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

no real substitute for a proper education. The Radletts/Mitfords had knowledge and ‘gilded it with their own originality’, but they were incapable of concentration and could not bear to be bored. The sense that they are thus improperly equipped for life – modern life, at any rate – permeates the book and infects Linda, certainly, who has an instinctive intelligence but very little sense.
    This, then, is Nancy’s oblique attack upon her own posh-feral upbringing, with its laissez-faire attitude to learning, its governesses and its anti-school snobbery (‘my father thought one got thick calves from playing hockey,’ she later said. ‘Well, he was very much against these thick calves’ 23 ). In fact there was nothing odd about being home-taught, especially for girls of that class and time. Lady Diana Cooper once remarked upon the parental fear that if a girl went to school she would start wearing bangles (which, as Diana Mosley observed, would have been headline news if Nancy had said it).
    Some of the Mitford governesses were inadequate, such as the one who taught Unity, Jessica and Deborah to shoplift (‘jiggery-pokery’) and another, small of stature, whom Unity would pick up and put on the sideboard. But the Batsford governesses were very good. Vanda Sereza, or ‘Zella’, who taught French and later married an Englishman, became a close friend of Nancy’s (and visited Diana in Holloway). Miss Mirams, also at Batford, was described by Diana as ‘rather severe’ but nonetheless prepared Tom for his prep school (Lockers Park) where he excelled in the entrance exam. Miss Hussey, trained in the PNEU 24 programme of which Sydney approved, taught at Asthall in the early 1920s, then Swinbrook ten years on, thus catching all the girls except Nancy. She was entirely competent, despite the difficulty of adjusting lessons to such varied ages and abilities (Pam, she later recalled, ‘had been kept rather behind.’ 25 ) And Miss Hussey did not, as Hons and Rebels had it, pass out when she saw Unity’s snake, Enid, wrapped around a lavatory chain (the snake was Diana’s, ‘just a little grass snake’, and nobody fainted at the sight of it). Jessica, again, was making merry with the facts. The Pursuit of Love had already started this particular hare when Nancy wrote that the Radlett governesses would scamper away after a couple of days, terrified of Uncle Matthew and his stock whips. Jessica – a highly gifted writer, but essentially a journalist rather than a creative – took hold of such flights of fancy and soared away with them; then called them autobiography.
    Of course Nancy was also, beneath the flimsy disguise of fiction, writing what readers believed to be a true account of her childhood. It was true, in essence. The points where the truth bends are therefore not always easy to establish. Take the passage about the Radlett/Mitford education – Nancy did mean it in a way. She regretted the lack of a steady depth of knowledge such as her clever male friends possessed (‘you must remember I am an uneducated woman ’, she wrote plaintively to Evelyn Waugh), and which she saw in her brother Tom. At the same time, The Pursuit of Love tells another story beneath the surface. The properly educated Fanny is a delightful person, but she has no vestige of the heady Radlett/Mitford charm, in which Nancy herself took barely concealed pride (and from which she made a very good living). Furthermore, when Uncle Matthew asks Fanny to tell him about George III, all she can come up with is ‘He was King. He went mad,’ whereas Linda (‘you’re uneducated, thank God’) bursts forth with a scattering of disorganized but far more engaging facts. As for the idea that the children never learned the habit of concentrated endeavour – Nancy could write a book in three months, Jessica’s journalistic research became formidable, Diana’s articles are models of precision and, for Deborah, running Chatsworth would have been