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  2

  Farve and Muv

  N

  ANCY WROTE ABOUT our childhood in her novels, which to her amazement, and ours, became best-sellers. People still ask me, ‘Was your father really like Uncle Matthew?’ In many ways he was. Nancy made him sound terrifying but there was nearly, though not always, a comic undercurrent not apparent to outsiders. I adored him. He was an original, with a total disregard of the banal or boring. He had a turn of phrase he made his own, delivered with a deadpan face and perfect timing. Strangers stared at him nonplussed but we knew just what he meant. ‘That feller whacked merry hell out of the piano,’ described an admired musician’s performance. Ordinary words were memorable when they came from him and two favourites were ‘mournful’ and ‘degraded’: ‘Take your degraded elbows off the table,’ he ordered Diana, aged fourteen. He was easily irritated by a non-favourite and encouraged them to ‘go to hell judging your own time’. An unloved was dismissed as ‘some mournful woman’ and whatever this anonymous female did was wrong. She (and other people’s babies) might also be ‘a meaningless piece of meat’ and that was that. A ‘putrid sort of feller’ could never aspire to anything better. In our family Farve was all-powerful: we appealed to him when we thought something was unfair and he could overturn any order given by a governess or anyone else in authority over us. Even my mother did not question his word. Like others of his kind, David Mitford did not care a hang what people thought of him, take him or leave him, and it never occurred to him to toe the line or trim. He was honest and looked honest: tall and upstanding, blue-eyed and extraordinarily handsome, he had thick white hair and moustache by the time I remember him. He was unmistakably an English countryman. His prized possessions were his rod and gun, locked away and untouched by anyone except himself, and his car. After the financial crash of 1929, the Daimler and beloved chauffeur had to go and were replaced with a Morris that Farve drove himself. He had been friends with William Morris, later Lord Nuffield, since the motor magnate’s Oxford bicycle-shop days and we were brought up on the legend that Farve had been asked to invest in Morris’s business but decided against it – one of several unlucky financial decisions on his part. The car was treated as if it were alive, safely put away in the garage at night and never expected to go long distances without a rest. Propping up the bonnet, Farve would check the oil, wiping the dipstick on a clean rag to ensure accuracy, and top up the radiator water religiously. The petrol tank was replenished from cans, except when we went to Oxford and an adored attendant at the Clarendon Yard Garage, another William, was given the job of filling up while he talked to my father about engines. Farve was a good driver and enjoyed driving, but the sight of a female in charge of a vehicle was sometimes too much for him. If a car came too close or made the smallest mistake with the rules of the road he shouted, ‘Blasted woman driver’, to which my mother was often able to say, with truth, ‘Funny thing, she’s dressed as a man.’

  ‘My good clothes’ were cosseted like his car and gun. Mabel the parlourmaid was in charge and he was always well dressed. In the country, his appearance was indistinguishable from that of a gamekeeper, an occupation that would have suited him down to the ground. He wore a brown velveteen waistcoat, alternating with moleskin; a gunmetal watch – no silver chain but a leather bootlace; gaiters with huge chunks of shoes that were made for him; and he carried a stout thumbstick that completed the illusion. As years went by, the gaiters gave way to trousers fashioned from an impenetrable material called Mount Everest cloth – ‘thorn proof, dear child’. In London he was conventionally dressed but for one garment: a black cloak inherited from his father (Farve would never have bought such a thing himself), which he wore when forced to go out in the evenings. In his mid-thirties he went to a dentist and asked him to take out all his teeth. The dentist refused, saying it was dangerous. ‘All right then,’ said Farve impatiently, ‘I’ll go to someone who will.’ An hour or so later there was not a tooth left in his head. Thereafter ‘my good dentures’ chewed up Muv’s excellent food.

