The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (18 page)

The younger girls always loved staying in London, though for Decca any time spent there was marred because she was not allowed to take Miranda. ‘She’ll be no trouble,’ she said on this occasion, adding, ‘The dear thing would so love it. She’s never been to London.’
⁵⁷
But the parents were cruelly adamant: London was no place for a sheep. There was compensation: the games about white slavers took on a heightened intensity, for Nanny had warned that London was the headquarters of the white-slave trade. They might be sitting quietly at a matinée in the cinema, and feel nothing but the slightest prick in an arm, and they would wake up from a morphine-induced sleep, in chains, in Marseille, bound for South America. Decca and Unity were fairly sure that Nanny was right for they had been able to identify a white slaver who lived close to them in Rutland Gate. Each morning as they walked the dogs he hurried past them in his pinstriped suit and bowler hat, and he always said, ‘Good morning.’ Since he was not in uniform and he spoke to them even though they did not know him, it was obvious to Decca that he was a white slaver. ‘Don’t answer him,’ she cautioned Debo, ‘or you’ll wake up in Buenos Aires and be distributed.’
⁵⁸
It was a significant disappointment to discover after some months that the man they watched so carefully was a friend of Nancy and was married to Mary Lutyens (later Mary Sewell).
⁵⁹

But even white slavers were forgotten in the weeks leading to Diana’s wedding, for living in London was even more thrilling than usual. Decca and Debo lived for the wedding day, relishing the fittings for their cream and gold bridesmaids’ dresses, glorying in the drifts of satin and lace, boxes frothing with tissue, the constant planning of guest lists, menus and the trousseau; an atmosphere of joyful anticipation pervaded the house. Diana was carried away with exhilaration. She remembered joking with pseudo-sophistication at the vulgarity of some of the presents, but her father reminded her quietly and gravely, ‘It is so kind of people to give you presents.’ Debo chiefly recalls the joy of it because, as the youngest of six girls with a thrifty mother, she ‘never had a new dress. Those jerseys and skirts and straight cotton frocks are engraved on my mind.’
⁶⁰
So the excitement was intense and only Unity, now fourteen and large-framed, though not fat, with very straight fair hair that stuck out in an unflattering manner, did not look forward to the wedding. Self-conscious about her looks she chafed at being cast in the role of bridesmaid and was persuaded only with difficulty to submit to fittings. ‘Oh dear, poor Boud, she is rather enormous,’ Sydney sympathized, which can only have added to Unity’s discomfort.
⁶¹

When the great day dawned, 30 January 1929,
⁶²
Decca and Debo, the two sisters who had most looked forward to the wedding, were confined to the sickroom with a contagious disease that would probably never have affected them had Sydney allowed them to be injected with ‘disgusting dead germs’. Decca recalls that they had scarlet fever, and flushed red faces. Diana thought it was whooping cough, but whatever it was they could not attend the wedding of the year – as the newspapers referred to it in acres of coverage. The absence of her bright, funny little sisters ‘spoiled the wedding for me,’ Diana wrote. ‘I could have spared anyone more easily than them.’
⁶³

5
Bright Young Things
(1929–30)

Diana and Bryan left in a cloud of confetti for Europe. There was no sense of anticlimax for Diana because marriage meant freedom to pursue the things that mattered to her. Chief among them was meeting interesting new people without having to face the disapproval of her parents, good conversation, books, pictures, music and travel. Some of these, clearly, were available to her at home but perhaps she had felt too constrained there to enjoy them. From being treated as a child to be sent hither and thither, always with a nanny or governess, always chaperoned, and subject to the will of one or both of her parents she was suddenly transformed into a grown-up, married woman with a handsome, kind husband whom she loved in a romantic sense, leading a glamorous life. The sense of liberty was blissful. Every day was like a new kind of heaven to her, especially when the long honeymoon took them south towards Sicily and she first saw the Mediterranean, with its Greek temples among almonds in blossom, and olive groves. ‘I would willingly have stayed there forever,’ she wrote; adding naïvely, ‘It seemed to me a mystery why anyone who is not obliged to do so by work should choose to live anywhere else.’
¹

When the couple returned to London they moved into 10 Buckingham Street (now Buckingham Place), Buckingham Gate. It was a pretty Lutyens house but the furniture had been chosen by Bryan’s generous parents and was not to Diana’s taste. Not that it worried her unduly for in a sense the eighteen-year-old Diana was still only playing house. She made a brief attempt at keeping household accounts in the book Sydney had given her, bound in dark blue leather with her initials tooled in gold, but when Bryan’s eccentric mother, Lady Evelyn, discovered Diana bookkeeping she was horrified: ‘How
barbarous
of Bryan,’ she whispered, assuming her son had decreed the practice. Diana never again kept accounts.

