The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  A few months later, in March 1956, the transcript of Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party was published, detailing Stalin’s horrendous crimes. Ten million people had been killed in the thirties because they opposed him, from peasant proprietors who objected to their land being ‘collectivized’ to members of the right-wing intelligentsia, old Bolsheviks and members of the old officer corps. Anyone who stood in his way had been mercilessly eliminated in the way that the Nazis had eliminated the Jews and other non-Aryans. The transcript ‘sent shock waves’ through the American Communist Party and there were resignations en masse, but Decca wrote,

  I did not share this anguish to any marked degree. I had never been as thoroughly convinced as most comrades had of Soviet infallibility. Terrible as the revelations were it seemed to me that the very fact that Khrushchev had seen fit to lay them out before the world signified that the Soviet leadership was set on a course of fundamental change . . . At least that was my view at the time, although, as it turned out, I was grievously mistaken.32

  She regarded her membership of the party as a way of combating Fascism in the West, not as an implied alliance to Russia.

  Even the unfolding of the Hungarian situation did not persuade her to resign from the party, though there was always at the back of her mind a niggling question mark over the waiter and the teacher in Hungary. It was two years before the Treuhafts decided to leave (‘Bob was never as committed as Decca,’ one friend remembered), but eventually they did so, having concluded that the American Communist Party was no longer a force for democracy, peace and socialism in the USA, and that instead of fighting Fascism it had become a self-serving organization dominated by Russia and out of touch with working people. Meanwhile the CRC was disbanded, perceived as an arm of the Communist Party rather than an organization campaigning for civil rights, and Decca found herself out of a job. It seemed that everything for which she had worked since she and Esmond arrived in the USA eighteen years earlier was coming apart. Nevertheless, in later years she stated on a television programme that the years of work for the Communist Party and CRC were ‘among the most rewarding of my life’.33 And once, when asked in an interview about her politics, Decca answered wryly, ‘sort of old left. Or maybe just left-over.’

  For a while she worked in the classified section of the San Francisco Chronicle, selling advertising space. As a new employee her name was listed in the union’s newspaper, and she was tickled when a fellow employee came round with a few extra copies for her, saying, ‘I know what a thrill it is to see your name in a newspaper for the first time.’ The job didn’t last. The FBI found out where she was working, contacted the Chronicle and Decca found herself a housewife once again. Dinky and Benjamin were at summer camps and from being frantically busy she now had time to kill. To relieve boredom she began to sort through old papers, including bundles of Esmond’s letters, and correspondence with Sydney going back to 1938. Over the next weeks she showed interesting or amusing extracts to one of her best girl-friends, Pele de Lappe, and to other old comrades, who like the Treuhafts had become ‘Ex’s’ (ex-members of the Communist Party). It was at these friends’ suggestion that Decca began to write a memoir of her childhood, including all the hilarious Mitfordian anecdotes she had related over the years, and the story of her relationship with Esmond.

  She had already achieved a miniature literary success with a home-printed booklet called Life-itself-manship, a sideways look at membership of the Communist Party. She made up five hundred copies and it sold like hot cakes to the comrades. Demand was so great, Decca wrote to Sydney, that it looked as if she was going to have to mimeograph and staple another batch - ‘Nancy is so lucky not to have to bother.’ The memoir, untitled at that point, was a full-length book, and a different matter altogether. It took her two years to write, aided and abetted by a group of friends she called her ‘Writing Committee’.34 Working as a veritable team of editors, the committee read it, offered helpful suggestions and reminded her of stories she had half forgotten. Bob, of course, was editor in chief (‘Chairman,’ Decca said) though he recalled, ‘I hardly saw the manuscript until it was finished. ’ The committee acted as editors and prompters only, the text was pure Decca and it was her apprenticeship as a writer. She sent the completed manuscript to six publishers but it was rejected. Disappointed, she put it away.

  As compensation, in 1957 Decca learned that she had inherited a large sum (‘it’s between £8,000 and £10,000’)35 from the estate of Esmond’s mother, but there were problems: it was eighteen months before probate was granted, and the English banks were unable to transfer the money to America because of the still-trenchant currency restrictions. Meanwhile Decca could not go to England because she had no passport so she appealed to the Bank of England on grounds of domestic need. ‘Please don’t bother to intercede for me,’ she wrote to Sydney hastily, ‘because I know you’ll tell them I’m giving it to the Communist Party and I won’t be able to get it . . .’ Two years later, when a Supreme Court ruling restored their passports, Bob and Decca immediately set off to England, with Benjamin. Decca also took the manuscript, thinking it might get a better reception in England. If not, she thought, she would forget about writing as a potential career.

