small wages, and “spare shillings.” Then at the age of nineteen, with fifty pounds saved, she set off to the Spanish Civil War to fight fascism.
SHE WAS CHRISTENED Jessica Lucy Freeman Mitford in 1917, the sixth of seven children born to Baron David and Lady Sydney Redesdale. Her mother, or “Muv,” called her “Brave Little D.” In childhood, she and her siblings invented languages and exchanged nicknames meant to be funny and mystifying to outsiders. Those that stuck for Jessica included “Boud,” “Hen,” and “Susan,” though friends and family mainly called her “Decca.” Most everyone who saw her in her youth remarked on her beauty, and by all accounts, she was always a fighter. The inscription on the Mitford family coat of arms was “God Careth for Us”—but embarrass the powerful, mock the hypocrite, and shift the complacent were always mottos more to Decca’s taste.
What was Little D. running away from? The usual: parental rules and regulations, hothouse sibling rivalries, boredom; the more arcane: country estates, nannies, governesses, secret cupboards, and secret languages; conservatism and elitism in her relations; and fascism, in the body politic. Where was she running to? At first, she longed to go to school and, later, to the East End of London to live in a bedsit and be a Communist. To readers of the British press, the Mitfords were the subject of gossip and scrutiny for the fashions they wore and the odd things they did. Anyone not related to her seemed infinitely more fascinating to Decca.
Her father built Swinbrook House on family land near the village of Burford. The eighteen-bedroom house gave a beautiful view from the top of a hill over the bucolic Cotswolds, but passersby noted the building’s “uncompromising air.” Decca, raised there from the age of nine, thought Swinbrook distinctly institutional in appearance, like an English “lunatic asylum.” Its interior was drafty and damp. Seeking a warm hideaway, Decca and her younger sister, Deborah (nicknamed “Debo”), forged a secret Amazon club they called the Society of Hons, in a linen closet heated by hot water pipes. They invented and practiced a language called “Honnish,” influenced both by the prefix Hon, short for Honorable, to which they were entitled as daughters of an English baronet, and by their abiding interest in the chickens their mother raised. Decca and Debo called each other “Hen” all their lives. (Debo was reputed to give a good imitation of a chicken laying an egg.)
Among so many siblings, strategic teasing was a weapon for defense and destruction. Plotting to usurp the grown-ups, they played flesh-pinching and skin-scratching games, little teasing tortures designed to toughen up the players—making a younger sister cry was a foundation technique. The family custom of mockery made Decca unafraid of words and gave her confidence. Eldest sister Nancy was a supreme tease, with all the honors this conferred. She was also the younger girls’ vile nemesis. Why so vile? “The others bored me and I made them feel it,” Nancy admitted in her memoir, The Water Beetle.
The Mitford children had fields to roam, horses to ride; there was no terrible school food, dormitory discomfort, or group sports to dread. They had an extensive library to browse and could order all the magazines and books they liked. It was a good childhood for some; for instance, Debo loved country life, but Decca felt trapped. Muv considered school “unnecessary” and “expensive,” the uniforms hideous, and the strange children overstimulating. She educated her daughters herself with nannies and a string of governesses, finishing the Mitford girls with a season abroad.
In 1937, when Decca was nineteen and fed up with the frills and ruffles of privilege, she met eighteen-year-old Esmond Romilly at the home of a mutual relation. She didn’t yet know the means of her escape, but it would start that night with Romilly and an aperitif.
Romilly was Winston Churchill’s nephew and Decca’s second cousin. He had dropped out of one school, been expelled from another, spent time in a reformatory, lived in a Bloomsbury bookstore from which he’d published an underground newspaper called Out of Bounds, and was already a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Decca passionately admired his book, which was also called Out of Bounds (a manifesto opposed to the conform-ism, drumbeating, and sadism of English boys schools) and had been published the year before. He was, she imagined, the only man on earth who might begin to understand her. “Are you planning to go back to Spain?” she whispered to him over dinner. “I was wondering if you could possibly take me with you.”
EVEN AMONG SO many siblings, in her youth Decca felt lonely and misunderstood, an intellectual forced to live in the body of a useless debutante. She read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “having smuggled a copy in from Paris,” and appropriated the gramophone to listen to the études of Claude Debussy. Her
elder sisters laughed at her pretensions when they weren’t ignoring her, which was just as infuriating. She had so many sisters. Their parties filled society columns. They set styles in language and fashion. They inspired envy, lust, rage, and headlines. Deborah, the youngest, later became the Duchess of Devonshire. Nancy, the eldest, was a brilliant and jealous girl, a wit. She went on to become a celebrated writer of novels of manners and social satire, and of biographies of Parisian notables: Louis XIV, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and Madame de Pompadour. Nancy adored France and was passionately America-phobic. She was also the person, more than any other, against whom Decca would measure her own accomplishments.
