The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  During that Christmas holiday Diana was invited to stay at Chartwell, home of the Winston Churchills. At least at Chartwell, Diana noticed with gratification, she was no longer treated as a child. She admired ‘Cousin Winston’ enormously and was always thrilled when she was seated next to him, hanging on his words as he talked politics incessantly. Churchill called her, affectionately, ‘Dina-mite’. Clementine, whom Diana adopted as a role model of elegance and beauty, told her ‘just pull his sleeve to start him off’.

  In the new year of 1927 Winston and Randolph were due to leave for Rome to visit Mussolini, and when Diana returned to Cours Fénelon in early January she travelled to Paris in their company, which obviated the need for Sydney to arrange a chaperone. At the Gare du Nord, she parted from the Churchills and was met by an old woman, one of two sisters who made a living by taking in English girls who were attending finishing schools in Paris. Their boarding-house was close to the hotel where the family had stayed, the school and the Helleus’. Consequently, Diana was allowed to walk alone to school, to her music lessons and to visit the Helleu family. Even this limited freedom was intoxicating.

  Life in the boarding-house was not exactly comfortable. There was no bathroom and twice a week a small tin bath was filled with an inch or two of hot water so that the young residents could bathe. When Sydney sent Diana a small amount of money to enable her to go to the hotel and take a proper bath occasionally the two old ladies considered it not only personally insulting but highly extravagant.

  Diana settled in well at the school and found that as her French improved she could cope easily with the work. Immediately she arrived in Paris she had contacted the young friends made through Nancy and Pam, and used the limits of her freedom to the utmost. Just as Nancy had once used her visits to Eton to cover meeting with her Oxford friends, so Diana invented extra music lessons in order to go to the cinema with a young man, and even – occasionally – to a tea dance.

  And there was Monsieur Helleu, admiring and uncritical, who would take her for a sandwich or coffee, to visit fellow artists, or to walk in the wintry gardens at Versailles, or to Rouen to see the exquisite rose window in the cathedral. As he was a friend of Sydney, this was perfectly allowable. But when Helleu became ill and Diana called at the flat, his daughter Paulette refused to let her see him, which indicates that she was aware of her father’s obsession with Diana and was probably jealous. Diana reciprocated Helleu’s admiration but their relationship was innocent. ‘Monsieur Helleu is terribly ill,’ she wrote to James Lees-Milne. ‘I don’t know how I can write it, coldly like this . . . a man whom I have almost worshipped, and who has worshipped me for three months is going to die. I shall never see him again, never hear his voice saying, “Sweetheart, comme tu es belle,” never ring at his door and hear him come to open it with a happy step. How can I bear it?’34 She had never experienced such gaiety, liveliness and enthusiasm in any man she had ever met. Within a few days Helleu had died and Diana wrote to tell Lees-Milne: ‘. . . Nobody will ever admire me as he did. He called me “beauté divine” always, and said, “Tu es la femme la plus voluptueuse que je n’ai jamais connu.” This from a man who has known all the lovely women of his day in Paris, London and New York, and had the most amazing vie amoureuse. He didn’t believe in God, but he believed in beauty . . . He loved the wind, and clouds, and leaves, and statues, and above all very young women.’35 She returned sadly to London for the Easter recess, taking with her one of the portraits he had made of her, which had been reproduced in the magazine L’illustration and brought her considerable cachet at school. The entire family sympathized at the loss of her friend and she was comforted.

  Shortly before she was due to return to Paris Diana was out walking in the park with Pam one morning when she suddenly realized she had left her diary lying open in the drawing room. She had been writing in it after breakfast when someone had telephoned and she had forgotten to return to it. She returned home hastily but as soon as the door was opened she knew there was trouble. ‘Her Ladyship wants to see you,’ said Mabel, the parlourmaid. She heard her mother calling her to come at once, and the dreaded ‘Diana!’ From that she knew things were bad. She was never called Diana in the family: Sydney called her ‘Dana’, David called her ‘Dina’, Nancy ‘Bodley’, Pam and Unity ‘Nardy’, Decca called her ‘Cord’, and Debo called her ‘Honks’. ‘Diana’ meant she was in deep trouble. ‘Useless to protest the harmlessness of what I had done; to have been to the cinema alone with a young man, in Paris, even in the afternoon, was a frightful disobedience and an almost unforgivable crime.’36 Of course, if she had written of all the things that Monsieur Helleu had said to her, her parents might have been even more upset.

