Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (54 page)

Yet why should it have been? Nancy may have revelled in exaggeration, she may have had a writer’s facility for bending truth to her imaginative will. But there is no reason whatsoever for
inventing
the lack of love that she felt from her mother. It would be wholly pointless. And indeed, a comment like ‘until Pam was born you reigned supreme’ does read wintry and non-maternal, like a report from a headmistress upon a difficult pupil. Nancy might well have believed from it that the flow of motherliness towards her was not instinctively there, that from the first there had been a cool judgmental eye upon her.

And it is odd that Sydney should have given birth to this pretty, pert little thing (Nancy was no ‘howling orange’, she was a gorgeous-looking child, with her cloud of black hair and her mother’s down-turning mouth); should have done so in the earliest days of her marriage, when all was meant to be sunlight and bliss; and yet should have created this impression of remoteness, indeed of dislike. David Mitford’s joy at Nancy’s arrival seems to have been boundless: ‘I never dreamt of such happiness’, he wrote to his mother when Sydney fell pregnant; and, after the birth – at which, most unusually for the time, he was present – ‘our happiness is very great’. Sydney’s own feelings are not recorded.

Nancy was not an especially easy child (she was not even easy in the producing: Sydney’s labour lasted fourteen hours). Cleverness often leads to frustrations, and according to her mother she was given to uncontrollable tantrums: ‘you used to get into tremendous rages, often shaming us in the street’, Sydney would later tell her daughter, again in the detached and deadly tone that Nancy found so difficult. David had gone in for tantrums as a child, so possibly he understood and indulged Nancy in a way that irritated his wife. He also had a sister who tried to force Sydney to bring up her daughter in a new-fangled, give-her-anything manner, which was no doubt an added annoyance: ‘She said you must never hear an angry word and you never did...’ (more’s the pity, runs the subtext). Essentially it seems that David was completely entranced by Nancy – he called her ‘the pearl of the family’ – and that her mother was therefore left to take a more distanced role. It is said that Sydney wanted and fully expected a son, and this might have suited her better. Possibly she felt ambivalent about the whole experience of bearing this first child, especially when those around her – not least her husband – assumed her to be delirious with joy.

She may, very simply, have been jealous of Nancy, not least because of her daughter’s extreme closeness to David. The age gap between a mother and her eldest daughter is often not so great as to preclude the possibility of competitiveness. Sydney was a clever and attractive woman, and the flowering of these qualities in Nancy – her, more than the younger girls – may have given rise to tricky emotions. And Nancy would not have been someone to break through these. Diana is quite right to say that it cuts both ways. Certainly the relationship between these two women was not really like that of a mother and daughter: even at its best, it was more like that of England and France, wary and respectful enemy-friends.

It is certainly unusual for a mother to tell her daughter that she had wanted to run off with another man when the daughter was aged just two, but felt herself obliged to stay for the sake of the child. Yet according to Nancy, Sydney told her exactly that; although it must be said that both Deborah and Diana consider this to have been an invention (to what purpose, however, it is again hard to say, unless malice itself was purpose enough; contrary to Nancy’s ‘agenda’, the story shows Sydney in a selfless light with regard to her daughter).

And it does square with another story, which sprang up amongst Sydney’s contemporaries and had her walking up the aisle of St Margaret’s, Westminster, weeping for a man called Jimmy Meade. He had been her suitor before David Mitford, but she had supposedly broken off the attachment on account of his womanising reputation (one cannot help but wonder whether it was the other way about). Again, proof of this is scant, but the story must have come from somewhere. Sydney had certainly had her share of suitors before her marriage (at the age of twenty-four, which was not so young in 1904), including a man who was killed in the Boer War. David Mitford may not have been the absolute choice of her heart.

Of course there is no way of knowing the feelings of this very secret woman, at the start of her life as a wife and mother. Yet there may have been unfinished business in Sydney when she married; which was still unresolved when Nancy was born, barely ten months after the wedding. And for that, in some obscure way, Sydney may have blamed her daughter, who definitively closed the door on a life half-reluctantly left. Here, perhaps, lies the source of that radiating chill.

