The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (6 page)

61. Four of the sisters in 1967. (
Left to right
) Cecil Beaton, Nancy, Debo, Pam, Diana and Andrew at a dance after the wedding of Debo and Andrew’s son.

62. Decca in front of a plaque commemorating Tom at Swinbrook church. The pews were donated by David, purchased by a win on the Grand National.

63. Bob and Decca at a testimonial dinner in Oakland, 1993.

INTRODUCTION

During the course of researching and writing this book I have often been asked the question that people ask endlessly of a biographer: ‘Who are you writing about at the moment?’ In answering, ‘The Mitford family,’ I have noticed that recognition begins at about the age of fifty. In other words, if the questioner is over the age of fifty I generally receive a sage nod, below that the polite enquiry, ‘And who are they?’

‘They’ were six beautiful and able sisters, Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica (‘Decca’), and Deborah (‘Debo’). Nancy wrote a series of sparkling bestselling novels, the best known of which are
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
, and for which she drew largely upon her family for characters. Decca launched her writing career when she wrote a bestselling memoir of her early life called
Hons and Rebels
. These three books spawned a genre, which is called by the family the Mitford Industry. Later, both Diana and Debo also produced bestselling books. Yet the Mitford sisters are not known merely for producing literature: they also led extraordinarily full lives, quite independent of each other.

The bones of the sisters’ childhood with their private languages, family jokes and endless nicknames are well known to people of my generation (over fifty), so I have tried to make the story intelligible to readers new to it without dwelling over-much on material about the girls’ childhood that has been told and retold, except when necessary for continuity or when it added measurably to the narrative. What I set out to do was explore the relationships between the sisters, drawing on personal interviews, family papers and correspondence not previously seen outside the family, as well as extensive published sources.

When I began researching, I suppose I had in mind – because of the above books – a frothy biography of life in Society between the wars. Of course I knew of the polarized ideologies of Diana, Unity and Decca but I had not realized how quickly or how completely the mirth of the sisters’ childhood disintegrated into conflict, unexpected private passions, and tragedies.

The girls’ parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale – David Freeman Mitford and his wife Sydney – are perhaps better known to posterity (thanks again to the above-mentioned books) as ‘Farve’ and ‘Muv’. They were honest, well-meaning, salt-of-the-earth, admittedly slightly eccentric, socially retiring minor aristocrats; thoroughly nice people who, because of their extraordinary daughters, were propelled unwillingly, blinking and unprepared, into an international spotlight. Yet if there is a heroine in this book it is surely Sydney. Her loyalty to, degree of concern for and tactful support of all her daughters were unflagging, even when pre-Second World War polemics caused the disintegration of her formerly happy marriage. This strength may come as a surprise to those who recall the ‘Muv’ of her daughters’ writings as a slightly batty, absent-minded and vague personality almost disassociated from the reality of her children’s lives.

Although politics plays a major part in the story of the sisters, this is not a political book, so anyone expecting a stand against Unity or Diana and the far right, or Decca and the far left, must look elsewhere. I accept each of these protagonists as she was, and, in Diana’s case, as she still is. This book seeks to explore the richness of the personalities, not to judge them. The reader is as capable as I am of forming his or her own opinions based on the evidence, and an individual social ideology. Rather, I hope to illustrate the complex loyalties and love, disloyalties and even hate, and above all the laughter that ran through this family’s relationships – they could always find humour even in their own misfortunes. Lord Longford, who has known the family for seventy years, told me, ‘You have to look at that family as
fun
. They were enormous fun.’
¹

Two of the sisters are triumphantly alive as I write this book. Diana, at ninety, is still chic and articulate; Debo, serene and utterly charming, celebrated her eightieth birthday in March 2000, yet apparently possesses the energy levels of someone half her age. She is a busy CEO directing a large, successful and constantly expanding organization that employs hundreds of people.

