At this time Unity, now three years old, had a familiar, ‘Madam’, whom she blamed for anything naughty she might have done. One of her sins was drawing with a pencil on the wallpaper near her cot. When Nanny began to scold, Unity’s eyes became huge. ‘But, Nanny, Madam did it! I saw her do it!’
Mrs. Hammersley was greatly interested in Madam. She took Bobo on her lap and said: ‘Tell me, Unity, what is Madam like?’
Unity gazed at Mrs. Hammersley. ‘She’s got black hair, and a black dress, and a white shawl,’ she replied, describing what she saw.
‘Oh,’ cried Mrs. Hammersley. ‘Am I Madam?’ Unity did not answer.
While we were at Batsford Farve lent a cottage in the village to his aunt, who usually lived at Dieppe. She had chosen Dieppe because it was cheap, and because it had a casino; she was an inveterate gambler. I had seen her once before, and it is probably my earliest recollection. We were at a children’s party in London, and Aunt Natty took me on one of her knees while on the other sat a tiny girl with red hair, blue eyes and thin white hands. ‘Two Dianas,’ said Aunt Natty. I looked up at her Brobdignagian face under its black lace cap, and at the other little girl, and wished she would put me down. Now here she was, at Batsford, still larger than life. At this time we loved her more than all our other uncles and aunts put together.
She was quite different from Grandmother, except that they were both stout and stately and like most old ladies in those days both wore uniform. Grandmother wore a widow’s veil thrown back over a bonnet and a voluminous black gown, and Aunt Natty a lace cap and a tent-like robe and a cape. Great-granny was still alive; she also of course wore uniform. She set off her black with a blue satin ribbon. ‘Now, Blanche, you are not to copy this,’ she said to her daughter, but Aunt Natty copied it at once. Her cloak’s lining was edged with blue. After Grandfather’s death, Grandmother would not have dreamed of wearing a coloured ribbon; only a little white relieved the black.
Aunt Natty came to tea with us every day and told us stories, or rather serials, for she always promised to go on the following day. Most of the stories were about herself and her brothers and sisters when they were children. In one of them she and Grandmother had new coats which they disliked: navy serge with brass buttons. The Prince Consort died, and they went to Great-granny. ‘Mother, shouldn’t we wear mourning for the Prince?’ Great-granny considered for a moment and then ordered the gold buttons to be cut off and black ones sewn on instead.
Aunt Natty’s cottage was joined on to the electric light house. There was a steep bank the other side of the road at the back, and here, when there was snow, Tom and I used to take our toboggans. The run got faster and faster the more we used it, and at last I came down head first such a bat that I crashed through the door of the electric light house and was picked up unconscious among the dust and the glass accumulators. While I was in bed with concussion Aunt Natty came every day to the night nursery to tell me stories.
Her own grandchild was the other Diana—Diana Churchill. She often spoke of her. One day she showed me a little brooch with pearls and an emerald on it. ‘I offered this to the other Diana,’ she told me.
‘How lucky.’
‘She didn’t want it. She said, Granny Blanche, I’d rather have a Kodak.’ She pronounced her name, Blanche, with a short a, as in Granny.
This episode amazed me. How could anyone refuse ‘jewellery’? We all longed to possess something precious. There were so many of us that even my clothes were not my own; I was just their tenant on their way from Pam to Unity, at least in theory, though it was not always thought worth while to keep them for four whole years. I longed for something to belong only to me, and perhaps for this reason they gave me Dicky, the nursery bird. ‘You can call Dicky yours if you like, darling,’ Nanny said.
‘Oh, but that’s no good; he must be mine. Muv, can Dicky be mine?’
‘Yes. I’m sure he can,’ said Muv.
After that, when we had one of our conversations about what we possessed of our very own, I was able to say: ‘Well, Dicky’s mine, and he must be very valuable.’
When I was grown up I never allowed my boys to have a caged bird in their nursery; I agreed with Blake that it would put heaven in a rage. Yet Dicky was loved, and he seemed happy.
