Nancy Mitford: a portrait by her sisters

Nancy Mitford 1904-1973

Nancy Mitford 1904-1973 A Portrait by Her Sisters

I started writing when I was about 23 because I wanted to make £ 100.

And I wrote a novel and I made about £ 100 which in those days worth about £ 1000 now I suppose.

And then I got into the habit of it.

What prompted you to become a professional writer? It wasn't a necessity, you didn't need money, for example.

Oh yes, I've always needed money. - Really?

Terribly.

I entirely earned my living, I haven't got any money except what I earned at all.

At an early stage you had to earn ... - Yes.

Well, I didn't have to earn my living. If I wanted anything extra, to go to the South of France or buy clothes or anything, I had to earn it, you see.

Was it easy for you to get published?

Yes, I never had any trouble.

Luckily. If I had it would put me off completely. I don't think I would have gone on.

Nancy Mitford was the oldest of Lord Redesdale's 7 children.

Ironically, she's probably best remembered for "U and Non-U",

an article about class distinction in speech which was originally published in "Noblesse Oblige".

Her other works are far more interesting:

The pre-war novels are farcical spoofs of upper-class goings-on in Scotland, London and the West Country.

And she ended her career as a distinguished historical biographer.

But immediately after the war she published her masterpieces: "The Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate".

They described the affairs of a large eccentric aristocratic family and they are highly autobiographical.

It was an exact portrait of my family with the characters muddled up a little bit into each other,

the characters of the children.

And the character of my father and mother absolutely exact.

My father was Uncle Matthew, my mother was Aunt Sadie.

And they were as exact or more exact than if I'd been writing about them in memoirs or a true account.

I don't think really that I invented anything about either of them.

The children between Louisa's 11 and Matt's 2 years

sit round the table in party dresses or frilly bibs according to how old they are.

All of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide to the flash

and all looking as if butter would not melt in their round pursed up mouths.

There they sit, held like flies in the amber of that moment -

Click goes the camera and on goes life;

the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth,

from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them all, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves.

I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

Do you remember that photograph itself being taken?

Oh yes, very well.

A photographer used to come out from Oxford.

And it bored us intensely, we had to dress up in our best clothes and sit there for hours while he organized it all.

And then the photograph would emerge.

And it was done about every 4 years as we grew up, so that there was a continuous line of them.

On the far left is my mother

and then on the top steps is Nancy

and then Tom and then I'm next

and then my father.

and then if you go down again, there's Unity sitting on the lowest step

and Diana a little bit above her.

Then there's Jessica

and Deborah again on the lowest step.

And then there were two dogs, Ruby and Andy.

Her brother Tom was killed in action in Burma during the war.

Her sister Unity attempted suicide when war was declared and died finally in 1948.

Come here.

Pamela Jackson is the eldest of the four sisters who remember Nancy in this film.

She's a country woman who still lives in Gloucestershire, the setting of The Pursuit of Love and the home of the Mitford family.

Look out not to be kicked.

She rears a rare breed of Swiss chicken, Appenzeller Spitzhauben.

Before her death Nancy had something to say about all her sisters.

First thing I remember is the birth of my sister Pam

which threw me into a permanent rage for about 20 years.

I was so furious not being the only one.

Now feel sorry for people with family planning who don't have brothers and sisters. I think it must be awful for them.

That's my sister Diana,

who was born beautiful, always beautiful, is still beautiful,

one of those ... now there are certain people, always beauties, from the moment they enter the cradle.

Diana was first married to Bryan Guinness by whom she had two sons

one of whom, Jonathan, will also appear in this film.

She later married Sir Oswald Mosley with whom she lives in a miniature chateau outside Paris.

Jessica Treuhaft is married to an American lawyer.

Radical in her politics since childhood she was at one time a member of the Communist Party in America where she now lives.

She's published 2 volumes of autobiography and several books of investigative journalism including The American Way of Death.

My sister Jessica sees our home life through, whatever it was, 15 years of living in America.

And then I think she saw it a little bit through the eyes of my novels also.

Chatsworth is one of the largest and most beautiful houses in England.

It is the seat of the Duke of Devonshire.

His wife Deborah is mistress and manager of the place.

And she's Nancy's youngest sister.

The youngest is Deborah

and she's 16 years younger than me and she's my goddaughter.

And when she was born,

our parlourmaid Mabel whom we worshipped, said:

I knew it was a girl by the look on His Lordship's face.

Because they'd already got 5, poor things, they didn't want a 6th daughter very much.

She's turned out rather satisfactorily.

The Mitford family spent their childhood and youth in three large West Country houses.

First Batsford,

then Asthall,

and finally in 1926 they moved to Swinbrook

which Lord Redesdale rebuilt to accommodate his ever-growing family.

Here there were grounds and outhouses and stables where the children could indulge their passion for animals of every sort.

For example, I had Miranda, this adorable lamb, when I was about 9.

I brought her up from the bottle. She adored chocolates. Amazing how all the animals loved chocs.

And then I also had a dove and various things of that sort, you see.

