The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  While David tolerated such teasing - and far more - with remarkable equanimity, he also began to spend an increasing amount of time away from home at his London club, the Marlborough, since the house at Rutland Gate had been let. He had given up his committee work at the Lords to oversee the building of Swinbrook but although he was less than interested in politics he took his seat in the upper house and even, occasionally, got up to speak, especially when the subject under discussion touched a nerve. Such an occasion occurred when the Lords debated whether to allow peeresses in their own right to sit in the upper house. David opposed the bill and Nancy maintained that his reason was a practical one. There was only one lavatory close to the chamber, and David thought that if women were allowed to attend the upper house they might want to use it. (If only we could so clearly see the basis of all our legislation.) In recess, and during the Season, he went shooting in Scotland, leaving the family to settle in at Swinbrook.

  The children congregated on the second floor, where could be found the schoolroom, nursery and living quarters for the governesses and Nanny, all painted in ‘Redesdale blue’, the colour for the indoor servants’ uniforms. The rooms were generous and separated from the rest of the house, just as the servants’ quarters were, by a green baize door. The schoolroom, described by Decca as ‘large and airy’ with bay windows, had a coal fire and chintz furniture. It does not sound unwelcoming but it lacked the cosy familiarity of beloved Asthall. The younger girls took to sitting in the warmest place they could find: the linen cupboard through which ran some hot-water pipes. Squeezed in among heaps of crisply ironed linen sheets and pillowcases, towels and bath mats, neatly stacked on slatted racks, they spent hours hatching plans and working out new rules for their ‘Hons Society’. 37

  Many years later Decca would recall the cupboard’s ‘distinctive stuffy smell and enchanting promise of complete privacy from the grown-ups’. Decca and Unity, the two Bouds, spoke fluent Boudledidge, which the other sisters understood well enough to know what they were talking about. The older ones were allowed to join them there for giggles, Mitford jokes, stories and teasing. Here, Nancy produced poems and stories to entertain them. A typical one impersonated the governess in residence Miss Broadmoor’s elocution, a tortured diction that passed for refined (‘refained’) speech: ‘Ay huff a löft, and öft/as ay lay on may ayderdown so soft/(tossing from sade to sade with may nasty cöff)/ay ayther think of the loft/, or of the w-h-h-h-heat in the tröff of the löf’, though some might say this was a bit rich coming from someone who pronounced ‘lost’ and ‘gone’ as ‘lorst’ and ‘gorn’. Nancy immortalized the linen closet as ‘the Hons Cupboard’, but it was not, as is generally believed, a part of her own childhood, and even Unity was only allowed in there occasionally. The Swinbrook linen cupboard belonged to Decca and Debo, the two Hons. There was another Hons Cupboard, a disused bread oven in the wall of Old Mill Cottage at High Wycombe, just large enough to hold three small children (Unity was always too large for that one), but the one Nancy described in her novels is that at Swinbrook House.

  Miss Broadmoor was not the only governess to come in for ‘attention’, for governesses came and went with tedious regularity, which the children liked to claim was due to their relentless naughtiness. A few lasted only a school term or two, but ten stayed for a year or more between 1910 and 1936. The best of these, Diana feels, were Miss Mirams and Miss Hussey (who was called variously by the children Steegson or Whitey) and who tutored them for two separate periods of several years. Like Miss Mirams, Miss Hussey had been trained at Ambleside to teach the PNEU system mentioned earlier, and was recruited by Sydney in 1922. One of her ambitions was to travel to India and in early 1925 she heard of a family who needed a governess to go there with them. ‘So of course she had to take it,’ said Diana.38 Miss Hussey returned to Swinbrook in 1931 to teach Decca and Debo, and stayed this time for just over two years. She thought that in the intervening years some of the governesses had let the girls down badly, but that their English was better than hers.