He was a goldfinch; he went with us everywhere, with a green baize cover over his cage in the train. When we were very small we also took our pony in the carriage with us; Muv, Farve, Nanny, Ada, Nancy, Pam, Tom, me, Dicky, Brownie and Luncheon Tom, all in a third class carriage. Brownie was an extremely tiny Shetland pony. I think it was saintly of Farve to travel with us children; possibly it only happened once, and that is why we never forgot it.
In the business room at Batsford there was a little object which I craved so much that one day Farve gave it to me. ‘You must take great care of it,’ he said. It was a pink jade goldfish, Japanese.
Grandfather had been one of the first Europeans to live in Japan as a young diplomatist. He went there again when he was old with Prince Arthur of Connaught to take the Order of the Garter to the Mikado. He saw that the country had changed from the thirteenth century to the twentieth century during his lifetime. ‘Tell us how it was in the old days,’ said the ladies at Court. Grandfather’s wild garden, where one came upon surprises like the Buddha preaching to bronze deer among the bamboos, was of Japanese inspiration. Indoors and out there were hundreds of Japanese objects he had collected.
I clutched the fish in my hand because I could not bear to be parted from it. At night it stood on a table near my bed, so that when my eyes opened I saw it and felt happy. One day the inevitable happened. I dropped it on a stone floor and it broke: its lovely twisted tail snapped off. Farve knew. ‘You’ve broken the goldfish,’ he said. To my despair at having destroyed the beautiful thing was added the knowledge that I had made him sorry he had given it to a child of seven. Occasionally through out my life in a museum or an exhibition I have seen fishes that resembled Farve’s gift to me when I was ‘a silly little baby’ as the others called me; I cannot look at them without a pang.
Aunt Natty had a Scotch terrier at Batsford. She told us how she had brought him over from Dieppe hidden under her cloak, so that he should not have to be parted from her and put into quarantine. Just as she was walking through the Customs he wriggled. ‘Madam,’ said the Customs man, ‘have you got a dog under your arm?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Aunt Natty.
‘Well, Madam, then what’s that there moving, then?’
‘So I flung open the other side of my cloak and said: “Cannot you believe the word of an Englishwoman?” and I walked through.’
Evidently the Customs man was too awed to stop her as she sailed by him. My parents disapproved of this story. ‘Oh Natty, how could you?’ said Muv.
Aunt Natty could, and did, do anything and everything she pleased. She was the first unprincipled grownup who came our way. She often said ‘I love privilege’, the sort of remark that Grandmother and Muv, though so different in other respects, both thought outrageous. She never wrote letters, but every morning gave Hooper, our groom, a sheaf of telegrams to be sent from Moreton-in-Marsh. We often found him in despair outside the post office. ‘Can’t read Lady Blanche’s writing,’ he said. Nor could we, and nor could the post mistress; she had a puzzle writing which looked almost Chinese.
She never dressed till lunchtime, but used to throw a cape over her flowing nightgown and walk about the village in what we considered a strange déshabillé. Once she invited Tom and me into the cottage to drink chocolate. ‘Not cocoa, there’s nothing more disgusting than cocoa,’ she told us. She was not dressed.
‘Ah, you are looking at my feet!’ she said.
‘Oh no, Aunt Natty, we’re not,’ said Tom and I; but we were. Her legs were bare, and although one could only see her fat ankles, and her feet in bedroom slippers, it seemed very curious to us for in those days one never saw a grown-up’s legs except in stockings.
We all kne
w that as soon as the war was over Batsford was going to be sold because we were too poor to live there. We hoped the war would go on forever. The last summer there, when I was eight, a huge garden fête was held, in aid of the wounded soldiers. Nancy decided that we would act a play, and charge sixpence for tickets. I cannot remember the plot of this play, but when the curtain went up Nancy and one of the village boys were on the stage, dressed as a farmer’s wife and a farmer. The boy had the first line, it was: ‘Phew, wife, the heat is tremendous.’ Nancy’s partner pronounced this as Few, woife, and he gave every subsequent syllable exactly equal value, so that it sounded utterly unlike somebody talking in real life. The rest of us were the farmer’s wife’s children, which Nancy relished.
