The Mitfords Read online

  Yesterday morning, too, she wanted to go out directly after breakfast, but poor Nanny had to go to the lavatory, and Debo was furious again, and said ‘When Muv was here we didn’t have to do all this silly going to the lavatory’. Nanny said very crossly ‘I shall go to the lavatory when I want to’.

  Love from DECCA Je Boudle

  I swear it’s quite true about the ham & lavatory, don’t believe Debo.

  Darling Bods

  After 2 hrs solid of thinking I have at last analysed my feelings.

  I am in love with H2 but as you know the one thing in the world I admire is intellect so I am in the position of someone who is out to marry money & falls in love with a poor man.

  I think this is quite the true state of my mind & sounds more sane than my rather hysterical conversation this evening. So frightfully tired.

  Love, N

  1

  Dear Nancy & Corbish,

  Last night I went to a party & danced with M. Chaliapine.2 He IS so sweet he jumped about with me and hummed in a sweet voice to the band. I have struck up an acquaintance with his two daughters at the Pontresina Hotel. They are good and nyang [sweet] – aged 8 and 17. It is snowing and a blizerd today.

  Love from Decca

  Deborah, Tom, Pamela, Unity, Jessica and ‘Muv’, in one of the rare photographs of Lady Redesdale smiling. Pontresina, 1930.

  Darling Honkite

  We were so excited when Nan woke us up at six o’clock to tell us about Baby G.1 What is his name? We are coming up to see him as soon as nurse lets us. Won’t it be fun? There isn’t much more to say except to heartily congratulate you!

  Much love (and to the baby) from Debo

  Darling Bodley1

  Oh I am having such an awful time. First poor little Decca who happily does seem to be more or less all right.2 Now today a huge picture of me in the Sunday Dispatch saying that my book3 is dedicated to Hamish who I’m engaged to. And there is the most appalling row going on. Muv & Farve spent the whole morning telling me that my friends are all drunkards, that I’m ruining my health & my character, hinting that I have taken to drink myself. I simply don’t know what to do. They say if I go to London this summer it will be the end of me & I’ve practically promised not to go.

  Then dear Uncle George,4 to whom I sent an advance copy, has written to Muv saying it’s awfully indecent but he hopes it will sell & I gather Aunt Iris5 wrote in the same vein. Farve says it is killing Muv by inches.

  Why did I dedicate the beastly book at all, as I said to Muv other people can dedicate books without this sort of thing happening but she & Farve appear to think I did it to annoy them. Then they say that as I’m nearly thirty I ought to stop going out at all. Why? And what should I do if I did stop. I can’t make out what they really want me to do. Live permanently in the country I suppose.

  Oh dear I do feel miserable.

  Best love, N

  Darling Bodley

  I am so unhappy for you on account of this terrible tragedy.1

  I can’t help thinking that for her it must have been best, as she didn’t do it on an impulse when he died it shows she must have considered it & decided that life without him was & always would be intolerable. But for you & all her friends it is a terrible loss, I am so so sorry darling.

  Please give my love & sympathy to Bryan.

  V. best love, Naunce

  Darling Nard

  I thought I would just write & tell you that I went to court last night & enjoyed it very much, though when I came into the PRESENCE my heart failed me & I was almost too nervous to curtsy, though I managed to in the end.1 Everyone admired my dress, and it really is too lovely, how can I ever thank you enough, I shall never wear anything else at dances now. I was entirely dressed by you – dress, bag, fur coat, & bracelet. It was great fun waiting in the Mall, we waited about two hours. I shouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much if I hadn’t had such a lovely dress.

  Please give my love to Bryan & Tom.2

  Best love from Bobo

  Unity, ‘a huge and rather alarming debutante’, dressed for presentation at court, 1932.

  My Darling Bodley

  Thank you for the lovely week I had, I enjoyed myself to the full.

  Mitty1 & I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon discussing your affairs2 & are having another session in a minute! He is horrified, & says that your social position will be nil if you do this. Darling I do hope you are making a right decision. You are SO young to begin getting in wrong with the world, if that’s what is going to happen.

