Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (18 page)

It was to Diana’s credit, really, that a near-infinite supply of money and adoration was not enough for her. She had not wanted Bryan because he was so rich (as she exclaimed, with some glee, ‘I became terribly poor when I left him!’
³
– although this was the relative poverty of Eaton Square). Like Nancy, in fact like all the Mitford girls, she lacked that particular hard-headed quality. She had married because Bryan represented a new world, and perhaps because her parents’ opposition had pushed her into it. They had been right to say that she was too young, but it probably would have made no difference. Straightforward contentment was always going to be too easy for such a woman, who had been given every blessing without the obligation of payment.

II

In February 1932, the
Sunday Graphic
reported: ‘A young writer who will shortly be back in London is Miss Nancy Mitford who in a week or two’s time will have completed her new novel [
Christmas Pudding
]. She tells me that she finds it easier to write in the country, and probably more amusing, since her mother, Lady Redesdale, gave a ball last week for her youngest sister [sic], who rejoices in the name of Unity Valkyrie. Lady Redesdale does not share her daughter’s talent for writing, but she is an excellent baker...’

The first dance for Unity was held at Swinbrook, just over five months before the Cheyne Walk ball. She made her debut at the start of what would be a tumultuous year, the one that set everything off for the Mitfords: the calamities, the tragedies, the fame, the myth. But it all seemed normal enough when the next daughter in line made her expected emergence into society. If this particular girl was a little different – lacking the attractions of Nancy, the placidity of Pam, the beauty of Diana – that was just the way it was. The debutante mothers may have whispered over the teacups about Sydney Redesdale’s difficulties – four girls ‘out’, only one married, Nancy
almost
thirty
my dear and now this giant daughter like something out of Norse mythology – but nothing, as yet, had gone cataclysmically wrong.

Descriptions of Unity as a girl differ. Jessica recalled her as sulky and moody; John Betjeman as lively and humorous; a fellow schoolgirl as ‘really a suicide, she was so self-destructive’. The family parlourmaid, Mabel, said that she was ‘awful to Miss Hussey’, one of the Mitford governesses; yet Miss Hussey remembered Unity with compassionate affection: ‘she had a look of a little St Joan of Arc which I’ve never forgotten.’ As Deborah – who admitted to her own bewilderment – wrote many years later: ‘Perhaps it is too easy to say that she was inexplicable, but it is a fact.’ There is a certain amount of wisdom after the event in some memories of Unity, exaggeration or over-analysis of her oddities. As with a murderer who is subsequently described as ‘a loner... a bit of an obsessive’ – traits that would probably not be remarked upon in a law-abiding person – so one can look at Unity’s bizarre pets, her double expulsion from school, and see therein the seeds of lunacy; notwithstanding the facts that Deborah owned a pet goat, she too was unable to cope with formal education, and nobody was ever more sane than she.

Certainly Unity could be a disruptive presence at home (as indicated by the persistent attempts to send her to school). She was not necessarily loud – in fact she had a predilection for ‘dumb insolence’, particularly when under the watch of her father’s critical and fastidious eye. David’s tendency to flare up over small things would have been exacerbated, in turn, by Unity’s habits (such as sliding under the table at mealtimes). And even in those large houses she was as inescapable as a piece of garden statuary cluttering up the hallway. Her sullenness had a funny side; on one occasion her mother, taking on teaching duties, read out a passage and asked Unity to recount it for her, which for some reason she refused to do. Did she not remember a
single word
of the passage, coaxed Sydney? Just one word? All right, said Unity: ‘The.’ And her letters give off an extraordinary vivacity, almost as if trying to contain the Mitfordian excess of personality. An interesting side issue is Miss Hussey’s recollection of Unity’s talent for art. ‘She did drawings and paintings rather like Blake. Such imagination.’ The Mitford girls were gifted to varying degrees, in various ways, and Unity later attended art college in London (at Sickert’s old school). Yet the outlet this offered, the putative channel for her frustrations, was insufficient; or possibly it came at the wrong time. In the end she made one of her clever collages for that other painter manqué, Adolf Hitler.

From the age of twelve or so, Jessica could be similarly difficult, although this was not really recognized in the same way, perhaps because her neat entrancing prettiness – she was the smallest of the sisters – made her less overwhelming. Unity was a huge girl, nearly six feet tall, handsome but with bad teeth from her mashed-potatoes diet: she had two grey fillings at the front. She was like Diana’s gawky, slightly misshapen twin: ‘shy, farouche, the features exaggerated by a bigger face, more chin’.
⁴
was a contemporary judgment. But the newspapers, which handed out judgments on the debs in a prim variant of the
Daily Mail
’s ‘sidebar of shame’, were complimentary. ‘I thought that the prettiest girl at Epsom was Hon Unity Mitford,’ the
Daily Express
pronounced after the 1932 Derby. This was almost certainly not the case. There was, in fact, already a sense in which Unity had been singled out for notice because she was a Mitford sister.

