All in One Basket: A Memoir - Softcover

Mitford Duchess Of Devonshire, Deborah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250013801 ISBN 13: 9781250013804

Publisher: Picador, 2012

Synopsis

Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, is the youngest of the famously witty brood of writers, agitators, and icons. Here she recalls anecdotes about famous friends from Evelyn Waugh to John F. Kennedy; her struggles and success at Chatsworth, England's greatest stately home; and of course tales of her beloved chickens, which the Duchess began raising as a child for pocket money. All in One Basket brings together two volumes of her writings and provides a disarming look at a life lived with great zest and originality by a "national treasure" (The New York Times).

About this title

About the Author:

Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, was brought up in Oxfordshire, England. In 1950 her husband, Andrew, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, inherited extensive estates in Yorkshire and Ireland as well as Chatsworth, the family seat in Derbyshire, and Deborah became chatelaine of one of England's great houses. She is the author of Wait for Me!, Counting My Chickens and Home to Roost, among other books, and her letters have been collected in The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters and In Tearing Haste: The Correspondence of the Duchess of Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Following her husband's death in 2004, she moved to a village on the Chatsworth estate.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

ALL IN ONE BASKET (Chapter 1)

The first sentence of a diary given to a nine-year-old child at Christmas, written on New Year’s Day and kept faithfully till at least 10 January, was ‘got up, dressed, had breakfast’. The first sentence of a book is a different matter and very difficult indeed. I have been pondering over this for some time. I asked my sister Jessica what to do. She tells me that in America, if you pay some money, you can get advice as to how to begin and then go on to be a famous author. They say put down ‘the’ on a bit of paper, add some words, keep on adding and Bob’s your uncle (or the American equivalent), you’re off and the rest will follow. It doesn’t seem to work. Just try. So, hopelessly stuck and faced with the empty page, see how other people manage. Lately we have been reminded of ‘I had a farm in Africa...’ ‘I had a farm in Derbyshire’ somehow doesn’t sound as good and anyway it would be a lie because in England things like farms seldom belong to women. Having failed with ‘the’, try ‘and’. ‘And it came to pass’, too affected and you can’t go on in that biblical style. When you open books to see how it is done it seems so easy, set down there in the same type as the rest as if it was no trouble at all, the second sentence flowing out of the first one like one o’clock. Believe me, the writer has suffered over those words. As 50,000 books are published every year the first sentences must add hugely to the level of anxiety in an already anxious race.

 

I looked at the television programme about Uncle Harold, 2 called !Reputations How strange it is to see his and Aunt Dorothy’s private life trotted out like a story in a film. He would have considered the fashion for such entertainment unspeakably vulgar. And so do I. The point about Dorothy Macmillan was her charm, energy and earthiness; there were no frills. She was one of the few people I have met who was exactly the same with whoever she was talking to, oblivious of their class – something which people keep on about now almost as much as they do about sex. She gave her whole attention, laughed easily, was unread and not smart, and was a tireless constituency worker. I was always told that it was she who won the elections at Stockton-on Tees. Her time in Downing Street was famous for children’s parties, and the branches, more than flowers, which she dragged up from the garden at Birch Grove in the back of her car. When Uncle Harold was Housing Minister, Andrew, my husband, was president of the Building Societies’ Association. It seemed to be indicated that Andrew should ask his aunt to the annual dinner as guest of honour. She asked, ‘Shall I wear my best dress or the other one?’ The thought of the other one made us wonder.

Harold was an intellectual and a politician all right, no doubt about that; but the mistake so often made of putting people into categories left him there, and did not allow for his interest in the family publishing business and many different aspects of life, including his devotion to field sports. The press called that the grouse moor image. After he married, his father-in-law expected him to go out shooting, even though he had never before fired a shotgun. Reg Roose, a Chatsworth gamekeeper and a delightful man, was detailed to be his tutor. Uncle Harold was a quick learner. Years later Reg and I watched his performance when large quantities of pheasants flew high across a valley with the wind behind them. ‘Doesn’t the Prime Minister shoot well?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ answered Reg, proudly. ‘I taught him and he’s fit to go anywhere now.’

When Uncle Harold was ninety he stayed with us for three months. I will always remember his perfect manners. He dined alone with me often, and I am sure he would have welcomed other company. But he talked as if I were his intellectual equal – ha, ha – or another ex-prime minister, and I almost began to think I was. For much of the day he sat in an armchair in his bedroom and listened to tapes of Trollope. (It made me nervous when he dropped off, lest his smouldering cigar should fall into the wicker wastepaper basket by his side.) He once told me of a mistake made by the suppliers of the tapes. ‘I think there is something wrong. They have sent a curious book called Lucky Jim, by a feller called Amis. Have you ever heard of him? I don’t like it much. Must be a very peculiar man.’ He was frail and shuffled down the long corridors at his own speed. He couldn’t find the door to the hall and I heard him mutter, ‘The trouble with this house is you have to throw double sixes to get out.’

