On September 3, 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany, Unity Mitford, the daughter of minor English aristocrats, took a pearl-handled pistol to the English Garden in Munich and put a bullet through her brain. “She told me that if there was a war,” her sister Diana Mosley recalled, “which of course we all terribly hoped there might not be, that she would kill herself because she couldn’t bear to live and see these two countries tearing each other to pieces, both of which she loved.” A mother walking in the park with her two sons heard the shot, and the older boy caught the nearly six-foot figure as she slid to the ground, blood streaming down her face. Instead of killing her, the bullet lodged at the back of her skull, from where it could not be removed.
Unity was visited in the hospital by Adolf Hitler, who also sent roses, paid the medical bills, and arranged for her transfer to Switzerland and for the suicide attempt to be kept a state secret. It was not until October 2 that her parents, David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and Lady Sydney Redesdale (known by their seven children as Farve and Muv, or Male and Fem), heard that their daughter, known as Bobo, was recovering from an “illness.”
In January 1940, Sydney and her youngest child, Deborah, known as Debo and later the Duchess of Devonshire, brought Unity back to the family home, a chilly mansion built by Farve in the Cotswold village of Swinbrook. “She was a completely changed person,” Debo recalled, “like somebody who has had a stroke…. Her memory was very jagged and she could remember some things and not others.” The damage caused to her brain, according to James Lees-Milne, who had been at Eton with Unity’s only brother, Tom, meant that she now had the mental age of a child. Some might say that this was Unity’s mental age to begin with. (Nancy, the eldest, called Debo “Nine”—this, she teased, being Debo’s mental age.) It took nine years for the bullet to kill her: nursed at home by Sydney, Unity eventually died at the age of thirty-three of meningitis caused by an infection around the wound.
Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford (who was conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, where the family owned a small gold mine) had used this pistol for target practice in the garden of friends in England. Asked what she was doing, she replied that she was “practicing to kill Jews.” Unity’s experience of Jews amounted to attending Nica Rothschild’s coming-out ball. “The English have no notion of the Jewish danger,” she wrote in a letter to the German propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer in the summer of 1935.
Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes…. 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! With German greeting, Heil Hitler!… PS:…Please publish my name in full…. I want everyone to know that I am a Jew hater.
Her letter was reported in the British press several weeks later under headlines such as “Peer’s Daughter Is a Jew Hater” and “The Girl Who Adores Hitler.”
No one else from England had the access to Hitler that was afforded to Unity, who went to Munich in 1934 with the sole intention of meeting her hero and spent her lunchtimes in his favorite restaurant until, after ten months, he asked her to join him. It was “the most wonderful and beautiful [day] of my life,” she wrote to Farve. “I am so happy that I wouldn’t mind a bit dying. I suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world…. For me, he is the greatest man of all time.” The Führer, as Unity called him, and Kind (child), as he called her, sat arm in arm and drew up lists of who would be shot when Germany conquered her homeland. He stroked her hair; she stayed with the Goebbels family during the Berlin Olympics in 1936; he placed her beside him on the balcony when he announced the Anschluss in 1938; and he paid the rent for her apartment, in Munich’s Schwabing neighborhood, which “belongs,” Unity wrote home ecstatically in June 1939, “to a young Jewish couple who are going abroad.”
Her most prized gift from Hitler was a gold swastika with his signature engraved on the back, which she wore as a badge and later swallowed in a second suicide attempt. It was removed from her stomach with a probe. Unity introduced Hitler to her parents and siblings, Debo, Pam, Tom, and Diana; Diana (known as Nardy) married her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, in the drawing room of the Goebbels apartment on October 6, 1936, with Hitler as guest of honor. Sydney, who thought Hitler charming, supported Germany during the war, thus alienating her spouse. After 1940 Lord and Lady Redesdale no longer lived together as husband and wife.
Would Unity have pursued Hitler had she not been the fourth and least attractive of six girls raised to be debutantes and then wives and mothers? She was, said her younger sister Jessica, “a huge, outsize child.” Jessica was generally known as Decca, except by Nancy, who called her Susan, while Unity and Decca called each other Boud. “Oh dear…she is rather enormous,” Sydney complained as Unity squeezed into outfits that were then returned to the shops. Nancy gave Unity the nickname “Hideous,” but in Germany her tall and slender physique was the Nazi ideal.