  Farve shopped only where he was known. His regular ports of call were the best, and certainly the most expensive: Solomon’s, a fruit shop in Piccadilly opposite the Ritz; Fortnum and Mason, where he was friends with the tail-coated assistants; Berry Bros, where he bought wine for our occasional guests (he drank only water); and Locke’s the hatter. All these were within a stone’s throw of each other and on the way to his club, the Marlborough in Pall Mall. His favourite shop, however, was the Army and Navy Stores, which stocked all the stuff of Empire: folding chairs with canvas seats and backs, enamel bowls with buttoned waterproof lids, a chronometer for his desk (so he could see if anyone was a quarter of a minute late), string and labels of lasting quality, the latest in camp beds, rust-proof filing cabinets, gritty Lifebuoy soap that smelt strongly of carbolic (his idea of complete cleanliness), thick woollen underclothes (stocked no doubt for Arctic explorers) and the precious Primus stove for his early-morning tea.

  He walked to this holy of holies in Victoria Street with a lurcher and Labrador at heel – no leads. He put the dogs to sit in the entrance and waited with them for the doors to open at 9 a.m. My mother asked him why he had to be there so early. ‘If I am any later I am impeded by inconveniently shaped women,’ was the reply. He often brought back a little present for us, always beautifully packed, which gave it an air of importance. My mother was not sure of his taste in anything decorative and he told me that when buying something for her, he always said to the shop assistant, ‘A lady will be in to change these next week.’ And so she was.

  Punctuality was drilled into us. If one of us dawdled before an outing Farve went without the laggard. Pam, daydreaming, was once left behind on a longed-for afternoon at the zoo – a lesson learned the hard way and cited again and again as a purple warning. Nancy’s portrayal of Uncle Matthew standing at the front door, watch in hand at 11.55 a.m., awaiting someone expected at midday, muttering to himself, ‘In six minutes the damn feller will be late,’ is Farve exactly. He also had a horror of anything sticky. I once asked him what his idea of hell was. ‘Honey on my bowler hat,’ was the answer. His all-seeing eyes spotted a spill anywhere down the long dining-room table. Honey, jam and marmalade were all high-risk, but the sight of Golden Syrup in its wonderful green and gold tin made him particularly nervous, and he insisted on it being ladled on to the suet pudding by a grown-up. This was a regular occurrence because suet pudding was a favourite with us all. Farve got up and hovered as Mabel went round the table and we were relieved when the last person had been served with no spillage. What a mercy that no modernizer at Tate & Lyle has tampered with the design of the Golden Syrup tin, with its picture of bees buzzing round a dead lion and the line from the Bible, ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’. I have always been fascinated by it and only wondered much later how it came to be associated with a pudding made of beef fat.

  Two things annoyed Farve in my mother’s otherwise impeccably run house. If a housemaid was rash enough to remove the deepest ashes from the grate where a wood fire burned, she was in trouble. Farve was right: it is the ashes that hold the heat and ensure a quick start in the morning. He found a way of avoiding the second annoyance. After breakfast he refilled his coffee cup and took it to his study. He let it get cold and drank what he called his ‘suckments’ at intervals during the morning. A tidy, new-to-the-job maid took the cup back to the pantry, emptied and washed it. This enraged my father: ‘Some monkey’s orphan has taken my suckments.’ Thereafter he locked the cup in his safe.

  Farve was impatient, intolerant, impulsive, loyal, courageous, loving, fastidious, unread and possessed of great charm, all underwritten with courtly good manners – to most. Every now and then his short fuse made him lash out. He was profoundly irritated by some of the young men Nancy invited to the house and more than once lost his temper with her friend James Lees-Milne, the future author and diarist. On one occasion Jim leant down to pick something up and a comb fell out of his pock
et: ‘A man carrying a comb – well!’ On another famous occasion, Jim advocated friendship with Germany and Farve turned him out of the house. Poor Jim went to his motorbike but it was raining hard and it would not start. In despair he found the back door and was rescued by Mabel who hustled him upstairs. As he was creeping out of the house the next morning he met Farve. ‘Good morning,’ said Farve. He had forgotten the whole episode and offered Jim our usual generous breakfast.

  Farve either liked you or he did not, there was no middle way. My mother sometimes tried to reason with him, but reason was not part of his makeup and, unlike her, he had favourites. This was unfair but he never tried to hide or moderate his feelings, it was part of his honesty. There was often a ‘Rat Week’ when he would pick on one of us for sometimes imaginary offences. Decca, who was able to twist him round her little finger and take liberties with him that none of the rest of us would have dared, fell out of favour for a while for no apparent reason. Unity became more silent and unresponsive in her teens because Farve was always watching her for some trifling misdemeanour.