  In Hons and Rebels it was ‘Miss Whitey’ who was the hapless governess made famous for having been subjected to a prank. Decca records how Unity’s pet snake was left ‘wrapped around the lavatory chain’ so that the unwary woman, having locked the door of the WC, suddenly spotted the snake, fainted and had to be rescued with crowbars. This incident, however, is open to considerable doubt, for although something of the sort occurred, the snake was not Unity’s but Diana’s (‘It was just a little grass snake; I bought it at Harrods’), and the governess at the time of the alleged incident was Miss Bedell, not ‘Miss Whitey’. Diana recalls the incident less dramatically than Decca. It occurred during that dreadful summer at Bucks Mill when nothing of any note happened. On the day in question, ‘Nanny came in and said to me, “Diana, your snake has escaped and is lying in the corner of the lavatory.”’ Ordered to go and rescue it before it got out, ‘I put it out of doors, set it free,’ Diana recalled. Perhaps it took only a small leap of imagination from reality to the amusing incident recorded by Decca; perhaps the children plotted such a scenario to pass the time.39 It was some years later that Unity bought Enid, her snake, which she took to débutante dances with her. ‘In any case the governesses were all used to our various pets and wouldn’t have been frightened by a little grass snake,’ Diana said. The anecdote would hardly bear refuting, she said, were it not for that the story in Decca’s book was widely believed, and later used by the writer and literary critic Rebecca West as evidence of Unity’s ‘cruelty’.40

  Then there was Miss Bunting, the governess who, Decca claimed, taught the two youngest girls the gentle art of shoplifting. Diana bridled at this story, too, doubting its veracity. However, she was not under the aegis of the schoolroom when shoplifting was part of the curriculum. Debo was, and she also recalls the governess, Miss Dell, introducing it - ‘Like to try a little jiggery-pokery, children?’ It was just small things - some postcards, a packet of razor-blades - in a small post office in Devon. ‘My mother found out but thank goodness the shopkeepers didn’t, and Miss Dell disappeared.’41 Another governess taught them the card game Racing Demon, and was liked by the children because she was lax about lessons. ‘We just played Racing Demon the whole time, Debo recalls.’ It seems, when one also recalls the head-banging Nanny, that Sydney’s interview techniques may have been in need of revision.

  Debo, now twelve, felt safe and secure at Swinbrook and never had the urge to flee the nest as her sisters had. Her parents were always there, the dozens of pets and farm animals were considered as important as humans, and there was a nucleus of long-serving staff whom she considered her friends. ‘My best friend was our old groom, Hooper,’ she said. ‘He was the human end of the horses and ponies . . . I adored, and of the stables. One of the jobs Hooper had to do was to drive the eggs in a horse-drawn float from my mother’s chicken farm to the station . . . It was six miles to the station at Shipton-under-Wychwood, and nice and hilly so it took a lovely long time, and I was allowed to drive the horse. A dramatic and strange thing happened on one of these journeys. It was the eleventh of November 1927, nine years after the end of the Great War. Everything stopped for two minutes’ silence then, all traffic and factories . . . Hooper got out his watch and exactly at eleven, he stopped the cart, got down to hold the horse’s head and took off his cap. No sooner had he done this than the old mare swayed and fell dead, I suppose of a heart attack. Since she had been bought out of the Army at the end of the war, having seen service in France, her death during the silence made a great impression on us children.’42

  Diana missed most of these schoolroom excitements. Having served her allotted penance she was permitted to spend time later in the summer of 1927 at Chartwell with the Churchills. Here, in addition to Randolph and Diana Churchill, of whom she was very fond and who had stayed at Asthall on a number of occasions, she was exposed to the company of some interesting fellow guests: Walter Sickert, the artist, and Professor Lindemann,43 one of t
he finest scientific brains of his generation. During the First World War he worked at Farnborough, then in its infancy as an aviation experimental unit. In those days the biggest threat to young airmen was not the enemy but the involuntary spin. No one had been able to work out how to recover from a spin, although one pilot who survived one suggested that pushing the stick forward seemed to have made a difference. This defied logic, so Lindemann set to work and proved mathematically that pushing the stick forward was the correct manoeuvre. No one was keen to test his theory so he learned to fly and tested it himself, at great risk, and subsequently saved many lives.

