Authors: Diana Alexander
Nancy paved the way for many of the others’ activities and one of these was a trip to Paris in the year before she became a debutante. Nancy adored Paris and was to live there in later life, referred to by her sisters as the French Lady Writer or simply Lady. After that each of the girls went to Paris before coming out. Nancy and Diana certainly lived it up there, but Pam’s Paris trip, as might be expected, was incident free. It was 1923 and she obviously enjoyed herself because the letters she wrote to her mother are full of details of the balls she had been invited to and the clothes she would wear to them. She was particularly excited by the thought of a fancy-dress party, to which her group of girlfriends had decided to dress as Arab women so that the boys would not know which was which – not perhaps something which would be considered politically correct today – but it did show that she had got over her childhood horror of dressing up.
Typically, though, the greatest excitement was a ride in a tank. ‘I should love to do the whole thing over again. I hardly think I have ever enjoyed anything so much.’ Quiet Pam, of all the sisters, probably had the greatest sense of adventure. ‘She was very courageous and she inherited this courage from our mother,’ her sister Debo told me many years later.
Pam’s coming-out dance in 1924 was actually in fancy dress and Pam went as Madame de Pompadour, whose biography Nancy was to write in later life. ‘I felt very self-conscious because I was rather fat,’ she said later, confessing that she didn’t enjoy any of the coming-out dances but wrote in her diary that she had had a marvellous time because she didn’t in the future want to be considered a failure at parties. Diana, the kindest sister, blamed this lack of self-confidence on Nancy’s spiteful teasing, but in a strange way the teasing made Pam the very individual and extraordinarily attractive woman she became in later years. In those days, too, she was considered a beauty, with her bright blue eyes and naturally streaked blonde hair, an effect which many girls today pay their hairdressers large sums of money to achieve.
At that time – the roaring twenties – hair was a pressing problem for Pam and Diana who needed their parents’ permission to have their hair bobbed like Nancy. The Redesdales were very strict when it came to appearance and the girls were not allowed to wear basic make-up as their contemporaries did. Even 8-year-old Debo was recruited to write to their mother, who was in Canada at the time, to beg that the two sisters be allowed to have short hair.
Pam still loved the more simple family traditions which she had enjoyed in childhood. One of these was Bailey Week which took place at the home of their cousins, Richard, Anthony, Christopher and Timothy Bailey; these were the sons of Aunt Weenie, Sydney’s youngest sister, who had married Colonel Percy Bailey and lived at nearby Stow-on-the-Wold. Activities included cricket, tennis, walks, riding, picnics and dancing, and all the girls looked forward to it immensely. Even in the full activity of her London debutante season, Pam wrote to her mother to say how much she was looking forward to Bailey Week. In fact, it was probably a welcome relief from all those balls that she had to pretend she enjoyed.
Thus shy Pam began adult life. It was on the surface a life less action-packed than those of her sisters, but, as the years went by, they began to see that she, who had long been the butt of jokes, who seldom stuck her head above the parapet for fear of more teasing, was the one on whom they came to depend. Of all the sisters, she was the one to whom the family and its origins probably meant most of all and it is not insignificant that she was the only one who read – and she found reading a slow process – her grandfather Redesdale’s account of the time he spent in the Far East. Entitled
Tales of Old Japan
, it remained in a prominent position on her bookshelves all her life. She also ploughed through two fat volumes of Bartie’s
Memories
which Jessica found ‘monstrously boring’.
I
n a family the size of the Mitfords, growing up was a long-drawn-out process. There was a sixteen-year gap between the eldest and the youngest and Sydney made Nancy one of Debo’s godmothers, fearing that she might not live long enough to see her grow up. In fact, Nancy survived her mother, who lived to be 83, by only ten years.
It says a great deal for Sydney’s stamina and her determination to launch her daughters into a world where they would find suitable husbands (the only option open to girls of their class and generation, although times were changing fast) that she endured six dreary debutante seasons, sitting at dances night after night when she must have longed to go to bed. It meant spending the summers in London when she must have hankered after her West Oxfordshire garden and she probably never knew that often, when a dance was particularly boring, the girls would leave by a back entrance and go to a nightclub, returning at a time when they felt they might be expected.
