Seventeen
Sisters, Sisters
Every large family has its changing relationships and with a family with such diverse views as the Mitfords, there was plenty of chopping and changing. Although sometimes infuriated with what one or another thought or felt, there is no doubt that they loved each other dearly. It was just sometimes hard to sympathise with someone whose views were so diametrically opposite to one’s own.
As teenagers Unity and Jessica shared a bedroom and as their political views widened they drew a line down the middle, Jessica draping her half with the hammer and sickle and other left-wing propaganda, and Unity displaying the swastika and a selection of Nazi treasures on her side. They would shout slogans across the divide but they were firm friends and no one mourned Unity’s death more than Jessica.
Nancy saw fit to shop Diana to the government when war broke out and was instrumental in her and Sir Oswald Mosley going to prison. She also suggested that Pam and Derek were fascist sympathisers, which was far from the mark. Yet when she was dying of cancer it was Pam and Diana who looked after her.
For much of their adult lives Diana and Jessica were on ‘non- speakers’, though Diana had been Jessica’s favourite sister as a child. They did not meet or communicate after Jessica’s disappearance to Spain and Diana’s marriage to Mosley until Nancy was dying, and even then there was much discussion as to how the meeting should be arranged. Debo, being the youngest (there were sixteen years between her and Nancy), was not so much involved with the early squabbles and in later life became the family peacemaker. Tom, during his short life, was wise enough not to take up the cudgels with any of his sisters; nor was it in his nature to do so.
An incident in 1962 illustrates how, in spite of all that had happened to them during their colourful lives, they still held firm to the differing views of their childhood. One day in August Pam and Giuditta arrived to stay with Diana in Paris, giving her only three hours’ notice of their arrival. Diana and Sir O, as the sisters often called him, were going out and so Pam and Giuditta went to see Nancy with whom Jessica was staying – at this time Jessica never saw Diana when in Paris, but she did keep up her relationship with Nancy. When Diana, Mosley, Pam and Giuditta all met again at the end of the evening, Diana was aware that the visit had been a disaster and that Pam and Giuditta were very upset. ‘What can have gone wrong?’ wrote Diana to Debo.
She soon discovered. Before she and Giuditta went home to Switzerland, Pam described how the conversation at Nancy’s had turned to their old family friend Violet Hammersley. It was a well-known fact that Mrs Ham’s two sons, Christopher and David, were her favourites and that her daughter Monica had had a miserable childhood, being mainly ignored by her mother. ‘Well, that’s just like our miserable childhoods,’ chorused Nancy and Jessica, much to Pam’s dismay. ‘It’s not TRUE,’ she said to Diana, her blue eyes filling with tears, and Diana agreed. Even in their fifties, the sisters still looked back to their childhood in entirely different ways, with Diana, Pam and Debo always seeing the good side of their parents and remembering all the happy times, and Nancy and Jessica (who would probably have been joined by Unity) convinced that they had been deprived and ignored. This is perhaps further illustrated by the fact that the three malcontents’ great ambition was to go to boarding school while the home lovers, especially Diana, confessed to feeling physically sick at the thought of it. To add insult to injury, neither Nancy nor Jessica had spoken a word to Giuditta during the whole of the evening, which had further upset Pam. ‘We smoothed them down and they went off fairly happy I think,’ Diana told Debo, but one cannot imagine Pam, Diana or Debo behaving so rudely.
Since Pam was uninterested in politics and never espoused causes as her sisters did, she was usually on good terms with all the others, who tended to regard this completely different sibling with mild amusement. Having been at the sharp end of Nancy’s cruel teasing for most of her childhood, she had learned to keep her head down and in later life, when she had forged her own kindly if eccentric character, she never tried to compete with any of her sisters.
In their letters to one another, the others often have some joke about Pam and her domestic interests and careful nature, both inherited from their mother. Nancy wrote to one of the others saying that Pam had been to London for the white sales: ‘How can she be my sister? I’ve never been to a white sale in my life and I hope I never have to go to one.’ During a visit to Italy, Jessica wrote to Nancy:
Woman arrived here yesterday! She is thinking of writing a book because 1) you and I got so reech [rich] from same, and 2) she has masses of boxes of writing paper left over from when she was married to Derek and it seems a shame to let it go to waste. She seems in v. good fettle. I am glad she could come as I haven’t seen her for years.
