The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  Undoubtedly Unity’s anti-parent stance attracted Decca just when she wanted to expand her personal horizons beyond Swinbrook with its apparently petty restrictions to which she would be subject for ‘years and years’, stretching far off into the future, until that happy day when she finally grew up and could run away. She described Unity as ‘a huge bright glittering personality, [she had] a sort of huge boldness and funniness and generosity - a unique character that is hard to explain to anybody who did not know her in those days. She was tremendous fun to be with. She wasn’t at all interested in politics [then] and she would go off into a dream world . . . of Blake, Edgar Allan Poe and Hieronymus Bosch . . . Oddly enough it was I who first became interested in Politics.’14

  In fact Decca became so interested in what she read in the newspapers that she even ‘grudgingly’ spared some money from her running-away account to buy leftist books and pamphlets, and pro-pacifist literature. But the defining moment of her burgeoning political interest came when she read a book by Beverly Nichols. Cry Havoc detailed the worst horrors of the First World War and was an eloquent plea for world disarmament. It appealed strongly to sections of a generation growing up in a world where the existing political systems seemed not to be working, and it gave Decca a focus for what were then no more than rags of political ideas. As she read about the growing social and fiscal problems across Europe she began to define her personal ideology, and a new element was added to her running-away plans. She realized that by instinct she was a socialist, and began to understand why she wanted to run away, what she was running away for and from. What she did not yet know was where she was running to. However, ‘I felt as though I had suddenly stumbled on the solution to a vast puzzle which I had clumsily been trying to solve for years,’ she wrote. Her first reaction was to appeal to Nancy and her pro-socialist friends, but she was disappointed in their reaction: they were thinkers not activists. Moreover, they were too busy attending parties every night to take seriously what Decca began to call ‘the class struggle’.

  Unity spent just over a year boarding at St Margaret’s, Bushey (SMB, as it is known to its pupils) in Nicholson’s house. The school was chosen presumably because her first cousins Robin and Ann Farrer, and Rosemary and Clementine Mitford were also there, so she was unlikely to be lonely. But she was remorselessly naughty and was expelled just before Christmas 1930, or rather her mother was invited to remove her - a nice point of distinction to which Sydney adhered stoically - because of her unsettling influence on the other girls. In later years Unity liked to claim that the reason for her expulsion was a single act, on Speech Day when she had to read aloud a quotation that included the line, ‘A garden is a lovesome thing God wot . . .’ to which she claimed she added the word ‘rot’. However, her biographer discovered that this joke was used throughout the school before Unity’s expulsion and one of Unity’s friends at St Margaret’s stated, ‘What she got the sack for was a fine disregard of the rules of the school.’15 Later, when Unity became infamous, pupils at St Margaret’s were forbidden to mention her name and she was, as it were, expunged from the school records. Strangely, Unity was upset at her expulsion: even years later she told new friends how sad it had made her.

  The Farrer girls who were at school with Unity were daughters of Aunt Joan, the third of David’s four sisters. Joan had married Major Denis Farrer, a distant Redesdale kinsman who had been David’s companion during his long-ago attempt at tea-planting in Ceylon. The Farrers had five children but it was the three girls who played a major part in the lives of the Mitford sisters. The eldest, Barbara, was the same age as Pam, while Ann and Joan (called Robin by her parents) were contemporaries of Unity and Decca. Major Farrer and David often shot together and there were exchange visits between Asthall and the Farrer home, Brayfield, on the Bedfordshire-Buckinghamshire border. Miss Hussey took some of the girls to Brayfield on several occasions, so it is something of a surprise to read in a letter between Decca and Ann that they ‘never really met’ until 1930 when Ann and Robin were invited to Swinbrook for the summer holidays.16 Ann became known as ‘Idden’ and Robin as ‘Rudbin’ (their names in Boudledidge),4 but after seeing Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest in Oxford, Idden and Decca took to calling each other ‘Sister’ in correspondence. 17 They became instant best friends, and Idden was Decca’s first real confidante outside her immediate family.18

