The Other Mitford (14 page)

The lives of Diana and Nancy came to be opposites of one another. Diana’s personal life was near perfect: she lived for Mosley and he for her and she had four healthy sons. But their political lives were doomed to disappointment because there was no way that Mosley would ever establish a serious following for his views once fascism had become so reviled in Europe. Nancy, on the other hand, had achieved fame and fortune through her writing but her personal life was doomed to childlessness and disappointment. After many years of refusing to give her a divorce, she and Peter finally parted for good in 1958, but even this did not improve her situation with the Colonel who married someone else in the mid-1960s.

Before the end of the war Sydney and Unity were also on the move, spending much of their time on the Scottish island of Inch Kenneth, since they were no longer thought to be a security risk. David, after Unity was reunited with the family and feeling that he could no longer live with Sydney when the two had such opposing political views, spent half of the year on Inch Kenneth and the other half at the family’s London home in Rutland Gate. His constant companion for the rest of his life was Margaret Wright who had been assistant parlour maid at Rutland Gate and was also a trained nurse. Most of the family found her bossy and possessive and Debo really disliked her, but she loyally looked after David who had aged prematurely, largely due to the many family dramas and tragedies which had beset him. After five years of living between two places, he and Margaret went to live in Redesdale Cottage in Northumberland and Sydney and Unity divided their time between Inch Kenneth and Swinbrook.

It was on Inch Kenneth, in 1948, that Unity contracted meningitis, probably from the bullet wound in her head. The weather was bad so there was a delay in getting her to hospital in Oban, where she died on 28 May. David travelled to Oban to be with Sydney, and Unity was later buried at Swinbrook at a service attended by all her sisters except for Jessica and at which the hymns were those that Unity had previously chosen. When Jessica heard of Unity’s death she declared that for her, the old Unity had died when she realised they couldn’t be friends any more, but Dinky later reported that her mother was heartbroken by the news. On Unity’s now-weathered gravestone it is still possible to read the inscription put there by Sydney: ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’ – a line from Winston Churchill’s favourite poem during the war.

Earlier that year Sydney had made the longest journey of her life when she flew to San Francisco to see Jessica and her family. She was 68 and to fly to the other side of the world in the late 1940s must have taken some courage, even though air travel had progressed enormously since Pam and Derek flew across the Atlantic shortly before the war. But Sydney was her father’s daughter and travel was in her bones.

The visit had come about because in January 1948 Dinky had written a Christmas thank-you letter to her grandmother asking her to come and stay. Sydney decided to grasp the nettle and make peace with Jessica with whom she had kept in touch over all the difficult years. Jessica had given birth to a second son, Benjy, a few months before and Sydney was keen to meet her American grandchildren and also Bob. Things were not easy at first as the two women tried to negotiate a relationship after all the things that had divided them, but Sydney was determined that the visit should be a success, and it was. Sydney loved the children, taught Dinky to knit and christened Nicholas ‘My little Okay’ because he answered ‘Okay’ to everything. She got on well with Bob and his mother Aranka and with all their friends. ‘I really rather adored her,’ admitted Jessica at the end of the visit. Debo visited the Treuhafts in 1950 when, to Jessica’s disappointment, some of her communist friends were rather deferential to the duchess.

Jessica and Bob continued to work for the Civil Rights Movement and the Communist Party, although Jessica, always the tease, found some of the comrades rather self-righteous and dull. Bob’s legal business was busy but did not make much money since most of his clients were poor black Americans.

Early in 1955 yet another tragedy engulfed Jessica when Nicholas was killed by a bus while on his paper round. The whole family was devastated, especially Dinky, who was in charge of her brothers while her parents were at work and held herself responsible. Bob and Jessica were so distraught that they could not even comfort one another and Nicholas was never talked about after that. Sydney, who knew what it was like to lose a son, wrote to Jessica mourning the death of her ‘little Okay’. For Jessica it was the fifth loss of someone she loved dearly – baby Julia, Esmond, Tom, Unity and now her beloved eldest son.

