The Mitford Girls Read online

  After a decent interval Sydney, the new Lady Redesdale, moved into Batsford with her lively brood. David’s mother, Clementine, the dowager Lady Redesdale, tactfully moved to Redesdale Cottage in Northumberland.

  In 1917, when Sydney moved in, Batsford was rather different from how it had been on her first visit in 1894 when she had met David and been overwhelmed by light, warmth and exotic scents. With only the ailing elderly Redesdales in residence for some time, many of the huge rooms had been closed off and the furniture shrouded in dust covers. Wartime restrictions and lack of money meant things did not change when Sydney took over. She opened only those rooms essential to house her family in comfort.

  David’s father left an estate valued at £33,000 gross.1 After tax and other bequests David was left with just under £17,000. According to the Bank of England, this equates to a present-day monetary value of more than £600,000, although it must be said that the properties and chattels could not be purchased today for seven or eight times that amount. It was a useful inheritance, but most of it was not in cash but land and property in Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Redesdale in Northumberland, and the income was insufficient to run Batsford House and its estate.

  Bertie, the 1st Lord Redesdale, was said to have inherited a fortune from an uncle. In addition to this he had enjoyed a successful career heading the Board of Works under Disraeli for twelve years, and he had had royalties from several books, especially his runaway bestseller Memories, which detailed his life as a diplomat in Russia, China and latterly Japan. In fact, he had been successful at anything to which he turned his hand - eminent Victorian traveller, writer, linguist, yachtsman, senior civil servant, MP, garden designer, and horse breeder. Although he moved in the rather fast (and costly) circles of the Prince of Wales’ set there is no evidence that he was a notable spendthrift or gambler. It appears that, apart from a wife who had little concept of living within her allowance, he spent most of his fortune on demolishing a perfectly good Georgian house at Batsford in 1880, and building the Victorian Gothic mansion with its elaborate gardens, arboretum and huge stables that still occupies the site. From the start it was obvious to David and Sydney that Batsford would have to be sold, but they could not even consider doing so until after the war.

  Few women of her class were as financially prudent as Sydney but running the vast house with its five staircases on a limited budget must have taxed even her ingenuity. Although the family was technically better off because of David’s inheritance, they had merely swapped one form of relative poverty for another. Some of Sydney’s economies have gone down in family history, and one caused much merriment for it somehow made its way into the Daily Sketch under the headline, ‘Peeress Saves Ha’pence’ when she decided to save on the cost of washing, starching and ironing several dozen table napkins each day. Yet it was not ha’pence she was saving, but a considerable amount over a year, for the household would have used close to two hundred napkins a week. Napkin rings were unacceptable, and paper napkins unthinkable and expensive, so the family did without. She also provided hard, shiny Bromo lavatory paper, which discouraged any extravagance in that department. Further aid to the exchequer came when the four Norman children were boarded out at Batsford for the duration of the war because their parents, Ronald and Lady Florence, were anxious to get them out of London with the threat of Zeppelins. So the Mitford children had built-in companions, as well as the children in the village as playmates.

  At this point Unity was still a toddler in the sole charge of Nanny, but the others, Nancy (thirteen), Pam (ten), Tom (seven) and Diana (six), and the Norman children were all taught by a governess, Miss Mirams, in the schoolroom. David and Sydney were not alone in believing that it was unnecessary to educate girls beyond reading, writing and basic arithmetic to enable them to keep household books, French (essential for a well-bred girl), and enough geography and history to prevent them appearing ignorant in polite society. Music, needlework and deportment were also included. Only Tom was to go away for formal education and David made no financial allowance to educate the girls, assuming that Sydney would be responsible for this. Later, Sydney would herself teach her three younger children to read (they all had to be able to read aloud The Times leader by the age of six), and the basics of arithmetic, history and geography, before they joined the schoolroom at about eight. In those early days at Batsford, though, she was too busy to teach them, with the demands of a large, though well-staffed, house and a growing family as well as another pregnancy.

