Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (47 page)

Meanwhile Nancy wrote to her old friend Heywood Hill that ‘Diana is outraged for my mother.’ Sydney had – as Nancy emphasized in her letter – stuck by Jessica ‘thick and thin’, but one would never have known it from the book. In fact all the sisters disliked
Hons and Rebels
, and to varying degrees viewed it as a travesty of the past, which in a way it was. ‘She has,’ as Nancy put it to Hill, ‘quite unconsciously copied from my book instead of real life, & various modifications of truth demanded by the novel form are now taken as true.’
Hons and Rebels
was a construct, as was
The Pursuit of Love.
It used Nancy’s novel as a springboard from which to leap towards the side of righteousness; and used it because Nancy’s reimagining of the Mitfords was such magnificent value. Thus Jessica had it both ways. She could deplore what she plundered. But her book was also brilliant, and extremely successful. ‘Oh dear,’ wrote Deborah to Nancy, ‘luckily it will soon all be over’: which of course it never really was.

Jessica’s capacity for guilt was small, or perhaps more accurately subsumed into her convictions. Nancy’s was much greater. She spent the years leading up to her mother’s death planning her autobiography, which would have laid bare the relationship with Sydney. Yet she was filled with the familiar furious wretchedness – reduced to the child who had had tantrums in the street – when her mother responded to her ‘Blor’ essay in 1962, writing: ‘It seemed when I read it that everything I had ever done for any of you had turned out wrong and badly, a terrible thought, and can’t be remedied now.’

Whether Sydney meant what she wrote, she
had
done things that turned out wrong: as who does not. Such is the nature of the family, which with the Mitfords was writ so peculiarly and dramatically large. In 1946 Diana had written to Nancy that she had seen a performance of Lorca’s
The House of Bernarda Alba
, the story of a stern matriarch with five daughters, whose lives she controls and whom she confines to her house: ‘It is all about Muv and us.’ This was a joke, but it was another kind of truth. Sydney
was
the dominating force in the family. Her daughters had eluded her, but their mother remained inescapable. What Nancy and Jessica thought of her is yet another truth; so too what Diana thought; so too what each sister thought about the other. The interpretations of the play multiply, and in the end none is definitive, although, given the nature of the Mitford girls – the capacity for conviction that lay within them all – they probably believed that they alone had it right. They continued to debate it until only one of them, Deborah, remained. In her lack of complication, her basic honesty, her ability to accept the complexity of her sisters without distorting her own healthy character, Deborah was perhaps the final word on it all. But that very straightforwardness meant that hers, too, was only a version of the truth.

In 1959, when Jessica was in London seeing her publishers and completing her purchase of Inch Kenneth (which she would finally sell eight years later), Sydney – who still spent her winters in the old mews at Rutland Gate – was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Yet she battled on, back to the wilderness of her island, where she now lived with the help of a couple called the McGillvrays, turning her face to the sea spray as she had done when sailing as a young girl with her father: at the age of nearly eighty, she was as indomitable as the Scottish landscape that she loved. Four years later, however, her condition became critical. In May 1963 the sisters were alerted that they should visit. As it had done for Unity in her last illness, the fearsome, magnificent island exerted its power: although Sydney had two nurses, the doctor was delayed in attending her by the rough seas. Perhaps she did not really mind. ‘So difficult to die,’ wrote Deborah to Jessica, ‘like so difficult being born.’

Sydney’s dying was indeed a slow business. Again to Jessica, Nancy wrote that ‘she has twice seemed to be going’, then rallied: she was a strong woman. In the tone that had characterized so much of her dealings with her mother, Nancy fretted petulantly that Sydney was scolding her daughters for ‘“dragging her back from the grave – what for?” But all we have done is given her a little water when she asks which isn’t exactly dragging!’ Then, also in character, the sudden softening. ‘How she loves clothes & nice things. Even in the night she likes my dressing-gown.’

Eleven days before Sydney died, on 25 May 1963, she said goodbye to the daughters who sat beside her, then added: ‘Perhaps Tom & Bobo, who knows?’ In the dim island light of Inch Kenneth, it may have seemed as though the faces around her bed became beautifully indistinguishable from each other: her Mitford girls.

