Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (11 page)

Tom had dreamed of a musician’s career, but in 1929 began studying for the law at Inner Temple. He needed to earn; although David gave him an allowance there was no real financial safety net. He entered the chambers of Norman Birkett, an esteemed KC, and in 1935 was part of the defence team for Alma Rattenbury, who was accused of conspiring with her much younger lover to murder her husband.
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This was one of the most sensational criminal trials of the decade; in her debutante year Jessica sneaked in to watch proceedings at the Old Bailey, to which her father reacted rather as Uncle Matthew did when his children mentioned Oscar Wilde.

Meanwhile Tom was a sleek social animal. His close friends included his second cousin Randolph Churchill – despite an age difference of thirty-five years, he was also friendly with Winston – and he had lots of girlfriends. It was thought that he might marry pretty young Penelope Dudley Ward, but (in the style of the then Prince of Wales) he preferred women of the world like the Countess Erdody, the married Princesse de Faucigny-Lucinge, or the Austrian dancer Tilly Losch. Perhaps their extreme sophistication was the best antidote to all those clamorous sisters – Losch, for instance, was a professional at playing hard to get, and that was one quality that the Mitford girls did not really possess.

But certainly Tom was not frightened of women. This is what was impressive about him: surrounded by so many girls, so strong in personality, so energetic even in their boredom, so relentlessly competitive – including for his attention – he could have gone down the Branwell Brontë route and decided to be overwhelmed. He could have been embarrassed by the girls, taking the side of his male friends against them. Instead he was extraordinarily good to Nancy when she was trapped in her futile passion for Hamish St Clair-Erskine; on one occasion in 1929 he rescued her from the Café de Paris, where she had gone with Hamish with 7½d between them (this was typical). ‘We were panicking rather,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘when the sallow & disapproving countenance of old Mit was observed...’ Tom lent Nancy £1 and swept her away to another nightclub: perfect brotherly behaviour, as was taking Jessica as his escort to the Inner Temple ball in 1935 (her debutante season). Tom could have become petulant, demanding, anything he chose really, given that he was – like Alexei, the heir to Tsar Nicholas II – the sole prized boy. Instead he went the other way, and dealt with it all as if it was the easiest thing in the world. He was the embodiment of an overused concept: cool. True cool does not exclude warmth, but Tom always had the ability to keep himself at a slight distance, to make others want to please him. If this was a natural consequence of growing up with the Mitford girls then it was a good ploy, the best possible way of coping with them. The sisters to whom he was closest – Nancy and Diana – both ended up with men who were always at a remove, who made the women come to them.

It was later suggested, by Unity’s biographer, that there was something faintly decadent in the relationship between brother and sisters: incest was said to be a ‘beloved Mitford topic’ and Tom ‘had more than his share of this joke’.
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Certainly one can imagine Unity making excitable cracks along these lines. Possibly Nancy might have done so, in a would-be daring spirit. But this is the kind of thing that can be made to sound a little warped, if one wishes to express a generalized disapproval; it would have been amazing if Tom
hadn’t
been teased in some way.

Despite the mutual affection, which really does seem to have been cloudless, he was quite different from his sisters. For instance he suffered from depression, whereas they had that iron will to happiness. He enjoyed their rippling flurry of constant jokes but did not have that same instinct to make absolutely everything funny. In 1930, however, he disguised himself as ‘Bruno Hat’, an avant-garde German painter, confined by ill-health to a wheelchair in which he made an appearance at a private view, staged by Diana and her first husband (the catalogue for the event was written by Evelyn Waugh). Poor Lytton Strachey actually bought one of Bruno Hat’s paintings. He may have done so to please Diana, whose friend he was; by this time the older Mitford girls had joined the outside world that Tom had, for some ten years, symbolized to them.

