A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  Once when I was standing with him waiting for driven partridges Farve’s loader, for some reason, was not his favourite, Turner. The man was slow. Farve took both guns and laid them reverently on the stubble; then he picked up the loader and shook him. It was done in deathly silence, Farve never spoke out shooting for fear of turning the birds.

  We were all very cross with him about this episode and put him in Coventry for two days, but when he was obviously not minding we relented, and spoke to him again.

  Our family was divided between those who longed to go to school and those who dreaded the very idea of it. Farve thought that boys must go but girls must not. Nancy was for school; she thirsted for learning. She was allowed to go to Hatherop where a dozen girls did their lessons together; it was a compromise. She was there when I had my religious mania.

  The thought of being sent away from home was enough to give me a temperature. If Nancy wanted to afflict me with a really unkind tease she well knew what to say. ‘Last night after you had gone to bed I was talking you over with Muv and Farve;’ my blood ran cold; however often she said this, and although I half knew that Muv and Farve would not talk me over with Nancy, a terrible sinking of the stomach made me feel sick. ‘We were saying how good it would be for you to go to school.’ ‘Did Muv and Farve say it would be good for me?’

  ‘Yes. We agreed that you might not be so stupid and babyish if you went to school.’

  Sometimes the anxiety induced by one of these conversations was so painful that I summoned up courage to ask Muv if they really were thinking of school for me. ‘School, darling? Oh I don’t think so. But you mustn’t be rude to Miss Edwards you know,’ she might add, taking advantage. This dislike of schools is something I have never grown out of; for one thing I cannot abide the zoo-like smell.

  The pupils at Hatherop had been Girl Guides, with the headmistress as their Captain. When she came home Nancy managed to persuade Muv to allow her to perpetrate a devilish scheme, which combined the advantages of achieving an all time high as a tease for me with gratification of her will to power and being considered praiseworthy by everybody, parents, uncles and aunts included.

  She announced it one day at tea. ‘I am going to form a company of guides; I am going to be the Captain and you and Pam can be patrol leaders; you will have to call me “Captain”,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t be a Girl Guide,’ I said firmly.

  To my surprise, because I could not believe she was to be allowed to get away with this, Muv supported Nancy.

  ‘You’ll join, won’t you, Palmer,’ Muv said to Pam, who replied listlessly, ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  I felt I might begin to cry at any minute; if only we had had warning of what was afoot I could easily have persuaded Pam to be on my side, and then Nancy’s tease would have been out of the question. It was simply that Pam did not see as promptly as I did what a pest being a Girl Guide was going to be.

  ‘Well, I shan’t,’ I said.

  ‘Dana, I’m afraid you must,’ said Muv. ‘You see, we can’t expect the village girls to join if you children aren’t in it.’

  ‘Oh but why should I, I shall hate it, Muv, it’s so stupid, and anyway Nancy won’t be a proper captain, she’ll only be pretending.’ But it was no good. Muv said I must join, she promised me one thing, however: if I still hated it at the end of a year I could give it up. A year seemed an eternity, but there was nothing to be done, and I became a very sulky and unwilling Girl Guide.

  It turned out to be all I had feared, and more. Ten of the village girls were told they had got to join, and Pam and I picked sides for our patrols (No damned merit went into the choice of the patrol leaders). We were all fitted out in stiff blue drill dresses, black stockings and shoes and hard round felt hats. Nancy, as captain, had a different and rather becoming hat turned up at one side with a cockade. We stumped about at the end of the garden, trying to light damp things with three matches and run a hundred yards in twenty seconds. Nancy tried to make us salute her with three uplifted fingers, and shake hands with our left hands, but this we refused to do. She studied a Girl Guide magazine in order to discover further humiliations to inflict upon us; she even threatened to get a flag and make us salute that. Sometimes we had competitions which Nancy would announce with assumed éclat for the following week:

  ‘You are to collect all the most useful things you can think of and put them in your pockets, and the best collection will win a prize,’ she said. ‘Only in your pockets mind, you mustn’t carry anything because a guide must always have her hands free—unless of course she is a standard-bearer or something like that,’ she added.

