The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (66 page)

It was at this point, in the mid-1980s, that I came into contact with her. She was warm, kind, bubbling. In interviews for this book I learned from numbers of people of her generosity to friends in trouble. Indeed, some months after our first contact, when she heard that my partner had died suddenly she was both hugely sympathetic and practical. She was, in fact, pretty well irresistible. This was the side of Decca that her friends saw, but woe betide an enemy. As an opponent Decca transformed herself into a determined avenger, able to use the power of words and her celebrity status as weapons. Her letters to friends are as full of spicy gossip as were Nancy’s.

In January 1984 Decca flew to Nicaragua with a group of writers concerned with press censorship there and in neighbouring El Salvador. Within a short time of her arrival she suffered a deep-vein thrombosis while getting into an elevator: ‘It was a very odd experience,’ she said later, ‘first a hand went, then a foot . . .’
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Fortunately, it was only a minor stroke and within a few months she had recovered and was back to normal, apart from a moderate limp. But it frightened her. For years she had been drinking and smoking heavily – when short of words she found drinking helped, and she had been addicted to cigarettes from her youth. Now, three years short of seventy, these indulgences began to take an inevitable toll. Warned to give up smoking at least, she promised to try, and took to chewing a brand of gum marketed in the USA as an aid to quitting, ‘because I have been such a bore to Bob and everyone,’ she wrote to Debo. ‘He was a total saint this time but how can he be expected to be ditto if it recurs due to my own fault?’

Apart from a few months for recuperation from the stroke, her work was unaffected. Later in 1984 she wrote
Faces of Philip
, an affectionate memoir of Philip Toynbee, Esmond’s oldest friend, and she followed this with a biography of her mother’s heroine, Grace Darling. Both books required her to spend long periods in England researching, and
Grace Had an English Heart
was eventually published in 1987. Neither of these latter books sold in quantity and Decca became bored with Grace Darling long before she completed the work. ‘Grey Starling is about to take wing,’ she wrote to her correspondents, ‘oh the amazing relief. Decompression.’ She was far more interested in the fulfilment of a long-held ambition: a trip to Russia.

Bob and Benjamin, along with Dinky, her husband and two children, and her immense circle of friends in the Bay area, many of whom dated back to the days when she had first arrived in California in the early 1940s, were paramount in her life, but she relished any new controversy that reared its head in the news as natural fodder for her articles. In the spring of 1989 the Islamic
fatwa
was declared on Salman Rushdie for his book
Satanic Verses.
On the day this was announced Decca appeared wearing an outsize cardboard lapel badge upon which she had printed ‘I AM Salman Rushdie’. Later the badge went into production and was worn all over the USA by those opposed to literary censorship, and subsequently Rushdie himself was absorbed into Decca’s vast international circle of literary and media friends. ‘About the Salman Rushdie badges,’ Decca wrote gaily to Debo, ‘I’d send you one, but I fear you don’t look much like him.’

Some years earlier, in 1982, Debo had also broken into print with
The House
; it was part autobiography and part a contemporary history of Chatsworth. She had written it as a product for the Chatsworth shops but it sold well generally, both in the UK and the USA, and she suddenly found herself touring on the lecture circuit in its wake. ‘Nancy once told me,’ Decca wrote, ‘that if you ever became a writer you’d put us both in the shade.’ In response to frequent requests from visitors Debo also wrote
The Estate
in 1990 (and in 2001 was working on a revision of
The House
prior to its planned republication).

When Andrew and Debo celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 1991, the Duke spoke of their years together: ‘My wife and I realize how lucky we have been,’ he said. On thinking how best to celebrate the occasion he had had the idea of a ‘golden wedding party’ to which he and Debo would invite not friends and dignitaries but other Derbyshire couples who had married in 1941. He thought that, with luck, a dozen or so marriages might have survived fifty years and made the announcement. To the Devonshires’ surprise and amusement, nearly a thousand couples applied, not all from Derbyshire, and this resulted in a massive party, held in a marquee almost a quarter of a mile long, at Chatsworth. There are undoubtedly some who would dismiss this generous gesture as paternalism, but there is equally no doubt that the happy occasion gave pleasure to a large number of people, and the attitude of the Duke and Duchess towards each other at that event showed the depth of their affection for each other.

In the latter years of the 1980s, Diana and Pam, who was now increasingly lame in the right leg that had been weak since her childhood attack of polio – ‘I’m a bit short in the offside leg,’ she would say in answer to enquiries – spent a number of holidays together, in Switzerland and Italy in the summer, and several winters in South Africa. They had grown very close in the last decade and enjoyed each other’s company. ‘I do hate winters now I’m old,’ Diana wrote to James Lees-Milne. ‘I feel happy in the sun among flowers.’
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She had endeavoured, in the absence of Mosley, to fill her life with serenity and beauty, but in November 1989 she provoked national controversy merely by appearing as a guest on
Desert Island Discs
. The BBC had tried to air the programme on three occasions: the first date they chose, 8 October, was changed because someone rang in to say that it was the eve of Yom Kippur, which was surely inappropriate scheduling. It was then announced that the programme would air on 1 October but the schedulers were advised that this was Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year). A third date announced, 19 November, was found to be the date of the annual memorial parade of Jewish veterans, so the programme was rescheduled for a fourth time to 26 November. To Decca, it did not matter when the programme aired: the mere fact of giving Diana an opportunity to speak in public proved that the BBC was ‘deeply imbued with the deep-dyed anti-Semitism that pervades all England’.
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As always, Diana answered the presenter’s questions frankly, calmly and without hedging or exaggeration. Hitler was, she said, ‘extraordinarily fascinating and clever. Naturally. You don’t get to be where he was just by being the kind of person people like to think he was . . . Of course, at that moment he was the person who was making the news and therefore he was extremely interesting to talk to.’ He had mesmeric blue eyes, she recalled. She had never believed there would be war between England and Germany, ‘I thought reason would prevail,’ she said. ‘Had I the slightest idea I would be imprisoned I would have given up going to Germany. My duty was to be with my children.’ She minded very much that she had missed those vital years of her children’s lives: they had all changed completely by the time she was released.

According to newspaper reports, many listeners were upset by what appeared to be Diana’s defence of Hitler, but Jewish leaders were infuriated by her championship of Mosley. Denying that he was anti-Semitic, she said, ‘He really wasn’t, you know. He didn’t know a Jew from a Gentile . . . But he was attacked so much by Jews both in the newspapers and physically on marches . . . that he picked up the challenge. Then a great number of his followers who really were anti-Semitic joined him because they thought they would fight their old enemy.’ Yes, she admitted, he had referred to Jews as ‘an alien force which rises to rob us of our heritage’ in a speech in 1936. ‘One of those things which horrified him,’ she said, ‘was that we had this enormous Empire and he did think that the Jews, and the City in general, had invested far too much in countries that had nothing to do with our Empire . . . They were attacked by Communists very often on peaceful marches through east London and in all the big cities, and when there is a fight people are injured of course.’
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It was undoubtedly insensitive of the BBC to schedule the programme originally so that it coincided with Jewish anniversaries, but equally one senses that the inadvertent clashes of dates merely added another card to the hand of those who opposed the Mosleys, and that Diana would have been attacked, automatically, no matter when the programme went out. A Jewish representative stated, ‘The activities of Oswald Mosley in the 1930s were racial, discriminatory and blatantly anti-Semitic. He capitalized on the economic difficulties of the 1930s attempting to throw responsibility on world Jewry . . . There can be no whitewashing Oswald Mosley today . . . BBC listeners should not be exposed to apologia for Hitler and Oswald Mosley.’
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A BBC statement said that they had received some complaints from Jewish listeners but equally they had received a positive response from people who had enjoyed the programme. Diana had been close to centre stage in world history for a while; therefore, what she had to say was of immense interest.
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On 12 April 1994 a devastated Debo telephoned Decca to advise that Pam had died from a blood clot after surgery for a broken leg. Although eighty-six, Pam had continued to lead a full life right to the end, having only to curtail somewhat her beloved trips abroad in recent years. As with her sisters, age had made little difference to the way she lived, thought or wrote, and only physical impossibility prevented her leading the life she had lived since she was a young woman. At her eightieth birthday party she had wowed her guests by appearing in a gold lamé coat, and sat radiant with pleasure, her eyes still that amazing shade of blue, which showed no signs of fading to octogenarian paleness.

