The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (17 page)

Diana missed most of these schoolroom excitements. Having served her allotted penance she was permitted to spend time later in the summer of 1927 at Chartwell with the Churchills. Here, in addition to Randolph and Diana, of whom she was very fond and who had stayed at Asthall on a number of occasions, she was exposed to the company of some interesting fellow guests: Walter Sickert, the artist, and Professor Lindemann,
⁴³
one of the finest scientific brains of his generation. During the First World War he worked at Farnborough, then in its infancy as an aviation experimental unit. In those days the biggest threat to young airmen was not the enemy but the involuntary spin. No one had been able to work out how to recover from a spin, although one pilot who survived one suggested that pushing the stick forward seemed to have made a difference. This defied logic, so Lindemann set to work and proved mathematically that pushing the stick forward was the correct manoeuvre. No one was keen to test his theory so he learned to fly and tested it himself, at great risk, and subsequently saved many lives.

At Chartwell over dinner one evening Lindemann put his brain to the onerous task of calculating with a slide rule how much champagne Churchill had consumed during his lifetime (enough to fill a railway carriage, apparently). And it was the German-educated ‘Prof’, as Diana called him, who, on learning that she was bored, suggested to Diana that she might learn German so that she could read some of the German classics. He was not a man who suffered fools gladly and he must have recognized something unusual in the teenage Diana to bother with her. Coincidentally Tom was in Vienna learning German, so when she returned home she asked David if she, too, might take German lessons. He refused, and when she pointed out that Tom was doing so, she received the inevitable quelling answer, ‘Tom’s a boy!’ She complained that her father could hardly have been more annoyed by her request if she had asked to learn the can-can, seeming to forget that she had already demonstrated that she was not to be trusted when sent abroad to learn a foreign language.

Tom, beloved of everyone, and especially of David, seems never to have put a foot wrong. He was handsome, bright, talented, charming, and sympathetic with his sisters. He was sometimes accused of arrogance, even by friends, but perhaps it was only the arrogance of youth. Although as a young man in London he was something of a ladies’ man – his various girlfriends thought the world of him – it is known that he had several homosexual relationships at school. What is surprising about this, perhaps, is that he confided in his sisters. On one occasion when he had an Eton friend to stay the house was already full of guests. When Sydney innocently asked Tom if he would mind sharing his room with his friend she couldn’t imagine why the girls doubled up with silent mirth and one by one fled the room.
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On leaving Eton he could not make up his mind whether he should become a musician or a barrister. Little of the real Tom can be gleaned from his letters for he wrote few and they are so brief that one can imagine he counted each word.

Germany was still crushed by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and had not yet begun the resurgence of the next decade, but Tom fell in love with the country, the land, the culture, the music, the literature. For part of the time he stayed as a paying guest with the family of Janos von Almassy, a Hungarian count he met through a mutual friend, in an ancient Gothic castle called Schloss Bernstein. It had originally been in Hungary but when Tom was there it was considered to be in Austria, as ‘since the war . . . they moved the border a few miles’.
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The family was almost as eccentric as Tom’s own and Janos, a highly intelligent man, was interested in the supernatural and horoscopes. Many evenings were spent in holding séances and casting horoscopes. Later Janos became a close friend of other members of the Mitford family. In the following year Tom decided to study law in Berlin.

When Diana attended her first ball at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary in the autumn of 1927, Clementine and Diana Churchill stayed at Swinbrook and went to the ball with the Mitfords. Next day Professor Lindemann rang Diana to see how many proposals she had received. It was his little joke, but Diana’s beauty guaranteed that she would be a sensational débutante and, although she was watched extra carefully by Sydney, she took London by storm in the following spring when she was presented to the King and Queen. In a diary entry written many years later, when he was happily married, James Lees-Milne recalled coming across the golden-haired seventeen-year-old Diana sitting on a low wall at Swinbrook: ‘I think she is the most flawlessly beautiful woman I have ever seen; clear creamy complexion, straight nose, deep blue eyes . . . Her figure is so slim. Is spare the word?’
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Not everyone concurred, of course: the journalist Michael Burn, who met her a few years later, thought her loveliness ‘cold’. Diana herself felt that she was less beautiful than her cousin, Clementine Mitford, Uncle Clement’s posthumous daughter.

