The Other Mitford (7 page)

Her behaviour continued to be somewhat disruptive, however, and legend has it that she took great delight during her debutante season in letting loose her pet rat, Ratular, at coming-out dances and once even at Buckingham Palace. Enid, her grass snake, possibly also made the odd appearance at debutante dances, to the general alarm of the other guests and to Unity’s glee.

After Diana married, Jessica, for whom she had always been the favourite sister, missed her badly and it was possibly from this time that her extreme rebelliousness and dissatisfaction with life began. As a young child she is remembered as being pretty, very funny and happy with her lot. Like the others she loved her animals, especially her pet sheep Miranda who became her constant companion. But unlike the others during childhood, she was far from being an outdoor girl, much preferring reading to riding. Diana spent hours with her in the pony paddock trying to teach her to ride her pony Joey, coaxing her to climb back onto him when she fell off for the umpteenth time.

Unity being sent to boarding school and Jessica not being allowed to go to school in Burford were probably other turning points; they transformed her from the little girl who would take hold of her father’s arm and shake it, telling him that she was giving him ‘palsy practice’ for his old age, into a bored and resentful teenager who couldn’t wait to leave home. She opened an account at Drummond’s Bank in which to save her ‘running away money’ – mainly her pocket money and the Christmas presents she received from various aunts. In the family the account was regarded as a joke and Nancy used it in
The Pursuit of Love
, where Linda’s little sister Jassy also has a running away fund, but Jessica was deadly serious as later events were to show. Tom, when he came home, realised that Jessica’s main problem was boredom with her situation and, ever the bookworm himself, introduced her to the sort of writers he felt she would enjoy. This helped but did not solve the problem.

Despite the differences in their outlook, Jessica and Debo were close companions. They would talk all day in Honnish, which was less incomprehensible than Boudledidge, being largely ‘normal’ English spoken with a Gloucestershire accent, and they shared each other’s secrets. But this close relationship was severely put to the test when Unity went to St Margaret’s and Jessica became moody and critical about everything to do with the family.

Debo found this attitude hard to understand because she was so happy with her life at Swinbrook, surrounded by a host of animals and on good terms with both her parents. David and Sydney were probably more indulgent to her partly because she was the youngest and also because she enjoyed the same things as they did: going fishing and shooting with her father and tending her poultry with the same care as Sydney. The thought of going to boarding school made her, like Diana, feel physically sick, but ironically, when Jessica, aged 16, went to study French in Paris as the older sisters had done, it was deemed to be cheaper to send Debo to boarding school than have a governess for an only child.

The school was in Oxford; Debo described it as smelling of lino, girls and fish and she hated it – so much so that she fainted in a geometry lesson and was sick several times. She persuaded Sydney to let her leave but the term’s fees had been paid in advance. They compromised: Debo went back as a day girl for the rest of the term and after that was taught, with Celia Hay, one of Sydney’s friend’s children, by the kindly Miss Frost.

Hunting was one of Debo’s great delights, as it had been Nancy’s, but she also loved skating and was very good at it, as were David and Sydney. On Saturdays she went hunting and on Sundays David and his younger brother Jack took her skating in Oxford. She had already learned to skate on a family holiday in Pontresina and the regular visits to the Oxford rink made her good enough to be ‘spotted’ by a trainer who suggested to Sydney that Debo could potentially make the British junior team. Sydney rejected the idea and Debo did not find out about it until later in life and was sorry that she had not had the chance to excel at something she loved. But unlike the others – except, of course, for Pam – she did not harbour resentment against her mother, either then or at any time.

Rather like Pam, Tom tends to be somewhat neglected in the history of the Mitford family, probably because, in the words of one of the children’s nannies, he was ‘no trouble’. But he was still very much his own man in this largely female family. Loved by his parents and his sisters, he did well at prep. school, at Eton and then in Vienna, where he studied music and learnt to speak German better than any other member of the family. He was a gifted musician and could easily have taken it up as a career. In the event he chose law and became a respected barrister.