  At Chartwell over dinner one evening Lindemann put his brain to the onerous task of calculating with a slide rule how much champagne Churchill had consumed during his lifetime (enough to fill a railway carriage, apparently). And it was the German-educated ‘Prof ’, as Diana called him, who, on learning that she was bored, suggested to Diana that she might learn German so that she could read some of the German classics. He was not a man who suffered fools gladly and he must have recognized something unusual in the teenage Diana to bother with her. Coincidentally Tom was in Vienna learning German, so when she returned home she asked David if she, too, might take German lessons. He refused, and when she pointed out that Tom was doing so, she received the inevitable quelling answer, ‘Tom’s a boy!’ She complained that her father could hardly have been more annoyed by her request if she had asked to learn the can-can, seeming to forget that she had already demonstrated that she was not to be trusted when sent abroad to learn a foreign language.

  Tom, beloved of everyone, and especially of David, seems never to have put a foot wrong. He was handsome, bright, talented, charming, and sympathetic with his sisters. He was sometimes accused of arrogance, even by friends, but perhaps it was only the arrogance of youth. Although as a young man in London he was something of a ladies’ man - his various girl-friends thought the world of him - it is known that he had several homosexual relationships at school. What is surprising about this, perhaps, is that he confided in his sisters. On one occasion when he had an Eton friend to stay the house was already full of guests. When Sydney innocently asked Tom if he would mind sharing his room with his friend she couldn’t imagine why the girls doubled up with silent mirth and one by one fled the room.44 On leaving Eton he could not make up his mind whether he should become a musician or a barrister. Little of the real Tom can be gleaned from his letters for he wrote few and they are so brief that one can imagine he counted each word.

  Germany was still crushed by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and had not yet begun the resurgence of the next decade, but Tom fell in love with the country, the land, the culture, the music, the literature. For part of the time he stayed as a paying guest with the family of Janos von Almassy, a Hungarian count he met through a mutual friend, in an ancient Gothic castle called Schloss Bernstein. It had originally been in Hungary but when Tom was there it was considered to be in Austria, as ‘since the war . . . they moved the border a few miles’.45 The family was almost as eccentric as Tom’s own and Janos, a highly intelligent man, was interested in the supernatural and horoscopes. Many evenings were spent in holding séances and casting horoscopes. Later Janos became a close friend of other members of the Mitford family. In the following year Tom decided to study law in Berlin.

  When Diana attended her first ball at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary in the autumn of 1927, Clementine and Diana Churchill stayed at Swinbrook and went to the ball with the Mitfords. Next day Professor Lindemann rang Diana to see how many proposals she had received. It was his little joke, but Diana’s beauty guaranteed that she would be a sensational débutante and, although she was watched extra carefully by Sydney, she took London by storm in the following spring when she was presented to the King and Queen. In a diary entry written many years later, when he was happily married, James Lees-Milne recalled coming across the golden-haired seventeen-year-old Diana sitting on a low wall at Swinbrook: ‘I think she is the most flawlessly beautiful woman I have ever seen; clear creamy complexion, straight nose, deep blue eyes . . . Her figure is so slim. Is spare the word?’46 Not everyone concurred, of course: the journalist Michael Burn, who met her a few years later, thought her loveliness ‘cold’. Diana herself felt that she was less beautiful than her cousin, Clementine Mitford, Uncle Clement’s posthumous daughter.

  Nevertheless, within weeks of making her début in the spring of 1928 Diana had captured a prize, and fallen in love. Bryan Guinness, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the country, proposed and she accepted. Described as ‘a quiet, gentle youth with a vague, almost haphazard, manner, which was utterly beguiling’, Bryan was ‘a writer at heart and was happiest in the company of artists and writers’.47 More than anything this, rather than his fortune, appealed to Diana. Sydney was appalled. ‘How old is he?’ she asked her daughter. On being told he was twenty-two her verdict was that they must wait two years to announce their engagement, although later she relented and reduced the waiting period to a year.

  Meanwhile the couple considered themselves secretly engaged and Diana went on the offensive - quietly. Decca later described her sister’s method of obtaining her objective: it was to ‘pine away’ and she sulked around the house for months looking pale and interesting. It was, Decca wrote,

  perhaps the only [method] that could have succeeded short of elopement . . . She stayed in her bedroom a great deal of the time, and came down to the drawing room only to sit in stubborn silence, looking vacantly out of the window. This strategy for getting one’s own way was not entirely unknown to us. Some years earlier Debo had successfully pined away for a Pekinese, causing suspension of an ironclad family rule that no one under the age of ten could own a dog . . . As prisoners confined to their cells manage to communicate to each other their restless, intolerable anxieties, creating the conditions for a mass riot, Diana managed to communicate boredom.