Nevertheless, within weeks of making her début in the spring of 1928 Diana had captured a prize, and fallen in love. Bryan Guinness, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the country, proposed and she accepted. Described as ‘a quiet, gentle youth with a vague, almost haphazard, manner, which was utterly beguiling’, Bryan was ‘a writer at heart and was happiest in the company of artists and writers’.
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More than anything this, rather than his fortune, appealed to Diana. Sydney was appalled. ‘How old is he?’ she asked her daughter. On being told he was twenty-two her verdict was that they must wait two years to announce their engagement, although later she relented and reduced the waiting period to a year.

Meanwhile the couple considered themselves secretly engaged and Diana went on the offensive – quietly. Decca later described her sister’s method of obtaining her objective: it was to ‘pine away’ and she sulked around the house for months looking pale and interesting. It was, Decca wrote,

perhaps the only [method] that could have succeeded short of elopement . . . She stayed in her bedroom a great deal of the time, and came down to the drawing room only to sit in stubborn silence, looking vacantly out of the window. This strategy for getting one’s own way was not entirely unknown to us. Some years earlier Debo had successfully pined away for a Pekinese, causing suspension of an ironclad family rule that no one under the age of ten could own a dog . . . As prisoners confined to their cells manage to communicate to each other their restless, intolerable anxieties, creating the conditions for a mass riot, Diana managed to communicate boredom.

The sisters were wholeheartedly with Diana and the forbidden romance with ‘Bry-inn’
⁴⁸
and against the predictable attitude of their parents. But Diana was only just eighteen; a few years earlier, at twenty, Nancy had caused furious family rows by cutting her hair short without permission. That a young American aviatrix had shown that a woman could perform feats previously regarded as a wholly male preserve cut no ice with David and Sydney. Amelia Earhart had just flown the Atlantic in twenty-eight hours and spent the end of the Season in London being escorted by the great and the good. But just as Tom was ‘a boy’, Earhart was ‘an American’ so it didn’t count.

During Diana’s long sulk Decca fell ill, and was not convinced by Sydney’s airy pronouncement that she had simply eaten too much breakfast. She waited until her mother went out to see to the chickens and telephoned Dr Cheatle in Burford, asking him politely if he would ‘mind coming over to take out my appendix’. An investigation showed an appendectomy to be appropriate and it was duly carried out in the nursery, with everything eerily swathed in white sheets. David was summoned from the closing room to supervise while Decca was anaesthetized by chloroform-soaked handkerchief. Dr Cheatle gave his patient the offending organ in a jar of alcohol and the object became one of fascination for Debo. ‘Oh, you
are
so lucky to have a dear little appendix in a bottle,’ she cried longingly. Decca sold it to her for a pound, but soon afterwards the appendix began to smell and had to be washed down the loo by Nanny.
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By the time Decca had recovered, several important things had occurred in the family. Pam had become engaged to Oliver Watney, known as ‘Togo’. He was a member of the Watney brewing family who were neighbours of the Redesdales so he was acceptable to David, though not unreservedly for poor Togo suffered from chronic tuberculosis, for which there was then no cure. He apparently proposed to Pam under pressure from his father and when she accepted he gave her a ring that was a replica of ‘King Alfred’s jewel’ in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Found in Athelney in 1693 the original is made of translucent enamel set in beaten gold. Nancy commented cruelly that it ‘looked like a chicken’s mess’, which must have taken away Pam’s joy in it. And Nancy must have known this for she used the incident in Pursuit of Love:

Linda, whose disagreeableness at this time knew no bounds, said that it simply 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 . . .
⁵⁰

