Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (48 page)

The loss of Pamela affected the surviving Mitfords very deeply. It was as if something that they had thought immutable, like rain, had suddenly gone. Pam was buried at Swinbrook, together with three of her sisters; her grave stands separate from the rest.

Diana

Suffered her own term of trial during the years of Nancy’s illness, driving between Orsay and Versailles almost every day as the migraines flowered in her head. Diana visited Nancy with the staunchness that her mother had shown when she herself was in Holloway. But the duty to be with Nancy fought the pressure to be with Mosley: ‘I longed to stay but it was impossible,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘If I had stayed he would have had his birthday completely alone.’

In 1977 Diana published her autobiography,
A Life of Contrasts
, which was received in predictable fashion: the style was greatly admired and the content criticized. Diana publicized the book and was interviewed on the BBC’s
Russell Harty Show.
Her appearance was controversial, but she was serenely undisturbed except by the sound of her own voice: ‘I think you
might
have died of laughing,’ she wrote to Deborah, who had missed the programme. In 1980 she published a biography of her friend, the Duchess of Windsor. Mosley, possessive even of her time, asked her not to write another book, even though she had done her work at night.

By this time Mosley had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Yet he remained strong until late 1980, around the time of his eighty-fourth birthday. Diana began helping him to undress, to go to bed. Throughout the night of 2–3 December she woke several times to check on him, and at 4 a.m. on the morning of the 3rd she found him lying dead on the floor. She held him in her arms, saying, ‘Darling, darling, come back to your Percher.’ The depth of her love, and her grief, were extraordinary: Diana’s emotions had the magnitude of Greek tragedy. In 1981 she became partially paralysed, as if from a stroke. She was suffering from a large, benign brain tumour, which she believed had grown on account of her bereavement. Who can say that she was mistaken? – although she was almost certainly wrong to think that Nancy’s virulent cancer had been caused by lack of love and excess of spite; this, surely, was ‘wisdom’ after the discovery of Nancy’s wartime betrayal.

Diana recovered quickly from complicated surgery (during a visit from Lord Longford she was heard to murmur: ‘He thinks I’m Myra Hindley’), but her despair did not lift. In December 1981, she wrote to Mosley’s son Nicholas: ‘Darling Nicky, One year today but for me it really seemed like the night before last, because that was the terrible night.’ A year later, she would attack Nicholas fiercely for the first volume of his excellent, measured biography of Mosley,
The Rules of the Game.
It verged upon madness, this love of Diana’s. But there was something very poignant about the way in which she wrote to Deborah, who had offered help during her illness. ‘I only want Kit and he can’t come.’

Eventually Diana resumed writing.
Loved Ones
, published in 1985, was a collection of pen portraits of friends and family (and, incidentally, a superb evocation of an era). She contributed reviews to the
Evening Standard
and
Books & Bookmen.
She produced not a word that was superfluous or inexact; her clarity of argument, even when arguing the case according to Mosley, was pure as geometry. James Lees-Milne thought her a better writer than Nancy. She was certainly more austere and refined, which he may have preferred (although he may simply have preferred Diana). But she lacked, perhaps, the vital creative flame; in her case that went into her life.

In 1989 Diana was a guest on
Desert Island Discs.
She spoke about her friendship with Hitler – ‘I can’t regret it’ – and her husband’s alleged anti-Semitism: ‘He really wasn’t, you know. He didn’t know a Jew from a Gentile. But he was attacked so much by Jews... that he picked up the challenge.’ Asked about the Holocaust, she said: ‘I don’t really, I’m afraid, believe that six million people were killed. I think this is just not conceivable. It’s too many. But whether it’s six or whether it’s one makes no difference morally. It’s completely wrong. I think it was a dreadfully wicked thing.’

This, then, was her stance. She condemned outright the Final Solution, but she would not do so in a way that satisfied. She would not say what people wanted her to say. Those were her terms; except when it came to Mosley, she had always done everything on her own terms. And somehow, by means that no other woman could have achieved, this too became part of her fascination.

Diana left the Temple de la Gloire in 1999 and moved to a beautiful airy flat in the Rue de l’Université. Although now extremely deaf – she had not truly enjoyed a visit to the opera since 1965 – she had books, a love of literature as deep as anybody ever possessed, and she had family. The following year she celebrated her ninetieth birthday at the Hôtel de Crillon, with more than forty of her descendants.