Because unlike Nancy, Diana, and Debo, she did not ride or hunt, there was nothing for Unity to do as she waited for her first London season. Aged sixteen, she hung posters of Hitler on her side of the sitting room she shared with thirteen-year-old Decca, who—equally bored—hung posters of Lenin on her own walls. Unity had always used shock tactics to gain attention; before the Führer became her unpleasant pet, she took her white rat to balls and wore her grass snake as a necklace. Even as a child, wrote Decca in her memoir Hons and Rebels (1960), Unity was “uncontrollable,” “completely outside the bounds of normal behaviour.”
Decca described Swinbrook as a medieval “fortress.” All of life was in the house because no one was allowed to leave it. The sisters had one another, that was all. Nor were people allowed in, due to Farve’s inhospitality to “outsiders.” Outsiders, Decca explained, consisted of
the whole teeming population of the earth’s surface, except for some, though not all, of our relations and a very few tweeded, red-faced country neighbours to whom my father had for some reason taken a liking.
“Have these people no homes of their own?” Farve would roar down the table at Nancy’s friends, whom he called “sewers.” To have been a “Swinbrook Sewer” became a badge of honor.
Trapped in “a time-proofed corner of the world” where “nothing ever, ever happened,” the Mitfords were like “a lost tribe, separated from its fellow men”; the sisters were “ill-assorted animals tied to a common tethering post.” Outside the fortress walls there were hunger marches as the Depression took hold in the 1930s. Refused permission to go to school, on the grounds that hockey (which was compulsory) gave girls thick calf muscles, Decca eked out her childhood in the family snow globe, where history was taught by Sydney: “See, England and all our Empire possessions are a lovely pink on the map.” Nancy, who had also longed to go to school, similarly described her childhood as unhappy, a charge Diana and Debo (who hated the idea of school) dismissed as untrue. But members of the same family do not have the same childhood.
Nancy’s unhappiness had begun at age three, when her sister Pamela (known as Woman) was born and the world was no longer her own. The arrival two years later of Tom, the prized son and heir, did not improve her mood. A nanny described Nancy at age six in the nursery, her “furious little round face…concealed behind the book.” Diana, born after Tom, was so beautiful as a baby that another nanny declared, like a bad fairy, that she was destined not to live for long. Nancy was “vile” to her siblings, she admitted, with Pam her main target. By the time she was sixteen, when Debo appeared, Nancy was the long-established family terror. Her character was so strong that Pam simply receded into the background, while Tom, who had the good fortune to start boarding school at age eight, was handsome enough not to need to sing for his supper.
Whiling away their time in the “Hons’ Cupboard,” the large, warm linen closet in Swinbrook from which Decca and Debo ran the “Society of Hons,” the youngest Mitfords dreamed of a more interesting future: “I’m going to Germany to meet Hitler,” Unity declared. “I’m going to run away and be a Communist,” Decca countered. Debo’s dream was to marry a duke and become a duchess. The Hons’ Cupboard—so called not because the sisters had the title “Honorable” but because they liked hens and the word evolved into “hons”—provides some of the funniest scenes in Nancy’s autobiographical novel The Pursuit of Love (1945). But there was a corrosive element to the Swinbrook nursery that laid hold of Unity, creating a moral vacuum. Her fascism was less an ideological belief than a catastrophic assertion of personality, a bid for attention in a family of extremophiles.*
The Mitford story is about sibling rivalry rather than class privilege. Unity was thrilled when it was she, rather than her sisters, who invited the headline “At It Again, the Mad, Mad Mitfords.” One of the mysteries of the sibling dynamic, which was composed of feuds and factions and long periods of not being on “speakers,” is that while the bond between Decca and Unity survived their opposing politics (“I do think family ties ought to make a difference,” wrote Unity to Decca), Decca never forgave Diana—once her favorite sister—for her fascism. And neither Unity nor Diana fully forgave Nancy, a socialist, for satirizing Mosley’s Blackshirts in her third novel, Wigs on the Green (1935).
Few other English families can have shared the Mitfords’ experience of the war years. While Sydney was caring for Unity, who was incontinent following her suicide attempt, Diana—whose marriage to Mosley had made her “the most hated woman in England”—was interned for three and a half years in Holloway Prison. Mosley was also interned, and after the intervention of Winston Churchill, a relation of the Mitfords by marriage, the couple was permitted to live together in a house in the prison grounds. It was Nancy who had informed on Diana, telling Hubert Gladwyn Jebb at the Ministry of Economic Warfare about her visits to Germany: “I advised him to examine her passport to see how often she went. I also said I regard her as an extremely dangerous person. Not very sisterly behaviour but in such times I think it one’s duty.”
