The Other Mitford (15 page)

Two events which were added to the Mitford family sagas emerge from the time Pam spent at Tullamaine after Derek left. While she was a tenant there she persuaded her landlord to install a new electricity system and he sent along a team of workmen to rewire the house. Then she asked him to provide a cow as she had no milk for their tea and again he duly obliged, sending a splendid cow in a lorry from Cork, 70 miles away. As the men used only a small amount of milk each day Pam bought four piglets and reared them on some of the remainder, sending the rest to the local creamery. She then received a cheque for £10 from the creamery, but when a friend suggested that she should reimburse the landlord, she was indignant. ‘Oh, no!’ she shrieked in horror. ‘After all, MY gardener milks the cow! And but for me the workmen would have had to BUY milk in the Fethard World!’

‘So,’ wrote Diana in a letter to Debo, ‘she keeps the cheque and the pigs – and the workmen are only there because
she
insisted. I thought we should die of laughter as the story unfolded. Isn’t she WONDAIR?’

When Pam finally left Tullamaine she held a sale of her belongings. Glasses which she had bought at the local Woolworth’s – where they could still be bought – fetched four times their retail price and she included in the sale large jars of eggs which had been stored in brine the year before. Diana and Debo teased her, saying that the eggs would have gone bad and would explode at intervals during the sale (they didn’t), but she took no notice and announced several times during proceedings in a loud voice: ‘Nothing leaves this house until it is paid for.’ This story is reminiscent of a previous occasion, this time when Pam and Derek were leaving Rignell. They invited the Mosleys to see if they wanted to buy anything from the house and during the evening Derek, becoming somewhat drunk and very sentimental, was heard by Pam to say to her sister: ‘Darling Diana, you mustn’t pay a penny for anything.’

‘Nothing leaves this house until she pays,’ said Pam in great indignation.

During the time Pam spent in the Cotswolds before moving to Switzerland, Giuditta, who had accompanied her to England, trained her horse at Sudgrove House, the home of former Olympic showjumping rider Pat Smythe. Pat was soon to marry Swiss businessman Sam Koechlin, also an international showjumper. Local farmer Malcolm Whitaker remembers Giuditta riding over to his farm in nearby Syde to ask if she could gallop her horse across his fields. Her ready smile and attractive manner always brightened his day – and he never refused her request. He felt that she came to ride on the farm partly because she very much enjoyed speaking German to his great friend Rudi Lomberg, a former German officer who had been taken prisoner during the war and chosen to stay in England. He worked with Malcolm on the farm and enjoyed these encounters with Giuditta as much as she did.

Due to her family’s friendship with Sam, a young Swiss girl, Margrit Kottmann, came to work on the farm at Sudgrove House for a year as part of her training. There she met Giuditta who took her home to Woodfield to meet Pam. This was the start of a friendship which provided a link between Switzerland and the Cotswolds and lasted until Pam’s death, since Margrit married George Powell, a local farmer, and made her home near Cheltenham. They had many meals with Pam at Caudle Green and enjoyed her excellent cooking, which Margrit remembers as being simple but very imaginative.

She once gave us mince flavoured with lemon and herbs but not with tomato, which was very unusual but tasted delicious and I remember her teaching my mother how to add curry powder to salad dressing to make it more tasty and also to add two to three dashes of Worcestershire sauce to Yorkshire pudding batter to give it extra zest.

George and Margrit still have in their garden plants which Pam gave them to remind them of her friendship. One of these is sorrel and Margrit still makes sorrel soup from Pam’s recipe (see Appendix).

When living in Switzerland Pam became friendly with Margrit’s parents who lived in the Jura mountains, and Margrit and her family visited Pam at her house in Grüningen, the tiny, low-lying village near Zurich where she had finally chosen to live. Years later, after Pam had left Switzerland, Giuditta, who had stayed on in the house, died suddenly from an asthma attack; it was Margrit’s son, Dan, and his friend Chris Thring who drove from Gloucestershire to Grüningen in an ancient van to bring back some furniture which Pam had left there. She had been quoted a price by a local removal firm which she was not prepared to pay!

The house in Grüningen was set amid picture-book scenery and was what Debo described as ‘an odd little house with a ladder to the bedrooms’ – not, you might think, a suitable staircase for someone with a weak leg but, ‘I’ve insured myself against accidents hurrying down to answer the telephone,’ Pam assured Diana. Inside, Pam’s house had a ‘vast china stove fed from the kitchen with wood’, which added to the warm and welcoming atmosphere always associated with her homes; the fact that all the houses in the village had very low doorways must have added to the feeling of cosiness inside.

The relationship between Pam and Giuditta has caused speculation, though not as much as it would if they were sharing a home today. Jessica was convinced it was a lesbian relationship and during a visit to England in 1955 wrote home to her husband Bob that her sister had become a ‘you-know-what-bian’. But Jessica’s descriptions of family members are notoriously inaccurate – her book
Hons and Rebels
, entertaining though it is, caused a great furore among the family due to some of the things she had said about them, which may have been as she saw them but were not entirely true. Diana, characteristically, was kinder about Pam: ‘I don’t know if they were lovers but it really was a kind of marriage’; while Diana’s son Jonathan Guinness is of the opinion that the exact relationship was not important – Pam had found a good companion to share her life with at a time when she badly needed friends.

Men certainly continued to find her attractive. Those she met in Switzerland couldn’t wait to take her out to meals and in 1969 Danish architect and painter Mogens Tvede wanted to marry her (‘He saw at a glance that she is the PICK of the Bunch. Clever old Dane,’ wrote Nancy to Debo), though this came to nothing. Not long after this – and she was over 60 at the time – she was asked out to lunch at a very expensive Paris restaurant by an old admirer whom she hadn’t seen for thirty-five years. She was somewhat apprehensive because she feared she might not recognise him since she could only remember that he was very tall. Sadly, there is no record of the actual meeting – if indeed they ever found one another – but, according to Nancy, Pam threw caution to the winds and went to the restaurant in a taxi. ‘She had her hair done yesterday and looks smashing … One can see the eyes from the other end of the passage.’ (More than all the others Pam had inherited her father’s bright blue eyes.) Even Derek, after they had settled their post-marital differences, made no secret of the fact that he found her very attractive, always paying great attention to her at the family parties to which he was still invited.

Pam got on very well with the Swiss people. She spoke to them in very correct high-class German, but those who spoke English, when they met her in the street, would cry, ‘Pamailah, how vonderful to see you!’

‘She is absolute monarch of ALL she surveys. She is Queen in Gruningen and receives waves and smiles from every door and window as she pounds along screaming at the Elles [dogs],’ wrote Diana to Debo after a visit. The sisters used to tease Pam that she knew all the Gnomes in Zurich and it wasn’t far from the truth. ‘I worship the Gnomes,’ she would say, and she especially enjoyed the way they would click their heels, kiss her hand and ask her out to lunch. In Switzerland she was loved for all the qualities which made her popular wherever she went and her Swiss friends would listen hour on hour while she regaled them with tales of her childhood.

Switzerland was a good centre for Pam to indulge in her love of travel and she often visited Rudi von Simolin in Bavaria, drove to Paris to see Nancy and Diana, and to Chatsworth to stay with Debo. She made many visits to Nancy after she was diagnosed with cancer in 1968. Pam hated staying in Nancy’s flat, which she found uncomfortable and claustrophobic, but she went whenever she could because of all the sisters it was she who gave Nancy the most comfort when she was at her worst. In her better moments, Pam would make her laugh, recalling stories of her dogs, her household affairs and Derek’s eccentricities during their married life. In 1969 she went with Nancy to Dresden and Potsdam for Nancy to research the life of Frederick the Great, whose biography she was writing. Pam was the ideal companion for the trip, not only because she spoke German fluently, which Nancy did not, but also because, as the journey progressed, Nancy’s condition worsened and Pam was there to comfort and reassure her.

Pam had also been invaluable some years earlier, in May 1963, when Lady Redesdale was dying on the island of Inch Kenneth, and Nancy, Pam, Diana and Debo all travelled to the island to look after her. Although they relished being together and were very glad that they could all share in looking after their mother, it was a heart- rending time for them. But the practicalities of life had to go on and Pam was the one who came to the rescue. ‘My clothes are all dirty, so I said to Debo, “I’m going to make Woman teach me to wash and I’ll stand and look on while she does.” Well it worked like a charm and now she’s going to teach me to iron,’ wrote Nancy to Jessica, in one of her many letters keeping her informed of their mother’s deteriorating condition. Needless to say, Pam also did the cooking, which must have raised their spirits at this very difficult time.

