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Authors: Laura Thompson

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BOOK: Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters
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11 This began as Deborah’s joke, later taken up by Diana and then used repeatedly in their letters. In the 1950s Deborah had attended a wedding at which, when the cake was about to be cut, the Queen Mother cried, ‘The cake!’ in an ecstasy of amazement.

12 Or ‘Smartyboots’, as the erudite writer and critic Connolly was called in the letters between Nancy and Evelyn Waugh. Apparently the nickname was originally conceived by Virginia Woolf, but they ran with it; Nancy once claimed that a madrigal, containing lines such as ‘Sweet Bonny Boots’, was all about Connolly.

13 Unusually this nickname came from Tom Mitford, who for reasons unknown had named Herr von Ribbentrop after an obscure medieval song: ‘Go to Joan Glover, and tell her I love her... ’

14 Nancy, who loudly proclaimed a not wholly sincere dislike of Americans, mocked President Kennedy – a friend of Deborah’s – at every possible opportunity, and came up with this particular name after the president was photographed in a rather low-cut bathing suit.

15 According to Evelyn Waugh, Nancy used this voice rather indiscriminately. After reading
Love in a Cold Climate
he wrote, in a typically dry scolding tease, that although he could accept the book’s heroine, Polly, talking exactly like the Radlett girls, the über-sophisticated Cedric was another matter. ‘Cedric is a Parisian pansy. Oliver Messel doesn’t talk like Debo.’ Nancy did make a few adjustments to Cedric’s speech, although in fact there is always a warning note of worldliness beneath his Mitfordian effusions.

16 Broadcast in 2010, this superb series had Rhys Thomas (as the journalist ‘Gary Bellamy’) meeting a selection of characters including ‘the Combe sisters’, spoof versions of Jessica and Diana, played by the heavily latexed Rosie Cavaliero and Lucy Montgomery.

17 Deborah said this in a 1980 BBC documentary made by Julian Jebb,
Nancy Mitford
– A Portrait by Her Sisters.
The programme was enchanting, although it caused the usual familial ructions (see p. 157).

18 
The Independent
, 12 November 2001.

19 Diana appeared on
The Russell Harty Show
in April 1977, to coincide with the publication of her autobiography
A Life of Contrasts.
A mild furore ensued, as was usual with Diana, although her main (laughing) concern was her ‘ghastly’ voice.

20 Of
Poor, Dear Brendan: The Quest for Brendan Bracken
(Hutchinson, 1974), by Andrew Boyle, reviewed for
Books and Bookmen
in 1974.

21 This snippet appeared in a coolly entertaining diary – like a superior contemporary newspaper column – written by Diana for
The European
(1953–9), the monthly publication that she edited for her husband Sir Oswald Mosley. Although the point of the magazine was its political content, written anonymously by Mosley, the diary was infinitely more readable.

22 In a letter to Nancy, 8 November 1949.

23 As Diana wrote to Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky, a friend of her son Max: ‘you no more have to learn that [sex] than how to eat a Mars bar... ’

PART I

  1 Nancy translated Madame de Lafayette’s
La Princesse de Clèves
– her favourite novel – for the Mosleys’ publishing house, Euphorion Books, in 1950, and the same year had a huge West End hit with her version of André Roussin’s play
La Petite Hutte.
Also for Euphorion, Diana translated Balzac:
La Duchesse de Langeais
and
Le Curé de Tours.
But her most successful venture was the 1978 translation of
For the Record
, the autobiography of the racing driver Niki Lauda (a friend of her son Max, a prominent figure in motor sport who later became president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile).

  2 Accounts of the Mitford–Fuld marriage in
The Times
hint at a very strange tale. After the Berlin wedding, at which Max Reinhardt performed, the new Mrs Mitford – said to be the richest girl in Germany – was presented at court and briefly seen at every London party. That same year, however, the marriage was declared null and void in Germany, and Jack Mitford issued a libel action over his wife’s allegations of ‘unnatural conduct’. The mind instantly leaps to sexual deviancy although, at a court action in 1923, designed to establish whether the declaration of nullity was valid in Britain, it transpired that Marie had accused her husband of being ‘addicted to masculine indolence’. He meanwhile counter-attacked with claims of adultery. It is unsurprising that Jack thereafter dedicated himself to the jolly life of a man about town and did not remarry. Aged seventy-seven, in 1963, he became the 4th Lord Redesdale (succeeding his brother Bertram, who had inherited from David in 1958), but died within the year.

