Irrepressible

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

For Gary

Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

 

—OSCAR WILDE

Two miles up the hill from the village is Swinbrook house, built by my father in 1926 to satisfy the needs as then seen, of a family of seven children plus two indoor servants, governess and nanny. We can look from the outside—but don’t let’s try to go on in. A nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.

—JESSICA MITFORD,
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
, MARCH 24, 1985

S
OON AFTER JESSICA Mitford moved with her family to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, she began to plot her escape from it. She was twelve years old, already an autodidact well aware of world events and with a practical sense concerning certain economic currents. That year—it was 1929—she wrote a letter to her family’s London bank, requesting that a new kind of account be opened on her behalf, and she provided specifications. In reply, she received the following, written in handsome script by an unknown clerk:

Later in life, she would recite those phrases as evidence of another world. Few things must have seemed less Californian than that letter. She delighted in the contrast between the ways things were done and said during her youth among the British aristocracy, including their “obedient servants,” and her more than fifty years in the American West. “Bank of America’s not your obedient servant,” she once cracked on camera in her best Lady Bracknellat-the-Kremlin-on-hashish tone of voice. “Rather marvelous, isn’t it?”

“I was never at all attracted to the life my mother imagined for us,” she said in the same interview. Her running-away fund began as a direct response to her mother’s refusal to let her attend the local grammar school. She kept that Drummonds account active for seven years, applying to it any gifts, small wages, and “spare shillings.” Then at the age of nineteen, with fifty pounds saved, she set off to the Spanish Civil War to fight fascism.

SHE WAS CHRISTENED Jessica Lucy Freeman Mitford in 1917, the sixth of seven children born to Baron David and Lady Sydney Redesdale. Her mother, or “Muv,” called her “Brave Little D.” In childhood, she and her siblings invented languages and exchanged nicknames meant to be funny and mystifying to outsiders. Those that stuck for Jessica included “Boud,” “Hen,” and “Susan,” though friends and family mainly called her “Decca.” Most everyone who saw her in her youth remarked on her beauty, and by all accounts, she was always a fighter. The inscription on the Mitford family coat of arms was “God Careth for Us”—but embarrass the powerful, mock the hypocrite, and shift the complacent were always mottos more to Decca’s taste.

What was Little D. running away from? The usual: parental rules and regulations, hothouse sibling rivalries, boredom; the more arcane: country estates, nannies, governesses, secret cupboards, and secret languages; conservatism and elitism in her relations; and fascism, in the body politic. Where was she running to? At first, she longed to go to school and, later, to the East End of London to live in a bedsit and be a Communist. To readers of the British press, the Mitfords were the subject of gossip and scrutiny for the fashions they wore and the odd things they did. Anyone not related to her seemed infinitely more fascinating to Decca.

Her father built Swinbrook House on family land near the village of Burford. The eighteen-bedroom house gave a beautiful view from the top of a hill over the bucolic Cotswolds, but passersby noted the building’s “uncompromising air.” Decca, raised there from the age of nine, thought Swinbrook distinctly institutional in appearance, like an English “lunatic asylum.” Its interior was drafty and damp. Seeking a warm hideaway, Decca and her younger sister, Deborah (nicknamed “Debo”), forged a secret Amazon club they called the Society of Hons, in a linen closet heated by hot water pipes. They invented and practiced a language called “Honnish,” influenced both by the prefix
Hon
, short for Honorable, to which they were entitled as daughters of an English baronet, and by their abiding interest in the chickens their mother raised. Decca and Debo called each other “Hen”
all their lives. (Debo was reputed to give a good imitation of a chicken laying an egg.)

Among so many siblings, strategic teasing was a weapon for defense and destruction. Plotting to usurp the grown-ups, they played flesh-pinching and skin-scratching games, little teasing tortures designed to toughen up the players—making a younger sister cry was a foundation technique. The family custom of mockery made Decca unafraid of words and gave her confidence. Eldest sister Nancy was a supreme tease, with all the honors this conferred. She was also the younger girls’ vile nemesis. Why so vile? “The others bored me and I made them feel it,” Nancy admitted in her memoir,
The Water Beetle
.

The Mitford children had fields to roam, horses to ride; there was no terrible school food, dormitory discomfort, or group sports to dread. They had an extensive library to browse and could order all the magazines and books they liked. It was a good childhood for some; for instance, Debo loved country life, but Decca felt trapped. Muv considered school “unnecessary” and “expensive,” the uniforms hideous, and the strange children overstimulating. She educated her daughters herself with nannies and a string of governesses, finishing the Mitford girls with a season abroad.

