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

sometimes played to the gallery with it: as in Jessica’s Hons and Rebels . But it was their natural idiom. A supreme example came from Diana, when she and Mosley were jailed in 1940 as suspected enemy sympathizers, and for three years in Holloway she endured unspeakable conditions and mental anguish. Nevertheless, as she put it to her husband, ‘it was still lovely to wake up in the morning and feel that one was lovely One. ’ This remark, with its almost painful funniness born of pain, its lightness born of indomitability, above all its complete naturalness (Diana wasn’t trying to be funny, she was simply saying what she meant) is wholly Mitfordian. So too is the private system of jokes, now so familiar that all those nicknames, all that Tuddemy (Tom 10 ), Cake (the Queen Mother 11 ), Boots (Cyril Connolly 12 ), Joan Glover (von Ribbentrop 13 ) and Bosomy (President Kennedy 14 ), can become a bit of a crasher (bore) – although that is not the fault of the jokers themselves. In her novels Nancy modified it slightly. But the dominant voice of her characters 15 is her own, the Mitford voice, and thus that distinct, direct, wide-eyed, fantastical idiom has become a familiar mode of speech, unbearable to some, adorable to others, oddly impossible to imitate. It is part-childish, part-posh, part-1920s exaggeration – ‘do admit’, ‘oh you are kind, the kindness of you’, ‘she ees wondair ’ – yet what makes it durable is the edge of perceptiveness, the nail on the head quality. ‘You know, being a Conservative is much more restful,’ says Linda Radlett, apropos the Communist Party, ‘though one must remember that it is bad, not good. But it does take place within certain hours, and then finish...’
    To be on the receiving end of the Mitford speech mode is an undoubtedly delightful experience. ‘Oh now aren’t you clever ,’ said Deborah to me, when I had done nothing more than recall the name of one of her husband’s racehorses. ‘Miss Thompson: so clever, and so nice,’ said Diana, to an aged gentleman who joined us for tea in her Paris flat. I fell for it, but then so did pretty much everybody who met them (Diana could have had Karl Marx grovelling at her feet). The point, of course, was that the way the sisters spoke was an outward expression of charm. And here one comes down to it: after all the analysis, the identification of the elements that comprise the Mitford phenomenon – the x 6 power, the upbringing, the times in which they lived, the showmanship, the toughness, the humour – one is left with that single, fused element. Charm. A quality that can enrage, but whose mystery is brightly indestructible.
    In itself there was nothing particularly remarkable about the fact of the Mitford sisters’ charm. Many of their circle were charming, people like Lady Diana Cooper, Lord Berners, Sir Harold Acton and, in her lugubrious way, Violet Hammersley. It is a characteristic associated with the upper classes, who had the leisure to weave that ethereal web, and the confidence to override resistance. The ‘creamy English charm’ that Evelyn Waugh famously described in Brideshead Revisited poured its streams through society, soothing and poisoning as it went.
    But the Mitford charm – which, for all its high-altitude chill, did the essential thing of making life seem better – was charm writ large. It had the quality of self-awareness, increasingly so after Nancy mythologized it. The Mitfords deployed their charm as a kind of tease, as part of a game in which the charmed were also invited to take part; and this knowingness, this self-ironizing, is the preservative that prevents decay.
    The charm of the Mitfords en masse was very much Nancy’s creation. But then there are the six individual girls, who in real life were charming all right, but were a lot of other things as well. When one thinks about Unity, in particular, the very notion of charm seems rather absurd. Indeed perhaps the most