  Two or three times they walked together to Chipping Norton - ten miles each way - to a shop where they could buy home-made sausage rolls (strictly forbidden under Sydney’s Mosaic regimen) and fizzy lemonade (also forbidden at Swinbrook). It was to Idden that Decca revealed her concern about the have-nots in society. In return Idden told Decca about their Romilly cousins. The Mitford children had never met Esmond and Giles Romilly. Sydney disapproved of their mother, Nellie, because of her reputation and feckless nature, although Nellie was David’s first cousin, and sister to Clementine Churchill. The two boys were not much welcome at the Farrers’ home at Brayfield either, and they spent most of their summer and Christmas holidays at Chartwell with the Churchills. The Farrers had met them at Chartwell a couple of times and it seemed that no matter how naughty the Mitfords were, and it was inevitable that bright children thrown so much on their own devices would be mischievous, Esmond outdid them by miles. He held the head of Mary Churchill19 under water until she conceded that there was no God, he smoked in his bedroom, and - a cardinal sin - he dared to appear once at dinner without a black tie.20

  Although, according to Decca, it was her interest in politics that stimulated Unity’s, the surviving evidence tends to show that Unity, three years older than Decca, had already become interested in pseudo-Fascist literature in 1930 a year or so before Decca’s first political stirrings. Unity’s biographer, David Pryce-Jones, came across a book she had owned. Autographed by her and dated 1930, it was a copy of Jew Süss, the novel by Leon Feuchtwanger about an eighteenth-century Jewish financier-adventurer. Because of its stereotypical Jewish characters, it was used in Germany to fuel and unify disparate elements of anti-Semitism. Pryce-Jones, whose father had been a Swinbrook Sewer at roughly the same time that Unity would have been reading this book, thought it an unusual choice of reading matter for a fifteen-year-old girl21 and it set him on a course of research that led to the only biography written about Unity, whom he described enigmatically as ‘a comet, blazing a trail too erratic to be charted’.22

  But no matter which of the two came to politics first, it was typical that although Unity and Decca became emotionally close to each other at this time, they opposed each other ideologically. Decca was toying then with socialism before becoming, as Farve would have put it, ‘a Bolshie’, and Unity had an initial slight interest in Fascism. ‘When Boud became a fascist I declared myself a Communist . . . thus by the time she was eighteen and I was fifteen we had chosen opposite sides in the conflict of the day’ was how Decca put it.23 As they egged each other on and their interest grew, a line was drawn down the centre of the DFD, and it became a miniature battleground of contradictory political fervour with the respective literature of each side crowding every surface, posters of Hitler and Lenin adorning opposite walls, swastikas, hammers and sickles scratched into the glass of the windows.

  Yet if Decca was truly unhappy, as she claims to have been, it was not obvious to her family. Her letters sparkle, almost as much as Nancy’s, with fun and enjoyment of her life, especially her friendship with Idden, and her beloved pets, the spaniel, Spanner, and Miranda, who loved chocolate. Her relationship with her father is nowhere better illustrated than by letters she wrote to him in 1932 from holiday on the Isle of Wight containing a series of spoof newspaper articles about him, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings. David took these letters in great good humour, but apart from the closeness of Decca’s relationship with her father these ‘articles’ also showed a basic understanding of the journalism for which in later life she would become renowned:

  Peer Had up for Murder - and Rightly />
  Lord ‘Sheepbrain’ Redesdale, well known to all committee frequenters such as the skating committee . . . was had up yesterday for assaulting and injuring Mr Adolphus Jones who afterwards died of shock.

  He is to be hung tomorrow as soon as possible [inset: ‘his daughter’s remarkable spaniel who has got mange’]. The Hon. Nancy Mitford, another daughter, whose engagement to P. Rodd was announced in these columns, is being married in the prison chapel so that her father can give her away before the hanging ...24

  One illustration shows David, dressed in a suit decorated with arrows with a rope around his neck, escorting Nancy, dressed in flowing bridal clothes, to the altar. Her next letter contained a home-made four-page newspaper:

  Man with Glaring Eyes Caught

  Lord Redesdale is to be tried in the House of Lords for the unnecessary murder of Miss Belle Bathe, a bathing Belle of Totland Bay.

