Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (49 page)

But Deborah was also immensely feminine and attractive. The spell she cast was less intense than Diana’s, yet there were few who could resist it. Nancy dreamed up a series of teases over some of Deborah’s friendships: with the playboy Aly Khan (‘Jungle Jim’), who gave her one of his steeplechasers, and particularly with Kennedy. ‘Our fast young sister went over that ocean & had long loving tete à tetes with your ruler,’ she wrote to Jessica in 1961. This was, and always had been, typical Nancy. Nevertheless to Diana, who in 1963 had remarked upon the nonsense of marriage vows that nobody dreams of keeping – ‘we’re all adulterers & adulteresses’ – Nancy had replied: ‘It’s not
quite
true, after all Debo’s absolutely pure.’ (Diana admitted that she had been thinking of herself and Nancy; and, intriguingly, of Pamela.)

The marriage was not always easy: Andrew had alcohol problems, about which both he and Deborah were utterly frank. Nevertheless they were essentially happy in the shared business of being Devonshires. Their life was magnificent, if exigent: receiving royalty; entertaining politicians; sitting for Lucian Freud – the first guest at Chatsworth, who painted several members of the family; attending occasions like the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer (‘she was mad of course,’ Deborah wrote to Diana, after the Princess of Wales’s death). Family life; the Chatsworth Estate; the shared passion for field sports and racing – Andrew owned one of the best race mares of the modern era, Park Top: it all created a life of wonderful solidity from which Deborah’s incandescent Mitford spirit could soar freely. ‘Oh Graceland,’ she wrote to Diana, having visited the home of her beloved Elvis Presley in 1997.

Deborah wrote a history of Chatsworth –
The House
, first published in 1982 – and several autobiographical works, all in her plain and delicious idiom, giving the lie to Nancy’s childhood joke that her sister could neither read nor write. In later life she became something of a magnet to the media. Journalists could not resist her. To the
Independent
in 2001, for instance, she expounded on her Elvis worship and on the fact that he was still sighted everywhere. ‘I wish he would turn up in our farm shop.’ The article was a homage to her brisk and deathless charm, her exquisite ‘oh now
aren’t
you clever’ courtesy: ‘These’, wrote her entranced interviewer, ‘are the sort of old-style manners that refuse to be defeated, no matter how hard you might try. At one point I suggest we do a house swap next summer... She doesn’t miss a beat. “What a marvellous idea.”’
²
Deborah was equal to whatever was thrown at her, and despite her round dismissal of most modern orthodoxies – she loathed Labour governments, the hunting ban, health and safety regulations – she was quite astoundingly popular. She strode dauntlessly through the contemporary landscape, while at the same time symbolizing a vanished past. It was very Mitford. And, as such, the public seemed to treasure it.

After Andrew’s death in 2004, Deborah gave over Chatsworth to her son, the 12th Duke of Devonshire. She moved back to Edensor, where she had begun her married life during the war, and had paid tuppence to smell the lemon on the post office counter.

On 24 September 2014, at the age of ninety-four, the last Mitford girl died.

~

We hope you enjoyed this book.

For an exclusive preview of Laura Thompson’s fascinating biography of Nancy Mitford, read on or click the image.

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Picture Section

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Picture Acknowledgements

~

About Laura Thompson

Also by Laura Thompson

An invitation from the publisher

Plate Section

Sydney and David, 2nd Lord and Lady Redesdale, the Mitford parents.

Bertie Mitford, 1st Lord Redesdale, paternal grandfather to the Mitford girls.

Thomas Bowles, founder of
The Lady
, the girls’ maternal grandfather.

Nancy

Diana

Pamela

Jessica

Unity