The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  Sydney was not the only one vexed by Hons and Rebels. Many relatives refused to read it, but when they gathered together they discussed it interminably, and commented on the fairness or unfairness of what Decca had written. Idden was tackled by Aunt Joan, who said she had been shocked by what Decca had written about the behaviour of the two girls during their finishing year in Paris. ‘I told her you hadn’t put in the half of it,’ Idden wrote. ‘Answer: “Oh?!!?”’ Rudbin wrote to say she was ‘sorry to see Farve has emerged . . . as a near Moron instead of one of the last giants of originality’. The aunts shouted it down, the uncles huffed that it was ‘greatly exaggerated nonsense’. Before Decca left for California Sydney’s sister, Aunt Weenie, had called round at the mews for tea. After chatting with Sydney and studiously ignoring Decca for an hour, Weenie demanded that she see her to the door with the statement, ‘I want a word with you.’ Decca said she felt about ten years old. At the door Weenie turned on her ‘in a fury. “I for one will never forget the savage cruelty with which you treated your mother and father. And now, you filthy little cad, you come back and write a lot of horrible things about your mother and come and sponge on her . . .” Time I left, I think,’ Decca wrote to Bob. ‘I am longing, panting, sighing, fainting, dying for California & you.’27

  Nancy, whose opinion Decca most wanted and most nervously awaited, wrote to her: ‘I think it’s awfully good, easy to read and very funny in parts. A slightly cold wind to the heart perhaps - you don’t seem very fond of anybody but I suppose the purpose is to make the Swinbrook world seem horrible, to explain why you ran away from it . . . Esmond was the original Teddy Boy wasn’t he, a pioneer of the modern trend and much more terrific than his followers?’28

  To her correspondents Nancy was more scathing: ‘She has quite unconsciously copied from my book instead of real life, & various modifications of the truth demanded by novel form are now taken as true,’ she wrote to Heywood Hill. But Nancy was wrong in her supposition when she wrote:

  I believe her husband has re-written it, or helped a good deal as it is his voice if you know them both. My mother stood by her through thick and thin . . . my sisters mind more than I do . . . It is rather dishonest for an autobiography because she alters fact to suit herself in a way that I suppose is allowed in a novel. (But as I have taken full advantage of that I can hardly blame her I suppose!). She is beastly about aunts & people who used to give us huge tips & presents & treats. Diana is outraged for my mother - I had expected worse to tell the truth - & of course minds being portrayed as a dumb society beauty. Altogether there is a coldness about it which I find unattractive, but of course made up for by the great funniness.29

  To Evelyn Waugh, she explained that she couldn’t review it:

  What I feel is this. In some respects she has seen the family, quite without knowing it herself, through the eyes of my books - that is, if she hadn’t read them hers would have been different. She is absolutely unperceptive of my aunts and uncles, Nanny, and Dr Cheatle [the doctor at Burford] & the characters whom I didn’t describe & who could have been brought to life but simply were not . . . Esmond was the most horrible human being I have ever met . . .30

  In general, my research for this book tends to support some of Nancy’s comments that Decca has exaggerated certain facts. Some of these are a matter of written record, and others have been confirmed by a number of surviving family members and friends who remember how things were at Asthall and Swinbrook. Decca was distanced from her family for so long, at a vulnerable time, when she was totally obsessed with Esmond, and subjected to his critical hard-boiled dislike of them. ‘From what Decca told me,’ Bob Treuhaft said, ‘Esmond was completely devoid of sentimentality of any kind. I don’t know about a sense of humour, but he would not have understood Decca’s residual fondness for her family. They were “the enemy” . . . It’s quite clear he kept her from visiting Unity.’31 It appears that Nancy’s myths and half-facts had become genuinely interchangeable with real memory in Decca’s mind. Then, too, she was such a good storyteller and a natural clown, and after telling exaggerated versions of Mitford stories for years to appreciative listeners in California, the jokey versions probably became what she remembered.

