The House of Mitford Quotes

“But there was more to Hitler’s charm than this. Incredible as it may sound, he excited protective, almost motherly instincts by a sort of helpless look, and this at the height of his power. Diana says that ‘what one might call the chivalrous attitude towards Hitler’ seemed particularly marked in Goering. There is one place where, to this day, one can get a feeling of this aspect of Hitler’s appeal – in Leni Riefenstahl’s film about the 1934 Parteitag, Triumph of the Will. There is a moment when Hitler gets out of his aircraft and looks around him for the welcoming party; he seems, for that moment, helpless and vulnerable, the Little Man. That apparent vulnerability can exercise mass attractiveness is, of course, well known. In the case of Hitler, who was also possessed of strong dominance and almost hypnotic powers of persuasion, this faculty helped him by, as it were, disarming those he confronted before they were overwhelmed. There are several passages in the correspondence between Diana and Unity in which they refer to Hitler as looking ‘sweet’ or ‘beloved’. This was the effect he had on them. This lovable man was then in due course to have enormous numbers of innocent people slaughtered. Life would be simpler if someone capable of ordering mass murder could never show an attractive side.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“What he said can be applied to all seven Mitfords. Decca’s sense of sin was every bit as deficient as Diana’s. Unity had nothing of the sort until she was brain damaged; there was not much sign of it in Nancy either. Pam and Debo were too concerned with practicalities to bother with it; Tom, who was an admirer of Kant but not particularly religious, would have known all about sin but seen it rather as a philosophical problem than as cause for a dark night of the soul.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“There is, though, a genuine case against them. Oddly enough it was young Randolph Churchill who as a schoolboy put his finger on it. His motives were characteristically impure; he was boyishly in love with Diana, and cross because she had got engaged to Bryan. But he made a shrewd point. He accused Diana of having ‘no fundamental moral sense. In other words, though you rarely do wrong, you do not actually see anything wrong in sin.’ (Quoted by Anne de Courcy in Diana Mosley.) Randolph’s accusation here was in effect that Diana based her good behaviour on what the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son: ‘Do as you would be done by is the surest method that I know of pleasing,’ rather than on Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative which elevates ‘do as you would be done by’ into the general principle that one should do nothing that cannot be made into a universal law.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“As time passes it becomes easier to see how alike the sisters were. Decca and Diana, the two political extremists, were in some ways the closest in character. Both fell blindly for totalitarianism, through men to whom they remained permanently loyal: both were adored by their own friends and family; both were funny, brave, charismatic and persuasive. But all the sisters inherited the confident style of their grandfathers.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Her favourite writer seems to be Beatrix Potter. Ginger and Pickles, about a cat and a dog who run a shop but go broke through giving credit, is according to Debo the best book on retailing ever written, and she treasures Peter Rabbit as a manual of garden design.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“The alternative to privilege is of course bureaucracy, and Debo is very sharp about that, in all its forms. Otherwise she simply describes in detail how her own set-up works. She demonstrates that Chatsworth is a happy community as well as a productive business, that the employees are valued and looked after. She never makes the mistake of claiming that the whole of Britain could be run on the same lines; Chatsworth after all is part of the countryside, pre-industrial. William Cobbett, almost two centuries ago, would have liked Britain to return to this condition, but even in his day it was too late.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“It needs defending, because the Chatsworth estate is more than a thriving business; it is also a survival. Andrew passed no exams, he was on no shortlist, he was selected by no committee of the great and the good. The same applies to Debo as his wife. Let us not mince words; they owe their position to privilege. As much as the old House of Lords, and indeed the Monarchy, they constitute a standing offence against the principle of equality of opportunity.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“The past,’ wrote L. P. Hartley, ‘is another country; they do things differently there.’ Debo, in her eighties, is an emissary from that country and speaks up for it. She keeps out of politics in the strict sense, though a giant portrait of her and Andrew presided over the Countryside March in September 2002. She is a sharp critic of what she sees around her today, always supporting the country and praising the old skills.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Her son, Benjamin Treuhaft, is continuing her beneficent radicalism. He is a restorer and tuner of pianos. One of the sillier aspects of the United States embargo on trade with Cuba concerns these instruments; if the Americans had their way, no pianos would reach Cuba and those already on the island would be getting more and more decrepit and out of tune. Perhaps some bureaucrat in the United States treasury department can explain how a cacophony of superannuated pianos can help the Cuban people free themselves from Communism, but it seems a mystery. Anyway, in 1993 Benjamin restored a grand piano and sent it to Havana’s Museo National de la Musica, and persuaded other tuners to send numbers of pianos there. The US Treasury Department tried to fine him $10,000 dollars for this activity but failed to press the matter, perhaps fearing ridicule. Benjamin now runs a charitable outfit called ‘Send a Piana to Havana’ which has delivered more than two hundred used pianos. Good for him.