Tag Archives: Abacus books

Charming cruelty: The Mitford Girls, by Mary S. Lovell

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Mary S. Lovell, The Mitford Girls: the biography of an extraordinary family. Abacus pb. 2002; first published 2001. 611 pp.

Why are the Mitford sisters, subject of this biography by Mary S. Lovell, so famous (and notorious)? In many ways they were just a typical example of the privileged minor provincial British aristocracy, not particularly endowed with any special qualities. Lovell doesn’t really provide clear answers: she’s too enamoured of her subject.

I don’t need to give much information here about them; there’s a good account on Wikipedia. Here’s a potted version.

David, second baron Redesdale (the irascible xenophobe Uncle Matthew in Nancy’s novels) married Sydney Bowles (not sure if she’s related to the present queen) in 1904 and had six children:

Nancy (1904-73): biographer and novelist of, among others, The Pursuit of Love (1945), Love in a Cold Climate (1949), and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960) which I described in a post here as ‘frothy and insubstantial’ (same with The Pursuit of Love); ‘snobbery and casual racism distasteful’ – especially Uncle Matthew’s loathing of all things foreign and foreigners. She was vaguely socialist.

Pamela (1907-94): didn’t do much of note. John Betjeman was in love with her, for some reason.

Thomas (1909-45): fascist sympathiser. Refused to fight the Germans in WWII; died fighting the Japanese in Burma.

Diana (1910-2003, died two years after this book was published, so the author might have been wary of upsetting her). Had an affair with the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, and married him in 1936. Evelyn Waugh was in love with her for a time. His novel Vile Bodies is loosely based on the Mitfords’ upper-class social circle.

Unity Valkyrie (1914-48; parents were Wagner fans; she was conceived in her father’s quixotic Canadian gold-seeking venture in a town called, appropriately, Swastika): ardent fascist who adored Hitler, stalked him and became close to him. Shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, survived, but with brain damage.

Jessica (known as Decca, 1917-96): communist, lived much of her adult life in America. Also a writer.

Deborah (1920-2014): married the future duke of Devonshire and ran the enormous stately home Chatsworth House (oddly enough it’s in Derbyshire).

Unity, Diana and Jessica/Decca are the most notorious sisters for their extreme political views and allegiances. What was the nature of Unity’s relationship with her adored Hitler? Lovell concedes that she was in love with him, but concludes that there’s no evidence there was ever a ‘sexual element’. Just an infatuated girl who made a bad choice, it seems.

Diana was another frequent visitor to Nazi Germany before the war and also developed an intimate relationship with Hitler. This is Lovell’s gushing comment on all this: ‘Diana is good company, as were all the Mitfords: it can have been no hardship for Hitler to spend time with a sophisticated and beautiful woman who happened to share his taste in art and music.’ So nothing much to disapprove of there, then. Lovell even quotes, clearly thinking this is amusing, the sisters’ mother saying in ‘exasperation’: ‘Oh, why do all my daughters fall for dictators?’

There were fierce loyalties and fissures in the sisters’ relationships. Fascist Diana (and husband Mosley) was interned in Holloway Prison 1940-43 under wartime regulations after being denounced by Nancy. Diana and her politically opposed sister Decca didn’t speak for decades.

This is an entertaining account, but it’s hard to ignore the awfulness and banality of several of the Mitford sisters. Lovell’s account is full of references to their charm, beauty, wittiness and elegance, but she presents the fascist sympathies of several of the siblings and their mother with a lot of sugar coating that I found distasteful and offensive. It’s more of a hagiography than a biography.

One example of their so-called wit: Nancy was particularly noted for her sharp wit: she was known in the family at the Queen of Teases:

She seemed to know exactly what would irritate her victims most, fastening on any insecurities with devastatingly accurate effect…One friend likened her humour to the barbed hook hidden beneath a riot of colourful feathers in a fishing fly…there was often a cruel element to her teasing, which caused real distress…But despite her cruel streak, Nancy’s sheer funniness endeared her to everyone, even when they were the butt of painful tease, for she went to great lengths to make them laugh.

The usual retort of the bully: can’t you take a joke? It’s only a bit of banter. No, this is repellent and inexcusable, and Lovell should have known better than to present this tendency shared by most of the Mitford family as charmingly amusing. The same goes for their father David’s fiery temper, intolerance and racism, as I noted above in my quotation from my post on his portrayal as Uncle Matthew in Nancy’s novels.

Jessica Fellowes, niece of Julian (the Downton Abbey creator and writer of the screenplay of the film ‘Gosford Park’) has written a sequence of six mystery novels based on the Mitford family. I’d be interested to know if anyone reading this has read any of them and what they thought of them.

Guilty pearls. Jane Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat

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Jane Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat. Abacus, 2018. First published 2009

 This is a sequel to Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, about which I posted a couple of years ago (link HERE). The Man in the Wooden Hat tells much the same poignant story, but from a different perspective.