And then Unity had rats and snakes and ... we all had whatever we liked.

In other words, a sort of great rivalry.

My lamb Miranda versus Unity's goat.

So goat-like and sheepish were the expressions.

Sheepish meant marvelous, goat-like meant absolutely horrid in my book,

you see, and vice versa in hers, so that's how it went.

How was Nancy as, should we say, as a handler?

As a handler of dogs? Well, she adored that smelly old border, Peter.

We each had a mouse, Nancy had a black-and-white mouse and I had a brown-and-white mouse.

And I got the estate carpenter to make a palace for my mouse.

It was a lovely palace for her,

and a bedroom and then a run.

Nancy was very envious of this and wanted her mouse to join in the palace.

So I said, she could put the mouse in if we shared the work.

So she agreed to that.

And I had the first week of feeding and cleaning out.

The end of the week I suddenly remembered the mice and I went to look.

And they'd been very hungry, my mouse had eaten Nancy's mouse.

Lord Redesdale or "Farve" is immortalized in the novels as Uncle Matthew.

It was his example which gave the children their obsession with animals.

He was going to work one morning and under Blackfriars Bridge he saw a man leading a little pony with a child on it.

And he asked if the pony was for sale and the man said yes.

So he went that evening after work to the stables

and he took such a fancy to this pony, it was a little 3-year-old I think, that he bought it.

And he took it home in a hansome cab.

And there was nowhere to live really in the house because it was a house in Graham Street in London.

But there was a dark room on the first floor,

so Brownie the pony was put in the dark room

to live until we went home for the summer to the country.

And then we set forth from the station, Waterloo I think it was,

and we went ...

the guard refused to have Brownie in the guard's van, so

my father said, very well, we'll all go in a 3rd-class compartment.

In those days it wasn't usual to travel 3rd class.

And we got in and there was Brownie

and 2 bloodhounds and a dachshund.

And I was a baby put up in the rack.

And there was Nancy, a nanny and the nursery maid and my mother and father.

So nobody else got into the compartment of course and we went down like that.

Brownie in a train.

One child says to another: "Child hunt tomorrow, Fanny.’’

“Yes, Josh told me. He was in the car - been to see the vet.”

My Uncle Matthew had four magnificent bloodhounds, with which he used to hunt his children.

Two of us would go off with a good start to lay the trail,

and Uncle Matthew and the rest would follow the hounds on horseback.

It was great fun.

Once he came to my home and hunted Linda and me over Shenley Common.

This caused the most tremendous stir locally,

the Kentish week-enders on their way to church were appalled by the sight of four great hounds in full cry after two little girls.

Well you see, that I'm afraid is poetic license because in fact my father only had one bloodhound.

But it's quite true, he used to hunt us with it.

We used to love seeing the cleverness of the bloodhound, following exactly where one had been.

In The Pursuit of Love there's a frightfully funny thing which I think is based on fact, and I'd rather like to know,

that he used to write down people's names

whom he particularly disliked.

He used to put them, these names, big pieces of paper, into various drawers?

Oh yes, stuck with pins.

That's true? - Yes.

Somebody ... if he didn't somebody, he used to call them a meaningless piece of meat.

I thought we had a theory that he was the missing link between Homo Sapiens and the apes.

He was called the Old Sub-Human, you see.

And he would let me measure his cranium

to find out the shape and size of his skull to send him to science, you know.

Well, he was very frightening, there's no doubt about it.

I remember him turning a friend of Nancy's out of the house because the friend

bent down to pick something up for my father and a comb fell out of his pocket.

My father thought that was disgusting, so he was out in the middle of the night.

Was it not fair to say that your father would suddenly, capriciously take an immense liking to the most unlikely person?

Yes, he was amazing in that way, for instance, poor Mark Ogilvie-Grant

who figures very large, you know, in the letters in Harold Acton's book.

Well he was suddenly taken a liking to.

And this went rather worse for poor Mark, you see, being liked than loathed, in one way because

he was expected, being liked, to be down at breakfast at 8:00 sharp, you see.

And then my father would sort of say:

"Good morning, Mark, brains for breakfast" upon which poor Mark

would go to a total tailspin, you see, it was always "those brains" after that in the family.

The thing about my father was, he simply hadn't got enough to do.

He was a very strong healthy young man

and he hadn't got anything to do.

And naturally it made him rather bad-tempered, you know. One can understand it really.

And the other day I found - I had to send for a birth certificate, I'm buying a house -

and put for David Mitford "occupation: honourable".

This is the river Windrush, one of the most famous trout streams in England.

And I very well remember an incident happening when I was a child.

My father loved the fishing

and in Nancy's book Love in a Cold Climate there's this piece about what had actually happened.

The famous trout stream that ran through the valley below Alconleigh was one of Uncle Matthews most cherished possessions.

But he had trouble with the coarse fish, especially the chubb

which not only gobbled up the baby trout but also their food, and they were a great worry to him.

Then one day he came upon an advertisement in Exchange and Mart:

"Send for the Chubb Fuddler".

The Radletts always said that their father had never learned to read,