Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (13 page)

Although the marquis repaid £13,000 to David, how much he actually put into similar schemes is unclear. ‘That’s where the millions [sic] he got for Batsford disappeared,’ wrote Diana to Deborah many years later. ‘Farve was an innocent.’ His judgment was almost perfectly the inverse of what it should have been. He turned down an opportunity to invest in the first ice-making machines, which were eventually installed in pretty much every British pub. It was said that he decided against putting money into his old friend William Morris’s car business, despite taking a great interest in motoring: in 1929 he attended a House of Lords debate about the proposed introduction of the driving test, which he unsurprisingly opposed, citing an examination that he had passed in order to drive in France: ‘It was a most unutterable farce and proved nothing.’ After the sale of the chauffeur-driven Daimler, David bought a Morris, happily drove it himself and spent hours at his friend’s car factory in Cowley, just outside Oxford. ‘As he had nothing much to do,’ wrote Diana, ‘it seems a pity, looking back, that he didn’t earn his living by joining this immensely successful firm.’
⁴³

But then, as Nancy put it in ‘The English Aristocracy’, ‘Does it occur to either Lord or Lady Fortinbras to get a job and retrieve the family fortunes? It does not.’

VIII

Uncle Matthew is described as having rather a lot of money, so much so that the subject is never spoken of by the family. It is mostly tied up in land, which is sacred to him. It is impossible to imagine him selling any part of it, and it is nearly impossible to imagine him away from it. As he says to Fanny, ‘you know I never go inside other people’s houses if I can help it.’

So it is something of a surprise to read the court pages of
The Times
, that fragrant daily burst of Georgette Heyer, and see just how often the names of Lord and Lady Redesdale appear. Of ‘Aunt Sadie’ it is said that she has ‘known the world’ – a lovely phrase – and that she rather enjoys parties, although as a wife she naturally, and contentedly, humours her husband’s preference (later Diana would concur with this, suggesting that her mother should have perhaps married somebody more social, but had not minded about it.) Nevertheless the impression from the court pages is of an outgoing couple, rather than the opposite. It is easy to forget that David was a scion of illustrious families, that he would in the nature of things attend state balls, royal weddings and, in 1928, a garden party held by ‘Mrs Baldwin’ at 10 Downing Street (although the aristocracy did not greatly care for the bourgeois Stanley Baldwin). Uncle Matthew goes to a grand ball in
Love in a Cold Climate
, squeezed into knee breeches so tight that he dare not sit down, but this is very much a one-off. He attends the House of Lords, voting unaccountably and according to conscience, making a speech against the admission of peeresses in their own right as they would use the peers’ lavatory. (According to his daughter Linda, this was what all the lords were thinking but only her father dared to say.)

As usual, this magnificent, free-spirited portrait is about half true of David. He
was
a somewhat maverick member of the Lords, but he was also frequently in attendance – it was not quite true to write, as he later did, ‘I never come to London if I can avoid it.’ To him the Lords was a necessity, an honourable place. His dream was to return the second chamber to the days before Lloyd George’s 1911 Parliament Act, which had curtailed its veto and removed its role in financial legislation. ‘Does it never occur to anybody,’ he wrote to
The Times
in 1926, ‘that this present Gargantuan orgy of extravagance in which this country is indulging, which is ruining it, not inch by inch, but league by league, is directly attributable to Single Chamber government in finance? This view, though naturally not popular with politicians, is well understood by the people as a whole...’ Whatever one thinks of this, it is not the argument of a raging illiterate; which Nancy – or more precisely Jessica,
après
Nancy – sometimes showed their father to be.

David was a true conservative, a tendency inherited only by Deborah (and possibly Pam). And one senses fear in him, an emotion that his daughters seem never to have felt. In 1922 his reaction to the ‘very grave crisis in the country’ – the dire post-war slump, the first national hunger march – was to join a new movement called ‘the Diehards’, along with the Lords Salisbury and Londonderry. As much as anything they were motivated by terror of what Salisbury called ‘the Bolshevist bogy’. This nervousness about the spread of Communism was absolutely real, and by no means as irrational as it now seems. The Diehards were formed during a Conservative administration, but they felt let down by its broken promise to repeal the Parliament Act; and now Ramsay MacDonald was around the corner. ‘We trust Labour,’ said Salisbury bravely. Nevertheless in 1934 – ten years after MacDonald formed his first administration – Salisbury would put forward a reform bill that proposed the election of 150 peers, on the grounds that a future Labour government might destroy the second chamber if it remained wholly unelected.

