The Sisters Quotes

“In a televised version of one of Nancy’s books, these child hunts were given a more sinister connotation with the children running terrified through woods while their father, on horseback, thundered after them with a pack of hounds baying. In fact the children loved it – they thought the hound was ‘so clever’.29 In her novel Nancy had referred to ‘four great hounds in full cry after two little girls’ and ‘Uncle Matthew and the rest would follow on horseback’.30 As a result, fiction overlaid fact, and during research for this book I met people who believed, and read articles that stated, that the Mitfords led the lives of the fictional Radletts, and at least one American journalist was convinced that David had ‘hunted’ his poor abused children with dogs. There was never any pressure to conform and the children grew as they wanted. There were no half-measures in their behaviour. ‘We either laughed so uproariously that it drove the grown-ups mad, or else it was a frightful row which ended in one of us bouncing out of the room in floods of tears, banging the door as loud as possible.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“And despite the portrait of Sydney promoted by Nancy’s books and Decca’s account of her unhappy adolescence, it is clear that much of their attitude to life was engendered by their mother, who allowed them freedom to develop while always being there to support in moments of crisis. In reply to his letter of condolence after David’s death, Sydney wrote to James Lees-Milne that she thought often of ‘the happy days when you were all young and David and I had the children all around us. I was lucky to have those perfectly happy years before the war. Isn’t it odd how, when one looks back at that time, it seems to have been all summers?”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“Hosts of friends attended the funeral at Swinbrook to sing the hymn sung at all Mitford funerals, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. Today, a small oak planted by Pam on the village green is as much a memorial to ‘the quiet Mitford sister’ as is her headstone in that peaceful place, which held so many childhood memories. Although she had no children of her own Pam’s many nieces and nephews were left feeling bereft: ‘Tante Femme’s’ maternal and caring qualities were unique in the family, and of all Sydney’s daughters she was the most like her mother.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“On 12 April 1994 a devastated Debo telephoned Decca to advise that Pam had died from a blood clot after surgery for a broken leg. Although eighty-six, Pam had continued to lead a full life right to the end, having only to curtail somewhat her beloved trips abroad in recent years. As with her sisters, age had made little difference to the way she lived, thought or wrote, and only physical impossibility prevented her leading the life she had lived since she was a young woman. At her eightieth birthday party she had wowed her guests by appearing in a gold lamé coat, and sat radiant with pleasure, her eyes still that amazing shade of blue, which showed no signs of fading to octogenarian paleness.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“In the spring of 1989 the Islamic fatwa was declared on Salman Rushdie for his book Satanic Verses. On the day this was announced Decca appeared wearing an outsize cardboard lapel badge upon which she had printed ‘I AM Salman Rushdie’. Later the badge went into production and was worn all over the USA by those opposed to literary censorship, and subsequently Rushdie himself was absorbed into Decca’s vast international circle of literary and media friends. ‘About the Salman Rushdie badges,’ Decca wrote gaily to Debo, ‘I’d send you one, but I fear you don’t look much like him.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“Her dislike of Jonathan had been bolstered recently at a meeting with his daughter Catherine who, when interviewing Decca for an article, showed her a letter from Jonathan in which he warned her about Decca: She’s a very tough cookie [he wrote], 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. But this leads to problems of identity; to an ambiguity as to what is real and what is an act. All this was very evident in her TV appearance here. Bob Treuhaft came over better, at least he is what he is. He is one piece so to speak, the bright Jewish boy with his ready made ‘red diaper’ principles, seeing (e.g.) Chatsworth from the outside with the healthy irony of a social historian.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“The real surprise of the programme was seventy-three-year-old Pam, for in it the ‘quiet sister’ emerged as a star performer. Giggling, pretty, funny and sometimes serious, she positively stole the show from her more famous sisters.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“As for Diana, ‘It is hard to convey her charm, even more to defend her politics,’ he wrote. ‘The latter are neither flaunted nor evaded but when they come up in conversation they are defended or explained with a temperance of language equalled by a gentleness of tone.’4 He was especially interested that this most beautiful woman was camera-shy. It seems that just as a plain woman may have a love affair with the camera and appear a ravishing beauty on screen, the reverse can happen too. It is certainly true that there are few photographs that show Diana’s real beauty in the way that paintings of her do. ‘As soon as we began to film,’ he said, ‘her face lost all its customary animation and her replies to my questions came as if from a mask with darting eyes.’ He concluded that she felt trapped by the camera.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“Sometimes, letters would contain phrases in Boudledidge (confusing to a researcher) such as, ‘Jaub, Dzdiddle no zdmudkung [yes, still no smoking] – I long for a puff,’ and a scribbled message on the outside of an envelope, ‘Jegg engludzed [cheque enclosed]’.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“Perhaps at the heart of the matter was that Decca had long ago crossed an invisible line of behaviour acceptable to her family in England. People of her parents’ generation, and even most of her own, lived by a strict code that Decca never accepted, hardly recognized. By running away, by treating her parents as she and Esmond had done, by her active Marxism, by the hurtful, small exaggerations in her book, funny though they were, she had broken this code and although she was still loved and welcomed back, her loyalty was never entirely trusted.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“her time at San José University led to other short-term academic contracts, including periods at Yale and Harvard. In 1974 she was awarded an honorary degree as Doctor of Letters by Smith College. This entitled her, she learned, to the letters D. Litt after her name. ‘Wouldn’t Muv be amazed to find that Little D. has been transformed into D. Litt?’ she wrote to her sisters.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“Nancy’s ashes were duly buried alongside Unity. Later, Pam had a headstone erected on the grave, bearing the heraldic device that Nancy had embossed on her writing-paper. It was a little golden mole, a creature included in the Mitford coat-of-arms.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“To James Lees-Milne Nancy had written, ‘It’s very curious, dying, and would have many a droll, amusing & charming side were it not for the pain . . . the doctors will not give one a date, it is so inconvenient they merely say have everything you want (morphia).’18 And to her beloved Colonel a few days before the end, her last letter: ‘I’m truly very ill . . . I suffer as I never imagined possible; the morphine has very little effect and hurts very much as it goes in. I hope and believe I am dying . . . the torture is too great. You cannot imagine . . . I would love to see you.’19 He did visit her sometimes, and then, on 30 June, while he was walking his dog, he suddenly had a strong presentiment that he must go to see her. Although she appeared to be in a coma when he arrived, she seemed to smile as he took her hand and spoke to her. The hearing is the last of the senses to fail and it is almost certain that she was aware of his presence. He was the dearest person in the world to her. Soon afterwards she slipped away. ‘Nancy was the bright star of our youth,’ Rudbin wrote to Decca, ‘a gay butterfly fluttering through attainable territories – quite the wrong person to be ill and suffer. A gossamer personality.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“One of the last things Nancy said to Debo was that she recalled hunting as a teenager. If there was one thing she would like to have done, she said, it was to have one more day with hounds.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“She had suffered harrowing torments, and when the condition was finally diagnosed as Hodgkin’s disease16 she was not surprised to be told by her doctors that the pain was known to be one of the worst.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“The research took her to East Berlin, accompanied by Pam who spoke German, which Nancy did not. There, Nancy had a similar experience to that of Bob and Decca in Hungary: she was approached by a personable young man who told her of his desperate longing for freedom to travel. ‘You know, how can Decca go on believing in it all?’ Nancy wrote to Debo. ‘I shall tell her it’s all right being a commy in our countries but wait until you are nabbed by the real thing! For ten days we haven’t moved without a policeman. I must say it suited me because I loved being looked after . . . still, it’s a funny feeling . . . Checkpoint Charlie is gruesome.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“It was curious, meeting Diana again after thirty-four years: ‘She looks like a beautiful bit of aging sculpture (is fifty-nine), they don’t have this thing of wanting to look young here, her hair is almost white, no makeup, marvellous figure, same large, perfect face and huge eyes,’ she wrote to Pele de Lappe.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“At about this time she was contacted by a friend of mine, Sunday Times journalist Brigid Keenan, who was writing a piece on Nancy and wanted Decca to comment on Nancy’s statement that ‘Sisters are a shield against life’s cruel adversity.’ Decca replied, ‘But sisters are life’s cruel adversity!”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“To Dinky’s horror everyone kept telling her she looked just like Diana, a compliment in any other branch of the Mitford family but Decca’s. ‘Silence was the only possible response,’ she decided. Like Bob, she was unsure of herself in the big house, though not overawed; if anything her reaction was one of amusement. Invisible hands unpacked her luggage and her laundry was whisked away and reappeared looking fresh and new. ‘They keep referring to Kennedy as Jack,’ she wrote to her parents, ‘and there is an autographed portrait of him in Debo’s drawing room.’ She found Nancy ‘cold and aloof’ and Diana ‘trying to pretend there was no reason for there to be any unfriendliness between us’. Pam was ‘relaxed and ordinary’ and Debo ‘so sensitive and welcoming’. In an odd sense, because she knew so much about the sisters, she felt like one of them, rather than a niece.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“It is so poignant,’ Nancy wrote to old Swinbrook-sewer Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘She feels so ill . . . two days ago she said, “Who knows – perhaps Tom and Bobo?” . . . She laughs as she always has . . . We long for her to go in her sleep, quietly.’38 A week later Sydney had a minor stroke and slipped into unconsciousness. ‘Before that it was dreadful,’ Nancy wrote. Sydney had been unable to swallow anything but sips of liquid because of throat constriction and was starving to death. Nancy had often claimed that she had never loved her mother but now she found that her feelings for her were stronger than she had suspected. ‘Now she is slipping away and feels nothing . . . the sadness comes and goes in waves. I have a feeling nothing really nice will ever happen again in my life. Things will just go from bad to worse, leading to old age and death.’39 Sydney died on 25 May, just after her eighty-third birthday. A carpenter travelled over to the island and made her coffin, and a neighbour said prayers over her body.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“My mother has always lived in a dream world of her own and no doubt was even dreamier during her many pregnancies . . . when she was young she never opened a book and it is difficult to imagine what her tastes and occupations [were]. My father and she disliked society, or thought they did – there again, later they rather took to it – and literally never went out. She had no cooking or housework to do. In those days you could be considered very poor by comparison with other people of the same sort and yet have five servants . . . Even so she was perhaps abnormally detached. On one occasion Unity rushed into the drawing room, where she was at her writing table, saying, ‘Muv, Muv, Decca is standing on the roof – she says she’s going to commit suicide!’ ‘Oh, poor duck,’ said my mother, ‘I hope she won’t do anything so terrible,’ and went on writing.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“Decca was distanced from her family for so long, at a vulnerable time, when she was totally obsessed with Esmond, and subjected to his critical hard-boiled dislike of them. ‘From what Decca told me,’ Bob Treuhaft said, ‘Esmond was completely devoid of sentimentality of any kind. I don’t know about a sense of humour, but he would not have understood Decca’s residual fondness for her family. They were “the enemy” . . . It’s quite clear he kept her from visiting Unity.’31 It appears that Nancy’s myths and half-facts had become genuinely interchangeable with real memory in Decca’s mind. Then, too, she was such a good storyteller and a natural clown, and after telling exaggerated versions of Mitford stories for years to appreciative listeners in California, the jokey versions probably became what she remembered.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“In private, however, the Mosleys were not only accepted but welcomed whenever they appeared in London, even by former enemies. On one occasion when they were lunching with Frank Pakenham, now Lord Longford, at the Gay Hussar in London, the arch-socialist Michael Foot was at the next table. ‘I saw Mosley look at him uneasily,’ Lord Longford said. ‘After Foot had finished his meal he stopped at our table and said, “What a pleasure to see you again, Sir Oswald.” After he left Mosley said softly, “How English. How English. Only in England could that happen.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“The last time Decca had seen David was when she had set off for Paris to elope with Esmond. She might easily have effected a reconciliation. David had written several times to her, brief kind letters on the birth of Benjamin and the death of Nicholas, and she might have gone to see him in Redesdale, but she took umbrage at Sydney’s comment, ‘Since you have imposed conditions it would be better not to see Farve . . .’ When his will was read it was found that she had been cut out in a marked manner: he had never recovered from her attempt to hand over part of Inch Kenneth to ‘the Bolshies’ and was fearful that anything he left her would be given away. In every clause where he left assets to be shared between ‘my surviving children’, he had added the words ‘except Jessica’.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“Diana mourned the Farve of long ago, the huge towering man with tempers like an inferno, humour that often made family mealtimes like a scene from a farce, and eccentricities such as chub-fuddling, which somehow made him more endearing in retrospect.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“in the spring of 1958, David died at Redesdale Cottage. Diana had woken one morning with a strong presentiment that she must join Sydney and Debo, who were going up to Redesdale to visit David for his eightieth birthday, which was just a few days away. David and Sydney were in constant touch by letter and they all knew he had been unwell. ‘I shall never forget the expression on Farve’s face when Muv appeared at his bedside, and his smile of pure delight,’ Diana wrote. ‘All their differences forgotten, they seemed to have gone back twenty years to happy days before the tragedies. She sat with him for hours, Debo and I going in and out. After a couple of days Muv and Debo travelled on to Scotland and I returned to London . . . A few days later he died.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“At eleven o’clock she would board the Contessa’s sleek motor launch bound for the Lido to swim, sunbathe and gossip with friends, then eat a late luncheon served by the Contessa’s white-gloved footmen. In the afternoons there was time for a siesta with the windows thrown wide open to passing breezes. In the evenings there were dinner parties at palazzos, or in the cafés and restaurants around St Mark’s Square where, dressed in couturier creations, she met old friends and members of the international set. It was an idyllic existence.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“the half-teasing theory that one could identify true members of the upper classes by manners, words and expressions; those who used fish knives and poured milk into a cup before the tea (MIF = milk in first), and who referred to ‘note-paper’, ‘mirror’, settee’, ‘serviette’ and ‘toilet paper’ betrayed their lower-class origins. Those properly taught by Nanny spoke of writing-paper, a looking-glass, a sofa, napkins and lavatory paper. There was a lot more nonsense in this vein and the great British public took it seriously. As a result, Nancy said, she had practically to rewrite Pigeon Pie, which was about to be republished. It was, she explained to Evelyn Waugh, ‘full of mirrors, mantelpieces and handbags, etc. Don’t tell my public or I’m done for.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“It was entitled ‘Linguistic Class Indicators in Present Day English’, and she found its serious presentation killingly funny. ‘It has sentences like, “The ideal U-address (U stands for upper class) is P.Q.R. where P is a place, Q is a describer (manor, court, house etc) and R the name of the County, But today few gentlemen can maintain this standard and they often live in houses with non-U names such as Fairfields or El Nido,”’ she wrote, chortling, to Heywood Hill.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

“Three years later she published her first biography, Madame de Pompadour, and the reviews again were good. ‘Miss Mitford . . . admires money and birth and romantic love,’ her friend Cyril Connolly wrote, ‘. . . good food, fine clothes, “telling jokes”, courage and loyalty, and has no time for intellectual problems or the lingering horrors of life.’37 The eminent historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote that everyone who had enjoyed The Pursuit of Love would be delighted that its characters had reappeared, ‘this time in fancy dress. They now claim to be leading figures in French history. In reality they still belong to that wonderful never-never land of Miss Mitford’s invention, which can be called Versailles, as easily as it used to be called Alconleigh. Certainly no historian could write a novel half as good as Miss Mitford’s work of history.’38 Another friend, Raymond Mortimer, described the book as ‘extremely unorthodox . . . it reads as if an enchantingly clever woman were telling the story over the telephone’. Nancy did not know whether to feel complimented or not. ‘I was rather taken aback,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘I had seen the book as Miss Mitford’s sober and scholarly work . . . he obviously enjoyed it though he says the whole enterprise is questionable.’39 The book was apparently banned in Ireland as being a potential threat to happy marriage.”
― Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family