THE MITFORD PHENOMENON
Take six girls, all of them rampant individualists, and letthem loose upon one of the most politically explosive periods in history. Thatis the story of the Mitfords. It is like a social experiment, the results ofwhich would have staggered even the most imaginative scientist, and no smallpart of its fascination lies in the fact that the experiment can never berepeated. Never again will there be six such girls, raised in such a way, atsuch a time.
The Mitford sisters were born in the heart of England,between 1904 and 1920, into a family of pre-Conquest antiquity. Daughters ofthe 2nd Lord and Lady Redesdale, they were expected to become wives, mothers,propagators of their class, the kind of women who appeared at state balls inslightly ill-fitting satin and tramped through Gloucestershire in good tweed.Something of this steadfast upbringing always remained with them: Nancy Mitfordconfessed on her deathbed that she would give anything for one more day’shunting. But a world beyond the Heythrop had long since claimed Nancy, andindeed all the girls except Pamela – the shadowy exception who threw the restinto even more powerful light.
One can chant the careers of the Mitford sisters in themanner of Henry VIII’s wives, thus: Writer; Countrywoman; Fascist; Nazi;Communist; Duchess. One can recite the mini-biographies, pulling outextraordinary facts with the practised ease of a conjuror. Nancy, anauto-didact who never learned to punctuate (Evelyn Waugh: ‘it is not yoursubject’), became a star author whose 1940s novels The Pursuit of Love and Lovein a Cold Climate are deeply loved popular classics. Pamela, the bucolicchicken-breeder whose blue eyes matched her Rayburn, was adored by the youngJohn Betjeman (‘Gentle Pamela, most rural of them all’). Diana, the greatestbeauty of her generation, calmly put herself beyond the social pale when sheleft her perfect husband for the leader of the British Union of Fascists, SirOswald Mosley. Unity, conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika, became afervent Nazi and the close companion of Adolf Hitler. Jessica eloped with herfellow Communist, Esmond Romilly, the nephew (and rumoured son) of WinstonChurchill, and proudly set up home among the working classes of Rotherhithe.Deborah became chatelaine of Chatsworth House, the magnificentseventeenth-century seat of the Devonshire family, where she filled her officewith Elvis Presley memorabilia.
All this poured out in a great torrent of newsprint whenDeborah – ‘the Last Mitford Girl’ – died in 2014, although the facts werealready familiar. Some people may have thought that Nancy was the Fascist andUnity the Communist, but they pretty much had the basic idea. Equally familiarwas the collective aspect of the sisters: their irrepressible aristocraticlevity, their variations-on-a-theme faces, their idiom. The Mitfords inhabiteda linguistic microclimate, whose almost nursery way of speech (‘oh do be sorryfor me’) is famous above all for the nicknames they gave to everybody,especially to each other, which began as a private joke and were laterdisplayed for public consumption. Again, people may have sometimes got thingsconfused and thought that Woman was the Nazi and Honks the Writer, or thatStubby was the Countrywoman and Bobo the Duchess; nevertheless there was anawareness that this was how the Mitfords went on. They all met Hitler and theyall called him Hitty or Herr Housepainter. Or something like that.
Some years before she died I interviewed the then Duchess ofDevonshire, or Debo, as she was always known (although Nancy – have you heardthis one? – called her ‘Nine’, after her alleged mental age). She admitted to abrisk bafflement with the whole Mitford industry. ‘As for people beinginterested in all of us now – that’s just amazing. But they seem to be, forsome reason best known to themselves.’ Her sister Diana Mosley (Honks, Bodley,Cord, Nardie), whom I also met, came more sharply to the point. ‘The Mitfordfamily has become a frightful bore,’ she said, laughing her still-beautifulhead off in a very Mitford way (almost silently, as if the mirth were too greatfor verbal expression). ‘It bores us to death!’
Of course one might now say much the same about Henry VIII’swives. Oh God, no, not the one about Anne of Cleves’s painting by Holbein. Whodoesn’t know that one?
Nonetheless, familiarity is undoubtedly an issue with theMitford story. The life of Unity Mitford should be the subject of an opera, yetit has become more like the punchline to a sick joke – ‘And then war wasdeclared and she shot herself!’– than the astonishing, murky tragedy that itwas. For familiarity does not merely induce boredom. It deadens significance.And the sisters were significant; still are, as a matter of fact. Those wholong to rip apart the twee latticework of Mitfordiana – Farve, Muv, Hons’Cupboards – may think otherwise, and I can quite see why, but at the same timeI would say: look afresh at the familiar and consider. These girls are prizeexhibits in a Museum of Englishness. What they represent is complex, althoughtheir image has a divine simplicity. And whatever one’s opinion of what theyrepresent, it is impossible, in truth, to find them boring.
As I say, the phenomenon of the Mitford sisters isunrepeatable. The nature of the girls, the nature of the world at that time:such a configuration can never happen again.
In the first place there is the simple fact that theRedesdales had so many children, seven in all (Tom, the only son, born in 1909,is generally overlooked, but his personality was at least as strong andintriguing as that of his sisters). Then there is their upbringing. AlthoughTom went to Eton, the girls were educated mostly at home, and the three largecountry houses that the family inhabited – Batsford Park, Asthall Manor,Swinbrook House – became their imaginative playgrounds. The well-raised modernchild has its every moment accounted for (oboe at 4, gluten allergy test at4.30) and accompanies its parents into almost every adult arena, from saloonbar to Starbucks. The Mitford girls, conversely, lived in a world of their own.They had a freedom that today would seem almost feral. In a literal sense itwas limited: they travelled nowhere beyond Scotland, nowhere without Nanny, andthey talked to few people outside the family except grooms, governesses and gamekeepers.Their mother could be rigid in outlook, their father would create suddenviolent storms about infringements of the behavioural code. Yet in a moreprofound sense the girls’ freedom was near absolute, because nothing reallyprevented them from indulging their essential natures. How far this was a goodthing is open to question, of course. But it made them the Mitfords.