David, who passionately disagreed with the bill, put forward a motion for rejecting it. He would have done sterling battle against Tony Blair (described by Deborah as ‘a stranger to common sense’), who in 1999 removed all but ninety-two of the hereditary peers. Denying the hereditary principle, said David, ‘was a direct blow to the Crown, and to the very foundation of the Christian faith’. Who knows whether he was genuinely religious – church every Sunday was about one’s position rather than one’s soul – but there were ideals in which he absolutely believed:
noblesse oblige
and England.

However much he really longed to be lurking in coverts with his beloved gamekeeper, Steele, he spent much of his time in public service (like Lord Fortinbras, who is ‘on the go’ all the time, although ‘it is a go that does not bring in one penny’). He served on the local bench and county council – that was in the nature of things – but he was also in London, doing all sorts of jobs that one would imagine to have bored Uncle Matthew to death. He sat dutifully on select committees, often at the head, considering such
recherché
questions as the boundaries of Brighton. In 1931 he became Chairman of the Charity Organization Society, and wrote regular letters to the newspapers, pleading with the public not to cut its donations. He was genuinely concerned about unemployment – by then rising to appalling levels, more than 20 per cent of the working population in 1933 – but he believed equally in the need to cut state dependency, as with the introduction of means testing in 1931. To David, solutions lay in reviving ‘the family ideal’, as opposed to ‘the mass-charity of the State’. He would probably have liked the concept of the Big Society, although he might have ground his dentures at the career politicians (smarmy sort of fellas) who so smoothly propounded it. Social responsibility was natural to him – he had a genuine bond of trust with his estate workers, just as Deborah would later have at Chatsworth – but he believed that it could best be achieved by direct and personal means. This, of course, was soon to become very unfashionable.

A subliminal yet major theme of
The Pursuit of Love
is Nancy’s elegiac homage to the feudalism of men like her father, which in theory is so easy to attack, but in practice sort of worked, and which by the time she wrote the book – 1945 – had been almost completely eradicated. What Nancy called her ‘vague’ Socialism (and Diana called ‘synthetic cochineal’) probably derived from an attempt to translate the principles implicit within her upbringing – paternalistic, non-capitalist – into a modern political idiom. The same was true of her later Gaullism, and of Deborah’s old-style Conservatism. But Unity, Diana and Jessica reacted against the essential stability of their world: how consciously, who can say. They placed their faith in change, in systems and in men who had scant awareness of their own fallibility. Beneath his aristocrat’s confidence David was only too aware of being fallible. That is why he – and Uncle Matthew – remain likeable
malgré tout
.

But David was weaker than his fictional counterpart, and nothing made this clearer than the way in which he transmuted his love for England into a hapless, hopeful belief in Hitler’s Germany. Uncle Matthew has only contempt for the Hun; this emotion remains as steadfast as the aim of his shotgun, so much so that one senses Nancy willing it to have been true of her father also. David wavered, for which he paid a high price. He seems genuinely to have thought, for a time, that the Anglo-German Fellowship was a worthy enterprise, that alliance with Germany would be the saviour of his own country.

Whether he would have thought this, or wanted to think it, had two of his daughters behaved differently in the 1930s, is another story.

IX

On 7 February 1928, a dance was held at the Astor family’s London house on St James’s Square. ‘The Duke and Duchess of York honoured the Viscountess Astor with their presence last night,’ read the court report, which then went on to name those who attended. Among the guests were members of the Devonshire family, David’s uncle the 11th Earl of Airlie, David and Sydney themselves, and three of their daughters: Nancy, Pamela and Diana. This was Diana’s first London event, although she had already attended a ball in Oxford. She was not yet eighteen (her birthday fell on 10 June), nor formally launched upon her debutante season.

