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

have accepted David as a way of healing that particular injury. The reasons why people marry each other are not always straightforward, although the simplicity of physical attraction can make them seem so. It may be that David would have done better, in the end, with a warmer woman, and Sydney with a stronger man, one more like her father. Nevertheless the union between these two was contented, close enough to its representation in The Pursuit of Love , until the 1930s tested it to destruction. In 1937 David spoke out in the House of Lords against an amendment to the Marriage Bill, a clause stating that no petition for divorce could be made within five years of a wedding. He wanted the clause removed. Forcing couples to stay together would, he said, cause suffering. 11 For such a conservative man, this was an unusually liberal viewpoint. It is unlikely that he was thinking of himself – his relationship with Sydney was intact at this point – but the fragmentation of his world had begun with Diana’s desertion of her first husband and Jessica’s elopement. Every certainty, including that of marriage as a lifelong commitment, was now open to question.
    Not so back in 1904, when people like David and Sydney Mitford could live behind Sloane Square with six servants on £1,000 a year, and the cataclysms of the next forty years were quite simply unimaginable. The young couple seemed ordinary representatives of their class. The most obviously exceptional thing about them was their looks. They were born to slightly unusual stock, but that in itself was quite usual. The fact is that one can trace back, discover creativity, musicality, brains, charm, eccentricity, love of Germany and so on within the Mitford pedigree – yet finding these traits after the event is something of a charlatan’s art, like palmistry. There was nothing, when Nancy was born in November 1904, to say that she would grow up to be anything other than an upper-class wife and mother. Just before her third birthday, however, another baby arrived, and the first rivalry between the sisters began to shape the family. The birth of Pamela, Nancy later said, ‘threw me into a permanent rage for about twenty years’. A joke; but not entirely. One day not long after her sister’s arrival Nancy, walking with her parents along a London street, began to scream uncontrollably. Nothing would stop her until, quite suddenly, she said: ‘The houses are all laughing at me.’ Her mother was naturally embarrassed and displeased; years later she wrote to her daughter, saying ‘you used to get into tremendous rages, often shaming us in the street.’ Her father, who adored Nancy, may have been more indulgent. But an interesting thing for a child to say?
    Those who know the Mitford childhood only through Nancy’s mythmaking may be surprised by how urban it was, at least until the outbreak of the First World War. Her ‘Radletts’ are absolutely country people, steeped in the robust beauty of the rural seasons, with a love of hunting in their ‘blood and bones’ and a defining sense of freedom. Yet for the first ten years of Nancy’s life – through the births of Pam, Tom in 1909, Diana the following year – the family’s main home was in London. Upmarket London, naturally, with Harrods and the Army and Navy stores on hand, but nevertheless with the attendant constraints of city streets, hansom-cab traffic jams, lack of space. The greenest thing the children saw was Kensington Gardens on their twice-daily outings with a nanny. David worked at The Lady (impossible to conceive of Uncle Matthew doing such a thing, or even to think of him walking through Covent Garden), dutifully supplementing his £400 a year from Bertie, and Sydney’s allowance from Tap.
    At first the Mitfords lived at 1 Graham Street, described by Diana as ‘hardly more than a doll’s house’; an exaggeration, of course, although with four young children it was certainly chock-full of prams and