Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (44 page)

Nevertheless attempts at treatment continued for what had now been diagnosed as meningitis, caused by an infection from the bullet. The mother and daughter went by boat to the mainland, and penicillin was administered at the hospital in Oban. As arrangements were being made for ambulance transport to a specialist neurosurgery unit – a journey much like the one made from Folkestone eight years earlier – Unity had an epileptic fit and lapsed into unconsciousness. She died the same day, aged just short of thirty-four.

Death, which had sat fidgeting in the waiting room since the first day of war, had at last risen to claim great galumphing Boud, who had rampaged through life like an innocent puppy but had held so much unfathomable darkness. In a strange way she had been the happiest of the sisters. Yet she had had not a clue as to how to live. She had been entirely at the mercy of her giant capacity for passion, for which she had sought a vessel of equal magnitude: the times being what they were, she had the evil luck to find one, and paid an equally all-consuming price for it. For Sydney, who had endured pain beyond imagining with her daughter, there was surely a degree of relief; not least that Unity would not now outlive her. But the real grief would have been for the girl who had existed before the suicide attempt – ‘How cruel it was, really, to bring her back to life,’ wrote Diana
¹⁵
– or perhaps before the first visit to Munich.

After Unity’s death, Diana wrote to Nancy (who, rather to her own surprise, was devastated by the loss of her sister). The letter said that Sydney was greatly distressed by a remark that Nancy had made, suggesting that Unity should never have been taken so far away from her doctor at the Radcliffe Infirmary. There was no reproach in Diana’s tone – the relationship between the sisters was still close at that time, and Diana was at pains to say that their mother must have misunderstood – but she wanted Nancy to give some reassurance. Nancy, meanwhile, was appalled: she had said nothing of the kind, she wrote to Diana, all she had done was
mention
the doctor. On this occasion, one believes her. It was, certainly, the sort of accusation that Sydney would have made only against this particular daughter, who had after all made the grim visit to Inch Kenneth after Unity’s death. Of course Sydney was in a state of great grief; increased, perhaps, by a sense that she should
not
indeed have taken her daughter to the island. If Nancy had even hinted at such a thing, she may have touched a nerve of guilt. But Sydney’s ability to stir the same emotion in Nancy was always very strong. ‘I can’t bear her to think I feel that anything different should have been done.’ She wrote to her mother, saying as much, but the fundamental impasse between the two women remained.

As did the protectiveness that her sisters felt towards Unity; for them she remained vulnerable after death. When her biography was written in 1976 the surviving Mitfords returned to war in their particular, inter-familial way. Mosley – who, in a television debate coinciding with its publication, described Unity as ‘a sweet gel, an honest gel’
¹⁶
– attempted to have the book suppressed, as did the Devonshires. Jessica, who had co-operated with the author David Pryce-Jones, was blamed for having done so. Deborah’s view had been that nobody who had not known Unity could possibly portray her, so contradictory was her character: ‘it would just be Nazis all the way’. (She added: ‘I do wish people would stop writing books.’)

When the biography was sent to Diana in proof, she wrote to Deborah: ‘It is very nasty.’ She deplored the interviews with Mary Ormsby-Gore and, especially, with the family’s former parlourmaid Mabel, by then aged ninety and in Diana’s view not a reliable witness. Mabel had, for instance, claimed that David Redesdale had said to her: ‘I can never lift my head up again’ – admittedly most unlikely from such a proud, withdrawn man. Diana was also appalled by the amount of material concerning the crazy anti-Semite Julius Streicher, and by what she perceived as the attempt to imply an affair between him and Unity. ‘He was about two feet high and wildly unattractive’ (the least of his problems, one might think). Diana longed, she said, to defend Unity, while recognizing that this was almost impossible. Oddly enough, it was Pamela who was the most enraged of all – beneath the passivity lay the Mitford steel – and accused Jessica of stealing a scrapbook of photographs for use in the book. Jessica furiously denied this to Pam and wrote a letter, both defensive and emollient, to Deborah. ‘I can’t make a break with her,’ was Deborah’s resigned conclusion to Diana. Thus, deep into middle age, the divisions and alliances remained as alive as ever. Of course the objections to the biography were slightly disingenuous, although several interviewees did claim to have been misquoted (fearful perhaps of the Mitford Furies?). Nevertheless the book was remarkably researched; it sought to understand rather than condemn, and the fact remained that Unity
had
associated closely with the Nazi regime. Did the Mitfords really believe that such behaviour remained, as it were, within the family; that the loyalty of friends was to be commanded, in the face of what Unity had said and done; that there were no public implications? This was an extraordinary expression of their peculiar confidence, if so, and it seemed as though it
was
so.