There was nothing noteworthy about the Astor dance. It was simply a high-end example of a typical 1920s society occasion, although what makes it interesting is that it contained within the guest list – the smiling, dancing, chit-chatting throng – a number of people whose lives would later collide spectacularly. For example Lady Dorothy Macmillan – sister of the Duke of Devonshire – was there with her husband Harold, the future prime minister; as was the Conservative MP, Bob Boothby, whom she would seduce the following year, starting an affair that lasted until her death (in between his forays for rough trade in the company of Ron Kray
⁴⁴
). Also present was another brilliant young politician, this one a Labour MP, accompanied by his wife, the former Lady Cynthia Curzon. Did Oswald Mosley notice the seventeen-year-old Diana Mitford, or she him?

Mosley was fourteen years older than Diana, and perhaps at their respective ages the gap was too great to be bridged – she would have looked to him like a lovely schoolgirl, not a potential paramour. He had both hands full anyway, as another guest of the Astors was his sister-in-law and mistress Lady Ravensdale (‘Vote Labour, sleep Tory’ was then his motto). However Diana had already received the tribute of devotion from several other men, both younger and older than Mosley. ‘Why are you so amazingly sympathique as well as charming?’ asked James Lees-Milne, as if in bewilderment at the completeness of her charm (Lees-Milne – who retained homosexual tendencies despite his later marriage to Alvilde Chaplin – in
Brideshead
-style loved both Tom and Diana Mitford). ‘I dare say you are very vain,’ he wrote in 1926, when Diana was staying in Paris, ‘and indeed you have cause to be.’ Around the same time her second cousin Randolph Churchill became besotted, and raged sulkily against Diana’s ‘extraordinarily cruel and callous behaviour’ when she turned him down. (In fact he never really forgave her, and when she became engaged to another man in 1928 spread rumours about her flirtatious character. Not that he didn’t chase other girls; for example in 1932 Nancy wrote to a friend: ‘Randolph C tried to rape me. It was very funny.’)

In Easter 1927 Diana’s education at the Cours Fénelon in Paris came to a sudden end when her mother read a diary containing the inevitable girlish indiscretions. Although ensconced in ultra-respectable lodgings on the Avenue Victor-Hugo, Diana had – after the departure of her family – been free for the first time. She was allowed to walk short distances alone: no chaperone (in London she would have needed one to walk to Harrods). Looking as she did, in a city where natural appreciation of the female is so heightened and relentless, it would have been fairly astonishing if she had not tested her power over men. Sydney should certainly have foreseen as much, but it is hard to know what she really felt about her girls and their development.

Diana’s diary contained references to cinema dates and tea dances with young men, the innocence of which – by today’s standards – is almost painful, although at the time she was obliged to cover by inventing music lessons and so on. The diary also mentioned sittings for the painter Paul César Helleu, whose family lived nearby. Sydney had known Helleu for years, which meant that Diana could spend time with him. Helleu could hardly believe his luck. This young girl, who looked like a living Canova (a Raphael, according to Lees-Milne, but that did not evoke her marmoreal quality), was hungry to learn – she was clever, as well as beautiful and enchanting – and here was he, with all the credentials for imparting artistic knowledge and, at the age of sixty-seven, a perfectly avuncular aspect, able to escort her to the Louvre and Versailles, to show her off to painter friends (one can imagine) and, above all, to draw and paint her in his studio. Although his fame had waned somewhat, Helleu had been a hugely fashionable portrait artist, and had had what Diana called ‘an amazing
vie amoureuse
’. Nevertheless, as she told Lees-Milne: ‘He called me “
beauté divine
” always, and said, “
Tu es la femme la plus voluptueuse que je n’ai jamais connu
.”’ Lees-Milne replied: ‘How I would adore to have a picture of you by M. Helleu. You must be like Emma Lady Hamilton sitting to Romsey.’ Helleu became ill in early 1927, and his daughter refused to let Diana visit him; clearly his ageing passion had been visible to the family. ‘A man whom I have almost worshipped, and who has worshipped me for three months, is going to die,’ wrote Diana, again to Lees-Milne. ‘How can I bear it?’ And then, after his death: ‘Nobody will ever admire me as he did.’ (‘What a horrifying little beast I must have been,’ she later commented.)