Authors: Diana Alexander
When Derek abandoned her, initially she had to live a much more modest life; she had no children but was never bitter or sorry for herself. Her naturally happy nature got her through the tragedies of her life. ‘She was a saintly person and she radiated goodness,’ said her niece Emma, remembering also her loyalty, courage and common sense. These qualities were particularly demonstrated when Emma held an exhibition in a London art gallery; the private view took place on a night of dreadful weather and many of her friends who lived in and around London didn’t turn up. She was beginning to feel a bit let down by this when through the door marched Pam. She had driven from Gloucestershire just to be there.
Pam’s personality and special qualities came to public notice during the late 1970s and early 1980s when the Mitford Industry was at its peak. In 1980, when director Julian Jebb made the television programme
Nancy Mitford – a Portrait by her Sisters
, Pam completely stole the show. She is shown at home at Woodfield in front of her pale-blue Rayburn and also at Swinbrook, where she stands by the Windrush river reading Nancy’s description of Uncle Matthew and the chubb-fuddler from
The Pursuit of Love
. Aged 73 she became a star performer, simply by being herself. After seeing the finished film Debo wrote to Jessica: ‘You will SCREAM – Woman’s the star, absolutely at ease … Diana and I are v. boringly discreet, I look like a headmistress about to retire and sit absolutely still … Honks looks 1,000 which she doesn’t in real life.’
At a similar time a television serial of
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
was made and much of it was, appropriately, shot in the Cotswolds; some at Rendcomb College, a public school near Cirencester. Pam, accompanied by Beetle, was a frequent visitor on the set and was welcomed as a valued member of the team. Certainly no one regarded her as an interfering old lady and she gave authentic advice in her authentic Mitford voice. When the series appeared on television she invited Kate, Emily and me, since we did not possess a television, to watch the programme with her. All three of us were aware of the extraordinary situation in which we found ourselves – watching a television serial based on a famous family in the home of a member of that family.
I had also spent the evening of the 1979 general election watching the television with Pam. Margaret Thatcher had achieved a landslide victory and Pam, a lifelong Conservative, was ecstatic – as were many people following the Winter of Discontent. I was far more entertained by the descriptions by Pam of former Labour MPs who were losing their seats. ‘Oh, look, Diana, Mr –––– looks just like a white rat that we used to have as children’, and, ‘Oh, Diana, there’s the white rat again!’
Another example of the Mitford Industry at this time was a musical entitled
The Mitford Girls
, a frothy and light-hearted look at the lives of this remarkable family, directed by Ned Sherrin. It took place at the Chichester Theatre, and Pam, Diana and Debo were invited to the opening night. When Pam returned I was keen to hear about the evening. ‘Did the rest of the audience know you were there?’ I asked. ‘Well,’ replied Pam, ‘they couldn’t really help it because all the gels in the chorus had badges which said “I am a Mitford Gel” but Ned had had special badges made for us. They were huge and they read, “I really AM a Mitford Gel.”’ She loved it.
A decade later, in 1993, the Mitford bandwagon was still rolling and a selection of Nancy’s letters was published under the title of
Love from Nancy
. In a letter to Pam at the time of publication, Diana wrote: ‘Don’t we all sound horrible in the book. Except you.’ Even though Nancy had spent a lifetime teasing Pam, she recognised what a particularly special person she was and always had been.
During the 1980s Pam and Diana became very close and spent holidays together, in Switzerland and Italy in the summer and South Africa in the winter. Pam drove them both on the European journeys, negotiating the terrifying Paris Périphérique without a map. But as she had feared would happen she became increasingly lame in the right leg which had been affected by polio when she was a child.
As early as 1978 she had written to Jessica, taking her to task for saying in her latest book,
A Fine Old Conflict
, that she had broken a leg while escaping from Nancy at the roadside canteen in 1926. ‘So far, luckily, I have not broken a leg although I may well do so one day as I fall about like a ninepin.’ These turned out to be prophetic words.