Unity was buried at Swinbrook, a place she had loved. Towards the end of her life she had amused herself by planning her funeral, although it was Sydney’s choice to engrave the line from Clough on her tomb: ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth.’ The Mosleys attended the ceremony, and although David did not speak to Diana’s husband she later received a letter from him apologizing for this: he had not meant any snub. To his wife, however, he gave no sign of lasting reconciliation. He had travelled to Oban to meet her, and they returned together to Swinbrook with their daughter’s coffin. Yet in July, just six weeks after Unity’s death, Nancy ran into his housekeeper Margaret, quite by chance, at the palace of Versailles. To Diana she described the encounter. Their father rang or wrote to Margaret every day, she said, and in her casual way she remarked how glad she was that David had found love: ‘One can’t say there was ever much of that from Muv who didn’t even like him particularly – not that I blame her.’ This, from the woman who had created the eternal partnership of Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie, in all its configurative contentment, and who even then was reconjuring it in
Love in a Cold Climate
? Did she really believe what she said? In a sense, perhaps, although the desire for detachment (and perhaps the ever-present urge to shock) made her too sharp. She had loved her father, and she admired her mother. He was the warmer, unquestionably, although so much the weaker. This is hinted at in Nancy’s novels, which portray Sadie sitting vaguely ‘on her cloud’ while her husband – who is never quite happy away from her (unless it is with somebody like his gamekeeper) – does most of what she wants. Despite his theatrical displays of temper, his children never really fear him or his disapproval. It is Sadie whose good opinion they seek. When Linda disappears with the glamorous Communist Christian in
The Pursuit of Love
, it is her mother’s imagined reaction – sorrowful, guilt-inducing – that worries her. Yet for all this, the veil of benevolence that Nancy throws over her parents’ fictional marriage embraces it completely. There is never a moment’s doubt that it is happy, nor that it will not last until death. However ironic this seemed by the time the novels were published, it surely contained something of the truth of the Redesdales’ past: it was their children who destroyed them and their life together.

Despite the death of Unity, the unspeakable irruption of Peter Rodd into her life, the terrible evening stuck with him at a restaurant table while the Colonel flirted merrily at another, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh with this typically teasing exclamation: ‘Heavenly 1948.’ He replied – similarly in character – ‘What an odd idea of heaven. Of course in my country we cannot enjoy the elegant clothes & meals & masquerades which fill your days.’

In France, it was true, Nancy was leading a life that England forbade. One of her aunts, her father’s sister Iris, wrote rather nastily, accusing her of not wishing to share in the austerity. Who, wondered Nancy, could actually wish such a thing? Waugh’s not wholly joking riposte was that she had voted for the government that was imposing these exigencies, then fled their consequences.

After the war, when the top rate of tax rose to 19s 6d in the pound, Derek Jackson had simply upped sticks with Pamela and moved to Ireland. They lived at Tullamaine Castle, in the hunting country of Tipperary. For all his love of horses – he rode in the 1946 Grand National – he rather quickly tired of the lack of intellectual stimulation and began working in the scientific laboratories at Dublin University. There he met a young woman named Janetta Kee, who would become the third of his six wives. For Pamela, impenetrable though her emotions were, this may have been something of a relief – as Deborah later guardedly remarked, Derek was ‘not like others’. It may even have been a joy, when she discovered the size of her divorce settlement. ‘So glad Woman is to roll,’ Nancy wrote to Diana in 1950. Plenty of people would have seethed over Pamela’s effectively unearned wealth, but in some ways Nancy could rise above the pettiness of jealousy; she did not seem to mind, for instance, when Jessica rivalled her success as a writer (despite the imitative aspect of
Hons and Rebels
) and she even told Evelyn Waugh that Diana’s memoirs, begun in 1962, were ‘dazzling and screamingly funny’. In another mood, of course, she might have said differently. Beyond all else, Nancy was unaccountable. What did she think, for instance, when Deborah became Duchess of Devonshire, chatelaine of a house that made Batsford look as bogus as an example of a Barratt Homes Georgian?

