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

lived well. So too did Bertie, who – in addition to Batsford, with its arboretum, its lake and its deer park – had a splendid house on Kensington High Street; Nancy remembered sitting on ‘Grandfather Redesdale’s’ balcony during the First World War, crocheting for the war effort ‘like a tricoteuse ’. The house did not long outlive its owner. A theme of Nancy’s later novels was the destruction of London family residences – she describes how a particular mansion on Park Lane was replaced by a hotel ‘the colour of old teeth’ 8 – and indeed Bertie’s home became part of the Milestone Hotel, whose 1926 advertising campaign stated, reverentially, that visitors would be treading the same floors as King Edward VII. The stable and courtyard had become the ‘much admired restaurant’, although still intact was an oak-panelled ballroom and, intriguingly, a private chapel. Quite a place, in other words; Bertie and his wife might have been living at the very edge of their means, but at the turn of the century the Mitford fortunes were high.
    Tap Bowles, meanwhile, lived on Lowndes Square, which was even grander. And his housekeeper was Sydney; having lost her mother when she was aged just seven, she became inextricably wrapped up in her father’s life and, despite the presence of Tello, acted something like a wife. She and her younger sister Dorothy (‘Weenie’) helped Tap canvass on his yacht and attended his dinner parties. From the age of fourteen, Sydney ran the huge Knightsbridge house. It is testament to her efficiency, but it was not much of a childhood. She never really had a mother and was treated like an adult by her father. This surely in part explains Sydney’s mysterious, reserved character, which affected all her daughters in different ways.
    Sydney, in turn, had been profoundly influenced by her father. She took on his rather bombastic quirks. He was a food bore, which she also became: she wrote frequently to newspapers about the importance of making one’s own bread (a letter on this subject was published in November 1939, not long after Unity’s attempted suicide), and about the value of unpasteurized milk (Deborah later claimed, quite unworriedly, that a lump in her neck – which remained all her life – developed after drinking the produce of her mother’s TB-infected herd of Guernseys). ‘Women should put their best brains to the study of food in relation to health (beginning with the Laws of Moses),’ Sydney wrote to The Times. This was in line with Tap’s belief that Jews did not get cancer. He also had a complete distrust of doctors; Sydney accordingly believed that the ‘Good Body’ would heal itself of pretty much anything. It was left to Jessica, aged around twelve, to telephone the doctor and inform him of her own case of appendicitis. Or so she wrote in Hons and Rebels : a book that was considered, by Diana, Deborah and Nancy, to be closer to fiction than fact. Jessica claimed, for instance, that after her appendix was removed she sold it to Deborah for £1. Years later Deborah would say that this was impossible, for the simple reason that she did not at that time have £1. A small instance of a theme that will recur: the question of truth and lies, multiplied and magnified within the charmed circle of the Mitford sisters.
    II
    Despite its oddity, it may be that life with the demanding, difficult but always invigorating Thomas Gibson Bowles was congenial to Sydney. She was intelligent – considered Girton material – and Tap associated with clever people. She loved his house in Wiltshire, whose eighteenth-century architecture was the style that she admired but would never again inhabit. She shared her father’s pleasure in sailing, which he would do for months at a time, spending idyllic summers on his little yacht in the painters’ paradises of Trouville and Deauville. ‘My mother adored the sea, which she saw in terms of Tissot rather than Conrad,’ wrote Nancy. 9