The Other Mitford

by Alexander, Diana

  In 1984 Pam took Debo and her younger daughter Sophy on a trip to Swinbrook, Asthall and Batsford to show Sophy where her mother and aunts had spent their childhood. They were warmly received and one can imagine Pam’s pleasure at showing her niece her childhood haunts. They would also have seen the family gravestones in Swinbrook churchyard, including the one which Pam organised for Nancy. Carved at the top of the slab of Cotswold stone is a mole, reminiscent of the moles which appear on the Redesdale coat of arms. One of the sisters happened to remark that it looked more like a baby elephant galloping across the gravestone, which caused shrieks of laughter among the others.

  Pam enormously enjoyed the annual game fair at Chatsworth and took great interest in all the innovations which Debo introduced to the house and estate, especially the restaurant and the food shop. The sisters visited the Royal Show regularly and also went to Smithfield, where Debo served her turn as president.

  ‘[Pam] was the complete countrywoman. Her life revolved round the kitchen garden, kitchen, her dogs and also her car. She had enormous courage which she inherited from our mother,’ said Debo, who confessed that Pam was the only one who still told her what to do, even in their old age.

  Eighteen

  Almost the Final Chapter

  While Pam was enjoying rural life in Gloucestershire, her sisters’ lives also continued along the lines of the last two decades but with some marked changes, due to the fact that the Mitford Girls, once an icon for extravagantly behaved youth, were getting older.

  The first casualty in the family was Sir Oswald Mosley who, until his late seventies, had remained active and energetic. After his 80th birthday in 1976 he aged quickly. He had Parkinson’s disease and the pills he took for it often caused him to fall over. For the first time in his life he began to look his age, although he still made occasional television appearances; he was due to fly to London to take part in a television programme when he died peacefully in his bed in November 1980.

  For Diana it was as if part of her had died too. He had been her whole life for almost half a century. She had given up nearly everything for him and, although she had managed to pursue a literary career – she had just completed a biography of the Duchess of Windsor before Mosley died – her main aims were to convince him that he still had something important to contribute to the world, to defend his ideals and to look after his physical needs. The fact he had little influence on political thinking after the war did not matter; she would back him to the hilt and this included her unrepentant attitude towards Nazi Germany. She supported him willingly because she never stopped loving him, and for him, in spite of his early philandering, she was the love of his life.

  Her sisters were not entirely surprised when, the following year, Diana had what at first appeared to be a stroke but was, in fact, a brain tumour. She was flown to a London hospital where the tumour, which turned out to be benign, was removed and she made a complete recovery, greatly helped by a period of convalescence with Debo at Chatsworth and a later holiday with Pam in the peace of Caudle Green. In hospital she had many visitors of which one of the most regular was Lord Longford. ‘Frank’s so faithful. Of course he thinks I’m Myra Hindley,’ she joked with her family.

  The sisters’ lives were now calm in comparison to what they had once been but public interest in them did not diminish. In the early 1980s television presenter Julian Jebb made a documentary entitled Nancy Mitford – A Portrait by her Sisters to coincide with a dramatisation of Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love. Pam was the star of the programme, with Diana and Debo appearing somewhat stiff and awkward in comparison, but old family differences had also come to the fore once again; Jessica insisted she would only appear on the programme if Jebb included a letter from Nancy which claimed that Tom had only pretended to be a fascist. Once again Diana, Debo and Pam protested, but the item about Tom had little impact on the viewing public and the programme was a success. Jessica just could not resist these political pinpricks although she must have known that they would once again cause family ructions. Nevertheless, when Mosley died, although she could not bring herself to write to Diana directly, she asked Debo to give Diana her sympathy. Of all the sisters, she had, perhaps, the most mixed up loyalties.

