The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (9 page)

By the time Nanny Blor joined the family, Nancy was partially exempted from the dull nursery timetable. She had begun to attend the Frances Holland day school conveniently situated in the same street as the Mitfords’ home.

Nancy makes no mention of the school in her scraps of autobiography, but admits to being ‘vile’ to her sisters and brother in those early years. It seems that while she loved her siblings in one sense, she never recovered from the halcyon period when, as an only child, she had the undiluted attention of her parents and nanny. Pam became the main target for Nancy’s retribution and temper tantrums (an echo of her father’s), and barbed teasing became second nature to Nancy and the ethos of the Mitford nursery. Recalling Nancy’s childhood Sydney wrote, ‘You were terribly spoiled as a little child, and by all. It was [Aunt] Puma’s
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idea. She said you must never hear an angry word and you never did, but you used to get into tremendous rages, often shaming us in the street . . . Puma adored you and in fact until Pam was born you reigned supreme . . .’
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But throughout all Nancy’s tempers and teases and general naughtiness Nanny Blor was scrupulously fair and even-handed with all her charges. ‘I would have been much worse but for Blor,’ Nancy admitted, ‘[she] at least made me feel ashamed of myself.’
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At about this time Sydney rented the Old Mill Cottage, in High Wycombe,
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as a retreat for her family from the heat of the summer in London. High Wycombe is on the southern side of the Chiltern Hills and the cottage, part of what was then a working mill, was on the outskirts of the town and gave the impression of being in the country. In subsequent years moving out to High Wycombe enabled the Mitfords to let their London house during the Season, which brought in some much-needed extra income, and eventually Sydney purchased the cottage with some help from her father.

The entire household went with Sydney and David to the Old Mill Cottage – Nancy, Pam, Tom and baby Diana, accompanied by Nanny Blor, Ada the nurserymaid, and all the staff, which had been increased to include Willie Dawkins, ‘the hound boy’. The latter’s job was to look after the family’s menagerie of David and Sydney’s three dogs, innumerable small creatures such as mice, hamsters and grass snakes purchased by the children from Harrods’ pet shop, and Brownie, a miniature pony David had spotted on the eve of their trip while he was on his way to work at the Lady. He bought it on a whim and brought it home in a hansom cab to spend the night in an unused box room.
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On the following day they took the pony with them to High Wycombe but hit a snag when the guard refused to allow it into the goods van. Refusing to be outdone, David exchanged the family’s first-class tickets for third-class ones, and they all – family, animals and servants – clambered into an empty compartment (in those days trains had no corridors). Today the point of this story would be the novelty of taking a pony into a passenger compartment. At the time, however, the impact was quite different. It was unheard of for a family of the Mitfords’ status to travel other than first class.

The act of buying the pony, with its attendant inconveniences, done with the sole intention of pleasing his children, is far more characteristic of David than the vivid larger-than-life caricature of him as the terrifying, bellowing ‘Uncle Matthew’ brandishing his ‘entrenching tool’,
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in Nancy’s novels. Much has been made by Mitford biographers of his violent temper, but although he undoubtedly suffered lifelong from spectacular outbursts, most of these could be better described as strong irritation coupled with periods of muttering under his breath (which were, more often than not, justifiable; Debo said, ‘the fact that we couldn’t always judge his mood made things exciting and we used to practise . . . to see how far we dared go before he turned and bellowed at us’).
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His reputation has suffered greatly from the spectre of Uncle Matthew.

The caricature overshadows the immense charm of the real David. There are stories of him playing noisy games with his children and their cousins, of his chasing them as they ran around the house screaming with delight and pretended terror. He was always ready to play games, it seems, and there was an endearing childlike element in his make-up. Debo recalled that ‘he was wonderfully funny and the source of all the jokes in the family’. Several nieces have recounted how he was ‘so funny that our sides ached with laughing’.
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On the other hand, one said, ‘He was very tall and rather frightening when he used to stand in the garden cracking his stock-whip . . .’
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His relationship with Nancy was close; he was immensely fond of his eldest child and she was devoted to him. Their repartee at the dining table was outstanding: ‘When they were on form together,’ Debo recalls, ‘they were funnier than anything I have seen on the stage. I still remember the pain of laughing at them.’
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Nancy teased him with her quick wit and he replied in his uniquely funny turn of phrase, half serious, half aware of how droll were his remarks.
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One of David’s dogs was a bloodhound and the major participant in a favourite game they called ‘child hunt’ in which the hound would hunt ‘the cold boot’. The quarry, or the ‘hares’ – as the participating children were called – were given a head start and would set off running across fields, laying as difficult a trail as possible by running in circles, through ‘fouled’ land such as fields containing sheep or cattle, and crossing and recrossing streams. When they could run no more they would stop and sit down while they waited for the hound to find them. Invariably the hound would then jump all over them while licking their faces before ‘poor old Farv’, red-faced from pursuit, caught up to reward the animal with pieces of raw meat.

In a televised version of one of Nancy’s books, these child hunts were given a more sinister connotation with the children running terrified through woods while their father, on horseback, thundered after them with a pack of hounds baying. In fact the children loved it – they thought the hound was ‘so clever’.
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In her novel Nancy had referred to ‘four great hounds in full cry after two little girls’ and ‘Uncle Matthew and the rest would follow on horseback’.
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As a result, fiction overlaid fact, and during research for this book I met people who believed, and read articles that stated, that the Mitfords led the lives of the fictional Radletts, and at least one American journalist was convinced that David had ‘hunted’ his poor abused children with dogs.

