The Mitford Girls Read online

  One of David’s dogs was a bloodhound and the major participant in a favourite game they called ‘child hunt’ in which the hound would hunt ‘the cold boot’. The quarry, or the ‘hares’ - as the participating children were called - were given a head start and would set off running across fields, laying as difficult a trail as possible by running in circles, through ‘fouled’ land such as fields containing sheep or cattle, and crossing and recrossing streams. When they could run no more they would stop and sit down while they waited for the hound to find them. Invariably the hound would then jump all over them while licking their faces before ‘poor old Farv’, red-faced from pursuit, caught up to reward the animal with pieces of raw meat.

  In a televised version of one of Nancy’s books, these child hunts were given a more sinister connotation with the children running terrified through woods while their father, on horse-back, thundered after them with a pack of hounds baying. In fact the children loved it - they thought the hound was ‘so clever’.29 In her novel Nancy had referred to ‘four great hounds in full cry after two little girls’ and ‘Uncle Matthew and the rest would follow on horseback’.30 As a result, fiction overlaid fact,and during research for this book I met people who believed, and read articles that stated, that the Mitfords led the lives of the fictional Radletts, and at least one American journalist was convinced that David had ‘hunted’ his poor abused children with dogs.

  There was never any pressure to conform and the children grew as they wanted. There were no half-measures in their behaviour. ‘We either laughed so uproariously that it drove the grown-ups mad, or else it was a frightful row which ended in one of us bouncing out of the room in floods of tears, banging the door as loud as possible.’31

  Sydney’s role at this stage in the children’s lives appears less involved than David’s, at least as far as the children’s memories go, but it was she who drove them around in a cart called ‘the float’. It had enormous thin wheels and Diana recalls that when they came to a hill the children were made to get out and walk, to spare the horse.32 Sydney enjoyed living in the country, though she took no direct part in field sports. After her marriage, there is no record of her shooting or hunting, though as a girl she rode well and often, and when she accompanied her father to Scotland in 1898 she was regarded as ‘a brilliant shot’.33 As they grew up she encouraged her children to follow the hounds of the Heythrop Hunt and join their father when he fished and shot, but if they were not interested she was unconcerned. Many of her friends would have said she was a countrywoman, but she enjoyed London too.

  In the same year that Sydney rented Old Mill Cottage for the first time, 1911, Pamela, who was not quite four years old, caught poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis. There was no known successful treatment then for this frightening disease and it was as much feared by parents then as meningitis is today. It was often a killer, and those children who survived were usually crippled for life. Pam’s illness must have severely tested Sydney’s unconventional theories on doctors and nursing. She had inherited her strongly held opinions from her father, who believed that doctors and medications usually did more harm than good, and that, left to its own devices, the body would heal itself. Possibly Tap’s lack of confidence in doctors stemmed from a bitter experience: he arrived home from work one day to find his wife, Jessica, dying, following an abortion performed by her doctor in the belief that for her to continue with her four-month pregnancy (her fifth child) would prove fatal.34

  As part of the regime for keeping the ‘good body’ in good order Tap Bowles had decreed a number of unfashionable rules for his motherless children. The system had worked admirably, and Sydney saw no reason to adopt an alternative one for her own children. Most of the rules concerned regular exercise and personal hygiene, and were merely common sense, but others perplexed the children’s carers by defying received childcare practices. The children were to have no medication of any kind - not even a weekly dose of ‘something to keep them regular’; no vaccination (‘pumping disgusting dead germs into the Good Body!’); their bedroom windows were always to be open six inches, winter and summer. Other dictates seemed positively eccentric: they were never to eat pork products, rabbit, hare or shellfish (the laws given in the Pentateuch, ‘as dictated by Moses in the Old Testament’),35 nor be allowed to eat between meals; nor were they ever to be forced to eat anything they did not want to eat - one child ate nothing but mashed potatoes for two years.36 Sydney was not alone in adopting unusual health ethics. She and her brother Geoffrey, ‘Uncle Geoff ’, composed letters to the newspapers on ‘murdered food’ (refined white sugar and flour with the wheatgerm removed). Uncle Geoff was convinced that England’s decline was connected to a reduction in the use of natural fertilizers on the soil and was violently opposed to pasteurized milk. The children found his writings on the subject and his letters to The Times causes for hilarity (really, it was too embarrassing to have an uncle who wrote to the newspapers about manure, and expounded further in his book Writings of a Rebel ).