Although Pam had never allowed the weakness in her right leg to affect her life, as she grew older it began to take its toll, putting a strain on both her spine and on the left leg. During the 1980s she made several visits to Cheltenham-based orthopaedic surgeon Guy Rooker. As something of a Mitford sister watcher, he was very interested to meet her and he was not disappointed, finding her as delightful as everyone else did. He prescribed physiotherapy and anti-inflammatory medication and she also went for treatment to Cirencester physiotherapist Deirdre Waddell. Typically, although she was keen to continue the treatment, Pam could not do so at the time since she was busy helping to look after Diana, who was recovering from an operation for what turned out to be a benign brain tumour. She later continued with the physiotherapy, finding that it did ease the pain.
The year 1987 was one that was both sad and happy. Beetle, who had become increasingly doddery, was put down in June, after much soul-searching. It was the end of an era for Pam who had never been without a dog and Beetle was much missed by Pam’s neighbours since he had become so much a part of the village scene. ‘I can so imagine how you miss sweet Beetle,’ wrote Diana, ‘but I’m sure his life had become a burden to him as well as to you. I only wish that when that happens to one, one could “send for the vet.” So wonderfully easy.’
In November of that year Pam celebrated her 80th birthday, for which Debo’s husband Andrew organised a party at Brooks’s club in London. Many of her old friends, such as James Lees-Milne, were invited and lots of cousins, including musician Madeau Stewart to whom Pam had become particularly close. Pam described the event in a letter to Jessica:
We were 43 altogether I think. It was all a great success. Lovely company, delicious food and marvellous wine and in a most beautiful room. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and were in top form. It was so good of Andrew to give such a party. I expected to be here, [at Woodfield] quietly. Oddly enough I feel just as I did before I was 80 – somehow I had expected some magical change to take place but all is as usual!
According to guests at the party, Pam, in a gold lame jacket, her eyes as blue as ever, looked far younger than her 80 years.
Her neighbours would not let her birthday pass without their own celebration and organised a splendid tea party at Woodfield House. Very few were able to sit down with their tea and every room on the ground floor was full of people trying to balance tea cups and cake plates. Dee Hancock and I, meeting in the sitting room (the one with the ill-fitting carpet, not usually open to visitors), agreed that it was an enormous tribute to Pam that so many people had turned up.
In the late 1980s Pam’s knees began to give her a lot of pain, in spite of spending winters with Diana in the warmth of South Africa which helped to ease her aching joints. By the spring of 1990 her right knee had become much worse and the following year, on 8 June 1991, Mr Rooker replaced the knee joint. The operation was a success and she went to Chatsworth to convalesce for three weeks and then to France to visit Diana at Orsay. From here she sent Mr Rooker a postcard of Diana’s magically beautiful home, Le Temple de la Gloire:
This is my sister’s house where I am staying for a week, luckily glorious weather and we have seen many friends who are absolutely amazed at how well I can walk again, quite different from last year. And I have had no difficulties in the journeys, air and train. I had to tell you. With grateful thanks. Yours sincerely, Pamela Jackson.
Guy Rooker never forgot her and described her to me many years later as ‘a nice, gentle, aristocratic lady who seemed to be perfectly content with being the least high profile of the Mitford sisters’.
Deirdre Waddell, the physiotherapist who treated her throughout this period, remembers her vividly:
She was a charming lady, thoughtful and kind. She never came for treatment empty-handed – she would bring mint jelly from Chatsworth which she knew my husband loved, or soft fruit from her garden.
She was always so grateful to the people who treated her and she regaled us with stories of her extraordinary family. She made an enormous impression on me.
In fact, after the operation’s initial success she must have regressed somewhat, for in 1993 she wrote to Debo mocking her lack of mobility, demonstrating her usual ability to see the funny side of life, even in the face of adversity:
I wish you could have seen us two travelling and in Zurich. As Nard [Diana] says we make one person: she can’t hear but can walk, I can hear but can’t walk. The result is that she rushes ahead and I can’t call to her if anything important happens. Our compartment on the train was a quarter of a mile up the platform – she was there before I was half way! She carried the bags as I can’t carry a thing with two sticks, only my bag slung round my Kneck.
In Mitford-speak, ‘please picture’. By this time she was 86; it was eighty-three years since she had had polio and she was on her way to Switzerland. By anyone’s standards, she was doing pretty well.
