The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  Although Nancy has traduced life in the country and portrayed it in novels as boring, and even Diana was less than complimentary of it when she was a teenager, waiting endlessly for escape into the glittering world of grown-ups, all the children had a happy childhood - even Decca who, though she never took to riding like the others, only became truly unhappy when she reached adolescence. There were always cousins and family visiting, always ‘something going on’, their cousin Rosemary recalled, far more so than in other houses that she and her sister visited.15 Apart from endless games that the children themselves thought up and organized, in the summer there were tennis parties and trips to Stratford about once a month. There was the annual ‘Bailey Week’ at the Stow-on-the-Wold home of their four Bailey cousins, Richard, Anthony, Christopher and Timothy, the sons of Aunt Weenie and Colonel Percy Bailey. Bailey Week included cricket, tennis, walks and riding, picnics and dancing. It was like a mini Season, and the girls enjoyed it immensely. Even years later when Pam was a débutante and in the full throes of a London Season she wrote to Sydney of how much she was looking forward to Bailey Week. During the winter there was hunting and coursing, weekends when the house was full of guests for one of David’s shoots, weekly trips to Oxford, where they skated at the rink behind the Regal cinema and browsed the latest books at Blackwell’s, and the ever-popular rainy-day occupation of dressing up and putting on plays.

  Church attendance on Sunday was compulsory for the Mitford children. Although the church at Asthall adjoined their home, the living of that parish was not in David’s gift,16 so he preferred to attend the church at Swinbrook where he could keep the clergyman in check. Here, with his family ranged beside him in a pew he had donated after a significant win on the Grand National in 1918, David watched hawk-like to see that the vicar did not stray from the wonderful liturgy of the prayer book with an extempore petition, or try to slip in a modern composition among the favourite traditional hymns he chose himself (‘We don’t want any of those damn complicated foreign tunes’), and that the sermon was kept to ten minutes, timed to the second by his stop-watch. Invariably, David also read the lesson and took the collection.

  Despite the short sermons and the fascinating tombs of the long-dead Fettiplaces, the girls were bored in church and spent their time trying to make Tom ‘blither’ - giggle. Later, after Tom got his own flat in London and returned for weekends this mainly consisted of emphasizing certain words in prayers or psalms to try to make him react. From what they overheard of their brother’s bachelor life it was considered especially important by his sisters that he be reminded often of the seventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ Often it worked, and Tom giggled helplessly to the delight of the girls. Occasionally, he got his own back. When she was nine Decca had discovered a good wheeze where she would apply to manufacturers for free samples of products. One she particularly enjoyed was Benger’s baby food. ‘It was lovely,’ she recalled. ‘It tasted like Horlicks.’ After a gap of about six months she sent off for another sample, which duly arrived, and then one day there came a loud knock at the door, and ‘that awful Tuddemy [Tom] caused Mabel to call me, saying that the Benger’s man was at the door wanting to see the baby. Total terror! [I had] visions of life imprisonment for fraud . . . ’17

  At Asthall Christmas was kept in the old-fashioned way with a party for the children of the tenants (still recalled by some who attended), and a fancy-dress party for the family and guests. There was a huge dressing-up box, from whose contents everyone had to concoct a character. For many years Pam was the fair Lady Rowena (Ivanhoe’s betrothed), while Nancy, who began as the tragic bride in the mistletoe-bough legend (an incident said to have taken place at nearby Minster Lovell),18 progressed as she grew older to a tramp who used to chase ‘Lady Rowena’ around the house lifting up the skirt of her red dress ‘to see her knickers’.19 The various characters of those long-ago parties are preserved in photographs in the Chatsworth archives: headless men, cavaliers, nurses, pierrots, gypsies and French aristocrats. 20