It was Jessica, however, with whom Pam had a ‘non-speakers’ period which started in September 1976 and went on for several months. Of all the sisters, Jessica was the most likely to take offence and spent much of her life in conflict with her family. This was partly because she was the one who lived a completely different life with her husband and children in California and partly because she had always been a rebel.
In 1976 journalist, novelist and biographer David Pryce-Jones was writing a biography of Unity to which Pam, Diana and Debo were opposed. Jessica, however, who had exchanged houses with Pryce-Jones in the summer of 1970, had given him help with the book, telling him about the sister to whom she was closest and never stopped loving despite their extraordinary differences. The other sisters hated the book, which Pam described as ‘pornographic’, and were angry with Jessica for her co-operation. When a large family scrapbook which had been at Chatsworth mysteriously disappeared, Pam wrote to Jessica suggesting that she had taken it and used it to help Pryce-Jones with his research, also letting him use some photos from their mother’s album.
Knowing Pam’s generally mild nature and reading the letter more than thirty years later, it seems surprising that it caused such a furore. But Jessica was as incandescent as only she could be:
Woman, [not dear or darling Woman] I was absolutely enraged by your foul letter implying that I’ve stolen Debo’s scrapbook and given P-J photos from one of Muv’s scrapbooks. As you well know, Muv left all hers to Jonathan Guinness so why don’t you get after him. I have practically no photos of Bobo [Unity], and have given none to P-J. There are, obviously, huge amounts to be had in newspaper offices & I suppose that is how he got them.
And on and on justifying herself; she even sent a copy of the letter to Debo.
The row went on, with Jessica repeating her present grievances and bringing up more from the past, Debo trying to keep the peace and Diana feeling powerless to help because of her long estrangement from Jessica, but basically taking Pam’s side. Through all this Pam seems to have kept calm but, as we have seen already, she felt things very deeply yet had learned through years of Nancy’s teasing not to show her true feelings. Neither does it seem at all likely that she intended to cause such conflict within the family. It simply was not her style. The truth was probably that, as she was not herself quick to take offence, she had not – possibly naively – expected Jessica to react in the way that she did.
Jessica was further incensed when Pam later wrote to her but didn’t mention her previous letter and that, when the book miraculously turned up at Chatsworth, where presumably it had been all the time, Pam didn’t apologise for accusing her of taking it. Without wishing to make excuses for Pam, Jessica was not one to apologise for any of her behaviour towards the family, particularly the unsympathetic way in which she portrayed their parents in Hons and Rebels. Once the scrapbook was found Jessica wrote to Pam saying that she would like to see her again but could never forget her original accusation. It’s impossible to see Pam taking the same stance if the situations had been reversed.
They met for dinner in Burford, near their family home, in December 1976, and appear to have made some sort of peace. Certainly, a year later Pam w
rote to Jessica saying how much she had enjoyed her latest book, A Fine Old Conflict, and obviously felt on good enough terms to pick her up on several points. She reminded Jessica that she (Pam) had not broken her leg when accosted by Nancy, disguised as a tramp, while the two were running a cafe for strike-breakers on the Oxford road in 1926; she had only sprained her ankle. She also took Jessica to task for saying that she couldn’t return to England after her husband Esmond had been killed because all the family had been pro-Nazi.
This was a sad figment of your imagination, what about Nancy, rabid anti-Nazi and always announced she was a socialist, Debo, Andrew, Tom, Derek and myself? We had all very much hoped you would return and I thought it was probably because of the very hazardous journey that you decided not to do so.
On this subject, it has to be said that although not pro-Nazi as such, Debo, Andrew, Tom, Pam and Derek were all right wing by the standards of the day and would certainly have seemed so to left-wing Jessica, who perhaps, on this occasion, had a point.