  Nancy’s career had been well established internationally since publication of her two Radlett novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Consequently, Pigeon Pie, which had attracted only limited sales when first published in 1940, became an ‘overnight’ success when republished in 1951: ‘Pigeon Pie has had better notices in America than any of my books, isn’t it unaccountable,’ she wrote to Sydney. ‘When I think how poor I was when it came out, almost starving (literally . . .) I feel quite cross though it’s nice at all times to have a little extra money.’36

  Three years later she published her first biography, Madame de Pompadour, and the reviews again were good. ‘Miss Mitford . . . admires money and birth and romantic love,’ her friend Cyril Connolly wrote, ‘. . . good food, fine clothes, “telling jokes”, courage and loyalty, and has no time for intellectual problems or the lingering horrors of life.’37 The eminent historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote that everyone who had enjoyed The Pursuit of Love would be delighted that its characters had reappeared, ‘this time in fancy dress. They now claim to be leading figures in French history. In reality they still belong to that wonderful never-never land of Miss Mitford’s invention, which can be called Versailles, as easily as it used to be called Alconleigh. Certainly no historian could write a novel half as good as Miss Mitford’s work of history. ’38 Another friend, Raymond Mortimer, described the book as ‘extremely unorthodox . . . it reads as if an enchantingly clever woman were telling the story over the telephone’. Nancy did not know whether to feel complimented or not. ‘I was rather taken aback,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘I had seen the book as Miss Mitford’s sober and scholarly work . . . he obviously enjoyed it though he says the whole enterprise is questionable.’39 The book was apparently banned in Ireland as being a potential threat to happy marriage. Nancy said she was prepared to edit it but on asking for a list of the offending material was advised that there was nothing in the text that had irritated the censors. ‘Then why is it banned?’ ‘Well, it’s the title,’ she was told.

  Perhaps even more responsible for Nancy’s remarkable literary success was a small book that she produced almost as a joke. It was called Noblesse Oblige - an enquiry into the identifiable characteristics of the English aristocracy, and was a compilation of essays by various writers such as Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman, taking an ironic look at fashionable mores and manners. Nancy edited the book and included an article she had previously published in Encounter on the aristocracy, which had appeared with an article on upper-class speech by Alan S.C. Ross.

  Professor Ross was a sort of latter-day version of Eliza Doolittle’s Professor Higgins, a learned if somewhat eccentric philologist working at Birmingham University. He was introduced to Nancy at a
luncheon given by a mutual friend: her exaggerated drawl to him was what Eliza’s Cockney was to Higgins; a prime subject for study. He told her that he had written an article on sociological linguistics for the Finnish magazine Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, in which he had quoted The Pursuit of Love as a source for indicators of upper-class speech. Nancy was captivated and having learned that it was written in English begged for a copy. It was entitled ‘Linguistic Class Indicators in Present Day English’, and she found its serious presentation killingly funny. ‘It has sentences like, “The ideal U-address (U stands for upper class) is P.Q.R. where P is a place, Q is a describer (manor, court, house etc) and R the name of the County, But today few gentlemen can maintain this standard and they often live in houses with non-U names such as Fairfields or El Nido,”’ she wrote, chortling, to Heywood Hill. ‘To me it seems a natural for the Xmas market illustrated by O[sbert] Lancaster and entitled “Are you U?”’

  Her lively confidence in this proposal owed much to reaction to her article in Encounter (September 1955), which had sparked furious debate about the half-teasing theory that one could identify true members of the upper classes by manners, words and expressions; those who used fish knives and poured milk into a cup before the tea (MIF = milk in first), and who referred to ‘note-paper’, ‘mirror’, settee’, ‘serviette’ and ‘toilet paper’ betrayed their lower-class origins. Those properly taught by Nanny spoke of writing-paper, a looking-glass, a sofa, napkins and lavatory paper. There was a lot more nonsense in this vein and the great British public took it seriously. As a result, Nancy said, she had practically to rewrite Pigeon Pie, which was about to be republished. It was, she explained to Evelyn Waugh, ‘full of mirrors, mantelpieces and handbags, etc. Don’t tell my public or I’m done for.’40 Waugh provided a piece for the book: ‘An open letter to the Honble Mrs Peter Rodd (Nancy Mitford) on a very serious subject.’ John Betjeman wrote a poem called ‘How to Get on in Society’.41 Professor Ross rewrote his original article.

