After a decent interval Sydney, the new Lady Redesdale, moved into Batsford with her lively brood. David’s mother, Clementine, the dowager Lady Redesdale, tactfully moved to Redesdale Cottage in Northumberland.
In 1917, when Sydney moved in, Batsford was rather different from how it had been on her first visit in 1894 when she had met David and been overwhelmed by light, warmth and exotic scents. With only the ailing elderly Redesdales in residence for some time, many of the huge rooms had been closed off and the furniture shrouded in dust covers. Wartime restrictions and lack of money meant things did not change when Sydney took over. She opened only those rooms essential to house her family in comfort.
David’s father left an estate valued at £33,000 gross.1 After tax and other bequests David was left with just under £17,000. According to the Bank of England, this equates to a present-day monetary value of more than £600,000, although it must be said that the properties and chattels could not be purchased today for seven or eight times that amount. It was a useful inheritance, but most of it was not in cash but land and property in Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Redesdale in Northumberland, and the income was insufficient to run Batsford House and its estate.
Bertie, the 1st Lord Redesdale, was said to have inherited a fortune from an uncle. In addition to this he had enjoyed a successful career heading the Board of Works under Disraeli for twelve years, and he had had royalties from several books, especially his runaway bestseller Memories, which detailed his life as a diplomat in Russia, China and latterly Japan. In fact, he had been successful at anything to which he turned his hand – eminent Victorian traveller, writer, linguist, yachtsman, senior civil servant, MP, garden designer, and horse breeder. Although he moved in the rather fast (and costly) circles of the Prince of Wales’ set there is no evidence that he was a notable spendthrift or gambler. It appears that, apart from a wife who had little concept of living within her allowance, he spent most of his fortune on demolishing a perfectly good Georgian house at Batsford in 1880, and building the Victorian Gothic mansion with its elaborate gardens, arboretum and huge stables that still occupies the site. From the start it was obvious to David and Sydney that Batsford would have to be sold, but they could not even consider doing so until after the war.
Few women of her class were as financially prudent as Sydney but running the vast house with its five staircases on a limited budget must have taxed even her ingenuity. Although the family was technically better off because of David’s inheritance, they had merely swapped one form of relative poverty for another. Some of Sydney’s economies have gone down in family history, and one caused much merriment for it somehow made its way into the Daily Sketch under the headline, ‘Peeress Saves Ha’pence’ when she decided to save on the cost of washing, starching and ironing several dozen table napkins each day. Yet it was not ha’pence she was saving, but a considerable amount over a year, for the household would have used close to two hundred napkins a week. Napkin rings were unacceptable, and paper napkins unthinkable and expensive, so the family did without. She also provided hard, shiny Bromo lavatory paper, which discouraged any extravagance in that department. Further aid to the exchequer came when the four Norman children were boarded out at Batsford for the duration of the war because their parents, Ronald and Lady Florence, were anxious to get them out of London with the threat of Zeppelins. So the Mitford children had built-in companions, as well as the children in the village as playmates.
At this point Unity was still a toddler in the sole charge of Nanny, but the others, Nancy (thirteen), Pam (ten), Tom (seven) and Diana (six), and the Norman children were all taught by a governess, Miss Mirams, in the schoolroom. David and Sydney were not alone in believing that it was unnecessary to educate girls beyond reading, writing and basic arithmetic to enable them to keep household books, French (essential for a well-bred girl), and enough geography and history to prevent them appearing ignorant in polite society. Music, needlework and deportment were also included. Only Tom was to go away for formal education and David made no financial allowance to educate the girls, assuming that Sydney would be responsible for this. Later, Sydney would herself teach her three younger children to read (they all had to be able to read aloud The Times leader by the age of six), and the basics of arithmetic, history and geography, before they joined the schoolroom at about eight. In those early days at Batsford, though, she was too busy to teach them, with the demands of a large, though well-staffed, house and a growing family as well as another pregnancy.
On 11 September 1917, Sydney gave birth to her sixth child, another girl whom they called Jessica after Sydney’s mother, but the baby was known from the start as Decca. If there was ever any doubt about the relationship between David and Sydney, and the basis of their marriage, it is dispelled by a letter from Aunt Natty written a few weeks before the birth of Decca. Sydney, she writes, ‘is good – unselfish – beautiful – and she and her husband [are] the greatest lovers . . .’2
Miss Mirams, the second governess Sydney recruited, seems to have been something of a paragon. She taught the children in two groups, and in the early days Nancy, quick, bright and a voracious reader, was way ahead on her own. Pam, Tom and Diana formed a younger group with Sibell and Mark Norman. Pam, like David, was a slow learner and had difficulty even in keeping up with her two younger siblings. In later life dyslexia was diagnosed,3 but throughout her childhood Nancy and her younger sisters teased her about her slowness. However, the standard of Miss Mirams’ teaching became obvious when Tom applied for a place at Lockers Park Preparatory School. Many of the applicants would have had a conventional pre-prep education but Tom’s entrance exam marks resulted in his being placed in the highest new-boy form. Certainly, then, the education the girls received in the schoolroom was not sub-standard and Miss Mirams’ teaching was supplemented with exploration of the Batsford library, the repository of the remarkable book collection made by Bertie Redesdale throughout his adult life.
