The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  Decca, who was eleven when Diana married, missed her elder sister and at first, like Unity and Debo, she scoured the Society pages of the daily newspapers to learn about Diana’s activities, but this soon palled. In the aftermath of the wedding ‘a suffocating sense of the permanence of [my] surroundings, family, and way of life . . . the unvarying sameness suddenly became unbearable,’ she wrote, although she admitted also to a guilty realization that ‘outward circumstances were not altogether responsible for my obscure malaise, because objectively life was extremely varied’.5 Sydney did her best to ensure that the three younger girls received as rounded an education as was possible, with far more treats than the older girls had enjoyed. There were more trips to London, seaside holidays, and more trips abroad: they were taken to Switzerland for winter sports, especially for ice-skating at which the whole family was proficient. She took fourteen-year-old Unity and eleven-year-old Decca to Sweden, where they saw the amazing City Hall in Stockholm, ‘a sort of 7th Wonder of the Modern World,’ they thought.6 Unity chose this trip to begin the fits of prolonged sulking moodiness that lasted until she was eighteen.

  Despite what Decca wrote in her delightful memoir Hons and Rebels about her unhappy childhood, her sisters, cousins and contemporaries remember her as a normal, happy, curly-haired little girl until the time of Diana’s marriage, though this point of reference is probably coincidental rather than connected. Shortly after Diana and Bryan returned from honeymoon Decca and Debo went to stay with them in Sussex and Decca wrote to thank David for some postal orders he had sent. ‘You absolutely Marvellous old Lord,’ she wrote, ‘. . . how I absolutely adore you. Oh thank you, thank you . . . thank you, thank you, thank you . . . [it] did save my life and reputation among the motorboat and donkey people. You, and life, are so ABSOLUTELY MARVELLOUS, so absolutely marvellous . . . love from your Very Affec Daughter (doubly so since the 5s[hillings] arrived).’ Several letters from her to her father survive and they are lively, happy and teasing, demonstrating a close and loving relationship.

  Bryan Guinness recalled that during his visits to Swinbrook shortly after his marriage to Diana, Decca seemed a happy child in a happy environment; he remembered the recitals given by her in Boudledidge, and her games of ‘slowly working away’, and ‘hure, hare, hure’. These were curious games: the winner was the person who could stand the longest being scratched with a fingernail (‘working away’ at one spot of skin) or being pinched, ‘really hard’.7 Then there were her demonstrations of her double-jointed arm, and the mock battles she organized between the Hons (Decca and Debo) and the Counter Hons (Unity and Tom, when the latter was at home), both sides armed with toy spears. He remembered David as a kindly man with an ironic sense of humour. ‘The parents seemed to me to devote much of their lives and thoughts to the education of their children . . . and [providing] an unworldly background.’8 No one pretended David did not have a quick temper over small things; he barred Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, from Swinbrook because on her first visit she had left a paper handkerchief on a hedge.9

  One of the cousins blamed Decca’s teenage angst on ‘Nancy’s clever friends,’ who made the younger children feel discontented and ‘that their home was rubbish’.10 Whatever its cause, the bored malaise of which Decca wrote, and which Sydney dismissed at the time as teenage gloominess – possibly she had suffered from it herself – would, within a few years, find a cause, and burgeon into burning resentment, turning Decca into a serious rebel. Initially she became ‘naughty’ and Nanny was forced to commission a bed-time prayer for the three youngest Mitfords: ‘God bless Muv, God bless Farve . . . and make Decca a good girl, Amen.’ When Decca considered running away she quickly realized that she would soon be brought home as she would not be able to look after herself. So the first practical effect of her discontent was the ‘running-away’ account, which she opened at Drummonds, the bankers, in 1929, a few months after Diana’s marriage. ‘Dear Madam,’ an understanding bank manager replied, ‘We are pleased to acknowledge receipt of your ten shillings to open your Running Away account. Passbook no. 437561 enclosed. We beg to remain, dear Madam, your obedient servants, Drummonds.’11