David, never an intellectual himself, was somewhat in awe of Tom’s knowledge, shown by the fact that he asked him to organise the Asthall library at the tender age of 10. His teachers respected him and he had lots of good friends. Many people would have been spoiled by all this affection and regard but it seems never to have gone to Tom’s head. Possibly the rough and tumble in a family of teasing, noisy sisters had discouraged him from having the high opinion of himself that his many gifts deserved. He was the first of the family to feel the fascination of a re-emerging Germany and he lived for some time not in Germany, but in Austria, in a castle belonging to a Hungarian, Janos von Almasy, who became a lifelong friend of Tom’s, and later Unity’s. It was often rumoured that Janos would have liked to marry Pam – John Betjeman certainly regarded him as a rival.

By the end of a turbulent decade, in which the country had now entered a period of severe financial depression, the Mitford children had begun to leave the nest. Nancy, although she still lived at home for periods, had embarked on her writing career; Diana was married with one small son and another on the way; and Pam was managing Bryan and Diana’s farm at Biddesden in Hampshire. Unity and Jessica were beginning to form the extreme and opposing views which would eventually separate them forever and Debo was living the kind of life she would always enjoy. As yet the political extremes which were to divide the family were only starting to smoulder. It would not be long before they caused violent eruptions.

P
am’s engagement to Oliver Watney did not last long. Togo, as he was known, was a tall, dark, stooping young man who suffered from chronic tuberculosis, for which there was then no cure. He lived at Cornbury, not far from Swinbrook, and probably only proposed to Pam because his father was keen on the match, which would have had the advantage of uniting an older, aristocratic family with the Watney commercial interests.

Before this, in a letter to Diana, who was at Bexhill recuperating after having her tonsils out, Pam had confessed to feeling intensely shy at the prospect of being left on her own with Togo, an event which she knew some of her friends were planning:

I do so wish you were here. You see I feel so stupid because everyone invited Togo to tea on Sunday to play tennis and everyone is to fade away and leave us two together! If you were here you would of course join in and I should not feel so young. However, I shall have to get over feeling shy and this weekend is sure to help me in doing so. I should really much prefer to be in Bexhill with you.

Hardly the words of a young woman in love.

When Togo’s father died of a heart attack his mother made it her business to talk him out of his engagement to Pam. His heart was obviously not entirely given to Pam because he seems to have succumbed to his mother without much opposition. Possibly the prospect of those five sharp-witted, shrieking sisters sapped his already waning enthusiasm. He was sent on a cruise for his health and on his return went to see Pam to break off the engagement.

The family was outraged by Togo’s treachery and Nancy wrote Pam a sympathetic letter of the sort that she had probably never written to her before:

Oh I am so sorry how beastly for you poor darling. Never mind I expect you’ll be rewarded by marrying someone millions of times nicer & obviously Togo would have been a horrid husband. Are you going to Canada? I do hope so, that would be lovely for you.

Best love and don’t be too miserable, I am, dreadfully, but one must make the best of things.

Heaps of love, Naunce

Pam, though initially very disappointed that the engagement was off, was relieved because she realised she was not in love with him. She was eventually to meet someone with whom Togo could not have ever hoped to compete. The wedding presents had to be returned and most of this somewhat embarrassing task was done by Tom who drove round London in his little car. A notice appeared in
The Times
announcing that the marriage would not now take place.

The Togo saga was not quite over, however. The engagement ring which he had given Pam was a replica of King Alfred’s jewel, the original of which was in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. True to form, Nancy said that it looked like a chicken’s mess which upset Pam, in spite of her lifelong love of chickens. Nancy saved up the incident to use in
The Pursuit of Love
.

Linda, whose disagreeableness at this time knew no bounds, said that it [the engagement ring of her sister Louisa] looked like a chicken’s mess. Same shape, same size, same colour. ‘Not my idea of a jewel.’

‘I think it’s lovely,’ said Aunt Sadie, but Linda’s words had left their sting all the same.

Long afterwards, when Pam was asked what had become of the chicken’s mess, she replied that she had given it to Unity. ‘And what did Unity do with it?’ ‘Oh, she gave it to Hitler.’ How many jilted fiancées could say that?