Decca claimed in her memoir that Sydney’s chief objection to Diana’s marriage was not her age but that Bryan was so rich, but Diana says she never realized, and neither did Bryan at this stage, that they
were
rich.
²
Probably they never gave it any thought. When Diana had visited Bryan’s people at Bailiffscourt on the south coast, they were living in what she regarded as a substantial beach hut while a new house was being constructed to Lady Evelyn’s requirements. The other Guinness houses Diana had seen were furnished with eccentricity and there was no evidence of great wealth or grandeur. But by the time she was twenty Diana found herself mistress of the house in Buckingham Street, of Biddesden, a country estate in north Hampshire, of Pool Place, a small house on the south coast that was permanently loaned to them by Bryan’s mother, and of Knockmaroon, a rambling property adjacent to Phoenix Park in Dublin. No wonder the practical and prudent Sydney had had reservations. Diana, though, rose to the challenge. Robert Byron wrote to his mother, ‘They are setting up housekeeping with innumerable servants, chauffeur etc. Nancy says he has £20,000 a year settled on him already. I don’t know if it’s true.’
³
It was close enough: Bryan eventually found out that a huge amount had been settled on him from the Guinness Trust, founded by his grandfather. ‘My father was a Trustee,’ he wrote. ‘It was very much his subject.’
⁴

Decca, who was eleven when Diana married, missed her elder sister and at first, like Unity and Debo, she scoured the Society pages of the daily newspapers to learn about Diana’s activities, but this soon palled. In the aftermath of the wedding ‘a suffocating sense of the permanence of [my] surroundings, family, and way of life . . . the unvarying sameness suddenly became unbearable,’ she wrote, although she admitted also to a guilty realization that ‘outward circumstances were not altogether responsible for my obscure malaise, because objectively life was extremely varied’.
⁵
Sydney did her best to ensure that the three younger girls received as rounded an education as was possible, with far more treats than the older girls had enjoyed. There were more trips to London, seaside holidays, and more trips abroad: they were taken to Switzerland for winter sports, especially for ice-skating at which the whole family was proficient. She took fourteen-year-old Unity and eleven-year-old Decca to Sweden, where they saw the amazing City Hall in Stockholm, ‘a sort of 7th Wonder of the Modern World,’ they thought.
⁶
Unity chose this trip to begin the fits of prolonged sulking moodiness that lasted until she was eighteen.

Despite what Decca wrote in her delightful memoir
Hons and Rebels
about her unhappy childhood, her sisters, cousins and contemporaries remember her as a normal, happy, curly-haired little girl until the time of Diana’s marriage, though this point of reference is probably coincidental rather than connected. Shortly after Diana and Bryan returned from honeymoon Decca and Debo went to stay with them in Sussex and Decca wrote to thank David for some postal orders he had sent. ‘You absolutely
Marvellous
old Lord,’ she wrote, ‘. . . how I absolutely
adore
you. Oh thank you, thank you . . . thank you, thank you, thank you . . . [it] did save my life and reputation among the motorboat and donkey people. You, and life, are so
ABSOLUTELY MARVELLOUS
, so absolutely marvellous . . . love from your Very Affec Daughter (doubly so since the 5s[hillings] arrived).’ Several letters from her to her father survive and they are lively, happy and teasing, demonstrating a close and loving relationship.

Bryan Guinness recalled that during his visits to Swinbrook shortly after his marriage to Diana, Decca seemed a happy child in a happy environment; he remembered the recitals given by her in Boudledidge, and her games of ‘slowly working away’, and ‘hure, hare, hure’. These were curious games: the winner was the person who could stand the longest being scratched with a fingernail (‘working away’ at one spot of skin) or being pinched, ‘really hard’.
⁷
Then there were her demonstrations of her double-jointed arm, and the mock battles she organized between the Hons (Decca and Debo) and the Counter Hons (Unity and Tom, when the latter was at home), both sides armed with toy spears. He remembered David as a kindly man with an ironic sense of humour. ‘The parents seemed to me to devote much of their lives and thoughts to the education of their children . . . and [providing] an unworldly background.’
⁸
No one pretended David did not have a quick temper over small things; he barred Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, from Swinbrook because on her first visit she had left a paper handkerchief on a hedge.
⁹

One of the cousins blamed Decca’s teenage angst on ‘Nancy’s clever friends,’ who made the younger children feel discontented and ‘that their home was rubbish’.
¹⁰
Whatever its cause, the bored malaise of which Decca wrote, and which Sydney dismissed at the time as teenage gloominess – possibly she had suffered from it herself – would, within a few years, find a cause, and burgeon into burning resentment, turning Decca into a serious rebel. Initially she became ‘naughty’ and Nanny was forced to commission a bed-time prayer for the three youngest Mitfords: ‘God bless Muv, God bless Farve . . . and make Decca a good girl, Amen.’ When Decca considered running away she quickly realized that she would soon be brought home as she would not be able to look after herself. So the first practical effect of her discontent was the ‘running-away’ account, which she opened at Drummonds, the bankers, in 1929, a few months after Diana’s marriage. ‘Dear Madam,’ an understanding bank manager replied, ‘We are pleased to acknowledge receipt of your ten shillings to open your Running Away account. Passbook no. 437561 enclosed. We beg to remain, dear Madam, your obedient servants, Drummonds.’
¹¹