To pay the governess’s salary of about £150 a year, and to fund the necessary books and teaching aids, Sydney set out to make money from eggs and honey, which she sold locally at first, but which later went up to London by train to smart clubs. She employed a full-time man to look after the five hundred hens, but she washed the eggs herself: ‘I never sell an unwashed egg,’ she told a visitor, and advised him that keeping chickens was no good as a project unless you knew what you were doing.4 Soft-shelled or cracked eggs were eaten by the family, the hens ate all kitchen waste, and when they became too old to lay they became ‘boiling fowl’. She managed the beehives herself, with the help of the redoubtable Miss Mirams. Other than to ensure the garden was well kept by the outside staff and produced sufficient fruit and vegetables for the kitchen, she was never much interested in it, and her hen-and-hive activities were merely a way of earning extra income. She always cleared a hundred pounds a year from her chickens, after expenses, and she tried to pass the ethic of prudent management on to her children. As soon as they were old enough they were all encouraged to keep chickens, pigs and even calves. They paid ‘rent’ to David for the land and stables, bought the feed from, and sold the produce to, the estate and were allowed to keep as pocket money any profits from their enterprise. Pam once fought her father over the matter of rent when she discovered at a tenants’ supper that she was paying more, pro rata, for her small piece of land than the local farmers on their commercial acreage. Pam shone at stock-rearing, Nancy was not interested, and Diana recalls that she did it as well as she could because it was her only source of pocket money.
In 1918 Miss Mirams left and a succession of governesses followed her. Each summer a mademoiselle came to teach them French. During these visits only French was allowed to be spoken at the table, and Diana remembered that meals were often very quiet.5 Even when French was not the order of the day, mealtimes could be fraught. It was one of David’s foibles that he could not bear sloppiness and crumbs: spills irritated him beyond reasonable complaint, and since there were no napkins to disguise the results of a moment of clumsiness the children learned to be extra careful. Woe betide the child or unwary guest who dropped a spot of soup on ‘the good tablecloth’ or inadvertently scraped a knife across ‘the good plate’.6 The child would be yelled at, the guest (depending on status) glared at or David would explode to himself, not quite sotto voce, ‘Filthy beast!’
In 1918 Tom went off to boarding school aged eight. He was never homesick or bullied, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Perhaps in comparison with the teasing and bullying by his sisters at home prep school seemed tame. He particularly appreciated being allowed to eat sausages every day for breakfast. In the Mitford home the only person allowed this pork product was David, and naturally the children ‘longed’ for anything forbidden them. Tom’s letters home lingered on this treat, a good tease on his sisters. Sometimes, though, Mabel the parlourmaid would take a chance and retrieve a leftover sausage as a treat for the girls who ‘danced around the pantry with a delicious end of a congealing sausage’, Debo recalled.7
When the war ended there was general rejoicing but there was a sting in the tail for the Mitford children. They had hoped the war would go on for ever for they had been told repeatedly that when it was over Batsford would have to be sold because they were too poor to live there. Almost their last memory of life at Batsford was a fête held by Sydney to raise funds for wounded soldiers. Just before it was due to be opened Sydney looked at her white elephant stall and thought it was understocked. She rushed into the house and began to gather ‘odds and ends’ to fill up the gaps. Most of these were priceless Oriental antiques brought back from the Far East by Bertie. David and the children managed to buy a few back, but the rest were snapped up by villagers and antiques dealers for coppers. The children learned from this: in subsequent years when it came near the time for summer fêtes they hid their toys.