  The following Saturday the guides turned up with their dresses sagging in all directions. A guide uniform is a positive nest of pockets, and full advantage had been taken. I had not been able to think of anything very useful to put in mine, except money, which was not allowed. My collection was meagre—a box of matches; a small bandage made out of a strip from an old sheet, provided by Nanny; a magnifying glass, and a pen-knife with a corkscrew and an attachment for prising stones out of horses’ feet.

  The village girls produced marvels. One of them took a quite huge bottle out of one of her pockets, and stood it beside an assortment of bootlaces, chocolate, sticking plaster, Beechams pills, a notebook, pencils, lint and bandages. Between us we had enough bandages to stock a hospital; it was the one thing we had all thought of.

  Muv was the judge. ‘What’s in the bottle?’ she asked. ‘Fluid, m’lady.’

  ‘Fluid? Yes, I see. What sort of fluid?’

  ‘Fluid,’ said the girl, turning very red and shy.

  At last the year was up; I counted the final weeks with mounting rapture. When the great day came I went to Muv. ‘I’ve done what you said and been in the guides for a year. I can leave now, can’t I?’

  A storm broke about me. ‘Leave? Just when it is doing the village girls so much good, and they are all enjoying it so much? Of course you can’t leave. It would set a very bad example. They’ll all want to leave if you leave.’

  The tears welled up, but I managed to say: ‘But you said I could! You promised that if I still hated it at the end of the year I could give it up! Well, I do still hate it, more than ever. And why should the village girls want to stop if they all enjoy it so much?’ But it was no good; I was commanded to continue being a guide. Even Farve was against me: ‘So selfish,’ he said.

  After a few more months, however, the Swinbrook and Asthall troop of guides petered out. Nancy lost interest; she was never there on a Saturday for one thing: she was gadding. The whole episode was an injustice of my childhood. It came about because Muv wanted to fill the gap until Nancy came out, while Nancy was enchanted to have such a solid, non-stop, reliable tease on hand.

  Thinking about it all years later I wondered why so much emphasis was put on bandages, tourniquets, broken limbs. In the lanes round Asthall there was small chance that one would come across people with broken bones, and if one did, a telephone call to Dr. Cheatle would ensue. Nobody in his senses would allow one to minister to his injuries. I said to Kitty Mersey, who had also been a Girl Guide in her childhood, ‘I wonder they didn’t teach us something useful; to cook, for example.’ She replied: ‘Oh, they did teach us. Boiled cod.’

  In spite of the guides, Nancy and I became great friends. During the winter, except on hunting days, we used to sit together aching with boredom. At least in theory we ached, because Nancy wanted to be in London, and though I hated London I saw her point—we wanted people, our friends; the animals were no longer enough. She was as clever and funny as ever, and sometimes wrote stories which I thought supreme. One was about a Lady Caraway somebody or other who could not marry the man she loved because his name was Seed. She had to arrange for him to be given a peerage.

  Mrs. Hammersley came to stay from time to time. She knew clever, unattainable people—‘My friend, Logan Pearsall Smith’, ‘My friends, the Huxleys’. We envied her. She talked in her deep, hollow
voice about books, writers, painters; also about travels.

  ‘I am going to Rome,’ she told us once.

  ‘Oh, isn’t Mrs. Hammersley lucky! She’s going to roam,’ said Unity. ‘Where are you going to roam to?’ she asked.

  Once a term we all descended upon Eton in a troop, to visit Tom. I could never make out whether he liked us coming or not. We quickly tired of the playing fields, so he obligingly let his bed down from the wall and we took turns lying on it in his tiny room, which was almost filled with piano. It was a concession of his tutor’s that he might put a piano in his room. At that time Tom wanted to be a professional musician; he played the flute in the school orchestra, and the organ in chapel, but the piano was his instrument.

  There is something infinitely exhausting about the air of Eton which affects even the casual visitor. After a good rest, and a certain amount of bickering during which Tom kept his usual Olympian calm, we went to have tea at the Cock Pit. We knew dozens of Eton boys, and the Cock Pit was a pivot of school life.

  Tom’s housemaster was called Mr. Dobbs. ‘He’s Irish,’ said Tom. ‘His address is Castle Dobbs, Dobbstown, County Dobbs, Ireland.’