  Another family row, this time among the Mosleys, blew up in 1983 when Mosley’s son Nicholas produced Rules of the Game which highlighted his father’s infidelity to his mother Cimmie, and the distress this caused her. The rest of the family was up in arms but the book was published just the same. The following year, Jonathan Guinness and his daughter Catherine produced The House of Mitford, the definitive history of the family, but Jessica refused to co-operate partly because she did not get on with Jonathan and could not understand how Catherine could deeply love her grandmother Diana when she knew what she believed in.

  In 1984 Jessica had a minor stroke while on a lecture tour to South America. She recovered well and tried to give up the heavy smoking and drinking which she felt must have contributed to it. However, it was not until she fell and badly broke her ankle in 1994 that she gave up alcohol altogether, realising that the fall was the result of having too much to drink. She did it by sheer willpower, confounding her family and friends. Possibly the sudden and unexpected death of Pam as the result of a fall (though it was not alcohol related) in the April of that year brought her face to face with her own mortality.

  Jessica’s broken ankle was giving her trouble so she went to the doctor, where she also mentioned the fact that she was coughing up blood. Lung cancer was diagnosed and this quickly spread to her liver, kidneys and brain. An operation was out of the question and she was given three months to live. In fact, she lived for less than six weeks. She spent her last few days at home looked after by Dinky, now a qualified nurse, who had fully lived up to her mother’s early description of her as being just like Pam. The funeral was minimal, as befitted the author of The American Way of Death, but there were two enormous memorial services: one in San Francisco and the other in a London theatre, led by Jon Snow who had become a friend. Debo was asked to speak but in the end could not face the razzmatazz ‘so stayed at home with my own thoughts about my remarkable dear old Hen’.

  In only two years the four remaining sisters had been reduced to two, and Diana and Debo grew even closer, keeping up a constant correspondence until Diana’s death in 2003. Diana had brought out her last book, Loved Ones, in 1985 which contained pen portraits of family and friends, including Mosley, Mrs Ham and Derek Jackson, and she continued to write book reviews, notably for the Evening Standard. As she grew increasingly deaf, the letters and faxes between the two sisters increased since they could no longer chat on the telephone, a source of sorrow to both of these lifelong natterers.

  Diana was never in the shadows for long. Her life with Mosley and the beliefs she still held made sure of that. In November 1989 she appeared on Desert Island Discs on which she refused to condemn Hitler or admit that Mosley was anti-Semitic. This caused a national outcry from both the general public and the Jewish community, but Diana remained unrepentant. Jessica, of course, was filled with righteous indignation that Diana should be allowed by the BBC to air her views at all.

  Diana never got used to life without Mosley and some of her letters to Debo reveal her great sadness and loneliness in spite of the attention of her loving children and grandchildren. She finally moved from the Temple de la Gloire to a flat in the heart of Paris and it was there that she died of a stroke in the heatwave of 2003. She was 93 and completely confounded the prediction of the nanny all those years ago that she was too beautiful to live long.

  Debo, the much-teased youngest sister whose birth went so unregarded and who Nancy said could only read nine words, really came into her own in the dying decades of the twentieth century. Apart from being ‘one of those Mitford sisters’, she had already made a name for herself as the mistress and saviour of Chatsworth. In 1982 she, too, burst into print: ‘I began writing at Uncle Harold’s [the former Tory prime
minister] bidding. He was looking for the Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick, written in 1844 by the Bachelor Duke. He said, “You ought to write what has happened to the house and garden since.” So I did.’

  That is the story of Debo’s whole life; ideas and opportunities have presented themselves and she has risen to the challenge.

  The result of Uncle Harold’s suggestion was The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth, published in 1982, which was an instant success and sold many copies. Always the businesswoman and realising she had found a winning formula, she followed this with The Estate: a View from Chatsworth and Chatsworth: The House, a sequel to her first book. With these books she demonstrates that she has the same flair for writing as her sisters – would that Nancy had lived to see the day when Nine would also become a respected writer. Her other books include Counting My Chickens and Other Home Thoughts, The Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth Cookery Book, no doubt partly inspired by Pam, Memories of Andrew Devonshire and Home to Roost and Other Peckings. Her autobiography, Wait for Me, published in 2010 when she was 90, received enormous publicity and spent several weeks in the bestseller lists. Unlike Nancy’s novels and Jessica’s ‘biographical’ books, Debo, true to form, tells the story of her family exactly as it was.

