The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (56 page)

The travelling party was to include Nebby Lou, the daughter of friends. ‘They were black intelligentsia with connections in New York,’ Bob recalled. ‘They were desperate about Nebby, she was at Berkeley High and had no interest in politics. She seemed unaware that there were any racial differences and was friends with, and stayed with, mainly white girls, shopped with them for cashmere sweaters and so on, all that high-school scene.’ They asked Bob and Decca if they would take Nebby with them to broaden her horizons, and the trip was the start of a long friendship between her and Dinky. The Treuhafts planned to spend several months touring the UK and Europe, but their first call would be at Inch Kenneth, to visit Sydney. Decca wanted to show the others the high points of the English Season, such as Ascot, Henley and Lords, ‘But where are they?’ she asked Sydney. She had forgotten. ‘Also I long to show them the Widow [Violet Hammersley]. I had a very nice letter from her not long ago, all about plans for her death bed. Perhaps she could arrange to have it while we’re there? . . . About Farve, I quite agree we should see him, only he will have to agree to be nice to Bob, Dinky and Nebby Lou and not to roar at them. Does he still?’
¹³
Sydney had been delighted that Decca would have this holiday to take her mind off the tragedy of Nicholas, but her relationship with David was just as important. She would never brook what she considered to be impertinence about him. Nebby Lou was very welcome, she replied firmly, but since Decca had chosen to lay down conditions about visiting her father, it was better that she didn’t see him after all.

David was still living at Redesdale Cottage. Nancy, Pam, Diana and Debo visited him at least once each year, Debo more often than the other three who were living on the Continent. Once when Diana visited him, he asked if she would like the fire lit. When she said she would he took out his keys, opened the safe and took out a firelighter. ‘Nothing else was kept in the safe,’ she said, recalling that he had done the same thing at Asthall to prevent the children taking firelighters to make the damp logs burn on the schoolroom fire. ‘It was a relic of the old days. At Redesdale Cottage there were no children to take his firelighters but the idea they might was ingrained. Farve’s safe would have been a grave disappointment to burglars.’
¹⁴
David and Sydney still met occasionally at Rutland Gate, during his increasingly rare visits to London, and she sometimes went to visit him in Northumberland. Like Sydney he was never sure whether to be flattered or annoyed by his portrayal in Nancy’s novels. ‘It shows how savage I must have been,’ he wrote to Sydney once, ‘but without knowing it.’
¹⁵

After a succession of jolly send-off parties from their friends, Decca, Benjamin and Nebby Lou set off by train for New York where they were to spend a week with Aranka. Dinky was already there and Bob was to fly to New York just before the ship departed. Dinky met them at Grand Central Station with terrible news. A cable had arrived, demanding that the passports be returned. They had apparently been granted by mistake and representatives of the State Department had been to the house at Oakland, to Bob’s offices and Aranka’s house, looking for Bob and Decca. By now skilled at evading officialdom, Bob had eluded them and was on a flight to New York, due to arrive at any minute. They drove straight to the airport and met him. During the flight he had made alternative plans. They would hide at his sister’s house overnight. He had discovered that a ship was sailing for Europe on the following day, the SS Liberté. If they went straight to the agent they could try to get on that, pretending, if they were stopped, that they had not received the cable.

They spent an anxious hour at the travel agent’s. The ship was fully booked but there was a last-minute cancellation in cabin class. They decided to take it. Then they found that the price of their original tourist-class tickets was not refundable unless the agency could sell on the tickets to someone else. Decca saw her trip disappearing, but Aranka came to the rescue and offered to pay for the cabin, then whisked Benjy away before Decca had a chance to say a proper goodbye to him. Next morning there were heart-stopping moments at Customs and during the boarding process; at every moment they expected to be recognized and stopped. They did not dare to go to their cabin but mingled on deck among the other passengers until the ship steamed out and they knew they were clear. After that they enjoyed five days of peace and unaccustomed luxury on the voyage to Southampton.