In 1919 Batsford was sold, and David bought Asthall Manor near the Cotswold village of Swinbrook in Oxfordshire. He never intended the house to be their permanent home for he owned some hillside land on the other side of, and overlooking, Swinbrook, where he planned eventually to build a house for his family close to his pheasant coverts. But far from pining for Batsford, Sydney and the children fell in love with Asthall, a generous Jacobean gabled manor house, in a gentle green valley amid rolling hills. Only David, Pam and Diana were made uneasy by the ghosts of Asthall, for no one else appeared to see or sense them, or if they did they ignored them like the family in The Canterville Ghost. The haunting took several manifestations: footsteps could be heard at night on the paving stones around the house, and sometimes the trickle and drip-drip of non-existent water. The nursery windows overlooked the churchyard, and although they were forbidden to watch funerals, they did. It was fertile soil in which Nancy could plant her own brand of scary ghost stories. Once, Decca and Debo fell into a newly dug grave and Nancy told them it meant ‘bad luck, forever’.8
The elder children agreed that the best thing of all was the library. It was housed in a converted barn linked to the main house by a covered way, which they called ‘the cloisters’, and contained a good collection of books from Grandfather Redesdale’s library at Batsford. The volumes had been chosen mainly by ten-year-old Tom, at his father’s request, for David did not feel competent to make the selection himself. Furnished with comfortable armchairs and a grand piano, it was a desirable place to the children for they were hardly ever bothered by grown-ups there, and provided they behaved reasonably, replaced any books where they found them, and did not make too much mess, they were left alone. On the other hand, if they tried to read a book in the house, Nancy once said, it was almost guaranteed to attract a remark from David such as, ‘If you’ve got nothing to do run down to the village and tell Hooper . . .’ Hooper, called by the children ‘Hoops’ or ‘Choops’, was the groom, much loved by Pam and Debo despite a fearsome temper which, Sydney later told them, was due to shell-shock and bad experiences during the First World War. ‘When Bobo once did something to annoy him, something with one of the ponies,’ Debo wrote, ‘he yelled at her, “I’ll take yer in that wood and do for yer!”’9
The old Lords of the Manor of Swinbrook were the Fettiplaces. They had bought the estate in 1504 and their manor house was said to be ‘one of the glories of Elizabethan England’. The family died out at the end of the eighteenth century, and the manor was purchased by a Mr Freeman of London. He lived quietly enough according to locals but he was, in fact, an infamous masked highwayman who even stooped to robbing his own guests as they rode home. Apprehended by Bow Street Runners, he was hanged at Tyburn in 1806; his estate became Crown property and the glorious manor house was demolished. Earl (the uncle from whom ‘Bertie’ inherited his fortune, but not the title of earl) Redesdale bought the Swinbrook estate, sans manor house, in 1810 for its sporting interests, and did little beyond collecting rents on the farms, building a few cottages and using the property for shooting parties.
When David inherited it, the village of Swinbrook was no more than a hamlet of 150 souls. Apart from a scattering of cottages built of honey-coloured stone and a few farmhouses, mostly owned by the estate, it consisted of the twelfth-century church, a village school, the Swan Inn on the very edge of the village, and the shop, which doubled as a post office and ‘sold four kinds of sweets – toffee, acid drops, Edinburgh rock and butterscotch’.10 Acid drops cost a penny-ha’penny a quarter, were weighed on the same brass scale as letters, and were sold in squares of paper deftly twisted into a cone by the postmistress.
Apart from the closure of the village shop, little has changed, and Swinbrook today still has a timeless, left-over-from-yesteryear ambience. Its narrow lanes, leading to the tiny village green, are still bordered with willows, beeches and silver birch, and in the spring its verges are full of primroses and blue cranesbill. The rolling hills are dotted with sheep and, apart from the occasional car passing through – there are faster routes to the comparative metropolis of Shipton-under-Wychwood than via Swinbrook – the prevailing sounds are birdsong, sheep, the trickle and splash of water from myriad streams, the shrieks of swallows and house-martins wheeling furiously overhead, and the far-off echoing ring of a horse’s hoofs on a paved road. As a child Decca always thought that when William Blake penned, ‘. . . up in the sky the little birds fly, and the hills are all covered with sheep . . .’ he was writing about Swinbrook.11
When they moved to Asthall the family was almost complete, but Sydney had one final attempt at producing another son, and in 1920, when she was forty, her seventh and last child was born. As usual David was present at the birth, and as he came out of the room Mabel the parlourmaid was waiting anxiously for news. ‘One look at His Lordship’s face,’ she said in later years, ‘told me everything.’ It was another girl. They called the baby Deborah, quickly shortened to Debo. Many years later Mabel would gloat that ‘His Lordship’s face was like thunder. I don’t think anyone looked at Miss Debo for three months . . . but she came up trumps in the end, didn’t she?’12 In the meantime, Nancy saw a tease in the situation. For years she tormented Debo with the line, ‘Everyone cried when you were born.’ She was sixteen, and Sydney asked her to be godmother to the new baby, fearing that she herself might not live to see Debo grow up. Pam was now thirteen, Tom eleven, Diana ten. Unity was six, and Jessica three.
