The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (4 page)

36. Decca with Unity’s storm-trooper ‘boyfriend’, Erich Widemann, in Munich, September 1934. Curiously, she made no mention of this trip in her memoirs.

37. Decca, the reluctant debutante, 1935.

38. The elopers. Decca and Esmond at the Hôtel des Basques on the day of their wedding in May 1937.

39. Esmond and Decca at Rotherhithe, 1937.

40. Esmond and Decca running their bar in Miami.

41. Diana in April 1939, aged twenty-nine, at the height of her beauty.

42. Diana and Mosley, taken the evening before his arrest in 1940.

43. Pam, the ‘most rural’ Mitford, according to John Betjeman.

44. Pam’s marriage to Derek Jackson. (Front row) Sydney, Derek, Pam, David. (Second row) Diana Mosley, Stella Jackson, Nancy Rodd, Aunt Weenie (Dorothy Bailey), Tom Mitford.

45. Debo aged seventeen.

46. David, still prospecting his gold claim in the mid-thirties.

47. Debo and Andrew at their wartime wedding in 1941. David (standing behind Debo, wearing his LDV uniform), broken down by family traumas, ‘looked like an old, old man’. (
Left to right, standing
) Sydney, 10th Duke of Devonshire, David, Andrew, ‘Billy’ Lord Hartington, Duchess of Devonshire.