A cousin of Muv’s, Georgie Gordon, kindly offered to rehearse us, and we worked hard for several weeks in the ballroom where it was quiet. Two days before the fête we were to have our dress rehearsal. We had great fun dressing up, and Muv was the audience. All through the play Georgie, who prompted, was very busy indeed; and at the end, after a rather worrying silence, Muv spoke:
‘I’m very sorry, children, but I’m afraid you can’t do your play.’
‘Can’t do our play, Muv? Why can’t we?’
‘Well, really, you see I’m afraid it’s too bad.’
We were dumbfounded. Georgie found wonderful excuses to save our faces, and our play died.
Aunt Natty gave the pearl and emerald brooch which had been rejected by my namesake to be raffled at this fête, and there were many stalls and side-shows. We made hundreds of pounds for the wounded soldiers, a fortune.
Although the Batsford fête was the biggest we ever had, in after years there were often fêtes on the lawn at Asthall. Every single time, Muv was seized with panic just before the opening when she looked at the stalls; she thought they were too bare. She would rush into the house and bring out anything she happened to see. We soon learnt to hide our possessions when a fête loomed up. At Batsford, the White Elephant stall would have been a treasure house to any Orientalist; Farve managed to buy one of Grandfather’s Japanese buddhas for sixpence, but by the time he had realized what was happening the stall was nearly empty. At Asthall Muv once disposed of two of Jessica’s most beloved toys, a cat and a rabbit called Nimmy and Shu-Shu. Poor Decca was in deep despair; next day we got new toys and went from cottage to cottage until we found the person who had bought them; luckily she was willing to exchange, their fur was almost rubbed off by Decca’s love, and their purchaser preferred the new ones.
Batsford was sold to Sir Gilbert Wills. We were very sad to leave, but fortunately Farve liked Sir Gilbert and often went back to stay for shooting. Farve never felt neutral about any one; he saw people as black or white without nuance. ‘Such a clever cove,’ he would say of somebody he was fond of. Often he liked a man but hated his wife. ‘A meaningless bit of meat,’ he called one such disliked lady.
When we left Batsford some of the furniture, pictures and books were sold too. Farve was a one-book man, he had read White Fang by Jack London; he thought it perfect but this did not make him decide to read any more books. Tom, who was ten years old at the time of the sale, was what Farve called a literary cove’. He and Nancy and I were omnivorous readers, Nancy particularly so. Her enthusiasms were contagious, and when I heard her say: ‘My favourite book is King Solomon’s Mines’ or ‘The Chaplet of Pearls’, I always looked inside the book, just to see. When I found it too difficult I went back to Mrs Tiggy Winkle, or Herr Baby, resolving to try again next year.
Farve allowed Tom to decide which books to sell—some had to go, because the Batsford library was bigger than the Asthall one. Am I dreaming this? I think not; I can hear Tom’s loud treble voice: ‘Oh no, Farve, you can’t sell that.’
Towards the end of the war I was often doubled up with pain. I was laid on a sheeted table in one of the visitors’ rooms and my appendix was removed. I awoke from the anaesthetic in a huge red brocade bed and everybody brought me presents. The others had been sent away to our Farrer cousins for my operation: Pam, convinced that the prophecy ‘she can’t live long’ was about to be fulfilled, spent her all on a paintbox for me. I suppose nowadays the surgeon would insist upon a clinic. Personally I prefer a brocade bed and beautiful unhygienic surroundings which (if one cares about such things) hasten recovery.
4.
ASTHALL
Farve had some land in Oxfordshire, and when Batsford was sold he planned to build a house near the coverts on the hill above Swinbrook. For the present we were to live at Asthall, an old manor house near a church, built of aged, gabled stone with leaded windows. Farve bought it; it was beside his farms and near the river Windrush, but he did not care for it; he wanted to live with the pheasants on the hill. He loved pheasants, and spent hours watching the baby chicks with Steele, the keeper, leaning on his thumb-stick and saying little. His greatest joy was to look out of his window in the early morning and see cock pheasants strutting on the lawn. Of course he also loved shooting—not the garden pheasants, they were sacred—and his other passion at this time was fishing.