There was never any pressure to conform and the children grew as they wanted. There were no half-measures in their behaviour. ‘We either laughed so uproariously that it drove the grown-ups mad, or else it was a frightful row which ended in one of us bouncing out of the room in floods of tears, banging the door as loud as possible.’
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Sydney’s role at this stage in the children’s lives appears less involved than David’s, at least as far as the children’s memories go, but it was she who drove them around in a cart called ‘the float’. It had enormous thin wheels and Diana recalls that when they came to a hill the children were made to get out and walk, to spare the horse.
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Sydney enjoyed living in the country, though she took no direct part in field sports. After her marriage, there is no record of her shooting or hunting, though as a girl she rode well and often, and when she accompanied her father to Scotland in 1898 she was regarded as ‘a brilliant shot’.
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As they grew up she encouraged her children to follow the hounds of the Heythrop Hunt and join their father when he fished and shot, but if they were not interested she was unconcerned. Many of her friends would have said she was a countrywoman, but she enjoyed London too.

In the same year that Sydney rented Old Mill Cottage for the first time, 1911, Pamela, who was not quite four years old, caught poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis. There was no known successful treatment then for this frightening disease and it was as much feared by parents then as meningitis is today. It was often a killer, and those children who survived were usually crippled for life. Pam’s illness must have severely tested Sydney’s unconventional theories on doctors and nursing. She had inherited her strongly held opinions from her father, who believed that doctors and medications usually did more harm than good, and that, left to its own devices, the body would heal itself. Possibly Tap’s lack of confidence in doctors stemmed from a bitter experience: he arrived home from work one day to find his wife, Jessica, dying, following an abortion performed by her doctor in the belief that for her to continue with her four-month pregnancy (her fifth child) would prove fatal.
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As part of the regime for keeping the ‘good body’ in good order Tap Bowles had decreed a number of unfashionable rules for his motherless children. The system had worked admirably, and Sydney saw no reason to adopt an alternative one for her own children. Most of the rules concerned regular exercise and personal hygiene, and were merely common sense, but others perplexed the children’s carers by defying received childcare practices. The children were to have no medication of any kind – not even a weekly dose of ‘something to keep them regular’; no vaccination (‘pumping disgusting dead germs into the Good Body!’); their bedroom windows were always to be open six inches, winter and summer. Other dictates seemed positively eccentric: they were never to eat pork products, rabbit, hare or shellfish (the laws given in the Pentateuch, ‘as dictated by Moses in the Old Testament’),
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nor be allowed to eat between meals; nor were they ever to be forced to eat anything they did not want to eat – one child ate nothing but mashed potatoes for two years.
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Sydney was not alone in adopting unusual health ethics. She and her brother Geoffrey, ‘Uncle Geoff’, composed letters to the newspapers on ‘murdered food’ (refined white sugar and flour with the wheatgerm removed). Uncle Geoff was convinced that England’s decline was connected to a reduction in the use of natural fertilizers on the soil and was violently opposed to pasteurized milk. The children found his writings on the subject and his letters to
The Times
causes for hilarity (really, it was too embarrassing to have an uncle who wrote to the newspapers about manure, and expounded further in his book
Writings of a Rebe
l).

During Pam’s illness, however, Sydney overrode her theories and called in one doctor after another, six in all. It was only after being told there was little that could be done for the desperately sick child that she reverted to the one medical practitioner both Tap and she trusted. He was a Swede called Dr Kellgren, and an osteopath rather than a qualified doctor.
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His treatments consisted of massage and exercise, an early form of intense physiotherapy (which pre-dated Elizabeth Kenny’s ground-breaking treatments for polio). The treatment he gave Pamela worked: other than a slight weakness in one leg during her childhood she made a complete recovery.

At about this time David hit on a scheme to end their financial problems. With his growing family, their limited income must have been the cause of constant worry to him. Stories of the rich strikes in the Klondike a decade earlier, perhaps bolstered by his spell of active service in South Africa, seem to have persuaded him that gold-mining might be the answer. On hearing that a new goldfield had been discovered in Ontario, he staked several claims to forty acres near the small township of Swastika, in the Great Lakes area. Only small quantities of gold had been found there so far, but a big seam was believed to exist.

Over the next twenty years or so, David would travel to Ontario many times to work the claim. He had already been there alone when, in the spring of 1912, he and Sydney decided to go together and – the biggest treat — they were to sail on the maiden voyage of the
Titanic
. Fortunately, something happened to make this impossible, and their departure was delayed until autumn of the following year. There, Sydney and David lived in a sturdy, well-built wooden cabin, which they called ‘the shack’. It was basic but it had everything they needed. There were no staff and Sydney did everything herself, including cooking and pumping the water by hand. She even made her own bread, and continued to do this for the remainder of her life.
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David, photographed in corduroy knickerbockers, canvas gaiters, warm workmanlike shirt and a leather waistcoat, enjoyed the time he spent there. It was a tough, masculine environment and he felt at home with the miners, who treated him with respect and taught him how to crack a stock-whip that he had been given by an Australian miner. He worked hard and found tiny traces of gold; just enough to keep him enthusiastic. Meanwhile, there was a massive strike on a neighbouring property owned by Harry Oakes, a prospector who had been mining unsuccessfully for some years. The Tough-Oakes mine proved the biggest gold mine in Canada, and was a mile or so to the east of David’s land, at Kirkland Lake. Oakes purchased a lakeshore claim and burrowed under the lake after his landlady told him about tiny nuggets and flakes of gold she had seen in the streams as a child. He struck gold almost immediately and issued half a million shares at thirty-five cents each. Within two years each share was worth seventy dollars and Oakes had kept the majority for himself.
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