Free Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson

was perhaps the most natural of them all: viz, her description of Hitler as ‘like a farmer in his old brown suit’. This really was somebody saying only and absolutely what they meant, the key to the Mitford idiom, and nobody did it better than Pamela. Some years later she bought an expensive Guernsey dairy cow only to find, as she put it, that ‘the brute was bagless’. Not even Nancy was capable of this kind of direct phrase-making, although she stole it for her books.
    Pam’s role, laid down by character and circumstance at an early age, was probably a necessary one within the family. ‘There’ll never be any one remotely like her, will there?’ wrote Deborah, when her sister died. Despite Nancy’s taunts – calling Pam nicknames like ‘Chunkie’ (in youth she was rather fat, and all her life obsessed with food) – she was never exactly a butt. She had too much innate dignity for that. After her death she was described as remarkable for her goodness, but in fact she could be surprisingly tough – for example she did not really like children – and obtuse, as when she allowed her beloved dachshunds (‘the Elles’) to romp unchecked over the sofas at Chatsworth: ‘She was herself with knobs on’, wrote Deborah to Diana. This was a typical description. Pamela was the still centre of the Mitford girls – comforting in her oddity, untouched and untouchable – whose placid mad sayings would be relayed back and forth with intoxicated delight by the other, more mutable sisters, always with the postscript: ‘She ees wondair .’ John Betjeman, who proposed to her twice in 1932, saw an English magic in her countrywoman’s demeanour. Compared with the rest of the family, she can seem like a vacuity. In fact she had the unignorable presence of one of her grandfather’s shire horses, quiescent in the face of Nancy’s jabbing little insect bites.
    So at Batsford a substantial part of the Mitford dynamic was established. Nancy was black queen, dominating and dazzling. Pam was essentially withdrawn from the fight. Diana and Tom – close in age, cool and controlled – were soulmates, remaining steadfast in this even after the start of his schooling in 1918. Then at Asthall, where Deborah was born in 1920, a new dynamic was formed by the younger children. They talked in private languages, not just the ‘do admit’ stuff but actual, near-unintelligible variations on English, as if they were mini-tribes within the family. Unity and Jessica, who called each other ‘Boud’, spoke ‘Boudledidge’ (understood only by Deborah, who nevertheless did not presume to join in). This continued into adulthood: ‘Jung va ja leddra,’ wrote Unity to Jessica in 1937, meaning ‘thanks for your letter’, before going on to lecture ‘my good Boud’ about her elopement, and describing how Hitler had forbidden German newspapers to print the story, ‘which was nice of him wasn’t it’. The closeness between Unity and Jessica, which developed to the full in adolescence, was such that political polarization could not quite break it: the girls would discuss whether one would shoot the other under orders, yet they remained oddly allied.
    Between Jessica and Deborah, there was an intense childhood bond. They called themselves the ‘Hons’ – this meant ‘hen’, rather than ‘Honourable’, and derived from the great brood of hens kept by their mother. They spoke ‘Honnish’. In later life their letters were still full of this language: ‘do write to yr old Hen,’ and so on. Nevertheless, from Deborah’s point of view, Jessica’s elopement created a deeper rupture than her sister ever wanted to accept. Jessica herself later suggested that she had been jealous of Deborah. 16 Despite the constant enforced companionship that came with being the two youngest, the ceaseless skittish stream of Honnish, the relationship was probably more one-sided than that between Jessica and Unity; both of whom were misfits, although in