  Lord Redesdale was interviewed today by our special correspondent. ‘I was imagining myself in a skating rink’ he [said] . . . when this damn girl came up and tried to hire out a towel. So I unfortunately trampled her underfoot with my skates.’ Lady Redesdale, when interviewed, merely replied, ‘Ohrrr, poor [darling]’, so we expect she will be tried for being an accessory after the fact.

  Miss Jessica Mitford was also interviewed by our correspondent. ‘I always expected something of the sort’, she said. ‘You see he really is a subhuman and a pathetic old throw-back, so what was one to expect?’ We also learn that Lord Redesdale is a great admirer of Hitler, ‘The fellow has fair hair. Really almost yellow’ he told our correspondent, ‘so of course I admire him.’ Lord Redesdale has narrowly escaped arrest for cruelty to children; loud shrieks have often been heard to come from his house . . .

  [Headline]: Lord Redesdale hanged - last words: ‘Take care of my skates ...’25

  The letters to David, which accompany these extracts, are alive with love and laughter, and appear to show a child confident in her father’s affection. They are not in any sense demonstrative of an unhappy child. However, Decca did record that Sydney withheld her pocket money on one occasion when she referred to her father as ‘a feudal remnant’. ‘Little D, you are not to call Farve a remnant!’ Sydney ordered. In fact, it was only one of countless names that all the children bestowed upon their parents and which were generally taken with good humour. Sydney became ‘the poor old female’, shortened to TPOF, and ‘the fem’ in conversation, while David was ‘the poor old male’, TPOM, and often ‘the poor old sub-human’. Letters are scattered with references to the parents as ‘the birds’ and ‘the nesting ones’. No one escaped a nickname in the Mitford household. 26

  Unity came out in the spring of 1932 and, economically, Sydney brought out Rudbin at the same time, irritated because David’s sister Joan seemed unprepared to ‘do anything’ to launch her daughters into Society. A fellow débutante recalled that as she and Unity were both nearly six feet tall they were made to bring up the rear of the procession. 27 Dressed in white and with the regulation ostrich feathers in their hair, they felt ridiculous and rebellious, which created an instant bond of friendship. Invited to stay at Swinbrook, Unity’s new friend was surprised and impressed by the sophisticated and free manner in which the Mitfords talked about their parents. Unity, she said, was quite unlike anyone else, but it was her behaviour rather than her character that was different. Her clothes were outlandish and she brightened up the requisite débutante wardrobe approved by Sydney by adding dramatic flourishes such as velvet capes and flashy jewellery hired from a theatrical costumier.

  Where Nancy enjoyed teasing, Unity liked to shock, though in her teenage years her manner of shocking people was often startling or funny rather than truly shocking. As a débutante she drew attention to herself by taking her pet white rat Ratular to dances and even to a Palace garden party. She would sit stroking it, almost daring young men to speak to her. Sometimes Ratular was left at home in favour of her grass snake, Enid, who performed as an unusual neck ornament. When either of these pets escaped - which was whenever Unity felt that things needed to be livened up - there was a huge amount of shrieking and commotion. Unity was not unattractive; someone said that looking at her was like looking at Diana in a slightly distorted mirror, and she had her own little court of admirers, but no one ‘stuck’. She was too unusual: all photographs of her show her with a sullen expression, but friends say she smiled and laughed a great deal. ‘She was fun,’ one said. ‘She used to giggle and giggle, but in photographs she looks severe because Diana had said that smiling wrinkled the skin, so she put on her photography face.’28

  When she was presented in May she discovered some Buckingham Palace writing-paper in a waiting room and immediately pocketed it to use as ‘jokey’ writing-paper for thank-you notes. Sydney was aghast, but Unity needed to stand out, to draw attention to herself, to be accounted as someone in her own right, not simply one of the middle Mitford girls. She felt awkward about her appearance, and had endured a full complement of sisterly taunts about her size, but her character and behaviour made her what Decca called a sui generis personality. Her originality made a deep impression on many who were introduced to her then for the first time. Diana’s neighbour, Dora Carrington, for example, met her in the summer before she came out while the Mitfords were visiting Biddesden, home of Diana and Bryan. ‘Dear Lytton,’ Carrington wrote afterwards, ‘I went with Julian to lunch with Diana today. There found three sisters and Mama Redesdale. The little sisters were astonishingly beautiful and another of sixteen (Unity) very marvellous or Grecian. I thought the mother was remarkable, very sensible and no upper class graces . . . the little sister [Debo] was a great botanist and won me by her high spirits and charm . . .’29

