It is precisely because Nancy Mitford was so adept at recycling her own experiences, weaving the often improbable eccentricities of the real-life Mitfords with the slightly mad fictional Radletts, that the lines between fact and fiction became so indistinct, and helps to explain why the Mitfords were destined to become almost a national institution. In reality the Mitford family did not lead a truly exceptional life. They lived in what they regarded as a sort of upper-class poverty, with parents who were apparently unable to show overt affection to their children. ‘Muv’, with her strong sense of the work ethic, her dutiful local charity work and keen interest in the Women’s Institute, appeared preoccupied to her children, but this was probably because she was always busy. ‘Farve’ was an eccentric country squire with loudly expressed jingoistic opinions. Like the fictional Uncle Matthew he ranted about ‘the Hun’ and ‘bloody foreigners’, believed that ‘wogs begin at Calais’, and that it was not necessary for women to be highly educated. All these traits were shared by many others of their class, described by one friend, Frank Pakenham,3 as ‘minor provincial aristocracy - the same as us’.36
What lifted the Mitfords from the ranks of the ordinary among their peers were not their lifestyles but their exceptional personalities: David’s utterances make him appear eccentric by today’s standards but he was essentially a kind man. Sydney’s ‘vagueness and preoccupation’ veiled a deep love and sense of responsibility to her children. Far from drifting about in a haze she was a hard-working chatelaine, in every way involved with village life and always sympathetic to the problems of those less fortunate than her own family. As a result she was highly valued locally. ‘She used to say,’ Debo recalled, ‘that the people who deserved praise, medals or whatever successful people got were the women who brought up families on the tiny amounts of money their husbands earned.’37 But what chiefly made the Mitford family ‘different’ were the girls.
Nancy’s brilliance as a novelist is arguably the primary reason why the Mitford family is still remembered, and is constantly being rediscovered by new readers. But the Mitford girls were first noticed publicly before Nancy’s most famous books were written, when three of them, Diana, Unity and Decca, independently made newspaper headlines. In itself this was shaming for David and Sydney, who believed that the name of a decent woman should appear in the newspapers only twice: first on her marriage, and second in her obituary.
Nancy’s private correspondence, and memoirs and letters written by Diana and Decca, show that despite their constant gales of laughter there was an incipient unhappiness among the Mitford girls as they grew up. This seems to be centred in a discontent with Sydney as a mother: they wanted more from her than she could give, or knew how to provide. Probably they wanted more physical contact, to be praised and told that they were loved, and the lack of this bred in them a basic insecurity, which lurked beneath their exuberant display of self-confidence and high spirits. But, again, Sydney was not unusual in her class and in that era.
Years later Nancy would say, ‘I had the greatest possible respect for her; I liked her company; but I never loved her, for the evident reason that she never loved me. I was never hugged or kissed by her as a small child - indeed, I saw little of her . . . when we first grew up she was very cold and sarky with me. I don’t reproach her for it, people have a perfect right to dislike their children.’38 Decca agreed, claiming that it was her mother’s implacable disapproval of her as a child that hurt most. ‘I actively loathed her as a teenager (especially an older child, after the age of fifteen), and did not respect her. On the contrary I thought she was extremely schoopid [sic: a family spelling] and narrow minded - that is sort of limited minded with hard and fast bounds on her mind. But then, after re-getting to know her [as an adult] I became immensely fond of her and really rather adored her.’39 Decca was fair minded enough to add, ‘She probably didn’t change, as people don’t, especially after middle age. Most likely we did.’ This sounds rather like Mark Twain’s comment that when he was fourteen his father was so ignorant that he could hardly bear to be near him. ‘But when I got to twenty-one I was astonished at how much he had learned in only seven years.’ Diana, too, felt this childhood estrangement from her mother, though Debo never did, perhaps because as the last child left at home she received the full share of attention from both parents.