They roamed around their homes, obsessing over books or loveor animals (never a photograph without a wonderful dog in it), growing evermore beautiful and hungrier for life, experiencing the perverse stimulation ofextreme boredom. They were not all together, all the time. They formedparticular alliances: Diana and Tom, Jessica and Unity, Deborah and Jessica.Not least because of age differences, the sisters did not operate as a sextet(with Tom as semi-detached musical director). Nevertheless, and partly becausethere was nobody else freely available, they sparked off each other like tindersticks. Competitive family hierarchies were set in place that would last alltheir lives. Right up to the end, when only Diana and Deborah were left, theMitford girls remained intertwined in a network of rivalries and alliances.
And indeed, their startling – one might even say theatrical– individuality was all part of that complex, six-ply weave. It sounds facilein the extreme to say that Jessica became a rabid Communist because Unity, thesister to whom she was closest, became a rabid Nazi. It sounds equally glib tosay that Unity became a Nazi because Diana – whom she admired and adored –became a Fascist. Yet to some extent these statements are true. Had these girlsnot grown up in such proximity, competing with or retreating from each other ina constant battling rhythm, they would not have become quite so singular. Andhad they not lived in such singular times, their individuality would – in somecases at least – have been expressed quite differently.
The Mitford girls came of age in a period of profound and,perhaps more importantly, highly dramatic change. Nancy made her society debuton 28 November 1922. The occasion was a ball at Asthall, reported in The Times’scourt pages with the formal respect then given to the upper classes (‘Amongthose who brought parties to the dance were Countess Bathurst …’), for all theworld as if the Edwardian era had never come to an end. The dance for theyoungest sister, Deborah, was held at the family’s London home on 22 March1938. Ten days previously, Adolf Hitler had instigated the Anschluss, theannexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
In the sixteen years between the two coming-out balls,politics had become ever more openly polarized and extreme. Communism andFascism stood at each end of the global chessboard like clumsy monoliths.Democracy seemed a feeble little beast by contrast, bleating of moderation inthe face of the aftermath of war and the Russian Revolution, the GreatDepression and mass unemployment. Of course Britain did not – as Italy, Spainand Germany did – turn to dictators, but there were many who craved thoseillusions and certainties, the politics of poster slogans. The BritishCommunist Party was formed in 1920, followed three years later – almostinevitably – by the first, small Fascist Party.
Meanwhile a succession of governments, mostly veryshort-lived, grappled with the enduring economic crisis and the attendant fearof instability. The ‘Zinoviev Letter’ of 1924, purportedly an instruction fromthe president of the Communist International to unleash class war, was takenvery seriously. Whatever the truth about the origins of the document, Bolsheviksubsidies had indeed been paid to foment unrest; but there was cause enoughanyway for real grievance. Unemployment was appallingly high, close to 3million in 1933. The first of six National Hunger Marches took place a coupleof weeks before Nancy’s society debut. In 1926 came the General Strike; ten yearslater, the Jarrow Crusade. In 1929 the first Labour prime minister, RamsayMacDonald, had appointed the dynamic young MP Sir Oswald Mosley to deal withthe unemployment problem, but Mosley went his own way when his radical (thoughnot unpopular) ideas were rejected. He formed the New Party in 1931 then, ayear later, the British Union of Fascists.
In Germany, where 7 million were unemployed in 1933, wherepoverty was dire and a sense of post-war grievance primed to explode, a starkchoice presented itself between Communism and Nazism. When Hitler becameChancellor he declared war on Marxism, and for this reason if no other wasadmired in some British quarters, as Mussolini had been when he took power in1922. Certain members of the aristocracy were quite open in their desire tomake common cause with Hitler: in 1936 the Anglo-German Fellowship held adinner for Ambassador von Ribbentrop attended by, among others, the Duke ofWellington, Lord Londonderry, and Lord and Lady Redesdale. That same year LordRedesdale praised Hitler almost unreservedly in the House of Lords, andattacked the press for ‘the greatest exaggeration in such matters as the Nazitreatment of the Jews’. Then he came to the heart of the matter: ‘Whatevermight be said against certain details of his administration, it is certain thatHerr Hitler saved Germany from going red.’ This was the aristocrat’s view. Yetit was shared in some measure by a good many normal, anxious Britons, in whomthe terror of Communism ran deeper than can possibly be grasped today. On theother side, within a sizeable part of the intelligentsia – the kind of peoplewhom Stalin was methodically liquidating – Communism represented a vision ofalluring idealistic clarity; but it was also a bulwark against Fascism. The factthat these two wildly opposing creeds were, when one came down to it,remarkably similar was perceived by many, including Nancy and Deborah Mitford.But sanity of this sort was not altogether in tune with the 1930s. What wasdemanded were gesture politics, uncompromising affiliations, solutions basedupon theory rather than the hesitant realities of human nature. Young peoplehave always responded to the clarion call of extremism: Diana, Jessica andUnity did not resist.
Nevertheless what they did was extraordinary. Again,familiarity has dulled its significance; but again, consider. They were not theonly bright young things who flirted with extremism at that time (a cousin,Clementine Mitford, got briefly carried away by the thrill of shiny jackboots),yet the point about the Mitford sisters is that they were not flirting, theycarried their convictions through. As Deborah wrote of Jessica in 1952: ‘Herblasted cause has become so much part of her that she can never forget it.’ Canone imagine their equivalent today? A nineteen-year-old Jessica Mitford,absconding to a life with an Islamic fundamentalist? No: a girl of that classmight dabble excitably in ‘activism’, in the sense of waving an anti-frackingbanner in Sussex (where her parents have a house) or having a fling with a sexyanti-capitalist protester (who went to school with her brother). Jessica’sfellow runaway Esmond Romilly was in fact a cousin of the family, anex-Wellington boy; Jessica, as Nancy wrote in a fictionalized version of the situation,‘had been introduced to him and knew his surname’. Yet when she disappeared in1937 – supposedly to meet friends in Dieppe, where she never arrived – theskies fell in for her parents. For a fortnight they did not know whether shewas dead or alive, and simply sat beside the telephone, waiting for they didnot know what. Lord Redesdale never saw Jessica again after seeing her off atVictoria Station. When news of her whereabouts finally arrived, her father isalleged to have said: ‘Worse than I thought. Married to Esmond Romilly,’ but ifhe did say this then he didn’t mean it. The shock of what Jessica had done –the casual, callous finality with which she disowned her former life – was onefrom which her parents never recovered (although far worse was to come). ‘Inearly went mad when it seemed you had quite disappeared,’ Lady Redesdale wroteto her. And for Deborah: ‘It was far the worst thing that happened to me.’Forty years after the event, Jessica wrote to Deborah that she was ‘vastonished’ to have caused her such distress, but the tone of this letter wasdefensive and not altogether convincing. The point is that back in 1937 Jessicahadn’t much cared whom she hurt. Such was the power of the extremist cause,embodied in a man. The man alone might have led her to elope. It was theextremism that led to the swift absolutism with which all else was abandoned.