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“There was worse to come. When the interview was published, Catherine prefixed it with a letter from Jonathan which called Decca ‘a hardened and intelligent Marxist agitator who knows very subtly how to play on her upper-class background so as to enlist residual snobbery (on both sides of the Atlantic) in establishing Marxism.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Pam died on 12 April 1994. She was 86, but was active and retained all her senses until the end. She had an accident on a visit to London; she fell down some steps and broke her leg. She was taken to hospital where it was pinned, and within twenty-four hours she was sitting up in bed and cheerfully talking to visitors. But a clot from the operation reached her heart, and suddenly she was no more. Her funeral was at Swinbrook, where she is buried near Sydney, Nancy and Unity; a country funeral, simple and evocative, attended by family and masses of friends. She had aged well. Teased all her life by her more quickwitted sisters, yet expert at surfing these breakers without loss of face, Pam developed in old age a sunny humour that earned the deep love of her sisters and all their descendants. Pam’s last years evoked the prelude to the last act of Falstaff, that masterpiece of Verdi’s genial old age.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“It was from Lismore that Nancy wrote to Diana on 6 July 1957: ‘Debo has become the sort of English duchess who doesn’t feel the cold, it is the only drawback to complete pleasure.’ But Nancy always felt the cold badly; her correspondence is full of references to not being warm enough.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“This is because Decca, early in life, felt the need to turn her feelings into explicit general principles; she also read books. Class became an evil to her, its beneficiaries including her own family became enemies. What started as a desire for closer human relationships turned into a dehumanization of her dealings with her parents and most of the real people she actually knew. (This was tragedy in the most literal sense.) But Debo, innocent of slogans and generalizations, regarded class more as a misfortune, since to her it showed itself in her day-to-day experience simply as an obstacle to getting to know particular people. She found that the best remedy for it was to ignore it. This is what she learned to do; she has always behaved in exactly the same way to everyone.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“In interview, Debo summarized what life was like in those few years at Swinbrook. She remembers her father for his charm and courtesy: ‘He made people feel marvellous.’ He did have rages, sometimes about small things; Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, was never asked to the house again because she left a paper handkerchief on a hedge. Sydney’s manner was unusually vague, ‘but she could come down like a ton of bricks and it was then awful’. Debo also remembers that neither of her parents bothered very much about what others thought. We think this self-confidence made all their children feel more secure, even though some of them could find it annoying.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Evidently her technique for dealing with teases was to cry easily, and yet learn not to mind too much underneath. That is, when one of her sisters started some rigmarole designed to upset her, she would begin weeping soon, so that the perpetrator would desist and perhaps, if there was a grown-up in earshot, be scolded. Debo was most of the time David’s favourite; being the youngest she appealed to his protective side, and in addition her tastes were close to his.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Happy is he, says Pushkin in Eugene Onegin, who is young in his youth and whose character develops in line with his age, who can learn to cope with life by degrees, over the years. Debo has had the luck to be like this. Just as Pushkin recommends, her abilities have always appeared when required, neither too soon nor too late. It is a great gift.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“There is a sense in which the book is written by two people, but in fact both are Decca: the funny child Decca of the Swinbrook nursery, and the stern adult Decca of the Communist apparat. In Freudian terms, Communism has got hold of her superego, and the charm remains in her id. Superego lets id out of her cage like a child actress, painted and bedizened, for her antics to attract the public.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“She now wrote Hons and Rebels. Her early life and family gave her, of course, a rich vein to exploit; Nancy’s novels had made the public familiar with the Asthall and Swinbrook world. Then there was Unity’s involvement with Nazism, Diana’s marriage to a notorious Fascist leader and her own romantic elopement; Debo’s status as a duchess, too, was no bad thing. We must not suppose that Decca sat down cold-bloodedly to make of the Mitford story a sort of Brechtian tract. Primarily, the book was written to make people laugh, which indeed it does. However, her deeply rooted beliefs put her against her family and all its ways; these were people to laugh at, not with. Hons and Rebels is what Marxists call a work of ‘critical realism’.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“What happened in Decca’s special case when the atmosphere changed in this way? She had left her family and country and she detested her class, but it was easier to take herself out of the upper class than the upper class out of her. Hilaire Belloc had noticed that aristocrats ‘talk of their affairs in loud and strident voices’; Decca was always to retain something of this attitude. In the meantime, she was well-educated and had a natural feeling for words. In addition she possessed a sharp sense of the ridiculous.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“The Mitfords did not, like some families, quarrel about money; it was as if their political differences exhausted their quarrelling capacity.