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partly, I suppose, the result of jealousy and partly of a longing to be grown-up and live with grown-up people. The others bored me, and I made them feel it… I expect I would have been much worse but for Blor.’
    Lady Redesdale seems to have exerted a negative influence. According to Nancy she had ‘always lived in a dream world of her own’. Apropos of which she commented: ‘I think that nothing in my life has changed more than the relationship between mothers and young children . In those days a distance was always kept. Even so she was perhaps abnormally detached. On one occasion Unity rushed into the drawing-room, where she was at her writing-table, saying: “Muv, Muv, Decca is standing on the roof—she says she’s going to commit suicide!” “Oh, poor duck,” said my mother, “I hope she won’t do anything so terrible” and went on writing.’
    This detachment may have been a subconscious defence against her explosive husband and boisterous children. With out knowing it Lady Redesdale was an incipient Taoist, for as Lao Tzu said, ‘The weak overcomes the strong, the soft overcomes the hard… The softest things in the world over ride the hardest.’ (Lao Tzu also said: ‘Mighty is he who conquers himself ,’ which scarcely applied to Lord Redesdale.) Albeit no Christian Scientist, Lady Redesdale did not believe in illness, but she was prejudiced against certain foods and against pig in particular . Ham, sausages, fried bacon were all craved for by her children, as is usual with forbidden fruit. Lady Redesdale’s brother, ‘Uncle Geoff’, seems to have swayed her ideas on health. He was an eccentric of a different kind who fancied that the fortunes of England depended on the use of natural manure in fertilizing the soil. He had violent objections to the pasteurization of milk, and his niece, Jessica, has left a funny description of his advocacy of the ‘unsplit slowly smoked bloater’ and other ingredients of wholesome diet, and she quotes a characteristic passage from a privately printed collection of his old letters to editors entitled
Writings of a Rebel
in her
Hons and Rebels
(required reading for all Mitford fans). Her mother, she tells us, added a few notions of her own to Uncle Geoff’s. ‘In defiance of the law, she refused to allow any of us to be vaccinated (“pumping dis gusting dead germs into the Good Body!”).’ When Jessica in turn begged to be sent to a school, her mother sensibly re marked: ‘If you went to school you’d probably hate it. The fact is children always want to do something different from what they are doing. Childhood is a very unhappy time of life; I know I was always miserable as a child. You’ll be all right when you’re eighteen.’ One cannot visualize young Jessica submitting to school discipline. Though she might mock her Uncle Geoff she was one of nature’s rebels. Unity went to two schools and was expelled from both. When one of her sisters said so, Lady Redesdale gently objected: ‘Oh no, darling, not expelled,
asked
to leave
.’
    In a draft for a broadcast after
The Pursuit of Love
was published, Nancy wrote: ‘I have described the early years of myself and my five sisters and one brother in my last book, with some alterations necessary to a work of fiction, but with no exaggeration. Indeed it would hardly be possible to exaggerate the eccentricity and restlessness of our upbringing. My father had two manias, for selling and for building. He would build a new house every time there was a boom, when labour was scarce and expensive. He would then live in it for a while, but as soon as there was a slump, as soon as labour became easy and cheap and values dropped, he would sell what he had built at a vast loss and we would all move on to the next house whose foundation stone would be laid on the first day of a new boom.’
    ‘Our first home was a large Elizabethan palace built by my grandfather in 1900. He had my father’s mania to an even more