Usually it is disaffected men who embrace a dramaticideology, although girls do it too. But the Mitford sisters? Those posh,protected creatures, who rode side-saddle to hounds, who were presented atcourt, who danced in and out of the great houses of London? Society tends tosay of its young rebels: they have nothing to lose. This is not always true,but for sure they would have less to lose than the Mitfords. They hadeverything to lose. They were the smooth-skinned daughters of privilege. Norwere they too stupid to know what they were doing: Jessica was as sharp as atack and Diana’s idea of light reading was Goethe (her wedding present from DrGoebbels was a complete set of Goethe’s works, bound in pink calfskin). Jessicawas also pretty, vital, by all accounts enchanting, while Diana, beautiful as agoddess, had a worshipping husband and two young sons, a life of picture-bookperfection in Belgravia. Unity, as Deborah later put it, was ‘always the oddone out’; nevertheless she was bright, handsome and popular despite heroccasionally unnerving eccentricity.
Of course the sheer idiocy of youth played its part. ‘TheFührer got into quite a rage twice … it was wonderful,’ is a typical phrasefrom Unity’s letters, which sometimes give the impression that Hitler is MickJagger and she a favoured groupie circa 1966. But there was more. Something inthese young women responded to the dark power of the times. Beneath the sunlitMitford effervescence ran a deadlier, steadily determined tide. There was astrong sex element in it, in this willingness to embrace the aggressive andunyielding, and it was obviously connected to individual men – but it was stillmore mysterious than that: extremism calls upon the entire pre-civilized self.
Exactly why, and how, the girls took the paths that they didwill be analysed more fully later. The starting point was Diana’s deep, complexpassion for Sir Oswald Mosley; although she had already been influenced by theintellectual Teutonic sympathies of her forebears. In the context of theperiod, and of the family dynamic, their behaviour does become just aboutcomprehensible. It also remains almost incredible. ‘What lives we do lead,’ asNancy wrote to her mother in 1940, her tone dry and disbelieving.
She had not hurled herself headlong into extremism. Thefamily friend Violet Hammersley once wrote to Nancy, saying ‘You Mitfords likedictators,’ but this was only half true. Pamela married a Fascist sympathizerand met Hitler (‘like an old farmer in a brown suit’), yet she stood quiteapart from the behaviour of Diana and Unity. So too did Deborah, who spent themonth before the Second World War at a house party for York races. Nancy helpedRepublican refugees in the Spanish Civil War, then went home to performfrenetic amounts of patriotic war work.
Nevertheless there was a characteristic aspect to thepoliticized girls. It wasn’t simply what they did, it was the way they did it:with the smiles-over-steel quality that is definitively Mitford. They werenaturally and comfortably shameless. Not necessarily flagrant, although Unitybecame so in her love of Nazism; more accurate to say that they wereshame-free. Their confidence was blithe, adamantine. Whatever the subjectmatter, the idiom remained that of the nursery. There was a bizarre disconnectbetween their mode of expression (sweet Hitler, blissful Lenin) and what theywere actually doing. The story of Jessica and Unity dividing a room in half,decorating one side with hammers and sickles, the other with swastikas, prettymuch sums up the Mitford relationship with politics. Completely sincere, butalso attention-seeking: showing off to Nanny.
They did not necessarily court publicity, of which theynaturally received a large and damaging amount, but they were not afraid of it.Partly this was in the blood – they had two very showy grandfathers – but itwas also them, their natures, the spectrum of beauty that they covered, the x 6aspect that magnified them into something overwhelming. Looking as they did,the Mitford girls were never going to be ignored. Being what they were, theydid not want to be. They had a feel for the limelight, a desire to prance inits glow. ‘Whoever is going to look at you?’ was their nanny’s refrain, butthat upper-class instinct towards self-effacement – the fear of being vulgar –was not really in them. Nancy was not just a writer, she was a ‘celebrity’author (Evelyn Waugh: ‘I saw Debo last week. I feel it my duty to tell you thatshe is spreading a very damaging story about you: that you have allowedyourself to be photographed by the Television.’3) She offered up her personaquite willingly, writing a highly opinionated column for the Sunday Times,co-operating with a slightly naff musical version of The Pursuit of Love4 and,later, with a projected ITV comedy series based on the lives of the Mitfordsisters.5 Deborah gave numerous interviews as Duchess of Devonshire, and waspossibly amused by the ease with which journalists could be coaxed to eat fromher hand (‘How could anyone resist her?’6). Diana, although she must have knownit was asking for trouble, went on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1989. Thepublic reaction to her appearance was predictable outrage; but alongside theMitford instinct for populism was a total lack of concern about what peoplethought of them. If they had ever used Twitter, which is not entirelyimpossible (one can certainly imagine Jessica), they would have roared withlaughter at the #poshbitch abuse. They were tough, as well as airy. When Dianaand her husband were placed under house arrest in 1943, they were besieged by apack of pressmen and forced to sit tight with the curtains drawn: ‘I wouldrather be us than them’, wrote Diana, ‘because it is the most frightfulweather.’ When Nancy wrote her 1955 treatise on class, ‘The EnglishAristocracy’,7 with its famous division of vocabulary into ‘U’ (upper-class)and ‘Non-U’ – viz, writing paper versus notepaper – the enraged response lefther essentially unshaken. ‘Who are you anyway?’ asked one reader. ‘So difficultto answer, really!’ was her reaction.