The mere fact that this book deals with nine personalities, three of whom have already been the subject of independent biographies,
²
means that for reasons of space much fascinating detail has had to be pruned. For those interested in delving further a bibliography is included. I have had to resist the temptation to explore a multiplicity of players on the twentieth-century world stage with whom various members of the Mitford family came into contact: from Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Adolf Hitler, Paul Joseph Goebbels, Benito Mussolini, Hermann Goering, and General de Gaulle, to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Max Beaverbrook, John and Bobby Kennedy, and Aly Khan; from George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Evelyn Waugh, Diana Cooper, Emerald Cunard, John Betjeman and Cecil Beaton, to Katherine Graham, Maya Angelou, Salman Rushdie and Jon Snow. A complete list of the celebrities, heroes and anti-heroes who moved in and out of the lives of the sisters would take pages. Suffice it to say that it is simply not possible to tell the story of the relationships between the members of the family and also indulge the luxury of exploring these fascinating side issues. For the same reason many less well-known personalities who were close to the sisters have had to slip through these pages as mere shadows: their first cousins, for example, who were an important part of their growing-up years, dear family friends, such as Mrs Violet Hammersley, who was like a character from a Victorian novel with her furious pessimism, love of gossip and great affection for the family, and Lord Berners, talented, generous, and eccentric in the grand manner. Then there was a literal host of Decca’s friends in California, among many others.

I hoped to discover some explanation for the diverse range of opinion between the Mitford sisters. They had sprung from a privileged background, but it was no more privileged than that of their childhood friends’ and their cousins’, who had a similar upbringing and education without becoming celebrities. Had Nancy’s colourful portraits of ‘Uncle Matthew’ and ‘Aunt Sadie’ been true reflections of her parents, much might be explained. But Nancy’s portraits were only colourful exaggerations. And these six girls, brought up in exactly the same way yet developing in such an individual manner, seem to have taken the twentieth century by the throat. It is not so much that they were historically important – except perhaps in the case of Diana, who as the second wife of Sir Oswald Mosley became arguably the most hated woman in England for a while, and was imprisoned without trial for most of the Second World War on the insistence of Labour ministers in the wartime coalition government – but that they are so much larger than life – easily as interesting as the characters in Nancy’s novels.

As political alternatives both Communism and Fascism are probably equally unpalatable to the majority, so it is natural to be curious that Decca seems wholeheartedly accepted by the media, while Diana has always been regarded as a bête noire. The difference may lie in that Decca looked back at the historical picture, and on learning that Stalin had massacred 10 million people in the early thirties, publicly admitted that she had been wrong about parts of the Communist ideology she had so passionately espoused.
³
On the other hand Diana, although deploring the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, and Hitler’s subsequent activities, has always rejected hindsight to rewrite the contemporary opinions of Hitler that she formed prior to 1939. She liked and admired him as a man when she met him, and she still believes that ‘It is not a question of right or wrong, but the impressions of a young woman in the thirties. Of course it would be easy just to deny these, but it would not be very interesting, or true.’
⁴
She has, still, only to put pen to paper, or appear on the radio, for the word ‘unrepentant’ to be hurled about by her critics.

I have been fortunate enough to meet four of the sisters. I contacted Debo and Diana first to research this book. I met Pam at a dinner party in Gloucestershire, in the eighties, where I was introduced to a pleasant woman by the name of Pamela Jackson, who was interested in my hunter, Flashman, and his breeding.
⁵
During dinner a remark made about a television programme in which the Mitfords had featured made me suspect who she might be, and when the ladies retired I asked my hostess if Mrs Jackson was one of the Mitford sisters. ‘Oh, yes, she’s the second eldest,’ she replied. ‘Wonderful eyes, hasn’t she? She ordered her Aga to match them, you know.’ I didn’t quite believe this, but some years later I watched a television programme in which Pam was interviewed in her kitchen, and there was the amazing blue Aga. Recently I was told a story about her, which is probably true. Apparently at a dinner party she was placed next to Lord Louis Mountbatten, who said to her, ‘I know who you are, you’re one of the Mitford girls, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Pam replied kindly. ‘And you are . . .?’