Following the death of his father later that year Togo went on an extended cruise for his health, during which his mother talked him out of the engagement. When he returned he called to tell Pam, who was unconcerned for she, too, had had second thoughts. The Redesdales were furious with Togo, but no harm was done. The requisite announcement was placed in
The Times
– ‘The marriage between . . . will not now take place’ – and all the wedding presents had to be returned, mostly by Tom, ‘driving round London in his little car’.
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Years later Pam was asked what had become of the chicken’s mess. ‘I gave it to Bobo.’ ‘And what did Bobo do with it?’ ‘Oh, she gave it to Hitler.’
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Next Nancy announced that she was unofficially engaged to arch-sewer Hamish St Clair Erskine who was four years younger than she, and thoroughly unsuitable in various ways, not least of which that he was an obvious (though unadmitted) homosexual. A friend described him as having ‘the most enchanting looks though not strictly handsome, mischievous eyes, slanting eyebrows. He was slight of build, well dressed, gay as gay, always, snobbish however, and terribly conscious of his nobility . . . he loved being admired and he was . . . shallowly sophisticated, lithe of mind [and] a smart society figure.’
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He was also intensely amusing and could make his friends laugh until tears ran down their faces, which was his chief asset as far as Nancy was concerned. David was livid, and so was Hamish’s father, the Earl of Rosslyn. The two men conspired together to break up the relationship, but the parents were not the only ones who frowned on it. Tom had enjoyed a brief homosexual relationship with Hamish at Eton and although he had now transferred his sexual attentions to women, his experience of Hamish enabled him to see what Nancy could not: that Hamish would never return her romantic devotion and that he was not marriage material.

Faced with these upsetting situations, and Diana’s sulk – and despite certain aunts pointing out what David and Sydney already knew, that Diana was only eighteen and ‘barely out of the schoolroom’ – David and Sydney suddenly capitulated and allowed Diana formally to accept Bryan’s proposal. Both the London house and Swinbrook were already let in anticipation of the parents’ latest prospecting trip to Canada. The younger sisters were packed off with ‘the gov’ (governess) to the seaside for a few months, Nancy went up to Scotland to stay with relatives of her friend Middy O’Neil, Pam went with David and Sydney to the shack at Swastika to help recover the family fortunes after the expense of the building of Swinbrook (she was the only Mitford child who ever visited Swastika), and Tom, who had left Eton in the previous year, returned to Vienna to continue his German language studies.

Diana, accompanied by Nanny, was allowed to visit her future in-laws on the coast in Sussex, and when Bryan introduced her to his mother he broke staggering news: ‘And she can cook, Mummy.’ Lady Evelyn, a delightful eccentric who only ever spoke in whispers, was dumbfounded. ‘I’ve never
heard
of such a thing. It’s
too
clever,’ she said faintly. Diana was modestly self-deprecating, and explained she could only fry eggs. ‘Anyone can do fried eggs,’ she said lightly. But it was too late, the word went round and soon even the nursery staff at Bailiffscourt had taken up the refrain: ‘To be able to cook – too wonderful.’
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In the late autumn the Mitford family was reunited at Swinbrook where Bryan paid his return visit of a week, accompanied by Robert Byron, a leading Swinbrook Sewer and good friend of Nancy. ‘Bryan is grotesquely in love with Diana Mitford (who is very beautiful) and goes red whenever she comes into the room,’ Byron wrote to his mother. ‘The house is modern, built in fact the other day, square, of Cotswold stone, commanding, as they say, lovely views.’
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Diana wrote that she ‘glowed with pride’ every time Bryan did something ‘uncountrified’, but he had a great love of horses and although he, like Pam, had had polio as a child,
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he rode well. The week went by satisfactorily without David exploding, though it was a near thing as Bryan tended to wave the porridge spoon around to illustrate some point he was making while he helped himself to breakfast. His audience held their breath but he never spilt or splashed anything. Following his visit the usual announcement was sent to
The Times
and the Mitfords moved en masse to London to prepare for the wedding. Inconveniently, 26 Rutland Gate was still let so they moved into ‘the garage’ – the family name for the chauffeur’s cottage in a mews behind the house. The wedding reception was to be held at the Guinnesses’ London house at Grosvenor Place.