  Despite the seemingly ceaseless round of parties, and the trips to Venice, Greece and Turkey that Diana and Bryan made, Bryan must have found time to work for in 1930 he was admitted to the bar. To his disappointment he was offered few briefs and only discovered the reason for this by accident: the clerk considered that others in the chambers were in greater need of the three-guinea fee than Bryan. After that he more or less gave up. In 1931 the couple moved from Buckingham Street to 96 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, overlooking the river. Formerly it had been the house of the artist James McNeill Whistler, and was two doors away from the old London home of Diana’s grandparents, where David had been born. Some time earlier Bryan had purchased Biddesden, a Queen Anne house in the baroque style, set in rolling chalk downland near Andover in north Hampshire. It was a comfortable old property of mellowed red bricks with stone coining, originally built for General Webb, one of Marlborough’s generals. A portrait of the first owner on his battle-charger hung, two storeys high, in the entrance hall. It went with the house and Diana was warned that if it was moved the general’s ghost would make a nuisance of itself by riding ceaselessly up and down the stairs in protest. Her childhood memories of the Asthall ghost made her especially sensitive to this legend and she made no attempt to alter the decoration of the hall, though she stamped her own youthful taste on the remainder of the house.

  That summer Diana was twenty-one and pregnant again, with her second son, Desmond, who was born in September 1931, so she did not travel abroad. When Bryan went away with friends, Sydney and the three youngest girls stayed at Biddesden to keep her company. Even so, and with a veritable army of servants, Diana lay awake at night, frightened of the darkness and listening for footsteps on the paving outside the house - presumably those of General Webb keeping a watch on his portrait. She confided her fears to their neighbour and close friend Lytton Strachey, whose reaction apparently cured her of her apprehensions once and for all. ‘[He] raised both hands in a characteristic gesture of despairing amazement. “I had hoped,” he said, “that the age of reason had dawned.”’30 Nevertheless, the portrait of General Webb remained in situ.

  With a real talent for entertaining and love of good conversation, Bryan and Diana encouraged an eclectic circle of friends from the worlds of polit
ics, literature, art and science to stay at Biddesden for extended periods. John Betjeman was there almost every other weekend, with Augustus John, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. Prof [Lindemann] was another frequent guest, as were the Sitwells, the Acton brothers, Harold and William, and the Huxleys. ‘Randolph Churchill almost lived with us,’ a member of the staff recalled.31

  Biddesden had a 350-acre dairy farm and a herd of fifty cows. Bryan was only too happy to agree to Pam’s suggestion that she manage it and run the milk round for him. There was a farm manager’s cottage built of brick and flint on the property and Pam moved in, but she was often invited to Biddesden for dinner. The farm workers called her ‘Miss Pam’ and had a healthy respect for her as she worked alongside them, invariably dressed in riding breeches and boots, even when, in the early days, she made a few mistakes. For example, she bid at market for what looked to her like a very fine cow, only to discover when it arrived at the farm that ‘the brute was bagless’. She always had an acute sense of humour about her own limitations and was quite unaware of her beauty, which endeared her to everyone who met her.32 Since her broken engagement two years earlier she had formed no emotional attachments, but John Betjeman, who had been a friend of Bryan since 1927 at Oxford when they were successive editors of the magazine Cherwell, became a founder member of what he called ‘the Biddesden Gang’ and fell instantly in love with her. Betjeman, or ‘Betj’, as Pam called him, was on the rebound from a frustrated love affair but his affection for her ran deep. In a letter to Bryan he admitted that all his thoughts were of Pam. ‘I hope I am not a bore. Possibly.’33 Although quieter than her sisters Pam had the same physical beauty of open, regular features and attractive cheekbones, fair hair, with startling blue eyes, the same colour as David’s.