Bob spent his time reading a series of humorous books on how to survive in a Society environment,
Lifemanship, Gamesmanship
and
One-Upmanship
. When Decca asked what he was reading he showed her and told her he was going to practise on her family. ‘Decca exploded with laughter. She knew what a dim chance I’d have; they wrote the rules,’ he said.
¹⁶

Debo met them in London with ten-year-old Emma and eight-year-old Stoker, and they travelled up to Inch Kenneth together. It took only slightly longer to get to the island, Debo told them, than it had taken her to fly to Rio de Janeiro. Sydney was waiting on the dock as the Oban ferry arrived. ‘It was one of the happiest moments of my life,’ Sydney wrote later.
¹⁷
She and her boatman had brought two cars to drive them across Mull to Gribun, where the launch was waiting for them. ‘The drive was a bit terrifying,’ Decca wrote. ‘We went with Muv in her 1930 Morris, she has bad palsy but drives like a New York cab driver, honking like mad at anything and everything in sight.’ At one point on the single-track road she made a truck driver reverse for over a mile so that they could pass. While they were being rowed over to the island Sydney said to Decca, ‘You and Bob are to sleep in the tent.’ They were aghast, but found later that it was a tented four-poster in a comfortable room. Decca had long been concerned that her mother was living on a bleak island, and had pictured her scraping a lonely living. She was quickly disabused of this idea, as she wrote to friends in California: ‘Muv’s lonely barren life here is relieved, we find, by six servants (a cook, a housemaid, a boatman and three others to take care of the sheep, cattle and goats). The house is large and comfortable (10 bedrooms and four modern bathrooms).’ As usual Sydney had furnished the house simply but with tremendous style, although Decca thought the French furniture out of place on the hauntingly beautiful island.

Sydney loved her island. To her it was the next-best thing to living at sea, and she was happy pottering with her farm, her animals and her garden, helped by people she knew well and trusted. Although in her seventies she still swam most days in the icy Atlantic waters. ‘I’m just going for a little
plonge
, dears,’ she would say to guests, and off she would go to Chapel Beach for a health-giving dip. The guests shuddered at the thought.
¹⁸

To Decca the whole thing, the trip, the sight of rolling green fields and pocket-sized gardens from the train windows, Cockney voices, seeing her mother and Debo again, all had a curious dreamlike quality about it. For the others it was merely the coming to life of the amusing and incredible stories that Bob had heard from Decca since they first met, and with which Dinky had grown up. When Sydney had visited California in 1948 she had been invited to give a talk to the children of Dinky’s school and chose to talk about her life on the island. One of the children had asked about her neighbours. ‘I don’t have neighbours, only sheep and cows,’ Sydney said. ‘What do you do there?’ ‘Oh, we have the sheep to shear, and we make blankets from the wool . . . and we have the cows,’ Sydney continued. ‘They give us milk . . . and they go to market in Oban.’ ‘How do they get there?’ ‘They swim across. I just take them down to the water and say, “There you are –
in
you go!”’ The children had been captivated: it was like a fairy-tale, but here were those
same
cows, and here was the sea they swam across to go to market, and the bull – tethered to the back of the
Puffin
– swam across to the island each spring to service the cows. At dinner there were no napkins – the penny-pinching peeress still saved money on those – yet she sent all the other linen to Harrods by train in a huge laundry hamper, just as she ordered her groceries from Harrods’ food hall and sent dirty banknotes to Harrods’ bank to be exchanged for nice crisp new ones. She even had her library books sent from London. It was all
true
.