  3 This information comes from
The Mitford Girls.
Mary S. Lovell writes in her own endnotes that Blanche Hozier was said to have confided the ‘truth’ about Clementine’s parentage to her friend Lady Londonderry.

  4 From a review of
Friends Apart
by Philip Toynbee, published in
The European
, 1954.

  5 Her granddaughter, Madeau Stewart, became a producer at the BBC and interviewed Nancy for the radio in 1970. An excerpt from their lovely chat was played in
Nancy Mitford
– A Portrait by her Sisters
. Nancy conjured her image of heaven, which would hold the sounds of
The Lost Chord
and ‘an occasional nightingale... I look forward greatly.’

  6 Nancy wrote to Diana in March 1931, saying that George Bowles had offered this opinion to Sydney, although he also expressed the hope that the book would sell.

  7 Nancy said this in an interview, given in 1966, for the ABC Television programme
Tempo.

  8 In
Don’t Tell Alfred.
The house in question is the fabulous Montdore residence that features in
Love in a Cold Climate
(from where Lady Montdore pities the poor people who have to live in Chelsea)
.

  9 From the essay ‘Mothering the Mitfords’, published in
The Sunday Times
in 1962, and reprinted in the collection
The Water Beetle
(also 1962) under the title ‘Blor’.

10 This remark was made in the 1966 interview for
Tempo
.

11 David’s stance was backed by Lord Moyne, whose son Bryan Guinness married Diana Mitford in 1928. The ending of that marriage, just four years later, had been strongly opposed by David and Moyne; nevertheless by 1937 they were both of the view that divorce should be made easier.

12 In
Nancy Mitford
– A Portrait by her Sisters.
Those were not Pamela’s exact words – rather an approximation from a deeply amused Deborah – but certainly that was her meaning.

13 As recalled in
Counting My Chickens
(Long Barn Books, 2001).

14 The lucrative gold mine, which ultimately proved to be the second largest in the Americas, was that of Harry Oakes. Later knighted, he moved to the Bahamas for tax purposes and became a friend of the then Governor, the Duke of Windsor. Oakes was murdered in 1943; the crime was never solved.

15 From ‘Blor’.

16 Specifically in a letter dated 26 October 1976. Jessica, with admirable honesty, cited Deborah’s extreme prettiness as the probable reason.

17 In 1965, Jessica wrote to Nancy that Pamela, who had noticed how rich both her sisters had become from their literary careers, was planning a book.

18 Diana described her sister thus to the author in 2001.

19 Deborah’s account of her schooling comes from
Wait for Me!
(John Murray, 2010).

20 By Mary S. Lovell, who writes that Unity would, in adulthood, say this to her friends.

21 From a review of the reissued
Nancy Mitford: A Memoir
by Harold Acton,
Daily Mail
, 2001.

22 
The Sunday Times
, 1997.

23 From the interview in 1966 for the ABC Television programme
Tempo
.

24 The Parents’ National Educational Union was a respected organization that conducted education by correspondence.

25 Miss Hussey was interviewed for
Unity Mitford: A Quest
by David Pryce-Jones (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976).

26 Nancy is heard speaking these words, in a tone of the utmost generous sincerity, in the 1980 television programme
Nancy Mitford
– A Portrait by her Sisters.

27 In conversation with the author in 2001.

28 From Anne de Courcy’s
Diana Mosley
(Chatto & Windus, 2003).

29 
The Honourable Rebel
, a 1977 television programme about Jessica.

30 Jessica to Nancy, 16 November 1971.

31 
The Times
, 26 April 1945.

32 Tom’s bisexuality (in adult life) was alleged in a lurid book entitled
Hitler’s Valkyrie: The Uncensored Biography of Unity Mitford
by David R. L. Litchfield (The History Press, 2014). It was also claimed that Unity had had ritualized sex with stormtroopers on a bed draped with swastika flags, that she staged orgies for Hitler and – with Diana’s encouragement – slept with Sir Oswald Mosley. Evidence for all this was scant, to say the least. It may have been true, however, that Unity had an affair with Almasy.
The House of Mitford
, by Jonathan and Catherine Guinness (Hutchinson, 1984), suggests that some members of her family believed that there was a brief liaison between them. Charlotte Mosley, the daughter-in-law of Diana who edited
Letters Between Six Sisters
(Fourth Estate, 2007), states in the book that the affair definitely happened. This is convincing, although in
Unity Mitford: A Quest
most of the interviewees who knew Unity in Germany took the view that she and Almasy were merely friends.