In their defence, although it at first seems a little unfair that the three sisters thought Jessica had taken the scrapbook, it was an incident in the past which encouraged them to doubt her. When Sir Oswald Mosley stood for Parliament in 1959, Jessica wrote a letter to a friend saying how sorry she was that she could find no photo of Mosley with Hitler or Mussolini just to remind people what he was like. She added – and it was not entirely a joke – ‘I guess that leaves it up to us to steam some out of Muv’s scrapbooks at the Island. I do hope she won’t mind.’
Pam and Diana remained close all their lives. Pam’s polio and different temperament meant that she could never keep up with Nancy, and although Diana was three years younger, the two girls were educated together and played together – when Pam was not inventing solitary games of her own. When Diana married Bryan Guinness Pam ran their farm at Biddesden and remained friendly with Bryan all his life. She also got on well with Mosley and kept in close touch with Diana so that when the Mosleys were imprisoned at the beginning of the war for their pro-Nazi sympathies, it was Pam who took in their two baby sons, together with Nanny Higgs. Pam’s nephews stayed with her and Derek for eighteen months at Rignell Hall, along with their two half-brothers, Jonathan and Desmond Guinness, when they were not at school or with their father.
Many years later, after Pam confessed that she could have been more affectionate towards the two boys, Diana and Debo bewailed the fact that the children could not have gone to another member of the family. But who? Their mother was Unity’s full-time carer, Debo at the time did not have a permanent home of her own, Nancy simply would not have coped and Jessica, even if she had lived in England, was not an option.
Pam was the obvious choice and it says a great deal for her strength of character that she was able to admit to her feelings so many years later. It also seems a little churlish of the other sisters to keep on about something she couldn’t help and which had happened so long ago, even if it was true. Apart from running the risk of being labelled a fascist herself, which probably bothered her not a jot, she must have performed miracles to keep her ever-increasing household fed and clothed after the introduction of rationing. She also had her mother and Unity to stay, which Unity always loved, and at Christmas 1941 she had eight to Christmas lunch and was worried that they wouldn’t have enough to eat. Of course, she managed as she always did.
Diana felt that Pam had been insensitive when she had had her dog, Grousy, and mare, Edna May, put down while she was in Holloway. She thought Pam had had no idea of how upset she would be. But Pam had had to sacrifice the herd of cattle that she had bred, including the bull, Black Hussar, because she could no longer get food for them. She knew exactly how painful such decisions were, but it was wartime, the Mosleys were in prison, and Pam had their children and their animals at a very difficult time.
In any case, although Pam may not have been at her best with babies and toddlers, she was a tremendous success with older children whom she never patronised but treated as adults with ideas of their own. Lady Emma Tennant, her eldest niece, is adamant about her rapport with older children and teenagers; as am I – my children absolutely loved her.
It was Pam’s relationship with Nancy which was the most complex and which really moulded the character she became. Nancy’s admission that Pam’s birth was one of the worst moments of her life was not a frivolous one. She made Pam’s life miserable for most of their childhood, not only teasing her cruelly but picking on her, rather than the others, because she was the least able to defend herself. Looking back over both their lives, it could be said that Nancy had done Pam a favour because, through Nancy’s treatment, Pam developed a character which was at least as strong if not stronger than her sisters’, yet she still retained her kindly, sensible nature.
This character meant that she led a much happier life than Nancy, for whom, aside from her brilliant writing, things never quite worked out. Her relationship with Hamish Erskine was a disaster, her marriage to Peter Rodd was a mistake from the beginning and her love affair with her French colonel, Gaston Palewski, never resulted in marriage – instead he married someone else while still seeing Nancy. Her books brought her success and fame but somehow she never seemed to be really happy and she never wanted to return to live in England.
Pam, however, never lost her joy and enthusiasm for life. It comes through in her letters and in the memories of all who knew her. In the latter part of her life Nancy enjoyed fame and fortune, she lived in Versailles, which she loved, she wore beautiful designer clothes and enjoyed the company of many witty friends; but contentment was not really in her nature. Pam, on the other hand, was still the ‘unknown Mitford sister’ who returned to the Cotswold countryside she loved so much and enjoyed old age clad in ‘good tweed skirts’ with her dog at her side and her friends and family around her.