In 1946 Deborah and Andrew had moved to Edensor, close to Chatsworth House, which that year was vacated by its wartime residents, 300 girls from Penrhos College. The rooms of the great stately home were cold and echoing: the contents had been stashed away, Old Masters stuffed casually into drawers, and the clocks, which were wound once a week, struck loudly in the emptiness. The Duke of Devonshire had taken little interest in Chatsworth since the death of his heir, although he was persuaded by his librarian that it should be run as a proper business. Two Hungarian sisters, together with a small team of Eastern European women, took on the job of dusting and polishing the rooms, which at that time numbered 178. The duke, who had removed himself to another family home, Compton Place at Eastbourne, spent his time drinking and chopping wood. He also handed over most of his fortune to the Chatsworth Settlement Trust, which required him to live a further five years if his descendants were to avoid death duties. He died of a massive heart attack in 1950, aged fifty-five, fourteen weeks before the time was up. His death certificate was signed by Dr John Bodkin Adams, who had treated Deborah’s two oldest children for whooping cough and the following year was accused of murdering a patient: he was later suspected of killing some 160 others.

The post-war tax regime now had the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire in its grip. Death duties were levied at a rate of 80 per cent on what was, undeniably, a massive estate: a house in London’s Mayfair (the old town house on Piccadilly, where Sydney attended her first debutante dance, was long sold); Lismore Castle in Ireland; great chunks of Derbyshire; land in Scotland; and Chatsworth House itself – dreamlike despite its substance, its flattened dull-gold frontage seeming to float in the air – with its Sculpture Gallery full of Canovas, its great gardens designed by Paxton, its roof spanning 1.3 acres. Nevertheless the debt was harsh – four-fifths of the estate had to go – and this would have confirmed Deborah, if such a thing had been necessary, in her dislike of socialist governments. In 1945 Andrew had stood as a Conservative candidate for the Chesterfield constituency, which he lost by more than 12,000 votes. While canvassing he was heckled and spat at, and on one occasion a car in which he and Deborah sat was rolled repeatedly until it almost turned over. Unlike some of her sisters, she got no kick out of this kind of political agitating. Like Uncle Matthew she believed in public duty and the sanctity of land ownership; believed therefore that Andrew was the custodian of his inheritance, and understood that responsibility better than the state. She was, in that sense, a true conservative. She would probably have been baffled by the fact that Nancy could express a nostalgic longing for those same ideals in
The Pursuit of Love
while voting for Mr Attlee. (It was indeed a paradox, although – one might say – by the by in that family.)

But Deborah also understood – as did Nancy – that the world had shifted away from her kind. She was above all a pragmatist. As her father had done in order to survive, Andrew sold: in this case thousands of acres, magnificent furniture and several paintings, including a Rembrandt that was later found to be a ‘studio production’. In 1954, when the debt to the Exchequer was in the process of being discharged, Nancy wrote an acid little aside to Evelyn Waugh, saying that she would sympathize more with the Devonshires if they actually cared about these objects (she also suggested to Deborah that the drawers-full of Old Masters had made her sister’s fingers ‘itch for an india-rubber’). Perfectly true that Deborah was not an aesthete by nature; also true that Nancy was joking; but the serpentine glint is surely discernible in Nancy’s remarks. At the same time she would have fairly relished the fact that her sister was a Grade One Duchess, who had placed the Mitfords in the impenetrable aristocratic sphere that fascinated Nancy as much as it did her readers. And for all her socialistic sympathies, which are sometimes so hard to detect, she would have believed that the Devonshire legacy was best handled by the Devonshires. In fact the debt to the government was not cleared until 1974. The money that might have restored Chatsworth for the nation had been returned to the nation. But the job of the house had begun: Deborah, who hated work, would find in it fulfilment.