It was in 1932 that John Betjeman wrote his oddly touching little ditty, ‘The Mitford Girls! the Mitford Girls, I love them for their sins...’ He was like the young poet in Muriel Spark’s
The Girls of Slender Means
, whose imagination is struck by the configurative aspect of a group of young women in a genteel London boarding house; and by one in particular, who symbolizes the whole. For Betjeman the one was Pamela (‘most rural of them all’). She was then living at Biddesden, where Betjeman was a frequent visitor. The end of her engagement to Oliver Watney had seen her at a loose end, rather subdued, carted about abroad with her parents as an obviously unmarried daughter. She went to Canada with her father (more prospecting) and to St Moritz with the family. At home she bred Border terriers and advertised them for sale in
The Times.
In some ways she was the most satisfactory of the sisters, in that she gave no trouble, but – as with Nancy – she still embodied the dread question: what does a girl do if she fails to marry? It was terrible, really, how little had changed in the hundred-plus years since Charlotte Lucas was obliged to thank God for Mr Collins.

But Pam solved the problem herself, for a while, by suggesting to Bryan Guinness that she manage his 350 acres of dairy farm. He instantly agreed – he was fond of Diana’s sisters; perhaps, like his fellow poet Betjeman, he responded to the collective picture that they presented
⁵
– and provided her with a cottage on the estate. ‘Miss Pam’, as the dairy workers called her, presented to the susceptible Betjeman an image of timeless countrified calm. She was attractive – again a version of Diana, but mixed with something passive and ovine; she had little of the Mitford spark but, in her unaware way, all its mysterious charm. ‘Woman’, the sisters’ nickname, was an apt joke. ‘My thoughts are still with Miss Pam,’ Betjeman told Diana in February 1932. ‘I have been seeing whether a little absence makes the heart grow fonder and, my God, it does. Does Miss Pam’s heart still warm towards that ghastly Czechoslovakian Count?’ This was in fact a Russian named Serge Orloff, no more than a friend according to Pam, although Nancy (typically) claimed that Pam ‘didn’t play her cards very well’ with him. Betjeman harped on Orloff a little and gave up his pursuit. He had proposed to Pam twice. She later said that she had been very fond of him, but not in love; so ‘I rather declined’. In 1932 he wrote to Nancy, whom he liked enormously: ‘If Pamela Mitford refuses me finally, you might marry me – I’m rich, handsome and aristocratic.’ Almost forty years later, when he received his knighthood, Nancy sent cheerful congratulations, saying: ‘If I had accepted your invitation – “Since Miss Pam won’t marry me I think you had better” – I should now be a lady. Alas too late.’
⁶
She liked him too. His love of Victoriana, an eccentricity in the 1920s, was one of the running jokes in
Highland Fling
, and the hesitant young writer in
Christmas Pudding
was based on him. Their relationship was light, generous and a significant counterbalance to the evidence suggesting that Nancy was a repository of spite. ‘How nice and clever we all are,’ she wrote to him, in reply to his letter praising
The Pursuit of Love.
(‘I am proud to know you’, he had said.)

Betjeman’s description of Biddesden is a veritable heaven. ‘It was a sort of Oxford set, we used to see things as an endless party.’ The three-storey building, formal and exquisite as its chatelaine, was the backdrop to what might have been a series of tableaux from an antique home movie: Bryan Guinness doing conjuring tricks, Unity and Betjeman singing evangelical hymns, Diana sitting for a portrait by Henry Lamb, Pamela in riding breeches with her herd of cows.

Lytton Strachey was also part of the Biddesden scene. Although homosexual, he too had fallen under Diana’s spell. Their first meeting came at a post-opera supper held by Emerald Cunard, who had offered him a seat next to the renowned beauty Lady Diana Cooper. ‘I want to sit next to the other Diana,’ he had said, perhaps in a spirit of perversity, but as she later wrote ‘we flew together like iron filings & magnet.’ Her hunger for learning, which her childhood had stimulated but not fulfilled, made Strachey a perfect companion at this stage in life. ‘Partly because of him I grew up quickly.’ In fact she gracefully gave the impression that she was his acolyte. Diana was never arrogant about her own ability to attract.