  But even Nancy was surprised at the book’s success. It was a worldwide smash hit and no one could quite work out why. Surely, with the new emphasis on socialism, she reasoned, few people were interested in the aristocracy and old-fashioned manners. But the correspondence columns of national newspapers, even the weightiest, were full of letters on the correct or incorrectness of the word ‘lounge’ as opposed to ‘sitting room’, and the social implication of calling pudding ‘a sweet’. Bookshops could not keep Noblesse Oblige on the shelves: ‘U and non-U’ was the buzz phrase of the day. Decca wrote in bewilderment to Sydney that the New York Times had reported that ten thousand copies had sold there in a week. ‘What’s that about?’ she asked. In fact, Nancy’s comments, never intended by her to be taken seriously, made her the arbiter of good manners for several generations. Professor Ross, however, resented her making fun of his serious academic thesis. Nancy found it all hilarious, and told the Colonel that her favourite joke was the new lyric to the old song: ‘I’m dancing with tears in my eyes, ’Cos the girl in my arms isn’t U’. Diana found the book rather distasteful and vulgar. Prod called it ‘decaying tripe’ in a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph. But, like it or not, Noblesse Oblige made Nancy a cult figure.

  There was another biography in 1957, Voltaire in Love, followed by Don’t Tell Alfred, a Society romp through the diplomatic salons of Paris with Fanny (the narrator of Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate) as the main character. Uncle Matthew is revived, Diana Cooper puts in an appearance as Lady Leone, and characters from The Blessing otherwise populate the pages. Friends loved it - and members of Nancy’s inner circle were best placed to appreciate the in-jokes. For example, when Nancy wrote of Fanny’s mother, always known as ‘the Bolter’, those in the know were particularly tickled: ‘The bolter’, based on the delightful and much-married Angela ‘Trixie’ Culme-Seymour, had appeared in the previous novels, but since then Trixie had eloped with the husband of her half-sister - who just happened to be Nancy’s former brother-in-law, Derek Jackson. It was all too delicious. Between producing her own books Nancy had also done several translations, The Princesse de Cleves (1950) and The Little Hut (1951), for which she was also involved in writing the screenplay for the film. In 1954, after endless trouble trying to get a visa, she made a trip to Russia. Decca was putrid with jealousy - ‘It’s not fair,’ she wailed in a letter to Sydney.

  Except in her relationship with the Colonel, and her lack of children, Nancy had everything she had ever wanted. In 1955 Palewski was offered a ministerial post in Fauré’s government, which meant that he had even less time for Nancy. She compensated by spending her summers in Venice with an Italian friend, a contessa who owned one of the old palazzos and could offer the sybaritic life Nancy loved. In the quiet early mornings she could do a few hours’ work on her biography of Voltaire (‘Not a life of Voltaire,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘Just a Kinsey report of his romps with Mme de Châtelet and her romps with Saint-Lambert and his romps with Mme de Boufflers and her romps with Panpan and his romps with Mme de Grafigny. I could go on for pages . . .’).42 At eleven o’clock she would board the Contessa’s sleek motor launch bound for the Lido to swim, sunbathe and gossip with friends, then eat a late luncheon served by the Contessa’s white-gloved footmen. In the afternoons there was time for a siesta with the windows thrown wide open to passing breezes. In the evenings there were dinner parties at palazzos, or in the cafés and restaurants around St Mark’s Square where, dressed in couturier creations, she met old friends and members of the international set. It was an idyllic existence.

  In the summer of 1957 she heard from the Colonel that he had been offered, with the influence of General de Gaulle, the post of ambassador in Rome. It was said to be the only personal favour that de Gaulle ever requested of the French government in his time out of office. At the time Paris was hot, and seemed a little small to Palewski, for he was involved in a passionate affair with a married woman who lived just round the corner from Nancy. From this date Nancy and he saw each other far less frequently, although she remained convinced that he could not manage without her and all would come right in the end.