Lady Redesdale died on 25 May 1963, aged 83, but long before this her face showed the strain which her family had caused her: Nancy’s writing about the family could be very cruel and gave her much pain; Diana’s divorce and remarriage were a terrible worry until she realised that Diana was supremely happy with Sir Oswald Mosley; Jessica running away to Spain with her cousin Esmond Romilly was a dreadful shock; and the estrangement from her husband made her very unhappy. None of this, though, could compare with the loss of Unity, whom she looked after until she died, and the death of Tom on active service in Burma in the final year of the war. In spite of all her anxiety, she was always the rock on whom her children depended. That mantle now passed jointly to Pam and Debo, the two daughters who had seldom given her any cause for worry. Debo did her best – and largely succeeded – to smooth over the many differences between the sisters, while Pam used her womanly skills and great kindness and understanding to look after them when they were sick or sad.

When Pam went to live in Switzerland, she took her dachshunds with her, announcing that she would stay there until they died. She told a reporter from a Swiss magazine (to whom she was giving an interview for an article about the Mitford sisters entitled ‘Six Black Sheep’) that this was not just because of the quarantine regulations which then existed, but because she thought they would like to spend their old age on the Continent. What the reporter thought of this reply can only be a matter of speculation; but she was serious.

The removal of the dachshunds to Switzerland in the first place must have been something of a relief to Debo who, although a real dog-lover herself, had had more than enough of Pam and her dogs after a visit to Chatsworth for Christmas 1960. She describes to Diana how Pam dedicated the whole time to her dogs: cooking ‘crank foods’ like rice and brown bread, as well as meat, feeding them and taking them out for walks, then repeating these three operations at intervals throughout the day. When the dogs came in muddy from their walks they jumped up on the sofas and she made no attempt to stop them except by speaking very loudly to them, to which they took no notice. Debo bore this recipe for a disastrous Christmas with great fortitude, remarking only that: ‘She is herself with knobs on.’

Pam enjoyed her time in Switzerland but eventually she longed to come home and only the two remaining dogs, Hexlie (German for little witch) and Susie, kept her there. She may also have begun to find the Swiss pride in hygiene a little irksome because on one of her visits to England she remarked triumphantly to Margrit and George Powell: ‘I’m delighted to hear that they’ve found salmon in the Thames and there aren’t many in the river down there [in Switzerland]. Raise the Union Jack!’

It should be added, however, that Pam’s command of the German language, which she had taught herself and made her very comfortable with the Swiss, is yet another indication that she was quite as intelligent as her siblings.

Eventually both dogs shuffled off their canine coil and Pam was able to return to England, after more than twenty years of living in Ireland and ‘on the Continent’ as she called it. She couldn’t wait to get home.

O
ne of the first big events for Debo in the swinging sixties was the inauguration of President Kennedy in 1961, to which she and Andrew were invited and treated as important guests. This was due to Debo’s staunch friendship with ‘Kick’ Kennedy, the president’s sister, who was married to Andrew’s elder brother who was killed in Belgium in 1944. When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 they were also present at his state funeral.

The death of Sydney in May 1963 shook the Mitford Girls possibly more than they expected, especially Nancy and Jessica, whose portrayal of the family in their writing had been very hurtful to their mother, although she usually tried to conceal her feelings. She had, however, had a furious row with Nancy about a very unsympathetic portrait of her in a little book entitled
The Water Beetle
, published in 1962, and this had not really been resolved.

Sydney, having spent the winter of 1962/63 in London, set off for Inch Kenneth in the spring, accompanied by Madeau Stewart, one of the Mitford cousins, who loved both Sydney and the island and had spent much time there in recent years. Sydney had had Parkinson’s disease for some time but she had not let it affect her life. After the journey to the island, however, Madeau was worried about her and called the doctor, who diagnosed her to be in the terminal stages of the disease and deteriorating rapidly. Nancy, Pam, Diana and Debo all came to the island to look after her, with the help of two trained nurses. The sisters kept Jessica up to date by almost daily letters. Sydney died on 25 May, shortly after her 83rd birthday.