The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (67 page)

Decca confounded Dinky, remaining calm and showing none of the usual symptoms of withdrawal distress. ‘She is positively amazing,’ Dinky wrote to Maya Angelou. ‘She’s now [gone] 18 days without a drink. She fired the substance abuse psychiatrist after he droned on about residential treatment, group therapy, AA etc. She just looked at me with her blue, droopy eyes, and said, “I’ve decided to give it up, that’s all.”’
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Dinky said she had never been prouder of her mother than during those early weeks when Decca turned her back on drinking. When she was mobile again, Decca attended AA meetings and Dinky acted as her ‘friend’. ‘She only ever called me three times,’ Dinky said. ‘She did it by sheer will-power. Once she gave up drinking she became a different person. A new and softer Decca emerged. All the crossness and meanness disappeared.’ Bob agreed with this: it was a return to the old Decca and the Treuhafts’ relationship benefited.

Decca’s smoking was another matter. She had given up years earlier, ostensibly. While she had even given a series of lectures on ‘giving up smoking’, her biggest problem during these lectures, she wrote to Debo, was finding the time to run to the ladies’ room ‘to have a quick puff every now and then’. She chewed nicotine gum at the rate of six packets a day. ‘She was so fastidious and it was quite uncharacteristic of her to chew gum,’ Bob reflected. He genuinely believed she had given up smoking. One day, however, she was discovered
in flagrante delicto
: ‘Dinky caught me and told Bob,’ Decca wrote to a friend. ‘How
awful
of her . . . So I suppose I will have to give up for real now.’ And she did so, though she never got over the craving for cigarettes. ‘Oh how I should like a puff,’ she wrote wistfully, in letters to her many correspondents.

Now in her mid-seventies Decca kept up a pace that would have punished someone twenty years younger. She was still in demand for lectures and public appearances, even appearing tremulously, on one occasion, side by side with Maya Angelou as they rode two elephants at the head of carnival procession. In June 1996 her broken ankle was giving her trouble; in compensating for it she had thrown out her hip, causing enough pain to make her consult a doctor. She also mentioned to him that she had been coughing blood for a few days. A series of X-rays and blood tests carried out subsequently provided a shock diagnosis: she had lung cancer.

‘It’s a bit of a facer, Hen,’ she wrote to Debo, but she said that she and Bob had decided to go ahead with plans for a holiday in Cape Cod in August. It was a place she had always loved since her time there with Esmond. In recent years she and Bob had visited the resort every summer as guests of Jon Snow, the Channel 4 news anchorman who had become a close friend after helping Decca with some awkward packing after a long visit to London. Decca instantly bestowed upon him the soubriquet ‘Packer’ Snow. Meanwhile, she said, she was determined to finish her present commission. It was an up-to-date revision of
The American Way of Death
or – as she referred to it in correspondence – ‘Death Warmed Up’. She also amused herself by writing to ‘Miss Manners’, a San Francisco newspaper column on matters of etiquette. Was it, she asked, contrary to the rules of etiquette for a dying person to exploit the pity of their friends to make them do what she wanted?

In July she went into hospital for further tests pending a course of chemotherapy, and the results were even worse than anticipated. The cancer had spread to her liver, kidneys and brain and was thus inoperable. The doctors recommended her to forget chemotherapy and to have radiation of the brain, to conserve its function for as long as possible. With her years of experience at the highest levels of nursing, Dinky was the family spokesperson,
²³
and though the prognosis was difficult for the rest of Decca’s family to take in, it was perhaps worse for Dinky, who knew precisely what it meant, clinically, for her mother. Decca took it in the way she had always taken bad news: on the chin. ‘You’re so brave, Little D,’ Sydney used to say. Even so, Decca asked Dinky to pass on the news to Debo, Maya and the people closest to her. The one thing she had never been able to face was sympat hy.

Writing on 11 July to Debo, to thank her for contacting Jon Snow, Decca said, ‘The Packer wrote such a funny fax, saying he’d never heard a Duchess say
Bugger
so much . . .’ Her situation was curious, she said. She was suffering no headaches or even malaise following the radiation, just some pain in her thigh. Meanwhile life was quite pleasurable with innumerable friends rallying round, bringing in food and gifts, and she was working on the book. Although she had been given a prognosis of only three months, she found it difficult to believe this could be correct and was half convinced that a major mistake had been made in the diagnosis.

