Authors: Diana Alexander
From the start it was obvious that the family could not afford to stay for long in a huge house where the upkeep was immense, but even David, who tended to sell when the market was low and buy again when it was high, realised that the war years were not a good time to put such a house on the market. The children always knew that they would not be there forever but they had a lot of fun playing hide and seek in the vast house, riding in the park with Hooper, hunting with the Heythrop hounds and being hunted themselves by their father’s bloodhound.
The Child Hunt has been made much of by those seeking to equate David to Uncle Matthew in Nancy’s semi-autobiographical novels
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
, which have been dramatised – or in some instances over-dramatised – for television. In fact, the children loved being hunted and were not in the least frightened. They set off well ahead of David’s pet bloodhound, laying as difficult a trail as possible, running through streams and among sheep and cattle to get rid of their scent. Then they would sit down and wait for the hound to find them. When he did he jumped all over them, licking them copiously until a breathless David arrived to call him off. He never pursued them on horseback – he had already given up riding after breaking his pelvis – and there was never a pack of hounds. In many ways he did resemble Uncle Matthew, but this was not one of them.
Much more tricky, now that most of the children were old enough to eat with their parents, was David’s aversion to stickiness. He would fly into a rage if a child spilled food and the fact that no table napkins were allowed further added to the mealtime tension. While still in London, Sydney had decided that the laundering of the vast quantities of napkins used by the family was uneconomic; paper ones were not to be tolerated so none were used at all. Diana remembers the uneasiness when suet pudding was on the menu accompanied by Tate & Lyle’s golden syrup. It was a great favourite with the children but if a single drop fell on the ‘good tablecloth’ there were bellows of rage from their father. In the end, one of the maids was given the task of serving the syrup which made for quieter mealtimes.
In 1917 yet another daughter was born to David and Sydney. She was called Jessica after Sydney’s mother and yet again, although they would have liked another boy, she was a welcome addition to the ever-growing family. Sydney found it hard to make ends meet at Batsford and she began to keep bees and hens in order to make money to pay the salary of the redoubtable governess Miss Mirams, who also helped with the bees.
In 1919 Batsford was sold and the family moved to Asthall Manor, a very attractive Cotswold manor house not far from Burford in West Oxfordshire. It was David’s intention eventually to build a house in Swinbrook, the neighbouring village where he owned much of the land, and the family only stayed at Asthall for six years. They were, however, very formative years and the children loved the mellow stone house which looked out over the churchyard and where they could spend endless hours in the library which was in a separate building joined to the house by a covered way and with bedrooms above in which the older ones slept.
Since David owned the living of Swinbrook that was where the family went to church each Sunday, sitting in the family pew which David had had made from money he had won on the Grand National. The parson was only allowed to preach for ten minutes or David would start to look at his watch, but in spite of this the children were bored and the great sport among the girls was to make Tom ‘blither’ (i.e. laugh), at which they usually succeeded; they would also, bizarrely, lick the pew. Whatever did it taste of? Certainly not as nice as the sweets in the village shop in Swinbrook – toffee, acid drops, Edinburgh rock and butterscotch sold in squares of paper twisted into a bag by the village postmistress, who weighed out the sweets on the same brass scales which she used for the letters.
In 1920 at the age of 40, and in one last attempt to produce another son, Sydney had her seventh and last child – a girl, who was christened Deborah. In her book
Wait for Me
, Debo describes how there was no entry in her mother’s engagement book for the day of her birth, 31 March. The first entry in April says in large letters, Kitchen Chimney Swept. She claims that, such was the disappointment, nobody except nanny looked at her for the first three months of her life. This neglect seems to have done her no lasting harm since of all the Mitford siblings, with the exception of Pam, she was the one who was the most balanced and the most happy with her lot, living in the countryside surrounded by a host of animals, seldom bored and always on good terms with her parents.