When the necessary wedding arrangements had been cancelled Pam went with her parents to spend the summer prospecting for gold in Canada. In 1912 David had laid claim to 40 acres of a new goldfield in northern Ontario. Although today this seems like foolish speculation, there was actually gold to be found in the vicinity and the Mitfords’ neighbour, Sir Harry Oakes, had made millions from prospecting, before being murdered in the Bahamas.

Very little gold, however, was found on the Mitfords’ patch but some happy holidays were enjoyed there. David and Sydney went out for the first time in 1913. They lived in a log cabin and Sydney – who had learnt domestic skills aboard her father’s boat, on which she had spent much of her childhood – did the cooking and cleaning. In her unpublished biography of Unity, Sydney makes it clear that it was here that Unity was conceived. By a strange quirk of fate, in the light of future events, the place was called Swastika which, even more ironically, is derived from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘a feeling of well being’.

Although, as always, gold was only found in small quantities in the summer of 1928, Pam was in her element at Swastika since she, too, could indulge in her domestic skills and live in the simple way she loved. Possibly also she enjoyed a little respite from her siblings. She and her parents lived in what the family called ‘the shack’ – a substantial log cabin where there were no servants and where Pam and her mother did the housework, cooked and pumped water by hand. Sydney made bread to her own special recipe, which she did for the rest of her life. Baked with stone-ground wholemeal flour and deliciously crusty, it is now immortalised on the internet (look up Lady Redesdale’s Bread) and Pam baked loaves to her mother’s recipe right into old age. For Pam, the gold-mining period must have been a source of great delight for she always kept a framed photograph of her father at Swastika in her home.

During the time Pam was there Jessica wrote to say that Nancy was sharing a house in London with the soon-to-be-famous novelist Evelyn Waugh and his new wife, the former Evelyn Gardener (the pair were known to their friends as he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn). They would be doing all their own housework, just like Pam and their mother in Canada.

Perhaps luckily for Nancy, who never aspired to domesticity of any kind (Pam’s womanly gifts were always a source of ‘wondair’ to the other sisters), the arrangement with the Waughs did not last long. She-Evelyn left her husband a month later and the threesome went their separate ways. But the friendship between Nancy and Waugh survived, with a few inevitable hiccoughs, for the rest of their lives.

In 1930 Bryan and Diana bought a 350-acre farm and a herd of fifty cows at Biddesden in Hampshire, and Pam offered to manage it for them and to run the milk round. It was the start of a very happy time for Pam who had acquired enough farming knowledge to make her position viable. In the end she stayed there for four years, longer than Diana herself who eventually left Bryan for Sir Oswald Mosley.

With her blonde hair and blue eyes, and wearing breeches and boots alongside the farm workers, Pam caused quite a stir among the traditional old farmers at Andover market where she went to buy stock. She grew to be a successful bidder for good animals but early on she made a mistake which became one of the many, many jokes in the Mitford family annals. Having bought what she thought was a very good cow, when she got it back to Biddesden she discovered that ‘the brute was bagless’. Nancy couldn’t resist using this incident in her third published novel,
Wigs on the Green
. Even so, Pam made a reasonably good job of farming, even at a very poor time for agriculture. The farm workers, who called her ‘Miss Pam’, had a healthy respect for her, mainly because she showed them that she was not afraid of hard physical work.

Pam’s farming experience stood her in good stead for when she kept cattle at Rignell Hall after her marriage and during the war. One of the stories much related in the family was of the bitterly cold winter of 1942 when all the water tanks for the cattle froze solid. The lad who had replaced her cowman (who had joined the armed forces) told her that there was no need to fetch fresh water for the cows because they could eat the snow. But Pam had heard that one before. ‘How do you know what they want? You’ve never been an in-calf heifer,’ she admonished the hapless boy.

During her time at Biddesden Pam met many of the Guinness’s friends, and although she lived in a small house in the grounds, she often dined with Bryan and Diana and their many guests from the worlds of politics, the arts and science. One night she met the youthful John Betjeman, and other guests included artist Augustus John, writer Lytton Strachey and his mistress Dora Carrington, eminent scientist Professor Lindemann and the Sitwell and Huxley families. A very frequent guest was Randolph Churchill, the Mitfords’ cousin, who became godfather, together with Evelyn Waugh, to Diana and Bryan’s eldest son, Jonathan.