‘Oh, people are horrified by our upbringing,’ says Debo, not batting an eye. Here, once again, is the Mitford paradox, that commentators are fascinated by what they feel almost obliged to condemn. However much they love reading about child-hunts among the uneducated posh, when they put the book down they return to the guise of social worker, or of Liberal Democrat spokesperson on education, and remind us that these children would have been far better off had they been brought up like everybody else. Pryce-Jones again:
With this poor lovable ogre of a father, and a blindly opinionated mother, Unity was bound to have a childhood out of the ordinary... Unity was not thwarted or narrowed deliberately. She grew up in the rhythm of the nannied class, of alternate indulgence and punishment...
This is harsh on the Redesdales; and a little unclear as to whether the Mitford upbringing was sui generis or of an upper-class type (both, in fact, are true). Yet there is certainly something in what Pryce-Jones says. The Mitfords would all, surely, have turned out as paler versions of themselves had their upbringing been a less potent mixture of restraint and freedom; had they been exposed to other influences beyond each other. This, of course, brings up the question of school, which only Unity – among the girls – attended for any length of time. Tom was sent to Eton, and fitted in easily enough. But the option was never really contemplated for his sisters. Jessica, in Hons and Rebels, laments this with what the rest of us, who know what schools are really like, might consider a wildly romantic passion:
The warm, bright vision of living away from home with girls my own age, learning all sorts of fascinating things, dominated my thoughts for years. But no arguments I could advance would move my mother on this point. Besides, she had heard them all before; the older children, with the exception of Pam, had all in turn begged to go.
In fact Diana has written that the thought of being sent to school made her sick with fear (a fear that Nancy played upon, periodically pretending to have heard her parents discussing it). Nevertheless, the brief time that she spent at school in Paris, aged sixteen, led her later to write: ‘I learned more at the Cours Fénelon in six months than I learned at Asthall in six years’.11 And Nancy herself liked the idea, although whether she would have liked the reality is another story. ‘She always wanted to go to school,’ says Diana. She had had her brief time at Francis Holland, aged five; but then there was nothing until finally, at the age of sixteen, she spent just short of a year at a genteel establishment called Hatherop Castle, where a handful of nice girls were educated in French and art and music along with the principal’s daughters. And this, as Diana says, ‘was a great success. She made great friends with all the gals there. She was always very popular, always. One gal there, Mary Milnes-Gaskell, became a bosom friend for life.’
It was after this interlude that Nancy acquired her passion for being the captain of girl guides. All her life she got on very well with women of her own age – the rivalries that snaked through her family do not seem, on the whole, to have affected her friendships – and so maybe there was an element of sincerity to the guides episode. After Hatherop, she may have craved more non-familial female company. Dread modern sensibilities might detect a lesbian element in this desire, although in later life Nancy was to write à propos homosexuality: ‘Nobody has ever been so ferociously normal as me.’ Nevertheless she was, when young, so literally innocent as to imply – in good convent girl style – the possibility of barely comprehended erotic imaginings. For example, a very mysterious 1948 reply to a (lost) letter from Evelyn Waugh contains the bare word ‘Masturbation’, and goes on to tell him that she had always masturbated when she thought about Lady Jane Grey (‘so of course I thought about her continually & even executed a fine water colour of her on the scaffold... I still get quite excited when I think of Lady Jane’). Assuming that this is not a total tease, and it does not give that impression, what can she have meant? That a young girl’s submission to death excited her? Her ‘confession’ to Waugh is made quite openly, and almost naturally, with only the barest glimmer of pride in her own daring. Prurient reaction therefore seems out of place; all the same one cannot help but be fascinated by this hint of what seethed within the crisp, clean folds of Nancy’s mind (‘Do you think everybody’s real life is quite different from what they manage to make it seem? Very likely. No dark secret, but everything different from the façade’12).