33 Mrs Rattenbury was acquitted but her lover, George Stoner, was convicted and sentenced to death. Mrs Rattenbury then killed herself; subsequently Stoner was reprieved.

34 From
Unity Mitford: A Quest
by David Pryce-Jones
.

35 From
Beloved Infidel
by Sheilah Graham (Cassell, 1933).

36 In conversation with the author.

37 From
Wait for Me!

38 The word used by David was actually ‘suar’ – Tamil for ‘pig’ – which he had picked up during his time in what was then Ceylon. His daughters transmuted this into ‘sewer’. As Sydney remarked, it was hard to tell which term was the more offensive.

39 Deborah described this childhood habit in
Wait for Me!
She also mentioned that her close friend, the distinguished travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, had done the same thing.

40 From a letter to his friend Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green), September 1929 (
The Letters of Evelyn Waugh,
ed. Mark Amory, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980).

41 The ABC Television interview broadcast in 1966.

42 In a 1946 radio talk for the BBC programme
Women’s Magazine.

43 
The Sunday Times
, 1997.

44 Boothby, a successful and self-publicizing politician, who became a life peer in 1958 and lived a couple of doors away from Lord Lucan on a corner of Eaton Square, married twice and was said to have fathered three illegitimate children. He was, however, openly bisexual and campaigned for the legalization of homosexuality. At Oxford he was exclusively gay and known as ‘The Palladium’ (in reference to the ‘twice-nightly’ shows then staged at the theatre). In 1963 he began an affair with an East End cat burglar who introduced him to Ronnie Kray, also bisexual, who with his twin brother Reggie was the foremost gangster of the period (and in 1968 sentenced to life imprisonment). Subsequently it emerged that Kray had supplied Boothby with young men in return for personal favours.

45 Quoted in
Unity Mitford: A Quest
by David Pryce-Jones.

46 In conversation with the author.

47 Howard killed himself in 1958, aged fifty-three, after the death of his lover.

48 From
A Little Learning
(Chapman & Hall, 1964), the first volume of Waugh’s unfinished autobiography. Nancy wrote to say that she loved the book – ‘of course’ – and that Jessica, who by that time was a highly successful author, had received an offer of ‘1000 (or a million) dollars’ to review it in America.

49 From 1933 onwards Bryan wrote nine published novels, six children’s books, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His poetry was also published.

50 From
Rules of the Game: Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family
by Nicholas Mosley (Secker & Warburg, 1982).

PART II

  1 In an interview for
Unity Mitford: A Quest
by David Pryce-Jones
.
A gifted designer, Lancaster was best known for the
Daily Express
cartoons in which he fondly mocked a society woman named Maudie Littlehampton. Lancaster, a friend of Nancy’s, provided the illustrations for
Noblesse Oblige
and for her collection of essays,
The Water Beetle
, about which Evelyn Waugh cattily remarked: ‘I wish they had not had those coarse drawings.’

  2 From a letter to Diana dated 9 March 1966, a month before Waugh’s death.

  3 In conversation with the author.

  4 From
Unity Mitford: A Quest.

  5 In 1983, Diana wrote to Deborah that she had seen Bryan by chance in the House of Lords. When she called his name, he went over, kissed her and said: ‘Which of you is it?’

  6 Nancy to Betjeman, 14 June 1969.

  7 These quotations are taken from ‘Lytton Strachey and Carrington’, one of the pen portraits in
Loved Ones
(Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985). Other subjects, wonderfully evoked by Diana, included Evelyn Waugh and Gerald Berners.

  8 In an interview with
The Times
, 6 October 1967.

  9 Diana wrote a lethal review of
Old Men Forget: The Autobiography of Duff Cooper
(1953) in
The European
. Later, in a letter to Deborah, she would suggest that Cooper’s venomous outburst was partly provoked by the fact that his wife was having an affair with Mosley at the time.

BOOK: Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters
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