The Other Mitford (2 page)

I should say here that I was not a professional cleaning lady (though I must have been quite good at it because Pam was something of a perfectionist) but was at home with my young children as they grew up. It was not easy to pursue my previous job as a journalist because childcare was not available in the 1970s as it is today, but I could fit in the cleaning while the children were at school and in the holidays it was a treat for them to come with me because, like all children, they loved Pam.

All the time I was there I realised the unique position I was in and I couldn’t wait to write about this missing Mitford. I met her sisters and her friends and I talked to her at length about her life and her family. Apart from short features in magazines, however, there was never time in my busy life to write about her in the detail I felt she so richly deserved. Three years ago I retired from full-time journalism and knew that now was the time. This, then, is the result.

But first, and bearing in mind that the Mitford sisters are still mainly remembered by what is now the older generation – though Nancy’s novels have recently been republished, Debo’s life story,
Wait for Me
, has received enormous publicity, there are new books about Nancy and Jessica, and the Mitford bandwagon seems to roll on and on – it might be useful to put Pam in context by describing some of the other members of her remarkable and eccentric family.

The Mitford story really starts with the two grandfathers, Algernon Bertram Mitford, the first Lord Redesdale, known as Barty to his family and friends, and Thomas Gibson Bowles, whose nickname was Tap. The Redesdales originated from Northumbria, taking the title name from the village of Redesdale, while Thomas Bowles was the illegitimate but much-loved son of a Liberal politician. Their backgrounds were very different but the two men got on well together, at one time both serving as Conservative Members of Parliament. They are both important in the Mitford story because it was largely from them that the girls who became writers inherited their talents. Barty, who spent some time in the diplomatic service, wrote about his experiences in both China and Japan and his
Tales of Old Japan
became a classic which has seldom been out of print. Tap branched out in a different direction, founding first the magazine
Vanity Fair
and then
The Lady
,
which is still going strong today.

You might wonder what these two men had passed on to Pam, who found writing quite taxing, but it was their spirit of adventure which she inherited. Barty travelled to the far-flung corners of the world and numbered explorer Richard Burton among his friends, while Tap was an intrepid sailor who had a master mariner’s certificate and, after his wife’s untimely death, spent much time at sea, taking his children with him. Pam would not have been out of place in either of those worlds.

It was through the somewhat unlikely friendship of their fathers that David Freeman Mitford and Sydney Bowles first met and their marriage was very much one of opposites. His volatile nature was tempered by the very pronounced sense of humour which he passed on to his children; although they quaked at his rages, all agreed that no one could make them laugh more than him, especially when he and Nancy got together. He loved country life and field sports, especially fishing, but was not good with money, usually selling his properties when prices were low and buying again when they had risen. Sydney, on the other hand, was much more serious, although she too had a good sense of humour. She had kept house for her father since the age of 14 and as a consequence had a very real sense of the value of things and nothing was ever wasted. Nancy and Jessica in particular felt that she was a rather vague and distant mother, and this image of her comes over in the character of Aunt Sadie in Nancy’s novels,
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
. They seldom realised how devoted she was to her unruly children and how devastating she found their behaviour as young adults.

Pam inherited her striking good looks and her love of the countryside from her father but, of all the sisters, she was most like Sydney in character, being utterly practical (which the others, except Debo, were not), careful with money, an excellent cook and provider, and, latterly, the one to whom they all turned when they needed help.

Pam’s siblings need little introduction since much has been written about them already, but for those not familiar with the Mitford Industry, as the family called it, here are some brief sketches:

Nancy, the eldest of the sisters, was born in 1904. With her dark hair and green eyes she did not inherit the Mitford looks and her sense of humour was more sharp and cruel than that of her siblings. Although she became a very successful writer, she was never quite satisfied with her lot and certainly life dealt her some severe blows. She married Peter Rodd but the marriage was not a success and finally broke up, after which she made her home in France. The great love of her life was Gaston Palewski, one of General de Gaulle’s right-hand men. Known in the family as The Col, he is immortalised as Fabrice in
The Pursuit of Love
. Nancy’s novels and biographies made her rich but not happy. She will ever be remembered as the creator of U and Non-U (upper-class and non-upper-class speak) in a book called
Noblesse Oblige
.