Strachey had a house near to Biddesden – Ham Spray – that was home to a typically Bloomsbury set-up comprising Dora Carrington, her husband and her husband’s lover. Although entirely broad-minded Diana had nothing Bloomsbury about her. She would never, as they did, equate free-spiritedness with grubby living: ‘The poorest peasant in central Europe would refuse to put up with such discomfort as they did.’ Carrington (as she was always called) was hopelessly in love with Strachey, but rather than competing with Diana became a good friend. She was a frequent visitor to Biddesden, where she created a surprise painting on a window for the birth of Diana’s son Desmond. After a visit in 1931 she wrote to Strachey that she had met ‘3 sisters and Mama Redesdale. The little sisters [Jessica and Deborah] were ravishingly beautiful, and another of sixteen [Unity] very marvellous, and grecian. I thought the mother was rather remarkable, very sensible and no upper-class graces...’

‘I imagined I knew her intimately,’ Diana later wrote of Carrington, ‘but this was mere illusion.’ She had not realized the strength of Carrington’s feelings for Strachey – ‘Only Lytton counted’ – and regretted that her friend’s considerable talent as a painter was subsumed into that strange and overriding passion, which was soon to enter its last act. By 1931 Strachey had become very ill, with typhoid on top of an inoperable cancer. He died in January 1932, after which Carrington tried to gas herself. She then asked Bryan whether she could borrow a gun, to which he agreed only reluctantly, although he was reassured when she visited him for a picnic in March and wrote a happy thank-you letter: ‘You never realize how much I love my visits to Biddesden.’ A few days later she shot herself. Bryan, who felt immense if irrational guilt, was consoled by Diana, who in turn was devastated. She had been in London when it happened. On 21 February she had attended a lunch party, where she had been placed between one of the Rothschild family and Sir Oswald Mosley, whom she knew by sight but now spoke to properly for the first time. Years later, writing about the Ham Spray ménage
,
she said that the strains within it had been palpable: ‘Yet to me there was also a feeling of permanence, perhaps only because to the young the idea that the present is transient seldom occurs.’
⁷
With the death of Strachey and Carrington, the transience of the idyll at Biddesden was soon to be apparent.

For Unity, too, it was an enchanted place, one that revealed her own capacity for happiness. Betjeman – who always called her ‘Unity Valkyrie’ – remembered her as ‘a joyful version of Miss Pam’, with the idiosyncratic Mitford way of speaking. She loved communal games like Grandmother’s Footsteps – Betjeman recalled playing Statues on the lawn at Ham Spray – and had a fascination with film stars (she would watch entire programmes at the Empire Leicester Square, two or three times in a row). ‘Unity Valkyrie
was
funny,’ he said, wholly unembarrassed by the affection in which he had held her, ‘she had a lot of humour which doesn’t come out in the accounts of her.’

In May 1932 Unity was presented at Buckingham Palace, and wrote happily about it to Diana – ‘it was great fun waiting in the Mall’. Diana had given her a grey and white dress by Norman Hartnell (a far cry from Gladys the maid) as well as a fur coat, gloves, the lot. ‘I was entirely dressed by you.’ There is no real sense of Unity as an uneasy or reluctant debutante. She would have known – girls do – that she was not physically equipped to be a great favourite with nervous young Englishmen, who would inevitably prefer something smaller and more conventional, but she had a few partners nonetheless. In
Hons and Rebels
, Jessica portrayed an image of ‘rather alarming’ oddity, causing ripples of shock to pass through the staid landscape of aristocratic ballrooms: Unity would put her rat, Ratular, in her handbag and sit stroking him at dances; she would wind her snake, Enid, around her throat in lieu of a necklace. ‘Legend has it that she sometimes took her rat, but legends cannot be relied upon,’ was Deborah’s oblique but caustic comment on this. As so often with the Mitford sisters, memories clashed according to agenda. It was in character with the Unity of myth (and Jessica was a great one for mythmaking) that she should have wished to
épate
society by accessorizing Hartnell with a serpent. It was in character with the pragmatic Deborah to suggest that Unity did nothing of the kind. A family photograph does show her wearing Ratular on her shoulder, but in the faintly feral, semi-surreal world of the Mitfords this was hardly remarkable behaviour. Other stories, that she stole writing paper from Buckingham Palace during the wait to be presented, that she went to Blackfriars to watch all-in-wrestling before a ball at the Hurlingham Club, are not exactly shocking. They are the sort of thing that any girl might do if, fearing a lack of the usual kind of attention, she sought to be noticed. And Unity was, above all, an attention-seeker, but she was not any girl.