  Once a year we were taken to a dentist in Queen Anne Street by Farve. The only reason I can imagine why Farve came was that he liked the dentist and enjoyed his company. When we arrived at Paddington Farve hailed a cab and got into it; as one clambered after him: ‘Child! Mind the good shoes!’ he cried gaily. Farve’s London suits and shoes were always called good by him, though his tailor suffered from being forced to put hare pockets inside the jackets. ‘A cove must have a hare pocket,’ said Farve.

  In the waiting room he stood and looked out of the window while we nervously turned over the leaves of an old Punch with out taking in the jokes. Once one was safely in the dentist’s chair Farve’s affability knew no bounds. He and the dentist chatted about this and that; our teeth were not among the chosen subjects.

  After a quick look the dentist applied the drill, but even then his attention was divided; he would glance for a moment at his victim, then away again to Farve. Gazing through tear-filled eyes at the chimney pots on the houses opposite I promised myself never, ever, to go to a dentist again once I was grown up.

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Muv when we got back to Asthall, worn out by the terrible day.

  ‘Torture.’

  ‘Nonsense, dear child,’ said Farve.

  It was this dentist, so unaccountably popular with him, who pulled all Farve’s teeth out, and made him the false teeth which according to Nancy he wore out at the rate of two sets a year by grinding them in his rages.

  When I was fourteen the Asthall schoolmistress, who played the organ in church, left the village. Mr. Ward asked me to take her place, and after that I no longer minded going to church. ‘Sorry, Farve, I can’t come to Swinbrook. I’ve got to play the organ here,’ I was able to say.

  The organ was at the back of the church to one side; a small mirror reflected Mr. Ward and his doings. A village boy pumped. He was very dreamy, but I knew the services so intimately from the days of my mania that I found it easy to prompt him. Unless he worked the wooden handle up and down no sound came.

  I gave the note to Mr. Ward. ‘Oh Lord, make haste to help us,’ he intoned. Then a chord, and ‘Oh God, make speed to save us’, Mrs. Ward’s ringing contralto boomed. During the sermon I turned the pages of my music, deciding on a voluntary; anything, even ‘Swanee’ and ‘Ramona’, was suitable provided it was played slowly enough to sound holy.

  There was a third church on Farve’s land, Widford. It was away in the fields by the river; no road led to it and there was only one service a year—harvest festival. It was tiny and old—‘restored in 1100’ said Farve; there were box pews: ‘a cove could have a deck of poker during the sermon,’ as he observed one day when Grandmother was at Asthall. ‘Dowdie, darling,’ she said disapprovingly, tucking in her chin, in her pas devant les enfants voice. Covered in sawdust there were bits of Roman mosaic pavement; Widford had been a temple before it became a church.

  All round us there were remains of great antiquity. On the hill above Asthall there stood a Saxon barrow, it was like a giant flower pot containing a group of trees. Uncle George asked Farve if he could open the barrow.

  ‘We shall find warriors lying there,’ he told us, ‘with great golden spears and shields.’

  After a long and patient dig, sifting every spadeful of earth, a few oddments came to light; needles, for example. The barrow must have been a woman’s burial place, the experts said. While he had his men Uncle George dug up a bit of the Roman road and found the handle of a spoon, formed by a greyhound chasing a hare. He gave everything to the Ashmolean, and took his wife to see his treasure. ‘Only that little heap?’ she said, disappointed.

  A problem that occasionally worried us was, how should we manage to keep alive when we were grown up? The question was raised at meal-times. ‘I hope you children realize you’ve got to earn your own living,’ Farve would say, and my tears welled up at the thought; ‘you won’t get anything from me,’ he would go on, ‘I’ve got nothing to leave you,’ and Muv, more serious, ‘But of course not, girls don’t expect it.’

  We all hated this conversation, but I had an idea what I might do; I still thought I could live with my friends in the Isles of Greece.