As well as attending lessons, the older children rode out every day except Sunday with Captain Collinson, the agent, or Hooper. Although most of the children regarded Hooper as a grumpy old devil, Pam always referred to him as ‘Hoops. Sweet Hoops . . .’13 David could no longer ride: in the early days at Asthall his horse had reared up and fell on him, breaking his pelvis and afterwards riding became too uncomfortable. Sydney, who as a débutante had been a keen rider, had long ago given it up, but Nancy, Diana and, later, Debo were good horsewomen, and hunted side-saddle with the local pack of foxhounds, the Heythrop. They were joined by any visiting cousins on the daily rides, Rosemary and Clementine Mitford (daughters of the late Uncle Clement), for example, who often stayed at Asthall while their mother spent the winter in the Sudan, where her second husband was a government game warden. ‘I remember riding a huge horse as a small child,’ Clementine wrote, recalling a less than happy incident sixty-five years earlier when she was eight and Nancy was eighteen, ‘and Nancy and Pam cantering ahead; Nancy looking like a Constantin Guys drawing, and Pam – not so glamorous but kinder to poor me. And Hooper, so disapproving (almost like a male Blor) I suppose because my riding clothes were all wrong. I remember the torture and embarrassment of the stirrup leathers biting into one’s legs because I was wearing socks and thin knickers . . .’14
Neither Tom, Unity nor Decca ever took to hunting, though Diana tried patiently to teach Decca to trot round a field on her little pony Joey. On Sundays they all went out coursing with David and one of his brothers, ‘Uncle Tommy’, who came to luncheon and brought his whippet. They enjoyed these physically active days, beating through fields of winter crops to put up hares. When one jumped up, the whippet and David’s lurcher would be unleashed, while David and Uncle Tommy leaned on their thumb-sticks and watched with countrymen’s interest in venery. Since Sydney would never allow hares to be eaten, the children could never think what happened to those killed by the hounds after David popped them into the hare pockets he had designed into all his country clothes. Probably they were presented to his workers or tenants.
The children’s enjoyment of field sports, which bred in most of them a oneness with the annual rhythms of their environment, did not stretch to condoning the traps set in the pheasant coverts by David’s gamekeeper, Steele, who regarded anything that was not a pheasant as ‘vermin’. As well as stoats, weasels and foxes, the bloody victims of these monstrous contraptions sometimes included hedgehogs, badgers and even the occasional feral cat. All the children made it a point of honour to visit the traps regularly and spring the captives, to the fury of the gamekeeper whom they all hated.
Although Nancy has traduced life in the country and portrayed it in novels as boring, and even Diana was less than complimentary of it when she was a teenager, waiting endlessly for escape into the glittering world of grown-ups, all the children had a happy childhood – even Decca who, though she never took to riding like the others, only became truly unhappy when she reached adolescence. There were always cousins and family visiting, always ‘something going on’, their cousin Rosemary recalled, far more so than in other houses that she and her sister visited.15 Apart from endless games that the children themselves thought up and organized, in the summer there were tennis parties and trips to Stratford about once a month. There was the annual ‘Bailey Week’ at the Stow-on-the-Wold home of their four Bailey cousins, Richard, Anthony, Christopher and Timothy, the sons of Aunt Weenie and Colonel Percy Bailey. Bailey Week included cricket, tennis, walks and riding, picnics and dancing. It was like a mini Season, and the girls enjoyed it immensely. Even years later when Pam was a débutante and in the full throes of a London Season she wrote to Sydney of how much she was looking forward to Bailey Week. During the winter there was hunting and coursing, weekends when the house was full of guests for one of David’s shoots, weekly trips to Oxford, where they skated at the rink behind the Regal cinema and browsed the latest books at Blackwell’s, and the ever-popular rainy-day occupation of dressing up and putting on plays.
Church attendance on Sunday was compulsory for the Mitford children. Although the church at Asthall adjoined their home, the living of that parish was not in David’s gift,16 so he preferred to attend the church at Swinbrook where he could keep the clergyman in check. Here, with his family ranged beside him in a pew he had donated after a significant win on the Grand National in 1918, David watched hawk-like to see that the vicar did not stray from the wonderful liturgy of the prayer book with an extempore petition, or try to slip in a modern composition among the favourite traditional hymns he chose himself (‘We don’t want any of those damn complicated foreign tunes’), and that the sermon was kept to ten minutes, timed to the second by his stop-watch. Invariably, David also read the lesson and took the collection.