  At the heart of Decca’s misery, she wrote, was desperation to go to school. She had a secret ambition to be a scientist for which she would need to go to university, but she knew that unless she had some formal education she would never achieve this. Her parents’ refusal even to consider school became a source of bitterness in Decca that lasted well into middle age. Nancy had longed to go to school for the interaction with other people. Diana passionately wanted to use her brain and yearned for a more challenging education but without going away to school. Decca simply had

  a certain conviction . . . that one had to get away from that dread place at all costs . . . I biked into Burford and rather shudderingly went to see the headmaster of the Grammar School. He said I could be admitted to the Grammar School (which had a scientific laboratory, that’s why I wanted to go) if I could pass a fairly easy exam, which I could learn to do by reading a list of books he gave me. I was very excited over this and rushed home to ask Muv if I could get the books, take the exam and bike to school each day. A cold ‘no’ was the only answer, no reason given. After that lessons with the gov. seemed totally pointless, although I admit I could have learned more than I did.12

  The point-blank refusal ‘burned into my soul,’ souring her adolescence, and Decca was far more affected by the transition from child to young adult than any other of the Mitfords. Rebelliousness coloured her youth and laid down the attitude of her adult years. Meanwhile she cast about for support from her siblings. When Diana had been agitating against their parents she had been a Favourite Sister for Decca to be proud of. Indeed it had been easy to side with Diana in hot defence of her secret engagement. Now that Diana was married and in charge of her own destiny, she ceased to be a role model for a budding rebel. Nancy had only rebelled to obtain the specific things she wanted: to go to boarding-school, cut her hair, choose her own friends, wear slacks. Tom now stepped in as favourite elder sibling/mentor and, realizing that Decca was suffering from a lack of mental stimulation, he introduced her to Milton, Balzac and Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

  Unity, too, had developed a scowling discontent but hers was more a dumb insolence that alternated with the occasional mischievous prank, such as climbing out on to the roof at Swinbrook through an attic window, or throwing slates off an outhouse roof, or eating all the ripe strawberries in the greenhouse just before a luncheon party.13 Although she went hacking on a big roan horse, she did not hunt like Nancy, Diana and Debo, so lacked the framework to the week that regular hunting fixtures provided. A study of her life as a teenager suggests that she was, quite simply, bored stiff. Perhaps recognizing this, Sydney gave in to Unity’s pleas for a private sitting room at the top of the house, which quickly became known as the Drawing from the Drawing room or DFD. Although initially Unity wanted it as a private space in which she could work on her ‘paintings’, which were a mixture of collage and paint, Decca gradually took over a 50 per cent share of it. Debo, a remarkably well-balanced child, was more an outdoor girl, living for riding and Saturday hunts, and to walk the pheasant coverts with her father.

  In the summer of the year following their marriage Bryan and Diana visited Tom, who had just begun reading law at Berlin University. He told her all about life at the university and the fights between politically opposed students. For the first time Diana heard the word Nazi used to describe those in favour of Fascism. ‘Do you take sides?’ Diana asked. ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘It’s their own affair. But if I were a German, I suppose I would be a Nazi.’ When pressed by Bryan he said there was no question about where his sympathies lay, for there were only two choices, Fascism or Communism, and the latter was totally unacceptable.14 Although later Decca would dispute this leaning in Tom, there are extant letters to friends in which he repeats the same statement.15 However, it is important to recognize that in 1928 Tom was speaking
without the benefit of hindsight: then ‘Nazi’ merely described supporters of a right-wing political movement. There was no hint of the horrors that would be perpetrated a decade and more later.