Snobbery, shallowness, stupidity, adultery, unpalatability –the Mitfords were accused of all these things and rode out every criticism,smiling brightly, talking in that direct yet obtuse way that disarms attack. InDiana this ‘never apologize, never explain’ quality was intensified to analmost unparalleled degree. It is hard to think of anybody more truly indifferentto public opinion. ‘Being hated means absolutely nothing to me as you know,’she wrote to Deborah in 2001. ‘I admired him very much,’ she said of Hitler onDesert Island Discs. ‘My husband was a very clever man,’ she remarked to me, inthe same calm beatific way as she said almost everything. It has beensuggested, surely rightly,8 that she was incapable of telling anything otherthan the truth as she saw it. This made things simple for her, but also verydifficult. She refused to defend or exonerate herself. She could have put theblame on circumstances, said that she had got carried away and now saw eventsdifferently: but no. Whatever one thinks of her, it has to be said that only awoman in a million would have stood as firm as she did. Instead she wrotearticles that argued, with cool cogency, against unquestioned ideas such as theabsolute rightness of war against Germany, or the absolute evil of the Vichyregime; she described Hitler as ‘a terrible part’ of history but refusedretrospectively to edit her friendship with him; and her loyalty to Sir OswaldMosley was so stalwart as to be almost beyond comprehension, like somethingfrom a legend. But Diana did have a mythic aspect, with her dynamic serenity,her sphinx smile. Even her sisters were confounded by her. Her politicalallegiances did not affect the remarkable, open-minded kindness that shedisplayed in every other area of her life. Her constant rippling urge tolaughter did not prevent adherence to a creed that took itself insanely seriously.Far more than Jessica and Unity – both strongly influenced by her – Diana wasan enigma. In fact she was quite possibly one of the most enigmatic women whoever lived. When people talk about the ‘Mitford Girls’, it is she and Nancywhom they really mean, because without the separate components of Diana andNancy the spell of the whole would never have been created.
Diana defined the mysterious, implacable side of thesisters. Nancy defined their wayward enchantment, their sublime silliness,their use of jokes as an act of defiance (‘there is,’ as Nancy wrote in aletter when she was dying of cancer, ‘always something to laugh at.’) Thisdistinction is simplistic, however, because the dual nature of the Mitfordscannot be pulled apart: in its contradictions lie the very heart of theirfascination.
There is no such word as ‘Mitfordian’, but – like Proustian,Dickensian or Gilbertian – it has a meaning. It is understood by people who mayknow little of the sisters’ actual lives, yet who have absorbed their image.
The reason for this is ultimately very simple. The elementsthat make up the phenomenon of the Mitford sisters are various, complex andcontradictory; but what really counts is the fact that this phenomenon wasparcelled and wrapped and sold with a beautiful great bow on it: by Nancy. Sheis the begetter of ‘the Mitfords’. In 1945 she wrote her family into life inThe Pursuit of Love. Thereafter she – followed by Jessica in theautobiographical Hons and Rebels – nurtured and primed the Mitfordian imageuntil it became the essence of aristocratic charm, accessible yet untouchable,and as dangerously irresistible as a drug.
Without Nancy, the sisters would have had their own separatesignificance, with Unity the most noteworthy. But their significance en masse –culturally, societally – came from the first Mitford girl. Not necessarily thecleverest of them – that was Diana – but by some measure the most intelligent,Nancy took an overview of her upbringing, gathered it up between her prettylittle hands and remoulded it as art. By so doing – by writing The Pursuit ofLove, that outbreath of familial memory, with its pinpoint accuracy shadinginto timeless haze – Nancy made of that world something definitive. So felt isher novel, it contains within it far more than she could possibly have intendedduring the three months of its creation. It contains the genesis of the Mitfordmyth. And the Mitford myth contains, first and foremost, an image of England.
To understand the sisters properly one must go to theCotswolds, where they grew up, and to the adjacent villages of Asthall andSwinbrook, which was once their father’s land. Four of them – Nancy, Unity,Diana and Pamela – are buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Swinbrook. Whatstrikes one most is how unassuming is this ending place, how embedded in thelandscape, how secure in its acceptance of time and death, how unlike thebright frenetic span in which the sisters put their mark upon the world. ‘Saynot the struggle naught availeth’ is the inscription on Unity’s gravestone: avery moving thing to read, especially in this calm little square of green,where the silence is absolute except for the tentative bravura of birdsong anda hymn being sung inside an English church. Here, the struggle of Unity’sshort, misguided life drops away into irrelevance.
From the church – which houses a memorial to Tom Mitford anda set of oak pews paid for by Lord Redesdale’s winning bet in the 1924 GrandNational – one can walk a mile or so to Asthall Manor, where the greater partof the Mitford childhood was spent. This is where the imaginative lives of thegirls were formed: in country the colour of hen pheasants, in a shallowflattened valley scooped from apparently limitless fields, amid drystone walls,fat healthy sheep and the constant rustle of the River Windrush. Asthallitself, dark brown and gabled, stands as rooted as a great tree, with beside itthe church, whose graveyard was overlooked by the nursery windows.
Everything about Britain has changed since the Mitford girlslived in this small part of Oxfordshire, yet Asthall and Swinbrook seem not tohave changed, and Asthall Manor is a peculiarly beautiful example of thatunchanging ideal: the English country house. This magical constancy is thebackdrop to The Pursuit of Love. Nancy reimagined Asthall as ‘Alconleigh’,peopled it with her family and described it, not with idealism, but with aravishing lightness and clarity, like the sun spilling onto the fields at dawn.
It is a construct, of course. The Mitfords were not quitelike Nancy’s fictional ‘Radletts’. Her father’s rampaging eccentricity wasrendered faithfully, as were his habits – such as writing down the names ofpeople he disliked and putting the paper into a drawer, stuck with pins – but‘Uncle Matthew’ was a simpler, more assured man than the real-life LordRedesdale, and ‘Aunt Sadie’ a more benign woman than his real-life wife.Although the book covers the same timescale as the one that sent assortedMitfords dashing towards political extremes, there is no reference to the factthat Lady Redesdale herself was an admirer of Hitler. The grimly naive remarksmade by Lord Redesdale about pre-war Germany are also expunged. ‘Good God, Inever expected to harbour a full-blooded Hun in this house,’ says UncleMatthew, when the son of the Governor of the Bank of England (surname Kroesig)turns up at his daughter’s coming-out ball. Nor does The Pursuit of Love alludeto the dark passions of Unity and Diana, while Jessica’s elopement is madelight of: the fictional ‘Jassy’ absconds with a Hollywood film star, and theheroine Linda, who falls for a Communist, does so mainly because he isincredibly good-looking.