Nancy was obviously the first to be presented at court but, having taken this big step towards adulthood, found it somewhat unfulfilling; she was therefore determined to surround herself with a set of interesting friends, mostly Oxford undergraduates, who, if they were brave enough, accepted invitations to dine or even stay at Asthall and later Swinbrook. David hated having people other than family members in the house and many of these friends, known as the aesthetes, were bawled out if they did something to offend him – which wasn’t difficult. Like Uncle Matthew in
The Pursuit of Love
, he really did call them ‘sewers’, though this was derived from a Tamil word which he had learned in Ceylon. Sua meant pig and it was difficult to know which was the greater insult. Even worse was his habit of calling down the table to Sydney at the end of dinner: ‘Have these people no homes of their own?’ Relations between David and his favourite daughter were, unsurprisingly, very strained at this time.
Nancy had also developed a delight in foreign travel, first fostered during a visit to Europe when she was 17. She went on a school trip with a friend and the group visited France and Italy. Nancy was enthralled, finding each city more beautiful than the last – life seemed very boring when she returned to Asthall and she could not then see her way to making her home ‘abroad’. She was, however, allowed to return to Paris in order to learn to speak French more fluently than in the schoolroom.
This was the roaring twenties and there was a lot of fun to be had at home. During her coming-out season and then at hunt balls and house parties Nancy danced and larked with the young post-war generation, who were called the Bright Young Things, a phrase taken up by Evelyn Waugh who became a close friend of Nancy. Her only complaint was that her clothes were not as fashionable as those of her fellow debutantes. They were home-made and she felt that they looked it. Although she had a small allowance from her parents, it did not go far into paying for the lifestyle to which she aspired. Her passion for ‘abroad’ and for stylish clothes were not fulfilled until her novels brought in enough income for a Paris flat and couture by Dior.
Diana was becoming increasingly bored at home but this boredom was soon to be relieved by a trip to Paris where Sydney took the girls in the autumn of 1926, mainly to settle Diana into a day school where she could be ‘finished’ and also improve her French. The family stayed in a modest hotel close to the home of Sydney’s friends the Helleus. Monsieur Helleu was an artist and he became obsessed with Diana’s beauty, painting her often and becoming a close friend. The family returned home for Christmas but afterwards Diana was allowed to go back to Paris and live in a boarding house while she completed her year at school. She travelled as far as Paris with her cousins Winston Churchill and his son Randolph, who were on their way to Italy to meet Mussolini.
Nancy and Pam had already lived in Paris so Diana was not short of friends and she made the most of her new-found freedom. Her great sorrow was that M. Helleu died during this time. He had been a faithful admirer and she mourned for him, but it didn’t stop her having a good time in a city where it was not compulsory to be chaperoned everywhere she went.
Keeping a diary of her activities, however, proved her undoing. When she returned home for the Easter holidays she made the mistake of leaving her diary open in the sitting room while she went out for a walk. Sydney read the entry which described a visit to the cinema alone with a young man one afternoon in Paris. This was an unforgivable crime and Diana was forbidden to return to school and condemned to spend the summer with the younger children in Devon. It was a terrible punishment and because she was bored, literally to tears, this must have contributed greatly to Diana’s determination to get away from the family home.
