Read Online Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson - Free Book Online

servants. There was a cook, three maids and two nannies: Laura Dicks – known as ‘Blor’, adored by the children – and a young girl called Ada Bowden. ‘So what did my mother do all day?’ Nancy later wrote. ‘She says now, when cross-examined, that she lived for us. Perhaps she did, but nobody could say that she lived with us...’ The 1911 census finds David and Sydney at Graham Street with the cook while the children, plus nannies, are named as ‘boarders’ at a house on the Undercliff at Bournemouth. This was April. That summer the family acquired a holiday home of its own, Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe, leased by Tap and later bought by Sydney (a wise investment on her part: when retrenchment was required, as was often the case, the house could be a retreat or a source of rental income). The family travelled to it by train with their servants, a menagerie of dogs, mice, guinea pigs and grass snakes, plus – that first year – a Shetland pony that had taken David’s fancy the previous day on his way home from The Lady (and that spent the night on a landing at Graham Street). The Shetland having been denied access to the guard’s van, David took a third-class compartment in order to accommodate it. ‘Of course it was most unusual for ANYONE to travel third class in those days,’ Pamela later recalled, straight-faced, for a television documentary. 12 This vignette is reminiscent of a story recounted by Deborah, who during the Second World War travelled third class from Scotland to London with her goat, and in the middle of the night milked it in the first-class waiting room: ‘which I should not have done’. 13 Very Mitford. Charming, eccentric, unselfconscious – except perhaps in the telling.
    And so life continued, away from the Edwardian era (Nancy had a powerful memory, which she admitted was probably false, of her parents weeping into black-edged newspapers at the death of the king in 1910), into the sweetly unaware period in which things apparently stayed the same, but were in fact preparing for the great change of August 1914. Clement, heir to the Redesdale estates, married his cousin Lady Helen Ogilvy, and had a baby, Rosemary. Bertie Mitford was rich in sons – five (that we know of) plus three daughters – but his boys produced just three between them. David began prospecting for gold in Canada, travelling to Ontario for the first time with Sydney in 1913. They lived in a cabin in a small mining community in Swastika, where Unity was conceived. It was somehow typical of David, first that he should have tried such a bold and manly scheme, second that a property barely a mile away struck a rich seam of gold. 14 His own finances remained essentially unimproved. Nevertheless back in England he moved his family to a large house on Kensington’s Victoria Road, where Unity was born four days after the outbreak of war.
    War with Germany must have seemed particularly strange to Bertie Mitford, then aged seventy-seven. His son Jack had recently had a spectacular Berlin wedding (although the marriage to Fräulein Fuld was over within the year); his friend Houston Stewart Chamberlain was admired by the Kaiser. The conflict within Bertie would have been nothing like as strong as it was in Unity, who twenty-five years later was torn apart by the enmity between Britain and Germany, as to a lesser extent were Diana, Tom and Sydney. But Bertie may have felt some of this; especially when his son Clement was killed near Ypres in May 1915.
    Nancy, never a friend to Germany, later wrote that she had ‘prayed, as hard as I could, for war’. 15 What she had craved (aged nine) was the prospect of living in a tree, like Robin Hood, and killing an invader. In fact war would change her fortunes in a way that was ultimately favourable, but Clement’s death caused her to feel intense guilt, as well as great sadness. Everybody had adored him. Pamela later recalled his death as the first time that she saw grown-ups