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“There has always been a paradox about the relations between almost any two Mitfords, which is that, though they both chat fluently and are deeply fond of each other, the affection between them is inarticulate and what they say to each other is independent of it. They rarely unburden themselves; the face they turn to each other is the face they turn to the public.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“About politics she never argued, but Bob’s legal activities met with her approval. ‘He helps those poor negroes when they are framed,’ she said later to Jonathan; ‘so good of him.’ But she also told Jonathan there were rather too many blacks in and out of the Treuhaft household; Dinky, she feared, might one day marry one. Bob’s mother, Aranka. took the same view, complaining to Debo that Decca had coloured folk in her home.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Decca says Sydney’s intention was to make friends at all costs. We are sure this is right, but it does not imply any sort of surrender by her mother. Sydney did not take the political views of any of her daughters very seriously, whether or not she agreed with them. She went mainly out of fondness for Decca, but also out of curiosity. At sixty-eight Sydney was still able to accept things exactly as she found them. Her attitude was that of her father when his yacht called at some unfamiliar port: cool, observant and amused. Decca’s life seemed perhaps queer in some ways, the American conditions as much as the Communism, but Sydney took it as she found it. Her bedroom, she noted, was furnished only with a bed and a piano. Very well, her suitcase would do instead of a cupboard. She loved the children, and made Bob laugh.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“the next few years of Decca’s life were largely devoted to the United States Communist Party and to the Civil Rights Congress, the Communist-run organization which campaigned for black rights. Her account of this period in A Fine Old Conflict manages to hold the reader’s interest while not concealing how boring much of it must have been. She liked most of the comrades, admired many of them, yet the reigning atmosphere of prosy self-righteousness comes across fully. She could not always help teasing; this was often, though not always, resented.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“This is because Diana presents scenes and people exactly as they seemed to her, making no concessions to generally accepted opinion. Her writing has the direct frankness of Sydney’s and some of Thomas’s, and in Diana’s circumstances that proved a bit too much. Mosley emerges as the man who could have given his country prosperity and peace. Pre-war Germany is a happy country; what was being prepared, what was happening outside Diana’s experience, is omitted. Hitler is a marvellous, if rather moody, companion who has abstemious habits and exquisite manners; there is a chapter about him and Churchill, comparing rather than contrasting, which was bound to annoy. Diana’s book soon got a label: it was ‘unrepentant’. Not only does she quite evidently fail to see what she has to repent of, she is distinctly astringent about at least two Nazis who did repent. One is Putzi; and there is a dig also at Albert Speer, whom she remembers at Hitler’s table.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“It was in Venice, too, that Mosley claimed to have overheard two Jews discussing them. ‘Say what you like,’ one is supposed to have said, ‘old Tom Mosley would never have done us any harm.’ ‘No,’ said his companion, ‘but Diana would.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Relations between Nancy and Mosley illustrate how right Logan Pearsall Smith was when he said: ‘If we treat people long enough with that pretence of liking called politeness, we find it hard not to like them in the end.’ Both had to be polite to each other because both knew that they would be in trouble with Diana if they were not; Nancy, in particular, had learnt this from the episode of Wigs on the Green. They were not at first inclined to get on. To Nancy, Mosley had ruined Diana’s life and in the most appalling fashion corrupted her; to Mosley, Nancy was a silly lady novelist catering to his countrymen’s worst instincts. ‘I’ve suffered from that type all my life,’ he once told Jonathan. But both loved Diana more than they disapproved of each other.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Soon Mosley began advocating the union of Europe, in a more extreme form than anyone else. The nationalism of the Fascists was outdated; there must be an ‘extension of patriotism’. ‘Europe a Nation’ was the new slogan. The slump, which Mosley expected about twenty-five years before it occurred, would make people turn to his ideas.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Now and then the Mosleys were visited by a group of young Germans, ex-prisoners of war who had stayed in the countryside as agricultural labourers. One of them asked Diana to explain something: he had been classified as a ‘Kaninchen-Nazi’, rabbit-Nazi. What had he to do with rabbits? Suddenly the penny dropped: Diana realized that he had misheard the English phrase ‘rabid Nazi’.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“She died in her own bed, peacefully, on 30 June 1973. Ten years before, at Chatsworth, Debo had written her various questions as to what should be done when she died, and she had replied. Debo: Is it true that you have left money in your will for a tomb and that I am to see about it? Nancy: True. Debo: Where do you want to be buried? Nancy: Near to wherever I drop off the perch … Debo: Have you got any thoughts on the Tomb? Nancy: Large and showy, with angels and a long inscription saying how lovely I was and greatly missed … Debo: Is the Tomb to be where you’re buried, I mean to say you die in Timbuctoo, then where do you want the Tomb? Nancy: Yes, Timbuctoo. Then it will be something for visitors to visit. Debo: Lots of clergymen and other fussy people are livid at the idea of angels, but I suppose I’ll be able to impose my will. Nancy: Yes, please impose … She must have changed her mind, for these arrangements were not followed. Her remains were flown to England, accompanied by Diana and Mosley, and she was buried in Swinbrook churchyard.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford