The Other Mitford (17 page)

Still worried about impending lameness, Pam decided to make the house easier to manage, creating a large, comfortable living kitchen where she could cook, eat, sit, watch television and entertain her many friends. She also installed a pale-blue Rayburn cooker which, it was rumoured, she had specially painted to match the colour of her eyes. That simply wasn’t her style. It certainly did match her eyes but this was merely coincidence – she liked pale blue. Any other explanation would suggest a vanity she did not possess.

When the builders had left, Pam needed someone to help her clear up after them and her great friend and neighbour, Dee Hancock, who lived on the other side of the green, suggested me. At the time I had a young family and had recently converted two formerly derelict cottages on the edge of the village. When Dee approached me I said I would be delighted to help, especially as I had recently bought a donkey for my children and discovered that the price of hay had mysteriously leapt from 9p per bale to £1. I needed the money. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was about to make a lifelong friend.

When I walked across Caudle Green to Woodfield House on a golden autumn morning, when the Cotswolds look their magnificent best, the name of my new employer, Pamela Jackson, meant nothing to me. Nor was I immediately alerted by the attractive, blue-eyed woman with the silver-grey hair and the distinctive up-market voice who came to the back door (nobody ever seemed to use the rather grand front door) and greeted me warmly. Nevertheless, I was an avid reader of both literature and history and as Pam showed me around the house, I couldn’t help noticing that there were all the novels and biographies by Nancy Mitford on the bookshelves or on occasional tables, plus the satirical writings of Jessica Mitford. The penny began to drop. This was one of the Mitford sisters whose extraordinary activities and remarkable books had been familiar to me all my adult life. Why had I not heard of her before?

For the next ten years I worked for Pam and could never quite get used to the idea that the books which I dusted were mainly by Pam’s family and friends, from her grandfather’s
Tales of Old Japan
, to the latest offerings by Diana, Lady Mosley, and later by Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and chatelaine of Chatsworth House. And there were books by Evelyn Waugh, a lifelong family friend, by poet laureate John Betjeman, Pam’s loyal admirer of long ago, by Lytton Strachey, whom she had known when managing Diana and Bryan Guinness’s farm at Biddesden, and many others, including a slim volume of poems by Bryan Guinness himself with whom Pam had always kept on friendly terms.

Photographs of family members by Cecil Beaton and a drawing of Derek Jackson by Sir William Rothenstein were a further fascination, not to mention the pictures by Renoir and Delacroix which Pam was left by her close German friend Rudi von St Paul, née Simolin. ‘I’m going to hang them on the wall, Diana, no thief would think of looking for them there,’ she said. And she was right. The thief who broke in when she was away and stole easily disposable electrical goods left Renoir’s still life of a bowl of peaches and Delacroix’s dingy battle scene still hanging in the drawing room. Rudi and Pam had managed to smuggle much of Rudi’s art collection out of Germany while they were still able to do so. They simply took the paintings out of their frames, packed them in their luggage and took them to Ireland where they remained until Rudi’s death. It could be claimed that gentle Pam, who looked so innocent, became quite a practised smuggler.

Pam’s sense of humour, though not the razor-sharp wit of some of her sisters, appealed to me. Pam knew this and always had some funny story to relate; like the time when Diana, Lady Mosley’s book entitled
Loved Ones
was published. ‘She wanted to call it
Dead Ones
, you know, because they all are, but the publisher thought it wouldn’t sell.’ Many of the stories were against herself and she was never afraid to tell these, especially if she felt they would cause amusement. One of the funniest Pam stories, which caused hysteria among the sisters, is related in Debo’s autobiography
Wait for Me
. It happened at the wedding dinner of Debo’s son Peregrine, now the Duke of Devonshire, to Amanda Heywood-Lonsdale. Pam was seated next to Lord Mountbatten who had been briefed on who she was; but it had not been thought necessary to tell Pam the identity of her high-profile neighbour. ‘I believe you are called Woman by your family,’ he said. She turned to him, giving him the benefit of her bright blue eyes: ‘Oh yes, I am, and may I ask who you are?’ The great man had no answer to this and turned to his other dinner partner. Hearing of this afterwards, Debo was incredulous that Pam had not known who he was. ‘Well, if he had got all his medals on I might have recognised him,’ she replied, quite unabashed. ‘One of the wonderful things about Pam was how unimpressed she remained by names, money, titles, reputations or any of the world’s extras attached to some people,’ said Debo, the sister who probably knew her best of all.

