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  To Louis, the well-beloved

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Dedication

  The Mitford Family Tree

  The Mitford Phenomenon

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  Afterwards

  Plate Section

  Preview

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Picture Acknowledgements

  About Take Six Girls

  Reviews

  About Laura Thompson

  Also by Laura Thompson

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  The Mitford Family Tree

  The Mitford Phenomenon

  Take six girls, all of them rampant individualists, and let them loose upon one of the most politically explosive periods in history. That is the story of the Mitfords. It is like a social experiment, the results of which would have staggered even the most imaginative scientist, and no small part of its fascination lies in the fact that the experiment can never be repeated. Never again will there be six such girls, raised in such a way, at such a time.

  The Mitford sisters were born in the heart of England, between 1904 and 1920, into a family of pre-Conquest antiquity. Daughters of the 2nd Lord and Lady Redesdale, they were expected to become wives, mothers, propagators of their class, the kind of women who appeared at state balls in slightly ill-fitting satin and tramped through Gloucestershire in good tweed. Something of this steadfast upbringing always remained with them: Nancy Mitford confessed on her deathbed that she would give anything for one more day’s hunting. But a world beyond the Heythrop had long since claimed Nancy, and indeed all the girls except Pamela – the shadowy exception who threw the rest into even more powerful light.

  One can chant the careers of the Mitford sisters in the manner of Henry VIII’s wives, thus: Writer; Countrywoman; Fascist; Nazi; Communist; Duchess. One can recite the mini-biographies, pulling out extraordinary facts with the practised ease of a conjuror. Nancy, an auto-didact who never learned to punctuate (Evelyn Waugh: ‘it is not your subject’), became a star author whose 1940s novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are deeply loved popular classics. Pamela, the bucolic chicken-breeder whose blue eyes matched her Rayburn, was adored by the young John Betjeman (‘Gentle Pamela, most rural of them all’). Diana, the greatest beauty of her generation, calmly put herself beyond the social pale when she left her perfect husband for the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley. Unity, conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika, became a fervent Nazi and the close companion of Adolf Hitler. Jessica eloped with her fellow Communist, Esmond Romilly, the nephew (and rumoured son) of Winston Churchill, and proudly set up home among the working classes of Rotherhithe. Deborah became chatelaine of Chatsworth House, the magnificent seventeenth-century seat of the Devonshire family, where she filled her office with Elvis Presley memorabilia.

  All this poured out in a great torrent of newsprint when Deborah – ‘the Last Mitford Girl’ – died in 2014, although the facts were already familiar. Some people may have thought that Nancy was the Fascist and Unity the Communist, but they pretty much had the basic idea. Equally familiar was the collective aspect of the sisters: their irrepressible aristocratic levity, their variations-on-a-theme faces, their idiom. The Mitfords inhabited a linguistic microclimate, whose almost nursery way of speech (‘oh do be sorry for me’) is famous above all for the nicknames they gave to everybody, especially to each other, which began as a private joke and were later displayed for public consumption. Again, people may have sometimes got things confused and thought that Woman was the Nazi and Honks the Writer, or that Stubby was the Countrywoman and Bobo the Duchess;1 nevertheless there was an awareness that this was how the Mitfords went on. They all met Hitler and they all called him Hitty or Herr Housepainter. Or something like that.

  Some years before she died I interviewed the then Duchess of Devonshire, or Debo, as she was always known (although Nancy – have you heard this one? – called her ‘Nine’, after her alleged mental age). She admitted to a brisk bafflement with the whole Mitford industry. ‘As for people being interested in all of us now – that’s just amazing. But they seem to be, for some reason best known to themselves.’ Her sister Diana Mosley (Honks, Bodley, Cord, Nardie), whom I also met, came more sharply to the point. ‘The Mitford family has become a frightful bore,’ she said, laughing her still-beautiful head off in a very Mitford way (almost silently, as if the mirth were too great for verbal expression). ‘It bores us to death!’

  Of course one might now say much the same about Henry VIII’s wives. Oh God, no, not the one about Anne of Cleves’s painting by Holbein. Who doesn’t know that one?

