Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson

rooted within the English countryside.
    David – now Lord Redesdale – cherished a great dream of building a house of his own, on the hill just outside Swinbrook. Asthall was only ever meant to be a stopgap. Yet as soon as he moved there he began to use his fiery energy on DIY, building stables, kennels, bedrooms and ‘cloisters’ – a very successful addition, unorthodox yet of a piece with the house – leading to the library-cum-music room that he created from a large barn in the garden. This barn, a separate little house, allowed the privacy of Batsford to be replicated at Asthall. Tom, who had inherited his grandfather’s passion for music, could play the piano undisturbed. Diana and Nancy could read and listen. Bach and Sir Walter Scott, Handel and Balzac, the creative heights of civilization were absorbed in an Oxfordshire barn while, all around, seethed the rural life of hunting, shooting and trapping, the Mitford life of dogs, mice, rats, guinea pigs, ponies, healthy blond children in jodhpurs jabbering away in Boudledidge and Honnish, Sydney with her hens, David with his stock whips, a beautiful life while it lasted.
    Asthall itself, casual and handsome, had the precious quality of homeliness. Sydney had a great gift for interior design (inherited by Nancy), and Diana later described the natural flair with which her mother furnished the house. Bertie’s Chinese screens were used to keep out the draughts in the long panelled hall, which had a fire at each end and windows on either side. The Japanese screens, painted with birds of prey, stood in the dining room. Outside the drawing-room windows was the church, so close as to form part of the same landscape; the children went there to evensong, and on one occasion heard the vicar preach a sermon attacking ‘people who run shouting with their dogs across God’s holy acre’. This referred to David, who habitually took his coursing dogs on a shortcut through the churchyard. From the age of fourteen Diana played the ancient organ in the church, into which a village boy pumped air: ‘I used two stops, one for noise, one for pathos.’ The Mitford sisters rode, hunted, went to tennis parties and dancing classes – ‘we did everything badly,’ wrote Diana 22 – but the spreading, teeming house was their life, with its nursery, its chilly schoolroom at the foot of the great oak staircase, its legendary poltergeist who was said to have pulled off the cook’s bedclothes, its magical barn.
    The Pursuit of Love has no equivalent of the Asthall barn. Instead, as the Radlett children’s refuge, it has the ‘Hons’ Cupboard’: in reality a large linen cupboard at Swinbrook House from which Jessica and Deborah ran the ‘Hons’ Society’ (an alternative venue was an old bread oven at the High Wycombe cottage) and, with Unity, spoke their strange languages. Nancy was twenty-one by the time the family moved to Swinbrook, past the age of huddling in cupboards, but she used the image for her novel and it has become totemic, a kind of metaphorical HQ for the Mitford mythology. In The Pursuit of Love the cupboard is, more pragmatically, a retreat where the children go to be warm, exchange news and speculate upon subjects like childbirth and abortions (‘Well, tremendous jumpings and hot baths anyway’). The heroine Linda, when she falls pregnant, lies in the cupboard with her dog and reads fairy stories.
    So there is scant sense of any educational life, except as lived by the narrator Fanny, who attends what Uncle Matthew calls an ‘awful middle-class establishment’ where she learns to ‘put the milk in first’. The novel does mention, as it were in passing, the fact that the Radlett children read extensively from the library – ‘a good representative nineteenth-century library, which had been made by their grandfather, a most cultivated man’ – although Nancy goes on to say, tellingly, that this reading in ‘fits and starts’, this auto-didacticism, was