  On 11 September 1917, Sydney gave birth to her sixth child, another girl whom they called Jessica after Sydney’s mother, but the baby was known from the start as Decca. If there was ever any doubt about the relationship between David and Sydney, and the basis of their marriage, it is dispelled by a letter from Aunt Natty written a few weeks before the birth of Decca. Sydney, she writes, ‘is good - unselfish - beautiful - and she and her husband [are] the greatest lovers ...’2

  Miss Mirams, the second governess Sydney recruited, seems to have been something of a paragon. She taught the children in two groups, and in the early days Nancy, quick, bright and a voracious reader, was way ahead on her own. Pam, Tom and Diana formed a younger group with Sibell and Mark Norman. Pam, like David, was a slow learner and had difficulty even in keeping up with her two younger siblings. In later life dyslexia was diagnosed,3 but throughout her childhood Nancy and her younger sisters teased her about her slowness. However, the standard of Miss Mirams’ teaching became obvious when Tom applied for a place at Lockers Park Preparatory School. Many of the applicants would have had a conventional pre-prep education but Tom’s entrance exam marks resulted in his being placed in the highest new-boy form. Certainly, then, the education the girls received in the schoolroom was not sub-standard and Miss Mirams’ teaching was supplemented with exploration of the Batsford library, the repository of the remarkable book collection made by Bertie Redesdale throughout his adult life.

  To pay the governess’s salary of about £150 a year, and to fund the necessary books and teaching aids, Sydney set out to make money from eggs and honey, which she sold locally at first, but which later went up to London by train to smart clubs. She employed a full-time man to look after the five hundred hens, but she washed the eggs herself: ‘I never sell an unwashed egg,’ she told a visitor, and advised him that keeping chickens was no good as a project unless you knew what you were doing.4 Soft-shelled or cracked eggs were eaten by the family, the hens ate all kitchen waste, and when they became too old to lay they became ‘boiling fowl’. She managed the beehives herself, with the help of the redoubtable Miss Mirams. Other than to ensure the garden was well kept by the outside staff and produced sufficient fruit and vegetables for the kitchen, she was never much interested in it, and her hen-and-hive activities were merely a way of earning extra income. She always cleared a hundred pounds a year from her chickens, after expenses, and she tried to pass the ethic of prudent management on to her children. As soon as they were old enough they were all encouraged to keep chickens, pigs and even calves. They paid ‘rent’ to David for the land and stables, bought the feed from, and sold the produce to, the estate and were allowed to keep as pocket money any profits from their enterprise. Pam once fought her father over the matter of rent when she discovered at a tenants’ supper that she was paying more, pro rata, for her small piece of land than the local farmers on their commercial acreage. Pam shone at stock-rearing, Nancy was not interested, and Diana recalls that she did it as well as she could because it was her only source of pocket money.

  In 1918 Miss Mirams left and a succession of governesses followed her. Each summer a mademoiselle came to teach them French. During these visits only French was allowed to be spoken at the table, and Diana remembered that meals were often very quiet.5 Even when French was not the order of the day, mealtimes could be fraught. It was one of David’s foibles that he could not bear sloppiness and crumbs: spills irritated him beyond reasonable complaint, and since there were no
napkins to disguise the results of a moment of clumsiness the children learned to be extra careful. Woe betide the child or unwary guest who dropped a spot of soup on ‘the good tablecloth’ or inadvertently scraped a knife across ‘the good plate’.6 The child would be yelled at, the guest (depending on status) glared at or David would explode to himself, not quite sotto voce, ‘Filthy beast!’

  In 1918 Tom went off to boarding school aged eight. He was never homesick or bullied, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Perhaps in comparison with the teasing and bullying by his sisters at home prep school seemed tame. He particularly appreciated being allowed to eat sausages every day for breakfast. In the Mitford home the only person allowed this pork product was David, and naturally the children ‘longed’ for anything forbidden them. Tom’s letters home lingered on this treat, a good tease on his sisters. Sometimes, though, Mabel the parlourmaid would take a chance and retrieve a leftover sausage as a treat for the girls who ‘danced around the pantry with a delicious end of a congealing sausage’, Debo recalled.7

  When the war ended there was general rejoicing but there was a sting in the tail for the Mitford children. They had hoped the war would go on for ever for they had been told repeatedly that when it was over Batsford would have to be sold because they were too poor to live there. Almost their last memory of life at Batsford was a fête held by Sydney to raise funds for wounded soldiers. Just before it was due to be opened Sydney looked at her white elephant stall and thought it was understocked. She rushed into the house and began to gather ‘odds and ends’ to fill up the gaps. Most of these were priceless Oriental antiques brought back from the Far East by Bertie. David and the children managed to buy a few back, but the rest were snapped up by villagers and antiques dealers for coppers. The children learned from this: in subsequent years when it came near the time for summer fêtes they hid their toys.