  It was the worst Mitford row in years. After the initial explosion David and Sydney did not speak to her for several days, and at first her sisters were sympathetic. But the tense atmosphere in the house persisted while their parents decided what to do about the matter and soon her sisters were all affected by the tension and gloom, and by the inevitable tightened restrictions on their own freedom. They became irritated with Diana, calling her a fool for leaving her diary lying about in the drawing room – ‘How could anyone be so stupid!’

  There was no question of her being allowed to return to Paris: telegrams were sent cancelling all her arrangements there. Neither, since she was in disgrace, could she simply be detained at Rutland Gate. The Season was just about to begin with lots of plans already made for Nancy and Pam; she would be in the way and she certainly did not deserve any treats. Nor could she be sent to Swinbrook, which was not yet ready for habitation. At last a decision was reached. She was to spend the summer with ‘the little ones’, Nanny and Miss Bedell, the current governess, at Bucks Mill, a seaside cottage at Clovelly in Devon belonging to a great-aunt, Lady Maude Whyte. There, Diana suffered the terrible agony of boredom. Only Unity at twelve and Decca, nine, were of schoolroom age. Debo was taught by Sydney when she was at home, and now, on holiday, was in Nanny’s sole charge. There was nothing to capture Diana’s interest: she had nothing to read, no money to buy books, no one of interest called on them, and the three long months limped by with an agonizing slowness. She ‘ached’ at the waste of time. In Paris she had been so close to everything that was worth living for, and the wonderful opportunity to learn, to use her brain. That summer at Bucks Mill was a truly awesome punishment.

  At the end of the holidays Nanny took them home, not to lovely Asthall but to the newly completed Swinbrook House. They claim to have been horrified. With the exception of seven-year-old Debo, who came to love it, and David, the family hated it. Everything was wrong: the design, the materials, the very newness of it. Instead of Asthall’s weathered old stone, encrusted here and there with lichen, they found a huge, square, three-storey, new stone building, which the family described as looking like ‘an institution’. Nancy called it Swine-Brook.

  For the older children the worst aspect was its lack of a bolt-hole. One of the best things about Asthall had been the privacy of the library, situated away from the main part of the house. The grand piano had been in the library at Asthall, and Tom had practised there for hours; he was an excellent pianist and might easily have become a professional musician. At Swinbrook, though, the piano was in the drawing room, so Tom hardly bothered to play it because he could never do so without being disturbed. More often at Swinbrook it was Sydney who played the piano, and the family and visitors gathered round to sing old parlour favourites, like the stirring ‘Grace Darling’ or sentimental Victorian ballads such as ‘The Last Rose of Summer’.

  True, the girls each had their own bedroom, but they were on the top floor, and fires were never allowed there unless they were ill. Sometimes in the winter they found their sponges and facecloths solid with ice. Sydney especially hated the rustic look of rough-hewn beams and local stone fireplaces. The green elm of the new doors warped and shrank, and made the house draughty. Situated on the top of a hill, on the site of the original old
Georgian farmhouse, Swinbrook had wonderful views but it was exposed to the worst of the weather, and with its draughts, and the damp chill from plasterwork that had still not dried out, it always seemed cold. A guest who visited there, however, describes it as a cheerful, light house. The drawing room was especially comfortable with its brilliant white walls and chimneypiece of rough stone, while the tall french windows provided long views across the valley. It was ‘lavishly provided with books and flowers’ – a typical Sydney touch.

  David was hurt by the family’s rejection of Swinbrook: it even affected his enjoyment of his fishing, and shooting in his own coverts. He had never felt about Asthall as his family did, and one of his nieces thought he was always troubled by the ghosts at Asthall and was ‘jolly pleased to leave it’. At Swinbrook he closeted himself gloomily in his study, which he had made child-proof by fitting an oversize mortice lock to the door. His plan was not only to lock out his children, but sometimes to lock them in for a telling-off. ‘However,’ Nancy wrote, ‘we children usually managed to effect an escape.’ The family called it ‘the closing room’, after Decca pointed out that since he spent virtually all his time in there, often with his eyes closed while he was ‘thinking’, it was almost inevitable that one day he would close his eyes there for the last time. Even the servants began to use the term: ‘Miss, His Lordship wants you in the closing room . . .’