  During Pam’s illness, however, Sydney overrode her theories and called in one doctor after another, six in all. It was only after being told there was little that could be done for the desperately sick child that she reverted to the one medical practitioner both Tap and she trusted. He was a Swede called Dr Kellgren, and an osteopath rather than a qualified doctor.37 His treatments consisted of massage and exercise, an early form of intense physiotherapy (which pre-dated Elizabeth Kenny’s groundbreaking treatments for polio). The treatment he gave Pamela worked: other than a slight weakness in one leg during her childhood she made a complete recovery.

  At about this time David hit on a scheme to end their financial problems. With his growing family, their limited income must have been the cause of constant worry to him. Stories of the rich strikes in the Klondike a decade earlier, perhaps bolstered by his spell of active service in South Africa, seem to have persuaded him that gold-mining might be the answer. On hearing that a new goldfield had been discovered in Ontario, he staked several claims to forty acres near the small township of Swastika, in the Great Lakes area. Only small quantities of gold had been found there so far, but a big seam was believed to exist.

  Over the next twenty years or so, David would travel to Ontario many times to work the claim. He had already been there alone when, in the spring of 1912, he and Sydney decided to go together and - the biggest treat—they were to sail on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Fortunately, something happened to make this impossible, and their departure was delayed until autumn of the following year. There, Sydney and David lived in a sturdy, well-built wooden cabin, which they called ‘the shack’. It was basic but it had everything they needed. There were no staff and Sydney did everything herself, including cooking and pumping the water by hand. She even made her own bread, and continued to do this for the remainder of her life.38 David, photographed in corduroy knickerbockers, canvas gaiters, warm workmanlike shirt and a leather waistcoat, enjoyed the time he spent there. It was a tough, masculine environment and he felt at home with the miners, who treated him with respect and taught him how to crack a stock-whip that he had been given by an Australian miner. He worked hard and found tiny traces of gold; just enough to keep him enthusiastic. Meanwhile, there was a massive strike on a neighbouring property owned by Harry Oakes, a prospector who had been mining unsuccessfully for some years. The Tough-Oakes mine proved the biggest gold mine in Canada, and was a mile or so to the east of David’s land, at Kirkland Lake. Oakes purchased a lakeshore claim and burrowed under the lake after his landlady told him about tiny nuggets and flakes of gold she had seen in the streams as a child. He struck gold almost immediately and issued half a million shares at thirty-five cents each. Within two years each share was worth seventy dollars and Oakes had kept the majority for himself.39

  It is not difficult to see why David remained keen, although the mining project eventually came to nothing. Furthermore, he and Sydney were at their closest in the shack at Swastika
through the winter in that inhospitable climate, and it was one of the happiest times of David’s life. It was there that Sydney conceived their fifth child.

  When the couple returned to London it was to a slightly larger house at 49 Victoria Road, off Kensington High Street. The new baby was born there, in August 1914, four days after Herbert Asquith declared war to cheering crowds gathered at Downing Street. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, David had been on the point of leaving for his gold mine in Canada, but as he watched the situation deteriorate he became anxious to ‘do his bit’. Although he had been classified as permanently unfit because he had only one lung, and knowing it was unlikely he would be allowed to see action, he nevertheless rejoined his old regiment. On 8 August he got a twelve-hour leave, and the latest addition to his family obliged by being born while he was at home.40 It was a girl. The parents, still hoping for a second boy, were disappointed, but soon came round. There was time for another boy. In David’s absence Sydney called her Unity after an actress (Unity Moore) she admired,41 and then Grandfather Redesdale said that she must have a topically apposite second name so they added Valkyrie, after Wagner’s Norse war-maidens. Almost from the time of her birth she was known in family circles as ‘Bobo’, but with hindsight, Unity Valkyrie’s unusual name, combined with the place of her conception, Swastika, seems almost like an eerie prophecy which the fifth Mitford child had no alternative but to fulfil.

