Welcome to Mitfordiana, the newsletter about Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Decca, Debo, and me. You can find my commenting policy here.
Four of the six Mitford sisters are buried in the churchyard at St Mary’s in Swinbrook in Oxfordshire; it is the church nearest the farmhouse Lord Redesdale bought in 1926 and had to sell in 1938. The older sisters apparently hated Swinbrook because they lacked the freedom they had enjoyed at Asthall Manor. For Debo, it was the essence of her childhood.
Debo, of course, was very much a country girl, which is good, because the church at Swinbrook, on top of a hill, feels very remote. I visited last December while my family was doing a car tour of the Cotswolds; we saw many small and charming villages but I mostly remember how long and how narrow the roads between them are. The Oxford city center is only twenty miles away, but at Swinbrook, you are completely in the country.
Debo writes lovingly of the horses and the hunts; the village and the villagers; the small routines that made up her childhood. Standing in the church at Swinbrook, staring at the plaque the family had put up to remember Tom, who was killed in WWII, I recalled the part in Wait For Me! where Debo licks the pews:
Prayers seemed interminable and held up the longed-for freedom when I could be out of doors again. Fidgeting about, I licked the pew beneath my face (the taste of the polish is with me now). I thought everybody did this, but apparently not. Years later I buttonholed a few friends and they vehemently denied such a disgusting habit. I then asked my old friend, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘Did you lick the pews?’ ‘Yes, of course,’ he said without hesitation, his understanding and memory of childhood undimmed…
It was gray and rainy and cold the day I went to Swinbrook. I completely understood why Diana, aged eighteen, had been in such a hurry to marry Brian Guinness and move away. London social life is miles more fun than Oxford; how much more so than Swinbrook. How can licking pews in your rural church compare to a nightclub at 3am?
I spent the last academic year in Oxford, taking a degree, as they say, in medieval studies. I had a marvelous time; I don’t know whether I learned more about the Middle Ages or myself. The promise of Oxford is that it’s a medieval university and it’s a modern market town; it’s where nothing ever changes and where every year eighteen-year-old children become adults. Oxford is where you get drunk on wine served by monks and then find yourself dancing at the gay nightclub to a playlist of only Taylor Swift songs. Oxford is where you find yourself in a candlelit and wood-paneled room being served snuff out of a silver snuffbox by your dissertation supervisor and then go home to order McDonald’s from UberEats at midnight.
I don’t mean to imply that it was all drinks and drugs. There were of course also the men, something that Nancy understood well. In The Pursuit of Love, Linda and Fanny are invited to lunch in Tony Kroesig’s rooms at Oxford— “7 King Edward Street, I expect you know the rooms. Altringham had them when he was up.” The address is just off the High Street, leading to Oriel College; interestingly, Cecil Rhodes lived next door at number 6. Linda and Fanny, who are about seventeen at the time, cannot attend luncheon by themselves, but Linda is in love. They concoct some lies about badgers and
on the stroke of one o’clock we arrived in Tony’s room. He was alone, but evidently a large party was expected, the table, a square one with a coarse white linen cloth, seemed to have a great many places. We refused sherry and cigarettes, and an awkward silence fell… Presently some undergraduates appeared, and completed the party. It was not really very enjoyable from our point of view, they all knew each other too well. They gossiped away, roared with laughter at private jokes, and showed off; still we felt that this was Life…”
Aside from the facts that you should never refuse sherry, that the Oxford men of my acquaintance no longer have suites of their own in college, and that all my interactions with undergrads took place in Spoons, this is precisely my experience of Oxford meals. This was Life.
I had what could politely be termed as not-nice social experiences growing up. I didn’t have a lot of friends my age; I couldn’t wait to be older so that I could be friends with people who might know things. I think I was eight when I told my mom that I liked big family dinners because it was fun to hear the grown-ups talk. I’ve always been independent, but conversely I’ve also always thought of myself as a loner. Moving away from home for college was simple enough, but then undergrad turned out to be scary and itchy, then the pandemic meant that our big family dinners took place over Zoom. The year I spent in Oxford was Life, finally. I had gossip, and laughter, and private jokes. I had friends to plot about going out with, and the luck of my college assignment meant that I also had sherry and cigarettes at square tables with coarse white linen cloths.
Debo loved Swinbrook because it was remote, because the woods and the horses and the pews were solid and there and lickable and unchanging. She grew up in a certain kind of privileged world that no longer quite exists: the privilege of living so far from typical families and normal schools and routine drudgery. Part of the way Oxford all worked out so well for me was because it was remote from my previous life. It too was a privilege; it too shouldn’t and doesn’t quite exist. People in undergrad used to talk about living in a bubble, but that bubble was never so intense the way an eight week Oxford term is. There was a privilege in being a Jewish American studying medieval Catholicism at a medieval university; it was a privilege to be so independent from my family and my old friends, from schools that held your hand, from the grind of a twelve or fourteen or sixteen week American semester.
I haven’t been in Oxford for a few months; already I’m not the girl I was. The pews I licked have already been replaced, the young people I knew to gossip about and with have left town for sunnier pastures. My Oxford was quick and bright and harsh lights in underground clubs; Debo’s Swinbrook was long and tedious and soft afternoons by the stream; we both learned more about who we were at the pace of life that Oxfordshire allows. Swinbrook hasn’t really changed, I don’t think, from 1926 to now. There’s been a church on top of that hill for over five hundred years. There’s been an Oxford for longer, and there’ve been adult children walking the streets in stupid little gowns and bowties since almost the minute bowties were invented. Four of the six Mitford girls ended up buried at St Mary’s because sometimes you just want to come back to the place that made you, no matter how different it might be, let alone how different you are.
I’m going back to Oxford this weekend for my graduation, which is to say, I’m going back to Swinbrook. I hope I’ll grow up this time; I hope it hasn’t changed; I hope I don’t either.
In tearing haste,
Diana