  The sisters were wholeheartedly with Diana and the forbidden romance with ‘Bry-inn’48 and against the predictable attitude of their parents. But Diana was only just eighteen; a few years earlier, at twenty, Nancy had caused furious family rows by cutting her hair short without permission. That a young American aviatrix had shown that a woman could perform feats previously regarded as a wholly male preserve cut no ice with David and Sydney. Amelia Earhart had just flown the Atlantic in twenty-eight hours and spent the end of the Season in London being escorted by the great and the good. But just as Tom was ‘a boy’, Earhart was ‘an American’ so it didn’t count.

  During Diana’s long sulk Decca fell ill, and was not convinced by Sydney’s airy pronouncement that she had simply eaten too much breakfast. She waited until her mother went out to see to the chickens and telephoned Dr Cheatle in Burford, asking him politely if he would ‘mind coming over to take out my appendix’. An investigation showed an appendectomy to be appropriate and it was duly carried out in the nursery, with everything eerily swathed in white sheets. David was summoned from the closing room to supervise while Decca was anaesthetized by chloroform-soaked handkerchief. Dr Cheatle gave his patient the offending organ in a jar of alcohol and the object became one of fascination for Debo. ‘Oh, you are so lucky to have a dear little appendix in a bottle,’ she cried longingly. Decca sold it to her for a pound, but soon afterwards the appendix began to smell and had to be washed down the loo by Nanny.49

  By the time Decca had recovered, several important things had occurred in the family. Pam had become engaged to Oliver Watney, known as ‘Togo’. He was a member of the Watney brewing family who were neighbours of the Redesdales so he was acceptable to David, though not unreservedly for poor Togo suffered from chronic tuberculosis, for which there was then no cure. He apparently proposed to Pam under pressure from his father and when she accepted he gave her a ring that was a replica of ‘King Alfred’s jewel’ in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Found in Athelney in 1693 the original is made of translucent enamel set in beaten gold. Nancy commented cruelly that it ‘
looked like a chicken’s mess’, which must have taken away Pam’s joy in it. And Nancy must have known this for she used the incident in Pursuit of Love:

  Linda, whose disagreeableness at this time knew no bounds, said that it simply looked like a chicken’s mess. ‘Same shape, same size, same colour. Not my idea of a jewel.’

  ‘I think it’s lovely,’ said Aunt Sadie, but Linda’s words had left their sting all the same ...50

  Following the death of his father later that year Togo went on an extended cruise for his health, during which his mother talked him out of the engagement. When he returned he called to tell Pam, who was unconcerned for she, too, had had second thoughts. The Redesdales were furious with Togo, but no harm was done. The requisite announcement was placed in The Times - ‘The marriage between . . . will not now take place’ - and all the wedding presents had to be returned, mostly by Tom, ‘driving round London in his little car’.51 Years later Pam was asked what had become of the chicken’s mess. ‘I gave it to Bobo.’ ‘And what did Bobo do with it?’ ‘Oh, she gave it to Hitler.’52

  Next Nancy announced that she was unofficially engaged to arch-sewer Hamish St Clair Erskine who was four years younger than she, and thoroughly unsuitable in various ways, not least of which that he was an obvious (though unadmitted) homosexual. A friend described him as having ‘the most enchanting looks though not strictly handsome, mischievous eyes, slanting eyebrows. He was slight of build, well dressed, gay as gay, always, snobbish however, and terribly conscious of his nobility . . . he loved being admired and he was . . . shallowly sophisticated, lithe of mind [and] a smart society figure.’53 He was also intensely amusing and could make his friends laugh until tears ran down their faces, which was his chief asset as far as Nancy was concerned. David was livid, and so was Hamish’s father, the Earl of Rosslyn. The two men conspired together to break up the relationship, but the parents were not the only ones who frowned on it. Tom had enjoyed a brief homosexual relationship with Hamish at Eton and although he had now transferred his sexual attentions to women, his experience of Hamish enabled him to see what Nancy could not: that Hamish would never return her romantic devotion and that he was not marriage material.