  In 1919 Batsford was sold, and David bought Asthall Manor near the Cotswold village of Swinbrook in Oxfordshire. He never intended the house to be their permanent home for he owned some hillside land on the other side of, and overlooking, Swinbrook, where he planned eventually to build a house for his family close to his pheasant coverts. But far from pining for Batsford, Sydney and the children fell in love with Asthall, a generous Jacobean gabled manor house, in a gentle green valley amid rolling hills. Only David, Pam and Diana were made uneasy by the ghosts of Asthall, for no one else appeared to see or sense them, or if they did they ignored them like the family in The Canterville Ghost. The haunting took several manifestations: footsteps could be heard at night on the paving stones around the house, and sometimes the trickle and drip-drip of non-existent water. The nursery windows overlooked the churchyard, and although they were forbidden to watch funerals, they did. It was fertile soil in which Nancy could plant her own brand of scary ghost stories. Once, Decca and Debo fell into a newly dug grave and Nancy told them it meant ‘bad luck, forever’.8

  The elder children agreed that the best thing of all was the library. It was housed in a converted barn linked to the main house by a covered way, which they called ‘the cloisters’, and contained a good collection of books from Grandfather Redesdale’s library at Batsford. The volumes had been chosen mainly by ten-year-old Tom, at his father’s request, for David did not feel competent to make the selection himself. Furnished with comfortable armchairs and a grand piano, it was a desirable place to the children for they were hardly ever bothered by grown-ups there, and provided they behaved reasonably, replaced any books where they found them, and did not make too much mess, they were left alone. On the other hand, if they tried to read a book in the house, Nancy once said, it was almost guaranteed to attract a remark from David such as, ‘If you’ve got nothing to do run down to the village and tell Hooper . . .’ Hooper, called by the children ‘Hoops’ or ‘Choops’, was the groom, much loved by Pam and Debo despite a fearsome temper which, Sydney later told them, was due to shell-shock and bad experiences during the First World War. ‘When Bobo once did something to annoy him, something with one of the ponies,’ Debo wrote, ‘he yelled at her, “I’ll take yer in that wood and do for yer!”’9

  The old Lords of the Manor of Swinbrook were the Fettiplaces. They had bought the estate in 1504 and their manor house was said to be ‘one of the glories of Elizabethan England’. The family died out at the end of the eighteenth century, and the manor was purchased by a Mr Freeman of London. He lived quietly enough according to locals but he was, in fact, an infamous masked highwayman who even stooped to robbing his own guests as they rode home. Apprehended by Bow Street Runners, he was hanged at Tyburn in 1806; his estate became Crown property and the glorious manor house was demolished. Earl (the uncle from whom ‘Bertie’ inherited his fortune, but not the title of earl) Redesdale bought the Swinbrook estate, sans manor house, in 1810 for its sporting interests, and did little beyond collecting rents on the farms, building a few cottages and using the property for shooting parties.

  When David inherited it, the village of Swinbrook was no more than a hamlet of 150 souls. Apart from a scattering of cottages built of honey-coloured stone and a few farmhouses, mostly owned by the estate, it consisted of the twelfth-century church, a village school, the Swan Inn on the very edge of the village, and the shop, which doubled as a post office and ‘sold four kinds of sweets - toffee, acid drops, Edinburgh rock and butterscotch’.10 Acid drops cost a penny-ha’penny a quarter, were weighed on the same brass scale as letters, and were sold in squares of paper deftly twisted into a cone by the postmistress.