‘Meet’ is perhaps the wrong word to describe my contact with Decca. I was packing in a hotel room in California one morning in 1986 when the phone rang and the caller identified herself as Decca Treuhaft which meant little to me. ‘Jessica Mitford then?’ she continued, in a delightfully deep and fruity English voice. I was there to see a publisher in Berkeley, about a book of short stories by Beryl Markham which I had compiled. Decca, who lived near Berkeley, had learned from a mutual friend that I was in town and telephoned to see if we could meet. She had been given a pre-publication review copy of my biography of Beryl Markham, and was kind enough to say that she had enjoyed it. So much so, she told me, that she was going to pass on her copy to a well-known Hollywood lawyer
⁶
with the suggestion that it would make a good movie.
⁷

I was due to leave the area within the hour for an appointment in Santa Barbara with an old friend of Markham’s who had eluded me for months. At the time, meeting him seemed more important so I never saw Decca in person, though we spoke several times afterwards by telephone. Perhaps it was just as well I did not know then of Decca’s devastating reputation as a book critic – I simply thought of her as the author of the highly entertaining
Hons and Rebels
, the only book of hers that I had read – for the Markham book was my first biography and I was nervous about the reviews. In a later telephone conversation I told her I was coming to San Francisco on a book-signing tour. We could not meet then because she was going out of town, but she told me a favourite story. A famous writer was in Australia on a book-signing tour. As one woman handed him a book he asked her name and duly wrote, ‘
To Emma Chisit with best wishes . . .
’ ‘It turned out,’ Decca chuckled, ‘that the woman had only been asking the price.’

It was a typical Decca conversation. I experienced only the warm and generous facets of her clever, complex nature, and was surprised to find, during research, that she could also be implacable and vindictive. I bitterly regret, now, that I did not
make
time to take up her several kind invitations to visit her in Oakland. Life, and research for other books, got in the way and she died before this book was ever thought of.

With the assistance of Decca’s family, however, I was able to access her private papers, and as the first biographer to see them was privileged to a behind-the-scenes view of the Mitford sisters through family letters covering more than sixty years. As well as letters she received, Decca kept copies of almost every letter she wrote and was so naturally funny that it was all I could do not to laugh out loud in the hushed sanctity of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department of the University Library where I was researching.
⁸
The letters to Decca, especially from Debo, for the two kept up a regular correspondence from the 1960s until Decca’s death in 1996, are equally amusing, not in terms of repeatable jokes but in their reactions to everyday events; what several of their contemporaries describe as a ‘Mitford way of talking’. Their irreverent and hilarious comments on daily life, and every subject under the sun from the Royal Family to growing old, are not really part of a biographical study, but thankfully will not be lost to a dusty archive, for Decca’s letters are presently being compiled for publication.
⁹

Debo was initially concerned that my lengthy research into Decca’s papers would give me a biased view of the family relationships. But I also had access to the unpublished papers of diarist James Lees-Milne and the objective correspondence between him and the other sisters covering a period of more than seventy years, particularly from Diana who wrote to him from the age of fourteen in 1924 until his death in December 1997. Furthermore, both Debo and Diana and other members of the family have been unfailingly helpful in submitting to interviews, patiently answering my letters of enquiry, and suggesting people to whom I should talk. Debo was also kind enough to allow me access to some Mitford family papers in the remarkable Chatsworth archives, and to help me in any number of ways since then. She is the youngest Mitford sister, and she possesses an endearing characteristic of treating everyone with whom she comes into contact in exactly the same way, always showing the same intelligent interest in what people have to say to her.

Diana invited me to visit her in her flat in the heart of Paris. Warned before our first meeting by a mutual friend that Diana was extremely deaf (‘she’s ninety this year’) I was not sure what to expect, or even that it would be possible to conduct a formal interview. I found a beautiful woman, in a lovely setting. Willowy, smiling, warm and self-assured, she might have been a youthful seventy-odd. As she had recently been fitted with two hearing-aids she was able (to my relief) to hear speech perfectly, though not (to her regret) music. Her physical beauty took me by surprise. Everyone I had met spoke of Diana’s remarkable beauty as a young woman, but somehow one does not expect a woman of ninety to be beautiful per se and, indeed, recent photographs of her are not flattering. I suspect that her beauty lies as much in her attitude and sharp intelligence as her skin texture, bone-structure, delicate colouring, thick soft white hair and those blue Mitford eyes. She speaks clearly and evenly, going over old ground without hesitation, displaying mild passion when the name of her late husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, crops up. Her memory is phenomenal and she is known to be utterly truthful (which has frequently rebounded on her when she might have done better to prevaricate, as others have done). Although she would rather I had not written this book she could not have been more helpful to me in its preparation