It was fortunate that when Nancy was diagnosed with cancer in 1969 Pam was able to help look after her. Diana, living in Paris, was able to visit Nancy most often but she was also looking after the ageing Mosley, and while Debo was very keen to help she had many commitments at Chatsworth and with her family. Although Pam at the time was living in Switzerland, she had no family ties there – except her dogs – and it was her visits which Nancy looked forward to most and Pam whom she most needed when she felt really ill. The others could make her laugh and have fun with her but when she wanted to cry, ‘Woman is so perfect … she puts things right in a second.’ Pam took her to the hairdresser to boost her morale, cooked delicious meals when she felt she could eat them and latterly dealt with the more humiliating parts of serious illness, like bedpans.
In her gentle way she made Nancy laugh with memories of their childhood. ‘Wooms is being so truly wondair,’ wrote Diana to Debo after the hairdresser visit. And when Nancy had a new cook who didn’t come up to the mark, Diana wrote again: ‘The only real answer is Woman,’ adding, ‘Naunce says you and I are for fair weather only, and I said no, for foul too, and she says no, only Woo for foul.’
It was Pam who accompanied Nancy to Germany to research her book on Frederick the Great. ‘Woman was the heroine. I shall never go away without her again,’ wrote Nancy to Debo on her return in October 1969. In the following March she wrote to Jessica: ‘Woman is still here – she has been awfully ill but has come to now. I wish to goodness she would settle in for our old ages but don’t like to suggest it. Her company suits me exactly – but people must have their own lives I know, furniture, pictures and so on (worst of all, dogs).’ It was all a very far cry from their childhood days when Pam was constantly at the receiving end of Nancy’s bullying.
It is tempting to think that Pam, with her womanly qualities and her natural nursing skills, felt very much in her element during Nancy’s illness. But although Pam was happy to do all she could for her sister and enjoyed her company, she did not enjoy staying in Nancy’s smart but uncomfortable and draughty flat in Versailles and longed first for her cosy little house in Switzerland and later
for Woodfield, where she returned during Nancy’s illness. Nancy, though she was much less sharp when she had Pam to look after her, was often in pain and must have been difficult to live with. Also, by this time Pam was over 60 and was making frequent journeys from either Switzerland or England. She never seemed to age or tire, but the constant driving, much as she enjoyed it, must have taken its toll. In a letter to Debo dated shortly after Pam’s death, Diana writes:
When Naunce died she [Pam] said, ‘Nard, let’s face it, she’s ruined four years of our lives.’ Poor Woo, how she hated Versailles and I expect Naunce blew hot and cold, in fact I know she did. Oh Debo! Her best and happiest years were Biddesden, Rignell and above all Chatsworth, Woodfield and YOU.
Diana, of course, was right. The sister to whom Pam was the closest was Debo, in spite of the age gap of thirteen years, which meant that they did not really share a childhood. Unlike the others they were true countrywomen, rejoicing in their love of the land and of animals, especially horses which they both knew a great deal about. Unlike the others they enjoyed living in the various country houses which, due to their father’s fluctuating fortunes, became their homes. Neither craved the bright lights of town life and simply enjoyed being at home. ‘We would have died if we had had to go to boarding school,’ said Debo, still remembering the horror of that idea at the age of 90.
Pam spent a lot of time at Chatsworth, to which her great contribution was the making of the kitchen garden; Debo was delighted with it and wrote to tell her so. Debo also stayed often at Woodfield and the two could be seen walking with Beetle along the Cotswold lanes. When Debo was modernising the Devonshire Arms, a hotel belonging to her husband’s family in the heart of the Yorkshire moors, Pam was at her side to help and would return home to give her friends enthusiastic blow-by-blow accounts of the alterations. I remember these in detail and I can’t help feeling that Debo must have missed Pam’s company, though not necessarily her ideas on interior design, when she later gave the Swan Inn at Swinbrook similar treatment. The pub had been left to the sisters by an elderly lady in the village and Debo has filled it with fascinating Mitford memorabilia which Pam would so have loved.
The Other Mitford Page 16