“There is a vein of callousness in her which almost amounts to cruelty,” James Lees-Milne said of Nancy. “All the Mitfords seem to have it, even Tom.” But Tom, who was killed in action in March 1945, lacked the family steel. To Diana and Unity he admitted to being a Nazi; to Decca he said he was a Communist. Tom was “happy to be whatever was necessary to be allowed to visit his sisters,” writes Mary Lovell in her nonpartisan biography The Sisters (2002).
In February 1937, two years before Unity shot herself, the nineteen-year-old Decca, having kept a “Running-Away account” at the family bank since the age of twelve, bolted with her second cousin Esmond Romilly (a nephew of Churchill’s), whom she had met for the first time the previous month at a house party. She had loved him, she wrote, since 1934, when she read in the newspaper that he had run away from school and set up “headquarters” in a radical bookshop in London, from which he launched an incendiary magazine called Out of Bounds.
Decca and Esmond, whose elopement became another news story (“Mixed Up Mitford Girls Still Confusing Europe”), went first to Spain, where he reported on the civil war, and then to America in 1939, where Decca lived until her death in 1996. She never saw her father again. His spirit was broken by her defection, together with Diana’s leaving her first husband, Bryan Guinness, for “the man Mosley,” the scandal that was Unity, Sydney’s support of Hitler, and Tom’s death. Aged sixty-two, Farve was white-haired and stooping. Between the war and his death at the age of eighty he lived as a recluse in a cottage in Northumberland.
“You Mitfords like dictators,” Violet Hammersley, a family friend, once said to Nancy. The Mitfords, like Charlotte Brontë heroines, fell in love with their masters, whom they then worshiped. Esmond (who died aged twenty-three when his aircraft disappeared over the North Sea in 1941) had for Decca a “god-like status”; she felt “physically faint” at the prospect of meeting him. Debo recalled that Unity shook so violently when she was with Hitler that she could hardly walk; Debo herself fainted when Pam got engaged to her own teenage crush, the physicist Derek Jackson. Diana’s devotion to Mosley, whom she called “the Leader,” was, as Laura Thompson puts it in The Six, “so stalwart as to be almost beyond comprehension, like something from a legend.”
Nancy married Peter Rodd, “Prod,” in 1933, on the rebound from the homosexual Hamish St. Clair-Erskine. Prod, serially unfaithful (as were Derek Jackson and Oswald Mosley), had proposed to three other women the week Nancy accepted him, but aged nearly thirty she was expected to settle. Her later love for Gaston Palewski, “the Colonel,” Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man, whom she met during the war and portrayed as Fabrice de Sauveterre in The Pursuit of Love, was unbending, despite his multiple affairs and refusal to marry her. Asked by Fabrice in Love in a Cold Climate (1949), “Are you going to be a Bolter…like your mother?,” Fanny replies, “No, no…. A tremendous sticker.” The Mitford girls were all tremendous stickers. Once their minds were made up, not one of them moved an inch.
Sydney, cast as the heroine of Lovell’s The Sisters, was described by four of her children as a “remote and unaffectionate” parent and appears in Nancy’s novels, in which there are no mother–daughter bonds, as a vague, colorless presence, or rather absence. Farve, on the other hand, was a “character.” The only man in a world of women, he was at the root of the dictator complex. A reactionary misanthrope prone (like Nancy) to sudden explosions of rage, he was also, Debo recalled, “wonderfully funny and the source of all the jokes in the family.” He and Nancy together, “when they were on form,…were funnier than anything I have seen on the stage. I still remember the pain of laughing at them.” Incarnated as Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Farve hunts his children with bloodhounds, holds that “abroad is unutterably bloody,” and displays over the chimneypiece the entrenching tool, “still covered with blood and hairs,” with which he had “whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out” in World War I. In Nancy’s hands, wrote Decca, Farve became “more a character of fiction than of real life, an almost legendary figure, even to us.” He was delighted, she said, with his own alter ego.
Long before the headlines and gossip and fictionalizations, Nancy had created the Mitford myth. She was the origin of the exaggerations and nicknames and insistence on rock-solid self-assertion. The family was, from the start, Nancy’s great invention: even her biography Madame de Pompadour, said A. J.P. Taylor, was about the Mitfords: she simply transposed their eccentricities to Versailles. It was Nancy who taught her sisters, who after 1937 were never together again, how to live their lives like characters in a novel.
It is curious how badly this material films. None of the adaptations of Nancy’s novels works, not even those that lift her dialogue wholesale, like the BBC miniseries Love in a Cold Climate (2001). What rises from the page falls flat on the screen. Outrageous, billed as “a family saga like no other,” is a dramatization of the Mitford story based on Lovell’s biography. The structure, however, is borrowed from The Pursuit of Love, making it unclear whether we are watching fact or fiction, comedy or tragedy. The narrator of The Pursuit of Love is Fanny, the favorite cousin of the Radlett girls, and the novel begins with Fanny’s description of a photograph of the tea table at Alconleigh (Swinbrook), around which Aunt Sadie (Sydney) and the children are sitting:
There they are, 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…and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves.
