The Other Mitford (20 page)

Her nephew, Max Mosley, has vivid childhood memories of her excellent cooking and also of her ‘out of my head’ recipes:

If one asked her where she got the recipe, she would usually answer ‘I made it out of my head’ which used to mean that as children, none of us dared catch the other’s eye for fear of starting to laugh. And of course, we always asked for the recipe just to get her to say that, even in later life.

My principal memory of her is that she was a full-on food enthusiast. She would come back from a trip abroad and regale everyone, particularly my mother, with what she had eaten. ‘The menu, Nard, was the following …’ was heard so often that it became a sort of catchphrase.

He also recalls that while living in Ireland, Pam would drive for miles to get the right pig’s head with which to make brawn, one of her specialities.

Pam was never one to resist a challenge where cooking was concerned. While still living in Ireland she turned down an invitation from Debo to visit her at Lismore Castle because she was making egg mousse for sixty people, who were invited to the Tullamaine point-to-point. This could easily have been on the menu at the Royal Show in 1969 when Debo hired a stand and introduced her Haflinger horses, newly imported from Austria, to an admiring public. ‘My sister Pam and I hired a caravan, parked it behind the horses’ stalls and spent a week there. Pam made lunch for crowds of friends; we sat on straw bales and were entirely happy.’ This would not have been regarded as fun by any of the other sisters, but for Pam and Debo it was exactly what they most enjoyed.

Both Debo and Pam were equally thrilled when Debo introduced the Duchess of Devonshire line of groceries to the Chatsworth shop and various other outlets early in 1987. Debo wrote to Pam:

I’m longing for you to see and taste the FOOD. We had 38 distributors (commercial travellers really) here on Wed, lunch for all, a tour in the freezing cold of the State Rooms etc, to try and show the fellows what we have to look after here … Then we went to the Stag Parlour set up with chairs like a school room & THE PRODUCT was unveiled, along with various pots and tins from rival firms to show how much better ours are! I long to know what
you,
specially, will think of them.

Pam’s main experience of brand products had been in 1976 when the village shop in neighbouring Brimpsfield had closed for good and she had bought all the remaining contents at a knockdown price – which must have pleased her greatly. But even she didn’t get round to using everything up, because when Debo and one of her staff from Chatsworth went to clear her house after she died in 1994, they found and threw away many items from the larder, the oldest of which had a sell-by date of 1977. Of that time, Debo told Diana:

Arriving here was awful … It’s odd beyond anything not to find her here. I’ve been faithfully round the garden plant by plant and am glad she can’t see the precious new tree peony (expensive) which has been struck by a frost and the new growth hangs in that horrid way. I’m also glad she can’t see the way we treat the water and the electric light, wickedly extravagant.

All through her life Pam just couldn’t resist a bargain. In 1968 she announced to Nancy that she would be arriving for Christmas laden with household goods for her store cupboard. These included two 5kg drums of soap powder for the laundry machine, and she could, if necessary, get hold of first-class soap powder for the dishwasher, bird seed and maize, envelopes, floor cloths and loo paper (very soft) from Switzerland at much cheaper prices than in France. Nancy, who found simple domestic tasks like boiling eggs and washing saucepans quite beyond her capabilities, must have shuddered at the thought of all these bargains arriving at her elegant Paris flat, but it is most unlikely that she managed to deter Pam from her mission.

Pam’s careful nature was at its peak many years earlier when Debo needed a cot and blankets for her youngest daughter Sophy when she went to stay at Lismore Castle for the first time. She felt sure that Pam would have not have thrown away the baby items she had acquired when she had had the Mosley boys to stay during the war, and she was right! Pam wrote from Tullamaine:

Of course I will get you a cot, blankets, sheets & all. I have a
perfectly good cot
that Al and Max used at Rignell. If painted would it not save a lot for you to borrow it while here? I think it may need a new mattress also a pillow. I have some
perfectly good blankets
which have a few moth holes; if Frau Feens [the seamstress at Lismore] cut them into the right size leaving out the
eaten parts
she could put some pretty ribbon to bind them and this would again save a lot. Then what kind of sheets, linen or cotton? If linen, I have some large double bed ones which are
rather worn
but here again Frau Feens could find plenty left to make cot sheets.