In 1937, when Decca was nineteen and fed up with the frills and ruffles of privilege, she met eighteen-year-old Esmond Romilly at the home of a mutual relation. She didn’t yet know the means of her escape, but it would start that night with Romilly and an aperitif.

Romilly was Winston Churchill’s nephew and Decca’s second cousin. He had dropped out of one school, been expelled from another, spent time in a reformatory, lived in a Bloomsbury bookstore from which he’d published an underground newspaper called
Out of Bounds
, and was already a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Decca passionately admired his book, which was also called
Out of Bounds
(a manifesto opposed to the conform-ism, drumbeating, and sadism of English boys schools) and had been published the year before. He was, she imagined, the only man on earth who might begin to understand her. “Are you planning to go back to Spain?”
she whispered to him over dinner. “I was wondering if you could possibly take me with you.”

EVEN AMONG SO many siblings, in her youth Decca felt lonely and misunderstood, an intellectual forced to live in the body of a useless debutante. She read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, “having smuggled a copy in from Paris,” and appropriated the gramophone to listen to the études of Claude Debussy. Her elder sisters laughed at her pretensions when they weren’t ignoring her, which was just as infuriating. She had so many sisters. Their parties filled society columns. They set styles in language and fashion. They inspired envy, lust, rage, and headlines. Deborah, the youngest, later became the Duchess of Devonshire. Nancy, the eldest, was a brilliant and jealous girl, a wit. She went on to become a celebrated writer of novels of manners and social satire, and of biographies of Parisian notables: Louis XIV, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and Madame de Pompadour. Nancy adored France and was passionately America-phobic. She was also the person, more than any other, against whom Decca would measure her own accomplishments.

As a child, second sister Pam wanted to be a horse. She liked to cook and garden. The other sisters dubbed her “Woman” for her domesticity. To the younger girls, feeling thwarted as they did in the schoolroom, Pam’s nickname was no compliment. She didn’t possess the “restless, unformulated longing for change that, in one form or other, gripped the rest of us,” Decca would write. What she and Pam did share was a work ethic and resourcefulness.

Diana was the sister Decca worshipped in childhood but later loathed. The fourth Mitford child, Diana was famously bored, restless, and fascist. To connoisseurs, she was the most beauteous of those prewar blondes, slim as a cigarette, and with swoony, blue eyes twice as large as other people’s. A wandering shadow looking for somewhere to stick, she first married into
the Irish Guinness beer fortune, and then into the British Union of Fascists (in 1940, she would go to prison alongside its leader, her second husband, Oswald Mosley). Seven years her senior, Diana would roar when little Decca played court jester to her languid empress. To roar was a requirement in Swinbrook House, amid the din of clanging personalities. Uproarious laughter, often dark, filled the time. Their father, the rampant Lord Redesdale known as “Farve,” roared to laugh and to admonish. His mockery wasn’t particularly witty, but his mean teasing could mortify. Decca loved their game playing and adored her father.

Sister Unity (“Bobo”) was three years older than Decca and cultivated outrage. Decca and she called each other “Boud” in the language they invented called “Boudledidge.” Unity liked the limelight. To command attention when surrounded by so many pretty and interesting sisters, Unity recited Blake and Coleridge from memory and, inspired by the artists Hieronymus Bosch and Henri Rousseau, made collages, the same one over and over:
Hannibal Crossing the Alps
. Defiant and adventurous, she cursed, clambered over rooftops, and ate all the ripe strawberries before a garden party. Rather enormous (her mother’s description) at nearly six feet tall, she sulked, glowered, and shocked to get her way. At debutante dances, she was the one with the white rat on her shoulder. By age sixteen, Unity was reading
Jew Süss
, a malevolent novel that fueled German anti-Semitism and inspired many eruptions of hate and violence. Unity passionately cast herself into the dark side to become an outspoken hater and letter-to-the-editor writer. When she was twenty years old, she wrote to the German paper
Der Stürmer
: “We think with joy of the day when we shall be able to say with might and authority: England for the English! Out with the Jews! . . . PS: If you find room in your newspaper for this letter, please publish my name in full . . . I want everyone to know I’m a Jew hater.”