Tom, the only boy in the family, was born in 1909. He cheerfully put up with his noisy, teasing sisters, partly because of his equable nature and also because he was the only one of the family to go away to boarding school. He was not as pro-Nazi as Diana and Unity, but he was sympathetic to Germany and chose to fight in Burma rather than Europe. He died of wounds in 1945, a tremendous family tragedy, which meant that the Redesdale title passed to a cousin.

Diana, who was only a year younger than Tom – the two were very close as children – was deemed to be the beauty of the family. She couldn’t wait to leave home and at the age of 19 married Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing empire; but later she met Sir Oswald Mosley who became the love of her life. He was forming the British Union of Fascists at the time and Diana became one of his devotees and also one of his mistresses, for faithfulness was not in his nature.

She divorced Bryan and from then on devoted her life to Mosley and his cause, marrying him in secret in Germany in 1936 after the death of his first wife. The Mosleys were imprisoned during the war and afterwards went to live permanently in France. Diana possessed the family gift for writing and as well as reviewing books for various publications, wrote books of her own. Having been deemed by one of her nannies as too beautiful to live, she died aged 93 in the Paris heatwave of 2003, surviving Mosley by more than twenty years but never renouncing his views.

Even in this eccentric family Unity was felt to be unusual. She also inherited her father’s good looks – and his height. ‘Poor Unity, she is rather huge,’ said Lady Redesdale when Unity was fitted for her bridesmaid’s dress for Diana’s wedding. But it was her physical appearance which first brought her to Hitler’s notice, leading to an extraordinary friendship between the daughter of an English country gentleman and the German Führer. Unity’s strong opinions led her to attempt suicide in 1939, which left her brain-damaged.

In the family, in spite of the fact that she could be moody and sulky, Unity was loved for her originality, the laughter she generated and the tricks she got up to. Relationships among the sisters fluctuated depending on what stage they had reached or what cause they were supporting at the time, but the close ties between Unity and Jessica never wavered until the outbreak of war and Unity’s suicide attempt, which separated them forever. In spite of their totally opposing views, for Jessica espoused the communist cause, they remained firm friends and missed each other badly when those beliefs finally drove them apart. Unity died after an attack of meningitis in 1948.

Even more than Unity, Jessica was a discontented teenager who longed to get away from home and go to boarding school. She ran away to Spain with her cousin Esmond Romilly, who supported the communists in the Spanish Civil War, and later married him. After moving to America, Esmond joined the Royal Canadian Air Force on the outbreak of war but was lost on a mission over the North Sea. Jessica later married Bob Treuhaft and became a member of the Communist Party and a campaigner for civil rights. After the success of her autobiographical book
Hons and Rebels
, she was able to make a career out of writing. Always the rebel, she remained almost permanently at odds with the rest of her family, yet she kept in touch with all her sisters, except Diana. She died of cancer in 1996.

Deborah (or Debo) never gave her family cause for anxiety. She was a happy child who openly loved her parents but her birth was not greeted with great joy since her parents were still hoping for another boy. She eventually wrote several books, mainly about Chatsworth House, which became her home, culminating in her acclaimed biography
Wait for Me
.

Debo married Lord Andrew Cavendish, who succeeded as Duke of Devonshire when his elder brother was killed in the war, and they inherited Chatsworth – and a lot of death duties. That these were paid off and that Chatsworth is now probably the leading privately owned stately home open to the public is in huge measure down to Debo’s enormous energy and imagination.

In spite of her optimistic and equable nature, she, too, endured tragedy since she had three stillborn babies and another that died shortly after birth; she did, however, produce Peregrine, the present Duke of Devonshire, Emma and Sophia. In later life she became the family peacemaker, which was not an easy task.

