Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (56 page)

And when three of David’s other daughters – Jessica, Deborah and Pam – reminisced about him during the BBC television documentary
Nancy Mitford: A Portrait by Her Sisters
, broadcast in 1980, it was as though they, too, liked to see their father through the prism of this fictional vision. They celebrated his heightened reality. They brought back all his caprices to the glorified life that Nancy had given them: his habit of calling someone he hated a ‘meaningless piece of meat’; his converse habit of taking a shine to unlikely people (‘yes, he was amazing in that way’, said Jessica, her eyes bright with entranced memory), who would then be expected to turn up for breakfast at eight sharp and eat brains with their new friend (‘Pigs’ thinkers, Davey?’). They described their father as if he were a creature of myth whom they had happened to know rather well: a figure from a Hogarth tableau who had come to life in their midst. As early as 1931, Nancy had put David Mitford into her first novel,
Highland Fling
, as the character General Murgatroyd. This was a pure pantomime version of Uncle Matthew, a package of eccentricities only, a portrait by a daughter who, at the age of twenty-five, was highly fed up with her roaring and raging father. Even so, it had its effect. As Jessica wrote in
Hons and Rebels
: ‘Farve became – almost overnight – more a character of fiction than of real life, an almost legendary figure, even to us.’

Later, talking on television in 1966, Nancy said that the portrait of her parents, as Matthew and Sadie Alconleigh, was ‘absolutely exact’. She must have known that this was not strictly true, as Diana now makes clear. ‘Of course not!’ she says. ‘My mother wasn’t vague, she was very practical.’ Yet what a resonant – if benign – image of Sydney, of her remote yet forceful presence, is given to readers in the picture of Aunt Sadie sitting at the dinner table ‘on her cloud’. ‘And my father,’ Diana continues, ‘well he was very funny and very amusing, and wonderful value with Nancy, but he wasn’t as mad as that. And the idea of him being violent – well, if he’d been a violent father, no doubt we were very annoying, he would have hit us or something – but never. I mean he had perfect manners, you know. The very worst punishment we could have would be to be sent to bed early.’

Nancy, of course, has Uncle Matthew constantly giving out ‘first-class hidings’ to his children; again, in the pursuit of artistic truth – the literary need to create an impression of restless, rampaging physicality – she has fiddled the facts. Or has she? Diana says that David
never
hit his children, that the essence of him lay in the charming man with ‘perfect manners’, who was indulgent even to the point of indulging Nancy in her portrait of him. When, in ‘Mothering the Mitfords’, David is once again referred to as ‘violent’ and handing out ‘whippings’, Diana would undoubtedly say that Nancy’s memory had been over-run by the power of her own myth-making. ‘With Nancy, it was her imagination that worked.’ Nothing that she wrote could be trusted: even when – as in that essay – it purported to be fact, she was actually still using both her parents for her own clever, naughty, artistic ends.

Yet this was not absolutely the case. For example, what Nancy said about her father’s propensity to physical violence might at least be partly true. In David Pryce-Jones’s book
Unity Mitford: A Quest
, an interviewee recalled of Unity that ‘nobody in the history of corporal punishment was ever more beaten’, which apparently goes against Diana’s assertion that none of the children was ever hit. And Jonathan Guinness, in
The House of Mitford
, mentions a beating given to Jessica: in other words, David would seem to have been capable of losing his temper and whacking whoever crossed his path at the wrong time in the wrong way, although this was not something that happened every day. Nancy may well have exaggerated when she wrote about her father, but she did not necessarily tell a downright lie.

And the truth, on this unimportant but tangled little question, probably lay somewhere in between the evidence given by Nancy and that given by Diana. Which is a reasonably safe formula with which to treat much of what gets said by, and on the subject of, this clever and tricky family.

So what about how an outsider saw it all? Here, from the autobiography of James Lees-Milne,
Another Self
, is an impression of how the Mitfords comported themselves
chez eux
. Lees-Milne was a close friend of Tom Mitford’s at Eton and in adult life knew Nancy, Diana and Deborah, spending a good deal of time with Nancy during the war years. In his book he described a visit to the Mitford home which took place, according to his recollection, in 1926, when the family were living in their Oxfordshire house at Swinbrook.

Readers of Nancy and Jessica Mitford’s books have probably concluded that their home life was a sort of nether world ruled by their parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, in the guise of Hades... This was by no means my impression. On the contrary, Swinbrook House, where this large and united family then lived, was to me Elysium. Lady Redesdale... presided, for that is the word, over her beautiful and eccentric brood with unruffled sweetness, amusement and not a little bewilderment. Lord Redesdale was admittedly a dual personality. I cannot see that his children had much in him to complain about. Towards them he was Dr Jekyll, indulgent and even docile. Although not a cultivated man he tolerated their intellectual pursuits and allowed them to say and do whatever they liked. He submitted placidly to their ceaseless teasing, particularly Nancy’s with its sharp little barb, barely concealed like the hook of an angler’s fly beneath a riot of gay feathers...

To outsiders, and particularly his children’s friends, Lord Redesdale could be Mr Hyde with a vengeance. But then he resented and hated outsiders for daring to intrude upon the family circle. He referred to one of their friends, a shy and diffident boy, as ‘that hog Watson’ in front of his face, threatened another with a horsewhip for putting his feet on a sofa, and glowered at those who had done nothing wrong with such vehemence that they lost their nerve, and usually smashed things, thus provoking a more justifiable expression of his distaste. I was naturally terrified of him, but respected his uncertain temper.

Nevertheless Lees-Milne goes on to recount how, over dinner, he forgets that he is in the presence of this ready-to-erupt volcano, this primed mass of patriotism, and starts spouting that England should forget about the war and make friends with Germany.

