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

for the individual child, not of necessity.’ The Observer , gulping down Jessica’s tales like so many communion wafers, wrote a fierce attack on the Redesdales. Deborah remarked to Nancy that their mother could practically have sued for the implication that she had been unfit to bring up her children. When Sydney died, three years after the book’s publication, her obituarist James Lees-Milne seized the chance to address its caricatured portrayal. Nothing, he wrote, ‘is further from the truth than the popular conception of her, gleaned from Hons and Rebels , as a philistine mother with hidebound social standards’. According to Lees-Milne – a man of high culture himself – Sydney encouraged her children’s interest in the arts, and ‘probably inculcated the mental independence which has distinguished them’.
    This, almost certainly, is right. For such a progressive, Jessica takes a very conventional view. It is quite possible that school would have enhanced her life with things that she otherwise lacked, but only somebody who did not spend their childhood years at school could see it in quite such an idealized light. As it happened, Jessica and Deborah did spend a term at a day establishment in High Wycombe, when they were aged about eleven and nine respectively. Clearly this wasn’t enough for Jessica, but it was far too much for Deborah. ‘I did not understand what the teachers wanted or why.’ Confronted with lunch, she said simply: ‘No thank you.’ When she was fourteen another attempt was made with her, and she became a weekly boarder in Oxford – ‘no dog, no pony, no Nanny’ 19 – where she lasted three days, during which time she fainted in geometry. After finishing the term as a day girl, she was allowed to give up, for which she was forever grateful to her mother (various interfering aunts had told Sydney that Deborah should be made to stick it out). The Mitford sister for whom school was tried most frequently was Unity, whose ‘mental independence’ was developing a little too freely at home. In 1929 she boarded at St Margaret’s, Bushey, then two years later was a day girl at Queen’s College in London, and was expelled from both establishments (or, as Sydney would faintly protest: ‘no, no, asked to leave. ’) She had made no attempt to fit in. A fellow student recalled that she ‘seemed not to get the point, on purpose’. Yet she was also said to have been saddened by this failure. 20 If formal education had been an attempt at ‘socializing’ Unity, then it did not succeed. Which rather implies that school or no school made little difference, in the end.
    What made a difference to Jessica, almost certainly, was the fact that her close companion Unity had been sent to school, and she had not: the year 1929 was when her dissatisfaction with home really began. Nancy, who had attended Francis Holland aged five, shared Jessica’s yearnings to escape, although this was perhaps more a show than a reality. At sixteen she was sent to a quasi-finishing school, Hatherop Castle. ‘School, for her, was synonymous with paradise,’ wrote Diana (who was terrified by the prospect, and was never sent). Naturally: to Nancy it represented something new, different, and above all sister-free. ‘She prayed every night to be made, in some mysterious way she preferred not to think about, an only child.’ 21 True, in a way, that Nancy longed to be alone and unassailably special, cut loose from that scurrying train of noisy little sisters. In another way she would have hated it – getting what one professes to want is rarely as enjoyable as wanting it – and her boredom would have been of a less productive quality.
    IV
    This, of course, is at the heart of the Mitford sisters’ story: the collective life against which they chafed, to varying degrees, and which made them so singular. Exaggerated though it became, there is truth in the image of the family at Asthall, richly vital, running free yet