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

hugely demanding. These four were higher achievers than the average. If they were only interested in things that ignited their imagination, this is true of most people. What, then, would Roedean have added to the mix? The sisters were each other’s influence and encouragement. Not always in a benign way, but it was Unity – the schoolgoer – who suffered most from this. As Aunt Sadie says in The Pursuit of Love , in a spasm of anxiety about her children’s wayward upbringing, ‘Do you honestly imagine it makes the smallest difference when they are grown-up?’ Comes the reply: ‘Probably not to your children, demons one and all...’
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    Nancy did not really want to be Fanny, although she took pleasure in her, and in her kindly, sensible aunt-guardian, Emily, who roundly defends the decision to send her to school. The connection between Fanny and Emily – perfectly done, and pretty much perfect – was wishful thinking on Nancy’s part. It was also, in part, an attack upon her relationship with her mother.
    As did Jessica, Nancy felt resentment about her early years, and this grew stronger with maturity: in later life she expressed the desire to write a straightforward autobiography. But whereas Jessica took aim at the whole Mitford clan and its conservative milieu , Nancy focussed ever more closely upon Sydney. This enigmatic woman was viewed quite differently by every one of her daughters; she was a symbol of their separate memories of a shared past and, although the least-known member of the Mitford family, she was the focal point for the rest.
    When Nancy was near the end of her life and Jessica deep into middle age, the sisters formed an epistolary alliance against their mother. It is natural enough for people to look back, as it were, in search of a key that will unlock the mystery of their own selves. Nevertheless the back and forth of letters between these two sisters does put one in mind of the ‘leagues’ created by the Mitford children against whoever was considered an enemy, or ‘Counter-Hon’. In this case, the Counter-Hon-in-Chief was Sydney.
    In 1971, eight years after their mother’s death, Nancy wrote to Jessica that she had never loved Sydney for the simple reason that Sydney had never loved her: had never hugged her as a child, was cold and ‘sarky’ with her, and had generally given an impression of having scant affection for her first daughter. ‘I don’t reproach her for it, people have a perfect right to dislike their children...’ Jessica replied that she had loathed Sydney when growing up, especially as an adolescent, but in adulthood had become ‘immensely fond of her’. However: ‘The thing that absolutely burned into my soul ’, wrote Jessica, ‘was the business of not being allowed to go to school.’ The letter continued with a story of how, aged about eleven, Jessica had dreamed of becoming a scientist. Accordingly she had bicycled off to see the headmaster of a grammar school in Burford, near Swinbrook, where she learned that she could be admitted after passing a single exam. She returned home in triumph to ask her mother’s formal permission: instantly refused, with no reason given. If true, this does indeed shine an unsympathetic light on Sydney’s character as a mother. More likely it was exaggerated, or even invented – would Jessica really have stormed the citadel of a headmaster’s study? Deborah certainly did not believe it, and anyway according to her recollection Jessica was attending a school at the age of eleven (when the pair of them were day girls in High Wycombe). But the point about the story is not so much the facts, as the fact of Jessica’s enduring resentment.
    Nancy, too, was honestly suffering, allowing her bright brain to brood over the past. She knew, of course, that she had been raised in an environment and class that did not encourage intense closeness between mother and child. Nancy would have ridiculed our infant-centric universe (although,