The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters. Charlotte Mosley
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Lady Redesdale, whose admiration for Nelson was as great as her distrust of the medical profession, used to give lectures at the Women’s Institute on bread-making.
1 When one of the Mitford children’s guinea pigs was pregnant, the sisters called it ‘in pig’, as ‘in foal’, and used the expression for humans and animals alike.
1 ‘The Parent Birds’, i.e. the Redesdales.
2 Nancy’s French bulldog.
1 Dorothy L. Sayers’ eleventh thriller featuring Lord Peter Wimsey (1937).
1 Hitler’s autobiography, My Struggle, was first published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926.
2 Annemarie Ortaus; a keen German follower of Moral Rearmament whom Diana had met in Munich.
3 Miles Phillimore (1915–72). Author of Just for Today, a Moral Rearmament pamphlet (1940).
4 Vivien Mosley (1921–2002). Diana’s stepdaughter. Married Desmond Forbes-Adam in 1949.
5 Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale (1923–). Diana’s stepson became a novelist and biographer. His books include Accident (1964), Julian Grenfell (1976), Hopeful Monsters (1990) and a two-volume life of his father, Rules of the Game (1982) and Beyond the Pale (1983). Married to Rosemary Salmon 1947–74 and to Verity Raymond in 1974.
6 The Princesses Edda and Carmen von Wrede were twin daughters of a German father and Argentinian mother. They lived at Schloss Fantaisie near Bayreuth and had been friends of Unity’s since 1935.
1 The celebrated exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’, comprising pictures that had been removed from state collections, was designed to educate the Germans on the ‘evils’ of modern art. Works by Max Beckmann, Chagall, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Kandinsky and Nolde attracted five times as many visitors as a show of Nazi-approved art held at the same time.
1 The wife of Benno von Arent (1898–1956), Hitler’s favourite theatre designer.
2 ‘But Decca was so nice! She was so funny and charming!’
3 The city park in the centre of Munich where two years later Unity attempted to commit suicide.
1 ‘Really too stupid, much too easy.’
2 ‘But you’ve only got to think logically, I’d have guessed it in two minutes.’
3 ‘Fiery red.’
4 ‘A full-bodied wine.’
* I have marked my own contributions with a star.
5 ‘Landscape.’
6 ‘A tall, beautiful blonde woman.’
7 Harald Quandt (1921–67). Magda Goebbels’ son by her first marriage.
8 ‘But children, it’s obvious, it couldn’t be anyone else.’
9 ‘I was thinking of the Führer all along, but he drinks only water!’
10 Leo Schlageter (1894–1923). A Nazi martyr executed by the French for resisting their forces in the Ruhr.
11 I’m thinking of my mother; she’d have understood hardly anything; it must be absolutely clear for the simplest and stupidest people.’
12 Fritz Wiedemann (1891–1970). Hitler’s immediate superior during the First World War and subsequently one of his military aides and policy advisers.
1 Mussolini’s state visit to Germany, during which Hitler put on a massive display of military power, was instrumental in convincing the Italian dictator to join forces with Germany.
2 Karl Brandt (1904–1947). Surgeon who joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and served as Hitler’s doctor 1934–44.
3 George Ward Price (1886–1961). Munich correspondent for the Daily Mail and author of I Know These Dictators (1937), a sympathetic portrait of Hitler and Mussolini.
4 Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller had been published the previous year.
1 Rosaleen, Bryan and Elizabeth Guinness’s first child, was born on 7 September 1937.
1 Lady Bridget Coke (1891–1984). Mother of Deborah’s great friend Margaret (Maggot) Ogilvy. Married the 12th Earl of Airlie in 1917.
1 Deborah’s Christmas present to Nancy was a bracelet of Hand of Fatima charms.
2 The attack of measles had affected Deborah’s eyes. The sisters used to tease each other about syphilis, which can lead to blindness in its later stages.
3 Helen Eaton (1899–1989). Nancy’s nickname for her hostess at West Wycombe was ‘Hell Bags’. Married Sir John Dashwood in 1922.
4 ‘Get on’, Deborah’s way of addressing Nancy, was an interpretation of the sort of growl that the Mitfords’ groom used to greet people with. Deborah took it up as a way of fighting back at her eldest sister.