Despite the short sermons and the fascinating tombs of the long-dead Fettiplaces, the girls were bored in church and spent their time trying to make Tom ‘blither’ – giggle. Later, after Tom got his own flat in London and returned for weekends this mainly consisted of emphasizing certain words in prayers or psalms to try to make him react. From what they overheard of their brother’s bachelor life it was considered especially important by his sisters that he be reminded often of the seventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ Often it worked, and Tom giggled helplessly to the delight of the girls. Occasionally, he got his own back. When she was nine Decca had discovered a good wheeze where she would apply to manufacturers for free samples of products. One she particularly enjoyed was Benger’s baby food. ‘It was lovely,’ she recalled. ‘It tasted like Horlicks.’ After a gap of about six months she sent off for another sample, which duly arrived, and then one day there came a loud knock at the door, and ‘that awful Tuddemy [Tom] caused Mabel to call me, saying that the Benger’s man was at the door wanting to see the baby. Total terror! [I had] visions of life imprisonment for fraud . . .’17
At Asthall Christmas was kept in the old-fashioned way with a party for the children of the tenants (still recalled by some who attended), and a fancy-dress party for the family and guests. There was a huge dressing-up box, from whose contents everyone had to concoct a character. For many years Pam was the fair Lady Rowena (Ivanhoe’s betrothed), while Nancy, who began as the tragic bride in the mistletoe-bough legend (an incident said to have taken place at nearby Minster Lovell),18 progressed as she grew older to a tramp who used to chase ‘Lady Rowena’ around the house lifting up the skirt of her red dress ‘to see her knickers’.19 The various characters of those long-ago parties are preserved in photographs in the Chatsworth archives: headless men, cavaliers, nurses, pierrots, gypsies and French aristocrats.20
Secret societies were much in vogue among the younger children, and Unity and Decca, who called each other Boud (pronounced ‘Bowd’ not Bood), developed their own secret language called Boudledidge in which they became so fluent that they could tell rude stories to each other in front of unsuspecting grown-ups. Another of the societies was the Society of Hons formed by Decca and Debo, later made famous by Nancy in her novels. The two youngest children were keen on chickens – it was how they earned their pocket money – so they originally called their club the Society of Hens and began to call each other ‘Hen’ (and did so until Decca’s death in 1996). The change from Hens to Hons came about, Decca explained, from a poem culled from two sources: one was a Burns poem, in which the line ‘John Anderson, my Jo John’ became ‘My Hon Henderson my Ho Hon’ and the second, ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium’, which spawned the ‘Honnish lines’: ‘Hon Henderson my Ho Hon/By the nine gods she swore/That the great house of Henderson/Should suffer wrong no more’. So the Society of Hens became the Society of Hons, with its carefully written-down set of rules – to break one made one a Counter Hon – and initiation tasks that included frog-hopping across the tennis court, turning two somersaults while running forward and answering a series of general-knowledge questions.21 The H was always pronounced in Hon, as it is in hen. It was never, as later came to be believed, a society for girls entitled to the prefix ‘Honourable’.
The initial raison d’être of the society was to wreak vengeance on ‘the Horrible Counter Hons’, chief of whom, at the time of founding, was Tom, for some now-forgotten misdemeanour during his school holidays. Decca recalled that Nancy was elected Head of the League against Tom and badges were made, emblazoned with ‘League against Tom. Head: Nancy’.22 But empires crumble, and among Sydney’s effects was also found a small homemade badge in Debo’s childish hand, ‘Leag against Nancy; Head Tom’.23 The Society of Hons even had its own Honnish language; this was not so comprehensive as Boudledidge and borrowed freely from it.
In her memoir Decca recalled the inevitable squabbles that occur between a group of lively siblings with significant age disparities. The anti-Tom, or anti-Tuddemy (his name in Boudledidge)24 campaign was merely ‘the curious Honnish mirror-world expression of our devotion to him’, she explained. ‘For years he was the only member of the family to be “on Speakers” with all the others.’ In spite of temporary alliances, which were generally formed for the purpose of defeating a governess, Decca wrote that her real childhood enmities were not with her older sisters but with her near contemporaries, Unity, who was three years older, and Debo, who was three years younger. ‘Relations between Unity, Debo and me were uneasy, tinged with mutual resentment,’ she recalled. ‘We were like ill-assorted animals tied to a common tethering post.’25 Elsewhere she would write of the boredom of the endless years of the schoolroom where she felt she had learned nothing. ‘The one advantage was unlimited time to read. The library with Grandfather Redesdale’s collection was for me a heavenly escape . . . it never occurred to me to be happy with my lot.’26
The only survivor of these three youngest children, Debo, cannot recall any of this smouldering resentment during their childhood, and believes it was something that occurred much later, after Decca grew up and became a rebel. But there is no doubting that Unity, Decca and Debo were all worlds apart in opinion, even at a young age. The squabbles and teasing that went on almost continuously were dealt with summarily by Nanny Blor or Sydney, with the quelling put-down, ‘You are very silly children!’
Nancy ‘ached’ to learn more than was available to her at home. But though she could wheedle David in most things, he always turned sticky when she brought the subject round to education. He feared that if they went to school his daughters would meet the wrong sort of girls and would be made to play hockey and develop thick calf muscles. Any such outburst as ‘It’s not fair, Tom has been allowed . . .’ usually received the unanswerable reply, ‘Tom’s a boy.’ She never stopped pleading, though, and at last, in 1921, when she was sixteen, Sydney sent her as a boarder to nearby Hatherop Castle School to be ‘finished’. Although it subsequently became a formal educational establishment, Hatherop Castle then took about twenty of ‘the right sort’ of pupils, the nucleus of whom were the children of the family who lived in the Elizabethan manor house that housed the school. Lady Bazely, a widow who later married Commander Cadogan, had one Cadogan daughter and two Bazely daughters. Like the Redesdales she would not have dreamed of sending her daughters to public school, so she set up a small PNEU (Parents’ National Education Union) school and invited the daughters of suitable neighbouring families to attend.