Later that year, Jessica and her family visited Europe in spite of an attempt by the US government not to issue passports. They visited Inch Kenneth and then went to Edensor, near Chatsworth, where Debo and her family were then living. The visit did not go smoothly and Jessica admitted that she was ‘not a good guest’. They went from England to Hungary where Bob’s family had come from and then to Paris to visit Nancy, who had taken fright at the thought of this all-American family trashing her precious flat and fled to Chatsworth to stay with Debo. She did return to Paris and the visit was a success, with Jessica and Nancy chatting together as in the old days while never actually divulging to one another their innermost thoughts. Jessica did not see Diana, either then or on other family visits, until Nancy was dying, but she saw Pam in London.

Jessica and Bob remained sympathetic to the communist cause but chose to leave the party, feeling that they could do more good as non-communists in a country where left-wing politics were viewed as a crime. Before this Jessica, finding the communist language and jargon so impenetrable, wrote a pamphlet entitled ‘Lifeitselfmanship’, or ‘How to become a Precisely Because Man’, gently poking fun at the leaden language used by party officials. Though frowned upon by the party leadership, the pamphlet was a great success and showed that many communists were actually able to laugh at themselves.

Encouraged by the success of ‘Lifeitselfmanship’, Jessica produced
Hons and Rebels
, an account of her childhood as she saw it, which was published in 1960. The reading public was already familiar with the Mitford family through Nancy’s novels, but
Hons and Rebels
was altogether sharper, altogether more ‘Jessica’, and tended to laugh at the family rather than with them. It became an instant success both in America and Britain, making Jessica a recognised author and personality; it meant that she could then spend the rest of her life as a writer and journalist. The book was not popular within the family, however, as it is full of inaccuracies or perceived inaccuracies, many of them quite cruel. Sydney, older and wiser than the others, was kinder, although she also disliked much of it, saying that she was pleasantly surprised that the book was not more furious against everyone.

David did not live to see its publication. He had died in 1958, a broken man and older than his years. Diana, Debo and Sydney had been with him a few days previously, for his 80th birthday, and all the sisters were at his funeral, except Jessica whom he also left out of his will. This was partly because of her unsuccessful attempt in the 1940s to sell her share of Inch Kenneth (David had made the island over to Tom, after whose death it passed to his sisters) to the Communist Party. Nancy felt that Jessica had been unfairly treated in the will and gave her share of the island to her. In the end Jessica, after receiving a legacy from Esmond’s family, bought the whole island and signed it over to Sydney for her lifetime.

Debo did not move far after the war, only from The Rookery, on the Chatsworth estate, to Edensor House in the nearest village to Chatsworth. Chatsworth House, the traditional seat of the Devonshire family, had been taken over by Penrhos College, a girls’ boarding school, during the war and bore the signs of being inhabited by schoolgirls for seven years. The present Duke and Duchess had never considered living there but in 1949, after considerable renovation, the gardens and some of the staterooms were reopened to the public.

Andrew stood for Parliament as a Conservative in 1945, at the time of the great Atlee landslide, and although Debo had no interest in politics (like Pam), she supported him by going canvassing with him; she vowed she would never do so again, however, after being tripped up, spat on and nearly having their car overturned. ‘They like ’im, but they say booger ’is party,’ was one observer’s comment. Andrew stood again in 1950 (without Debo’s help) but was again unsuccessful.

In 1946 Andrew’s father made over the estate to him in order to avoid the crippling death duties levied by the Labour government. He had to live for five years after the transfer to comply with the inheritance laws and as he was only 51 and in good health, this seemed a good move. But in November 1950 the duke died of a heart attack, aged 55, while chopping wood on his estate near Eastbourne. It was fourteen weeks short of the statutory five years and death duties of 80 per cent were now due on the estate, which looked as if it would have to be broken up and many of its treasures sold. Andrew and Debo were not prepared to let this happen without a fight. Although Debo is always credited with saving Chatsworth, she is the first to admit that it was Andrew’s shrewd sale of land, works of art and beautiful Hardwick Hall – which had been in the Cavendish family for fifteen generations and was sold to the National Trust – which saved Chatsworth from being gobbled up by the Inland Revenue. Even so, it took seventeen years of negotiations and the final payment was not made until 1974.