Hatherop did not constitute a great educational advance; it was more a chaste foretaste of debutante life, and was probably, despite Nancy’s avowed longing for school, quite enough for her. Yet she did think that she wanted to go to school. Like her ‘nastiness’, this is a fairly natural consequence of being stuck at home with six younger siblings and a hungry brain. After all, being taught by governesses was hopeless in a way, as these women – about fifteen of them throughout the Mitford childhood, staying for varying periods of time – simply lacked the authority to deal with these children; this impregnable unit of rampant individualism.
Which is not to say that the perpetuated image of hapless Miss Prisms tiptoeing into a world of upper-class anarchy, tremulously demanding ‘and what is the capital of Mongolia?’ of a girl with a rat round her neck or a sheep under her desk, is entirely true. The uselessness of the governesses has become a part of the Mitford mythology, and is about as much fiction as fact. Here, gorgeously embroidering, is The Pursuit of Love on the subject:
As for governesses, they had been tried, but none had ever been able to endure for more than a few days the terror of Uncle Matthew’s grinding dentures, the piercing, furious blue flash of his eyes, the stock whips cracking under their bedroom windows at dawn. Their nerves, they said, and made for the station...
Dutifully taking this idea on board, Jessica tells in Hons and Rebels of how one of the Mitford governesses, Miss Hussey, fell unconscious after finding Unity’s snake, Enid, wrapped around a lavatory chain. This sounds good but is a bit of an exaggeration. In reality the serpent in question was not Enid, but a snake of Diana’s and according to her it caused no such furore – Blor simply asked, in that imperturbable way of hers, that it be removed from the position it had taken up in the bathroom. Anyway Miss Hussey was not the bag of nerves into which Jessica turned her, she was a competent woman who had been trained in the perfectly acceptable PNEU system (the Parents’ National Educational Union, an organisation that conducted education by correspondence) which Sydney approved of for her daughters. Later, Miss Hussey would say of the Mitford girls: ‘Some of the governesses had let them down badly.’13 Certainly there were those who would cause shudders amongst today’s violently competitive ‘Eustacia is reading Harry Potter in Catalan’ parental brigade. One woman, for example, would take Unity, Jessica and Deborah on shop-lifting trips into Oxford (‘like to try a little jiggery-pokery, children?’). Another simply played Racing Demon with them all day. It was hardly the road to a fulfilling life of the mind; nonetheless Decca and Debo came out of it a good deal more intelligent than the average ‘educated’ person.
And Nancy’s teachers were not so bad. Miss Mirams, who came to Batsford in 1917, had the sense to let her race ahead of Pam and Diana (Tom, in preparation for school, did subjects like Latin on his own, which may have annoyed his clever sister). There was also the French teacher, known as ‘Zella’, who according to Debo ‘probably did more for Nancy than anybody else’. Mademoiselle Vanda Sereza, later Mrs Stern, was more than just a governess: ‘the angelic Zella’, as Nancy called her, became a good friend during the war, when both women were living in London. Nancy no doubt felt enormously grateful to Zella, whose tuition had given her an ease with the language and country that she most loved. All the same it was always to be expected that Nancy would learn to speak good French, the one female scholastic accomplishment of which Lord Redesdale unequivocally approved. His grandmother, Lady Airlie, had told Nancy at the age of four that there was ‘nothing so inferior as a gentlewoman who has no French’: the kind of remark that Nancy always took on board. She delig
hts in making the characters in her novels speak French, and with a facility which nowadays would seem most unusual. Even darling simple Linda has a mastery of reflexive verbs – ‘Voulez-vous vous en aller?’ – when her life is falling apart and she is sitting at the Gare du Nord, alone, penniless and on the wrong side of two husbands.
But Linda’s lack of general education is palpable, nonetheless; her drifting, questing romanticism is implicitly linked to it; and Nancy blamed both her parents, in different ways, for putting her in the same position. Sydney was accused of a detachment which led to near-indifference, even discouragement. ‘I had literary ambitions at a very early age’, Nancy would later say14, ‘and began my career by writing a story the opening words of which, “A Youth of thirty entered the room”, made my mother so shriek with laughter that I gave up writing and decided instead to express myself by art...’ Meanwhile David had his prejudices against ‘middle-class establishments’ which gave girls thick calves from playing hockey. ‘I have to thank my father’, Nancy said, ‘for having me taught, much against his better judgement, to read and write.’