  It had been the same with his own brothers and sisters. He never liked his younger sister Joan but was fond of the man she married, Denis Farrer. ‘The very desiccated Old Dean’, he called him affectionately. Denis was not a dean, it was just a play on his name, but it was a spot-on description of that thin, sharp-featured fellow in middle age. Farve was once talking to an acquaintance about the Farrers and said, ‘The only trouble with the Old Dean is that he married a ghastly woman.’ ‘Oh?’ said the acquaintance, ‘I thought she was your sister?’ ‘Yes, she is. A poisonous creature.’ It was no wonder that people were surprised by him. Aunt Dorothy, wife of his adored brother, Uncle Tommy, was a nonfavourite. She was said to be ‘frightfully rich’ but we never saw any sign of this alleged wealth and she was ‘careful’, to put it mildly. My parents went to lunch with Uncle Tommy and Aunt Dorothy in their house at Westwell, near Burford. The fare was sheep’s hearts. ‘Still beating on the plate,’ my father told us afterwards. He did not go again.

  Farve was the second son in a family of nine – five boys and four girls, none of whom inherited Grandfather Redesdale’s love of art and architecture or his passion for the Far East. The eldest son, Clement, was killed in action on the Western Front in 1915. Clem was a heroic figure to his siblings, and my father and his other brothers were brought up in his shadow. He was better at everything than any of them, an example to be emulated, and was his parents’ great hope for the future. Clem acted as guardian to his first cousins, the six Ogilvy children, after their father, the Sixth Earl of Airlie, was killed leading a cavalry charge against the Boers at the Battle of Diamond Hill in 1900. Their mother, Mabell, widowed at thirty-four, devoted the rest of her life to her children, the Cortachy estate in Angus and Queen Mary (whom she served as Lady of the Bedchamber for forty-three years).

  Clem married one of his wards, Helen Ogilvy, in 1909. Helen had startling blue eyes and black hair, a rare combination, but she went completely white at the age of twenty-three. Their first daughter, Rosemary, was born in 1911 and their second, Clementine, shortly after Clem’s death. As Clem had no son, my father was next in line to inherit the Batsford and Swinbrook estates. Farve was very much a second son and his childhood had been blighted by unhappiness at school. He hated every moment of it and longed to be home, free from lessons and out of doors at all hours with the keepers. As a boy he had a terrible temper, which worried his parents and anyone in authority over him. Clem had gone to Eton but Grandfather decided that Farve should be sent to Radley. I believe Grandfather was afraid that one of Farve’s outbursts of temper would have damaging repercussions for Clem’s school career.

  It was towards the end of his time at Radley that Farve first set eyes on Sydney Bowles. Grandfather Redesdale (before his peerage) was newly elected to Parliament and invited a fellow MP, Tommy Bowles, to speak at a meeting. As was his wont, Bowles brought his children with him. Sydney described her first sight of David as he stood with his back to the fire at Batsford, wearing an old brown velveteen coat: ‘A wonderful figure of a young man . . . He looked splendid to me, and he was indeed very handsome. So when I was fourteen and he was seventeen, I fell in love with him.’ No doubt Muv kept the picture of this beautiful young man in her mind but, as happens with teenage girls, it was superseded by other fancies.

  After leaving Radley, Farve’s dearest wish was to join the Army but he could manage only 19 marks out of 2,000 for Latin, or so he told us, and he failed the entrance exam. Whether or not this unlikely score was the reason, history does not relate, but fail he certainly did and he often used to say to us, ‘What good would Latin have been to me in the Army?’ Grandfather Redesdale had a friend with tea estates in Ceylon and Farve was sent out there to work as a planter. When he arrived he was shocked by the hard drinking of his colleagues and decided then and there to be a teetotaller, a decision he kept for the rest of his life. ‘Sewer’ was Farve’s word for the worst of the bad, usually prefaced by ‘damned’, and it became part of the language of our family. In truth it was suar, Hindi for pig, ‘the accursed one’, picked up while he was in Ceylon; but it sounded better in English, especially when you pictured what he meant.