Rather like Pamela, but in a more dynamic way, Tom was necessary to the family. Otherwise the jagged composite of Nancy, Diana, Unity and Jessica would have overbalanced it completely. Tom was the person whom everybody both respected
and
liked. To achieve that, all he really had to do was be male and keep relatively quiet, but he did more – the imprint of his personality was enduring. Nevertheless he remained a mystery. Later his sisters would tear themselves to pieces over whether he had or had not been a Fascist sympathizer. Nobody knew quite what he felt about anything. Unlike the Radletts in
The Pursuit of Love,
who ‘tell’ everything, Tom was the male equivalent of exquisite Polly Hampton in
Love in a Cold Climate
, who burns with emotions but keeps them entirely to herself. Polly is to some degree based upon Diana; yet even she, enigmatic though she was, did at least ‘explain’ herself in letters and writings – very few of Tom’s letters survive. They are friendly and perceptive but most decidedly not in the Mitford idiom. In 1930, for example, Tom describes to his mother a flight along the English coast in a ‘7 man unit’ whose passengers included Churchill and T. E. Lawrence: ‘It was very amusing flying
very
low over the edge of the sea and jumping the piers at Brighton and Littlehampton, to the astonishment of the people there...’ That year Tom, who had joined the Auxiliary Air Force, was in a flying accident when his plane crashed into a tree while taking off from Swinbrook. He was taken to Burford hospital and suffered concussion only, but one may imagine – in the days before misfortune began to come at the Mitfords from every direction – the carefully concealed terror of his parents.

Also in 1930, Tom holidayed with his parents and assorted sisters at St Moritz, where they skated constantly. This was a family obsession. As a girl Sydney had loved skating, and had a passion for her instructor: ‘I would even let him kiss me,’ she wrote in her diary. David, still with that excess of energy in his early fifties, often visited the skating rink in Oxford with his brother Jack, where both men flirted gallantly with the Austrian instructresses. Unity won a medal for skating (although on one occasion she fell on her face, having failed to put out her hands in time: ‘I was waiting to see if nature would prompt me’). Tom was talented enough to partner the Olympic champion Sonja Henie (who skated through several Hollywood films), while Deborah, who at St Moritz partnered the Conservative statesman Sir Samuel Hoare, was actually invited to join the British junior team, although her mother turned this down without telling her of the offer (the regret that Deborah admitted to in her autobiography was quite strong, by her standards). Jack Mitford was also on the St Moritz trip, preparing to do the Cresta run. With him was a glamorous chorus girl named Sheilah Graham, who later became a hugely successful Hollywood columnist (one of the first iconoclast celebrity journalists) and the last love of F. Scott Fitzgerald. One of those clever young creatures who instinctively recognize how to find advantage in every situation, Graham relished mixing with the Mitfords – although at that point they had no fame – and aspired to what she saw as their cultured conversation, as well as their aristocratic ease. Perhaps it was her nature to do this, but she became – almost uniquely – fascinated by the Mitford men rather than the women. Tom, whom she described as ‘one of the handsomest men I had ever seen’, was naturally the focus of her fantasies. ‘Perhaps I could found an aristocracy of my own. And I would choose Tom Mitford to be the father, and my sons would look like Saxon kings.’
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VII

David, too, was compared with a Saxon king. Sheilah Graham may have known about the antiquity of the Mitford family, but really she was judging David by his physicality and demeanour: his ‘great shoulders’, his ‘finely chiselled head’, the undiminished air of the aristocrat who had dominated through strength, who had ascended to power because he looked as though it naturally belonged to him.

The impression is of a man who would have thrived in those simpler times. Nancy, too, portrayed her father in this way. ‘Such men as... Uncle Matthew would not have been themselves had they not always been kings in their own little castles,’ she wrote in the valedictory 1960 novel
Don’t Tell Alfred.
‘Their kind is vanishing as surely as the peasants, the horses and the [Parisian] avenues, to be replaced, like them, by something less picturesque, more utilitarian.’ By then David was dead, and had long ceased to be Uncle Matthew, but in Nancy’s literary imagination he had become a symbol of something irrecoverable, grander and wilder than the age to which they both belonged.

