Honourable Rebel

Jessica Mitford found the act of sitting down to write formidably hard. ‘’Tis now 12:30 on the first day I was to really work all day on the book,’ she reported to her husband and daughter in May 1959. ‘As you can see, in spite of the good news I’m as bad as ever – ANYTHING to keep from it.’ The ‘good news’ was that after several attempts to place her book she had finally secured publishing deals in both Britain and the United States. The book in question was a memoir which she wanted at various points to call ‘Red Sheep’ and ‘Revolting Daughters’ but which is known today as Hons and Rebels.

Hons and Rebels is a tale of two halves. Its first part describes Jessica’s upbringing at Swinbrook in the Cotswolds, territory familiar to Mitford-lovers from her older sister Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love. All the crucial ingredients of Mitford-lore are present: the vacant mother and booming father, the sisterly teases and the sisters themselves: sharp Nancy, fascist Diana, Nazi Unity, domesticated Pamela, Communist Jessica and country-loving Debo. Their nicknames and private languages are here too (‘Honnish’ and ‘Boudledidge’ are just two of the dialects the sisters speak), providing a backdrop against which Jessica sketches her emerging political identity. One of the themes of the first part of Hons and Rebels is the gradual accumulation of funds in Jessica’s ‘Running Away Account’ which she opens aged 12 at Drummonds Bank. Hons and Rebels departs from a familiar Mitford narrative at the point at which Jessica meets her cousin Esmond Romilly. She falls in love with the idea of Esmond long before their meeting, drawn to him by his well-publicized rebellion against the public-school system. When they do finally meet her dream of romance becomes a reality, and together they elope to France and then Spain where they become caught up in the chaos of civil war. After resisting the attempts of the Mitfords to recover them they are married at Bayonne in the presence of their mothers, who sit looking ‘more like chief mourners at a funeral than wedding guests’. Jessica is particularly good on the charm of her early married life with Esmond, the one person about whom she writes with uncomplicated affection and devotion. ‘Living with Esmond was like going for a walk in a fairy story,’ she recalls. ‘You never knew whether some sinister troll disguised as a British Consul or a croupier might be lying in wait round the next corner, or when the thorny briar forest would magically part to admit you into the enchanted palace.’ The couple make their first home among the warehouses of Rotherhithe where Jessica attempts to prove herself as an efficient working-class wife, ‘keeping everything bright and clean and attractive’ before abandoning the washing-up and stair-cleaning to Esmond’s more capable friends. She recalls her first experiences in the world of work, her increasing disenchantment with her family, and the couple’s delighted mutual absorption in their baby daughter, born a few months after their return to England. The baby is their best hope for the future and she describes how together they watch her ‘learn to smile, learn to wave her feet and catch them with an unsteady hand’. She is to be the symbol of a bright and classless future, ‘growing up among the rough children of Rotherhithe Street, born to freedom and May Day parades, without the irksome restraints of nanny, governess, daily walks and dull dances’. Instead the baby becomes the victim of a class-bound society, dying aged 4 months in a measles epidemic that ravages the neighbourhood.

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Hons and Rebels is a funny book with much in it to make the reader laugh out loud. There is Nanny wringing her hands at the thought of Jessica eloping with only one set of undergarments; Lord Redesdale torturing Nancy’s young men early in the morning by shouting ‘Brains for Breakfast’; Jessica herself expelled from dancing class aged 9 for explaining the mechanics of making babies to little girls in organdie dresses. But its plot is marked by a series of tragedies. Jessica devotes little space to these, writing of the death of her baby only that she and Esmond were left ‘like people battered into semi-consciousness in a vicious street fight’. Of her political estrangement from Unity, her favourite sister, she describes simply ‘a sad and uneasy feeling that we were somehow being swept apart by a huge tidal wave over which we had no control; that from the distance a freezing shadow was approaching which would one day engulf us’. On the tragedy that concludes Hons and Rebels she is even more elliptical. After describing her happy adventures with Esmond in America, whence they travelled shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, she breaks off from tales of new friends, new scenes and hair-brained money-making schemes to talk of Esmond in the past tense. The reason for this shift is explained only in a footnote: ‘He was killed in action in November 1941, at the age of twenty-three.’ In a letter to her children written decades after the publication of Hons and Rebels Jessica explained the brevity of her account of Esmond’s death in the context of her decision to omit all references to her second son Nicky (killed by a bus in 1955) in her subsequent volume, A Fine Old Conflict (1977). To write about such things, she confessed, was ‘a bit more than I cld bear’. Hons and Rebels makes capital out of the notoriety of the Mitfords but it also asserts that some things are private: part of a story, yes, but otherwise not the property of anyone other than the author. In our era of confessional tell-all there is something refreshing about this, and the austerity of Jessica Mitford’s narrative of loss renders it painfully moving. I have admired her ever since I first read Hons and Rebels in my teens. But re-reading it now I find that it is the moments of reflection rather than the Mitford jokes that are the most memorable. There is no doubt that at times Jessica wears her politics heavily but the sincerity of her beliefs is everywhere apparent. Also striking is her clear-eyed self-analysis. ‘Both Esmond and I would have scouted the idea that anything in our conduct was remotely attributable either to heredity or to upbringing,’ she acknowledges, ‘yet our style of behaviour during much of our life together, the strong streak of delinquency which I found so attractive in Esmond and which struck such a responsive chord in me, his carefree intransigence, even his supreme self-confidence – a feeling of being able to walk unscathed through any flame – are not hard to trace to an English upper-class ancestry and upbringing.’ The Communist campaigner and the sulky débutante represent different aspects of her youth but were not, she suggests, so very different in reality. There is much that is fascinating about the social history of Hons and Rebels for both British and American readers, but the book endures, I think, because it is at heart a coming-of-age narrative. It may be most famous for its portrait of eccentric aristocrats but there is something timeless in its account of the struggles of one young woman to grow up. Its cast of characters is stylized and its central romance is cut brutally short but it nevertheless has something powerful to say about the experience of forming one’s own views and shaping one’s own life. It ends with a pregnant Jessica watching Esmond drive away, ‘feeling dimly that a chunk of my life was now over for good, rounded off and put behind’. Readers who fall for Jessica’s idiosyncratic voice and particular views can follow her onwards in further volumes of memoir and in her letters, magnificently edited by Peter Sussman. But Hons and Rebels is the place where many of her fans, including me, discover her for the first time. ‘The family are being a riot about the book,’ she wrote to a friend in June 1959 when she was in the throes of composition. ‘Debo keeps saying “Oh Hen, I do hope it’s not going to be frank.”’ And then, to her husband a month later, ‘THE BOOK IS FINISHED! I could scream with joy. Isn’t it amazing, I was so terrified it wouldn’t be done.’ Hons and Rebels doesn’t make me scream with joy and it isn’t a hoot from beginning to end like The Pursuit of Love. But I for one am very glad it manages to be both frank and private, and that Jessica Mitford conquered her aversion to the typewriter and settled down to write.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 41 © Daisy Hay 2014