Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters

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Authors: Laura Thompson
Tags: Historical, Biography & Autobiography
childhood this was apparent only in Unity. Deborah, on the other hand, had a supremely well-adjusted nature, which may have been in some way inimical to Jessica.
    In 1936, the three younger girls were taken on a Hellenic cruise by their mother. Perhaps Sydney scented trouble, and was trying to divert Unity and Jessica before too late. However Unity behaved in what was by then her usual way, arguing with a left-wing shipboard lecturer – the Duchess of Atholl, no less – and wearing her swastika badge in Spain, where she narrowly avoided attack. According to Hons and Rebels , Jessica then had a physical set-to with Unity about the Spanish Civil War. This is not mentioned in Deborah’s account, which is determinedly normal in tone, and in which she and Jessica carry on in the sweet, irritating way of the younger sisters in Nancy’s novels, calling a harmless academic ‘the lecherous lecturer’ (this made its way into Love in a Cold Climate ) and staring mesmerized at a pair of eunuchs at the Topkapi Palace (‘Children’, said Sydney, ‘you are not to mention those eunuchs at dinner’). The impression given by Deborah is of two silly and happy young girls. Jessica later wrote that she was all the while plotting her escape, which would be effected within a year.
    The stories told by the sisters are versions of the Mitford childhood, just like The Pursuit of Love . Without Nancy’s novel it is probable that no other account would have been written; as it was, the Mitfords became a commodity, and Jessica, Diana and Deborah all produced memoirs (Pamela also considered a book, but this did not happen). 17 Diana wrote in a clear, bare way that resisted fancifulness. Deborah – described by Diana as ‘one of the truthful ones’ 18 – relished her family’s eccentricities, but refused to sensationalize. Jessica, on the other hand, produced in Hons and Rebels an autobiography so partial as to stray into the territory of fiction. ‘Shameless but most diverting,’ as one reviewer had it. It was also highly imitative of The Pursuit of Love . ‘What I think is this,’ wrote Nancy to Evelyn Waugh. ‘In some respects she has seen the family, quite without knowing it herself, through the eyes of my books.’ Yet there was a fundamental difference between the two accounts, and not simply that one was a novel, the other autobiography. Nancy’s book was joyful, while her sister’s was resentful. Hons and Rebels was full of vociferous complaints: about her parents’ refusal to send Jessica to school, the blinkered conservatism of her upbringing, the prejudiced right-wingery that encased her early life. David Redesdale, wrote his daughter, regarded the entire world as ‘outsiders’: the only exceptions were certain family members and ‘a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbours to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking.’ This was fairly predictable stuff, Nancy with the rogue element of genius removed. More grotesque, and deeply distressing to the other sisters, was an unfounded accusation made against their uncle Bertram (always known as Tommy): Jessica claimed that he got a kick out of his Justice of the Peace duty of being a witness at hangings. All of this was breezily relayed, but the reader was left in no doubt as to where his or her sympathies should lie.
    Hons and Rebels is a very clever book, managing to have it both ways; attacking the reactionary eccentricities that nevertheless made such excellent copy. According to her sisters, it was also a very dishonest book. ‘Silly old Hen,’ was Deborah’s characteristic killer judgment. Diana, meanwhile, was sufficiently roused by the review in the Times Literary Supplement to fire off a letter refuting some of its claims. What enraged her particularly was the suggestion that the Mitford household was devoid of culture (the Batsford library?) and her parents actively opposed to enlightenment: ‘scorn of intellectual values was a matter of choice

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