Boredom was something which frequently overcame Nancy, Diana, Jessica and Unity at various times of their lives and yet their lives were probably more interesting than those of many other young people of their time. They had a well-stocked library, they went on frequent trips to Oxford, and rather less frequent ones to the theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, and they had visits from their many cousins and visited them in turn. All the family sang well and spent time singing round the piano which Sydney played. And then there were the animals. Where once the pets had been bought selectively from Harrods, now they had ponies, dogs and goats; Jessica had a sheep called Miranda to which she was devoted and they all kept hens and sold the eggs to make pocket money.
Something which few of them realised at the time was that they had particularly devoted parents. David’s rages could not disguise the fact that he loved his children and, once they had moved to the country, played a big part in their childhood; while Sydney, though she often seemed distant and vague, lived for her family and was devastated by some of their later actions and by the deaths of Tom and then Unity. She was always there for her children, a fact which Nancy and Jessica found hard to accept but which Pam, Diana and Debo realised very early on in their lives.
W
hen Nancy once said that she thought sisters were a protection against life’s cruel circumstances, Jessica replied that, as a child, her sisters
were
the cruel circumstances. Nancy was certainly Pam’s main cruel circumstance since she teased her unmercifully through childhood and beyond, still harbouring the jealousy that had overwhelmed her when Pam was born.
While some of the teasing was surely intended for fun, much of it was undoubtedly cruel. For instance, when Nancy and Pam were debutantes Nancy would find out the name of the boy that Pam was keen on and tell her she had seen him out with another girl. Pam, as always, bore her sister no malice but it must have made her miserable at the time.
Nancy was capable of making all her sisters laugh with harmless – or relatively harmless – teases. Her skill at dressing up was unsurpassed in the family. One of Pam’s favourite stories was of the Christmas when Nancy was nowhere to be seen as everyone else gathered in their costumes and guests sat down to dinner. Finally, as they were leaving the dining room, the hinged window seat slowly creaked open to reveal the missing sister ‘dressed’ as an Egyptian mummy.
Another tease much laughed about in the family happened during the General Strike of 1926 when Pam and Nancy helped to run a temporary canteen for strike-breaking lorry drivers. This was while they were living at Asthall Manor and the canteen was in a barn not far away, on the main road between Burford and Oxford. Pam was an early riser so she took the early shift. She was also the only one who knew how to make tea and sandwiches and wash up. In any case, Nancy moaned about having to do more than hand out the sandwiches. ‘Oh, darling, you know how much I hate taking things out of ovens, one’s poor hands … besides, I do so loathe getting up early.’ Although the canteen fare did not involve ovens at all, Pam was still happy to oblige. Even then she showed the gift for catering which remained with her for the rest of her life, and to which her sisters never aspired.
At five o’clock one morning Pam was alone at the canteen and, getting somewhat impatient because there were no customers, she lay on the ground with her ear to the road in the hope of hearing an approaching lorry. She had just gone back to her post in front of the tea and sandwiches when a disgusting tramp lurched towards her and asked for a cup of tea. While she was pouring it, he came round the counter, put a filthy arm around her waist and thrust his horribly scarred face into hers, demanding a kiss. Pam shrieked and ran, but fell over and badly twisted her ankle in her attempt at flight. The tramp, of course, was Nancy. Pam, being Pam, laughed as much as the others, in spite of her injury.
Indeed, Pam was by far the most contented of all the sisters. She was the only one, except Debo, who genuinely loved country life and was never bored by her rural existence. Although academically she lagged well behind Nancy, she had a sharp sense of business, most likely inherited from her mother. This began at an early age when all the children rented small plots of land from their father on which to raise their various animals. Pam insisted that she should be invited to the dinner which David gave for tenant farmers and, although he tried to refuse, he had to relent because she was also a tenant.
At the dinner, the farmer sitting next to her asked her what rent she paid and she discovered that, size for size, she was paying about twice as much as he was. At his suggestion she asked her father for a reduction and although he was reluctant to do this, her point was a valid one and her rent was reduced. Of all the sisters, Pam was the one who was never out of favour with her often volatile father, perhaps because they shared an enduring love of the countryside and country pursuits.
