The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (13 page)

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-inlaw, 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 leave . . . 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, hairdressing, 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 handyman
⁹
– 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’.

Nancy faced considerable difficulty in spending time with her new friends. Society, and the behaviour of upper-class women, was still governed by a complicated set of unwritten rules, which had remained unaltered since the days of the Regency, and would be difficult now to envisage. No young girl was ever seen out in town without a chaperone, and there were still parts of London – clubland in St James’s, for example – where no respectable lady would be seen at all, even in a carriage. In the country, near one’s own home, different rules applied: girls could walk and ride out alone, without any impropriety, though they were usually cautioned to ride in pairs for reasons of safety. But in London Nancy needed a companion – her mother, a younger sister, a member of staff, or Nanny – to accompany her if she wanted to walk round the corner to Harrods.

In addition there was David’s hatred of anyone outside the family circle and mistrust of young men in general. ‘According to my father,’ Decca wrote, ‘outsiders included not only Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners but also other people’s children . . . almost all young men – in fact the whole teeming population of the earth’s surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbours to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking.’
¹³
Realizing that David’s bark was worse than his bite (‘we were never punished,’ Diana wrote), Nancy braved her father’s outbursts and his downright rudeness to her friends, and invited them home for tea or dinner, and sometimes even to stay for the weekend. There was only one telephone in the house: it looked like a black daffodil and was installed in David’s study. Debo recalls how on one occasion Nancy’s friend Peter Watson
¹⁴
‘was bold enough to ring up and ask to speak to her. Without moving his mouth from the instrument my father shouted into the hall, “Nancy, it’s that hog Watson wants to speak to you.”’
¹⁵
Nancy’s male guests had to stand firm in the face of being called ‘damned puppy’ if they were unfortunate enough to venture an opinion that disagreed with David’s own (not difficult), and what sounded like ‘sewer!’ for merely daring to exist.
¹⁶