The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (20 page)

Unity spent just over a year boarding at St Margaret’s, Bushey (SMB, as it is known to its pupils) in Nicholson’s house. The school was chosen presumably because her first cousins Robin and Ann Farrer, and Rosemary and Clementine Mitford were also there, so she was unlikely to be lonely. But she was remorselessly naughty and was expelled just before Christmas 1930, or rather her mother was invited to remove her – a nice point of distinction to which Sydney adhered stoically – because of her unsettling influence on the other girls. In later years Unity liked to claim that the reason for her expulsion was a single act, on Speech Day when she had to read aloud a quotation that included the line, ‘A garden is a lovesome thing God wot . . .’ to which she claimed she added the word ‘rot’. However, her biographer discovered that this joke was used throughout the school before Unity’s expulsion and one of Unity’s friends at St Margaret’s stated, ‘What she got the sack for was a fine disregard of the rules of the school.’
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Later, when Unity became infamous, pupils at St Margaret’s were forbidden to mention her name and she was, as it were, expunged from the school records. Strangely, Unity was upset at her expulsion: even years later she told new friends how sad it had made her.

The Farrer girls who were at school with Unity were daughters of Aunt Joan, the third of David’s four sisters. Joan had married Major Denis Farrer, a distant Redesdale kinsman who had been David’s companion during his long-ago attempt at tea-planting in Ceylon. The Farrers had five children but it was the three girls who played a major part in the lives of the Mitford sisters. The eldest, Barbara, was the same age as Pam, while Ann and Joan (called Robin by her parents) were contemporaries of Unity and Decca. Major Farrer and David often shot together and there were exchange visits between Asthall and the Farrer home, Brayfield, on the Bedfordshire–Buckinghamshire border. Miss Hussey took some of the girls to Brayfield on several occasions, so it is something of a surprise to read in a letter between Decca and Ann that they ‘never really met’ until 1930 when Ann and Robin were invited to Swinbrook for the summer holidays.
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Ann became known as ‘Idden’ and Robin as ‘Rudbin’ (their names in Boudledidge),
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but after seeing Humphrey Bogart in
The Petrified Forest
in Oxford, Idden and Decca took to calling each other ‘Sister’ in correspondence.
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They became instant best friends, and Idden was Decca’s first real confidante outside her immediate family.
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Two or three times they walked together to Chipping Norton – ten miles each way – to a shop where they could buy homemade sausage rolls (strictly forbidden under Sydney’s Mosaic regimen) and fizzy lemonade (also forbidden at Swinbrook). It was to Idden that Decca revealed her concern about the have-nots in society. In return Idden told Decca about their Romilly cousins. The Mitford children had never met Esmond and Giles Romilly. Sydney disapproved of their mother, Nellie, because of her reputation and feckless nature, although Nellie was David’s first cousin, and sister to Clementine Churchill. The two boys were not much welcome at the Farrers’ home at Brayfield either, and they spent most of their summer and Christmas holidays at Chartwell with the Churchills. The Farrers had met them at Chartwell a couple of times and it seemed that no matter how naughty the Mitfords were, and it was inevitable that bright children thrown so much on their own devices would be mischievous, Esmond outdid them by miles. He held the head of Mary Churchill
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under water until she conceded that there was no God, he smoked in his bedroom, and – a cardinal sin – he dared to appear once at dinner without a black tie.
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Although, according to Decca, it was her interest in politics that stimulated Unity’s, the surviving evidence tends to show that Unity, three years older than Decca, had already become interested in pseudo-Fascist literature in 1930 a year or so before Decca’s first political stirrings. Unity’s biographer, David Pryce-Jones, came across a book she had owned. Autographed by her and dated 1930, it was a copy of
Jew Süss
, the novel by Leon Feuchtwanger about an eighteenth-century Jewish financier-adventurer. Because of its stereotypical Jewish characters, it was used in Germany to fuel and unify disparate elements of anti-Semitism. Pryce-Jones, whose father had been a Swinbrook Sewer at roughly the same time that Unity would have been reading this book, thought it an unusual choice of reading matter for a fifteen-year-old girl
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and it set him on a course of research that led to the only biography written about Unity, whom he described enigmatically as ‘a comet, blazing a trail too erratic to be charted’.
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But no matter which of the two came to politics first, it was typical that although Unity and Decca became emotionally close to each other at this time, they opposed each other ideologically. Decca was toying then with socialism before becoming, as Farve would have put it, ‘a Bolshie’, and Unity had an initial slight interest in Fascism. ‘When Boud became a fascist I declared myself a Communist . . . thus by the time she was eighteen and I was fifteen we had chosen opposite sides in the conflict of the day’ was how Decca put it.
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As they egged each other on and their interest grew, a line was drawn down the centre of the DFD, and it became a miniature battleground of contradictory political fervour with the respective literature of each side crowding every surface, posters of Hitler and Lenin adorning opposite walls, swastikas, hammers and sickles scratched into the glass of the windows.