  Despite this fluttering in the family dovecote, however, Hons and Rebels was a resounding hit. Decca showed that she could be as funny, ironic, deft - and waspish - as Nancy, and that she had huge ability as a writer. It seemed that people could not get enough of the eccentric Mitfords, and pre-publication sales in the UK alone netted more than double Decca’s advance. As any author with a first book, Decca was nervous about the reviews, but on the whole they were amazingly good. In interviews she enjoyed playing to the gallery, and pulled no punches when asked about Diana: ‘I haven’t seen her since I was nineteen. We’re completely on opposite sides of the fence. Her husband stood for Parliament in the last election and I’m glad to say lost his deposit. His programme was to send all the coloured people to Africa and then divide Africa into two parts, the northern part white and the southern part black. My idea was to form an organisation of “In-laws against Mosley”, led by my husband who is Jewish.’ Her mother, she told one interviewer, was especially fond of her because, unlike most of her sisters, she had never been divorced or to jail. Her sister Pam, she said, ‘used to be married to a jockey’.32

  With ten thousand dollars assured within a month of US publication, the Treuhafts moved to a new house at 6411 Regent Street, still in the ‘old-fashioned neighbourhood’ that they so enjoyed in Oakland, but with plenty of space and a garden. At the age of forty, somewhat to her astonishment, Decca found herself successfully launched on a new career with offers flooding in for articles and lectures - Life offered her five hundred dollars for five hundred words and Esquire offered six hundred dollars for a piece on civil rights in the South. She used the opportunity to go to Montgomery, Alabama, to hear Martin Luther King speak at a Baptist meeting and she became trapped in the church overnight while the Ku Klux Klan and a mob of 1,500 whites hurled tear gas through the open windows. The uproar had been caused by the surprise appearance at the event of the Freedom Fighters, a sort of flying squad of black youths on motorcycles, who were much feared by whites in the Southern states. Next morning when Decca was finally able to leave she found that her car had been burned out. Needless to say the article she turned in after this experience, cleverly titled ‘You-all and Non You-all’, was rather more controversial and interesting than the one she had originally intended to write.

  To achieve a sudden ‘respectability’ after years of being almost a pariah was a heady experience. She began her second book almost immediately. It was a bit ghoulish, she said, but it had important social connotations. It was about the funeral industry in America and for the next few months she regaled her correspondents with gruesome bits of information on embalming. ‘Hen, I’ll bet you didn’t know what is the best time to start embalming, so I’ll tell you: before life is quite extinct, according to a text book I’ve got. They have at you with a long pointed needle . . . with a pump attached.’

  In 1961 Debo visited America (‘for a tête-à-tête with your ruler,’ Nancy wrote to Decca); she admired the President a good deal and it was to be the first of five visits she would make to the White House over a couple of years. President Kennedy made one visit to Chatsworth to visit the grave of his sister, as did his brother Robert. Nancy could not resist writing to tell Debo that the on-dit at the Venice Lido was that if JFK didn’t have sex once a day he got a headache, and to Decca to say, ‘Andrew says Kennedy is doing for sex what Eisenhower did for golf.’ Andrew had recently been appointed Under-Secretary of State for the Commonwealth. There was a row about this in Parliament since his uncle Harold was Prime Minister. The arch anti-royalist and anti-aristocrat MP Willie Hamilton asked a question about nepotism in the Commons. Macmillan replied blandly, ‘I try to make the best appointments I can.’33