Then there is the emphasis that Nancy places upon continuum.The seasons come and go, as does the hunting and the lambing, the rhythms ofcountry life; the Radlett children roam and flit like butterflies, searchingfor brightness; and Alconleigh itself stands immutable at the heart of it all,rooted in the land with which Uncle Matthew has an ineffable bond.
In fact the Mitfords had three main childhood homes, whosesurrounding acres were disposed of in job lots. Lord Redesdale inheritedconsiderable assets when he succeeded to the title in 1916, but he was unableto hold on to them. Batsford Park in Gloucestershire, a fairytale castle of oldgold built by his father, was first to go in 1919, together with almost 10,000acres. In 1926 Asthall Manor and more land was sold. The home that the familyhad grown to love was replaced with the self-built Swinbrook House, a chilly,over-symmetrical structure perched just outside the village. Nancy gaveAlconleigh something of the appearance of Swinbrook – ‘It was all as grim andas bare as a barracks, stuck upon the high hillside’ – but little of itsatmosphere. Only Deborah liked it there. Jessica, aged nine when the familymoved to Swinbrook (or ‘Swinebrook’, as Nancy called it), longed to leave. Shecollected ‘running-away money’, and asked repeatedly to be sent to school, arequest fulfilled only briefly. When she did escape, Lord Redesdale may haveblamed himself for not giving her a happier home, but Jessica’s teenagerebelliousness – which lasted well into middle age – was more complex thanthat. Nevertheless the move to Swinbrook was significant; it was the beginningof the end for the family as an entity. ‘We never again had real family lifeafter we left Asthall,’9 Diana later wrote. Nancy devised a brittle tease abouthow their fortunes had descended from Batsford PARK to Asthall MANOR toSwinbrook HOUSE, but after Swinbrook was sold in 1938 there were no morecountry houses at all. That life was over.
The supreme irony about The Pursuit of Love is that, by thetime it was published, pretty much everything that it represented wasvanishing. Not just the world of feudal certainties and communion with theland; but that of the Mitfords themselves. Tragedy and dislocation comes to thefictional Radletts, yet the family remains essentially secure in itself,eternal despite the passage of time. In real life, the thunderous ideologies ofthe 1930s – so impersonal, so destructive of personal happiness – left theMitfords bereft and broken.
For Nancy, there was creative glee in writing The Pursuit ofLove, but it was also an act of poignant salvation. She was celebrating whathad been lost: her own past, as well as that of her kind. And in doing so shetriggered a public response that has never really faded.
After the war, and despite the election of the 1945 Labourgovernment (for which Nancy herself voted), it seemed that people still cravedwhat the ‘Radletts’ had: an ease, an unhurried confidence, a charm that madelife a less exigent, more reassuring business, above all a rooted sense ofEnglishness. Certainly people liked reading about these things. As withBrideshead Revisited, also published in 1945, The Pursuit of Love was aninstant, stunning success. It sold 200,000 copies within a year, 1 millioncopies by the time of Nancy’s death in 1973, and even now – when the upperclasses are about the only minority that can be attacked with impunity – it isas popular as it has ever been. So too is its 1949 successor, Love in a ColdClimate, in which the Radletts prance on the sidelines but the central dramaexerts the same fundamental enchantment.
Nancy Mitford was an artist. Not major league, but nobodyelse could do quite what she did. She told her stories in such a way as toencapsulate – to become – the essence of what she was writing. As time went onshe became the smiling gatekeeper to a particular image of England (rather thanBritain), irresistible not just for its content but for the way in which thiswas presented. Nancy did not write about the upper classes as her friend EvelynWaugh did, with an awed seriousness beneath the jokes: she treated them as ifthey were the most normal thing in the world – which, to her, they were. Nordid she satirize her characters, even the fabulously comedic ones. Her tone wasinnately good-natured and accepting. Yet her humour, which ran as deep andessential as the marrow in her bones, enabled her to see what she was, and tolaugh at it; even though she believed in it.
Nancy offered up the aristocracy with a light touch, withoutself-consciousness. She exemplified the almost childlike lack of fear in theupper classes, their refusal to throw veils of half-embarrassed discretion overwhat they are or say. Take, for instance, the reaction of Linda Radlett to hernew-born baby. ‘It’s really kinder not to look,’ she says to her friend Fanny,who is equally appalled by the ‘howling orange’ in its swaddling. Now this is areaction shared by many obliged to coo over cots, but few would dare to expressit, and anybody who did would draw attention to their own daring. Nancy felt nosuch need. She said outrageous things with exactly the same polite, feminineprecision as she said anything else. Linda, embarking on a train journey toSpain, tells Fanny that she dreads the journey alone. You may not be alone,says Fanny: ‘Foreigners are greatly given, I believe, to rape.’ ‘Yes, thatwould be nice …’ In Love in a Cold Climate another baby is born, this time tobeautiful Polly and her creepy husband; it ‘took one look, according to theRadletts, at its father, and quickly died again’. One’s laughter at this ispartly shock, but Nancy was never shocked, nor shockable. Her manners were impeccable,but she was delicately careless of the proprieties. And her refusal to beserious is the most subversive thing of all. When she arrived at Perpignan towork with Spanish Civil War refugees – a hard, distressing job that sheperformed with caring competence – she was nevertheless unable to resist sayingthat Unity was also on her way to help. Nothing quite that off-colour ever madeit into her novels. They were not, as has been said, the whole truth: theyturned the truth into a commodity.