The sisters’ high-profile lifestyles were further enhanced by their equally high-profile family and friends. They were cousins of the Churchills, related to former prime minister Harold Macmillan and numbered most of the literary figures of their generation among their friends. Diana was probably the only person in the world to be friendly with both Churchill and Hitler, and she and Unity knew most of the German High Command. Debo’s friends included Ali Khan, the Kennedy family, Prince Charles and the late Queen Mother.

Since there were sixteen years between Nancy and Debo, the sisters spanned an unusual and changing swathe of history: the eldest three were born as the long, easy-going Edwardian afternoon was drawing to a close and when Britain still ruled over a vast empire on which it seemed the sun would never set; Unity when the lights were going out all over Europe; Jessica when the ‘war to end all wars’ was in its final stages; and Debo at the beginning of the roaring twenties. They witnessed changes of the sort that had never been seen before – women’s suffrage, Irish Home Rule, the General Strike, the Slump and yet another war; and they all lived to see a world which had changed beyond recognition from the one into which they were born. But they have never lost their popularity, in spite of the generations who have never heard of the Mitford sisters, and Nancy’s novels still fly off the shelves of leading booksellers. Even Andrew Marr saw fit to devote a section of his excellent history
The Making of Modern Britain
to this extraordinary family.

It is tempting to ask ‘why?’ Many devotees will have their different reasons and many theories have been advanced by those more qualified to speculate on the phenomenon of the Mitford family. My task is to tell the story of Pam who, because she never sought the limelight, has somehow fallen below the radar. I hope to show that in her quiet and understated way, she was just as interesting as her more flamboyant siblings.

Most families have nicknames for at least some of their members, but all the Mitford family had a series of names which they called one another at different times. I have by no means used all of them, but most of them are worth listing if only to show their diversity.

Nancy was called Koko in early childhood by both her parents and her father sometimes called her Blob-Nose. Her older siblings, Pam, Tom and Diana, called her Naunce or Naunceling; Jessica called her Susan; and after she went to live in France, Debo would refer to her as the French Lady Writer, the Old French Lady or simply Lady.

Practical Pam was always known as Woman to the others, who also called her Wooms or Woomling.

Tom was Tud or Tuddemy, which stood for Tom in Boudledidge, the secret language made up by Unity and Jessica.

Diana was Dina to her father while her mother called her Dana. She had a rather large head as a child so Nancy called her Bodley, short for The Bodley Head; she was Nard or Nardy to Pam, Tom and Unity; Jessica called her Cord or Corduroy; while to Debo she was always Honks. History does not relate where these last three nicknames originated.

Unity was most often called Bobo, a derivative of Baby, which her parents called her when she was small. She and Jessica called each other Boud (pronounced Bowd), presumably because they were the only two speakers of Boudledidge. Diana and Jessica took to calling her Birdie, a derivative of Boud. Not many people actually called her Unity – except Hitler.

Jessica quickly became Decca, though her mother called her Little D; Nancy called her Susan, and Jessica and Debo called each other Hen or Henderson, partly on account of their devotion to poultry. Occasionally, and mysteriously, she was called Squalor; equally mysterious was Pam’s nickname for her of Steake, pronounced Ste-ake.

Debo was called Stubby during her early years by her mother, on account of her (compared to the others’) stubby little legs. Pam changed this to Stublow, which she used at intervals for the rest of her life when writing to her youngest sister. Nancy often called her Miss or Nine, telling her that this referred to her mental age. On one occasion Debo, having written an unusually long letter to Nancy, ended by saying that if she didn’t finish soon Nancy would be forced to change her name to Ten.

The children called their father Farve and their mother Muv, but also referred to them as TPOM (The Poor Old Male) and TPOF (The Poor Old Female). Sydney was also known as Fem or the Fem. The children thought these names were very much their preserve, but one day Sydney was telephoned by Violet Hammersley (one of the family’s oldest friends, and christened The Wid by the children since she always wore mourning clothes after her husband’s death), and she instantly recognised the gloomy voice. Forgetting herself entirely, Sydney said, ‘Hello Wid’; ‘Hello Fem’ was the instant reply. David and Sydney were also known jointly as The Revereds.