The effect was electric. The smile on Lord Redesdale’s face was switched off as though by a current... ‘You damned young puppy!’ he shouted, as he thumped the surface so that the plates and glasses clashed together like cymbals. ‘How dare you? You don’t know what the bloody Huns are like. They are worse than all the devils in hell. And you sit there, and have the damned impudence...’ Lady Redesdale with a pained expression on her dear face put a hand on his arm, and just said in her plaintive, drawly voice ‘David’. He stopped, threw down his napkin, rose from the table and stalked out of the dining-room. For a second or two there was a chilling silence, then a chorus of breath let out of girlish lungs. ‘Oh gosh! I said, ‘what had I better do now?’ The six sisters from Nancy, aged twenty-one, down to Debo, aged six, looked at one another and then chanted in unison:

‘We don’t want to lose you,

But we think you ought to go.’

Which he does. Later, and predictably enough, he creeps back into Swinbrook only to be enveloped in the manly embrace of Lord Redesdale. ‘I was dragged into his smoking room, a sanctum as remote from his children’s guests as the Antipodes, plied with whisky and soda, and told I must stay with him for ever...’

Now this is a colourful account, of highly dubious accuracy (a letter of Nancy’s dates the whole episode in 1928, shows that she too was directly involved in the quarrel with her father, and makes it all seem unpleasant and embarrassing rather than funny). All the same, Lees-Milne’s recollections are wonderfully in tune with what one would
expect
. It is surprising that, after Nancy’s death, he admitted in his diaries to having little admiration for her writing
¹²
, since what he himself wrote about her family is – whether he knew it or not – deeply influenced by
The Pursuit of Love
. The Mitford myth, which his opening sentences set out as if to cut through, is simply too strong to resist.

Despite their friendship, Nancy and James Lees-Milne were not much alike, as his diaries make periodically clear (‘I did not much enjoy [dinner] for Nancy’s scintillations dry me up’ is a fairly typical entry). Although their views of the Redesdales are superficially similar, their sympathies are subtly different. Lees-Milne regards David as a bit of a mad monster and his wife as the saintly soul of forbearance. Nancy did not see things that way at all, instead divining the essential warmth – towards her, at least – in her father, and the lack of it in her mother.

But what comes across most powerfully in this little passage of Lees-Milne’s is the strength of the Mitford myth. It is there in perfect miniature, the impenetrable fascination of this family: the image of all that surging life, that blazing intimacy, that leaping drama being played out in a setting of dark panelled rooms in solid, conventional, Cotswold houses. It is an image that is English to the point of being Expressionist: enlivening and not a little theatrical and somehow wholly comfortable. In this sense it is not unlike reading a period detective story. Of course it is not the ‘truth’, as such, of the Mitford family; but as with
The Pursuit of Love
– which also has this infinitely reassuring quality – it is what we take most gladly from it, and what Nancy gives us freely.

And wonderfully in tune with it, once again, is the tableau conjured in Lees-Milne’s story of the six girls singing together as one: childish, charming, unreachable, Mitfordian. Can they
really
all have sat there and done that? Both Nancy and Diana – in complete agreement for once – wrote in subsequent letters that they did nothing of the kind: that everyone sat appalled and furious, that this was uncomfortable reality rather than fable, that there was no possibility of transmuting the moment into a joke, a shriek, a tale. The myth must have taken a hold of the writer; so much so that it was as if Lees-Milne really did believe in the truth of what he wrote. Forty years after the event, twenty-five years after
The Pursuit of Love
, he gave his night with the Mitfords a new and more resonant life: drew the picture of twelve dancing eyes fixed upon him, of six powerfully individual girls fused into an almost terrifying vital whole, burning and laughing and sparkling within that remote country house, just as Nancy had told them to.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

  1 In fact ‘Woman’ was Pamela; ‘Honks’ was Diana; ‘Stubby’ or ‘Stublow’ was Deborah; and ‘Bobo’ was Unity.

  2 ‘Farve’ and ‘Muv’ were the names given to the Mitford parents. The Hons’ Cupboard featured in
The Pursuit of Love
; based upon a large linen cupboard in one of the Mitford family homes, it was the secret place in which the children were assured of privacy.

  3 Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford, 5 March 1957.

  4 By Julian Slade. It opened at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in May 1967 and failed to transfer to London. Two years earlier, Nancy, who wrote the dialogue but not the lyrics, had contacted Diana to say that one of the songs – created for the character of their father – began with the line, ‘I do want my girl to be a lady (changed by Nancy to ‘I do want my girl to be a moron’).

  5 This was amazing. In 1971, Nancy agreed, in principle, to an idea from the then head of BBC Comedy for a series of half-hour programmes based upon the Mitford family. The proposed writer was the late Barry Took, who at the time wrote sitcoms, although an internal memo at the BBC suggested – with all seriousness – that the Mitford series might have ‘the same sort of interest as
The Forsyte Saga
’. Fortunately the rights to
The Pursuit of Love
remained entangled in a deal struck with a film company back in 1946. After Nancy’s death in 1973, the terrible idea was laid to rest.

  6 Deborah Ross in
The Independent
, 12 November 2001.

  7 Originally commissioned by Stephen Spender and published in
Encounter
; reprinted in 1956 in
Noblesse Oblige
, together with a reply by Evelyn Waugh entitled ‘To the Honble Mrs Peter Rodd On a Very Serious Subject’. Nancy claimed that it was Spender who had insisted upon the inclusion of the ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’ material.

  8 By Mary S. Lovell in
The Mitford Girls
(Little Brown, 2001).

  9 From a 1997 article for
The
Sunday Times.

10 The nickname was a vague rhyme for ‘adultery’, which the sisters found a hilarious concept when applied to their brother.