I was nine years old when we went to live at Asthall. It had a long hall panelled in old oak, with a fire at each end. Over one fire-place hung a portrait of François I by Clouet. There were doors to the garden and windows on each side, yet we sat comfortably near the fire sheltered by Chinese screens. Muv’s drawing-room had only French furniture; Louis XVI commodes and secrétaire, and white chairs covered in old needlework. There was a water colour by Richmond of our great-grandmother with her sons, Grandfather and his elder brothers wearing muslin skirts and blue ribbons, their hair in long yellow ringlets, and a Louis XVI gilt-bronze clock and barometer which are now mine; I bought them years later in one of Farve’s numerous sales.
In the dining-room there were portraits including one of our great-great grandfather William Mitford, the historian of Greece; and one of Farve, almost unrecognizable. He had been persuaded to have his portrait painted and chose a Belgian camouflage expert for the job. A stranger to vanity, Farve thought it a wonderful likeness and a splendid work of art. Muv, like all her contemporaries, was painted by Laszlo; she was at the height of her beauty. This picture is now at Chatsworth.
The books were housed in a converted barn in the garden, and four extra bedrooms were build above. This library was all the world to Tom and me at Asthall, partly for the beautiful leather-bound books which we could read as much as we liked provided we put them back where they belonged, and also because it was some way from the house and we could be there undisturbed. There were comfortable sofas and a grand piano. Already when he was ten Tom could play divinely and I was perfectly content to sit and listen to him. When he was away at school I missed him dreadfully. For one thing, he could do no wrong in Farve’s eyes; a proposition which would have enraged him coming from one of us was considered reasonably if expounded by Tom, who in many ways seemed the more adult of the two.
During the term Pam, who had quite recovered from her polio, and I went once a week to a dancing class at Hatherop Castle. We sat up together in the outside dickey at the back of a little Morris Cowley, dressed in trench coats belonging to Farve over our dancing frocks. In spite of the coats we arrived completely numbed and paralysed with cold; even our governess, who sat by Turner in front, was frozen, but we were blue and trembling. When the class was over, on went the trench coats and we climbed into the dickey and drove home through the bitter night. Strangely enough, we looked forward to these outings.
When we had been at Asthall a few months Muv went up to Victoria Road where her last child was born. Nancy got the telegram; she ran upstairs with it and saw me standing at the end of the corridor talking to a housemaid. ‘Annie! We are seven!’ Then, to the question in Annie’s face: ‘Another girl.’
‘Oh, Miss Nancy, what a disappointment,’ said dear old Annie, almost in tears. It was this incident that led Nancy to tell Debo in after years: ‘Everybody cried when you were born.’ Mabel, our p
arlourmaid, was at Victoria Road; she used to say, ‘I knew what it was the moment I saw his lordship’s face.’
I thought the baby, which was a complete surprise to me, quite perfect from the very first moment.
Nancy became cleverer and funnier every day. We used to sit together and scream with laughter, which naturally irritated everybody. Before long a grown-up would come along and remind one of some duty: ‘Have you fed your chickens?’ ‘Have you done your practice?’ Nancy had by now been wise enough to abandon these activities, but I kept chickens, pigs and even calves in a supreme effort to make money.
Rather like Farve and his pheasants, which were cherished only to die, I did not mind when these creatures were sold to the butcher. It was what they were for. On the other hand, when our pets died—usually violent deaths—we cried for days; the most terrible of all these occasions was when my guinea pig was killed by Nancy’s border terrier.
Every day except Sunday we went out riding with Captain Collison, the agent. The kennels, garage and stables could be reached by a short cut across the churchyard, and although we were never allowed to ride on Sundays we used the churchyard path even more than usual then, because of fetching dogs for coursing. Farve had a lurcher and every Sunday between October and March Uncle Tommy came to luncheon with his whippet and we all went out coursing.
We were cursed by Farve if we did not keep in line; one struggled and hopped along through turnips or kale or over the prickly stubble. When a hare got up there were cries of ‘Loo after it!’; the lurcher and whippet were slipped and they streaked after the hare, which doubled and twisted and usually got away. Sometimes it was caught; the first one went into Farve’s hare pocket, and subsequent ones were given to us to carry. Uncle Tommy and Farve used to say: ‘Wasn’t that a beautiful sight?’ and stand for a while leaning on their thumb-sticks while the dogs got their breath, then on we would go to look for another hare.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 3
