Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters Read Online Free

‘Alconleigh’, peopled it with her family and described it, not with idealism, but with a ravishing lightness and clarity, like the sun spilling onto the fields at dawn.
    It is a construct, of course. The Mitfords were not quite like Nancy’s fictional ‘Radletts’. Her father’s rampaging eccentricity was rendered faithfully, as were his habits – such as writing down the names of people he disliked and putting the paper into a drawer, stuck with pins – but ‘Uncle Matthew’ was a simpler, more assured man than the real-life Lord Redesdale, and ‘Aunt Sadie’ a more benign woman than his real-life wife. Although the book covers the same timescale as the one that sent assorted Mitfords dashing towards political extremes, there is no reference to the fact that Lady Redesdale herself was an admirer of Hitler. The grimly naive remarks made by Lord Redesdale about pre-war Germany are also expunged. ‘Good God, I never expected to harbour a full-blooded Hun in this house,’ says Uncle Matthew, when the son of the Governor of the Bank of England (surname Kroesig) turns up at his daughter’s coming-out ball. Nor does The Pursuit of Love allude to the dark passions of Unity and Diana, while Jessica’s elopement is made light of: the fictional ‘Jassy’ absconds with a Hollywood film star, and the heroine Linda, who falls for a Communist, does so mainly because he is incredibly good-looking.
    Then there is the emphasis that Nancy places upon continuum. The seasons come and go, as does the hunting and the lambing, the rhythms of country life; the Radlett children roam and flit like butterflies, searching for brightness; and Alconleigh itself stands immutable at the heart of it all, rooted in the land with which Uncle Matthew has an ineffable bond.
    In fact the Mitfords had three main childhood homes, whose surrounding acres were disposed of in job lots. Lord Redesdale inherited considerable assets when he succeeded to the title in 1916, but he was unable to hold on to them. Batsford Park in Gloucestershire, a fairytale castle of old gold built by his father, was first to go in 1919, together with almost 10,000 acres. In 1926 Asthall Manor and more land was sold. The home that the family had grown to love was replaced with the self-built Swinbrook House, a chilly, over-symmetrical structure perched just outside the village. Nancy gave Alconleigh something of the appearance of Swinbrook – ‘It was all as grim and as bare as a barracks, stuck upon the high hillside’ – but little of its atmosphere. Only Deborah liked it there. Jessica, aged nine when the family moved to Swinbrook (or ‘Swinebrook’, as Nancy called it), longed to leave. She collected ‘running-away money’, and asked repeatedly to be sent to school, a request fulfilled only briefly. When she did escape, Lord Redesdale may have blamed himself for not giving her a happier home, but Jessica’s teenage rebelliousness – which lasted well into middle age – was more complex than that. Nevertheless the move to Swinbrook was significant; it was the beginning of the end for the family as an entity. ‘We never again had real family life after we left Asthall,’ 9 Diana later wrote. Nancy devised a brittle tease about how their fortunes had descended from Batsford PARK to Asthall MANOR to Swinbrook HOUSE , but after Swinbrook was sold in 1938 there were no more country houses at all. That life was over.
    The supreme irony about The Pursuit of Love is that, by the time it was published, pretty much everything that it represented was vanishing. Not just the world of feudal certainties and communion with the land; but that of the Mitfords themselves. Tragedy and dislocation comes to the fictional Radletts, yet the family remains essentially secure in itself, eternal despite the passage of time. In real life, the thunderous ideologies of the 1930s – so impersonal, so destructive of personal happiness – left the Mitfords bereft and broken.
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