  Secret societies were much in vogue among the younger children, and Unity and Decca, who called each other Boud (pronounced ‘Bowd’ not Bood), developed their own secret language called Boudledidge in which they became so fluent that they could tell rude stories to each other in front of unsuspecting grown-ups. Another of the societies was the Society of Hons formed by Decca and Debo, later made famous by Nancy in her novels. The two youngest children were keen on chickens - it was how they earned their pocket money - so they originally called their club the Society of Hens and began to call each other ‘Hen’ (and did so until Decca’s death in 1996). The change from Hens to Hons came about, Decca explained, from a poem culled from two sources: one was a Burns poem, in which the line ‘John Anderson, my Jo John’ became ‘My Hon Henderson my Ho Hon’ and the second, ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium’, which spawned the ‘Honnish lines’: ‘Hon Henderson my Ho Hon/By the nine gods she swore/That the great house of Henderson/Should suffer wrong no more’. So the Society of Hens became the Society of Hons, with its carefully written-down set of rules - to break one made one a Counter Hon - and initiation tasks that included frog-hopping across the tennis court, turning two somersaults while running forward and answering a series of general-knowledge questions.21 The H was always pronounced in Hon, as it is in hen. It was never, as later came to be believed, a society for girls entitled to the prefix ‘Honourable’.

  The initial raison d’être of the society was to wreak vengeance on ‘the Horrible Counter Hons’, chief of whom, at the time of founding, was Tom, for some now-forgotten misdemeanour during his school holidays. Decca recalled that Nancy was elected Head of the League against Tom and badges were made, emblazoned with ‘League against Tom. Head: Nancy’.22 But empires crumble, and among Sydney’s effects was also found a small homemade badge in Debo’s childish hand, ‘Leag against Nancy; Head Tom’.23 The Society of Hons even had its own Honnish language; this was not so comprehensive as Boudledidge and borrowed freely from it.

  In her memoir Decca recalled the inevitable squabbles that occur between a group of lively siblings with significant age disparities. The anti-Tom, or anti-Tuddemy (his name in Boudledidge)24 campaign was merely ‘the curious Honnish mirror-world expression of our devotion to him’, she explained. ‘For years he was the only member of the family to be “on Speakers” with all the others.’ In spite of temporary alliances, which were generally formed for the purpose of defeating a governess, Decca wrote that her real childhood enmities were not with her older sisters but with her near contemporaries, Unity, who was three years older, and Debo, who was three years younger. ‘Relations between Unity, Debo and me were uneasy, tinged with mutual resentment,’ she recalled. ‘We were like ill-assorted animals tied to a common tethering post.’25 Elsewhere she would write of the boredom of the endless years of the schoolroom where she felt she had learned nothing. ‘The one advantage was unlimited time to read. The library with Grandfather Redesdale’s collection was for me a heavenly escape . . . it never occurred to me to be happy with my lot.’26

  The only survivor of these three youngest children, Debo, cannot recall any of this smouldering resentment during their childhood, and believes it was something that occurred much later, after Decca grew up and became a rebel. But there is no doubting that Unity, Decca and Debo were all worlds apart in opinion, even at a young age. The squabbles and teasing that went on almost continuously were dealt with summarily by Nanny Blor or Sydney, with the quelling put-down, ‘You are very silly children!’

  Nancy ‘ached’ to learn more than was available to her at home. But though she could wheedle David in most things, he always turned sticky when she brought the subject round to education. He feared that if they went to school his daughters would meet the wrong sort of girls and would be made to play hockey and develop thick calf muscles. Any such outburst as ‘It’s not fair, Tom has been allowed . . .’ usually received the unanswerable reply, ‘Tom’s a boy.’ She never stoppe
d pleading, though, and at last, in 1921, when she was sixteen, Sydney sent her as a boarder to nearby Hatherop Castle School to be ‘finished’. Although it subsequently became a formal educational establishment, Hatherop Castle then took about twenty of ‘the right sort’ of pupils, the nucleus of whom were the children of the family who lived in the Elizabethan manor house that housed the school. Lady Bazely, a widow who later married Commander Cadogan, had one Cadogan daughter and two Bazely daughters. Like the Redesdales she would not have dreamed of sending her daughters to public school, so she set up a small PNEU (Parents’ National Education Union) school and invited the daughters of suitable neighbouring families to attend.