Afterwards

Nancy

Remained in France for the rest of her life. After her last novel,
Don’t Tell Alfred
, was poorly and rather unjustly received in 1960, she returned to historical biography with
The Sun King
in 1966, a life of Louis XIV. ‘No more readable book has ever been written in my view!!!!’ she wrote to Deborah. Produced as a coffee-table book, it sold vastly and made her still richer. In
The Times
she was described as one of those writers who ‘change the talk and the behaviour of a whole generation’. Her fans were many and sometimes surprising: Bertrand Russell (a distant cousin) had made repeated visits to her hit London play,
The Little Hut
, and she was much admired by Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. ‘I suppose you hate Monty – well I LOVE him,’ Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh. The death of Waugh in 1966 took her best audience, the person who, for all his oddity, truly understood what she most valued in herself.

In 1967, Nancy moved from the Rue Monsieur to a little house at Versailles. She loved the proximity to the chateau, and cherished the romantic idea of a
champ-fleuri
garden, although the house itself was not attractive and it is hard to understand why she chose it. It has the air of a withdrawn resting-place, the last home of a quiet provincial widow. Despite her never more glittering career Nancy was tiring at last of
la haute société;
she was still spry and indestructibly elegant, but the merry fervour of her twenty years in Paris had subdued. Many friends had died: Waugh, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, Victor Cunard, the
beau monde
of her merry middle age. Gaston Palewski had returned from Rome, but his departure – as Nancy had recognized at the time – had changed their relationship for ever.

In 1968 Peter Rodd died, with one of Nancy’s letters in his hand. This, in its strange way, was also a grief. It was what Aunt Sadie called ‘the dropping off of perches’; what Nancy called ‘one more step towards THE END’; which was hastening rather swiftly by this point, although she still had her least popular but, in a way, finest book to complete:
Frederick the Great
, published in 1970. Deeply researched – Nancy had visited the battlefields of Potsdam, Dresden and Prague in the company of Pam – it showed the very remarkable path that she had taken from innately gifted debutante scribbler to serious yet wholly readable scholar. It was a homage to the power of self-education; whatever Jessica might say.

It was at the end of 1968 that Nancy first felt a pain in her left leg. The following year she began to feel unwell. ‘What
can
it be?’ she wrote to Diana in February 1969. Throughout her Paris years she had enjoyed perfect health and it was not her nature to believe in illness (only for housemaids, as Diana Cooper put it). Nevertheless she saw a doctor, who told her to rest in bed while awaiting tests. It was then that Palewski appeared at her house. ‘Hallo Colonel, I’ve got cancer,’ she said, which put him off his stroke. He had come to tell her that he was engaged to be married, to a divorcée named Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord.

From that point Nancy fought – the will to happiness was never stronger than when she was dying – but the last four years of her life are scarcely bearable to contemplate: she saw doctor after doctor, had tests, operations; and through it all she remembered the Colonel, his final, gently delivered betrayal. Jessica was adamant that Nancy should be told she had cancer – although this was not yet definitively stated – but Diana, surely rightly, was of the opinion that her sister lived by illusion and never needed it more than then. It was in 1972 that she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer that fills the body with such agony that Nancy would, as Deborah said, simply ‘sit in bed and cry with the pain’. In the night, she told James Lees-Milne, she longed for Blor.

But Palewski continued to visit, their friendship – which was a kind of love – did not diminish, and in 1972 his recommendation secured Nancy the Légion d’Honneur of which she had dreamed. It was Diana who half lifted her down the stairs to greet the Colonel, where he pinned the decoration to her dress as tears poured down her face. ‘He was,’ Diana later wrote, ‘a kind old object.’ Subsequently Nancy also received the CBE, and told Diana that what she chiefly liked about it was thinking how many people it would annoy.

As they had for their mother, so her sisters now gathered around Nancy’s bedside; it was Pamela’s calm presence that she craved. Diana braved the jealous tantrums of Mosley to drive to Versailles every day. Deborah asked: ‘Is there
anything
I can do?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied Nancy. ‘But I would give anything for one more day’s hunting.’ Jessica came from California and saw Diana for the first time in forty years: ‘She looks like a beautiful bit of ageing sculpture... God, it’s odd.’ The two sisters were polite, nothing more. Yet Jessica later admitted to treasuring the short, kindly letter that Diana sent to her after Nancy’s death: ‘That was so nice to get’.

