The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  To be sure, everything was not entirely perfect. Her homemade clothes made her feel conspicuous beside her more smartly dressed companions; she had less spending money than they did, and while she was allowed to wear her hair up, David’s decree that she might not wear make-up rankled: ‘both [Jean] and Marjorie powder their noses the whole time. I wish I could. I’m sure for travelling one ought.’2 But it was the sort of trip Nancy had longed for, and although she did her best to appear a femme du monde in her letters to her parents, tales of juvenile pranks nudge the accounts of visits to art galleries, boat excursions and firework displays. In one she describes how a girl jumped on another’s bed and burst the hot-water bottle, making ‘such a mess! We “ragged in the dorm” violently after that and an old lady came along and . . . that rather shut us up!’ On another she tells of how she met and discussed Ruskin with a nice ‘old man’ she met in the hotel restaurant and to whom she had ‘talked for ages . . . The others say he isn’t old, but he is really, quite 45.’3

  When Nancy returned from the trip, her head filled with images of terracotta-roofed towns baking in hot sunshine, of flowers and colour, and blue waters, life for her would never be the same again. She could not see how she would ever afford to realize her dream of European travel, and Asthall seemed excruciatingly parochial: Pam was wrapped up in her love of the country, Diana – her quick intelligence already disappointed by an inadequate curriculum – was bored by the three younger sisters’ eternal squabbling and giggling in their private languages, playing with their animals, or re-enacting their fantasy of being kidnapped by white slavers. That game went on for years: all respectable young women were warned constantly until the beginning of the Second World War never to speak to strangers, ‘unless they are in uniform’, for fear of ending up in a South American house of ill-repute. The younger Mitford girls rather fancied the idea, especially Unity who went out of her way to attract and appeal to any lurking white slavers.

  The younger children were quick to realize when they were being patronized by Nancy, and although they loved the elder sisters – especially the jokes they told, which made them all roar with laughter – their hero-worship was patchy. ‘Nancy was too sharp-tongued and sarcastic to be anyone’s Favourite Sister for long,’ Decca noted. ‘She might suddenly turn her penetrating emerald eyes in one’s direction and say, “Run along up to the school-room; we’ve had quite enough of you.” Or, if one had taken particular trouble to do one’s hair in ringlets, she was apt to remark, “You look like the eldest and ugliest of the Brontë sisters today.”’4 Pam, with what they regarded as her own brand of bucolic bliss – she loved gardening, animal husbandry and cooking – although innately kind and with no trace of cruelty in her humour (she had been the butt of Nancy’s all her life), was almost as vague as Sydney, and not really suitable as a role model. But Diana, who resembled ‘a Vogue cover artist’s conception of the goddess of the chase’, although bored and rebellious, was unfailingly kind to them, laughing at their jokes, pushing them forward to perform in Boudledidge to visitors, helping them with French, piano practice and riding. She was definitely Favourite Sister material. It was she who patiently encouraged Decca, who never took to horses, as she bumped inexpertly round a paddock on her little pony Joey. ‘Do try to hang on this time, darling,’ Diana would tell her, as she picked her sister off the muddy ground for the umpteenth time. ‘You know how cross Muv will be if you break your arm again.’ It was Decca’s proud boast to have had two broken arms before the age of ten, and – even better – an unusual bone-setting job had made her double-jointed in one elbow, which she delighted in demonstrating. Diana was also a Favourite Cousin, for that year – 1921 – Randolph Churchill visited Asthall and fell in love with her: she so resembled his mother, with her blonde elegance, beautiful features and huge sapphire-blue eyes, and no matter which way she turned her head it was a joy.5

  Nancy always had a willing audience in her envious younger siblings for her stories about her trip, and she had her coming out dance to organize and look forward to. This did not quite live up to her imaginings for her dance programme of waltzes, polkas, foxtrots, one-steps and cotillions was filled with the names of family friends and kinsmen, rather than handsome dark-haired prospective lovers. Later she parodied the occasion mercilessly in The Pursuit of Love, describing the run-up to the ball where every man they knew was pressed into service as a dancing partner, ‘elderly cousins and uncles who had been for many years forgotten’ were ‘recalled from oblivion and urged to materialize’. The longed-for magical evening came at last. Tall, with a fashionably slim, boyish figure, her dark curly hair worn up, for her request to have it ‘shingled’ had been vetoed by both parents, Nancy wore a straight dress with silver bugle beads, very à la mode:

  This then is a ball. This is life, what we have been waiting for all these years, here we are and here it is, a ball, actually going on now, actually in progress round us. How extraordinary it feels, such unreality, like a dream. But, alas, so utterly different from what one had imagined and expected . . . the women so frowsty . . . but above all the men, either so old or so ugly. And when they ask one to dance . . . it is not at all like floating away into a delicious cloud, pressed by a manly arm to a manly bosom, but stumble, stumble, kick, kick . . .6

  However, at the time Nancy loved it, just as she enjoyed being a débutante yet denigrated it in the same manner in her novels. This early-twenties era was excitingly different, and not just to Nancy. The post-war generation of young people (dubbed Bright Young Things or BYTs) erupted into Society determined to change the world for the better now that the war to end all wars was over. Their background was upper class, of course, but talented gatecrashers, working-class émigrés like Noël Coward, were not unwelcome. The aim was pleasure, set against a background of ‘larks’ and jazz music played on wind-up gramophones with trumpet amplifiers, and shameless new dances like the ‘Black Bottom’, and songs like ‘I Love my Chili Bom Bom’ or ‘Squeeze up Lady Lettey’. Girls shingled their hair, wore slave bangles and cloche hats, and dressed in shapeless, waistless dresses designed to ‘move’ across an uncorseted body and display the lower legs, clad in silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. They smoked cigarettes in long holders and drank cocktails with names like ‘Horse’s Neck’. Their elders, the Edwardian generation who had fought a world war, and whose mores were still Victorian, were satisfyingly shocked.

  Nancy’s letters sparkle with accounts of dances and parties, shoots and hunt balls which entailed ‘staying over’; and her hosts would provide mounts so that she could hunt, which she loved.7 Although she was not, in her first Season of 1923, in the thick of Society, she was instantly popular, which was a triumph for her, though the edge was often taken off her enjoyment by her wardrobe. At home her new clothes had seemed so grown-up and glamorous, but compared with those of her fellow-débutantes she felt they looked what they were: homemade. Her allowance was £125 a year,8 out of which she had to clothe herself and pay all incidentals such as laundry, hairdressing, books, family presents for birthdays and Christmas, tips to the staff when she visited country houses, trains and taxi fares. Although £125 would have been a significant sum to a working-class man or woman – it was almost what Sydney paid the governesses’ for a year’s work, for example, and seven pounds more than she paid the Stobies, her cook and handyman9 – it would not have gone far in the life Nancy led.

  Her introduction to different circles from the county set of her childhood began with her first dance: a distant cousin, Kathleen Thynne,10 had written to Sydney to suggest she invite her brother, Lord Henry Weymouth. Nancy went on seeing him afterwards as a casual friend. He was ‘on the fringe’ of a clever Bohemian group at Oxford and he introduced her to some of these men. Another important source of introductions was Nina Seafield, with whom Nancy spent some months in Scotland.11 Nina introduced Nancy to her cousin, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who introduced her to his friends John Sutro, Robert Byron, Harold Acton and Brian Howard, who regard
ed Nancy’s wit as ‘pyrotechnical’. They comprised a group of Oxford aesthetes who were star players in what is now known as the Brideshead generation; Brian Howard was, of course, the model for Anthony Blanche, the leading character in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It has often been stated, incorrectly, that Nancy’s initiation into this group ‘whose talent and intelligence were often veiled by flippancy’,12 was effected through Tom at Oxford, but he was only fourteen and still at Eton when Nancy made her début in Society and gathered her own circle of friends. She impressed these young men, many of whom were homosexual, with her unusual manner of speaking, her brilliantly irreverent and exuberant witticisms and her sense of the absurd. She had three hectic Seasons, but as she became increasingly involved with the Brideshead set, the attraction of hunt balls and dances palled. She began to see such events through their eyes, and found them increasingly ‘boring’.