  However it is all your own affair & whatever happens I shall always be on your side as you know & so will anybody who cares for you & perhaps the rest really don’t matter.

  With all my best love, Nance

  Darling Naunce

  You are divine to me, I don’t know what I would do without you.

  I have read your book1 and it is simply heavenly and beautifully written and I read a lot of it to the Leader2 and we laughed so much we couldn’t go on reading.

  Bryan has now arrived and is in a state of airy bliss and longing for me to start work on his flat.3 He is in a magnanimous mood and I told him about the stock of country shoes and crepe de chine4 I am laying in and he was all for it. He says I can have the pick of Cheyne Walk furniture and in return I am giving him two or three pictures. The future appears to me to be roseate specially now he is so gay and bright.

  I ought to get you a diamond necklace – last chance!

  All love, Diana

  Darling Bodley

  Oh I feel as if I were sitting on a volcano (thank you, by the way, a million times for the life saving gift of £5 THE LAST). You know, back in the sane or insane atmosphere of Swinbrook I feel convinced that you won’t be allowed to take this step. I mean that Muv & Farve & Tom, Randolph,1 Doris,2 Aunt Iris, John,3 Lord Moyne4 & in fact everybody that you know will band together & somehow stop it. How, I don’t attempt to say.

  Oh dear I believe you have a much worse time in store for you than you imagine. I’m sorry to be so gloomy darling.

  I am glad you like the book, so do Robert5 & Niggy,6 it is a great comfort. But so far there’s not been one single review – is this rather sinister? I think I had quite a lot in the first week of H. Fling.

  Mitty says £2,000 a year will seem tiny to you & he will urge Farve, as your trustee, to stand out for more.

  Do let me know developments, I think it better in every way that I should stay here at present but if you want me at Cheyne Walk I’ll come of course. Only I think I can do more good down here. I wish I felt certain it was doing good though, it would be so awful later to feel that I had been, even in a tiny way, instrumental in messing up your life. I wish one had a definite table of ethics, for oneself & others like very religious people have, it would make everything easier.

  Much love always darling, Naunce

  Darling Naunce

  The detectives are extraordinary and just like one would imagine.1 It is really rather heavenly to feel that they are around – no pickpockets can approach etc. Isn’t it all extremely amusing in a way. I mean there is such a great army of them and it is all so expensive for Lord Moyne (may he burn in hell).

  I have shirked the Grosvenor Place party2 because I was advised it would be better not to go. They ALL cried when I wouldn’t & I gave as an excuse ‘Grosvenor Place is such a big house to surround so thought it more friendly to save half a dozen men & stay at home’.

  Darling you are my one ally. But it is vastly lying to suggest you encouraged my sot [foolish] behaviour;3 you always said it would end in TEARS.

  Do come here soon. I am not hurrying to leave because if Bryan leaves ME the onus is on HIM and so he will.

  All love darling, Diana

  Darling,

  At last a moment to write you – & now my fingers are too cold to hold the pen! Oh the cold is awful, luckily the ’tectives have made themselves an awfully cosy little wigwam outside with a brazier & are keeping themselves
warm & happy taking up the road. Bless them.

  Saw Bryan yesterday, he was pretty spiky I thought, keeps saying of course I suppose it’s my duty to take her back & balls of that sort. Henry Yorke1 told him you had gone to Mürren with Cela.2 Would I either confirm or deny? I said I thought it very doubtful if Henry knew anything about it & that I would forward a letter to you if B cared to write one.

  I may say that the Lambs3 seem to have turned nasty, apparently they told B they were nearly certain you had an affair with Randolph [Churchill] in the spring.

  Lunched with Dolly [Castlerosse] & Delly.4 Delly said I don’t mind people going off & fucking but I do object to all this free love. She is heaven isn’t she?

  I had a long talk with Mrs Mac5 who refuses to stay with Bryan. She says you are the one she is fond of. I told her it would mean no kitchen maid but she doesn’t seem to mind that idea at all. You must see her as soon as you get back. B & Miss Moore6 both told her (a) you couldn’t afford her & (b) you wouldn’t be entertaining at all, but living in a very very quiet retirement.

