Jessica described having sisters as ‘a great toughening and weathering process’ which prepared one for later life. When Nancy once ventured that she thought sisters were a protection against life’s cruel circumstances, Jessica countered that, as a child, her sisters were the cruel circumstances. Diana wrote that she regarded it as a fault of their upbringing that it should be considered unthinkable to admit to ‘weakness, misery or despair’. Certainly all six sisters had the capacity to withstand private tragedy and public opprobrium with unusual resilience – often appearing insensible to other people’S opinions – and were practised at putting on a brave face and hiding their vulnerability behind a lightly worn armour of flippancy and self-deprecation. They wore this protective shield not just with the outside world, where it was often taken for ruthlessness, but also with each other and, with few exceptions, rarely shared their most intimate confidences. While avoiding emotional depth and turning everything into a joke is a widespread English custom, the sisters’ comic genius transformed a national character trait into an art form.
Less inhibited than their memoirs and more intimate than the biographies that have been written about them, the sisters’ correspondence explores the kaleidoscopic pattern of their shifting relationships and exposes less-well-known sides of their complex and contradictory characters. Unlike many books about the Mitford family that have focused on the years when the sisters’ exploits intersected with historical events, their letters cover their whole lives, revealing how triumphs and tragedies wore down their youthful fanaticism.
The sisters wrote to each other to confide, commiserate, tease, rage and gossip but above all they wrote to amuse; when something made them laugh, half the fun of it was to relate it to a sibling. Beneath their contrasting personalities they shared a common temperament: unconditional in their loves and hates and passionate about the causes they embraced, they also possessed the ability to laugh at themselves and to make light of even the darkest predicaments. It is this indomitable spirit, fierce courage and irrepressible enjoyment of life that make their letters so powerful, eloquent and entertaining.
I had letters from you & the Lady* & Henderson** today, wouldn’t it be dread if one had a) no sisters b) sisters who didn’t write.
Deborah to Diana, 21 July 1965
* Nancy
** Jessica
The Mitford children in 1921: Unity, Pamela, Deborah, Tom, Nancy, Jessica and Diana.
There are few letters to record the Mitford sisters’ childhood and early youth, and such letters as they did write were mostly to their mother and father. Nor are there many letters dating back to the eight years covered in this section. By 1925, only Nancy, aged twenty – one, and Pamela, aged eighteen, had gone out into the world; the four youngest children were still in the nursery or schoolroom. Nancy’s main family correspondent at the time was her brother Tom, and Pamela – who confided mostly in Diana – was the least prolific writer of the sisters.
When the letters begin, the family had been living for six years at Asthall Manor, a seventeenth-century house in the Cotswolds, which the sisters’ father, Lord Redesdale, had bought when he sold Batsford Park, a rambling Victorian pile that he had inherited in 1916 and could not afford to keep up. Before the First World War, David Redesdale, or ‘Farve’ as he was known to his children, lived in London where he worked as office manager for The Lady, the magazine founded by his father-in-law. Life in the country was far better suited to this unbookish, unsociable man, whose happiest moments were spent by the Windrush, a trout river that ran past Asthall, or in the woods where he watched his young pheasants hatch. Unluckily for his family, country sports did not exhaust his energies and Asthall, which the children loved, was not to his liking. In 1926, they moved to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, a grim, ungainly edifice that Lord Redesdale had built on top of a hill near Swinbrook village. All the sisters except Deborah, who was six when they moved, disliked the new house, which was cold, draughty and impractical. Worst of all, unlike Asthall where the library had been in a converted barn some distance from the house and where the children were left undisturbed, there was no room at Swinbrook that they could call their own. The younger children found some warmth and privacy in a heated linen cupboard, later immortalized in Nancy’s novels as the ‘Hons’ cupboard’, while the older children had to share the drawing room or sit in their small bedrooms. Lord Redesdale was hurt by the family’s dislike of his dream project and began to spend more time at 26 Rutland Gate, a large London house overlooking Hyde Park that he had bought when Asthall was sold.
The sisters were in awe of their father. Strikingly handsome, with the brilliant blue eyes that passed down to his children, he was kind-hearted, jovial and the source of much of the fun that was had in the family. Deborah remembered him as ‘charming, brilliant without being clever’ and uproariously funny when in a good mood. She wrote that when he and Nancy started sparring they were better than anything she had ever seen on stage, ‘a pair of comedians of the first order’. But he could also be impatient and had a violent temper. The smallest transgression – a child spilling her food or being a minute late – could send him into a towering rage. His anger was all the more alarming for being unpredictable: he would turn with sudden fury on one of his daughters and then, for no apparent reason, decide to single out another. Their way of standing up to him, and of drawing his unwrathful attention, was to catch their father in one of his sunnier moods and tease him, which he took in good part. Jessica used to call him ‘the Old Sub-Human’ and pretend to measure his skull for science or would gently shake his hand when he was drinking a cup of tea to give him ‘palsy practice’ for when he grew old. Nancy’s caricature of him in her first novel, Highland Fling, as the jingoistic, hot-tempered General Murgatroyd – a precursor of the formidable Uncle Matthew in her later novels – was an effective way of reducing this larger-than-life figure to less alarming dimensions. As they grew up, the sisters rarely seem to have resented Farve and looked back on his autocratic eccentricities with affectionate amusement. The inclination to hero – worship is foreshadowed in their relationship with their father; like the other powerful men who were to come into their lives, he could do no wrong.
Their resentment – and that of Nancy and Jessica in particular – against the perceived shortcomings of their upbringing was reserved for their mother. In contrast to her moody, volatile husband, Sydney, or ‘Muv’ as her children called her, was cool and detached. Her own mother had died when she was seven years old and at the age of fourteen she had taken on the responsibility of running her father’s household. This had taught her financial prudence and to be a good manager – qualities that came in useful later when raising a family of seven on never quite enough money – but it also created a certain rigidity in her attitude to her children when they were growing up; an inflexibility that fuelled her daughters’ rebellious behaviour and their desire to shock.
From her father, Lady Redesdale had inherited definite opinions about health and diet, believing that the ‘good body’ would heal itself more effectively without the intervention of doctors or medicine. An early campaigner against refined sugar and white flour, she made sure that her children ate only wholemeal bread, baked to her recipe. Physically undemonstrative, she rarely exhibited