Yet if Decca was truly unhappy, as she claims to have been, it was not obvious to her family. Her letters sparkle, almost as much as Nancy’s, with fun and enjoyment of her life, especially her friendship with Idden, and her beloved pets, the spaniel, Spanner, and Miranda, who loved chocolate. Her relationship with her father is nowhere better illustrated than by letters she wrote to him in 1932 from holiday on the Isle of Wight containing a series of spoof newspaper articles about him, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings. David took these letters in great good humour, but apart from the closeness of Decca’s relationship with her father these ‘articles’ also showed a basic understanding of the journalism for which in later life she would become renowned:

Peer Had up for Murder – and Rightly

Lord ‘Sheepbrain’ Redesdale, well known to all committee frequenters such as the skating committee . . . was had up yesterday for assaulting and injuring Mr Adolphus Jones who afterwards died of shock.

He is to be hung tomorrow as soon as possible [inset: ‘his daughter’s remarkable spaniel who has got mange’]. The Hon. Nancy Mitford, another daughter, whose engagement to P. Rodd was announced in these columns, is being married in the prison chapel so that her father can give her away before the hanging . . .
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One illustration shows David, dressed in a suit decorated with arrows with a rope around his neck, escorting Nancy, dressed in flowing bridal clothes, to the altar. Her next letter contained a homemade four-page newspaper:

Man with Glaring Eyes Caught

Lord Redesdale is to be tried in the House of Lords for the unnecessary murder of Miss Belle Bathe, a bathing Belle of Totland Bay.

Lord Redesdale was interviewed today by our special correspondent. ‘I was imagining myself in a skating rink’ he [said] . . . when this damn girl came up and tried to hire out a towel. So I unfortunately trampled her underfoot with my skates.’ Lady Redesdale, when interviewed, merely replied, ‘Ohrrr, poor [darling]’, so we expect she will be tried for being an accessory after the fact.

Miss Jessica Mitford was also interviewed by our correspondent. ‘I always expected something of the sort’, she said. ‘You see he really is a subhuman and a pathetic old throw-back, so what was one to expect?’ We also learn that Lord Redesdale is a great admirer of Hitler, ‘The fellow has fair hair. Really almost yellow’ he told our correspondent, ‘so of course I admire him.’ Lord Redesdale has narrowly escaped arrest for cruelty to children; loud shrieks have often been heard to come from his house . . .