  While David tolerated such teasing – and far more – with remarkable equanimity, he also began to spend an increasing amount of time away from home at his London club, the Marlborough, since the house at Rutland Gate had been let. He had given up his committee work at the Lords to oversee the building of Swinbrook but although he was less than interested in politics he took his seat in the upper house and even, occasionally, got up to speak, especially when the subject under discussion touched a nerve. Such an occasion occurred when the Lords debated whether to allow peeresses in their own right to sit in the upper house. David opposed the bill and Nancy maintained that his reason was a practical one. There was only one lavatory close to the chamber, and David thought that if women were allowed to attend the upper house they might want to use it. (If only we could so clearly see the basis of all our legislation.) In recess, and during the Season, he went shooting in Scotland, leaving the family to settle in at Swinbrook.

  The children congregated on the second floor, where could be found the schoolroom, nursery and living quarters for the governesses and Nanny, all painted in ‘Redesdale blue’, the colour for the indoor servants’ uniforms. The rooms were generous and separated from the rest of the house, just as the servants’ quarters were, by a green baize door. The schoolroom, described by Decca as ‘large and airy’ with bay windows, had a coal fire and chintz furniture. It does not sound unwelcoming but it lacked the cosy familiarity of beloved Asthall. The younger girls took to sitting in the warmest place they could find: the linen cupboard through which ran some hot-water pipes. Squeezed in among heaps of crisply ironed linen sheets and pillowcases, towels and bath mats, neatly stacked on slatted racks, they spent hours hatching plans and working out new rules for their ‘Hons Society’.37

  Many years later Decca would recall the cupboard’s ‘distinctive stuffy smell and enchanting promise of complete privacy from the grown-ups’. Decca and Unity, the two Bouds, spoke fluent Boudledidge, which the other sisters understood well enough to know what they were talking about. The older ones were allowed to join them there for giggles, Mitford jokes, stories and teasing. Here, Nancy produced poems and stories to entertain them. A typical one impersonated the governess in residence Miss Broadmoor’s elocution, a tortured diction that passed for refined (‘refained’) speech: ‘Ay huff a löft, and öft/as ay lay on may ayderdown so soft/(tossing from sade to sade with may nasty cöff)/ay ayther think of the loft/, or of the w-h-h-h-heat in the tröff of the löf’, though some might say this was a bit rich coming from someone who pronounced ‘lost’ and ‘gone’ as ‘lorst’ and ‘gorn’. Nancy immortalized the linen closet as ‘the Hons Cupboard’, but it was not, as is generally believed, a part of her own childhood, and even Unity was only allowed in there occasionally. The Swinbrook linen cupboard belonged to Decca and Debo, the two Hons. There was another Hons Cupboard, a disused bread oven in the wall of Old Mill Cottage at High Wycombe, just large enough to hold three small children (Unity was always too large for that one), but the one Nancy described in her novels is that at Swinbrook House.

  Miss Broadmoor was not the only governess to come in for ‘attention’, for governesses came and went with tedious regularity, which the children liked to claim was due to their relentless naughtiness. A few lasted only a school term or two, but ten stayed for a year or more between 1910 and 1936. The best of these, Diana feels, were Miss Mirams and Miss Hussey (who was called variously by the children Steegson or Whitey) and who tutored them for two separate periods of several years. Like Miss Mirams, Miss Hussey had been trained at Ambleside to teach the PNEU system mentioned earlier, and was recruited by Sydney in 1922. One of her ambitions was to travel to India and in early 1925 she heard of a family who needed a governess to go there with them. ‘So of course she had to take it,’ said Diana.38 Miss Hussey returned to Swinbrook in 1931 to teach Decca and Debo, and stayed this time for just over two years. She thought that in the intervening years some of the governesses had let the girls down badly, but that their English was better than hers.