  In the following year Dinky showed that she really did have running-away bloo
d in her, and quit college to work for the civil-rights movement. Decca was furious. She travelled immediately to Sarah Lawrence College, just north of New York, and convinced the Dean to give Dinky, who was regarded as an excellent student, an ‘honourable discharge’ that would enable her to return to college at a later date. Then mother and daughter, so much alike in many ways, returned to California. ‘We were on that train together three days and three nights and we barely spoke a word to each other,’ Dinky said. A few months later Decca played at being ‘Lord of the Isle’ (as suggested by Debo) and went to Inch Kenneth for the first time since becoming its owner. ‘Muv was asking me what is to be done with the Isle when she no longer comes here . . .’ Decca wrote to Debo from there. ‘I said, “Where will you be going?” and she went into gales of laughter, saying, “To the next world I expect.” But to my great relief she really doesn’t seem to be departing at the moment.’34 But death was on Decca’s mind for she was taking the opportunity to research her book about the funeral industry, she said, and had just come across a fascinating editorial entitled, ‘Children’s Funerals - a Golden Opportunity to Build Good Will’. ‘Do admit, they are a lark,’ she wrote.

  While Decca was staying with Sydney, Nancy published a little book called The Water Beetle. It was a collection of her essays, including a sketch about Blor, the best description we have of the woman who was so important in the lives of the young Mitfords, but Sydney was also portrayed:

  My mother has always lived in a dream world of her own and no doubt was even dreamier during her many pregnancies . . . when she was young she never opened a book and it is difficult to imagine what her tastes and occupations [were]. My father and she disliked society, or thought they did - there again, later they rather took to it - and literally never went out. She had no cooking or housework to do. In those days you could be considered very poor by comparison with other people of the same sort and yet have five servants . . . Even so she was perhaps abnormally detached. On one occasion Unity rushed into the drawing room, where she was at her writing table, saying, ‘Muv, Muv, Decca is standing on the roof - she says she’s going to commit suicide!’ ‘Oh, poor duck,’ said my mother, ‘I hope she won’t do anything so terrible,’ and went on writing.35

  This was the so-called straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back as far as Sydney was concerned. She and Decca had a blistering row about Hons and Rebels, the education of the Mitford girls, and Decca and Nancy’s literary portrayal of her as a dilettante mother leaving the upbringing of her children to nannies. Sydney wrote in a similar vein to Nancy, deploring the piece. But although Nancy wrote a conciliatory letter saying that she realized that their education had been the product of received wisdom at the time, rather than any whim of their parents, Sydney was not to be pacified and told Nancy what she had already said to Decca: ‘I wish only one thing,’ she said firmly, ‘that you will exclude me from your books. I don’t mind what you write about me when I am dead, but I do dislike to see my mad portrait while I am still alive.’

  As usual Sydney spent the winter months at the mews. To save costs, the island was virtually shut down each autumn, the animals sold off and the house closed except for an occasional cleaning and airing done by her faithful couple, the McGillvrays. When she returned to the island in the spring of 1963, she was accompanied by Madeau Stewart.36 Madeau, who had trained at the Royal College of Music, had stayed on the island for weeks at a time over several years and loved being there. ‘Sydney played the piano and I played the flute; we used to play Victorian ballads, they were very expressive,’ Madeau said. ‘And there were lots of books to read and so much to talk about.’

  Diana was less enthusiastic about visiting. On one occasion when she travelled back with Sydney they were stuck at Gribun for forty-eight hours in a storm, and finally boarded the Puffin in a grey and troubled sea. Sydney, in her eighties, still loved the sea. Wrapped in her oilskins against driving rain and spray, she shouted back to her daughter, ‘Great fun, isn’t it?’ The lack of news, mail and table-talk also bothered Diana, although she conceded that the beauty of the island was some compensation. During those years she and Debo had a pact to write to each other every day while either was on the island, so that they could be sure of at least receiving some mail while they were there. Often the only visitors were picnickers, whom Sydney spotted through binoculars, and she used to send McGillvray as an emissary to invite them to tea. ‘Such a haphazard choice of guests was, to me, strange taste,’ Diana wrote. ‘It must have been the gambler in Muv which made her positively enjoy . . . the luck of the draw at her tea parties.’37