His relationship with President Kennedy was worth watching. The President had never seen anything like him, and you could say the same for Uncle Harold. They struck up an unlikely friendship and were more surprised and more amused by one another at every meeting. They talked endlessly on the telephone – usually in the middle of the night. I used to hear of these conversations from both participants. It was the time when initials of organisations began to be used as a sort of shorthand. One night, after speaking of Castro, they went on to discuss Seato and Nato. Uncle Harold was stumped for a moment when the President said, ‘And how’s Debo?’ When Mrs Thatcher was new to the job he had had for years, she went to see him. ‘Oh good,’ I said, ‘and did you talk?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘she did.’

Uncle Harold’s good manners were often tested when he stayed with us. I am not good at place à table, and one night I saw he was sitting at dinner between my son and his friend, both in their first year at Eton. There was the usual political crisis on and the PM was preoccupied with his own thoughts, while the boys anxiously cast round for a suitable subject of conversation. After a long silence I heard Sto say, ‘Uncle Harold, Old Moore’s Almanack says you’ll fall in October.’ To his eternal credit, after a suitable pause, he answered, ‘Yes, I should think that’s about right.’

 

It is strange to see your family enacted on television from an old book about them, written half a century ago. I suppose the royal family and politicians such as Bush and Mandy, 3 whose ancestors played a part in public life, do so continually. But for ordinary folk it is indeed an odd experience. It was also odd to read the reviews. Mr Paul Hoggart in Reputations He disapproves in a governessy way of the idea of my father hunting my sisters with his bloodhounds Reputations What else would he have done it for? (Alas, I was considered too young to be hunted and, by the time I was of huntable age, the bloodhounds had gone.) I know that some misguided people, for reasons best known to themselves, are against hunting foxes, but surely children are fair game? He complains, too, about a mother’s reaction to the hideous appearance of her newborn baby. I wonder if, in his sheltered life, the reviewer has ever seen a newborn baby. Referring to Nancy, he goes on to say that ‘she presents her cast as freaks’. Another reviewer states we were the ‘lunatic fringe’. Oh dear, freaks and lunatics. Well, never mind. My sister Nancy’s letters have been published, 4 or some of them I should say, as we have got thousands here. They are kept in cardboard boxes with holes for them to breathe through. Whenever I pass by a pile of these boxes, containing papers of every description accumulated since the 1950s, I always hope they are a consignment of day-old chicks, which used to travel by train in the guard’s van in just such boxes. They provide what Americans call Optimum Archival Conditions. I don’t know about their conditions, but Nancy’s are certainly of Optimum Archival Amusement. She had neat handwriting and the talent of filling the last page exactly, so ‘love from’ is always at the bottom: difficult to achieve if the letter is to make sense – and hers do. I am not the only one to think she was the supreme entertainer, both in real life (she and my father together were better than any turn on the stage) and on paper. Her letters are just as funny as her books. What would psychiatrists make of her teases? She called me Nine because she said that was my mental age. About right, I expect, but disconcerting when she introduced me to her smart French friends as ‘my little sister aged nine’ long after I was married.

The correspondence between Nancy and Evelyn Waugh has been ably read on the wireless by Timothy West and Prunella Scales, and listening, I was reminded of Evelyn’s generosity when he was in Paris just after the liberation. (Why was he there? Perhaps he was a liberator; I can’t remember.) He bought me a hat which he tried on himself in the shop to make sure. He didn’t tell me what the vendeuse thought about that, but French people are keen when it comes to business and a sale is a sale whatever for or why, so no doubt she was delighted and probably thought all English soldiers wore women’s hats when off duty. It was made of white felt with a blue straw brim on which perched two small white stuffed birds. Luckily the Animal Rights people were still in utero or Evelyn would have been lynched for buying it and I for wearing it. Sadly it has gone the way of old hats. Fifty years on it might be revered as a bit of heritage or a historic document, like a Dinky toy or a 1945 bus ticket. Who knows, it could even have found a home in the V & A with the rest of their jumble.

 

Nancy’s letters often describe clothes. When Dior invented the New Look in 1947, my mother-in-law, ‘Moucher’ Devonshire and her friend, the Duchess of Rutland, who were in Paris for a less frivolous reason, wanted to see the colle...

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1250013801
• ISBN 13: 9781250013804
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368