As a child, second sister Pam wanted to be a horse. She liked to cook and garden. The other sisters dubbed her “Woman” for her domesticity. To the younger girls, feeling thwarted as they did in the schoolroom, Pam’s nickname was no compliment. She didn’t possess the “restless, unformulated longing for change that, in one form or other, gripped the rest of us,” Decca would write. What she and Pam did share was a work ethic and resourcefulness.
Diana was the sister Decca worshipped in childhood but later loathed. The fourth Mitford child, Diana was famously bored, restless, and fascist. To connoisseurs, she was the most beauteous of those prewar blondes, slim as a cigarette, and with swoony, blue eyes twice as large as other people’s. A wandering shadow looking for somewhere to stick, she first married into the Irish Guinness beer fortune, and then into the British Union of Fascists (in 1940, she would go to prison alongside its leader, her second husband, Oswald Mosley). Seven years her senior, Diana would roar when little Decca played court jester to her languid empress. To roar was a requirement in Swinbrook House, amid the din of clanging personalities. Uproarious laughter, often dark, filled the time. Their father, the rampant Lord Redesdale known as “Farve,” roared to laugh and to admonish. His mockery wasn’t particularly witty, but his mean teasing could mortify. Decca loved their game playing and adored her father.
Sister Unity (“Bobo”) was three years older than Decca and cultivated outrage. Decca and she called each other “Boud” in the language they invented called “Boudledidge.” Unity liked the limelight. To command attention when surrounded by so many pretty and interesting sisters, Unity recited Blake and Coleridge from memory and, inspired by the artists Hieronymus Bosch and Henri Rousseau, made collages, the same one over and over: Hannibal Crossing the Alps. Defiant and adventurous, she cursed, clambered over rooftops, and ate all the ripe strawberries before a garden party. Rather enormous (her mother’s description) at nearly six feet tall, she sulked, glowered, and shocked to get her way. At debutante dances, she was the one with the white rat on her shoulder. By age sixteen, Unity was reading Jew Süss, a malevolent novel that fueled German anti-Semitism and inspired many eruptions of hate and violence. Unity passionately cast herself into the dark side to become an outspoken hater and letter-to-the-editor writer. When she was twenty years old, she wrote to the German paper Der Stürmer: “We think with joy of the day when we shall be able to say with might and authority: England for the English! Out with the Jews! . . . PS: If you find room in your newspaper for this letter, please publish my name in full . . . I want everyone to know I’m a Jew hater.”
Decca and Unity shared a room at the top of Swinbrook House, where they conspired and plotted their various plans to escape. By 1932, when she was fifteen, Decca’s own interests had begun to coalesce against the “beastly fascists.” In clarifying her opposition to Unity, Decca threw in with the crowd she thought would end suffering, injustice, poverty, and cruelty. She wouldn’t join the Communist Party for ten more years, but it seemed to her the most powerful counterbalance.
Meanwhile, thanks to sister Diana’s affair with Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Unity enrolled, subscribed, and submerged herself in their cause. She would have found some way in, but such lubricated access suited her especially. She loved what groupies love, the reflected power and distinction of the limelight. When she sneaked away from Swinbrook to attend rallies or sell copies of the party organ, Blackshirt, she always wore her special fascist badge, awarded by Mosley himself. It had all seemed grand enough at first, but eventually, she had to move on to Berlin.
Unity met Hitler many times. He gave her other badges, autographs, possibly a gun. She dined with him and invited her visiting family to experience der Führer’s teatime sociability. (Decca and Nancy both declined.) Muv said Hitler had very nice manners. Later, Decca considered how easy it would have been to visit Unity and Hitler with a gun in her handbag. She was sorry she missed her chance to assassinate the Nazi leader. “Unfortunately, my will to live was too strong for me actually to carry out this scheme, which would have been fully practical and might have changed the course of history. I often bitterly regretted my lack of courage.”