At the heart of Decca’s misery, she wrote, was desperation to go to school. She had a secret ambition to be a scientist for which she would need to go to university, but she knew that unless she had some formal education she would never achieve this. Her parents’ refusal even to consider school became a source of bitterness in Decca that lasted well into middle age. Nancy had longed to go to school for the interaction with other people. Diana passionately wanted to use her brain and yearned for a more challenging education but without going away to school. Decca simply had

a certain conviction . . . that one had to get away from that dread place at all costs . . . I biked into Burford and rather shudderingly went to see the headmaster of the Grammar School. He said I could be admitted to the Grammar School (which had a scientific laboratory, that’s why I wanted to go) if I could pass a fairly easy exam, which I could learn to do by reading a list of books he gave me. I was very excited over this and rushed home to ask Muv if I could get the books, take the exam and bike to school each day. A cold ‘no’ was the only answer, no reason given. After that lessons with the gov. seemed totally pointless, although I admit I could have learned more than I did.
¹²

The point-blank refusal ‘burned into my soul,’ souring her adolescence, and Decca was far more affected by the transition from child to young adult than any other of the Mitfords. Rebelliousness coloured her youth and laid down the attitude of her adult years. Meanwhile she cast about for support from her siblings. When Diana had been agitating against their parents she had been a Favourite Sister for Decca to be proud of. Indeed it had been easy to side with Diana in hot defence of her secret engagement. Now that Diana was married and in charge of her own destiny, she ceased to be a role model for a budding rebel. Nancy had only rebelled to obtain the specific things she wanted: to go to boarding-school, cut her hair, choose her own friends, wear slacks. Tom now stepped in as favourite elder sibling/mentor and, realizing that Decca was suffering from a lack of mental stimulation, he introduced her to Milton, Balzac and Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
.

Unity, too, had developed a scowling discontent but hers was more a dumb insolence that alternated with the occasional mischievous prank, such as climbing out on to the roof at Swinbrook through an attic window, or throwing slates off an outhouse roof, or eating all the ripe strawberries in the greenhouse just before a luncheon party.
¹³
Although she went hacking on a big roan horse, she did not hunt like Nancy, Diana and Debo, so lacked the framework to the week that regular hunting fixtures provided. A study of her life as a teenager suggests that she was, quite simply, bored stiff. Perhaps recognizing this, Sydney gave in to Unity’s pleas for a private sitting room at the top of the house, which quickly became known as the Drawing from the Drawing room or DFD. Although initially Unity wanted it as a private space in which she could work on her ‘paintings’, which were a mixture of collage and paint, Decca gradually took over a 50 per cent share of it. Debo, a remarkably well-balanced child, was more an outdoor girl, living for riding and Saturday hunts, and to walk the pheasant coverts with her father.

In the summer of the year following their marriage Bryan and Diana visited Tom, who had just begun reading law at Berlin University. He told her all about life at the university and the fights between politically opposed students. For the first time Diana heard the word Nazi used to describe those in favour of Fascism. ‘Do you take sides?’ Diana asked. ‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘It’s their own affair. But if I were a German, I suppose I would be a Nazi.’ When pressed by Bryan he said there was no question about where his sympathies lay, for there were only two choices, Fascism or Communism, and the latter was totally unacceptable.
¹⁴
Although later Decca would dispute this leaning in Tom, there are extant letters to friends in which he repeats the same statement.
¹⁵
However, it is important to recognize that in 1928 Tom was speaking without the benefit of hindsight: then ‘Nazi’ merely described supporters of a right-wing political movement. There was no hint of the horrors that would be perpetrated a decade and more later.

In 1928 Nancy had managed to persuade her parents to allow her to attend the Slade School, then under the directorship of Professor Henry Tonks, to study art. Despite the titanic arguments she endured to get there, she lasted less than a month: Tonks told her baldly that she should learn to cook for she had no talent as an artist. ‘I wept,’ she said,
¹⁶
but she could not resist teasing Decca by telling her she had given it up because she found it impossible to look after herself in her bed-sitter. Decca was furious. ‘Oh, darling, but you should have seen it,’ Nancy drawled. ‘After about a week it was knee-deep in underclothes. I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away.’
¹⁷

In order to earn some additional pocket money Nancy began submitting items of gossip to
Vogue
and
Harpers Bazaar,
and from this graduated to writing the occasional article. The first known to be published was ‘The Shooting Party, Some Hints for the Woman Guest’ by the Hon. Nancy Mitford. She earned twenty-two pounds for each one, which she spent on gifts for Hamish. Her romance with him was going nowhere, although she longed to marry him. Whenever she could she stayed in London, chiefly with Middy O’Neil who had been so helpful in Paris, and Evelyn Gardner, whom she had known for many years. When it was not let, she was occasionally allowed to stay at, and even entertain from, 26 Rutland Gate. She had given a smart little party there for Evelyn Gardner when the latter became engaged to Evelyn Waugh (‘who writes, I believe, very well’) in 1928.
¹⁸
After the two Evelyns married, the complication of their names was resolved by the simple expedient of referring to them as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn. The marriage could never have worked: Waugh had homosexual urges and was not able to give She-Evelyn the emotional security she needed; as a writer he needed quiet and isolation, while She-Evelyn craved social life.