Debo forwarded the letter to Diana underlining the words now in italics. This was their sister at her ‘make do and mend’ best, the true heir to their mother Lady Redesdale.

Just occasionally, however, Pam was persuaded to part with some of her most elderly belongings: in the spring of 1989 she told Diana about a list of items she was having specially collected by the district council since they were too heavy for the usual dustbin round. It was a very long list ending with ‘old metal feeding troughs, rusted and holy’.

E
very large family has its changing relationships and with a family with such diverse views as the Mitfords, there was plenty of chopping and changing. Although sometimes infuriated with what one or another thought or felt, there is no doubt that they loved each other dearly. It was just sometimes hard to sympathise with someone whose views were so diametrically opposite to one’s own.

As teenagers Unity and Jessica shared a bedroom and as their political views widened they drew a line down the middle, Jessica draping her half with the hammer and sickle and other left-wing propaganda, and Unity displaying the swastika and a selection of Nazi treasures on her side. They would shout slogans across the divide but they were firm friends and no one mourned Unity’s death more than Jessica.

Nancy saw fit to shop Diana to the government when war broke out and was instrumental in her and Sir Oswald Mosley going to prison. She also suggested that Pam and Derek were fascist sympathisers, which was far from the mark. Yet when she was dying of cancer it was Pam and Diana who looked after her.

For much of their adult lives Diana and Jessica were on ‘non- speakers’, though Diana had been Jessica’s favourite sister as a child. They did not meet or communicate after Jessica’s disappearance to Spain and Diana’s marriage to Mosley until Nancy was dying, and even then there was much discussion as to how the meeting should be arranged. Debo, being the youngest (there were sixteen years between her and Nancy), was not so much involved with the early squabbles and in later life became the family peacemaker. Tom, during his short life, was wise enough not to take up the cudgels with any of his sisters; nor was it in his nature to do so.

An incident in 1962 illustrates how, in spite of all that had happened to them during their colourful lives, they still held firm to the differing views of their childhood. One day in August Pam and Giuditta arrived to stay with Diana in Paris, giving her only three hours’ notice of their arrival. Diana and Sir O, as the sisters often called him, were going out and so Pam and Giuditta went to see Nancy with whom Jessica was staying – at this time Jessica never saw Diana when in Paris, but she did keep up her relationship with Nancy. When Diana, Mosley, Pam and Giuditta all met again at the end of the evening, Diana was aware that the visit had been a disaster and that Pam and Giuditta were very upset. ‘What can have gone wrong?’ wrote Diana to Debo.

She soon discovered. Before she and Giuditta went home to Switzerland, Pam described how the conversation at Nancy’s had turned to their old family friend Violet Hammersley. It was a well-known fact that Mrs Ham’s two sons, Christopher and David, were her favourites and that her daughter Monica had had a miserable childhood, being mainly ignored by her mother. ‘Well, that’s just like our miserable childhoods,’ chorused Nancy and Jessica, much to Pam’s dismay. ‘It’s not TRUE,’ she said to Diana, her blue eyes filling with tears, and Diana agreed. Even in their fifties, the sisters still looked back to their childhood in entirely different ways, with Diana, Pam and Debo always seeing the good side of their parents and remembering all the happy times, and Nancy and Jessica (who would probably have been joined by Unity) convinced that they had been deprived and ignored. This is perhaps further illustrated by the fact that the three malcontents’ great ambition was to go to boarding school while the home lovers, especially Diana, confessed to feeling physically sick at the thought of it. To add insult to injury, neither Nancy nor Jessica had spoken a word to Giuditta during the whole of the evening, which had further upset Pam. ‘We smoothed them down and they went off fairly happy I think,’ Diana told Debo, but one cannot imagine Pam, Diana or Debo behaving so rudely.