Sydney’s actions and reactions, as her daughters made their own adult lives, show that far from being uninvolved she was deeply loving. Children sometimes appear to believe that parents have an inbuilt guide to perfect parenting and that an inability to deliver what they want or need is a deliberate act of neglect. But parenting is a hit-and-miss affair, depending on many ingredients: the age of the parents, the relationship between them, the behaviour of their own parents towards them and their reaction to it, and also the demeanour of the child. Parents, too, apparently, often have an inbuilt confidence that their children, given the same upbringing they themselves received, will grow up with the same values and beliefs. But there is no magic formula to good parenting and parents get only one crack at it with each child. They cannot rehearse and go back, learning from past mistakes if they get it wrong. Invariably, too, children grow up with a ragbag of selective memories.
In 1921 Sydney took the children to Dieppe for the summer, renting Aunt Natty’s house there. The children adored it and were so busy with seaside activities that they hardly noticed two major family tragedies that traumatized the grown-ups. One day Sydney received a telegram advising that Natty’s only son, Bill, had shot himself because of his debts. He had been an addicted gambler and had been bailed out several times by his brother-in-law, Winston Churchill. This time he felt he could no longer carry on and it fell to Sydney to break the dreadful news of his suicide to his mother, who was staying near by. A pall of sadness hung over the holiday but the children, it seems, were not aware of it. Decades later Sydney told Decca how Natty’s daughter Nellie, then in her early twenties and unmarried, had once come to her in Dieppe in deep despair and begged for the loan of eight pounds. It was a gambling debt, she said, a debt of honour and must be paid. ‘Muv went straight to Aunty Natty,’ Decca recalled disapprovingly. The debt was honoured, ‘and Nellie was bitterly punished. Muv told me this, but simply couldn’t see what a vile thing it was to have done. I guess it’s that awful disapproving quality that I always hated about her.’40 Decca was four at the time of Bill’s death, and probably seven when Nellie begged Sydney for help. In writing as she did many years later, Decca made no connection between the two incidents.
The other bad news received on that holiday concerned Sydney’s father, Tap. He was in Spanish Morocco at Algeciras on holiday when he died suddenly. He had been a former member of the parliamentary committee on Gibraltar, so it was deemed appropriate that he should be buried there with full naval honours. His estate was just under £60,000, almost twice what Bertie Redesdale had left, and Sydney inherited just under a quarter of it, including a 19 per cent share in the Lady.41
4
ROARING TWENTIES (1922-9)
In a sense, Nancy’s seventeenth birthday in November 1921 was a watershed in the life of the family. She was the first to leave the nest, and her flight heralded the beginning of the end of an era of comfortable and inconspicuous family life. Although it would take another fifteen years to reach a nadir, change took place inexorably as, one by one, the girls reached adulthood and went out into the world.
But this was still in the future when Nancy set out on a school trip with immense excitement. A friend of hers, Marjorie Murray, attended a school in Queen’s Gate, whose headmistress had arranged to take a group of four girls on a cultural tour to France and Italy. Europe had only recently returned to some semblance of normality after the 1914-18 war, and somehow Nancy contrived to be in the party. It was her first experience of being free of the family and she found it intoxicating.
Her letters home are full of enthusiastic superlatives: Paris was ‘heavenly . . . we don’t want to lea
ve . . . Why doesn’t one always live in hotels? It is so lovely . . .’ Pisa was also ‘too heavenly . . . the buildings . . . so white in the middle of such green grass’, and Florence ‘too lovely, too romantic . . . quite beyond description . . . last night we went for a walk on the river and a man with a guitar and a girl with a heavenly voice serenaded us. I gave them two lire . . . and they went on for hours. It was too delicious . . .’ The art galleries were beyond words: ‘How I love the pictures. I had no idea I was so fond of pictures . . . if only I had a room of my own I would make it a regular picture gallery . . . how shall I tear myself away? Thank you so much for sending me. I have never been so happy in my life before, in spite of minor incidents such as fleas . . .’ The colours in Florence were ‘marvellous’ and ‘the blue sky is heavenly. I can’t like Venice as much as this.’1 But she loved Venice too, ‘quite heavenly . . . in a quite different way to Florence. Here it is more the place that one likes, there it is the things, statues, pictures and buildings . . .’