There was no mistake. Within days of writing this letter Decca began to suffer paralysis in the right side of her body and was admitted to hospital. Though concerned, when they ascertained that she had not suffered a stroke, the doctors agreed that she could still go to Cape Cod in a few weeks’ time. From then on, however, her deterioration was rapid. ‘It seems that one of the cancer lesions in the brain may have swollen or bled a bit,’ Dinky reported. A week later Decca was being fed through a tube but after a few days she asked for this treatment to be withdrawn. ‘Yesterday she told Bob . . . she wants to come home to die,’ Dinky advised Debo. ‘She looks pale and tired . . . she wakes up and smiles and tries to talk. She’s very clear about what she wants, knows who everyone is. Bob asked her if she wants you to come, and she says she doesn’t see the point . . . Who could have imagined this would go so fast?’

Decca’s last four days were spent at home: her hospital-type bed was installed in the spacious sitting room she loved, surrounded by her books and pictures, Mitford memorabilia, closest friends and members of her family. Maya Angelou came every day and while Decca could still laugh they laughed together. At the end ‘Maya was the real doctor,’ Bob said. ‘Decca was not reacting to anything. She could hardly swallow and barely recognized people. Maya would come in each evening and stand by Decca’s bedside and sing to her . . . bawdy songs, romantic songs and Decca would finally react and realize, “Oh, it’s you.” And she would even open her mouth and try to sing along. Her last words were really songs that Maya started her singing . . . I’ll never forget Maya for that. It was one of the great moments of my life learning what true sisterhood is all about.’
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Decca died on 22 July less than six weeks after being told she had cancer.

Her funeral was minimal. She organized it herself from hospital: a no-frills cremation with her ashes to be scattered at sea, at a total cost of $475. Yet her host of friends wanted to mark the memorial service with something more fitting to her huge personality. Once in an interview she had been asked what sort of funeral she had in mind for herself and she had replied wryly, ‘Oh, I’d like six black horses with plumes, and one of those marvellous jobs of embalming that take twenty years off . . . The streets to be blocked off, dignitaries to declaim sobbingly over the flower-smothered bier, proclamations to be issued, that sort of thing . . .’ In a remarkable tease on Decca, that is almost what happened at the memorial service. More than five hundred people attended the service at a hall in Delancy Street, San Francisco. Tributes from friends were interspersed with old hymns from Decca’s childhood, and the service finished with a band playing ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’. As they spilled out on to the street, those who attended were greeted by the sight of six black horses wearing plumes and harnessed to an antique glass hearse that had been drawn up outside the hall. Inside it were copies of all Decca’s books and articles.

A few months later there was a memorial service in London. It was held in a theatre, for it would have been hypocritical to hold it in a church, although this is the more usual venue in England. Debo had intended to go, and to speak, but press reports that it was to be ‘a circus’ with ‘sideshows’ of funeral directors showing their wares worried her. At the last minute she decided not to attend. However, a huge number of media personalities did go. Packer Snow compèred and Maya Angelou stepped in to pay the main tribute in place of Debo. It was a warm occasion, full of laughter, in celebration of the life of a woman who was brilliant, feisty and surprisingly complicated.

Decca did not live to finish her revision of
The American Way of Death
, but Bob completed and published it, using Decca’s notes. ‘I tried to preserve as much as possible of Decca’s inimitable way of putting things,’ he said. He still lives in their family home in the pleasant traditional ‘neighbourhood’ in Oakland. The house is old-fashioned, shingled, and has a generous front porch. Scented red and white roses planted by Decca flourish by the front steps. At the rear is a small enclosed garden of Californian flora, alive with humming birds, and squirrels scampering across the rails of the decked patio. When I last saw him in October 1999 Bob had just taken delivery of a new computer after organizing a website for Decca’s books. ‘We’ve had 1,300 hits already,’ he told me gleefully, and gave me some instruction on using e-mail, a technology that I had yet to tackle. ‘Decca had no idea of technology,’ he recalled, but she had been thrilled by the instant communications provided by her fax machine. Shortly after she started using it she came downstairs on Christmas Eve to find that the messages received overnight had a red border. It did not occur to her that this was a warning that the paper was running low: ‘She thought it was a delightful festive touch provided by the manufacturers,’ he said, smiling at the memory, ‘so of course she let the paper run out.’ One day he brought her home a packet of yellow Post-it notes, which he thought would be useful for her to mark references in books. Next evening, he asked how she was finding them but she said she couldn’t make them work. ‘Well, how are you using them?’ he enquired. ‘Well I lick them like this and stick them down . . . look,’ she demonstrated, ‘but they keep falling off.’