What defines Nancy’s writing – its Mitfordian quality – isthe sincerity of her levity. All the sisters had this trait, as to an extentdid their father. They brought it out in each other, and sometimes played tothe gallery with it: as in Jessica’s Hons and Rebels. But it was their naturalidiom. A supreme example came from Diana, when she and Mosley were jailed in1940 as suspected enemy sympathizers, and for three years in Holloway sheendured unspeakable conditions and mental anguish. Nevertheless, as she put itto her husband, ‘it was still lovely to wake up in the morning and feel thatone was lovely One.’ This remark, with its almost painful funniness born ofpain, its lightness born of indomitability, above all its complete naturalness(Diana wasn’t trying to be funny, she was simply saying what she meant) iswholly Mitfordian. So too is the private system of jokes, now so familiar thatall those nicknames, all that Tuddemy (Tom10), Cake (the Queen Mother11), Boots(Cyril Connolly12), Joan Glover (von Ribbentrop13) and Bosomy (PresidentKennedy14), can become a bit of a crasher (bore) – although that is not thefault of the jokers themselves. In her novels Nancy modified it slightly. Butthe dominant voice of her characters15 is her own, the Mitford voice, and thusthat distinct, direct, wide-eyed, fantastical idiom has become a familiar modeof speech, unbearable to some, adorable to others, oddly impossible to imitate.It is part-childish, part-posh, part-1920s exaggeration – ‘do admit’, ‘oh youare kind, the kindness of you’, ‘she ees wondair’ – yet what makes it durableis the edge of perceptiveness, the nail on the head quality. ‘You know, being aConservative is much more restful,’ says Linda Radlett, apropos the CommunistParty, ‘though one must remember that it is bad, not good. But it does takeplace within certain hours, and then finish …’
To be on the receiving end of the Mitford speech mode is anundoubtedly delightful experience. ‘Oh now aren’t you clever,’ said Deborah tome, when I had done nothing more than recall the name of one of her husband’sracehorses. ‘Miss Thompson: so clever, and so nice,’ said Diana, to an agedgentleman who joined us for tea in her Paris flat. I fell for it, but then sodid pretty much everybody who met them (Diana could have had Karl Marxgrovelling at her feet). The point, of course, was that the way the sistersspoke was an outward expression of charm. And here one comes down to it: afterall the analysis, the identification of the elements that comprise the Mitfordphenomenon – the x 6 power, the upbringing, the times in which they lived, theshowmanship, the toughness, the humour – one is left with that single, fusedelement. Charm. A quality that can enrage, but whose mystery is brightlyindestructible.
In itself there was nothing particularly remarkable aboutthe fact of the Mitford sisters’ charm. Many of their circle were charming,people like Lady Diana Cooper, Lord Berners, Sir Harold Acton and, in herlugubrious way, Violet Hammersley. It is a characteristic associated with theupper classes, who had the leisure to weave that ethereal web, and theconfidence to override resistance. The ‘creamy English charm’ that Evelyn Waughfamously described in Brideshead Revisited poured its streams through society,soothing and poisoning as it went.
But the Mitford charm – which, for all its high-altitudechill, did the essential thing of making life seem better – was charm writlarge. It had the quality of self-awareness, increasingly so after Nancymythologized it. The Mitfords deployed their charm as a kind of tease, as partof a game in which the charmed were also invited to take part; and thisknowingness, this self-ironizing, is the preservative that prevents decay.
The charm of the Mitfords en masse was very much Nancy’screation. But then there are the six individual girls, who in real life werecharming all right, but were a lot of other things as well. When one thinksabout Unity, in particular, the very notion of charm seems rather absurd.Indeed perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the Mitfordian image is that itentrances and delights and at the same time contains so much that is notentrancing at all. Perhaps that is simply charm at work again, compellingpeople to overlook the lethal sympathies?
Without Nancy’s mythologizing skills, the separate lives ofthe Mitford girls (except Pam) would be of interest, but because of her –because she marketed herself, her family and her class – interest stillflourishes in the full six-pack. As current usage would have it, the sistersare ‘iconic’. They are part Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, part PattiHearst in the Symbionese Liberation Army, part Country Life girls in pearls,part Malory Towers midnight feasters, part marble frieze of smiling young goddesses.Their significance has become detached from the realities of their own times,and is now a significance of image; as most things are today.
They are the stuff of themed fashion shoots (tweed, littlehats, elegant brogues, shooting sticks) and mesmerized blogs (‘The Divine Debo’is a fairly representative post title). A book was published recently entitledThe Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life. Who knows, there may be a guided tour totheir widely varied habitat (Swinbrook, Chatsworth and Holloway jail). They areconstantly referenced in popular culture. Caitlin Moran’s fabled upbringing,with the eight auto-didact children running loose around a Wolverhamptoncouncil house, could be seen as a working-class take on the Mitfords. Meanwhilethe sisters themselves have been satirized by razor-witted modern comedians: inBBC2’s Bellamy’s People,16 two actresses dressed up as aged facsimiles ofJessica and Diana and sat in their drawing room beneath images of Stalin andHitler. The Mitford idiom was magnificently conjured: ‘Stalin – oh he wasterribly attrective! With that wonderful peasant moustache – very sixy!!!’‘Fuffy – oh that’s what I called the Führer – darling Fuffy, well, he wasterribly misunderstood …’ The joke was not exactly affectionate, but affectionis not really what the Mitford girls inspire; one is always aware that they arenot as cosy as they appear to be. The joke was also on us, incidentally, forturning these adherents to murderous ideologies into figures of fascination.
It is perverse. Society today seeks a nirvana ofnon-judgmentalism about everything, except the things that the Mitfordsrepresented. Yet their image still seduces. Why?
Well: one might call it a variant strain of Downton AbbeySyndrome, in which people seek comfort by retreating to an age of hierarchies,prejudices and certainties. The posh past, in other words. Being upper classtoday can bring the wrath of God down upon one’s head; attending public schoolcan be, as Linda Radlett whispered of Oscar Wilde’s unknown crimes, ‘worse thanmurder’; possessing an RP accent, or a Labrador, can lead to fiery accusationsof elitism: yet poshness retains its mystique, and this is a quality that theMitfords embodied. In The Pursuit of Love, Nancy conjures her world with acosy, companionable ease that still puts up invisible barriers. And her readersremain besotted: not just by her humour, charm and so on, but because we likewhat she is describing. We want the freedom to hate it yet we don’t – most ofus – want it to cease to exist (what would we do without class? We would belost). As long as an upper-class person handles their social status in theright way – preferably with a larky wink to their own eccentricity –egalitarian Britain will forgive them for it.