  At the time, though, all that the family thought of was the onset of the Great War. While Sydney was lying-in at Victoria Road, the children were sitting on the balcony of Grandfather Redesdale’s town house looking down on troops of men marching along Kensington High Street on their way to the slaughterhouse that lay in France. Nancy recalled that she was a miniature tricoteuse, knitting an ‘endless scarf ’ in wool of a disagreeable shade of purple, ‘for a soldier’. All the children did this knitting, even Tom - and the entire nation felt personally involved in the war.

  Within a short time David had managed to persuade the doctors that he was fit enough to be sent to the front as one of a group of sorely needed officer reinforcements for the regiment’s 1st Battalion. Before he left, and with his previous experience of war in mind, he set up an elaborate code so that Sydney could learn the most up-to-date news in a seemingly casual letter, merely from the manner and punctuation of the way he addressed her, or mentioned various fictional family members. For example, ‘Tell this to Nelly’, meant ‘We are marching north.’

  He returned home unexpectedly on embarkation leave to find his house strangely quiet. As usual during August Sydney had taken the children to spend the month with their grandfather Bowles in a rented cottage on the south coast, overlooking the Solent and the Isle of Wight.42 However, the cook had received disturbing news by that morning’s post. The cottage had been burned to the ground during the previous night and though she was expecting Mrs Mitford back later that day she was unable to tell David whether anyone had been hurt. Fortunately, they had escaped unscathed with only the loss of Diana’s teddy bear (a great sadness to her), but it must have been a traumatic few hours for David while he waited for the family’s return to London by train.

  In subsequent years Nanny Blor usually took the children to her family home at the seaside resort of Bexhill in Sussex, to spend part of the summer months. Sometimes they stayed at the neighbouring town of Hastings with St Leonards where Nanny’s twin sister43 lived. During these holidays the children enjoyed climbing ‘the perilous cliffs’, and ‘the scrumptious teas of brandy snaps, shop-butter, biscuits and marmalade’.44 More than seventy years later Debo still recalls the delight of the sea, waves and sand to children brought up in the country. They bathed daily in the icy waters of the English Channel, with Nanny sitting waiting for them, wearing her beige cotton gloves. ‘The comforting feel of holding her hand in its fabric glove is with me now, a refuge in time of trouble,’ Debo wrote. ‘She waited with striped bathing towels stretched out, wrapping [us], rubbing the sand into our mauve arms and legs, which was part of the sensation of well-being after bathing. We were rewarded with a Huntley and Palmer’s ginger biscuit and a hot drink out of the ever-present Thermos.’45

  David’s first spell at the front ended in January 1915 when he suffered a complete breakdown of health, no doubt due to the effect of the cold and rain of that first winter of the war on his one remaining lung. He was invalided home and it was there, while he was recovering, in the early spring that he received terrible news. His elder brother, the family’s golden child, Clement, had been killed in the fighting within a month of being awarded the DSO. Everyone was distraught with grief and Pam, who was about seven at the time, always recalled her father weeping openly at the news. She had not realized until then that grown-ups could cry. Clement left a three-year-old daughter Rosemary, and a young widow, Helen, just three months pregnant with her second child. If it was a boy, he would be heir to the Redesdale title. If it was a girl, David would inherit, but he, like the rest of his family, was so devastated by loss that it is almost certain he gave little thought to what this would mean to him in pecuniary terms. In any case his father was very much alive and expected to remain so for many years.