Nancy thoroughly enjoyed her time at Hatherop. The main curriculum, as well as sport (tennis, netball and swimming), was taken by the formidably able Miss Essex Cholmondeley, whom the girls adored. Mademoiselle Pierrat taught French, and there was an unnamed music teacher who gave them piano lessons. Once a week, on Wednesdays, there was dancing. It was important to young women with a London Season to face that they danced well. They all looked forward to this class and it was especially pleasurable for Nancy because Nanny brought Pam – now sufficiently recovered from polio to dance, although she never shone at the classes – and Diana from Asthall in the outside dickey seat of a Morris Cowley to join in the lessons. In the winter months, in their dancing dresses, the two younger girls arrived blue with cold, despite being wrapped up in David’s old trench coats. Afterwards they travelled home in the same way through the bitter darkness. ‘Strangely enough, we looked forward to these outings,’ Diana recalled.27 But while she enjoyed the dancing classes Diana shuddered at the idea of being sent away from Asthall to school like Nancy.
During her time at Hatherop, Nancy was introduced to the Girl Guide movement, and when she returned home suggested to her mother that she form a Swinbrook troop with herself as captain, Pam and Diana as her lieutenants, the members to be recruited from the village girls. Sydney thought it an excellent idea and the good-natured Pam fell in willingly with the scheme. Diana was horrified, which made the project even more attractive to Nancy as a long-running tease on her sister.
Nancy inspired teasing in her younger siblings to a greater or lesser degree, but she was the Queen of Teasers – ‘a cosmic teaser’, Decca would write. She seemed to know exactly what would irritate her victims most, fastening on any insecurities with devastatingly accurate effect. ‘She once upset us,’ Debo recalled, ‘by saying to Unity, Decca and me, “Do you realize that the middle of your names are nit, sick and bore?”’28 One friend likened her humour to the barbed hook hidden beneath a riot of colourful feathers in a fishing fly. And barbed is an apt word, for there was often a cruel element to her teasing, which caused real distress. For example, while Nancy longed to go to school Diana could not stand the thought of it: she became physically ill at the idea, and was therefore an easy victim of Nancy’s tease that she had overheard their parents discussing to which school they might send Diana. That this might cause her younger sister to lie awake at nights worrying did not concern Nancy. It was ‘a good tease’ and that made it all right. Pam recalled that when they were debs Nancy would find out the name of the young man Pam most fancied and tell her that she had seen him out with another girl.
Nancy called Debo ‘Nine’ until she married, saying it was her mental age, and she took advantage of Debo’s sentimental nature by writing poems and stories to make her cry. One was about a match: ‘A little houseless match/It has no roof, no thatch/It lies alone it makes no moan/That little houseless match . . .’ So effective was this that eventually Nancy had only to hold up a box of matches for tears to well in Debo’s eyes. Unity caught on to this form of entertainment and invented a story about a Pekinese puppy. Decca retold it in her autobiography: ‘The telephone bell rang. Grandpa got up from his seat and went to answer it. “Lill ill!” he cried . . . Lill was on her deathbed, a victim of consumption. Her dying request was that Grandpa should care for her poor little Pekinese. However, in all the excitement of the funeral the Peke was forgotten, and was found several days later beside his mistress’s grave, dead of starvation and a broken heart.’29 Soon, like Nancy with the box of matches, all the sisters had to do to reduce Debo to floods of tears was to whisper ominously, ‘The telephone bell rang . . .’
But despite her cruel streak, Nancy’s sheer funniness endeared her to everyone, even when they were the butt of a painful tease, for she went to great lengths to make them laugh. Here, her skill in acting and disguise – learned in countless home-produced plays – came in useful. During the general strike of 1926 Pam helped to run a temporary canteen on the main road to Oxford for strike-breaking truck drivers. According to Decca, Pam was the only one who knew how to make tea and sandwiches, and how to wash up, and she was given the early shift each day because she was an early riser. One morning at 5 a.m., while Pam was alone in the shack waiting for a customer, a filthy tram lurched in from the half-light and asked for ‘a cup o’ tea, miss’. When Pam started nervously to pour it he nipped round the counter, slipped a grimy arm around her waist and thrust his hideously scarred face into hers, slurring, ‘Can I ’ave a kiss, miss?’ Pam screamed, tried to run, fell over and broke an ankle. The tramp was Nancy. On another occasion, when the Redesdales were selling a house, a potential buyer, a fearsomely plump matron with a pouter chest, whiskers and garlicky breath, came to inspect the house. She was shown round courteously by members of the family until she burst into peals of laughter. Nancy again. During both these incidents the sisters were entirely taken in.