  Nancy faced considerable difficulty in spending time with her new friends. Society, and the behaviour of upper-class women, was still governed by a complicated set of unwritten rules, which had remained unaltered since the days of the Regency, and would be difficult now to envisage. No young girl was ever seen out in town without a chaperone, and there were still parts of London – clubland in St James’s, for example – where no respectable lady would be seen at all, even in a carriage. In the country, near one’s own home, different rules applied: girls could walk and ride out alone, without any impropriety, though they were usually cautioned to ride in pairs for reasons of safety. But in London Nancy needed a companion – her mother, a younger sister, a member of staff, or Nanny – to accompany her if she wanted to walk round the corner to Harrods.

  In addition there was David’s hatred of anyone outside the family circle and mistrust of young men in general. ‘According to my father,’ Decca wrote, ‘outsiders included not only Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners but also other people’s children . . . almost all young men – in fact the whole teeming population of the earth’s surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbours to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking.’13 Realizing that David’s bark was worse than his bite (‘we were never punished,’ Diana wrote), Nancy braved her father’s outbursts and his downright rudeness to her friends, and invited them home for tea or dinner, and sometimes even to stay for the weekend. There was only one telephone in the house: it looked like a black daffodil and was installed in David’s study. Debo recalls how on one occasion Nancy’s friend Peter Watson14 ‘was bold enough to ring up and ask to speak to her. Without moving his mouth from the instrument my father shouted into the hall, “Nancy, it’s that hog Watson wants to speak to you.”’15 Nancy’s male guests had to stand firm in the face of being called ‘damned puppy’ if they were unfortunate enough to venture an opinion that disagreed with David’s own (not difficult), and what sounded like ‘sewer!’ for merely daring to exist.16

  In fact the word was not ‘sewer’. Years later Sydney told Decca, ‘I daresay you don’t know that Sewer is really soor, or pig in Tamil. It was all you children who turned it into Sewer and I think Farve was delighted at the idea. But which is worst, Pig or Sewer, is hard to say.’17 The word (more usually spelled sua), was one of the few things learned by David long ago in Ceylon, but before Sydney’s explanation, young male visitors were warned that they might well be described to their faces by Farve as ‘sewers’.18 And terrifying as it was to face David in a temper, before too long men were boasting of being a ‘Swinbrook Sewer’, although this often meant having to outface David who, as dinner ended, was liable to call down the table to Sydney, ‘Have these people no homes of their own?’19

  Sydney enjoyed having visitors to stay, and although of Nancy’s Oxford aesthetes she was often heard to exclaim disapprovingly, ‘What a set!’ she sometimes threw her weight behind Nancy’s requests to entertain her friends, so that David found himself vanquished, and subsided, muttering under his breath. While the aesthetes regarded themselves as sensitive, thinking and amusing, the athletes, their college opponents, considered themselves clean-living and sporty. These opposing legions inevitably contained hooligans on one side and hedonists on the other, so it was not unknown for the streets of Oxford to reverberate with pitched battles between the ‘Hearties’ and the ‘Arties’. The hearty athletes were Conservative, patriotic nationalists, supporting the old order of things, King, country and fox hunting. The arty aesthetes espoused romanticism, Oscar Wilde, pacifism and were often anti-field sports and even (‘heavens!’) socialists.

  Had Nancy’s friends been Hearties, David might have been better able to accept them, but it was an anathema to him to have groups of effeminate young men wearing violet-scented hair cream arriving at his home in noisy open sports cars. They lounged about the house dressed in Oxford bags with 28-inch bottoms, loud Fair Isle sweaters and silk ties, making silly jokes and roaring with laughter at everything that David and his generation regarded as sacred, and speaking at the table in the affected phraseology that appeared to pass for good conversation: ‘how too utterly divine’, ‘not much cop’, ‘good show!’ To them the Boer War, in which David and his brothers had fought and been wounded, was ‘the Bore War’, while Blake’s ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ became ‘Green Unpleasant Land – ha, ha, ha!’ Sometimes, David could stand it no longer and let fly at the unfortunate youths with a barrage of oaths. One male guest was turned out of the house for wearing a comb in his breast pocket (‘a man carrying a comb!’), and on another for venturing an opinion that he thought it was time, more than a decade after the end of the war, that Britain stopped producing anti-German propaganda. ‘Be quiet!’ David roared. ‘And don’t talk about what you don’t understand!’ This was followed by a furious aside: ‘Young swine!’

  The offender on this occasion, James Lees-Milne, was a meek, sensitive young man, who had been a friend of Tom from their first months at Eton, and whose parents lived at Broadway, a nearby Cotswold town. Although quelled and terrified by David’s tirade, he held no grudge and remained a friend of the family for the rest of his life. David was not a grudge-bearer either and soon welcomed him back. Later Lees-Milne fell secretly in love with Diana, but he always had a particular affection for Sydney:

  She presided over her wilful, and be it said, deeply devoted family, with imperturbable serenity, pride and sweetness. It was often my privilege to stay at Asthall and later Swinbrook . . . To their callow and unsophisticated guests their home seemed a perfect Elysium of culture, wit and fun. The source of those cloudless days was . . . that enigmatical, generous, great-minded, matriarchal figure, with her clear china blue eyes and divinely formed, slightly drooping mouth, which expressed worlds of humour and tragedy.20

  Of David he wrote that, although he had a dual personality, ‘I cannot see that the children had in him much to complain about. He was to them Dr Jekyll, indulgent and even docile. He submitted placidly to their ceaseless teasing, particularly Nancy’s with its sharp little barb, barely concealed like the hook of an angler’s fly beneath a riot of gay feathers.’21

  Nancy was not so forgiving and viewed David’s outbursts with dismay, sometimes trembling with despair and rage at the indignities heaped upon her guests. As an elderly woman she recalled that one young man had been picked up and shaken like a rat by her father, who growled through clenched teeth, ‘I’d rather take a housemaid shooting than you, Lord Clive.’22 ‘Really,’ she complained to Tom, over the Lees-Milne incident, ‘parties here are impossible . . .’23 Unity, Decca and Debo could be relied upon to make any discomforted guest feel even more uneasy: if applied to for advice (‘What do you think I should do?’) they would invariably break into a well-rehearsed chorus of one of the popular songs of the First World War – ‘Oh we don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go . . .’ When David took an occasional liking to one of Nancy’s visitors it was almost as bad as being disliked, for the hapless guest was then expected
to be at the breakfast table, bright and shining, at eight-thirty sharp – not regarded as a ‘reasonable’ time by Nancy’s contemporaries. And, worse, one was likely to be greeted by a cheery David rubbing his hands and sharing the information that one of his favourite dishes was on the menu: ‘Brains for breakfast, old chap . . .’ This information had such a particular effect on one young man that Unity, Decca and Debo made it the subject of yet another refrain, the words of which rang merrily: ‘Brains for breakfast, Mark, Brains for breakfast, Mark, Oh the damned sewer, Oh the damned sewer . . .’

  Nancy was being paid back handsomely for her years of teasing the others, for all this terrorizing, offence and ridicule made it difficult for her to pursue her Oxford friendships. Outside débutante dances – which were not an all-year-round activity, and which were not top of the list as entertainment for aesthetes – and home, she had few ways of meeting them. At one point she found a way of circumventing the system. On the pretext of spending a day with a girlfriend visiting Tom at school the two girls would take the train to Eton, drop off some small treat for him, then take the next train to Oxford where they would spend the rest of the day with Nancy’s friends. It was all quite innocent, and the young people met in tea-rooms for amusing conversation, but on one occasion a neighbour of the Redesdales spotted Nancy and Brian Howard walking in Oxford without a chaperone. There followed, Nancy wrote to Tom, ‘a hell of a row’. David was furious and roared at her that her reputation was ruined and that no respectable man would marry her. He told her that had she been a married woman her action would have been grounds for divorce. She was condemned to house detention and missed several balls.