  Once he recovered from his infection David was determined to return to the front. He knew that the Army was desperate for officers because the life expectancy of a junior officer at the front was so short. With his experience and service record he managed again to get himself passed fit. He was appointed transport officer to the 2nd Battalion and shortly after he rejoined his regiment in France the second battle of Ypres began. Every night, and often twice a night, he had to get supplies through to his battalion on the other side of the town of Ypres, which was under constant heavy bombardment. David’s method was to quicken the pace of the horses as they approached the town and lead the wagons through Ypres at full gallop until they were clear of the Menin Gate. His men worked in two shifts but David refused any relief and personally accompanied every convoy, for which he was mentioned in dispatches. Not only was his battalion never without its supplies, but remarkably David never lost a man. Although his children do not recall him mentioning the war in later years, he did say modestly to a fellow officer that although no one could call his work ‘a picnic . . . it was of course a very soft job compared with the trenches’.46

  In October 1915 David and Sydney learned that Clement’s posthumous child was a girl, named Clementine.47 David became his father’s heir but it made little obvious difference to him, absorbed in the fight, and in contact with normal family life only by letters and occasional periods of leave.

  Several letters, written by Nancy to her father in France, survive. She had been learning French after David’s mother told Sydney, ‘There is nothing so inferior as a gentlewoman who has no French.’ In her first attempt at writing to him in French, in April 1916, Nancy tells him of a robin’s nest in their garden, that she had heard a cuckoo, and about her pet goat: ‘Ma chèvre est très bonne, elle aime beaucoup le soleil, et elle mange les chous que je lui donnes’. David’s delightful response is in verse:

  Unusual things have come to pass

  A goat gets praised for eating grass!

  A robin in a tree has built!

  The coo coo has not changed its lilt!

  And I have no desire to quench

  My child’s desire for learning French -

  Might I ask without being rude,

  Who pays the bill for Bon Chèvre’s food?

  Are cabbages for goats war diet?

  Or are they given to keep her quiet.

  His letters to his children, written in a tidy script, were always laced with fun, and he obviously took with good humour the numerous nicknames they bestowed on him such as ‘jolly old Farve of Victoria Road’ and ‘Toad’ or ‘Toad-catcher’. In turn he had pet names for his children: he called Nancy ‘my little Blob-nose’, or more often ‘Koko’ after the character from Mikado, because he considered that her high cheekbones, dark curly hair and green ey
es gave her a slightly oriental look.

  Sydney was able to meet David on at least one occasion while he was on leave in Paris. Her news was worrying: with the loss of his salary from the Lady, she found it difficult to manage on her allowance and his Army pay. Then her father wrote to say that, due to increased taxation, he had no alternative but to reduce her allowance. Fortunately, Lord Redesdale came to the rescue with the offer of a house on his land at Batsford. It was called Malcolm House and was next to the church. Sydney was not enthusiastic about moving to the deeply rural part of Gloucestershire, but she could not bear the thought of debt. The London house was let and the children were delighted to be living in ‘the real country’ at last.

  It was while the children were visiting their grandfather that six-year-old Diana developed appendicitis. Sydney had no option but to call in a doctor for what was a potentially fatal condition. Appendectomy was still regarded as highly dangerous and the surgery had to be performed ‘on the kitchen table’. Put to bed in one of the guest bedrooms, the patient made a rapid recovery, thanks - she suggests - to the comfort and luxury of her surroundings.

  Shortly after this the children saw seventy-nine-year-old Grandfather Redesdale for the last time. He was very ill and yellow with jaundice. He died in August 1916, his death undoubtedly hastened by the loss of Clement on whom he had pinned all his hopes for the future.

  David now became the 2nd Lord Redesdale. Eight months later he was invalided home again, this time suffering from extreme exhaustion. As he convalesced the Army, recognizing his service record and his new responsibilities, gave him a home posting. He was made assistant provost marshal, based in Oxford from where he could travel to Batsford by motorcycle in an hour, a journey he made once a week.

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  NURSERY DAYS (1915-22)