  When Debo gave birth to a healthy daughter, Sophia,43 after a series of miscarriages, everyone was thrilled for her, but then, six months later, in the spring of 1958, David died at Redesdale Cottage. Diana had woken one morning with a strong presentiment that she must join Sydney and Debo, who were going up to Redesdale to visit David for his eightieth birthday, which was just a few days away. David and Sydney were in constant touch by letter and they all knew he had been unwell. ‘I shall never forget the expression on Farve’s face when Muv appeared at his bedside, and his smile of pure delight,’ Diana wrote. ‘All their differences forgotten, they seemed to have gone back twenty years to happy days before the tragedies. She sat with him for hours, Debo and I going in and out. After a couple of days Muv and Debo travelled on to Scotland and I returned to London . . . A few days later he died.’44

  ‘My darling Little D,’ Sydney wrote to Decca, ‘Farve died peacefully two days ago . . . Diana and Debo and I had been up to see him on his 80th birthday and he died 3 days later, we did so wish we had stayed. He was pleased to see us, dear old boy, and we were able to have a little conversation, but he was terribly deaf. He was in bed, and obviously very weak . . .’ But he had been quite like the old David and said such characteristic things that they were all kept laughing. The last thing David said to Sydney was ‘Are you going to the Oban Hotel?’ She replied that she was. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘remember me to the hall porter.’ Sydney left for Inch Kenneth and had just arrived when the news of his death reached her. ‘I turned right round and came back,’ she wrote to Decca.45

  He was cremated at Redesdale, and a funeral service took place at Swinbrook. Nancy wrote to Decca that they were both ‘tearjerkers’, with all his old favourite hymns: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy . . . I was in fountains each time. Then the ashes were done up in the sort of parcel he used to bring back from
London, rich thick brown paper and incredibly neat knots. Woman and Aunt Iris took it down to Burford and it was buried at Swinbrook. Alas one’s life.’46 Diana mourned the Farve of long ago, the huge towering man with tempers like an inferno, humour that often made family mealtimes like a scene from a farce, and eccentricities such as chub-fuddling, which somehow made him more endearing in retrospect. Once, when she had been the subject of one of her father’s rages, Tom had consoled her with the sage remark that Farve would mellow as he got older. He had been right, but Diana found that with hindsight she preferred the unmellowed version.

  The last time Decca had seen David was when she had set off for Paris to elope with Esmond. She might easily have effected a reconciliation. David had written several times to her, brief kind letters on the birth of Benjamin and the death of Nicholas, and she might have gone to see him in Redesdale, but she took umbrage at Sydney’s comment, ‘Since you have imposed conditions it would be better not to see Farve . . .’ When his will was read it was found that she had been cut out in a marked manner: he had never recovered from her attempt to hand over part of Inch Kenneth to ‘the Bolshies’ and was fearful that anything he left her would be given away. In every clause where he left assets to be shared between ‘my surviving children’, he had added the words ‘except Jessica’.

  20

  A COLD WIND TO THE HEART (1958-66)

  The Mosleys lived at the graceful old Bishop’s Palace at Clonfert in Ireland for only two and a half years. During that time Diana spent a good deal of her energy turning it into the lovely home in which she expected they would spend the rest of their lives. It stood on the edge of a bog and was approached by a long avenue of ancient yews called the Nun’s Walk. For twelve-year-old Max, who loved foxhunting, it was a kind of heaven. Hounds met within reach of Clonfert several times a week and he would go off alone on his useful little pony, Johnny, who loved hunting as much as Max did, and could jump walls higher than himself. On frosty days, when Max followed hounds on foot, Johnny would stand in his stable and squeal with rage at being left when he could hear hounds hunting in the bog near by. In the first winter there Max was let off school for the entire season by his father, so that he could concentrate on hunting. After that he had to knuckle down and went off to school in Germany. ‘We thought, as Europeans, our sons should know at least two languages,’ Diana wrote. ‘Alexander went to school in France and Max in Germany, but both were expelled. After that Max went to a crammer and then to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read physics. Christ Church said it would take Alexander just on his A level results but he utterly refused to go and went instead to Ohio State University where he read philosophy. Their languages have been very useful to them.’1