Decca The Letters of Jessica Mitford

I BABY BLUEBLOOD AND HOBOHEMIAN Just enough letters survive from Decca's childhood to give a feel for the peculiar nature of the close-knit, even ingrown, world in which she was raised, mostly in a succession of country mansions and the family's London house. Even without biographical backgroundavailable in innumerable memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies of the Mitford sisters and their friendsDecca's earliest surviving letters convey the self-confidence and freedom that come with a pedigree of privilege, as well as the bantering, chattering, brash playfulness, and the sometimes stinging wit and candor that characterized this particular family. As devotees of the family's legend are all too aware, in addition to the secret languages and rituals the children and their parents had numerous nicknames that sometimes showed the daughters' cult of inventive nonsense and sometimes carried political or ironic undertones. In Decca's early letters, Baron Redesdale was "the Old Subhuman" and "the Feudal Remnant," among other names, and both parents were "the Revereds" or the Female (Fem) and Male, although they were most commonly and endearingly simply Muv and Farve. Decca's parents, she once wrote, were "Edwardian by chronology but Victorian in ideology." Her father, she said, "acquired [an] extra degree of British jingoism, remarkable even for his class and generation," and she noted that her two Nazi sisters used to refer to him, "approvingly and accurately," as "one of Nature's Fascists." Most of the sisters have published their sometimes contradictory recollections, and it is pointless to rehash all their childhood motivations and influences, much less the long-running disputes over the degree of, say, Lady Redesdale's vague detachment or her husband's fiery temper, unwavering habits, or atavistic views. Decca's letters, as well as her memoirs, convey her own reactions, both at the time and in retrospect. Her perceptions of her childhood changed somewhat over time, and more than most writers, she returned to the subject frequently throughout her life, as if she could never quite make sense of it or, indeed, define herself except in terms of the family she left abruptly at the age of nineteen. Decca once summed up her sisterly relationships before global and family politics shattered their confined world: Boud [Unity] was the one I really adored. Family relationships at that age changed in a kaleidoscope: first one, then 'tother was foremost Loved One amongst the sisters. Nancy was a remote star. Pam, a cypher, a perennial butt of teasing by the rest of us (led by Nancy), & I barely saw her at all; she went off to do farming or something for Diana & [her first husband] Bryan [Guinness] when I was about 12. The Diana relationship (from loving to loathing). . . . Debo & I, closest in age, veered a lot. That is, I think we always had a certain HONNISH* ADORATION of each other, but hardly any common interests, even when v. young. Although the Mitfords' financial resources were in decline during her childhood, partly because of Baron Redesdale's fascination with buying and building houses, "we were sort of cosseted, lapped in luxury & comfort," Decca has written. There were always household retainers to attend to their needs and whims. The six daughters were tutored by their mother and then placed, in turn, "under the jurisdiction of a series of inept governesses, from whom we learned next to nothing," she said. The sisters tormented the governesses mercilessly. As but one small example of their habitual defiance, Decca recalled how, when forbidden to say the word "damn," they delighted in infuriating the governess by routinely referring to tMitford, Jessica is the author of 'Decca The Letters of Jessica Mitford', published 2006 under ISBN 9780375410321 and ISBN 0375410325.