  Apart from the closure of the village shop, little has changed, and Swinbrook today still has a timeless, left-over-from-yesteryear ambience. Its narrow lanes, leading to the tiny village green, are still bordered with willows, beeches and silver birch, and in the spring its verges are full of primroses and blue cranes-bill. The rolling hills are dotted with sheep and, apart from the occasional car passing through - there are faster routes to the comparative metropolis of Shipton-under-Wychwood than via Swinbrook - the prevailing sounds are birdsong, sheep, the trickle and splash of water from myriad streams, the shrieks of swallows and house-martins wheeling furiously overhead, and the far-off echoing ring of a horse’s hoofs on a paved road. As a child Decca always thought that when William Blake penned, ‘. . . up in the sky the little birds fly, and the hills are all covered with sheep . . .’ he was writing about Swinbrook.11

  When they moved to Asthall the family was almost complete, but Sydney had one final attempt at producing another son, and in 1920, when she was forty, her seventh and last child was born. As usual David was present at the birth, and as he came out of the room Mabel the parlourmaid was waiting anxiously for news. ‘One look at His Lordship’s face,’ she said in later years, ‘told me everything.’ It was another girl. They called the baby Deborah, quickly shortened to Debo. Many years later Mabel would gloat that ‘His Lordship’s face was like thunder. I don’t think anyone looked at Miss Debo for three months . . . but she came up trumps in the end, didn’t she?’12 In the meantime, Nancy saw a tease in the situation. For years she tormented Debo with the line, ‘Everyone cried when you were born.’ She was sixteen, and Sydney asked her to be godmother to the new baby, fearing that she herself might not live to see Debo grow up. Pam was now thirteen, Tom eleven, Diana ten. Unity was six, and Jessica three.

  As well as attending lessons, the older children rode out every day except Sunday with Captain Collinson, the agent, or Hooper. Although most of the children regarded Hooper as a grumpy old devil, Pam always referred to him as ‘Hoops. Sweet Hoops ...’13 David could no longer ride: in the early days at Asthall his horse had reared up and fell on him, breaking his pelvis and afterwards riding became too uncomfortable. Sydney, who as a débutante had been a keen rider, had long ago given it up, but Nancy, Diana and, later, Debo were good horsewomen, and hunted side-saddle with the local pack of foxhounds, the Heythrop. They were joined by any visiting cousins on the daily rides, Rosemary and Clementine Mitford (daughters of the late
Uncle Clement), for example, who often stayed at Asthall while their mother spent the winter in the Sudan, where her second husband was a government game warden. ‘I remember riding a huge horse as a small child,’ Clementine wrote, recalling a less than happy incident sixty-five years earlier when she was eight and Nancy was eighteen, ‘and Nancy and Pam cantering ahead; Nancy looking like a Constantin Guys drawing, and Pam - not so glamorous but kinder to poor me. And Hooper, so disapproving (almost like a male Blor) I suppose because my riding clothes were all wrong. I remember the torture and embarrassment of the stirrup leathers biting into one’s legs because I was wearing socks and thin knickers ...’14

  Neither Tom, Unity nor Decca ever took to hunting, though Diana tried patiently to teach Decca to trot round a field on her little pony Joey. On Sundays they all went out coursing with David and one of his brothers, ‘Uncle Tommy’, who came to luncheon and brought his whippet. They enjoyed these physically active days, beating through fields of winter crops to put up hares. When one jumped up, the whippet and David’s lurcher would be unleashed, while David and Uncle Tommy leaned on their thumb-sticks and watched with countrymen’s interest in venery. Since Sydney would never allow hares to be eaten, the children could never think what happened to those killed by the hounds after David popped them into the hare pockets he had designed into all his country clothes. Probably they were presented to his workers or tenants.

  The children’s enjoyment of field sports, which bred in most of them a oneness with the annual rhythms of their environment, did not stretch to condoning the traps set in the pheasant coverts by David’s gamekeeper, Steele, who regarded anything that was not a pheasant as ‘vermin’. As well as stoats, weasels and foxes, the bloody victims of these monstrous contraptions sometimes included hedgehogs, badgers and even the occasional feral cat. All the children made it a point of honour to visit the traps regularly and spring the captives, to the fury of the gamekeeper whom they all hated.