By the late summer of 1927 the family home was no longer their beloved Asthall, but Swinbrook, which was entirely built to David’s design with Sydney, mysteriously, since she had excellent taste and was a superb homemaker, playing no part. Instead of nestling in a village it was perched on top of a hill and was draughty and uncomfortable. The children each had a bedroom of their own in which was a small fireplace, but they were not allowed a fire. The only warm place was the enormous linen cupboard with its distinctive smell of airing clothes, immortalised as the Hons Cupboard in Nancy’s
The Pursuit of Love
. It was here that the younger children, Unity, Decca (Jessica) and Debo, gathered to hatch schemes, work out the rules for their new Hons Society or talk to one another in one of their special languages, Boudledidge spoken by Unity and Decca, or Honnish which was the secret means of communication between Decca and Debo. What the older children especially missed was the large library at Asthall, set apart from the house, with their bedrooms above which they had made especially their own. But family life was changing fast and it would not be long before Nancy, Pam and Diana were leaving home for good. Tom was already studying in Vienna and in the end it was only Debo who really regarded Swinbrook as home and was happy there.
Eventually, David and Sydney relented towards Diana and in the autumn she was allowed to stay with the Churchill family at Chartwell, their country home. Here she met some very interesting people, including top-grade scientist Professor Lindemann, who became Churchill’s chief scientific advisor during the next war. Lindemann suggested that she might learn German and as Tom was studying German in Vienna, she asked her parents if she might do so too. Needless to say, after the Paris debacle, they refused point blank.
The following year, 1928, was Diana’s debutante season and within weeks she had met and fallen in love with Bryan Guinness. Boredom over, she eventually overcame her parents’ opposition on account of their age – she was 18 and he was 22 when they met – and they were married at St Margaret’s church, Westminster, the following year, on 29 January 1929. It was the ‘society wedding of the year’ but it was somewhat marred for Diana by the fact that Decca and Debo, who had looked forward to the event with wild excitement, went down with an unidentified infectious disease and could not be bridesmaids. It was left to 14-year-old Unity, who was very self-conscious about her height and her straight, sticking-out fair hair and who definitely did not want to be a bridesmaid, to represent the family.
Following Diana’s engagement to Bryan, Pam became engaged to Oliver Watney, a member of another brewing family. Nancy, obviously not wanting to be the elder sister ‘left on the shelf’, announced that she was unofficially engaged to Hamish St Clair-Erskine, who was four years younger and unsuitable in many ways, not least because he was homosexual, a fact which Nancy seemed unaware of or simply did not want to admit. Sydney and David were against it, as was Tom, who had had a brief affair with Hamish at Eton before deciding that he preferred women. But Hamish was intensely amusing and to be amused was what Nancy loved best. The ‘engagement’ dragged on for four years but eventually came to nothing.
In 1928 Nancy persuaded her parents to let her attend the Slade School of Art but she lasted there only a month, being told by the director of the school that she had no talent. This upset her greatly and she began to write short gossip pieces instead for glossy magazines such as
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
. She then talked herself into a job with the family magazine,
The Lady
, and not long afterwards her first novel,
Highland Fling
, was published. The Lady Writer was on her way.
Unity was shy and sensitive as a small child. When something which upset her was said at mealtimes she would slide under the table and not come out until she felt like doing so. This was understood and no one took any notice. She also had a strange diet for some time, eating nothing but mashed potatoes. However, a liking for strawberries at the age of 6 got her into real trouble. She and her cousin Christopher Bailey, also given to mischief, once ate all the strawberries in the greenhouse, which were being kept for a special occasion. This was one of the stories, much related, which became part of Mitford family history.
Unity drew well and could memorise reams of poetry by heart, but as she grew up she became very boisterous and had a habit of picking up Miss Dell, one of the many governesses, who was very small, and putting her on the sideboard. As Miss Dell also taught the children the art of shoplifting, she didn’t last long, and Miss Hussey, her successor, was constantly sending Unity to confess her antics to her mother. Miss Hussey suggested that boarding school might be a good idea but in the end it was Unity’s constant nagging that persuaded David and Sydney to send her to St Margaret’s School, Bushey, in January 1929. Although she could be moody and wilful, her parents had little trouble with her as a child and she was loved in the family for her hilarity and sense of humour. In a family of individuals, she was possibly the most eccentric, but this eccentricity did not go down well at St Margaret’s and she was eventually asked to leave, though, according to Sydney, she was heartbroken and always remembered the school with affection.