Back in England, Decca and Unity were star-crossed. Decca “still loved Boud for her huge, glittering personality, for her rare brand of eccentricity, for a kind of loyalty.” The loyalty, forged in their early, more cheerful enmity, and a routine sense of gamesmanship was enough to sustain them. But Decca sensed that a “freezing shadow was approaching.” (For the Mitfords’ Oxfordshire neighbor J. R. R. Tolkien, then working on The Hobbit, the shadow grew along the lines of Mordor. Saruman the White was like Unity, caught on the verge of betraying Gandalf and all the creatures of Middle-Earth.)
THERE IS A photo of Decca, aged four, arms crossed, mouth pursed, hat clamped down, ready to wait it out. A rebellious, pent-up spirit, burdened by the world’s troubles, but always funny. Young Decca made fierce attachments. In nursery days, she loved their Nanny Blor. And in Diana’s opinion, Blor loved Decca best. Blor, whose real name was Laura Dicks, was probably Decca’s earliest progressive influence. Labour Party members were virtually unknown in the heavily conservative Swinbrook milieu, but Nanny Blor came from a liberal and nonconformist family and voted Labour herself. It was Blor who never stopped trying to move Decca along. She invented a prayer for the three youngest children: “God bless Muv, God Bless Farve . . . and make Decca a good girl, Amen.”
In adolescence, Decca flailed at the injustice of it all. Why had Muv let Unity attend school and later Debo, but not Decca? Unity had been expelled, and there perhaps was the answer: Who would wish to repeat such an experiment in a hurry? Muv was reacting to the heat of Decca’s passion, wishing to damp down what appeared excessive, unseemly, insincere. How could Decca really want to leave so very much? Muv refused to be stormed, chided, or charmed on this point, dressing her own stubbornness in drifty procrastinations and vague rebukes. Perhaps Muv just knew this daughter would not fail and would probably never look back.
Tom was the third Mitford child, a sweet, easy, indulged only son, who seemed to like everyone and whom everyone adored. Brother Tom introduced Decca to Milton, Balzac, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson and helped guide his sister through Huxley, Lawrence, and Gide. From that jumping-off place, Decca tore through books about the brutality and horror of World War I and “about great movements in England and other countries to divest the rich of their wealth.” She eavesdropped on the “irreverent outpourings of Nancy’s liberal leaning friends” and sharpened her political claws battling with Unity. Using a diamond ring, Decca and Unity etched symbols of their political affiliations into the window of the room they shared at the top of the house—Unity drew a swastika; Decca a hammer and sickle.
Finally, at the age of eighteen, Decca was considered old enough to emerge formally from childhood. It was her debutante season, and despite its traditional purpose of parading new merchandise for breeding, coming out also implied various new degrees of freedom. Decca wore ostrich feathers in her hair and was presented at court, where she took the opportunity to steal some royal chocolates from the palace (having learned the finer points of shoplifting or “a little jiggery-pokery” from one of her governesses). Otherwise, she went through the motions.
For all the patronizing, condescending, and infa
ntilizing Decca felt in her home, there was kindness. For all the benign neglect, there was tenderness. For all the sarcasm and teasing and hostile sibling parrying, there was usually some kind of comfort. She knew it was positively time to find more like-minded friends, but to do so, she needed a plan. She longed to escape but feared that she wouldn’t get it right, that she’d make “an abortive attempt at running away, only to be ignominiously discovered and hauled back home to face greater strictness than ever.”
CHAPTER 2
BY THE TIME she met Esmond Romilly, Decca was already a little in love with him. From childhood, the reports Decca heard on the Romilly cousins had typically teetered on scandal. Had he really held Cousin Mary Churchill’s head in a bucket of water until she’d said there was no god? Brilliant! Later, along with the rest of England, Decca could follow Esmond’s exploits in the tabloid press, each headline preceded by “Winston Churchill’s Nephew.” He was the “Public School Runaway,” the “Red Menace,” the “Precocious Author,” and the “Gallant Young Soldier in the Spanish Civil War.”
Both Esmond and his brother Giles attended Wellington College, a public school known for its particularly militaristic tone. Wellington’s rigorous Officers’ Training Corps emphasized conformity, obedience, discipline, and an unassailable hierarchy. The OTC, field games, and other physical competitions were held to be the essential medium for assessing future generals, leaders of industry, and cabinet ministers. While a boy learned the importance of being earnest, loyal, true, and brave, he might also be wrung dry of sweetness and sympathy. This brutal, rigidly formal world was dangerous territory for freethinkers and romantics. A boy needed to have either a tough skin like Esmond’s or the lovers and intellectual allies whom Giles accumulated.