  Rather wonderful old ladies in fact.7

  John [Sutro] had a long talk to the Leader & is now won over. Next tease for John, ‘Why even Mosley can talk you round in half an hour’.

  Best love darling, Nancy

  * * *

  1 Diana had just had her tonsils out and was convalescing at the seaside.

  2 Patrick Cameron; a dancing partner of Nancy and Pamela, and a frequent visitor at Asthall.

  3 Mary Milnes-Gaskell; a friend of Nancy from schooldays. Married Lewis Motley in 1934.

  4 Oliver (Togo) Watney (1908–65). Member of the brewing family and a country neighbour of the Mitfords. He was briefly engaged to Pamela in 1929. Married Christina Nelson in 1936.

  5 David Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878–1958). The sisters’ father believed that Asthall was haunted by a poltergeist, which was one of the reasons he eventually sold the house and built Swinbrook.

  1 After much wrangling with her parents, Nancy had been allowed to enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art. She had little artistic talent, received small encouragement from her teachers and left after a few months.

  2 University College London, of which the Slade is a part, was the first university in England to welcome students regardless of their race, class or religion.

  3 Diana was in Paris learning French and staying in lodgings where the only bath was a shallow tin of water brought to her room twice a week.

  1 Unity in ‘Boudledidge’ (the first syllable pronounced as in ‘loud’), the private language invented by Jessica and Unity. This was incomprehensible except to themselves and Deborah who, although she understood it, would never have dared venture on to her older sisters’ territory and speak it.

  1 A weekend cottage that Lady Redesdale had rented before the First World War when the Mitfords were living in London. After the war, she bought it and the family lived in it during the Depression while Swinbrook was let.

  2 Laura Dicks (1871–1959). The daughter of a Congregationalist blacksmith who went as nanny to the Mitfords soon after Diana’s birth in 1910 and stayed until 1941. Known as ‘Blor’ or ‘M’Hinket’, she provided a steady, loving presence during the sisters’ childhood and was the model for the nanny in Nancy’s novel The Blessing (1951).

  ‘Blor’, the Mitfords’ much-loved nanny, Laura Dicks. c.1930.

  3 In her memoirs, Jessica remembered selling her appendix to Deborah for £1 (£50 today) and that it was later disposed of by their nanny. Hons and Rebels (Victor Gollancz, 1960), p. 39.

  4 Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne (1905–92). Diana had finally overcome parental opposition and became engaged to Bryan in November 1928. He trained to be a barrister but left the Bar in 1931 when he realized that his wealth was preventing him from being given briefs. His first novel, Singing Out of Tune, was published in 1933, followed by further volumes of poetry, novels and plays. Married to Diana 1929–34, and to Elisabeth Nelson in 1936.

  1 Pamela’s engagement to Oliver Watney had been broken off shortly before they were to be married. Pamela was not in love, and Togo was tubercular and probably impotent, but it was a disappointment nevertheless.

  2 To help her get over her broken engagement, Pamela accompanied her parents on one of their regular visits to prospect for gold in Canada where Lord Redesdale hoped, in vain, to restore the family fortune.

  1 Diana and Bryan had been lent Pool Place, a seaside house in Sussex belonging to Lord Moyne.

  2 Evelyn Gardner (1903–94). Married to Evelyn Waugh in 1928. Nancy’s spell as her guest was short – lived; soon after her arrival the two Evelyns separated and later divorced.

  3 Sydney Bowles (1880–1963). While they were prospecting for gold, Lady Redesdale and her husband lived in a simple cabin where she did the cooking and cleaning.

  1 Lady Redesdale, whose father brought her up according the dietary laws of Moses because he believed they were healthy, forbade her own children to eat rabbit, shellfish or pig. ‘No doubt very wise in the climate of Israel before refrigeration, but hardly necessary in Oxfordshire,’ Deborah wrote in a childhood memoir, Counting My Chickens (Long Barn Books, 2001), pp. 168–9.

  Pamela with Lord and Lady Redesdale at ‘the shack’, prospecting for gold in Swastika, Ontario. 1929.