And the Mitfords, with their populist streak and eye uponthe gallery, were remarkably good at classless displays of class. Deborah wouldmock her own accent – ‘Ridiculous. It’s just silly, and up here [in Derbyshire]it sounds even sillier.’17 ‘Class is just too dull for words,’ she would say,from the citadel of Chatsworth. Such broad-minded self-mockery is typicalMitford, although how deep it went is another story. In her letters Deborahexpressed contempt for the left-wing politics of Jessica and family (‘I’mafraid they’ll find Chatsworth not very progressive’). A middle-class personwould have suffered grievously for this kind of remark, but the ‘thrillinglyposh’18 Deborah got away with it. Her autobiography Wait for Me! is full ofbrisk loathing for New Labour, and sends a lethal countrywoman’s shot at IvorNovello, a visitor to one of the Devonshires’ homes, who called her coursingwhippet ‘an enchanting bit of beige’ (a very Nancy phrase, but not to Deborah’staste). Meanwhile Diana, in person, seemed entirely devoid of snobbery, and wassimilarly amused by what she perceived as her outlandish voice when she sawherself on television.19 But in her writings she could pull sudden, knowingrank: ‘There is no such person as Lady Sybil Colefax,’20 was a droll correctionin a book review. In a published diary she quoted the peer Lord Strathmoresaying that ‘if he had a gun’ he would shoot a fellow peer who had criticizedthe Queen. ‘What are we coming to, when a Scotch landowner, in August, has notgot a gun?’21
Note that ‘Scotch’, by the way. This is ‘U’ usage. The U andNon-U debate went a bit near the knuckle on the issue of class. In fact all thewriting paper v. notepaper stuff is in The Pursuit of Love, but there,crucially, the reader is in on the joke: a subtle form of flattery is going on,as in Four Weddings and a Funeral, which offers viewers the comforting illusionthat their own lives (including entrées to castles) are up on the screen.Conversely, the measured direct speech of ‘The English Aristocracy’ essay madeit very plain that this was Nancy’s joke. Not her invention – U and Non-U wasthe concept of the linguist Professor Alan Ross – but it was she who made itincendiary, because of who she was. Thousands of people were enthralled by herstrictures, and never again in their lives said the word ‘mantelpiece’. But shehad annoyed them, all the same. (‘We could do with something more interestingthan listening to a snobbish woman airing her views on class distinction,’ wasthe reaction of a viewer after Nancy appeared on the BBC.) Her followers werenot enchanted, as they had been when, say, Aunt Sadie decreed Surrey anot-quite-appropriate location for a country house. So it was lucky that theydid not see a letter written by Nancy in 1957, reassuring Jessica about herdaughter, who was in Mexico at the time of an earthquake: ‘People like us arenever killed in earthquakes & furthermore only 29 people were, all non-U …’This was the brutish side of Nancy’s ‘teasing’: the one that she softened forher public, but not for her friends, and especially not for her family. Today aremark of that kind would be almost as mal vu as a friendship with Hitler. ButNancy, were she alive to receive the criticism, would smile through it: just asshe did the storm over ‘U’, in which accusations of snobbery and shallownesswhirled around her elegant head like hailstones; just as Diana had sat, withouta tremor, and faced down vilification that would have shaken most people intopieces.
This confidence of theirs – relaxed, diamond-hard – isfascinating. It particularly fascinates women. It is the confidence of theupper classes, embellished by femaleness: a kind of confidence that, for alltheir greater freedom, today’s women do not find it easy to possess.
Women today ought to be high on self-assurance, given thatmen are obliged to behave around us with tiptoeing deference, the culture saysthat any way of life we choose should be ours for the taking, books tell usthat we must celebrate our every last flaw, while at the same time urging us tobe our best possible selves … but actually none of this is reassuring, quitethe opposite. Women are in a metaphorical pressure cabin, on a state of highalert, chiefly about what other women are doing and whether it is better thanwhat One is doing. Should one make cupcakes or become CEO of a multinational;should one strive to resemble an Oscar nominee or celebrate one’s freedom fromthat particular tyranny; should one shave every inch of one’s body or tweetpictures of one’s statement armpits; should one be a domestic goddess, a yummymummy, an alpha female, a pre-feminist, a post-feminist, a feminist, a feministwho nevertheless has a facelift … It is a shambolic state of affairs. There isonly one answer to all of this, which is to be oneself, but it seemsextraordinarily hard to be sure of what that is. Hence the fascination of theMitfords, who always had the confidence of their own choices, however mad thesefrequently were.
There is something essentially unworried about them. Again,today, this is almost impossible to achieve. It is not really to do with money– the Mitford girls grew up in a household that was lucky enough to have thingsto sell, but was nevertheless always selling them – although it is, of course,connected to privilege. Yet in truth this offered only a veil of protectionagainst peculiarly cruel events. The trauma of Jessica’s disappearance, theviolent public excoriation of Unity and Diana, the disintegration of the familyunit, the miscarriages and illnesses and shocking bereavements – the Mitfordstory was not unlike a soap opera in its constant assaulting dramas, and thesisters had all the resilience of soap opera matriarchs in the way that theyweathered tragedy. Nevertheless, and in some mysterious way, their browsremained clear. As Nancy had it, there was always something to laugh at. Thisdid not, as Diana once wrote,22 mean that one was necessarily happy – only thatsomething was funny – but it was a true philosophy, that yearning towardslightness, and it was as good a creed as any by which to live. It had thepriceless quality of allowing one to rise above events and see them astransient, not quite as important as they thought they were, merely steps onthe way to the churchyard at Swinbrook; therefore not worth worrying about.