It was Jessica, the victim of Nancy’s most despairing snaps of irritation – a dim echo of all that mysteriously productive childhood teasing – who heard her sister whisper to the doctor: ‘
Je veux me dépêcher
.’ But she waited to die: the Colonel was on his way. He arrived at the little house with his dog, and took Nancy’s hand. Although she was barely conscious, he had the impression that she smiled.

‘Oh! Fabrice –
on vous attend si longtemps
.’

‘
Comme c’est gentil
.’

She died that day, 30 June 1973, and was buried at Swinbrook beside Unity.

Pamela

Lived at Tullamaine Castle after the divorce from Derek Jackson, which had left her so delightfully rich, until 1960. Her companion there was another connoisseur of the horse, Giuditta Tommasi, a woman of Swiss-German-Italian birth: it was, according to Diana, ‘a kind of marriage’, although Jessica more bluntly stated that her sister had become a ‘you-know-what-bian’. Pamela was also friendly with Rudi von Simolin, who had known Unity in Munich and been aware of her intent to kill herself. In 1958, Diana wrote to Deborah that although Giuditta Tommasi wanted to move to Rome, Pamela ‘really has her eye on Bavaria & Rudi’.

In fact she remained in Ireland with Giuditta until 1962, when the two women moved to Zurich with Pamela’s beloved dachshunds. Deborah later expressed surprise that her sister had never remarried. ‘I suppose really Giuditta put a stop to it,’ she said, which did not fully resolve the mystery of their relationship. When Giuditta died in 1992, Deborah described Pamela as ‘wonderfully unmoved’.

Pamela was possibly the toughest of the sisters, and the best at hiding it. When Nancy died, she said to Diana: ‘Nard, let’s face it, she’s ruined four years of our lives,’ meaning the length of that atrocious illness. It was at least as shocking as anything Nancy ever said. Perhaps it was justified in Pamela’s mind by memories of her sister’s childhood jibes. Yet when Jessica’s daughter Constancia met her aunts at Chatsworth she had the impression that they
all
made Pamela a butt of their jokes. Constancia thought it ‘cruel – it was as though Pam came from a different family from the rest of you’. Which was, indeed, the impression given by Pamela herself. Yet her placid, muted manner and her wayward pronouncements were savoured, not unkindly, by Diana and Deborah (‘Woman works in a mysterious way’). So too was her obsession with food. The chicken that she ate over lunch with Hitler was what she most remembered from that encounter.

She remained in Europe until her dachshunds died, telling a German magazine that they – the dogs – preferred living on the Continent. In 1972 she moved to Woodfield House, in the Gloucestershire village of Caudle Green, and returned to her countrywoman roots. She had eight acres, pigsties and stables, a superb kitchen garden and a black Labrador. She stood for the local parish council, carrying what Deborah called her ‘Unscratchable’ (a leather attaché case that she refused to allow anybody to touch). She was reconciled completely with Jessica after the row over Unity’s biography, although the rupture had lasted more than a year. She also remained friendly with Derek Jackson. ‘Hallo, horse,’ she said to him when he walked into Chatsworth for the wedding of Deborah’s daughter Sophia.

Gradually Pamela retreated further into the world of the other, numerous, unknown Mitfords, the ones who lived in the country and never ruffled its feathers: like her uncle Bertram, High Sheriff of Oxfordshire, who inherited the title of Lord Redesdale from David and kept a prize-winning flock of Hampshire Down sheep. Pamela acquired an additional home, a cottage at Swinbrook, close to the one where Sydney and Unity had lived during the war. She bred poultry, as her mother had done, and became an expert in her field. In 1986 Diana visited the Swinbrook cottage and was so cold that she lay in bed reading Strindberg while her sister fretted over the malfunctioning Rayburn.

As Pamela aged, so the effects of her infantile paralysis worsened. She walked with two sticks and, on a visit to London in 1994, fell and broke her leg. After an operation, she came round and asked Deborah what had won the Grand National. Three days later, on 12 April, Deborah was recalled to the hospital, where her sister had died ten minutes earlier from a blood clot. ‘Hen. Please picture,’ she wrote to Jessica.