The accident occurred during ‘a jolly weekend in London’. She had spent the day shopping, and after dinner with friends was invited next door for drinks. Despite her usual care (she had written to Decca a short time earlier advising her to be careful about breaking legs or hips), she fell down some steep steps and suffered a clean fracture below the knee in her weak leg. She was taken to hospital where the bone was successfully pinned, and on coming round from the anaesthetic her first words were ‘Who won the Grand National?’ Within twenty-four hours she was sitting up in bed entertaining visitors, such as Debo’s granddaughter, Isabel, with her new baby, and several other callers, and being her usual ‘terribly funny’ self. Debo was in Ireland and spoke to Pam on the phone. She had just arrived in London when she received a message to go directly to the hospital. Pam died ten minutes before Debo could get there.

‘But imagine how she, of all people, would loathe a life confined to a wheelchair with somebody to look after her,’ Decca wrote. ‘And – God forbid, to do the cooking! (how I’d hate to be that somebody, come to think of it).’ The last time Decca had seen Pam was in the previous autumn when Decca was a guest speaker at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. She and Bob had taken several people to Pam’s cottage (‘neat as a pin’), which was near by, and Pam had cooked ‘the most delicious 3-course lunch . . . completely single-handed’.
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The scrapbook row, which Decca had not forgotten but had decided to overlook, was long behind them.

Hosts of friends attended the funeral at Swinbrook to sing the hymn sung at all Mitford funerals, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. Today, a small oak planted by Pam on the village green is as much a memorial to ‘the quiet Mitford sister’ as is her headstone in that peaceful place, which held so many childhood memories. Although she had no children of her own Pam’s many nieces and nephews were left feeling bereft: ‘Tante Femme’s’ maternal and caring qualities were unique in the family, and of all Sydney’s daughters she was the most like her mother. A friend who attended the funeral wrote and told Decca that Debo had forbidden the vicar to preach a sermon – ‘So like Farve with his stopwatch set for ten minutes,’ Decca commented.

In November that year Decca was staying at Dinky’s apartment in New York. She tripped on the hem of her long skirt as she and Bob were leaving to go out to dinner and suffered multiple fractures in her ankle. After a cast was fitted she and Bob were able to fly back to California where she was cared for by Benjamin’s Korean wife Jung Min. Decca wrote to Debo that she was well aware that the accident had been caused by clumsiness because she had had too much to drink. She had broken her wrist a year earlier in the same way. She knew she had become far too dependent on alcohol to get her through difficult times, to enjoy good times, and increasingly simply to get her started in the morning. She considered all this and made a decision to give it up, cold turkey.

Dinky was now a highly qualified nurse. At one point she had been appointed a director of the hospital but found she disliked being away from the bedside: her vocation was nursing, not administration. She asked to be returned to nursing, offering her resignation if this could not be arranged, and was subsequently responsible for establishing an acute-pain and palliative-care clinic where she still works. The caring characteristic that Decca had noted in her infant daughter, which had so reminded her of Pam, had never faded, and as a professional Dinky was intensely aware of how difficult it was going to be for Decca to give up drinking. She considered it could not be done without help. ‘She drank heavily for years and I do want to mention it because the way in which she gave it up shows the strength of Decca . . . When she tripped on the hem of her skirt she had been drinking and had had too much. It wasn’t unusual. She could be very mean when she’d had too much to drink. A different person altogether . . . I never preached to my mother, but she suddenly realized what it was going to mean if she continued drinking as she got older, for example if her drinking caused another stroke . . . she couldn’t stand the thought of being alive and dependent.’
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