  As well as running Chatsworth and taking up her pen, Debo has undertaken many other projects. These include hosting the Chatsworth Game Fair, the Chatsworth Horse Trials and the International Sheepdog Trials, becoming a non-executive director of Tarmac, and president of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. In 1997, aged 77, she went on the Countryside Alliance march in London accompanied by her younger daughter, Sophy. Having completely renovated the Devonshire Arms at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire in the 1980s, she set about doing the same to the Swan Inn at Swinbrook when she was in her late eighties. Her talent for organisation is undoubtedly inherited from the Bowles rather than the Redesdale side of the family and her determination to keep her often-at-odds sisters together is Sydney all over again.

  Her passion for Elvis Presley seems an odd one for an elderly duchess but it is very real. She has visited Graceland – and loved it, including the bizarre decor – and in her present home, the Old Vicarage at Edensor, she has an Elvis room and an Elvis telephone.

  However, life has not always been plain sailing for this most energetic of the Mitford sisters. Alcoholism ran in the Cavendish family – Andrew’s father’s early death is thought to have been hastened by the habit – and Andrew also became an alcoholic, his mood changes making life very difficult for Debo and their family. After several fruitless attempts to give up, he finally succeeded with the help of Debo and his children, and until his death twenty years later, he never touched alcohol again.

  Andrew died in 2004 and Debo later moved into the Old Vicarage, leaving her son, Peregrine, always known as Stoker, and his wife Amanda to run the Chatsworth estate.

  Five of the Mitford sisters lived extraordinary lives by anyone’s standards: Nancy, the French Lady Writer whose lover was de Gaulle’s right-hand man; Diana, who married British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley at a ceremony in Goebbels’ dining room and in the presence of Hitler; Unity, the friend of Hitler who shot herself rather than see England and Germany in conflict; Jessica, who ran away with Churchill’s cousin to join the communists in the Spanish Civil War and became a respected left-wing journalist in America; and Deborah, friend of the Kennedy family, who became the Duchess of Devonshire and saved her family’s stately home against all the odds. You simply couldn’t make it up.

  But at the centre of this story is Pam. Pam, who was never responsible for a headline beginning ‘Peer’s daughter …’; kind, ordinary Pam who put up with terrible teasing from the others but looked after them when they were sick or sad; Woman, who was teased for her carefulness but envied for her culinary skills; and Tante Femme, so called by Debo’s children, who was loved by her nephews and nieces because she never patronised them. She had no wish to emulate her colourful siblings, never sought the limelight and was perhaps the only one who was entirely comfortable being herself. She is mentioned in the numerous books about the sisters which constitute part of the Mitford Industry, but no one before has cast her in the starring role. She would be amazed to find herself centre stage. ‘How extrorder,’ she would giggle, her forget-me-not blue eyes wide with surprise.

  I have called this ‘Almost the Final Chapter’ for three reasons. Firstly, due to its chronological position; secondly, because the end of the Mitford family story will, of course, come with Debo’s death. But thirdly, and to judge from past history, it is a story which will never actually end because fascination with this family, whose exploits even the most imaginative writer of fiction would find it difficult to invent, just goes on and on.

  Nineteen

  Contented Old Age

  The last years of Pam’s life were contented and happy. She loved living at Woodfield House and had plenty of help in the house and garden. She saw a lot of her family and her friends, many of whom came to stay. She particularly enjoyed the visits of her nieces and nephews and she found older children were drawn to her. Diana’s son Max always kept in touch with her and remembers what fun it was to stay with her both as a child and an adult. ‘She was very kind to us and is greatly missed,’ he said.