The island was said to be haunted, but for Decca on that first trip the ghosts were childhood memories: everywhere she turned there were reminders of Swinbrook and Asthall, from the high-backed Jacobean chairs that used to inhabit the closing room, to the six drawings of the sisters by William Acton all in a line in their red brocade frames, from the old records to which they used to sing and dance, ‘Isn’t It Romantic’, ‘Dancing Cheek To Cheek’ and Unity’s ‘
Horst Wessel Lied
’, to the great photograph albums kept religiously by Sydney where those early family groups full of hopes and dreams smiled or glowered at the camera according to whichever phase they were going through. She would never again see Tom and Unity, but she hoped to see Nancy and Pam during her trip. She had made up her mind, however, not to see Diana. She wrote,

I could not have borne [it]. When I was a small child she, seven years older, was my favourite person in the whole world. She was in all ways marvellous to me; she took me riding . . . taught me to speak French, encouraged me in the forbidden sport of ‘showing off’ in front of grown up visitors, was my staunch protectress against the barbs of Nancy, my ally in fights with Boud. I could see her in my mind’s eye, a radiant beauty of seventeen shrieking at my jokes. Teaching me, helping me through childhood, in general being the best of all possible elder sisters . . .

It might have been possible for her to meet Diana again, she thought, ‘if I hadn’t once, long ago, adored her so intensely. To meet her as an historical curiosity on a casual acquaintance level would be incredibly awkward, on a basis of sisterly fondness, unthinkable. Too much bitterness had set in, at least on my part.’
¹⁹

From Inch Kenneth they all went down to stay with Debo and Andrew at Edensor House. Naturally they wanted to see Chatsworth, where an army of painters, plumbers and decorators had taken over prior to the proposed move there of Andrew and Debo, now the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. ‘Chatsworth is only slightly larger and grander than Versailles,’ Decca wrote to her friends in California, ‘[with] 178 rooms and no baths. Because of the Death Duties the poor dears cannot afford to live in Chatsworth, so they live in “the lodge” (which they own) in the village (which they own) and they make do by opening the house to trippers . . . This year they had 250,000 trippers at 2 shillings and sixpence a head.’
²⁰

Joking apart, the death-duties question still exercised Andrew’s mind. He plotted and planned and worked for years to resolve the conundrum of how to pay the tax bill while keeping the house and at least part of the estate in the family. Speculation, both at national and local level, about the future of Chatsworth had acted as a spur. There was talk in the newspapers that it should become a branch of the National Gallery. So many old estates and so much family wealth were affected by the new taxes; fine old houses were left to moulder into ruins because institutions had neither the knowledge nor the resources to care for them. It took decades for the public to recognize that in keeping these magnificent buildings intact, functioning properly as the living heart of a country estate, for the public to view, the old families were almost performing a public service. When families were turfed out – one newly inherited duke was reduced to living in a terraced house on the south coast – the best that could happen to a great house would be for the cash-impoverished National Trust to take it on, when so often it became a sterile museum
²¹
with many of the treasures sold off to pay the Treasury and fund maintenance, or it would be sold, converted into apartments and lost for ever to the public.

As part of Andrew’s plan, sales of Cavendish land began immediately after the death of his father. The 12,000-acre estate in Dumfriesshire went first, followed by 42,000 acres in Derbyshire, woodlands and property in Sussex, and a house in London. All were all handed over willingly to save Chatsworth. The nine most valuable paintings and art treasures, works by Rubens, Holbein, Rembrandt and Van Dyck among them, also went to pay off part of the crippling debt, then 141 precious books, 60 of which had been printed before 1500. Two years before Decca’s visit Andrew offered the house where the Cavendish family’s fortune had been founded, and Bess of Hardwick’s beautiful Hardwick Hall (‘The most beautiful house in the world,’ said Debo) was tipped into the maw of the Inland Revenue. Painful though this was, the sacrifice of Hardwick secured Chatsworth – and the family could no longer have supported two great estates anyway. As it was, money that should have been used for the upkeep and repair of Chatsworth, now regarded as a national treasure, had been lost for ever, and the Devonshires still faced an uphill battle. Not until 1974, twenty-four years after the death of Andrew’s father, were all Revenue debts settled. In addition, Andrew had worked to change the public perception of houses and properties like Chatsworth. In the early days the county council had wanted to drive a major new road through the estate. Today the destruction of such beautiful parkland, always open free of charge to the public, would be termed vandalism, but Andrew had to work hard to prevent it in the post-war years.