As well as Beetle and the Appenzellers, Pam also had a goat called Snowdrop who was completely white with amber eyes. Snowdrop went for walks with Pam and Beetle and she would skip on to the top of the Cotswold stone walls when a car came past, much to the amusement of the driver. Often they would be joined on their walks by me and my two girls, Kate and Emily, riding Dusty the donkey and Gwenny, the Welsh mountain pony which we had recently added to our own menagerie. The road out of Caudle Green is a narrow one and the combination of two adults, a donkey, a pony, a dog and a goat made passing by an oncoming vehicle almost impossible. When a vehicle did approach, everyone except Snowdrop (who made for the wall) crowded onto the verge. The most likely person to be passing was Mike Fitzpatrick, the farm foreman for Miserden Estate; the first time he spied this strange group he wound down his window and asked: ‘What have you done with the Ark?’ After that he just smiled. What else was there to say? Pam loved it.

Later, Pam took possession of Minor, a miniature Shetland pony from Chatsworth, where Debo, among all her other activities, bred Shetlands. Minor was incredibly naughty (perhaps that was why he was with Pam and no longer at Chatsworth) but Pam loved him dearly and he did have his uses. One of these was to pull fallen tree trunks out of the wood at the end of Pam’s garden. My family would be asked to help and have a share of the wood. Pam would harness Minor, attach long chains to his harness and then to a piece of tree trunk which Brian, my husband, had sawn to a suitable length. Then, with much verbal encouragement from Pam and a smack on his amble rump, Minor would rear up, exerting his full strength, until finally the trunk began to move and he trotted triumphantly out of the wood pulling his prize behind him. It was an exhausting experience, not only for Minor, and it would probably have been much quicker just to carry the logs; but it was a lot of fun and Pam was in her element. These were exactly the sort of activities which she had enjoyed all her life and for which she never lost her infectious enthusiasm.

Once back at Woodfield House, Pam and Debo saw a lot of one another. They were the two sisters who most enjoyed country life and Debo loved her visits to Caudle Green. Her particular recollection is the delicious smell of herbs – which she always associated with Pam, wherever she lived – as one opened the back door and walked towards the kitchen, and the single bedroom where she usually slept and where
Lark Rise to Candleford
was on the bedside table for at least twenty years. All her life Pam was a natural homemaker and a wonderful cook but it was at Woodfield that she really came into her own and her kitchen garden was a sight to behold; she would grow exotic vegetables like kohl rabi long before they were generally heard of in England.

In the garden, she was helped by her neighbour Gerald Stewart who, along with his wife Gladys, became her dear friend. Sadly she didn’t live to read Gerald’s evocative account of his life,
Pipe Lids and Hedgehogs
, in which he describes life in the Cotswolds seventy-five years ago, but she would have been delighted to know that he was supported in this venture by her niece, Lady Emma Tennant, to whom she left Woodfield House. Emma’s tenants, Stephen and Freddie Freer, would be just the people Pam would have chosen had she been letting the house and it was Freddie who persuaded Gerald to write the book. Thanks to his efforts and their enthusiasm the garden is almost exactly as it was when Pam tended it – a fitting memorial to this most rural Mitford.

Though Pam lived alone at Woodfield she had many visitors. Debo came the most often but Diana, Lady Mosley, also visited, captivating everyone she met with her incredible niceness and charm which was such a contrast to the political views which she never renounced. Others who came often were George Budd and his wife Margaret. They had been Pam’s close friends ever since George and Derek were stationed in RAF 604 Squadron together during the war; and it was Margaret with whom Pam was staying in April 1994 when she had the fall which led to her death – she could have been with no better person. Another visitor was Christopher Hammersley, the son of Mrs Ham, one of the subjects of Diana Mosley’s
Loved Ones
. She had played an important part in the childhood of the young Mitfords who teased her unmercifully (which she loved) but also used her as a treasured confidante.