  In Hons and Rebels it was ‘Miss Whitey’ who was the hapless governess made famous for having been subjected to a prank. Decca records how Unity’s pet snake was left ‘wrapped around the lavatory chain’ so that the unwary woman, having locked the door of the WC, suddenly spotted the snake, fainted and had to be rescued with crowbars. This incident, however, is open to considerable doubt, for although something of the sort occurred, the snake was not Unity’s but Diana’s (‘It was just a little grass snake; I bought it at Harrods’), and the governess at the time of the alleged incident was Miss Bedell, not ‘Miss Whitey’. Diana recalls the incident less dramatically than Decca. It occurred during that dreadful summer at Bucks Mill when nothing of any note happened. On the day in question, ‘Nanny came in and said to me, “Diana, your snake has escaped and is lying in the corner of the lavatory.”’ Ordered to go and rescue it before it got out, ‘I put it out of doors, set it free,’ Diana recalled. Perhaps it took only a small leap of imagination from reality to the amusing incident recorded by Decca; perhaps the children plotted such a scenario to pass the time.39 It was some years later that Unity bought Enid, her snake, which she took to débutante dances with her. ‘In any case the governesses were all used to our various pets and wouldn’t have been frightened by a little grass snake,’ Diana said. The anecdote would hardly bear refuting, she said, were it not for that the story in Decca’s book was widely believed, and later used by the writer and literary critic Rebecca West as evidence of Unity’s ‘cruelty’.40

  Then there was Miss Bunting, the governess who, Decca claimed, taught the two youngest girls the gentle art of shoplifting. Diana bridled at this story, too, doubting its veracity. However, she was not under the aegis of the schoolroom when shoplifting was part of the curriculum. Debo was, and she also recalls the governess, Miss Dell, introducing it – ‘Like to try a little jiggery-pokery, children?’ It was just small things – some postcards, a packet of razor-blades, postcards – in a small post office in Devon. ‘My mother found out but thank goodness the shopkeepers didn’t, and Miss Dell disappeared.’41 Another governess taught them the card game Racing Demon, and was liked by the children because she was lax about lessons. ‘We just played Racing Demon the whole time, Debo recalls.’ It seems, when one also recalls the head-banging Nanny, that Sydney’s interview techniques may have been in need of revision.

  Debo, now twelve, felt safe and secure at Swinbrook and never had the urge to flee the nest as her sisters had. Her parents were always there, the dozens of pets and farm animals were considered as important as humans, and there
was a nucleus of long-serving staff whom she considered her friends. ‘My best friend was our old groom, Hooper,’ she said. ‘He was the human end of the horses and ponies . . . I adored, and of the stables. One of the jobs Hooper had to do was to drive the eggs in a horse-drawn float from my mother’s chicken farm to the station . . . It was six miles to the station at Shipton-under-Wychwood, and nice and hilly so it took a lovely long time, and I was allowed to drive the horse. A dramatic and strange thing happened on one of these journeys. It was the eleventh of November 1927, nine years after the end of the Great War. Everything stopped for two minutes’ silence then, all traffic and factories . . . Hooper got out his watch and exactly at eleven, he stopped the cart, got down to hold the horse’s head and took off his cap. No sooner had he done this than the old mare swayed and fell dead, I suppose of a heart attack. Since she had been bought out of the Army at the end of the war, having seen service in France, her death during the silence made a great impression on us children.’42

  Diana missed most of these schoolroom excitements. Having served her allotted penance she was permitted to spend time later in the summer of 1927 at Chartwell with the Churchills. Here, in addition to Randolph and Diana, of whom she was very fond and who had stayed at Asthall on a number of occasions, she was exposed to the company of some interesting fellow guests: Walter Sickert, the artist, and Professor Lindemann,43 one of the finest scientific brains of his generation. During the First World War he worked at Farnborough, then in its infancy as an aviation experimental unit. In those days the biggest threat to young airmen was not the enemy but the involuntary spin. No one had been able to work out how to recover from a spin, although one pilot who survived one suggested that pushing the stick forward seemed to have made a difference. This defied logic, so Lindemann set to work and proved mathematically that pushing the stick forward was the correct manoeuvre. No one was keen to test his theory so he learned to fly and tested it himself, at great risk, and subsequently saved many lives.