Running, jumping, climbing trees…

Jessica Mitford's autograph by Liz Henry

Evoking the ghosts of a generation

Drifting back in her memories to early 1937, shortly after having eloped with Edmund Romilly, Jessica Mitford muses upon how her life had recently acquired a ‘dream like quality.’ Indeed, the reader would be hard pressed to argue as many of the details of Mitford’s life carry the distinct, ethereal feeling of unreality. In this beautifully written, witty memoir, she remembers with both warmth and a sense of injustice her extraordinary childhood and early adult years, evoking vividly the culture and characters that coloured her life in the early twentieth century.

Born in 1917, the second youngest of Lord Redesdale’s brood of six daughters and a son, Mitford was raised with her siblings in comparative isolation from wider society at Swinbrook, the family’s country seat in Oxfordshire. Much of the early part of Hons and Rebels is devoted to her recollections of the peculiar culture that the sisters developed in childhood whilst separated for extended periods of time from their peers.

‘Unity and I made up a complete language called Boudledidge, unintelligible to any but ourselves,’ she writes. Further creations ensued, and with her younger sister, Deborah, she conspired to form the Society of Honourables, of which they were the only two permitted members. Then there were the myriad childhood games, designed to test intelligence, creativity and in the case of the wincingly painful ‘Hure, Hare, Hure,’ bravery.

This culture is at once both fascinating and endearing and the seductive pull of her prose is augmented by the ubiquitous nicknames with which each of the siblings christened each other. Unity was known as ‘Boud’, Deborah as ‘Debo’ and Jessica herself as ‘Decca.’ Following family tradition, the three youngest sisters lived in a state of constant warfare with their parents Lord and Lady Redesdale, or ‘Muv’ and ‘Farve’.

Having explained these idiosyncrasies, Mitford proceeds to introduce a cast of characters that could quite well have emerged from the pages of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. Chief amongst them is her mother’s brother, Uncle Geoff, who was remembered for holding the considered opinion that ‘the greatness of England has risen and waned over the centuries in direct proportion to the use of natural manure, or compost in fertilising the soil.’

The book is at its strongest when Mitford applies her sharp wit and there is not a better section than when she documents her sister Diana’s wedding to the Irish brewing magnate, Bryan Guinness, in what was considered 1929’s ‘Society Wedding of the Year.’ In the immediate aftermath the two were heralded as the golden couple of the emerging ‘Bright Young People’, and in turn Diana became a ‘Beauty with a capital B.’

Featuring heavily in the pages of the national newspapers, Mitford laments how Diana’s ‘face always seemed to come out looking the same – large, calm, gazing rather vacantly into space.’ Meanwhile her own attempts to imitate ‘the look’ were greeted with much less success and were crushed emphatically by the following remark from Nanny: ‘What’s the matter darling? Aren’t you feeling well?’

Relations between the four sisters were held in a constant state of flux, with transient alliances continuously being constructed and destroyed, resulting in a rather odd synthesis with the political context of the early 1930s. Conflict, the reader senses is an important component of Mitford’s personality: from an early age she is primed to rebel and she is constantly raging against a different foe. Her first and most durable advisories are ‘The Grown Ups’, led by ‘Muv’ and ‘Farve,’ but there were others too: a succession of governesses, the ‘White Slavers’ and the aristocratic ‘Sub Humans’ chief amongst them.

As the sisters mature into adolescence in the 1930s, two of her closest sisters, Diana and Unity are drawn by the seductive glamour of NAZI Germany and on numerous visits manage to form friendships with many of the party’s leading figures. In an instant the enemy that Mitford so needs crystallises, but instead of documenting her struggles against Fascism with the sober logic that it merits, Mitford once again reverts to her familiar brand of woozy frivolity. It’s almost as if Fascism carried all of the menace of a current bun.

‘Don’t you long to join too, Decca? It’s such fun,’ Unity begged her, ‘waving her new black shirt in the air.’ Mitford’s response was characteristically defiant: ‘Shouldn’t think of it. I hate the beastly Fascists. If you’re going to be one, I am going to be a Communist, so there.’

The reader can trace to the day, early in February 1937, when Mitford’s childhood ended with a start. Long fascinated by the antics of Edmund Romilly, the ‘Red’ nephew of Winston Churchill, the two finally met, fell instantly in love and decide to elope to Spain, a country neck-deep in the fury of a civil war. Mitford’s sudden disappearance disgraced the family, dominated the headlines of national newspapers and sparked a diplomatic dilemma, but with a plodding inevitably the farce continues. When her sister Nancy eventually hunts the couple down the situation is set for a fiery, passionate sister to sister, eyeball to eyeball confrontation. Instead Mitford treats the reader to a classic scene of understatement:

‘Decca you really are a naughty thing…worrying us all like that. Poor Muv has been in floods ever since you left, and so has Nanny. Nanny keeps saying you didn’t have any suitable clothes to fight in.’

Victorious in escaping from the restrictions of life as an Honourable, the second half of the book settles into Mitford’s domestic life with Romilly. Mitford, who was known to be cool in many of her personal relationships, writes with loving warmth about Romilly, dubbing him ‘ingenious’, ‘optimistic’, ‘single minded.’ In a rare moment of emotional clarity, Mitford admits that, ‘of course I had been in love with Edmund for years, ever since I first heard of him.’

She recounts the story of their few years together with typical pace and humour. In the fullest sense of the word, their lives become an odyssey, as they whirl from Spain to France, to the East End of London before embarking on a their final trip to the United States. Characteristically, Mitford comes unstuck in the most mundane of situations. First she claims an inability to cook anything beside an egg, and upon accruing vast debts from utility bills she complains that ‘no one explained to me that you had to pay for such things as electricity.’

Hons and Rebels ends with Romilly setting off for a commission with the Canadian Air Force in 1940, a posting from which he would never return. Here, once again, Mitford skips the opportunity to dig deep emotionally, content to reflect with a wistful humour on what might have been. Her young life scuppered again, this time by events well outside of her control.

The book is best considered both a poignant eulogy to the memory of Romilly and an extraordinary memoir of a unique childhood. One could accuse Mitford of being elusive – she treats her bitter feud with Diana with stoic silence and her description of Unity’s infamous failed suicide attempt is far too brief – but perhaps even the most inquisitive will agree that a fraction of reserve is essential when writing about one’s own family. Hons and Rebels is a product of Mitford’s great skill as a writer, of her razor wit, her eye for detail and her penchant for finding an enemy in an empty room. It is a memorable and evocative modern classic.

(Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels, Phoenix, £7.99, 252 pages. First published, 1960)