It is frankly therapeutic to think of Diana, shakinghelplessly with ill-suppressed laughter at the hey-nonny-nos of the folk singer‘who had so kindly come to Holloway to amuse the prisoners but had not meant toamuse them quite as much as that’. It is quite marvellous to read Nancy on herFrench lover, Gaston Palewski, who turned fifty ‘& minds. I’ve never mindedbeing any of the terrible ages that have overtaken me and so don’t quiteunderstand.’ Or indeed Nancy, sorting out her inheritance with Deborah whilelying on her deathbed: ‘We had screams over the Will.’ Or Deborah, after losingher third baby, writing that the village nurse had called her Your Ladyship‘through the most undignified parts’. Or Diana, saying that sex, about whichpeople made such a fuss, was no more difficult than eating a Mars bar.23 Allthe things we take so seriously – suffering, ageing, dying, babies, love … TheMitfords took them seriously too, deep down. But what liberation there is, allthe same, in pretending otherwise.
Fearless though they were, the Mitford girls neverthelessalways operated within certain boundaries. They were a blend of formality andanarchy that is impossible now to achieve: revolutionaries who had been to thehairdresser, iconoclasts who put the milk in second, transgressors in tweeds.And this, too, fascinates women, this indestructibly feminine way of breakingthe rules.
For sure they fascinate me. I remember Diana, movinggracefully about her airy apartment in the septième: a tall wraith, like a longexquisite wisp of grey-white smoke, entirely beautiful at the age of ninety.Her cheekbones retained the purity of a Canova, curving constantly as shedissolved into that almost silent Mitford laughter. I can still hear hersaying, en passant: ‘I’ve had a fantastic life.’ Then Deborah, a vigorous andeaseful figure with her dog at her side, sitting with her feet up on a stool ina casually grand anteroom at Chatsworth, instructing me firmly that a womanneeds a ‘proper husband, proper children’ – advice totally contrary to my ownideas, but somehow I have never forgotten it. And then Nancy, beloved Nancy,architect of the Mitford myth, with her neat sharp brain, her romanticism, hercynicism, her felicitous heart-lifting turns of phrase; when I first read her,aged about thirteen, I could scarcely believe (so weighted down was I withEliot and Hardy) that one was actually allowed this kind of pleasure, thatliterature could be soufflélight as well as monolithic, and still tellmemorable truths. Few are the women who do not relish Nancy (her sisters wereamong the exceptions, but that’s another story). Her Dior silhouette, herFrench bulldogs, her spry energy, her sharp silliness, her love of Parisiansmartness and seventeenth-century prettiness, her description of an ideal partyas ‘hours and hours of smiling politeness’: all this satisfies female cravingsfor elegance in an inelegant world. But there is also a sense of realsubstance, of the daily courage in frivolity. As for her novels – like JaneAusten’s they can be misunderstood in a way that flatters feminine fantasies.Linda Radlett meets a sexy French duke with a spare flat in the seizième;Lizzie Bennet meets a brooding Englishman with a magnificent estate; both womenare loved for their Real Selves … Of course such interpretations turn a blindeye to the flickering shadows in these books. The Pursuit of Love is permeatedwith images of death – like the graveyard outside the nursery at Asthall – and,as does Pride and Prejudice, it reminds the reader constantly that love, thehappy ending, is a matter of chance: that life is brief, and goes awry veryeasily. Yet what endures – not just in this book, but in everything that Nancysubsequently wrote – is the bright affirmativeness of her voice. It containsthe sound of happiness, of sane good humour; it taught me that levity andseriousness are not incompatible, which was an important thing to learn.
So I am immensely grateful to the Mitfords, to theMitfordian image that makes life quite simply more enjoyable, althoughnaturally it is far from being the whole truth. To take just one example ofwhat lay beneath: the appalling migraines that Diana suffered, which beganafter the war, affected neither her looks nor her calm demeanour, and can beseen as a metaphor for a mass of hidden tumult. There was a large price to payfor being one of six such girls. In 1972 Nancy told an interviewer that sisterswere a protection against ‘life’s cruel circumstances’, to which Jessica – whoin 1944 praised her daughter by saying ‘There’s not a trace of Mitford in her’– replied that sisters were life’s cruel circumstances (‘particularly Nancy’).The family dynamic was a veritable morass of female rivalries, shifting andreconfiguring throughout their lives. Nancy was jealous of Pam then of Diana;Jessica was jealous of Deborah; Unity was in thrall to Diana; Jessica was incompetition with Unity; Nancy and Jessica were wary allies; Diana was criticalof Nancy; and so on, and on, until the end. Yet in the main, with one notableexception, the knotty ties remained in place. The sisters met quite frequentlyand corresponded for most of their lives; although when, from the 1980sonwards, what had previously been unseen was gradually revealed – for examplewhat Nancy had written about one sister to another, thinking that the subjectof the letter would never read it – the entire family structure rocked again.
And what of this? In a letter to Deborah, written in 1989after she had been interviewed by a researcher for Desert Island Discs, Dianaexpressed the view that – contrary to the eager young Radio 4 girl’sassumptions – there was nothing especially remarkable about any of the sisters,except Unity. ‘Of course Birdie really was original to the last degree but therest of us weren’t a bit.’ The whole phenomenon, she suggested, was invented bythe newspapers.
A revisionist take on the Mitfords could indeed seek, thus,to rationalize their mystery. It could see them as nothing more than a typicalupper-class family who happened to have a lot of daughters, half of whomhappened to take an interest in extreme but fashionable ideologies. End ofstory? Yes, to the Mitford myth refuseniks. Although where that leaves Nancy’simperishable sliver of genius, Deborah’s ability to secure the future of anational treasure like Chatsworth House while charming men like John F. Kennedyinto rapt submission, the ruthless political fervour of Jessica, Diana and poor‘original’ Unity, I am not sure. Even if one allows nothing more than thebrimming variety of the Mitford sisters’ contacts book – Winston Churchill,John F. Kennedy, Joseph Goebbels, Evelyn Waugh, Adolf Hitler, Lucian Freud,Lytton Strachey, Maya Angelou, Field Marshal Montgomery, one could go on –there is a level of engagement with their times that carries its own, powerful,unrepeatable significance.
Do admit.
Copyright © 2016 by Laura Thompson