The narrator of Outrageous is Nancy, played by Bessie Carter. What follows will therefore be Nancy’s story, but not in Nancy’s own words. “The charm of your writing,” said her friend Evelyn Waugh, “depends on your refusal to recognise a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.” The Nancy we are introduced to here has neither quality. “There is a photograph that sits on my desk,” she drawls, “taken long ago”:
It captures my family, like flies in amber, just before we all set out into the world. Surely within the decade we’d all have married well and be quietly breeding the next generation of British aristocrats. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite turn out like that…. Instead, within a few short years, we would all have gone entirely off the rails!
The main problem with the voice-over is the voice itself. Bessie Carter’s charmless and entitled impersonation of Nancy sounds more like Lady Mary in Downton Abbey. The Mitford voice, which belonged to the family alone, was not a straightforward toff accent. It was a private language, as exclusionary as the nicknames and jokes and indecipherable lingo invented by Unity and Decca, known as Boudledidge. Nancy’s voice was so uniquely irritating that when she was asked to deliver a series of lectures to trainee fire watchers during the war she was sacked because the audience “wanted to put her on the fire.” Decca’s voice as a young woman, which mellowed with her communism, was described by a friend as “a curiously cadenced sing-song which would have been grotesquely affected if it had not been even more grotesquely natural.” “Ridiculous,” said Debo of the Mitford voice in the BBC documentary Nancy Mitford: A Portrait by Her Sisters (1980). “It’s just silly.”
Outrageous opens in September 1931, nearly three years into Diana’s marriage to Bryan Guinness, whom she is planning to leave for Mosley. The seven siblings are by the pool at the Guinness “country pile,” listening to frantic jazz music on the record player while quaffing champagne. Such is the mayhem that an elderly waiter drops his tray when a young Mitford in a swimsuit runs into him. Diana, Nancy tells us, was responsible for “the rot setting in.” Diana (Joanna Vanderham), sidling along the edge of the pool, lowers her sunglasses. She is a bottle blond in the generic mode, with none of the “mythic aspect” or “dynamic serenity” described by Laura Thompson, who met her as an old woman. In interviews Diana—an unrepentant fascist all her life—comes across as an alien. This is the woman who said, when her husband joined her in Holloway Prison, “It’s so lovely to wake up in the morning and feel that one is lovely one.” Even Diana’s sisters, writes Thompson, “were confounded by her.” Vanderham’s Diana is not such a figure.
The dialogue, instead of showcasing the Mitford humor, is there to provide a biographical commentary and push the plot forward. “Here I am,” says Nancy to a friend, “living at home, penniless, and still a virgin at twenty-eight. It’s grotesque!” “Now Hamish is out of the way,” says one or another of her sisters when Nancy’s “unofficial engagement” is broken, “you’re going to meet the man who’s going to be the true, great love of your life!” “They’re suffering out there,” says Decca (Zoe Brough) of the hunger protest taking place outside during Unity’s debutante ball, “while we’re stuck in here like dolls in a doll’s house.” The leaden lines recall the joke my history teacher liked to make about pupils whose sense of the past involved a horde of peasants crying, “Come men of the Middle Ages, let us fight the Thirty Years’ War.” There are no jokes in Outrageous. Even the famously funny Farve (James Purefoy) is denied a comic turn, while the stone-cold Sydney is warmed up by the charm of Anna Chancellor.
The series ends in 1936 with Nancy a fledgling novelist adjusting to marriage with the dreary and insolent Prod, Pam disappearing into country life with Derek Jackson, Decca planning her escape with Esmond, Debo not yet a duchess, Unity brandishing her mother-of-pearl pistol that, she tells Decca, was given to her by “the Fürore,” and Diana marrying Mosley, “a man,” she tells him on their wedding day, “who has more real intellect and vision than Hitler or Mussolini put together.” With these cliff-hangers, we are poised for season 2.
It is an achievement to make the Mitfords seem dull, but if the characters are drained of their complexity and given nothing to talk about, we are left with only a midafternoon melodrama. “Oh Nard,” Nancy says to Diana in episode 6 of Outrageous. “Who have you become?” This is the question. “Who are you, anyway?” asked one of Nancy’s readers in 1955. “So difficult to answer, really!” Nancy replied. The unknowability of the Mitford girls is left, once more, intact.
English (US) · 