  1 Diana and Bryan’s London house.

  2 James Alexander (Hamish) St Clair – Erskine (1909–73). Nancy’s unhappy relationship with the flighty, homosexual son of the Earl of Rosslyn was in its second year and although she considered him her fiancé, they were never officially engaged.

  1 All the sisters except Nancy and Diana were on a winter holiday with their parents. The Redesdales were both keen skaters and used to take the family to the Oxford ice rink every Sunday. It was once suggested that Deborah should train for the British skating team, a proposal that Lady Redesdale immediately rejected.

  2 Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938). The great Russian operatic bass had left the Soviet Union in 1921 and was based in Paris.

  1 Jonathan (Jonnycan) Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne (1930–). Diana’s eldest son became a writer and banker. Author, with his daughter Catherine, of The House of Mitford (1984), a history of three generations of the family. Married to Ingrid Wyndham 1951–63, and to Suzanne Lisney in 1964.

  1 When she was a baby, Diana’s head was thought to be too big for her body and was nicknamed ‘The Bodley Head’ by Nancy, after the publishing company of that name.

  2 There is no record of what was wrong with Jessica.

  3 Nancy’s first novel, Highland Fling (1931).

  4 George Bowles (1877–1955). Lady Redesdale’s elder brother was manager of The Lady, the family magazine to which Nancy contributed her first articles. Married 1902–21 to Joan Penn and to Madeleine Tobin in 1922.

  5 Iris Mitford (1879–1966). Lord Redesdale’s younger sister was the archetypal maiden aunt, loved by all but very censorious. General Secretary of the Officers’ Families’ Fund, she devoted her life to charitable works.

  1 Dora Carrington (1893–1932). The Bloomsbury painter, a friend and neighbour of Diana at Biddesden, had shot herself with a gun that Bryan had lent her to hunt rabbits. Two months previously, Lytton Strachey, the love of Dora’s life, had died aged fifty-one.

  1 The London Season opened with a ball at Buckingham Palace at which debutantes were presented to the King and Queen. Unity would have been required to walk up to the royal couple, curtsey twice and retreat backwards gracefully.

  2 Thomas (Tom) Mitford (1909–45). The sisters’ only brother, nicknamed ‘Tud’ or ‘Tuddemy’ (to rhyme with ‘adultery’ because of the success his sisters believed he had with married women), was studying to be a barrister in London.

  1 Tom Mitford.

  2 Diana had told her family that she was planning to leave Bryan.

  1 Nancy’s second novel, Christmas Pudding (1932).

  2 Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980). Diana’s affair with the leader of the British Union of Fascis
ts (BUF) had begun earlier in the year. Mosley was married to Lady Cynthia Curzon 1920–33 and to Diana in 1936.

  3 Bryan was so distraught by the break-up of his marriage that he could not face the resulting upheaval in domestic arrangements. He asked Diana to pack up their London house in Cheyne Walk and find him a flat.

  4 Diana had joked to Nancy that she was going to stock up on ‘a trousseau’ of expensive clothes while she could still afford them.

  1 Randolph Churchill (1911–68). Winston Churchill’s only son was related to the Mitfords through his mother, Clementine. He was a great friend of Tom and had a crush on Diana as a teenager. In 1932, he began his journalistic career covering the German elections for the Sunday Graphic. Married to Pamela Digby 1939–46 and to June Osborne 1948–61.

  2 Doris Delavigne (1900–42). Beautiful, uninhibited daughter of a Belgian father and English mother. Married the gossip columnist Viscount Castlerosse in 1928.

  3 John Sutro (1904–85). Talented mimic, musician and film producer from a well-off Jewish London family. A lifelong friend of Nancy and Diana, he was best man at Nancy’s wedding and Jonathan Guinness’s godfather. Married Gillian Hammond in 1940.

  4 Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne (1880–1944). Diana’s father-in-law, a distinguished soldier and politician, was assassinated in Cairo by members of the Stern gang, a Jewish terrorist group.

  5 Robert Byron (1905–41). Travel writer whose best-known book, The Road to Oxiana (1937), was a record of his journeys through Iran and Afghanistan. Nancy counted him as one of her dearest friends and mourned him for many years after his death at sea.