  In 1928 Nancy had managed to persuade her parents to allow her to attend the Slade School, then under the directorship of Professor Henry Tonks, to study art. Despite the titanic arguments she endured to get there, she lasted less than a month: Tonks told her baldly that she should learn to cook for she had no talent as an artist. ‘I wept,’ she said,16 but she could not resist teasing Decca by telling her she had given it up because she found it impossible to look after herself in her bed-sitter. Decca was furious. ‘Oh, darling, but you should have seen it,’ Nancy drawled. ‘After about a week it was knee-deep in underclothes. I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away.’17

  In order to earn some additional pocket money Nancy began submitting items of gossip to Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, and from this graduated to writing the occasional article. The first known to be published was ‘The Shooting Party, Some Hints for the Woman Guest’ by the Hon. Nancy Mitford. She earned twenty-two pounds for each one, which she spent on gifts for Hamish. Her romance with him was going nowhere, although she longed to marry him. Whenever she could she stayed in London, chiefly with Middy O’Neil who had been so helpful in Paris, and Evelyn Gardner, whom she had known for many years. When it was not let, she was occasionally allowed to stay at, and even entertain from, 26 Rutland Gate. She had given a smart little party there for Evelyn Gardner when the latter became engaged to Evelyn Waugh (‘who writes, I believe, very well’) in 1928.18 After the two Evelyns married, the complication of their names was resolved by the simple expedient of referring to them as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn. The marriage could never have worked: Waugh had homosexual urges and was not able to give She-Evelyn the emotional security she needed; as a writer he needed quiet and isolation, while She-Evelyn craved social life.

  That social Season – which heralded the Wall Street Crash and a world depression – and the one that followed it were arguably the most hectic ever known in London. For the privileged few there was a party every night, mostly in costume: clown parties, baby parties, bath and bottle parties, heroes and heroines parties, Roman orgy parties, Russian parties, wear-almost-nothing parties, ancient Greek parties, subject-of-a-book parties. A party where guests attended in ordinary evening clothes was just plain unsmart.

  Diana and Bryan were the acknowledged leaders of London Society. They were rich, young, intelligent and beautiful, and a focal point for various sets: the aesthetes, such as Roy Harrod, Henry Yorke, Harold Acton, Robert Byron and Brian Howard; the pre-jet jet-setters, such as Emerald Cunard, Margaret Mercer-Nairne (Lady Margaret Myddleton, daughter of Lady Violet Astor), and Duff and Diana Cooper; the more cerebral world of Lytton Strachey and his lover Dora Carrington, John Betjeman and Professor Lindemann; and the theatre world of Noël Coward.

  As for the Bright Young People, Diana and Bryan knew many of them, but regarded them as too frivolous. Diana, still not twenty, preferred grand balls especially because Bryan was a wonderful dancer: ‘I loved dining out and dancing . . . we never went to all those [Bright Young People] “parties” except Brian Howard’s Greek party in fancy dress. We had many parties at Buckingham Street, some in fancy dress though the house wasn’t big.’19 One of these was an 1860s party that was grist to Evelyn Waugh’s literary mill. That summer, in ten days, he wrote twenty-five thousand words of a novel about it all: ‘It is rather like a P.G. Wodehouse,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘all about bright young people. I hope it will be finished by the end of the month.’20

  Earlier, in May, She-Evelyn had invited Nancy to move in with her at the Waughs’ house in Canonbury Square, Islington, because He-Evelyn wanted to go away to the country to work on his book. Nancy had been there only a matter of weeks when She-Evelyn bolted with a lover, leaving a note for He-Evelyn breaking the news. Clearly Nancy could not stay with He-Evelyn alone so she had to return home, which at that juncture was High Wycombe, Swinbrook having been let to provide extra income. Leaving the rarefied company of Diana’s social whirl and London’s literati for Old Mill Cottage with its singular delights of ‘the children’, Sydney’s collection of Leghorns and bantams, Unity’s goat, Decca’s sheep and Debo’s guinea-pigs was like an emergency stop in a vehicle that had been racing along deliciously at maximum speed. Nancy was morose and teased everyone more than ever. Friends thought she was just ‘spinsterish’, following Diana’s marriage: it was considered something of a blow to have a younger sister marry first.