  Nonetheless, familiarity is undoubtedly an issue with the Mitford story. The life of Unity Mitford should be the subject of an opera, yet it has become more like the punchline to a sick joke – ‘And then war was declared and she shot herself!’– than the astonishing, murky tragedy that it was. For familiarity does not merely induce boredom. It deadens significance. And the sisters were significant; still are, as a matter of fact. Those who long to rip apart the twee latticework of Mitfordiana – Farve, Muv, Hons’ Cupboards2 – may think otherwise, and I can quite see why, but at the same time I would say: look afresh at the familiar and consider. These girls are prize exhibits in a Museum of Englishness. What they represent is complex, although their image has a divine simplicity. And whatever one’s opinion of what they represent, it is impossible, in truth, to find them boring.

  As I say, the phenomenon of the Mitford sisters is unrepeatable. The nature of the girls, the nature of the world at that time: such a configuration can never happen again.

  In the first place there is the simple fact that the Redesdales had so many children, seven in all (Tom, the only son, born in 1909, is generally overlooked, but his personality was at least as strong and intriguing as that of his sisters). Then there is their upbringing. Although Tom went to Eton, the girls were educated mostly at home, and the three large country houses that the family inhabited – Batsford Park, Asthall Manor, Swinbrook House – became their imaginative playgrounds. The well-raised modern child has its every moment accounted for (oboe at 4, gluten allergy test at 4.30) and accompanies its parents into almost every adult arena, from saloon bar to Starbucks. The Mitford girls, conversely, lived in a world of their own. They had a freedom that today would seem almost feral. In a literal sense it was limited: they travelled nowhere beyond Scotland, nowhere without Nanny, and they talked to few people outside the family except grooms, governesses and gamekeepers. Their mother could be rigid in outlook, their father would create sudden violent storms about infringements of the behavioural code. Yet in a more profound sense the girls’ freedom was near absolute, because nothing really prevented them from indulging their essential natures. How far this was a good thing is open to question, of course. But it made them the Mitfords.

  They roamed around their homes, obsessing over books or love or animals (never a photograph without a wonderful dog in it), growing ever more beautiful and hungrier for life, experiencing the perverse stimulation of extreme boredom. They were not all together, all the time. They formed particular alliances: Diana and Tom, Jessica and Unity, Deborah and Jessica. Not least because of age differences, the sisters did not operate as a sextet (with Tom as semi-detached musical director). Nevertheless, and partly because there was nobody else freely available, they sparked off each other like tinder sticks. Competitive family hierarchies were set in place that would last all their lives. Right up to the end, when only Diana and Deborah were left, the Mitford girls remained intertwined in a network of rivalries and alliances.

  And indeed, their startling – one might even say theatrical – individuality was all part of that complex, six-ply weave. It sounds facile in the extreme to say that Jessica became a rabid Communist because Unity, the sister to whom she was closest, became a rabid Nazi. It sounds equally glib to say that Unity became a Nazi because Diana – whom she admired and adored – became a Fascist. Yet to some extent these statements are true. Had these girls not grown up in such proximity, competing with or retreating from each other in a constant battling rhythm, they would not have become quite so singular. And had they not lived in such singular times, their individuality would – in some cases at least – have been expressed quite differently.

  The Mitford girls came of age in a period of profound and, perhaps more importantly, highly dramatic change. Nancy made her society debut on 28 November 1922. The occasion was a ball at Asthall, reported in The Times’s court pages with the formal respect then given to the upper classes (‘Among those who brought parties to the dance were Countess Bathurst...’), for all the world as if the Edwardian era had never come to an end. The dance for the youngest sister, Deborah, was held at the family’s London home on 22 March 1938. Ten days previously, Adolf Hitler had instigated the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.