  Debo’s elder daughter, Lady Emma Tennant, who loved her aunt dearly, is clear that when it came to dealing with children, Pam was always kind and natural, never patronising them and always treating them as adults. After Pam died, Emma’s daughter Stella said that Pam was always a good person to ask for advice because she was so strong and sensible. The last family member to see Pam before her sudden death was Emma’s elder daughter Isabel, who took her baby to visit Pam in the London hospital where she had had an operation on a broken leg.

  Pam took an interest in the names which the younger members of the family passed on to the next generation. In 1993 she wrote to Debo: ‘I wish Sophy [Debo’s youngest daughter had called her son Declan] had a nicer name for the baby, it sounds like something out of arithmetic or out of Latin. Isn’t there a lesson on Latin – declining?’ And her easy way with children was not confined to her own family. I well remember outings with my own children, organised by Pam. Especially memorable was a trip to Chatsworth to collect Beetle the Labrador, who always went to Debo (who had bred him) when Pam was away. Despite my offers to share the driving, Pam insisted on driving both ways on the same day – a trip of well over 200 miles. This included several delays because Emily kept feeling sick and Pam insisted on stopping each time and talking her for a walk to get some fresh air. She gave us a splendid day at Chatsworth, taking us into the family’s part of the house as well as showing us the magnificent rooms which are open to the public.

  The latter years of Pam’s life had an extra tranquillity, because since Nancy’s long illness when Pam had been the sister who could give her the most comfort, both in practical ways and because of her innately sympathetic nature, there had been no more teasing. Finally, the other sisters realised her true worth and her stature in the family was never questioned again.

  Jessica, in a letter to Debo a few days after Pam’s unexpected death, mentioned the teasing. ‘Actually, I think she rather thrived on it,’ she wrote. Whose conscience was she trying to salve? In Jessica’s defence, she does go on to say what an utter trooper Pam had been when caring for Nancy and how it changed the way in which the rest of the family regarded her.

  She also states that in spite of their quarrel over the lost scrapbook, after which they were on ‘non-speakers’ for several months: ‘In recent years we became great friends, Bob and I adored going there, she used to come to parties in London … All my friends loved meeting her and vice-versa, I think.’ And that was the joy of Pam – she was so particularly loveable. Her wide blue eyes were often invisible when she laughed hilariously at some joke, possibly even her own. And her calm, natural manner and practical nature endeared her to all those whom she met. She also developed a very strong persona
lity (which may well have been a result of all the teasing) which made her most resemble the Mitford Girls’ mother, Lady Redesdale. She never tried to compete with the others, was never glib or brittle as Nancy or Jessica could be; she was always herself. Her nephew Max says of her: ‘She used to sort of slightly send herself up. She was fully aware of what amused the others about her and played up to it.’ Her sense of humour was never far below the surface.

  Life had not always been kind to Pam but she bore the bad times with the fortitude that was so much part of her nature. In spite of all the teasing, she was a happy child, finding pleasure in the country life that most of the others couldn’t wait to get away from. She made light of it when her engagement to Togo Watney was broken off, but according to Debo it made her miserable. When her marriage to Derek Jackson came to an end after fourteen years she seemed to accept the fact with her customary calm, while underneath she was deeply unhappy. When Margaret Budd stayed with Pam at Tullamaine shortly after Derek had left, Margaret told Pam that she admired her enormously for staying so cool in the circumstances. ‘If only you knew,’ Pam replied, ‘I may seem calm but everything is churning underneath.’ At this time Derek was very cruel to her but he couldn’t resist her kind nature for very long and they were soon friends again, remaining so until the end of his life. When he died in 1982 he left her a large enough sum of money in American dollars for her to write in a letter to Diana: ‘I shall be so well off and won’t know myself.’ She added, typically: ‘What is so terribly sad is the fact that I shall never be able to thank him. It quite haunts me.’