  We had our friends and cousins to stay in the holidays; Rosemary and Clementine Mitford, the daughters of Uncle Clem who had been killed in the war, often came. Rosemary was my best friend, and Clementine at the age of eight was the most beautiful human being I have ever seen in my life. There were also Dick and Dooley Bailey, Diana and Randolph Churchill, Cecilia Keppel, Sibell and Mark Norman. We went away to stay with all these children. On our return home, full of what I had seen and heard, I looked in vain for an audience. Nanny slightly disapproved of one’s ever going away on any pretext; Muv was not much interested. ‘Oh did you, darling,’ or ‘Oh was it, h’m’ was about as much as one could hope for, and she stretched her arms and yawned. She might add: ‘I’m sure Chartwell’s lovely; Clementine is so clever;’ it was no use hoping for more than that.

  She also had certain prejudices: for example, she did not care for rich people. She realized, of course, that some people could not help being rich, but she looked upon it as a quite serious disadvantage.

  Tom and I loved staying at Chartwell; Diana and Randolph became our bosom friends. Cousin Clementine was beautiful and kind, Cousin Winston a perennial wonder. We hung on his words at mealtimes, and at the end of dinner he occasionally sang ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ and other ballads of his youth, beating time as he did so with his shapely white hand before getting up and going off for a game of six-pack bezique followed by hours of work on his book. When we first resumed relations with these cousins they used to say: ‘What’s the use of a W.C. without a seat?’ But by the time we visited Chartwell he was back in Parliament, and Chancellor of the Exchequer in Baldwin’s government. A fellow-guest at Chartwell, our cousin Edward Stanley, was asked one night at dinner by Cousin Winston whether he was a Liberal, in the old tradition of the Stanley family.

  ‘No,’ said Edward.

  ‘Why not?’ Edward said he could not belong to a party led by Lloyd George. Thereupon Cousin Winston launched into such a superb paean glorifying his old friend and former leader as completely to convert at least one of his listeners.

  Someone who was in and out of Chartwell in those days was Brendan Bracken, an extraordinary looking young man with an almost negroid cast of countenance, thick red hair and black teeth. He never stayed long for he was not liked by his hostess. Randolph loved his company, though they bickered. Diana said: ‘There’s a rumour that Mr. Bracken is papa’s son!’ with shrill giggles, and Randolph added: ‘Mummy won’t call him Brendan because she’s so afraid he might call her Clemmie.’

  An American we knew also disliked Brendan. ‘Everything about the man is phoney,’ he said; ‘even his hair which looks like a wig, is his ow
n.’

  It does not take children very long to become attached to a house; we loved Asthall, though Farve did not. He still spoke of his intention to build; on the site of his choice there was a rather unattractive farm house called South Lawn. One day, to our sorrow, some people came to ‘look over the house’. The schoolroom door opened and they peeped in. ‘This is the school-room,’ said Mabel. We stood up, and they quickly shut the door again. Muv, who had also grown fond of Asthall, was not happy about Farve’s plan for selling it. She insisted that if it were sold we must have a London house; Nancy and Pam were both grown up now, and during the summer they were busy in London. Pictures of Asthall appeared in Country Life; we could not recognize it from the descriptions of the agents. An elm tree beyond the tennis courts became ‘an ancient rookery’ and one of the water meadows ‘a natural polo ground’. For a while, the sale hung fire.

  Now that the hated guiding was over we returned to our old habit of bicycling to Burford on Saturday for shopping. In the weeks before Christmas we bought presents for each other at Packers, the stationers; for our parents we had generally made some horror in the schoolroom, a beaded tray cloth or embroidered anti-macassar. We wrapped up the presents in good time, and gave them on Christmas morning between opening our stockings and church. Nancy once despised my present so much that she threw it straight on the fire. Strangely enough I did not mind a bit; I knew it was a hopeless present and admired her courage in demonstrating her displeasure. Muv, on the other hand, loyally put our gifts in her room and pretended to love them.

  On Christmas night we had a fancy-dress dinner. With our aunts and uncles we opened the dressing-up chest and did what we could with the contents. One was not allowed to buy anything or prepare in advance; it was a test of resourcefulness and imagination. Tom and I worried a good deal over our disguises, but Nancy and Pam did not. Nancy always made herself either irresistibly comic or exquisitely beautiful; Pam, no sooner were her animals fed, flew to the box and got out a shapeless purple gown and necklace of wooden beads. In this she appeared, Christmas after Christmas, as the Lady Rowena from Ivanhoe.