  In the sixteen years between the two coming-out balls, politics had become ever more openly polarized and extreme. Communism and Fascism stood at each end of the global chessboard like clumsy monoliths. Democracy seemed a feeble little beast by
contrast, bleating of moderation in the face of the aftermath of war and the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression and mass unemployment. Of course Britain did not – as Italy, Spain and Germany did – turn to dictators, but there were many who craved those illusions and certainties, the politics of poster slogans. The British Communist Party was formed in 1920, followed three years later – almost inevitably – by the first, small Fascist Party.

  Meanwhile a succession of governments, mostly very short-lived, grappled with the enduring economic crisis and the attendant fear of instability. The ‘Zinoviev Letter’ of 1924, purportedly an instruction from the president of the Communist International to unleash class war, was taken very seriously. Whatever the truth about the origins of the document, Bolshevik subsidies had indeed been paid to foment unrest; but there was cause enough anyway for real grievance. Unemployment was appallingly high, close to 3 million in 1933. The first of six National Hunger Marches took place a couple of weeks before Nancy’s society debut. In 1926 came the General Strike; ten years later, the Jarrow Crusade. In 1929 the first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had appointed the dynamic young MP Sir Oswald Mosley to deal with the unemployment problem, but Mosley went his own way when his radical (though not unpopular) ideas were rejected. He formed the New Party in 1931 then, a year later, the British Union of Fascists.

  In Germany, where 7 million were unemployed in 1933, where poverty was dire and a sense of post-war grievance primed to explode, a stark choice presented itself between Communism and Nazism. When Hitler became Chancellor he declared war on Marxism, and for this reason if no other was admired in some British quarters, as Mussolini had been when he took power in 1922. Certain members of the aristocracy were quite open in their desire to make common cause with Hitler: in 1936 the Anglo-German Fellowship held a dinner for Ambassador von Ribbentrop attended by, among others, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Londonderry, and Lord and Lady Redesdale. That same year Lord Redesdale praised Hitler almost unreservedly in the House of Lords, and attacked the press for ‘the greatest exaggeration in such matters as the Nazi treatment of the Jews’. Then he came to the heart of the matter: ‘Whatever might be said against certain details of his administration, it is certain that Herr Hitler saved Germany from going red.’ This was the aristocrat’s view. Yet it was shared in some measure by a good many normal, anxious Britons, in whom the terror of Communism ran deeper than can possibly be grasped today. On the other side, within a sizeable part of the intelligentsia – the kind of people whom Stalin was methodically liquidating – Communism represented a vision of alluring idealistic clarity; but it was also a bulwark against Fascism. The fact that these two wildly opposing creeds were, when one came down to it, remarkably similar was perceived by many, including Nancy and Deborah Mitford. But sanity of this sort was not altogether in tune with the 1930s. What was demanded were gesture politics, uncompromising affiliations, solutions based upon theory rather than the hesitant realities of human nature. Young people have always responded to the clarion call of extremism: Diana, Jessica and Unity did not resist.

  Nevertheless what they did was extraordinary. Again, familiarity has dulled its significance; but again, consider. They were not the only bright young things who flirted with extremism at that time (a cousin, Clementine Mitford, got briefly carried away by the thrill of shiny jackboots), yet the point about the Mitford sisters is that they were not flirting, they carried their convictions through. As Deborah wrote of Jessica in 1952: ‘Her blasted cause has become so much part of her that she can never forget it.’ Can one imagine their equivalent today? A nineteen-year-old Jessica Mitford, absconding to a life with an Islamic fundamentalist? No: a girl of that class might dabble excitably in ‘activism’, in the sense of waving an anti-fracking banner in Sussex (where her parents have a house) or having a fling with a sexy anti-capitalist protester (who went to school with her brother). Jessica’s fellow runaway Esmond Romilly was in fact a cousin of the family, an ex-Wellington boy; Jessica, as Nancy wrote in a fictionalized version of the situation, ‘had been introduced to him and knew his surname’. Yet when she disappeared in 1937 – supposedly to meet friends in Dieppe, where she never arrived – the skies fell in for her parents. For a fortnight they did not know whether she was dead or alive, and simply sat beside the telephone, waiting for they did not know what. Lord Redesdale never saw Jessica again after seeing her off at Victoria Station. When news of her whereabouts finally arrived, her father is alleged to have said: ‘Worse than I thought. Married to Esmond Romilly,’ but if he did say this then he didn’t mean it. The shock of what Jessica had done – the casual, callous finality with which she disowned her former life – was one from which her parents never recovered (although far worse was to come). ‘I nearly went mad when it seemed you had quite disappeared,’ Lady Redesdale wrote to her. And for Deborah: ‘It was far the worst thing that happened to me.’ Forty years after the event, Jessica wrote to Deborah that she was ‘v astonished’ to have caused her such distress, but the tone of this letter was defensive and not altogether convincing. The point is that back in 1937 Jessica hadn’t much cared whom she hurt. Such was the power of the extremist cause, embodied in a man. The man alone might have led her to elope. It was the extremism that led to the swift absolutism with which all else was abandoned.