Dinky, whom he adores, flies regularly from the East Coast to visit him as he feels he could no longer tolerate East Coast winters. Just before I visited them they had had a rare disagreement. Bob had referred to her in conversation as ‘my step-daughter’. Dinky took him to task: ‘You’re the only father I’ve ever known,’ she pointed out.

In Dinky’s generation other descendants of the sisters, too, have made significant successes of their lives. Debo’s son ‘Stoker’ has been chief steward of the Jockey Club, while her elder daughter Emma is a talented artist and has been for many years the head of National Trust Gardens. Diana’s second son Desmond has devoted his life, and financial support, to the Irish Georgian Society, which he founded and which has saved countless eighteenth-century buildings, architectural features and artefacts. He has lectured all over the USA for forty years on the subject. Her son Max is president of the international organisation which governs Formula One motor-racing, and Debo and Diana each has a granddaughter who is a supermodel.

Debo and Diana are the sole survivors of the sisters. Diana celebrated her ninetieth birthday in 2000. When the Temple with its large gardens became too much for her to cope with she sold it, and now lives quietly in her light, airy apartment in the heart of Paris. Her sitting room is at tree-canopy level and overlooks a huge walled garden that once belonged to Napoleon’s mother. With the full-length windows open in the summer, it is hard to believe it is only a few minutes’ walk to the roar of the Place de la Concorde. Although Diana is very deaf, state-of-the-art hearing-aids enable her to enjoy the regular visits of friends, whom she entertains with customary style and charm, and her large family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren are never far away. Looking back over her life when interviewed for this book she said, ‘We all seem to have gone from disaster to disaster, yet I look back on my life, except prison, as being happy, and so lucky.’
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Debo is equally family-minded, but for her there is no hint of retirement although her stewardship of Chatsworth is a full-time job that would defeat many a younger person. She still appears to have all the energy and liveliness that so characterized the Mitford sisters, and recently Andrew said in the popular TV series
Great Estates
, ‘My wife is far more important to Chatsworth than I am.’ This modesty is typical of the Duke. In fact, all the important decisions concerning the running of the estate have always been taken by him, though in recent years he has been assisted in this work by his son, Stoker. In addition, Andrew has taken his position in the county very seriously. Apart from his time as Member of Parliament, he was for a time Mayor of Buxton, and there is scarcely an organization in Derbyshire, large or small, from village cricket clubs to the Mothers’ Union and the boards of major public institutions such as hospitals, that has not benefited in some way from his personal support.

But ‘the house’, as Chatsworth is known locally, has been Debo’s responsibility for over fifty years now. The building that had such a hangdog air when the war ended now looks glossy and well cared-for. This has not happened automatically, and the huge cost of running Chatsworth has to be earned by making the house and the estate pay their way. Chatsworth has always been among the leading stately homes in terms of annual visitors, but what impresses those who pay to see it is not just its grandeur – it is one of the great treasure houses of Europe – but the sense that it is a family home and not a museum.
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Debo cannot understand this, saying that it is a mixture of hotel and museum and that, after all, ‘The family do not live in the state rooms.’ Nevertheless, she has created an unmistakable ambience of warmth and friendliness, based on what she learned from Sydney. This does not simply apply indoors: the sense of belonging that Andrew and Debo have engendered among the huge staff, some of whom are in the third and fourth generation at Chatsworth and feel they are part of ‘the family’, permeates everywhere, even to the car parks where Debo’s flocks of chickens – especially the stately Buff Cochins – scratching about in the sun have now become almost as famous as the house itself.