OF was largely an account of the life of Sir Edward Feathers, an undistinguished jobbing London lawyer who moved to Hong Kong and revived his career. He went on to become a respected judge back in England. We learnt about his damaged childhood, and the knocks he endured and which shaped him into the fragile, emotionally scarred man he became.

Jane Gardam The Man in the Wooden Hat cover Wooden Hat gives the story from his wife Betty’s point of view. We don’t get so much information about her childhood, but the formative experiences of her life were her exhilarating war work at Bletchley Park during WWII – she was clearly a brilliant mind, contributing to the breaking of enemy codes – and subsequent horrors in a Japanese prison camp. Like Edward, she’d been a ‘Raj child’ – raised in the far east and shipped home for exiled schooling away from her family.

 

Both characters then are emotionally unsuited for the rigours of enduring married intimacy. There are fissures in the relationship from the start: Edward’s proposal, their honeymoon, early years of marriage – all lack the spark of romance. There is love, but it’s of a frail and unfulfilling kind. As they grow old together they become accustomed to life of quiet acceptance, creating a genuine bond, but with something missing at the heart of the relationship. Probably because of their respective damaged emotional states, and the problems that fate provides for them.

The awful cad Veneering reappears, too. He’s Edward’s professional (and romantic) rival. There’s a crucially symbolic gift of ‘guilty pearls’ that functions like Chekhov’s gun, with a heartbreaking twist at the novel’s end.

Edward and Betty’s whole adult life is sketched in with unobtrusive compassion and understanding: their mis-steps, regrets and fleeting moments of insight into what might have been.

As in OF, the narrative is carefully crafted. The emphasis is on character and what makes a person feel and suffer. There’s more on the odious colonialism and casual sexism and racism of the times; Jane Gardam presents this unflinchingly but without tub-thumping.

The narrative voice is again poised and assured. This is a writer with whom you feel in safe, caring hands.

 

 

Jane Gardam, Old Filth – and Feock again

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Jane Gardam, Old Filth. Abacus, 2018. First published 2004

Mrs TD and I discovered a new walk yesterday. It starts at Feock church, on a headland divided by branches of the River Fal by Carrick Roads. I’ve written before about this village, the sturdy little church, its obscure patron saint, and its fine lych-gate and venerable yew trees.

Jane Gardam Old Filth coverMrs TD passed on to me a book she’d just read, and what a good recommendation it was. Jane Gardam was born in a district of Redcar, N. Yorkshire – where I attended grammar school. Old Filth deals with the long life of a retired advocate and judge, Sir Edward Feathers, said to have invented the uncomplimentary acronym of the novel’s title: Failed in London, Try Hong Kong. After an undistinguished career as a jobbing lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he’s given the opportunity to ‘try Hong Kong’ and the ‘Far Eastern Bar’, where he flourishes.

The novel deals mainly, however, with the ways Feathers’ childhood and youth scarred him emotionally and made him into the cipher he appeared as an adult to his contemporaries. The novel is bookended by dismissive, pejorative comments about his outwardly uneventful, unexciting and unimaginative life by some of his surviving legal community:

Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit…He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after his retirement.

Gardam’s narrative demonstrates brilliantly and movingly how little we can know about a person’s depths – the truth of them – from the exterior they construct and present to the world.

His widower father showed him no affection, and had him shipped at the age of four back to England – like so many other ‘Raj orphans’. His foster mother in Wales treated him and the other children in her care with cruelty bordering on sadism. Other events in his early life show his capacity for hiding his emotional scars while searching desperately for the love and affection so long denied to him by those who should have cared for him.

The narrative is complex in structure, with frequent flashbacks to different stages of his development, each one subtly indicating what shaped him into the outwardly competent but aloof figure he became. We gain a gradually focusing picture of his loving but not entirely satisfactory relationship with his wife, Betty. At the novel’s start Eddie is in his eighties and Betty has recently died. As the narrative proceeds we hear about the secrets that haunt him, the relationships, heartbreaks and experiences that moulded him.

It’s a deeply felt portrayal of a conflicted, damaged life, and an indictment of the heartlessness of the powerful elite British who ran ‘the colonies’ of their former empire, ensuring they exploited every natural resource, while tainting the lives of all who came into contact with them.

Back to our walk yesterday. We followed a path down to the foreshore of a creek at Penpol and Point. A group of ten swans cruised majestically up the ebbing tide, then spoiled the elegant look by breaking up into aggressively lunging squabbles.

Penpol creekWe followed another, unknown path back across fields high above the creek. The views were lovely – on a rare day this summer in Cornwall of clear blue sky and sunshine we could see Carn Brea monument high above Camborne, some fifteen miles away.

Back at Feock we walked a little way across a field to gaze at Carrick Roads below. There were handsome but very large cows gazing at us inquisitively; Mrs TD isn’t keen on cows, so I went ahead alone to take the picture below. Earlier the footpath passed beside a field with glamorous-eyelashed alpacas, and again Mrs TD insisted on hurrying past, avoiding eye contact with them as they sauntered over to look at us. They looked affronted but amused.

Carrick cows