  Usually it is disaffected men who embrace a dramatic ideology, although girls do it too. But the Mitford sisters? Those posh, protected creatures, who rode side-saddle to hounds, who were presented at court, who danced in and out of the great houses of London? Society tends to say of its young rebels: they have nothing to lose. This is not always true, but for sure they would have less to lose than the Mitfords. They had everything to lose. They were the smooth-skinned daughters of privilege. Nor were they too stupid to know what they were doing: Jessica was as sharp as a tack and Diana’s idea of light reading was Goethe (her wedding present from Dr Goebbels was a complete set of Goethe’s works, bound in pink calfskin). Jessica was also pretty, vital, by all accounts enchanting, while Diana, beautiful as a goddess, had a worshipping husband and two young sons, a life of picture-book perfection in Belgravia. Unity, as Deborah later put it, was ‘always the odd one out’; nevertheless she was bright, handsome and popular despite her occasionally unnerving eccentricity.

  Of course the sheer idiocy of youth played its part. ‘The Führer got into quite a rage twice... it was wonderful,’ is a typical phrase from Unity’s letters, which sometimes give the impression that Hitler is Mick Jagger and she a favoured groupie circa 1966. But there was more. Something in these young women responded to the dark power of the times. Beneath the sunlit Mitford effervescence ran a deadlier, steadily determined tide. There was a strong sex element in it, in this willingness to embrace the aggressive and unyielding, and it was obviously connected to individual men – but it was still more mysterious than that: extremism calls upon the entire pre-civilized self.

  Exactly why, and how, the girls took the paths that they did will be analysed more fully later. The starting point was Diana’s deep, complex passion for Sir Oswald Mosley; although she had already been influenced by the intellectual Teutonic sympathies of her forebears. In the context of the period, and of the family dynamic, their behaviour does become just about comprehensible. It also remains almost incredible. ‘What lives we do lead,’ as Nancy wrote to her mother in 1940, her tone dry and disbelieving.

  She had not hurled herself headlong into extremism. The family friend Violet Hammersley once wrote to Nancy, saying ‘You Mitfords like dictators,’ but this was only half true. Pamela married a Fascist sympathizer and met Hitler (‘like an old farmer in a brown suit’), yet she stood quite apart from the behaviour of Diana and Unity. So too did Deborah, who spent the month before the Second World War at a house party for York races. Nancy helped Republican refugees in the Spanish Civil War, then went home to perform frenetic amounts of patriotic war work.

  Nevertheless there was a characteristic aspect to the politicized girls. It wasn’t simply what they did, it was the way they did it: with the smiles-over-steel quality that is definitively Mitford. They were naturally and comfortably shameless. Not necessarily flagrant, although Unity became so in her love of Nazism; more accurate to say that they were shame-free. Their confidence was blithe, adamantine. Whatever the subject matter, the idiom remained that of the nursery. There was a bizarre disconnect between their mode of expression (sweet Hitler, blissful Lenin) and what they were actually doing. The story of Jessica and Unity dividing a room in half, decorating one side with hammers and sickles, the other with swastikas, pretty much sums up the Mitford relationship with politics. Completely sincere, but also attention-seeking: showing off to Nanny.