[Headline]: Lord Redesdale hanged – last words: ‘Take care of my skates . . .’
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The letters to David, which accompany these extracts, are alive with love and laughter, and appear to show a child confident in her father’s affection. They are not in any sense demonstrative of an unhappy child. However, Decca did record that Sydney withheld her pocket money on one occasion when she referred to her father as ‘a feudal remnant’. ‘Little D, you are not to call Farve a remnant!’ Sydney ordered. In fact, it was only one of countless names that all the children bestowed upon their parents and which were generally taken with good humour. Sydney became ‘the poor old female’, shortened to TPOF, and ‘the fem’ in conversation, while David was ‘the poor old male’, TPOM, and often ‘the poor old sub-human’. Letters are scattered with references to the parents as ‘the birds’ and ‘the nesting ones’. No one escaped a nickname in the Mitford household.
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Unity came out in the spring of 1932 and, economically, Sydney brought out Rudbin at the same time, irritated because David’s sister Joan seemed unprepared to ‘do anything’ to launch her daughters into Society. A fellow débutante recalled that as she and Unity were both nearly six feet tall they were made to bring up the rear of the procession.
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Dressed in white and with the regulation ostrich feathers in their hair, they felt ridiculous and rebellious, which created an instant bond of friendship. Invited to stay at Swinbrook, Unity’s new friend was surprised and impressed by the sophisticated and free manner in which the Mitfords talked about their parents. Unity, she said, was quite unlike anyone else, but it was her behaviour rather than her character that was different. Her clothes were outlandish and she brightened up the requisite débutante wardrobe approved by Sydney by adding dramatic flourishes such as velvet capes and flashy jewellery hired from a theatrical costumier.

Where Nancy enjoyed teasing, Unity liked to shock, though in her teenage years her manner of shocking people was often startling or funny rather than truly shocking. As a débutante she drew attention to herself by taking her pet white rat Ratular to dances and even to a Palace garden party. She would sit stroking it, almost daring young men to speak to her. Sometimes Ratular was left at home in favour of her grass snake, Enid, who performed as an unusual neck ornament. When either of these pets escaped – which was whenever Unity felt that things needed to be livened up – there was a huge amount of shrieking and commotion. Unity was not unattractive; someone said that looking at her was like looking at Diana in a slightly distorted mirror, and she had her own little court of admirers, but no one ‘stuck’. She was too unusual: all photographs of her show her with a sullen expression, but friends say she smiled and laughed a great deal. ‘She was fun,’ one said. ‘She used to giggle and giggle, but in photographs she looks severe because Diana had said that smiling wrinkled the skin, so she put on her photography face.’
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When she was presented in May she discovered some Buckingham Palace writing-paper in a waiting room and immediately pocketed it to use as ‘jokey’ writing-paper for thank-you notes. Sydney was aghast, but Unity needed to stand out, to draw attention to herself, to be accounted as someone in her own right, not simply one of the middle Mitford girls. She felt awkward about her appearance, and had endured a full complement of sisterly taunts about her size, but her character and behaviour made her what Decca called a
sui generis
personality. Her originality made a deep impression on many who were introduced to her then for the first time. Diana’s neighbour, Dora Carrington, for example, met her in the summer before she came out while the Mitfords were visiting Biddesden, home of Diana and Bryan. ‘Dear Lytton,’ Carrington wrote afterwards, ‘I went with Julian to lunch with Diana today. There found three sisters and Mama Redesdale. The little sisters were astonishingly beautiful and another of sixteen (Unity) very marvellous or Grecian. I thought the mother was remarkable, very sensible and no upper class graces . . . the little sister [Debo] was a great botanist and won me by her high spirits and charm . . .’
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Despite the seemingly ceaseless round of parties, and the trips to Venice, Greece and Turkey that Diana and Bryan made, Bryan must have found time to work for in 1930 he was admitted to the bar. To his disappointment he was offered few briefs and only discovered the reason for this by accident: the clerk considered that others in the chambers were in greater need of the three-guinea fee than Bryan. After that he more or less gave up. In 1931 the couple moved from Buckingham Street to 96 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, overlooking the river. Formerly it had been the house of the artist James McNeill Whistler, and was two doors away from the old London home of Diana’s grandparents, where David had been born. Some time earlier Bryan had purchased Biddesden, a Queen Anne house in the baroque style, set in rolling chalk downland near Andover in north Hampshire. It was a comfortable old property of mellowed red bricks with stone coining, originally built for General Webb, one of Marlborough’s generals. A portrait of the first owner on his battle-charger hung, two storeys high, in the entrance hall. It went with the house and Diana was warned that if it was moved the general’s ghost would make a nuisance of itself by riding ceaselessly up and down the stairs in protest. Her childhood memories of the Asthall ghost made her especially sensitive to this legend and she made no attempt to alter the decoration of the hall, though she stamped her own youthful taste on the remainder of the house.