Sydney was so impressed with the standard of teaching at Hatherop School that she recruited a Miss Hussey, who had been trained in the PNEU programme at Ambleside, as governess. All the younger girls were taught by this system. Far from being a sub-standard education, as some Mitford biographers have suggested, PNEU was and is a highly regarded, reliable and time-tested system of teaching.30 It concentrates on a good basic education but one of its important precepts is to encourage a child to learn through the senses and independent exploration, rather than being spoon-fed with information. Regular, independently marked examinations check the pupil’s progress. If there was a drawback it was that reading was then taught phonetically so that spelling remained a problem for the girls into their teens. And, although this is jumping ahead in the story, the end result of the Asthall schoolroom education speaks for itself. Four of the girls, Nancy, Decca, Diana and Debo, would become bestselling writers and were what would now be regarded as A and B grade pupils, therefore potential university material. Furthermore, educated in such a small isolated group, the children’s personalities were allowed to develop and flower individually, even though they were always inevitably lumped together as ‘the Mitford sisters’. It is clear, with hindsight, that they were gifted children, but one wonders how they might have turned out if they had been educated in the arena of a formal school and taught to a pattern.
Nevertheless, the standard of teachers in the Asthall schoolroom varied, for not all were PNEU trained, and to one ‘geography’ meant a study of the Holy Land, and tracing the journeys of St Paul in coloured inks.31 Decca claimed to have been bored with the schoolroom from an early age and jealous of the children of literature who had such adventurous lives. Once, it is said, she burst out, ‘Oliver Twist was so lucky to live in a fascinating orphanage.’32
David had no involvement in his daughters’ schooling. Apart from serving on the local bench and the local county council, David took his seat in the House of Lords regularly and was chairman of the House of Lords’ Drains Committee, which attempted to improve the building’s antiquarian plumbing system. In his spare time he did the things he liked best. He rose at dawn, or before daybreak in winter. The housemaids, scurrying round trying to do their dusting and get the grates cleared and fires lit before the family woke up, would encounter him, in his Paisley dressing-gown, wandering amiably about the house, humming a favourite tune, with his vacuum flask of tea under his arm.33 After breakfast, served promptly at eight-thirty for he could not abide latecomers to the table, he dealt with the running of the farms and the estate. Then, in his habitual corduroy breeches, canvas gaiters and comfortable jacket, thumb-stick in hand, he walked his coverts discussing maintenance with Steele, organized shoots, and went hare coursing or fishing. He no longer hunted, but he usually went to the meets to see his daughters off. There was also the annual rite of ‘chubb fuddling’*, hilariously described by Nancy in Love in a Cold Climate.
The Windrush is a notable trout river that flows gin-clear through the valley past Swinbrook and below Asthall Manor. David owned fishing rights there, just as the fictional ‘Uncle Matthew Radlett’ owned the rights to a similar trout stream, which flowed beneath his fictional Cotswold home, Alconleigh;
It was one of his favourite possessions. He was an excellent dry-fly fisherman and was never happier, in and out of the fishing season, than when messing about in the river in waders and planning glorious improvements for it . . . He built dams, he dug lashers, he cut the weeds and trimmed the banks, he shot the herons, he hunted the otters, and he restocked with young trout every year. But he had trouble with the coarse fish, especially the chubb, which not only gobble up baby trout but also their food . . . One day he came upon an advertisement . . . ‘Send for the Chubb Fuddler’. The Radletts always said that their father had never learnt to read, but in fact he could read quite well, if really fascinated by his subject, and the proof is that he found the Chubb Fuddler like this all by himself.34
The chub fuddler came by appointment, and scattered the river with treated groundbait. The fish came surging to the surface in a feeding frenzy, whereupon every able-bodied man in the village, equipped with rakes, landing-nets and wheelbarrows hauled them out to be used in chub pies or as garden manure. The annual visit of the chub fuddler was a real-life event, and surely there is a heartfelt memory behind the incident when Uncle Matthew yells at Fanny, the narrator of Love in a Cold Climate, ‘Put it back at once, you blasted idiot – can’t you see it’s a grayling? Oh my God, women – incompetent.’35
It is precisely because Nancy Mitford was so adept at recycling her own experiences, weaving the often improbable eccentricities of the real-life Mitfords with the slightly mad fictional Radletts, that the lines between fact and fiction became so indistinct, and helps to explain why the Mitfords were destined to become almost a national institution. In reality the Mitford family did not lead a truly exceptional life. They lived in what they regarded as a sort of upper-class poverty, with parents who were apparently unable to show overt affection to their children. ‘Muv’, with her strong sense of the work ethic, her dutiful local charity work and keen interest in the Women’s Institute, appeared preoccupied to her children, but this was probably because she was always busy. ‘Farve’ was an eccentric country squire with loudly expressed jingoistic opinions. Like the fictional Uncle Matthew he ranted about ‘the Hun’ and ‘bloody foreigners’, believed that ‘wogs begin at Calais’, and that it was not necessary for women to be highly educated. All these traits were shared by many others of their class, described by one friend, Frank Pakenham,* as ‘minor provincial aristocracy – the same as us’.36
What lifted the Mitfords from the ranks of the ordinary among their peers were not their lifestyles but their exceptional personalities: David’s utterances make him appear eccentric by today’s standards but he was essentially a kind man. Sydney’s ‘vagueness and preoccupation’ veiled a deep love and sense of responsibility to her children. Far from drifting about in a haze she was a hard-working chatelaine, in every way involved with village life and always sympathetic to the problems of those less fortunate than her own family. As a result she was highly valued locally. ‘She used to say,’ Debo recalled, ‘that the people who deserved praise, medals or whatever successful people got were the women who brought up families on the tiny amounts of money their husbands earned.’37 But what chiefly made the Mitford family ‘different’ were the girls.