In the mid-1950s the family moved into the house in order to open it to the public and make it a paying concern. Debo decided that she would undertake the decoration herself, as Sydney had always done, but it was a huge project as the house had 175 rooms, 24 bathrooms, 21 kitchens and 17 staircases, making Batsford with its five staircases look like a country cottage. Nevertheless she succeeded. ‘Nobody could have done it as well,’ wrote Nancy in a letter to Diana. Praise indeed.

It was not all work and no play, however, for Andrew and Debo were able to escape at intervals from their new responsibilities and the austerity of post-war England by visiting the south of France and Italy. Debo also had holidays with her friend Prince Aly Khan at his fabulous villa in France, where she mixed with famous film stars. But there was sadness, too, for after the birth of Stoker in 1944 she lost three babies, before Sophia was safely delivered in 1957. As the sister who was closest to David and shared his interests, she must have felt his death the following year very keenly; also that of Unity, in spite of their differences in later years. There was yet another tragedy for Debo in the same year that Unity died: Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy, widow of Andrew’s elder brother Billy, sister of future American president Jack and Debo’s close friend from debutante days, was killed in an air crash. Kick had fallen in love again but with a married man. They were on their way to Cannes for the weekend when they flew into a storm and the plane crashed with no survivors. Rose Kennedy, who had threatened to disown her if she married a divorced man, declared that it was God saying ‘no’ to Kick. Debo organised her funeral and she is buried at Edensor where Debo has tended her grave ever since.

The period from the end of the war until the swinging sixties was not as traumatic for the Mitford family as what had gone before, despite the loss of Unity, Nicholas Treuhaft and David. There were many positives: Nancy was a popular published writer and Jessica was on her way to being the same. The Mosleys’ marriage was on a firmer footing than ever before and Pam was making a new life for herself after her divorce from Derek. Chatsworth would eventually be saved for the nation, Sydney was reconciled with Jessica and was enjoying a rather quieter life on her much-loved Inch Kenneth. At last the family seemed, in Grandfather Bowles’s language, to be sailing into calmer waters.

A
fter Derek left, Pam was still very much immersed in Irish life, so much so that Diana and Debo believed she had far too much to do while she stayed at Tullamaine. And they had cause to worry, if a previously unpublished letter from Pam to Debo written in January 1957, a year before Tullamaine was sold, is anything to go by:

I
was
pleased to hear from you. My life is just one long rush and if I start the morning in gumboots I somehow never have time to change them till the evening! Today was hectic and it was the day of Alice Daly my charming daily! I have two, one is super, Bridie, and she comes four times a week, the other is old Alice Daly and although she polishes the floors better than anyone else she is such an effort and somehow I always find she almost makes more work than she does!

Anyway today the Hounds met a mile away so what with having to ride one horse to the meet, cadge a lift home, cook a meal for Alice, rush down to the Lodge and see how it was getting on in readiness for the Hungarian refugees, then finish getting Alice’s lunch, then rushing off with the dogs to see the men who are cutting larch trees, then back to find someone ringing at the front door with a parcel of things to help with the furnishing of the cottage for the refugees, then mixing the horses’ mash, then rushing to the Fethard World with urgent letters for the Post, ending with a call at McCarthy’s Hotel and drinks with friends.

Now you know what a normal day is like for me and, yes, Derek agrees it would be better to sell this so if you know anyone who would like it do send them to have a look. I would really be so much more comfortable in something smaller and really England would be better as this is so far from everyone and everything.

How lovely it would be if you and I could share a life as I would love to spend half a day sometimes in bed and you might like to do some of my rushing for me.

Pam continued to live at Tullamaine even after it was sold early in 1956, since the buyer did not want to live in the house. She and Giuditta Tommasi stayed there as tenants until 1960 when they moved briefly to Woodfield House in Caudle Green in the Cotswolds, which Pam had bought with her proceeds of the sale. She had not been very happy at Tullamaine since Derek had left – it was too full of memories – but she was unsure what she wanted to do next or where she wanted to live. Her plan was to let Woodfield until such time as she decided to live in England again.