Since Pam was uninterested in politics and never espoused causes as her sisters did, she was usually on good terms with all the others, who tended to regard this completely different sibling with mild amusement. Having been at the sharp end of Nancy’s cruel teasing for most of her childhood, she had learned to keep her head down and in later life, when she had forged her own kindly if eccentric character, she never tried to compete with any of her sisters.

In their letters to one another, the others often have some joke about Pam and her domestic interests and careful nature, both inherited from their mother. Nancy wrote to one of the others saying that Pam had been to London for the white sales: ‘How can she be my sister? I’ve never been to a white sale in my life and I hope I never have to go to one.’ During a visit to Italy, Jessica wrote to Nancy:

Woman arrived here yesterday! She is thinking of writing a book because 1) you and I got so reech [rich] from same, and 2) she has masses of boxes of writing paper left over from when she was married to Derek and it seems a shame to let it go to waste. She seems in v. good fettle. I
am
glad she could come as I haven’t seen her for years.

It was Jessica, however, with whom Pam had a ‘non-speakers’ period which started in September 1976 and went on for several months. Of all the sisters, Jessica was the most likely to take offence and spent much of her life in conflict with her family. This was partly because she was the one who lived a completely different life with her husband and children in California and partly because she had always been a rebel.

In 1976 journalist, novelist and biographer David Pryce-Jones was writing a biography of Unity to which Pam, Diana and Debo were opposed. Jessica, however, who had exchanged houses with Pryce-Jones in the summer of 1970, had given him help with the book, telling him about the sister to whom she was closest and never stopped loving despite their extraordinary differences. The other sisters hated the book, which Pam described as ‘pornographic’, and were angry with Jessica for her co-operation. When a large family scrapbook which had been at Chatsworth mysteriously disappeared, Pam wrote to Jessica suggesting that she had taken it and used it to help Pryce-Jones with his research, also letting him use some photos from their mother’s album.

Knowing Pam’s generally mild nature and reading the letter more than thirty years later, it seems surprising that it caused such a furore. But Jessica was as incandescent as only she could be:

Woman, [not dear or darling Woman] I was absolutely enraged by your
foul
letter implying that I’ve stolen Debo’s scrapbook and given P-J photos from one of Muv’s scrapbooks. As you well know, Muv left all hers to Jonathan Guinness so why don’t you get after him. I have practically no photos of Bobo [Unity], and have given none to P-J. There are, obviously, huge amounts to be had in newspaper offices & I suppose that is how he got them.

And on and on justifying herself; she even sent a copy of the letter to Debo.

The row went on, with Jessica repeating her present grievances and bringing up more from the past, Debo trying to keep the peace and Diana feeling powerless to help because of her long estrangement from Jessica, but basically taking Pam’s side. Through all this Pam seems to have kept calm but, as we have seen already, she felt things very deeply yet had learned through years of Nancy’s teasing not to show her true feelings. Neither does it seem at all likely that she intended to cause such conflict within the family. It simply was not her style. The truth was probably that, as she was not herself quick to take offence, she had not – possibly naively – expected Jessica to react in the way that she did.

Jessica was further incensed when Pam later wrote to her but didn’t mention her previous letter and that, when the book miraculously turned up at Chatsworth, where presumably it had been all the time, Pam didn’t apologise for accusing her of taking it. Without wishing to make excuses for Pam, Jessica was not one to apologise for any of her behaviour towards the family, particularly the unsympathetic way in which she portrayed their parents in
Hons and Rebels
. Once the scrapbook was found Jessica wrote to Pam saying that she would like to see her again but could never forget her original accusation. It’s impossible to see Pam taking the same stance if the situations had been reversed.

They met for dinner in Burford, near their family home, in December 1976, and appear to have made some sort of peace. Certainly, a year later Pam wrote to Jessica saying how much she had enjoyed her latest book,
A Fine Old Conflict
, and obviously felt on good enough terms to pick her up on several points. She reminded Jessica that she (Pam) had not broken her leg when accosted by Nancy, disguised as a tramp, while the two were running a cafe for strike-breakers on the Oxford road in 1926; she had only sprained her ankle. She also took Jessica to task for saying that she couldn’t return to England after her husband Esmond had been killed because all the family had been pro-Nazi.