Bye-bye to Debo: Last of Mitfords Passes

wfgodot said:

Gosh, commentless -- perhaps I've over-estimated the number of WSers who regularly use the word châtelaine as a search term.

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Several friends expressed horror when I told them that I was comparing the Mitfords to the Kardashians. One wrote: “The Mitford sisters were wonderful and Love in a Cold Climate is the sort of blissfully perfect yarn you discover in a bookcase at home, pages well-fingered from years of adoration. The Kardashians, however, are the kind of low lives one discovers while being subjected to the treadmill in a gym by virtue of the staff having control over your TV destiny.”

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I take his point, but I think what he is objecting to is actually the format in which the Kardashians are presented to us. The works of Nancy and Jessica Mitford were funny, tender, romantic stories, rich with incidental asides and unique characters. Keeping Up with the Kardashians may not compare to the Mitfords’ novels, but the cult of celebrity which surrounds the family, does.
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With one sister imprisoned for being a Nazi sympathiser and another who was so besotted with Hitler that she shot herself, one might assume that some stigma would have stuck to the Mitford name during the war. Deborah, though, insists that she was never aware of any. 'I mean, I'm sure there must have been, but I certainly never lost any friends as a result. They were just very sad for all the horrible things that had happened.'

'What did you think of Oswald Mosley?'

'Oh, I loved him,' she says without hesitation.
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Why are you a Conservative, I ask her, which later I think may be a stupid question, given that the Devonshires own Chatsworth, thousands of acres of the Derbyshire countryside, a castle in Ireland, and half a dozen other residences. "I like conserving things," she says circularly. "I like people to stay as they are, though I know they can't." Stumblingly, I point out that at the Guardian we do not wholly approve of dukes, duchesses and other feudal throwbacks. How does she justify them? Her answer is characteristically lateral. "There are two retired head gardeners here," she says, "both of whom have done 50 years at Chatsworth, and they are just such extraordinary people that if you could sit and talk to them you would learn some things that you would never have known. They are just wonderful, and it's really the company of them and the people who work on the farms that I like best of all."

She says time-honoured hierarchies are better than faceless modern conglomerates; the 600 or so people employed at Chatsworth know who they should moan at if things go wrong. "There's always been access to the top here. There's a human. You can laugh at them, you can dislike them, but they're there."
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Their parents didn't think that girls needed much in the way of formal schooling, which is likely a major reason their childhood eccentricities ran completely amuck in adulthood. Really there's no point in any hipster attempting to cultivate any affectations ever, given that the Mitfords once existed on this planet.
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1. Jessica: “You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.”
2. Nancy: “If I had a girl I should say to her, ‘Marry for love if you can, it won’t last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven’s sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all.” (Christmas Pudding)
3. Pam: “She had a great way with animals and introduced the Appenzeller Spitzhauben breed of chicken to Britain from Switzerland. She knew all about the mysteries of home-made yoghurt, compost heaps, ‘curing one’s own hams’, ‘making soup out of one’s head’, and growing rare varieties of vegetables long before such things became fashionable.”
4. Debo: STILL ALIVE. [victory lap]
5. Unity: Mentally ill Nazi sympathizer.
6. Diana: Nazi sympathizer without the excuse of mental illness.

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Debo has always rather cultivated the myth of her own stupidity, selling herself as deeply unlettered and ignorant and consistently declaring her ennui when faced with a book. It seems to me that where most people pretend to have read the books they haven't, Debo has tended to err on the side of pretending not to have read the books that she has. 'There may be a substratum of truth in that,' she admits. 'That was to get out of talking about them for hours.'
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