Nancy’s brilliance as a novelist is arguably the primary reason why the Mitford family is still remembered, and is constantly being rediscovered by new readers. But the Mitford girls were first noticed publicly before Nancy’s most famous books were written, when three of them, Diana, Unity and Decca, independently made newspaper headlines. In itself this was shaming for David and Sydney, who believed that the name of a decent woman should appear in the newspapers only twice: first on her marriage, and second in her obituary.
Nancy’s private correspondence, and memoirs and letters written by Diana and Decca, show that despite their constant gales of laughter there was an incipient unhappiness among the Mitford girls as they grew up. This seems to be centred in a discontent with Sydney as a mother: they wanted more from her than she could give, or knew how to provide. Probably they wanted more physical contact, to be praised and told that they were loved, and the lack of this bred in them a basic insecurity, which lurked beneath their exuberant display of self-confidence and high spirits. But, again, Sydney was not unusual in her class and in that era.
Years later Nancy would say, ‘I had the greatest possible respect for her; I liked her company; but I never loved her, for the evident reason that she never loved me. I was never hugged or kissed by her as a small child – indeed, I saw little of her . . . when we first grew up she was very cold and sarky with me. I don’t reproach her for it, people have a perfect right to dislike their children.’38 Decca agreed, claiming that it was her mother’s implacable disapproval of her as a child that hurt most. ‘I actively loathed her as a teenager (especially an older child, after the age of fifteen), and did not respect her. On the contrary I thought she was extremely schoopid [sic : a family spelling] and narrow minded – that is sort of limited minded with hard and fast bounds on her mind. But then, after re-getting to know her [as an adult] I became immensely fond of her and really rather adored her.’39 Decca was fair minded enough to add, ‘She probably didn’t change, as people don’t, especially after middle age. Most likely we did.’ This sounds rather like Mark Twain’s comment that when he was fourteen his father was so ignorant that he could hardly bear to be near him. ‘But when I got to twenty-one I was astonished at how much he had learned in only seven years.’ Diana, too, felt this childhood estrangement from her mother, though Debo never did, perhaps because as the last child left at home she received the full share of attention from both parents.
Sydney’s actions and reactions, as her daughters made their own adult lives, show that far from being uninvolved she was deeply loving. Children sometimes appear to believe that parents have an inbuilt guide to perfect parenting and that an inability to deliver what they want or need is a deliberate act of neglect. But parenting is a hit-and-miss affair, depending on many ingredients: the age of the parents, the relationship between them, the behaviour of their own parents towards them and their reaction to it, and also the demeanour of the child. Parents, too, apparently, often have an inbuilt confidence that their children, given the same upbringing they themselves received, will grow up with the same values and beliefs. But there is no magic formula to good parenting and parents get only one crack at it with each child. They cannot rehearse and go back, learning from past mistakes if they get it wrong. Invariably, too, children grow up with a ragbag of selective memories.
In 1921 Sydney took the children to Dieppe for the summer, renting Aunt Natty’s house there. The children adored it and were so busy with seaside activities that they hardly noticed two major family tragedies that traumatized the grown-ups. One day Sydney received a telegram advising that Natty’s only son, Bill, had shot himself because of his debts. He had been an addicted gambler and had been bailed out several times by his brother-inlaw, Winston Churchill. This time he felt he could no longer carry on and it fell to Sydney to break the dreadful news of his suicide to his mother, who was staying near by. A pall of sadness hung over the holiday but the children, it seems, were not aware of it. Decades later Sydney told Decca how Natty’s daughter Nellie, then in her early twenties and unmarried, had once come to her in Dieppe in deep despair and begged for the loan of eight pounds. It was a gambling debt, she said, a debt of honour and must be paid. ‘Muv went straight to Aunty Natty,’ Decca recalled disapprovingly. The debt was honoured, ‘and Nellie was bitterly punished. Muv told me this, but simply couldn’t see what a vile thing it was to have done. I guess it’s that awful disapproving quality that I always hated about her.’40 Decca was four at the time of Bill’s death, and probably seven when Nellie begged Sydney for help. In writing as she did many years later, Decca made no connection between the two incidents.
The other bad news received on that holiday concerned Sydney’s father, Tap. He was in Spanish Morocco at Algeciras on holiday when he died suddenly. He had been a former member of the parliamentary committee on Gibraltar, so it was deemed appropriate that he should be buried there with full naval honours. His estate was just under £60,000, almost twice what Bertie Redesdale had left, and Sydney inherited just under a quarter of it, including a 19 per cent share in the Lady.41