Yet Sydney did try to engage with her daughters’ education; with the three youngest, at least, whom she taught to read (The Times leaders at the age of six, no less). And the governess Miss Hussey contradicted the accepted opinion about David’s attitude to female education – an opinion, let it be noted, started by Nancy – by saying that ‘Lord Redesdale knew that the girls ought to have a better education’. In some way, then, he recognised that he was letting his bright daughters down. Again, the two Davids appear before us: the pantomime ogre who sent his son to Eton and left the girls to fend for themselves, because that was what people of his kind did; and the sensitive, intuitive man who saw in his children something special, and did not know what to do with it.
To Nancy, on her own, he certainly could respond. A letter sent to her in 1916 shows him carefully correcting her first attempt to write a letter in French: he does so with sweetness and humour, revealing a close fascination with his daughter that even today’s fathers, who carry their babies in papooses in the way that David would have carried a pheasant in his poacher’s pocket, could not fault. ‘Il y a un nid de rouge-gorge dans un arbre’, writes Nancy, for example, underneath which David has replied: ‘This is a very common occurrence – it happens most years’. His letter finishes with a funny little poem, which he must have exerted himself to compose while serving in the war in France: ‘A robin in a tree has built!/ The coo coo has not changed its lilt!/ And I have no desire to quench/ My child’s desire for learning French’. This is hardly Uncle Matthew, nor indeed most upper-class early-twentieth-century fathers. But the sheer number of children that David produced sent him helplessly back to type. His instinct was to indulge his daughters, despite the flashes of anger that he would display against them: he would organise the child-hunts that amused them so much, he would allow Jessica to measure his head and call him ‘the old Sub-human’, he would endure being stared at across the dinner-table by Unity for minutes on end, her huge pale eyes fixed upon him while she ate vast quantities of mashed potatoes – he was intrigued and delighted by these girls, however much they could enrage him, and however much Tom was his deeply adored, the special light of his life. Sydney, too, indulged her daughters, although perhaps with less delight. ‘My mother was far ahead of her time, really,’ says Debo. ‘She never made us eat food that we didn’t want, she wasn’t a bit interested whether we’d been to the lavatory, she knew we’d go in the end.’ Sydney was not a controlling mother, however much her strong personality may have made itself felt.
And that, with Nancy, seems to have been part of the problem: really what she wanted was more attention to be paid to her. From the birth of Pamela onwards, the desire to be noticed – to come first – had grown increasingly intense. Nancy was not entirely joking when, towards the end of her life, she was asked what she liked best in the world and gave this answer: ‘Well, I think my absolute dream of perfection is to spend the day on the Lido with great friends in the baking sun. Then we’d be gondolaed back to Venice at sunset. And I’d be staying in much the most beautiful palazzo. Then I’d have a bath and change and when I came down to dinner I’d be told by everyone that I was the best dressed woman there. And – isn’t it awful? – I’d be wearing the best jewels too.’15
No sisters, and especially no Diana, to force her to share the glory: what heaven. And what an irony that it was, in no small part, through writing about her family that Nancy would achieve the kind of fame and freedom which buys holidays on the Lido and dresses from Dior.
When, in The Pursuit of Love, Nancy conceived the childhood of Fanny as an alternative to the one lived by the Radlett-Mitfords, she was of course having a dig at her parents for their failure to educate her. She wrote of the Radlett children that ‘they never acquired any habit of concentration, they were incapable of solid hard work’, and this frustration with her own mind was something real and lasting.