  About that journey in 1963, Madeau recalled that Sydney was ‘very tottery. We had dinner and a bottle of wine on the train, and we got to Oban. I remember there were screams of laughter when I tried to put on her shoes and got them on the wrong feet. Anyway, the crossing was a bit rough and she said she’d like to lie down. That was unusual. When we got to the island she said she wasn’t feeling very well and she thought she might call the doctor on Monday.’ Alarm bells rang and Madeau decided to get the doctor immediately. She sent for Dr Flora MacDonald, whom Sydney liked. Dr MacDonald recognized that Sydney’s condition was serious: having suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years she was now in the terminal stages of the illness and her condition was deteriorating rapidly. Madeau alerted the sisters, and Nancy, Pam and Diana came rushing up to the island. Debo could not leave immediately but Nancy kept her up to date until she could join them. Two nurses came in to help them with round-the-clock nursing, and though there were several periods when it seemed that Sydney was fading she rallied each time. Curiously, for she had been very deaf for some years, her hearing returned in the last days: they kept a fire burning in her room and she could hear the logs crackling and spitting.

  ‘It is so poignant,’ Nancy wrote to old Swinbrook-sewer Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘She feels so ill . . . two days ago she said, “Who knows - perhaps Tom and Bobo?” . . . She laughs as she always has . . . We long for her to go in her sleep, quietly.’38 A week later Sydney had a minor stroke and slipped into unconsciousness. ‘Before that it was dreadful,’ Nancy wrote. Sydney had been unable to swallow anything but sips of liquid because of throat constriction and was starving to death. Nancy had often claimed that she had never loved her mother but now she found that her feelings for her were stronger than she had suspected. ‘Now she is slipping away and feels nothing . . . the sadness comes and goes in waves. I have a feeling nothing really nice will ever happen again in my life. Things will just go from bad to worse, leading to old age and death.’39

  Sydney died on 25 May, just after her eighty-third birthday. A carpenter travelled over to the island and made her coffin, and a neighbour said prayers over her body. After a period of fearful storms there was a sudden calm, enabling the coffin to be ferried across to Mull as the sun was setting. The Puffin, flying her ensign at half-mast, was escorted by a small flotilla of local boats, and a lone piper played a lament during the short journey over to Gribun. Friends Sydney had known for many years met them and carried the coffin from the little launch to its overnight resting place before it was driven down to Swinbrook. It was all very moving, Pam wrote to Decca. Sydney had wanted to be buried next to David at Swinbrook where, on what was the first warm day of spring, the Mitford clan gathered. Debo wrote,

  Swinbrook looked perfectly magical. The birds singing so loud, and the churchyard was full of cow parsley and brilliant green grass. The sight of Choops,10 Mabel . . . and all the aunts, so ancient now, and Honks [Diana], Woman and Nancy in deepest black . . . the feel of the pews, not to mention the taste when licked (do you remember) . . . When ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ started Honks and I were done for; it was too much. We had ‘Jerusalem’, as well. Afterwards we thought we ought to have had ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ . . . Hen it was all fearfully upsetting and sad. The beauty of the place and the day and the flooding memories of that church and village . . .40

  Decca, who was inexpressibly sa
d, for in latter years she had learned to value her relationship with Sydney, sent a subdued answer: ‘I should have felt very lonely if it hadn’t been for your letters (and Nancy’s) . . . Thanks so much for sending flowers from me. (By the way my new book is all about the ridiculous waste of money on funeral flowers and an attack on the Florist Industry for inducing people to send flowers. But I can see not, in this case).’ Decca was nothing if not irreverent.

  In the aftermath of the funeral another Mitford story emerged. Weenie and Geoffrey were the only survivors of Tap’s four children as George had died before Sydney. (‘What did he die of?’ Decca had enquired. ‘A nasty pain,’ Sydney replied.) When she returned to London from Swinbrook Weenie telephoned Geoffrey. ‘George is gone and now Sydney is dead, don’t you think we should meet?’ ‘But we have met,’ he replied, puzzled.41