  Later that summer Diana and Bryan went to Paris and stayed at the house of Bryan’s parents in rue de Poitiers. Bryan had known Evelyn Waugh at Oxford and wrote asking him to come to stay with them while he completed his novel. Waugh had attempted reconciliation with She-Evelyn but, having at last admitted that divorce was inevitable, accepted the invitation. Later Nancy went over to join them. All her sympathies were with He-Evelyn, and before the Paris trip they had taken to lunching together at the Ritz, where she dispensed emotional sympathy, and he provided advice about her writing after she began working on a novel called Highland Fling.

  Waugh had taken the world of the Guinnesses as the setting for his novel Vile Bodies, a world he knew intimately, though often he must have been more observer than participant. ‘It is a welter of sex and snobbery,’ he wrote of his novel to a friend, ‘written simply in the hope of selling some copies.’21 For those in the know it was scattered with private jokes, like plums in a rich fruitcake. He even managed to insert one of Decca’s favourite expressions. Because of her love for Miranda she would say, ‘It’s perfectly sheepish’ to describe something that Nancy and Diana would have called ‘divine’, and ‘goatish’ to describe a horror. Waugh wrote, ‘He left his perfectly sheepish house in Hertford St . . .’22 Nancy based her principal character on Hamish, and Bryan, who wrote a novel as tit-for-tat for Waugh’s plot, took as his subject the marriage of a young writer whose wife runs off with a lover, leaving her husband to find out about it in a note. While the three worked at their respective novels, Diana, who was pregnant, sat in bed reading contentedly and making occasional comments on their progress.

  Diana’s first child, Jonathan, was born in March 1930. Unlike Sydney who had dismissed most of her babies as ‘too ugly for words’, Diana was a natural mother, worshipping all her children as babies and as they grew. Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill stood as godparents, and the Churchills’ old nanny, Nanny Higgs, was recruited for the nursery. Despite the world depression Diana returned to Society. The Season was more frenetic than ever with non-stop entertainments every night, if not a dinner, dance or fancy dress ball then a ‘treasure hunt’ in which guests were provided with a list of items they must retrieve, such as a policeman’s helmet or a lamppost or street sign, kidnap a dog, or collect a duck from St James’s pond. There were other pranks too, such as a pretend exhibition of modern works by a fake artist called Bruno Hat, who was in reality Tom Mitford in bohemian clothes and false whiskers.

  Waugh, who spent a lot of time with Diana and Bryan, became curiously disapproving of Diana’s desire to return to the social whirl after Jonathan’s birth. Increasingly he tried to persuade her not to go out, but to stay at home and enjoy quiet conversation. But Diana, just twenty that summer, longed to dance again, and meet clever new people, and thought he was being ‘boring’. It was not that he had suddenly developed a sympathy with those who wrote to the newspapers deprecating a disgraceful flaunting of wealth and privilege in the face of growing unemployment and real poverty, nor with the older generation, like David and Sydney, who could not stomach the frivolity demonstrated by the Bright Young People, with its inconvenience to innocent bystanders. Many years later, he admitted that he had been jealous: he had fallen in love with Diana and wherever they went she was surrounded by a court of adoring young men. While she was pregnant he had her to himself, sharing long hours with her, ‘just sitting with h
im all day, and dining in bed – I had a table in my room for Evelyn and Bryan . . . which of course was very cosy. But Evelyn didn’t much like new friends such as Lytton Strachey who stayed with us in Ireland . . . Evelyn refused to come.’ During a visit with the couple to their south-coast property, Pool Place, he picked quarrel after quarrel with Diana and left abruptly, sending her only a brief note to apologize for being ‘unfriendly . . . Please believe it is only because I am puzzled and ill at ease with myself. Much later everything will be all right.’ In fact, it marked the end of their friendship and they were only to make contact again in 1966, shortly before his death, when he admitted the true cause of his boorish behaviour. By the time he left Diana had begun to find his behaviour ‘so horrid . . . that one didn’t miss him at all’.23 As the weeks went by she found she missed his conversation and tried to bring him back, but he refused all invitations.