But Nancy was also wondering what it would have been like to live as Fanny did: as an only child, encouraged in the art of self-discipline rather than having rules imposed from outside. The likelihood is that she would have been bored out of her mind. Much as she adores and takes comfort in Fanny, she clearly shows the Radletts to be more fascinating. And it is interesting to see that, when Fanny is quizzed by Uncle Matthew to give an example of her learning, it is Linda (‘you’re uneducated, thank God’) who steps in with the better answer.
Yet there is a case, nonetheless, for asking whether the Mitford girls would have been better off had they not grown up quite so much like favoured inmates of a posh prison. With Unity, of course, this was tried. She was sent to school – presumably in an attempt to control her – and she was twice expelled (‘No, darling’, her mother would say, if one of her sisters used the dread word: ‘Just asked to leave.’16). A contemporary at St Margaret’s School, Bushey, which Unity attended between 1929 and 1930, told David Pryce-Jones of how she would ‘contrive to be sent to stand outside the [headmistress’s] door’ – something that the other girls regarded as a shaming disgrace. ‘The Mitfords seemed not to get the point, on purpose.’
This is a telling observation, and one for which Pryce-Jones considers the answer to have been, very simply, more school. ‘Readers of Nancy’s novels and Hons and Rebels may conclude that the Redesdales would have saved themselves much expense of spirit had they resorted to the safety valve of sending their children away to be educated. Boarding schools break inherited superiorities.’ They also create a good many of their own. It is very easy to say, oh, if only these girls had been educated and ‘socialised’ and turned into fully rounded human beings – but what on earth does that mean? It is as if those who are brought up ‘normally’ constitute some sort of touchstone of behaviour; a misguided conclusion, since most people do odd things in their lives, but without the attendant to-the-power-of-six Mitfordian drama. And why this touching faith in the power of the English education system, when the Mitford girl who went to school ended up the oddest of the lot?
But then Unity was what she was: easier to socialise Ratular or Enid than that poor girl. Children have an essential nature, or so some of us believe. Fanny – whom Nancy shows to have been sensibly brought up – is said by Aunt Sadie to have been ‘born good’, as if the upbringing made no material difference in the end. Of course when one reads about the child Fascist, Unity, and the child Communist, Jessica, demanding of people what politics they supported, then shuddering with bored horror at the words ‘I am a democrat’, one cannot help but wonder if the passions in these girls could have been better handled. But Unity had a desperately sad adult life, and Jessica rather a fulfilling one; so who can say what difference it would have made?
Among the sisters, Jessica is certainly the one who most agreed with the modern orthodoxy about the Mitford upbringing. Diana says that they were indeed ‘too many girls – I have to admit that I just couldn’t wait to get away when I wa
s eighteen’, but that is not the same as wishing that she had been brought up completely differently: ‘I’ve had a fantastic life,’ she says, and one imagines that she saw her childhood as a part of that. Deborah takes a similar pragmatic view, and doubtless Pamela would have done also. Jessica, however, decided that her early life was not just peculiar but futile: what Evelyn Waugh called, in another context, ‘a deformative period’.17 Yet she used it as material, as surely as Nancy did. Her ‘hatred’ of where she came from supplied her with a raison d’être. With her vociferous espousal of Communism, her antagonism towards England, her relentless politicising, Jessica always retained a good deal of the rebellious adolescent whom she described in Hons and Rebels. It is quite possible that this edge would have been knocked off her had she been brought up as she professed to have wanted, which is to say ‘like everyone else’.
As for Nancy – although she could not have known, as a bored teenager, that her upbringing would one day yield her such rich fruit, she may have grasped its mysterious value. Not that the frustrations should be minimised. Rivalries among the siblings were oppressive, sometimes unbearable. Long dark days in the dank Cotswolds were boring, sometimes excruciating. When Fanny and Linda ask each other the time constantly, saying ‘better than that’ if it is half-past rather than quarter-past the hour, there is no doubt that this is how Nancy often felt. At the same time her powerful imagination could make the world of her childhood homes into a stage set, upon which she could stride as principal boy. Her busy brain turned Mitford family life into a plaything, a construct.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 7