Then there was the Mitford connection, between Diana and Deborah: the last pair standing, who alone among the sisters never deceived each other, whose mutual adoration was real and warm. In Deborah’s case it encompassed the political beliefs that she neither understood nor shared, but which in the case of Diana she simply accepted, because this was Diana. Deborah held the view that Diana became almost ‘saint-like’ in later life; the unstated implication was that this remarkable generosity of spirit was a kind of expiation for what had gone before.

The two sisters exchanged letters to the end. Variations on the Mitford past was their major theme: ‘My goodness how it all comes back.’ They wrote to each other in the voices of girls; in that respect they never grew old. Nor did Diana ever lose her beauty, also a part of her.

With the reissue of
A Life of Contrasts
in 2000, she became a rather fashionable public figure. She had always commanded the most acute interest but, as with Mosley, the urge to vilify her gradually shifted into something more honest: the desire to penetrate her mystery. It could not be done, but she was worth the trouble.

In July 2003 Diana suffered a small stroke, after which she refused to go into hospital. She died on 11 August and was cremated at Père Lachaise cemetery. Diana had no religious belief; her faith had been in Mosley. She was buried next to Unity in Swinbrook churchyard.

Those who met her found her impossible to forget.

Jessica

Published
The American Way of Death
, about the outrageously commercialized funeral industry, in 1963. It became a number one best-seller, earned her around $115,000 within a year and launched her into a career that was, for a time, as stellar as Nancy’s. Jessica had found what she was truly good at: journalism. She was without fear, she loved controversy and publicity – adored reading her own reviews and cuttings – and she had a genuine social conscience. She subsequently wrote
The American Way of Birth
, followed by
Kind and Usual Punishment
, about the American prison service. Her collected journalism was published under the title
The Making of a Muckraker
: no other Mitford sister would ever have described herself in that way.

Apparently with much delight, Jessica became a media figure. ‘From the extent of the brouhaha,’ wrote
The Times
, in a 1965 article about
The American Way of Death
, ‘it is clear that Miss Mitford’s impact on the transatlantic scene is only slightly less than the Beatles’, and may be a good deal more lasting.’ Throughout the 1960s and 1970s she travelled to Europe more often. She allowed Nancy to drag her into couture houses and spent a large chunk of her royalties; in London she met the writer Maya Angelou, who would become a close friend (a de facto, and wonderfully non-Mitford, ‘sister’). She went on book tours, appeared on television and was a brilliant speaker on the lecture circuit. She worked extremely hard, perhaps even harder than Nancy. Yet the
faute de mieux
argument – that success could not compensate for the sadness of Nancy’s life – was never really applied to Jessica in the same way; although she suffered far worse tragedies. Jessica could irritate and enrage her sisters, but with Nancy the emotions went deeper.

Handsome like all Mitfords, Jessica was the only one who did not keep her looks. The others aged but did not change. Jessica became fat, bold and comfortable, like a grand Cotswolds landowner disguised as an American tourist; which in a sense is what she was.

She continued as an activist deep into middle age and was followed in this by Constancia, who had worked for the civil rights movement and had two sons by a leader of the extremist Black Power movement. It interested her sisters greatly that Jessica appeared to disapprove of her daughter’s liaison: did she revert to type a little?

In 1978 she published a second volume of autobiography,
A Fine Old Conflict.
Pamela wrote to say that she had greatly enjoyed it, but that it was wrong of Jessica to say that she had remained in America because all the Mitford family were pro-Nazi. ‘That was a sad figment of your imagination.’ Jessica had a remarkable ability to shrug off such remarks. She also wrote a memoir of her friend Philip Toynbee –
Faces of Philip
– and a book about Grace Darling (‘Grey Starling’),
Grace had an English Heart
, the writing of which bored her tremendously. Like Diana she appeared on
Desert Island Discs.

In 1985 Jessica learned that her husband was having an affair with an old friend of the family. ‘It sounds very bad, poor Decca,’ wrote Diana to Deborah, although in fact the marriage survived. Diana never lost her fondness for the sister who had once adored her; all her life she wore a brooch that Jessica had given her before eloping with Romilly. For her own part, Jessica almost certainly came to regret a rupture that had become, in their relative old age, a near-absurdity, yet she also felt that it had now gone on too long for her to back down. When Mosley died, she wrote to Deborah asking her to convey sympathy to Diana, adding the rather hopeless postscript: ‘you know how it is, Hen’.

