Like most girls of their class and generation, the sisters were educated at home. Lady Redesdale taught all her children until they were eight, after which the girls moved to the schoolroom to be instructed by governesses and Tom was sent away to boarding school. Nancy and Jessica blamed their mother for this lack of formal education, even though Lord Redesdale was just as opposed to sending his daughters to school. ‘Nothing would have induced him to waste money on anything so frivolous’, wrote Deborah. He also worried that they might develop thick calves from being made to play hockey. Neither parent believed that girls should be educated beyond basic literacy and regarded intellectual women as ‘rather dreadful’. The Redesdales’ views were not uncommon at the time but their children’s response was more unusual. Nancy’s bitterness at not having received what she considered a proper education was enduring and runs as a refrain throughout her correspondence. Jessica wrote that the dream of her childhood was to be allowed to go to school, and that her mother’s refusal to countenance it had burned into her soul.
It is questionable, however, whether the sisters would have been better educated had they gone away to school. At the time, fashionable establishments for girls taught social rather than intellectual skills, preparing pupils for marriage and the drawing-room rather than the workplace. When the Redesdales eventually allowed Nancy, at the age of sixteen, to go to Hatherop Castle, a small private school for girls from ‘suitable’ families, the mainly non-academic curriculum concentrated on music, dancing and French, whereas at home, the sisters were free to make use of their grandfather’s first-rate library and Nancy and Diana became bookworms at an early age. It was perhaps the boredom of being confined at home with only siblings for company that rankled with Jessica and Nancy as much as their lack of formal schooling. Not until they left home and had to earn a living – they were the only two sisters who did not marry rich men – did they have cause to view their rudimentary education as a handicap.
The age gap between the Mitford children meant that they formed almost two separate generations. In 1925, the year that opens this collection of letters, the older children, Nancy, Pamela, Tom and Diana, ranged between the ages of twenty-one and fifteen. The youngest three, Unity, Jessica and Deborah, were aged eleven, eight and five. Nancy had ‘come out’ when she was eighteen and had followed her first season as a debutante with three further years of weekend parties and balls. She had met the right people, made many friends and quite enjoyed herself, but she had failed to do the expected thing and find a husband. With very little money and no immediate prospects, she was living at home, taking out her frustration on her sisters. The three youngest looked up to her like a remote star: her vitality, cleverness and supreme funniness lit up the family atmosphere, as did her determination to turn everything into a joke, but she was too caustic and indiscreet to be the recipient of anyone’s confidences. In Unity’s copy of All About Everybody, a little book of printed questions that she asked her family and friends to fill in, Nancy put as her besetting sin ‘disloyalty’, a trait that could make her incomparably good company but an uncertain ally.
Nancy’s usual victim was Pamela, whose unguarded nature made her an obvious target for teasing. Diana, however, presented more of a challenge; she was fully Nancy’s intellectual equal, with just as determined a character, and was able to stand up to her sister’s bullying. Occasionally Nancy managed to exert her seniority and successfully torment her younger sister. When she was sixteen, she formed a company of Girl Guides, appointed herself captain and tried to make ten-year-old Diana salute her. On another occasion, she pretended to have heard the Redesdales discuss sending Diana to boarding school, an idea that filled her little sister with horror. But they both enjoyed reading, which drew them together, as did a similar sense of humour and a longing to escape the confinement of Swinbrook. As they grew up, they became, according to Diana, great friends. But underlying the friendship was a deep current of envy on Nancy’s part towards a younger sister who was already a great beauty and the instant centre of attention with the undergraduate friends that Nancy brought home. These feelings were exacerbated when Diana, aged eighteen, married the extremely rich and good-looking Bryan Guinness and became a sought-after London hostess.
Shortly before Diana’s engagement to Bryan in 1928, Pamela accepted a proposal of marriage from a neighbour of the Mitfords, Oliver Watney. The prospect of having two younger sisters married before she was may help to explain Nancy’s unwise decision to become unofficially engaged to Hamish St Clair-Erskine, a friend of Tom’s from Eton who was younger than her and homosexual. Her infatuation with Hamish dragged on for five unsatisfactory years, causing her a great deal of unhappiness. During this period she started to write her first articles for Vogue, and in 1930 was taken on as a regular contributor to cover social events for The Lady. This brought in a little pocket money, as did her first two novels, Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding, light satires on upper-class life that sketched out the world she would so successfully depict in her accomplished post-war novels.
Nancy used to say that the first three years of her life were perfect, ‘then a terrible thing happened, my sister Pamela was born’ which ‘threw me into a permanent rage for about 20 years’. Her affront at being supplanted in the nursery was compounded by an insensitive nanny who immediately shifted all her love and attention to the new baby. By the time Nancy was six and Pamela three, they might have overcome their differences and played together, had not Pamela contracted polio which affected her physical and mental development. She was in constant pain from an aching leg, and often tearful and sad. Her illness was doubtless a strain on Nancy: ‘you’ve got to be kind to Pam, she’s ill’, was dinned into her unceasingly. Instead of narrowing, as it normally would, the age gap between the two sisters widened. Pamela, who was the least able to defend herself, became Nancy’s scapegoat. She learnt to keep her head down and seems never to have shown any ill will towards her tormentor. She loved jokes as much as the rest of the family, and laughed about her own limitations, but she refused to retaliate or compete in the teasing. Her sisters nicknamed her ‘Woman’ because, like a symbolic character in a medieval Mystery Play, she epitomized the womanly virtues of simplicity and goodness. From her mother, she inherited dignity, common sense and the talent for making a comfortable home; from her father, a love of the countryside, where she was at her happiest. In 1925, when these letters begin, Pamela was a shy seventeen-year-old debutante, confiding to Diana her nervousness about going out into the world.
Unlike Nancy, who was a late developer and drew out her adolescence well into her twenties, Diana, by the time she was thirty, had been twice married, given birth to four sons and experienced the most eventful decade of her life. When these letters begin, she was a precocious fifteen-year-old, dreaming of independence. Her closest companion in the family, both in age and interests, was Tom, and when he was home for the holidays the two were inseparable. Diana admired her brother’s musical and intellectual talents and delighted in the company of his sophisticated friends. These glimpses of a world of art, music and intelligent conversation increased her yearning to escape the restrictive family atmosphere. The 1926 General Strike, sparked off by the grim working conditions in the coal mines, made a deep impression on her, kindling her social conscience and fostering a lifelong interest in politics. Whereas Nancy treated the national emergency as something of a joke and disguised herself as a tramp to frighten Pamela who was running a canteen serving food to strike-breaking lorry drivers, Diana felt the injustice of the miners’ situation acutely. Her interest in politics was also fuelled by visits to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s family home in Kent. Churchill’s wife, Clementine, was a first cousin of Lord Redesdale, and two