The coming and going of guests meant that, as well as my cleaning duties, I had plenty of beds to change. Pam was not prepared to spend a lot of money on laundry: she washed the single sheets herself but those from the huge double bed in her large guest bedroom were taken to Mrs Bird in the next village, who passed them on to the Paramount Laundry. ‘I always remind her that I am an Old Age Pensioner because I get one shilling off the price of each sheet,’ she would tell me with pride.

The sheets were not always laundered after each guest, however. When I arrived to change the big bed – always hoping that I would not have to turn the enormous flocked mattress which had a life of its own and would spitefully try to smother anyone who tried to turn it unaided – Pam would announce, if her sisters’ visits were in close proximity: ‘Debo is coming to stay next week and Diana will be here in two weeks’ time, so one of them can sleep on this side and the other on that.’ When one sister had left, Pam would stand on one side of the bed and me on the other, and we would tug the creases out of the side which had been slept in. This was not an easy task since these sheets were Irish linen (what else?) and creased very easily. If the sisters knew about this it must have amused them greatly; it was just one more example of Woman’s ‘carefulness’.

Other family guests included Pam’s nephew, Max Mosley, and his family. Despite her later confession to her sisters that she felt she had not always shown enough affection to Max and his brother Alexander when they were living with her at Rignell as babies, Max very obviously had a great affection for Aunt Pam. But Pam always felt that the family would be bored by her company and would march them up the village to my house where Max, who was at the time heavily involved in developing the March racing car, would get into deep conversation with my husband Brian who had pioneered the sports racing car, the TVR V8, while all the children raced around the large, untidy (compared to Pam’s) garden.

Debo, who probably knew her better than anybody, says in
Wait for Me
that she thinks Woodfield was Pam’s happiest home. ‘It was the ideal house for anyone who loves the Cotswolds. Pam’s presence there felt exactly right: the house, garden, paddocks and owner all suited each other.’

P
am happily settled into the even tenor of life which Caudle Green offered and became one of the village’s most popular residents – not because she had a title (very few people except the postmen, Maurice, Tony and Ron, realised that she was the Hon. Pamela Jackson) but because she was, simply, nice.

One of her closest friends was Dee Hancock who, with her husband Johnny, lived in the big, Georgian-fronted farmhouse across the green. Although they only got to know one another when Pam came to live in Caudle Green, Dee had long known of the family (who didn’t?) because in her brother’s diary, written while aboard his battleship during the war, she had found an entry which read, ‘the Mitford girls came to tea’. Also, she remembered that her grandfather Sir Albert Muntz had known the then Duke of Devonshire and the Mitfords’ grandfather, the first Lord Redesdale, because they were three of the most well-known Shire horse breeders of their day. When Dee, Debo and Pam all went to the Royal Show, where the grandfathers had exhibited their horses, they felt that they were reliving the past. Dee recalled:

Also, my brother was killed in the war and I didn’t find it easy to talk about it, but when Pam described the terrible sense of loss that Derek felt at the death of his twin brother Vivian I found that I could tell her my feelings too.

Pam was a really good friend to me. She had been through a lot herself and was a very understanding listener but she was also very original and good fun. Although she suffered from what I used to call ‘workhouseitis’ and couldn’t bear to waste anything – she ate rabbit bran for breakfast – she was also very generous, always sharing the exotic vegetables which she grew in the garden – and she even lent me a dress to wear to Buckingham Palace.

Our friendship could have been severely tested on the occasions when the cattle which she grazed on the green escaped onto the road and she would hail Johnny and me to come and help her – usually when we were in the middle of dinner. But we were such good friends that it never mattered.

Mary Sager was a Yorkshirewoman with a wry sense of humour and many was the evening when she and Pam had supper in her tiny cottage or when they walked together with Beetle in Miserden Park. Another Beetle-walker was Margery Clements who lived on the edge of the village in a cottage refurbished by Norman Jewson, a leading member of the Arts and Crafts movement, who was one of her friends. She led a very frugal life, existing mainly on bread and cheese, and was so thin that Pam used to refer to her as the Mythical Figure. When Mrs Clements left Caudle Green, aged 90, to live in the much more remote Cotswold village of Temple Guiting, she sold her cottage to Michael and Pat Moody, who also became good friends of Pam. Pat said: