Nancy was obviously the first to be presented at court but, having taken this big step towards adulthood, found it somewhat unfulfilling; she was therefore determined to surround herself with a set of interesting friends, mostly Oxford undergraduates, who, if they were brave enough, accepted invitations to dine or even stay at Asthall and later Swinbrook. David hated having people other than family members in the house and many of these friends, known as the aesthetes, were bawled out if they did something to offend him – which wasn’t difficult. Like Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love, he really did call them ‘sewers’, though this was derived from a Tamil word which he had learned in Ceylon. Sua meant pig and it was difficult to know which was the greater insult. Even worse was his habit of calling down the table to Sydney at the end of dinner: ‘Have these people no homes of their own?’ Relations between David and his favourite daughter were, unsurprisingly, very strained at this time.
Nancy had also developed a delight in foreign travel, first fostered during a visit to Europe when she was 17. She went on a school trip with a friend and the group visited France and Italy. Nancy was enthralled, finding each city more beautiful than the last – life seemed very boring when she returned to Asthall and she could not then see her way to making her home ‘abroad’. She was, however, allowed to return to Paris in order to learn to speak French more fluently than in the schoolroom.
This was the roaring twenties and there was a lot of fun to be had at home. During her coming-out season and then at hunt balls and house parties Nancy danced and larked with the young post-war generation, who were called the Bright Young Things, a phrase taken up by Evelyn Waugh who became a close friend of Nancy. Her only complaint was that her clothes were not as fashionable as those of her fellow debutantes. They were home-made and she felt that they looked it. Although she had a small allowance from her parents, it did not go far into paying for the lifestyle to which she aspired. Her passion for ‘abroad’ and for stylish clothes were not fulfilled until her novels brought in enough income for a Paris flat and couture by Dior.
Diana was becoming increasingly bored at home but this boredom was soon to be relieved by a trip to Paris where Sydney took the girls in the autumn of 1926, mainly to settle Diana into a day school where she could be ‘finished’ and also improve her French. The family stayed in a modest hotel close to the home of Sydney’s friends the Helleus. Monsieur Helleu was an artist and he became obsessed with Diana’s beauty, painting her often and becoming a close friend. The family returned home for Christmas but afterwards Diana was allowed to go back to Paris and live in a boarding house while she completed her year at school. She travelled as far as Paris with her cousins Winston Churchill and his son Randolph, who were on their way to Italy to meet Mussolini.
Nancy and Pam had already lived in Paris so Diana was not short of friends and she made the most of her new-found freedom. Her great sorrow was that M. Helleu died during this time. He had been a faithful admirer and she mourned for him, but it didn’t stop her having a good time in a city where it was not compulsory to be chaperoned everywhere she went.
Keeping a diary of her activities, however, proved her undoing. When she returned home for the Easter holidays she made the mistake of leaving her diary open in the sitting room while she went out for a walk. Sydney read the entry which described a visit to the cinema alone with a young man one afternoon in Paris. This was an unforgivable crime and Diana was forbidden to return to school and condemned to spend the summer with the younger children in Devon. It was a terrible punishment and because she was bored, literally to tears, this must have contributed greatly to Diana’s determination to get away from the family home.
By the late summer of 1927 the family home was no longer their beloved Asthall, but Swinbrook, which was entirely built to David’s design with Sydney, mysteriously, since she had excellent taste and was a superb homemaker, playing no part. Instead of nestling in a village it was perched on top of a hill and was draughty and uncomfortable. The children each had a bedroom of their own in which was a small fireplace, but they were not allowed a fire. The only warm place was the enormous linen cupboard with its distinctive smell of airing clothes, immortalised as the Hons Cupboard in Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love. It was here that the younger children, Unity, Decca (Jessica) and Debo, gathered to hatch schemes, work out the rules for their new Hons Society or talk to one another in one of their special languages, Boudledidge spoken by Unity and Decca, or Honnish which was the secret means of communication between Decca and Debo. What the older children especially missed was the large library at Asthall, set apart from the house, with their bedrooms above which they had made especially their own. But family life was changing fast and it would not be long before Nancy, Pam and Diana were leaving home for good. Tom was already studying in Vienna and in the end it was only Debo who really regarded Swinbrook as home and was happy there.
Eventually, David and Sydney relented towards Diana and in the autumn she was allowed to stay with the Churchill family at Chartwell, their country home. Here she met some very interesting people, including top-grade scientist Professor Lindemann, who became Churchill’s chief scientific advisor during the next war. Lindemann suggested that she might learn German and as Tom was studying German in Vienna, she asked her parents if she might do so too. Needless to say, after the Paris debacle, they refused point blank.
The following year, 1928, was Diana’s debutante season and within weeks she had met and fallen in love with Bryan Guinness. Boredom over, she eventually overcame her parents’ opposition on account of their age – she was 18 and he was 22 when they met – and they were married at St Margaret’s church, Westminster, the following year, on 29 January 1929. It was the ‘society wedding of the year’ but it was somewhat marred for Diana by the fact that Decca and Debo, who had looked forward to the event with wild excitement, went down with an unidentified infectious disease and could not be bridesmaids. It was left to 14-year-old Unity, who was very self-conscious about her height and her straight, sticking-out fair hair and who definitely did not want to be a bridesmaid, to represent the family.
Following Diana’s engagement to Bryan, Pam became engaged to Oliver Watney, a member of another brewing family. Nancy, obviously not wanting to be the elder sister ‘left on the shelf’, announced that she was unofficially engaged to Hamish St Clair-Erskine, who was four years younger and unsuitable in many ways, not least because he was homosexual, a fact which Nancy seemed unaware of or simply did not want to admit. Sydney and David were against it, as was Tom, who had had a brief affair with Hamish at Eton before deciding that he preferred women. But Hamish was intensely amusing and to be amused was what Nancy loved best. The ‘engagement’ dragged on for four years but eventually came to nothing.
In 1928 Nancy persuaded her parents to let her attend the Slade School of Art but she lasted there only a month, being told by the director of the school that she had no talent. This upset her greatly and she began to write short gossip pieces instead for glossy magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She then talked herself into a job with the family magazine, The Lady, and not long afterwards her first novel, Highland Fling, was published. The Lady Writer was on her way.
Unity was shy and sensitive as a small child. When something which upset her was said at mealtimes she would slide under the table and not come out until she felt like doing so. This was understood and no one took any notice. She also had a strange diet for some time, eating nothing but mashed potatoes. However, a liking for strawberries at the age of 6 got her into real trouble. She and her cousin Christopher Bailey, also given to mischief, once ate all the strawberries in the greenhouse, which were being kept for a special occasion. This was one of the stories, much related, which became part of Mitford family history.
Unity drew well and could memorise reams of poetry by heart, but as she grew up she became very boisterous and had a habit of picking up Miss Dell, one of the many governesses, who was very small, and putting
her on the sideboard. As Miss Dell also taught the children the art of shoplifting, she didn’t last long, and Miss Hussey, her successor, was constantly sending Unity to confess her antics to her mother. Miss Hussey suggested that boarding school might be a good idea but in the end it was Unity’s constant nagging that persuaded David and Sydney to send her to St Margaret’s School, Bushey, in January 1929. Although she could be moody and wilful, her parents had little trouble with her as a child and she was loved in the family for her hilarity and sense of humour. In a family of individuals, she was possibly the most eccentric, but this eccentricity did not go down well at St Margaret’s and she was eventually asked to leave, though, according to Sydney, she was heartbroken and always remembered the school with affection.
Her behaviour continued to be somewhat disruptive, however, and legend has it that she took great delight during her debutante season in letting loose her pet rat, Ratular, at coming-out dances and once even at Buckingham Palace. Enid, her grass snake, possibly also made the odd appearance at debutante dances, to the general alarm of the other guests and to Unity’s glee.
After Diana married, Jessica, for whom she had always been the favourite sister, missed her badly and it was possibly from this time that her extreme rebelliousness and dissatisfaction with life began. As a young child she is remembered as being pretty, very funny and happy with her lot. Like the others she loved her animals, especially her pet sheep Miranda who became her constant companion. But unlike the others during childhood, she was far from being an outdoor girl, much preferring reading to riding. Diana spent hours with her in the pony paddock trying to teach her to ride her pony Joey, coaxing her to climb back onto him when she fell off for the umpteenth time.
Unity being sent to boarding school and Jessica not being allowed to go to school in Burford were probably other turning points; they transformed her from the little girl who would take hold of her father’s arm and shake it, telling him that she was giving him ‘palsy practice’ for his old age, into a bored and resentful teenager who couldn’t wait to leave home. She opened an account at Drummond’s Bank in which to save her ‘running away money’ – mainly her pocket money and the Christmas presents she received from various aunts. In the family the account was regarded as a joke and Nancy used it in The Pursuit of Love, where Linda’s little sister Jassy also has a running away fund, but Jessica was deadly serious as later events were to show. Tom, when he came home, realised that Jessica’s main problem was boredom with her situation and, ever the bookworm himself, introduced her to the sort of writers he felt she would enjoy. This helped but did not solve the problem.
Despite the differences in their outlook, Jessica and Debo were close companions. They would talk all day in Honnish, which was less incomprehensible than Boudledidge, being largely ‘normal’ English spoken with a Gloucestershire accent, and they shared each other’s secrets. But this close relationship was severely put to the test when Unity went to St Margaret’s and Jessica became moody and critical about everything to do with the family.
Debo found this attitude hard to understand because she was so happy with her life at Swinbrook, surrounded by a host of animals and on good terms with both her parents. David and Sydney were probably more indulgent to her partly because she was the youngest and also because she enjoyed the same things as they did: going fishing and shooting with her father and tending her poultry with the same care as Sydney. The thought of going to boarding school made her, like Diana, feel physically sick, but ironically, when Jessica, aged 16, went to study French in Paris as the older sisters had done, it was deemed to be cheaper to send Debo to boarding school than have a governess for an only child.