It was Pam and later Debo who were particularly skilled at animal husbandry, but all the sisters loved living creatures and were very soft-hearted towards them. Hens were a particular favourite and, like their mother, they managed to make some money by selling eggs. Later, Nancy famously kept a hen in her Paris flat and the nicknames of Hen and Henderson, which Jessica and Debo gave to one another, refer to their obsession with poultry. Likewise, the Hons Cupboard at Swinbrook House, where all the children would congregate to keep warm, and Jessica’s best-selling account of the Mitford family,
Hons and Rebels
, were not so called because they were all honourables – hon stood for hen in their special language.
Pam’s sense of the value of things, as shown from her argument with her father over her rent, stayed with her all her life, some of the tales of her ‘carefulness’ causing howls of laughter among the other sisters. But this did not mean she was ungenerous. For instance, when Diana had her appendix removed, everybody made a great fuss of her, especially Pam, aged 10, who bought her a magnificent paint box. Diana’s appendectomy was a dramatic tale often related by the sisters, particularly Pam whose memory always served her so well: the operation was performed by the local doctor on the kitchen table at Batsford from where the patient was removed to one of the comfortable guest rooms to convalesce. Presumably, Sydney realised that this was another occasion when the Good Body would not recover on its own.
When Nancy finally achieved her dream of going to Hatherop Castle, a boarding school near Cirencester for local upper-class girls, Pam and Diana were taken there once a week for dancing lessons so that they would not disgrace themselves when they became debutantes. Still somewhat lame from her childhood illness, Pam never shone at these classes but they were much enjoyed by all three sisters, in spite of the fact that the two younger ones had travelled from Asthall to Hatherop, a distance of at least 15 miles, in the outside dickey seat of their father’s Morris Cowley. In winter, despite being covered up with David’s old trench coats, they arrived shivering with cold and with the prospect of travelling home the same way in the freezing darkness. Pam, who felt the cold all her life (her thick cardigans were legendary), must have dreaded these journeys but, true to form, she never grumbled and neither she nor Diana had any desire to join Nancy permanently at school.
Another spin-off (though not a welcome one) for Pam and Diana of Nancy’s time at Hatherop Castle was that Nancy became a Girl Guide; when she returned home she persuaded their mother to let her form a Swinbrook troop of which she would be captain, with her two younger sisters as her patrol leaders and troop members recruited from the village girls. Sydney thought it an excellent idea and Pam good-naturedly fell in with Nancy’s plans, but Diana hated every minute of it which further pleased Nancy as it was yet another tease to discomfort her sister.
Diana described guiding to be ‘all I had feared and more. Ten of the village girls were told they had to join and Pam and I picked sides for our patrols.’ Even worse was the uniform – stiff blue drill dresses, black stockings and shoes, and hard, round felt hats; to add insult to injury, Nancy had a different and rather becoming hat turned up at one side with a cockade. ‘We stumped about at the end of the garden, trying to light damp things with three matches and run a hundred yards in twenty seconds.’ They held competitions to see who could collect the most useful things (with Sydney as judge) and learnt first-aid techniques with bandages and tourniquets. Her mother had promised Diana that she could give it up at the end of the year if she still hated it, but she reneged on her promise as ‘it was doing the village girls so much good’. Eventually Nancy grew tired of it, much to Diana’s relief, and probably Pam’s too, though she never complained.
Pam was quite happy to put up with most of the guiding activities but what annoyed even her was Nancy’s ability to make a successful bonfire out of twigs and damp leaves. Every year the children had a bonfire to clear up their gardening plots for the winter. Nancy’s was next to Pam’s and Diana’s, and while the two younger girls desperately tried to get their barely smoking heaps to catch light by means of adding more newspaper, Nancy’s fire would be blazing away and Nancy would crouch in front of it ‘like a triumphant witch’, singing ‘Burning, burning, merrily burning’ in the accent of the Czechish lady doctor. Pam must have learned a lesson or two from Nancy because in later life, in her Gloucestershire kitchen garden, she could light a bonfire which burned very merrily, with the help of Gerald Stewart, her faithful gardener for many years.