  Nancy thoroughly enjoyed her time at Hatherop. The main curriculum, as well as sport (tennis, netball and swimming), was taken by the formidably able Miss Essex Cholmondeley, whom the girls adored. Mademoiselle Pierrat taught French, and there was an unnamed music teacher who gave them piano lessons. Once a week, on Wednesdays, there was dancing. It was important to young women with a London Season to face that they danced well. They all looked forward to this class and it was especially pleasurable for Nancy because Nanny brought Pam - now sufficiently recovered from polio to dance, although she never shone at the classes - and Diana from Asthall in the outside dickey seat of a Morris Cowley to join in the lessons. In the winter months, in their dancing dresses, the two younger girls arrived blue with cold, despite being wrapped up in David’s old trench coats. Afterwards they travelled home in the same way through the bitter darkness. ‘Strangely enough, we looked forward to these outings,’ Diana recalled. 27 But while she enjoyed the dancing classes Diana shuddered at the idea of being sent away from Asthall to school like Nancy.

  During her time at Hatherop, Nancy was introduced to the Girl Guide movement, and when she returned home suggested to her mother that she form a Swinbrook troop with herself as captain, Pam and Diana as her lieutenants, the members to be recruited from the village girls. Sydney thought it an excellent idea and the good-natured Pam fell in willingly with the scheme. Diana was horrified, which made the project even more attractive to Nancy as a long-running tease on her sister.

  Nancy inspired teasing in her younger siblings to a greater or lesser degree, but she was the Queen of Teasers - ‘a cosmic teaser’, Decca would write. She seemed to know exactly what would irritate her victims most, fastening on any insecurities with devastatingly accurate effect. ‘She once upset us,’ Debo recalled, ‘by saying to Unity, Decca and me, “Do you realize that the middle of your names are nit, sick and bore?”’28 One friend likened her humour to the barbed hook hidden beneath a riot of colourful feathers in a fishing fly. And barbed is an apt word, for there was often a cruel element to her teasing, which caused real distress. For example, while Nancy longed to go to school Diana could not stand the thought of it: she became physically ill at the idea, and was therefore an easy victim of Nancy’s tease that she had overheard their parents discussing to which school they might send Diana. That this might cause her younger sister to lie awake at nights worrying did not concern Nancy. It was ‘a good tease’ and that made it all right. Pam recalled that when they were debs Nancy would find out the name of the young man Pam most fancied and tell her that she had seen him out with another girl.

  Nancy called Debo ‘Nine’ until she married, saying it was her mental age, and she took advantage of Debo’s sentimental nature by writing poems and stories to make her cry. One was about a match: ‘A little houseless match/It has no roof, no thatch/It lies alone it makes no moan/That little houseless match . . .’ So effective was this that eventually Nancy had only to hold up a box of matches for tears to well in Debo’s eyes. Unity caught on to this form of entertainment and invented a story about a Pekinese puppy. Decca retold it in her autobiography: ‘The telephone bell rang. Grandpa got up from his seat and went to answer it. “Lill ill!” he cried . . . Lill was on her deathbed, a victim of consumption. Her dying request was that Grandpa should care for her poor little Pekinese. However, in all the excitement of the funeral the Peke was forgotten, and was found several days later beside his mistress’s grave, dead of starvation and a broken heart.’29 Soon, like Nancy with the box of matches, all the sisters had to do to reduce Debo to floods of tears was to whisper ominously, ‘The telephone bell rang . . .’

  But despite her cruel streak, Nancy’s sheer funniness endeared her to everyone, even when they were the butt of a painful tease, for she went to great lengths to make them laugh. Here, her skill in acting and disguise - learned in countless home-produced plays - came in useful. During the general strike of 1926 Pam helped to run a temporary canteen on the main road to Oxford for strike-breaking truck drivers. According to Decca, Pam was the only one who knew how to make tea and sandwiches, and how to wash up, and she was given the early shift each day because she was an early riser. One morning at 5 a.m., while Pam was alone in the shack waiting for a customer, a filthy tramp lurched in from the half-light and asked for ‘a cup o’ tea, miss’. When Pam started nervously to pour it he nipped round the counter, slipped a grimy arm around her waist and thrust his hideously scarred face into hers, slurring, ‘Can I ’ave a kiss, miss?’ Pam screamed, tried to run, fell over and broke an ankle. The tramp was Nancy. On another occasion, when the Redesdales were selling a house, a potential buyer, a fearsomely plump matron with a pouter chest, whiskers and garlicky breath, came to inspect the house. She was shown round courteously by members of the family until she burst into peals of laughter. Nancy again. During both these incidents the sisters were entirely taken in.