The other Mitford girls essentially concurred in the representation of David as Uncle Matthew. Diana protested a little – ‘he wasn’t as mad as that’
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– and both she and Deborah corrected Nancy’s repeated suggestion that he was violent. But David did not, as his wife did, arouse deep divisions of opinion within the sisters. He was warmer than Sydney, more vulnerable, easier to know; and weaker, despite the confidence of his breed. Overlooked as a boy, overshadowed by a charismatic father and paragon brother, thwarted in his desired army career, he naturally gravitated towards the calm divinity that was the young Sydney, and in the early years of their marriage he wrote of his great happiness. Like Tom he was comfortable with a house full of women. When Deborah was born in 1920, the parlourmaid Mabel said: ‘I knew it was a girl by the look on his Lordship’s face,’ but the disappointment would have been superficial. If the honeymoon gloss of his London family life had worn away a little, the seven years at Asthall were surely still the most contented period that David would know: when he could stretch his limbs across his pheasant-coloured land, prowl in his coverts, fish for trout in his three miles of the Windrush, occupy his space in the world with his own people. Deborah would later recall how, as a child, her father would pick her up and carry her lightly as he went about his countryman’s business: ‘the comforting feel of his velveteen waistcoat is inseparable from my memories of him.’
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Like Uncle Matthew, David was an indulgent father. Although – unlike a modern parent – he was most definitely a father rather than a friend, he enjoyed entering his children’s world, they entranced him with their spirited, fantastical, sometimes bad-tempered behaviour, and he sought to encourage them (albeit not intellectually). The pony that he took to High Wycombe in a third-class carriage was bought (under Blackfriars Bridge) because he suddenly thought that his children would like it. At Asthall he made a pool in the river where they could learn to swim, together with a diving board. Walking back home after bathing, in his dark-blue serge suit plus what he called his ‘crinoline’ – a bizarre little skirt worn for modesty – he would amuse them by picking up sticks and stones with his feet, saying: ‘Look what my prehensile extremities can do.’ His turn of phrase, which was his own, was a mixture of deliberate droll pedantry, surreal adjectives (‘take your degraded elbows off the table’) and straightforward statements whose very plainness created a kind of poetry (‘he’s a meaningless piece of meat/ a literary cove/ a putrid sort of fella’). Like the Mitford girl idiom, this mode of speech was completely natural to him, although one has the sense that he knew it amused his daughters and deployed it accordingly. Thanks to Nancy, it gave him a kind of immortality.

Uncle Matthew was a more accurate portrait than Nancy’s first shot at portraying her father, as the blustering, blimpish General Murgatroyd in
Highland Fling.
But both creations had his wilful, unaccountable temper. As Deborah put it, ‘reason was not part of his make-up.’ In youth he was prone to appalling tantrums and was once locked in a room by his father, where he heated a poker with which to launch a revenge attack.
The Pursuit of Love
describes how his children could push him, inch by inch, in what Nancy called a game of ‘Tom Tiddler’s ground’, teasing and badgering and measuring his head to see whether he was a ‘subhuman’; all of which he would take in high good humour, until suddenly the explosion would come.

This was close to real life, although David’s rages had an irritable oddity that his alter ego lacked. Uncle Matthew would flare up over all sorts of things – punctuality (‘in precisely six and three-quarter minutes the damned fella will be late’), his neighbour Lady Montdore (‘the hell-bag’), his daughters’ young men (‘sewers’),
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Slavs (‘so that’s a Serb, is it? Well, just what one would expect, needs a shave’), any foreigner (‘they’re all the same, and they all make me sick’) – and so on. Yet so widespread is this hatred that it creates a perversely benign effect: it is token, almost meaningless. David was milder in the general way of things, but his anger was more disconcerting. It may have sprung from frustration – as if he were constantly fighting against the missing lung, the broken pelvis that put an end to riding – rather than bombast. David had no vices (unless one counts smoking). He did not drink, gambled only occasionally, almost certainly never womanized and, despite memberships of the usual places – the House of Lords, the Carlton and Marlborough Clubs – he did not really indulge in the wallowing relaxation of masculine company. So he had no outlets for emotional steam: except these sudden manifestations of temper. He could be rude, as to James Lees-Milne. He was obsessively fastidious, and had a horror of untidy eating, of spills on the ‘good tablecloth’, of stickiness anywhere (his stated idea of hell was honey on his bowler hat). He was also provoked by Unity’s habit of eating vast quantities of mashed potatoes while staring at him with her giant baleful eyes. Sometimes she would slide down from her chair and simply sit beneath the table. This is where David’s raging and Sydney’s detachment failed, quite seriously, to meet the case; but who knows what would have worked better?