Alone among the sisters, Jessica smoked and drank spirits: the Hemingway touch. In the mid-1990s her daughter, now a nurse, confronted her mother about her alcohol problem. To Maya Angelou, Constancia wrote that Jessica had given up instantly, by sheer will-power, which was not something she ever lacked. Her marriage improved thereafter. Smoking, however, was a tougher nut even than Jessica. In June 1996 she was diagnosed with lung cancer, and the end was very quick. This was mercifully unlike Nancy’s illness, although Jessica’s bravery was comparable. To Deborah she wrote: ‘Here’s the point Hen: SO much better than just being hit by a car or in plane wreck.’ She went home for the last few days of her life; as the cancer spread like a blaze through her body, Maya Angelou came and sang to her. The night before she died, on 22 July, she spoke to her Hen on the phone. ‘She knew it was me.’ wrote Deborah to Diana.

After a simple service in a San Francisco hall, Jessica’s ashes were scattered at sea. No American Way of Death for her. No English one either.

Deborah

Enjoyed what was unquestionably the most pleasurable life of any Mitford girl. She worked extremely hard for Chatsworth: but what a job.

As Fabrice de Sauveterre put it to Linda in
The Pursuit of Love
: ‘In short,
madame,
I am happy to tell you that I am a very rich duke, a most agreeable thing to be, even in these days.’ By the time that Deborah’s rich duke inherited, ‘these days’ had become rather less agreeable, although everything is relative. As Jessica wrote to a friend, after visiting her sister in 1955: ‘Because of the Death Duties the poor dears cannot afford to live in “the lodge” (which they own) in the village (which they own) and they make do with opening the house to trippers...’

‘I don’t want to be the one to let it go,’ Deborah’s husband had said. Yet it was an act of defiance against the times, trying to keep such an estate together in the post-war era. The Devonshires finally moved into the great house in 1957 and Deborah took up the challenge, set by Mr Attlee, of making Chatsworth thrive as a commercial enterprise. Andrew, who like most true aristocrats was without snobbery, was insistent that the public should enter through the main front door, that as much of the house as possible be open to them, and that they should wander and picnic as they wished in the gardens (only the Old Park is private: home to the deer). Then he left Deborah in charge of every domestic detail. Like her mother, she had the gift of an aesthetic sense – and of divine efficiency.

She later wrote that she had not employed a decorator, because she was too mean to pay somebody else for what she could do herself: ‘besides, I loved every minute of it.’
¹
Her friend Nancy Lancaster, whose interior designs Deborah much admired, said: ‘If I had done this house for you, you would have had to sell it to pay me.’ Later, and often, people would ask Deborah how she had done it. With a great deal of help, was her usual reply. She always robustly rejected the popular idea that she had ‘saved’ the great house: ‘It was Andrew who was determined to keep Chatsworth independent.’ Yet nobody could have been better suited to the role of modern-age chatelaine than Deborah, in whom the quality of good sense became something imperishably charming.

In 1960 Andrew became Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, and the Devonshires took official trips to Africa and the Caribbean. The following year, they were invited to the presidential inauguration of Deborah’s old dancing partner, Jack Kennedy. After the death of Billy Hartington’s widow, Kick, in a plane crash in 1948, Deborah had kept in touch with the family, and later they would visit Kick’s grave at Edensor in turn: Rose, Bobby, Teddy, Jack. Deborah became very fond of the president in the brief time before his assassination. He was, she said, rare among politicians in being able and willing to laugh at himself. She facilitated an easy relationship between Kennedy and the man she called ‘Uncle Harold’ – Prime Minister Macmillan – whose wife was a Devonshire relation; and Deborah was invited to accompany Macmillan to Washington in 1962, in order to help ‘cement Anglo-American relations’. Later that year, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy attended an exhibition of drawings from Chatsworth at the Washington National Gallery, and after a dinner at the White House invited Deborah to ring Jessica from the Oval Office. He certainly rather adored her; like the Führer, he could not resist that aristocratic confidence. ‘Muv thinks you & Kennedy so like Birdie & Hitler,’ wrote Diana.