  Sydney was so impressed with the standard of teaching at Hatherop School that she recruited a Miss Hussey, who had been trained in the PNEU programme at Ambleside, as governess. All the younger girls were taught by this system. Far from being a sub-standard education, as some Mitford biographers have suggested, PNEU was and is a highly regarded, reliable and time-tested system of teaching.30 It concentrates on a good basic education but one of its important precepts is to encourage a child to learn through the senses and independent exploration, rather than being spoon-fed with information. Regular, independently marked examinations check the pupil’s progress. If there was a drawback it was that reading was then taught phonetically so that spelling remained a problem for the girls into their teens. And, although this is jumping ahead in the story, the end result of the Asthall schoolroom education speaks for itself. Four of the girls, Nancy, Decca, Diana and Debo, would become bestselling writers and were what would now be regarded as A and B grade pupils, therefore potential university material. Furthermore, educated in such a small isolated group, the children’s personalities were allowed to develop and flower individually, even though they were always inevitably lumped together as ‘the Mitford sisters’. It is clear, with hindsight, that they were gifted children, but one wonders how they might have turned out if they had been educated in the arena of a formal school and taught to a pattern.

  Nevertheless, the standard of teachers in the Asthall schoolroom varied, for not all were PNEU trained, and to one ‘geography’ meant a study of the Holy Land, and tracing the journeys of St Paul in coloured inks.31 Decca claimed to have been bored with the schoolroom from an early age and jealous of the children of literature who had such adventurous lives. Once, it is said, she burst out, ‘Oliver Twist was so lucky to live in a fascinating orphanage.’32

  David had no involvement in his daughters’ schooling. Apart from serving on the local bench and the local county council, David took his seat in the House of Lords regularly and was chairman of the House of Lords’ Drains Committee, which attempted to improve the building’s antiquarian plumbing system. In his spare time he did the things he liked best. He rose at dawn, or before daybreak in winter. The housemaids, scurrying round trying to do their dusting and get the grates cleared and fires lit before the family woke up, would encounter him, in his Paisley dressing-gown, wandering amiably about the house, humming a favourite tune, with his vacuum flask of tea under his a
rm.33 After breakfast, served promptly at eight-thirty for he could not abide latecomers to the table, he dealt with the running of the farms and the estate. Then, in his habitual corduroy breeches, canvas gaiters and comfortable jacket, thumb-stick in hand, he walked his coverts discussing maintenance with Steele, organized shoots, and went hare coursing or fishing. He no longer hunted, but he usually went to the meets to see his daughters off. There was also the annual rite of ‘chubb fuddling’2, hilariously described by Nancy in Love in a Cold Climate.

  The Windrush is a notable trout river that flows gin-clear through the valley past Swinbrook and below Asthall Manor. David owned fishing rights there, just as the fictional ‘Uncle Matthew Radlett’ owned the rights to a similar trout stream, which flowed beneath his fictional Cotswold home, Alconleigh;

  It was one of his favourite possessions. He was an excellent dry-fly fisherman and was never happier, in and out of the fishing season, than when messing about in the river in waders and planning glorious improvements for it . . . He built dams, he dug lashers, he cut the weeds and trimmed the banks, he shot the herons, he hunted the otters, and he restocked with young trout every year. But he had trouble with the coarse fish, especially the chubb, which not only gobble up baby trout but also their food . . . One day he came upon an advertisement . . . ‘Send for the Chubb Fuddler’. The Radletts always said that their father had never learnt to read, but in fact he could read quite well, if really fascinated by his subject, and the proof is that he found the Chubb Fuddler like this all by himself.34

  The chub fuddler came by appointment, and scattered the river with treated groundbait. The fish came surging to the surface in a feeding frenzy, whereupon every able-bodied man in the village, equipped with rakes, landing-nets and wheelbarrows hauled them out to be used in chub pies or as garden manure. The annual visit of the chub fuddler was a real-life event, and surely there is a heartfelt memory behind the incident when Uncle Matthew yells at Fanny, the narrator of Love in a Cold Climate, ‘Put it back at once, you blasted idiot - can’t you see it’s a grayling? Oh my God, women - incompetent.’35