The following year, on 7 March 1994, Pam wrote to Jessica to say she didn’t think she would manage a trip to California to see her and her family because ‘I am getting very wobbly, not as agile as when you were here in the autumn and I fall very easily. It would be awful if I broke something when in America … I would love to see America again but honestly the old legs are beyond it now alas.’ It was one of the last letters she wrote.
A month later she drove to London to stay with her old friend Margaret Budd. On 8 April they had been shopping, had dinner with their friend Elizabeth Winn, and afterwards gone for a drink with Margaret’s next-door neighbour. Pam then did what she had always dreaded: fell down some steep steps and broke her right leg, the weak one, in two places below the knee. The ambulance men came quickly and she was given drugs for the pain and taken to hospital; the following morning she had an operation to put a metal plate in the leg. She woke from the anaesthetic asking, ‘Who won the Grand National?’ and appeared to be making good progress. She had a lot of visitors and was reported by Elizabeth Winn to be ‘in fine form and very funny’; but the following Tuesday, just before Debo, who had returned from Ireland, could visit her, she died of an embolism to the heart.
The sisters were devastated. Suddenly Pam, who had been the constant rock in all their lives, who had been the butt of their teasing but who had always been there to comfort them when life was hard, had gone. She was 86, but her sisters had never considered life without her. Lady Emma Tennant, in her excellent obituary in
The Independent
, wrote:
She never wrote a book, took up a cause or made headlines. Instead she lived quietly in the country, surrounded by the friends and animals she loved so much. They loved her in turn, and many people of all ages will find her calm, wise and deeply humorous presence irreplaceable in their lives.
She concluded:
In old age, Tante Femme radiated serenity and goodness. Her huge blue eyes were as innocent as a child’s. Indeed, innocence along with courage, honesty and cheerfulness was one of her remarkable qualities. But it was the innocence of a woman who had lived and suffered, loved and lost, and overcome adversity to enjoy an unusually contented old age.
The funeral was held at Swinbrook on a sunny April day, when the daffodils were blooming and the trees were just coming into leaf. The church was packed with mourners from every walk of life, whose lives in some way Pam had touched. They sang ‘Eternal Father Strong to Save’ which was one of her favourites. It had been sung every Sunday at Batsford, where the sisters had lived as young children, ever since their Uncle Tommy had come home on leave during the Great War, shortly after the Battle of Jutland; he had been enraged to find that there was no mention of sailors in the church service. Toby Tennant, Emma’s husband, read from Ecclesiastes, Chapter III, and the sisters thought the verse ‘Every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God’ was particularly appropriate. Debo, like her father, deplored long sermons, so there was no sermon at all. There was no need for one; everyone there knew Pam’s very special qualities.
Spilling out into the graveyard, I did a quick headcount of Pam’s neighbours and hoped no burglar was abroad in Caudle Green that day as nearly every house would be empty. Even former neighbours, now living miles away, had come to say their goodbyes.
Pam was buried near the graves of Nancy, Unity and now Diana. Madeau Stewart planted lavender bushes on the grave and now lies beside her cousin and friend. The inscription on the simple Cotswold stone headstone reads, ‘Pamela Jackson, née Mitford, 1907–1994, “a valiant heart”’. Those three simple words sum her up exactly.
But perhaps Debo, the sister to whom Pam was closest, should have the final word: ‘There’ll never be anyone remotely like her, will there?’
T
owards the end of his stint as a navigator with Bomber Command, Derek Jackson commissioned Bond Street jeweller Cartier to make a brooch for Pam of the regimental insignia of 604 Squadron. It was a fabulous piece of jewellery made of diamonds, sapphires and rubies, and Pam kept it all her life and wore it often.
After she died, Debo, who took charge of her jewellery, at first considered donating it to a museum; she approached the RAF Museum and also St Clement Dane’s church, which has an exhibition of RAF memorabilia. Both declined the offer, feeling that it was of too great a value to be on public display; so Debo lent it to Pam’s very close friend Margaret Budd, whose husband George had been in the RAF with Derek.