  My father’s escape from Ceylon was the Boer War. His first home leave in four years coincided with the outbreak of hostilities and he seized the chance of joining the Army at last. Clement was already serving in the 10th Hussars and in January 1900 my father enlisted as a private in the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, and later transferred to the Northumberland Fusiliers. He was in his element, popular with men and officers alike, and was immediately given a commission. In 1902 he fought at the Battle of Tweebosch under Lieutenant General Lord Methuen and was lucky to survive a chest wound that destroyed one lung. (This did not stop him from being a chain-smoker. ‘Have a gasper,’ he would say when greeting any man he met, opening his neatly packed gunmetal cigarette case. A woman smoker was, of course, taboo, his daughters included. Only Decca broke the rule when she grew up.) After being wounded, Farve lay for three days, near death, on an ox cart, trundling over rutted roads to the field hospital at Bloemfontein. He was invalided home for a long convalescence. His strong constitution pulled him through, but it was a close-run thing.

  My parents met again some ten years after they had first set eyes on each other, and this time it was David who fell for Sydney. Whatever and whoever had come between them since their last meeting, there must have been an immediate rapport. Farve went to Tommy Bowles to ask permission to marry his daughter. ‘How do you plan to support her?’ asked Bowles. ‘I’ve got £400 a year and these,’ said Farve, holding up his hands. The engagement was announced and they were married on 6 February 1904. Their honeymoon was spent on board Bowles’s schooner and nine months later Nancy was born. Farve wrote to his mother just before the birth, ‘I am sure I only wish that everyone could be so happy, there would be little left in life to complain of. I don’t deserve it, but I am grateful.’ Grandfather Bowles gave my father a job in the office of The Lady, the magazine he had founded in 1885. A more unsuitable occupation for the country-loving would-be gamekeeper is hard to imagine.

  When they were first married, my mother was shocked to realize that my father had read only one book. She persuaded him to listen to her reading aloud some classics, starting with Thomas Hardy. She chose Tess of the d’Urbervilles with its descriptions of farm and heath land, which she thought he would enjoy. When she got to the sad part, my father started crying. ‘Oh, darling, don’t cry, it’s only a story.’ ‘WHAT,’ said my father, his sorrow turning to rage, ‘do you mean to say the damn feller made it up?’ I was born after the days of White Fang and never saw my father open a book.

  Farve stuck at the office of The Lady for ten years until the outbreak of the First World War. As a result of his one lung, he was regarded as permanently unfit for active service but this did not deter him, aged thirty-seven, from joining his old regiment. He was sent to France in Septe
mber 1914 as an officer reinforcement to the 1st Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers. Soon afterwards, his health broke down and he was invalided home. Determined to return to the front, he again succeeded in getting passed fit and rejoined his regiment’s 2nd Battalion in April 1915. He was appointed transports officer, in the belief that it would be less strenuous than the front line, but his arrival coincided with the opening of the Second Battle of Ypres. As Brigadier H. R. Sandilands wrote in Farve’s obituary:

  Night after night (and sometimes twice nightly) he had to take up supplies to the battalion through the town of Ypres, which was under constant heavy bombardment. His method was to quicken the pace on approaching the town, and then to lead his wagons at full gallop through Ypres until clear of the Menin Gate. The men worked in two shifts, but David Mitford declined the offer of any relief, and accompanied every convoy. Thanks to his leadership, the battalion, throughout the Battle of St Julien, was never without its supplies: and, miraculously, he succeeded in delivering these without the loss of a man.

  The strain of these days proved too much and Farve was once more invalided to England, where for the remainder of the war he trained the Special Reserve.

  Grandfather Redesdale died in 1916, a year after his beloved Clem was killed. His finances had been hard hit by the enormous cost of rebuilding and maintaining Batsford. The place had been run on the extravagant lines of Edwardian England, with palatial stables for carriage horses, riding horses and Grandfather’s famous stud of Shires. My grandmother’s little book that records menus of many courses opposite the names of her guests (to ensure no repetition from one visit to the next) was usual in such a household, but my grandfather was also a gardener and I have never seen, except in this little book, a description of the flowers on the dinner table.