The school was in Oxford; Debo described it as smelling of lino, girls and fish and she hated it – so much so that she fainted in a geometry lesson and was sick several times. She persuaded Sydney to let her leave but the term’s fees had been paid in advance. They compromised: Debo went back as a day girl for the rest of the term and after that was taught, with Celia Hay, one of Sydney’s friend’s children, by the kindly Miss Frost.
Hunting was one of Debo’s great delights, as it had been Nancy’s, but she also loved skating and was very good at it, as were David and Sydney. On Saturdays she went hunting and on Sundays David and his younger brother Jack took her skating in Oxford. She had already learned to skate on a family holiday in Pontresina and the regular visits to the Oxford rink made her good enough to be ‘spotted’ by a trainer who suggested to Sydney that Debo could potentially make the British junior team. Sydney rejected the idea and Debo did not find out about it until later in life and was sorry that she had not had the chance to excel at something she loved. But unlike the others – except, of course, for Pam – she did not harbour resentment against her mother, either then or at any time.
Rather like Pam, Tom tends to be somewhat neglected in the history of the Mitford family, probably because, in the words of one of the children’s nannies, he was ‘no trouble’. But he was still very much his own man in this largely female family. Loved by his parents and his sisters, he did well at prep. school, at Eton and then in Vienna, where he studied music and learnt to speak German better than any other member of the family. He was a gifted musician and could easily have taken it up as a career. In the event he chose law and became a respected barrister.
David, never an intellectual himself, was somewhat in awe of Tom’s knowledge, shown by the fact that he asked him to organise the Asthall library at the tender age of 10. His teachers respected him and he had lots of good friends. Many people would have been spoiled by all this affection and regard but it seems never to have gone to Tom’s head. Possibly the rough and tumble in a family of teasing, noisy sisters had discouraged him from having the high opinion of himself that his many gifts deserved. He was the first of the family to feel the fascination of a re-emerging Germany and he lived for some time not in Germany, but in Austria, in a castle belonging to a Hungarian, Janos von Almasy, who became a lifelong friend of Tom’s, and later Unity’s. It was often rumoured that Janos would have liked to marry Pam – John Betjeman certainly regarded him as a rival.
By the end of a turbulent decade, in which the country had now entered a period of severe financial depression, the Mitford children had begun to leave the nest. Nancy, although she still lived at home for periods, had embarked on her writing career; Diana was married with one small son and another on the way; and Pam was managing Bryan and Diana’s farm at Biddesden in Hampshire. Unity and Jessica were beginning to form the extreme and opposing views which would eventually separate them forever and Debo was living the kind of life she would always enjoy. As yet the political extremes which were to divide the family were only starting to smoulder. It would not be long before they caused violent eruptions.
Five
Out into the World
Pam’s engagement to Oliver Watney did not last long. Togo, as he was known, was a tall, dark, stooping young man who suffered from chronic tuberculosis, for which there was then no cure. He lived at Cornbury, not far from Swinbrook, and probably only proposed to Pam because his father was keen on the match, which would have had the advantage of uniting an older, aristocratic family with the Watney commercial interests.
Before this, in a letter to Diana, who was at Bexhill recuperating after having her tonsils out, Pam had confessed to feeling intensely shy at the prospect of being left on her own with Togo, an event which she knew some of her friends were planning:
I do so wish you were here. You see I feel so stupid because everyone invited Togo to tea on Sunday to play tennis and everyone is to fade away and leave us two together! If you were here you would of course join in and I should not feel so young. However, I shall have to get over feeling shy and this weekend is sure to help me in doing so. I should really much prefer to be in Bexhill with you.
Hardly the words of a young woman in love.
When Togo’s father died of a heart attack his mother made it her business to tal
k him out of his engagement to Pam. His heart was obviously not entirely given to Pam because he seems to have succumbed to his mother without much opposition. Possibly the prospect of those five sharp-witted, shrieking sisters sapped his already waning enthusiasm. He was sent on a cruise for his health and on his return went to see Pam to break off the engagement.
The family was outraged by Togo’s treachery and Nancy wrote Pam a sympathetic letter of the sort that she had probably never written to her before:
Oh I am so sorry how beastly for you poor darling. Never mind I expect you’ll be rewarded by marrying someone millions of times nicer & obviously Togo would have been a horrid husband. Are you going to Canada? I do hope so, that would be lovely for you.
Best love and don’t be too miserable, I am, dreadfully, but one must make the best of things.
Heaps of love, Naunce
Pam, though initially very disappointed that the engagement was off, was relieved because she realised she was not in love with him. She was eventually to meet someone with whom Togo could not have ever hoped to compete. The wedding presents had to be returned and most of this somewhat embarrassing task was done by Tom who drove round London in his little car. A notice appeared in The Times announcing that the marriage would not now take place.
The Togo saga was not quite over, however. The engagement ring which he had given Pam was a replica of King Alfred’s jewel, the original of which was in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. True to form, Nancy said that it looked like a chicken’s mess which upset Pam, in spite of her lifelong love of chickens. Nancy saved up the incident to use in The Pursuit of Love.
The Other Mitford Page 5
