Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters > Status Update

‘Deborah took up the challenge, set by Mr Attlee, of making Chatsworth thrive as a commercial enterprise. Andrew, who like most true aristocrats was without snobbery, was insistent that the public should enter through the main front door, that as much of the house as possible be open to them, and that they should wander and picnic as they wished in the gardens (only the Old Park is private: home to the deer).‘

‘But to be jailed with no notion of when one will be freed is a peculiarly refined kind of torture. Hope remains – perhaps this will be the day? – then as the day passes, and nothing changes, hope becomes merely a mockery. When the bombs fell on London in 1941, and thirty-eight incendiaries exploded in the grounds of Holloway jail, what Diana minded was the noise; the possibility of death was an irrelevance.’

‘So Unity, frantically learning German, began visiting the same restaurants as Hitler (as Deborah later put it, today she would have been arrested as a stalker). This is where that extraordinary blithe Mitford confidence played its part. She seems to have had no doubt that she could command the attention of this player on the world’s political stage’

‘Mosley was fourteen years older than Diana, and perhaps at their respective ages the gap was too great to be bridged – she would have looked to him like a lovely schoolgirl, not a potential paramour. He had both hands full anyway, as another guest of the Astors was his sister-in-law and mistress Lady Ravensdale (‘Vote Labour, sleep Tory’ was then his motto).’