To be sure, everything was not entirely perfect. Her homemade clothes made her feel conspicuous beside her more smartly dressed companions; she had less spending money than they did, and while she was allowed to wear her hair up, David’s decree that she might not wear make-up rankled: ‘both [Jean] and Marjorie powder their noses the whole time. I wish I could. I’m sure for travelling one ought.’2 But it was the sort of trip Nancy had longed for, and although she did her best to appear a femme du monde in her letters to her parents, tales of juvenile pranks nudge the accounts of visits to art galleries, boat excursions and firework displays. In one she describes how a girl jumped on another’s bed and burst the hot-water bottle, making ‘such a mess! We “ragged in the dorm” violently after that and an old lady came along and . . . that rather shut us up!’ On another she tells of how she met and discussed Ruskin with a nice ‘old man’ she met in the hotel restaurant and to whom she had ‘talked for ages . . . The others say he isn’t old, but he is really, quite 45.’3
When Nancy returned from the trip, her head filled with images of terracotta-roofed towns baking in hot sunshine, of flowers and colour, and blue waters, life for her would never be the same again. She could not see how she would ever afford to realize her dream of European travel, and Asthall seemed excruciatingly parochial: Pam was wrapped up in her love of the country, Diana - her quick intelligence already disappointed by an inadequate curriculum - was bored by the three younger sisters’ eternal squabbling and giggling in their private languages, playing with their animals, or re-enacting their fantasy of being kidnapped by white slavers. That game went on for years: all respectable young women were warned constantly until the beginning of the Second World War never to speak to strangers, ‘unless they are in uniform’, for fear of ending up in a South American house of ill-repute. The younger Mitford girls rather fancied the idea, especially Unity who went out of her way to attract and appeal to any lurking white slavers.
The younger children were quick to realize when they were being patronized by Nancy, and although they loved the elder sisters - especially the jokes they told, which made them all roar with laughter - their hero-worship was patchy. ‘Nancy was too sharp-tongued and sarcastic to be anyone’s Favourite Sister for long,’ Decca noted. ‘She might suddenly turn her penetrating emerald eyes in one’s direction and say, “Run along up to the school-room; we’ve had quite enough of you.” Or, if one had taken particular trouble to do one’s hair in ringlets, she was apt to remark, “You look like the eldest and ugliest of the Brontë sisters today.”’4 Pam, with what they regarded as her own brand of bucolic bliss - she loved gardening, animal husbandry and cooking - although innately kind and with no trace of cruelty in her humour (she had been the butt of Nancy’s all her life), was almost as vague as Sydney, and not really suitable as a role model. But Diana, who resembled ‘a Vogue cover artist’s conception of the goddess of the chase’, although bored and rebellious, was unfailingly kind to them, laughing at their jokes, pushing them forward to perform in Boudledidge to visitors, helping them with French, piano practice and riding. She was definitely Favourite Sister material. It was she who patiently encouraged Decca, who never took to horses, as she bumped inexpertly round a paddock on her little pony Joey. ‘Do try to hang on this time, darling,’ Diana would tell her, as she picked her sister off the muddy ground for the umpteenth time. ‘You know how cross Muv will be if you break your arm again.’ It was Decca’s proud boast to have had two broken arms before the age of ten, and - even better - an unusual bone-setting job had made her double-jointed in one elbow, which she delighted in demonstrating. Diana was also a Favourite Cousin, for that year - 1921 - Randolph Churchill visited Asthall and fell in love with her: she so resembled his mother, with her blonde elegance, beautiful features and huge sapphire-blue eyes, and no matter which way she turned her head it was a joy.5
Nancy always had a willing audience in her envious younger siblings for her stories about her trip, and she had her coming out dance to organize and look forward to. This did not quite live up to her imaginings for her dance programme of waltzes, polkas, foxtrots, one-steps and cotillions was filled with the names of family friends and kinsmen, rather than handsome dark-haired prospective lovers. Later she parodied the occasion mercilessly in The Pursuit of Love, describing the run-up to the ball where every man they knew was pressed into service as a dancing partner, ‘elderly cousins and uncles who had been for many years forgotten’ were ‘recalled from oblivion and urged to materialize’. The longed-for magical evening came at last. Tall, with a fashionably slim, boyish figure, her dark curly hair worn up, for her request to have it ‘shingled’ had been vetoed by both parents, Nancy wore a straight dress with silver bugle beads, very à la mode:
This then is a ball. This is life, what we have been waiting for all these years, here we are and here it is, a ball, actually going on now, actually in progress round us. How extraordinary it feels, such unreality, like a dream. But, alas, so utterly different from what one had imagined and expected . . . the women so frowsty . . . but above all the men, either so old or so ugly. And when they ask one to dance . . . it is not at all like floating away into a delicious cloud, pressed by a manly arm to a manly bosom, but stumble, stumble, kick, kick ...6
However, at the time Nancy loved it, just as she enjoyed being a débutante yet denigrated it in the same manner in her novels. This early-twenties era was excitingly different, and not just to Nancy. The post-war generation of young people (dubbed Bright Young Things or BYTs) erupted into Society determined to change the world for the better now that the war to end all wars was over. Their background was upper class, of course, but talented gatecrashers, working-class émigrés like Noël Coward, were not unwelcome. The aim was pleasure, set against a background of ‘larks’ and jazz music played on wind-up gramophones with trumpet amplifiers, and shameless new dances like the ‘Black Bottom’, and songs like ‘I Love my Chili Bom Bom’ or ‘Squeeze up Lady Lettey’. Girls shingled their hair, wore slave bangles and cloche hats, and dressed in shapeless, waistless dresses designed to ‘move’ across an uncorseted body and display the lower legs, clad in silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. They smoked cigarettes in long holders and drank cocktails with names like ‘Horse’s Neck’. Their elders, the Edwardian generation who had fought a world war, and whose mores were still Victorian, were satisfyingly shocked.
Nancy’s letters sparkle with accounts of dances and parties, shoots and hunt balls which entailed ‘staying over’; and her hosts would provide mounts so that she could hunt, which she loved.7 Although she was not, in her first Season of 1923, in the thick of Society, she was instantly popular, which was a triumph for her, though the edge was often taken off her enjoyment by her wardrobe. At home her new clothes had seemed so grown-up and glamorous, but compared with those of her fellow-débutantes she felt they looked what they were: homemade. Her allowance was £125 a year,8 out of which she had to clothe herself and pay all incidentals such as laundry, hair
dressing, books, family presents for birthdays and Christmas, tips to the staff when she visited country houses, trains and taxi fares. Although £125 would have been a significant sum to a working-class man or woman - it was almost what Sydney paid the governesses’ for a year’s work, for example, and seven pounds more than she paid the Stobies, her cook and handyman9 - it would not have gone far in the life Nancy led.
Her introduction to different circles from the county set of her childhood began with her first dance: a distant cousin, Kathleen Thynne,10 had written to Sydney to suggest she invite her brother, Lord Henry Weymouth. Nancy went on seeing him afterwards as a casual friend. He was ‘on the fringe’ of a clever Bohemian group at Oxford and he introduced her to some of these men. Another important source of introductions was Nina Seafield, with whom Nancy spent some months in Scotland.11 Nina introduced Nancy to her cousin, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who introduced her to his friends John Sutro, Robert Byron, Harold Acton and Brian Howard, who regarded Nancy’s wit as ‘pyrotechnical’. They comprised a group of Oxford aesthetes who were star players in what is now known as the Brideshead generation; Brian Howard was, of course, the model for Anthony Blanche, the leading character in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It has often been stated, incorrectly, that Nancy’s initiation into this group ‘whose talent and intelligence were often veiled by flippancy’,12 was effected through Tom at Oxford, but he was only fourteen and still at Eton when Nancy made her début in Society and gathered her own circle of friends. She impressed these young men, many of whom were homosexual, with her unusual manner of speaking, her brilliantly irreverent and exuberant witticisms and her sense of the absurd. She had three hectic Seasons, but as she became increasingly involved with the Brideshead set, the attraction of hunt balls and dances palled. She began to see such events through their eyes, and found them increasingly ‘boring’.
The Mitford Girls Page 7