Sydney Mitford was not really a conventional woman, although she has been viewed as such: ‘full of the domestic virtues and good works, with enough dottiness to stop her being insipid’, was David Pryce-Jones’s judgment in his biography of her daughter Unity. ‘Knowing nothing of the world at large in all its complexity, they [she and her husband] had neither the inclination nor the intellectual means to find out about it. They preferred their home, and its pursuits. They expected their children to be like themselves. Faced with originality, they were defenceless.’

Now this is true to an extent – true of most people? – but it is also reductive. And it does not take into account the fact that Sydney may have striven for an appearance of conventionality because her own upbringing had been so very bizarre for its time. Her father, Thomas Gibson Bowles (‘Tap’), was illegitimate, the product of a liaison between a Liberal MP and one of his servants. Tap was taken into his father’s household but educated in France, and became a man of very considerable, if eccentric, force. He founded the magazine
Vanity Fair
aged twenty-six, and later
The Lady
; he married into a military family, living with his wife Jessica in a house near the Albert Hall in which he kept chickens (Nancy later did the same in her London home, and also had a white hen in her Paris flat); he became MP for King’s Lynn having fought his electoral campaign from his yacht; after his wife’s death, when Sydney was aged just seven, he had three children by his children’s governess, whom he made editor of
The Lady
. He retired finally aged around seventy-six – ‘the capacity of man for work is almost unlimited’, he had said – and died in 1921. ‘I believe I was born in 1841. I am no more certain of it than I am of the birthday of Julius Caesar...’ he wrote at the end of his life.

But no less remarkable than Tap’s career was his relationship with his children, which – in externals at least – was unusually modern. Where he went, so did they. No packing off to nanny and the nursery for Tap’s two daughters: dressed in sailor suits, they helped their father canvass from his yacht and sat with him at dinner tables, where he would tell other guests if he thought they were eating too much. His views on health were extreme. He had a loathing of doctors, his wife having died from an abortion performed to save her from a fifth, life-threatening pregnancy, and he disliked medicine. He also believed that the pig should not be eaten (this was on the grounds that Jews did not suffer from cancer). His daughter took these ideas directly on board. Nancy wrote in ‘Mothering the Mitfords’ that Sydney ‘did not really believe in illness’, and certainly when she was operated on, at the age of two, for an infected foot, it was her father who insisted upon the use of chloroform. Meanwhile Jessica would recall in her book
Hons and Rebels
that, at the age of twelve or so, she herself had telephoned a doctor and asked him to remove her appendix, her mother having dismissed her terrible stomach pains as a consequence of over-eating. On the question of diet, Sydney held to a sensible belief in foods such as wholegrain bread, which she baked herself, but at the same time forbade her children the meats that she and David ate: ‘the occasional sucking-pig which crackled into the dining-room hardly bears contemplating, even now’, wrote Nancy, and Evelyn Waugh later described (fancifully) how in childhood Deborah would stuff ‘pork sausages up her knickers to consume in secret’.

It is not surprising that Sydney should have been so influenced by her father, for he dominated her life. In fact he turned her into something like a wife. From the age of fourteen, she was running his large house in Lowndes Square (and thereafter was very efficient at housekeeping; although she always hated employing men, having found it hard as a girl to impose her authority upon them). Her father must have been all things to her. Yet she, in her turn, had to vie with her younger sister for his love; and indeed Dorothy – or ‘Weenie’, as she was rather repulsively called – did perhaps get more than her share of it. Tap’s sailing book
The Log of the Nereid
was dedicated ‘To Captain Weenie (aged 3)’ and is full of her irritating doings. No mention of Sydney, though – shades here of Nancy and Pamela?

And a clue, perhaps, to the difficulties Sydney had in becoming a mother. She had scarcely had one herself. What she had had instead was a relationship with her father that was unusual in its closeness and that gave her a good deal of attention, but attention of a very particular kind. It must have been satisfying to a young girl, being taken like a consort to political meetings and adult weekend parties. But at the same time she may have been dissatisfied with a father who, for all his physical proximity, had a remoteness about him, a self-centredness, and was not very much like a father to her at all.

Yet he had surely raised her expectations of life, made her feel that it would be a demanding, involved and fascinating business, that it held more than the prospects of housewifery and motherhood (although these, as it turned out, would make demands upon her that she could never have imagined). She thought of going to Girton, although nothing came of this; perhaps her father did not want to lose her. She always read a good deal – ‘she loved memoirs, Queen Victoria’s letters, that kind of thing’, says Diana – and her own unpublished memoirs show that she wrote carefully and well. Attractive in a soulful, long-eyed way that hinted at earthy passions (the sexiness of her drooping mouth was quite something), she was a hit as a debutante. She took pleasure in sailing and met painters like Tissot during summers spent, on the yacht, at smart resorts like Deauville and Trouville. She loved ice-skating (as Unity later would) and had a passion for her Swedish instructor (‘I would let him call me Sydney, I would even let him kiss me...’ she wrote in her diary for 1899). It was a free and promising life that she left when – whether dry- or wet-eyed – she walked in her white veil towards respectable penury with David Mitford.

Of course it may have seemed that the time had come for her life to take a more regular course. Her husband, although a second son, was a decent enough catch for a girl of faintly uncertain origins. And she had, or so she wrote in her memoirs, fallen in love with him ten years earlier, when she saw him leaning in front of the fireplace at his family home of Batsford Park, in Gloucestershire. He was seventeen then, an amazingly good-looking young man, tall and strong and casual, with the refined masculine features of Gary Cooper and the blue
regard
of his most beautiful daughter, Diana (and of Polly Hampton in
Love in a Cold Climate
, ‘a blue flash, the bluest and most sudden thing I ever saw’). Hardly to be wondered at, that a young girl would swoon at such a vision, standing as he was in semi-possession of a baronial mansion. It must have been rather like the Queen, aged thirteen, falling for the blond and gleaming Philip: and these are the images of another person which endure, even into old age.

Yet David, too, was not all that he seemed, nor quite what his eldest daughter would later make him seem. Like his future wife, he had lived with the overwhelming presence of a father of character. Bertram Mitford, born in 1837, would later become a friend of Tap Bowles, which was how Sydney (taken everywhere as usual) came to stay at Batsford. It is not surprising that these two men should have gravitated towards each other when they entered Parliament, after the 1892 election, as they were in many ways very alike: both possessed of an almost alarming energy and restless desire to achieve. In Tap this was probably a consequence of his illegitimacy. In Bertie it may have been something similar: even if one dismisses the strong rumour that he, too, was illegitimate, he had to endure the trauma of his mother – Lady Georgina Ashburnham, a nineteenth-century Bolter – running off with a son of the Earl of Sefton when he was aged just four. The Mitford family had always been sedate landed gentry, with roots near Morpeth in Northumberland and with one reasonably well-known member, William, Nancy’s great-great-great-grandfather, who had written a history of Greece. But Bertie was not like his ancestors. He and his descendants may not even have been Mitfords at all; after his death it was said that if one wanted to know who the family really was, one should look in
Burke’s Peerage
under ‘Sefton’ rather than ‘Redesdale’. This, of course, is the kind of thing that people say with more relish than cause, and it is not a rumour given universal credence. What is certain is that something in the mingling of Bertie’s blood with that of Tap Bowles helped to turn the ‘Mitfords’ from the calm, discreet family of the past six hundred years into a wilder, more dazzling breed.

Bertie was one of those typical dynamic Victorians, but he was also more than a type. He had what Edmund Gosse would later refer to as a ‘redundant vitality... His nature swarmed with life.’ After Eton and Oxford, he became a diplomat. He immersed himself to varying degrees in foreign cultures and, while keeping his Englishness preserved, like a jar of Cooper’s Oxford, he allowed his mind to be opened by his travels. He watched a samurai commit hara-kiri and was deeply moved by the ritual; was moved, too, by what he saw as the savage treatment of North American Indians. Much later he would also, and rather less endearingly, stay with the Wagner family at Bayreuth and embrace the theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which set out something very like the Nazi creed. The significance of this to the future lives of Diana and Unity is, of course, pretty striking; although what really strikes one is the entranced naïvety with which Bertram Mitford absorbed Chamberlain’s work. He was a man of the world, but only in the literal sense. He was on the first train to Paris after the end of the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871, met Garibaldi in Italy, hunted buffalo (and brought a head back to Batsford), met the Mormon leader Brigham Young in Utah, and all by his middle thirties – it was quite some life, of the kind that cannot really be lived today. He subsequently wrote about it in his
Memoirs
and his
Tales of Old Japan
. This last book has never been out of print; like his granddaughter Nancy, Bertie knew how to write what people wanted to read.