Wait For Me!

Dear reader, I have a confession to make.

I have a terrible weakness for the Mitford sisters. My gateway drug was the 1980 television series of Love in a Cold Climate, which together with Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire at around the same time, had an indelible and unfortunate effect on my adolescent aesthetic and left me with a permanent guilty affection for English poshness. (Actually, you could probably throw in All Creatures Great and Small, which was less posh, but also set in the 1930s.)

From Nancy Mitford's novels, on which the series was based, I progressed to memoirs and biographies of the family, to their voluminous letters. (I still haven't forgiven the theft of my two collections of Nancy's letters... was it you, Colin Batrouney??) My favourite sisters were Nancy, with her heart-breaking unrequited love for Gaston Palewski, and Jessica, the Communist who ran away to America and became a civil rights activist. The fascist sympathisers Unity and Diana appalled me; Pam and Deborah were fairly neutral.

This memoir by Deborah Devonshire, the last of the sisters, was published in 2010, a few years before her death. The first few chapters, dealing with her youth, are delightful; the rest of the book deals with the restoration of her husband's ancestral home, Chatsworth, and her experiences as a diplomat's wife in the 1950s and 60s.

Deborah was unashamedly conservative and doesn't hesitate to say so -- she protested in favour of fox-hunting, disapproved of reforms to the House of Lords, couldn't bear Jessica's 'communist' friends etcetera. I must admit (do admit!) that I found the book less enjoyable as it went along. The antics of aristocratic young girls in the 1930s are jolly good fun, but shoots and balls and hanging out with the Prince of Wales and the Queen Mother feel slightly uneasy as we creep into the twenty-first century. Wait For Me! provides a window into a very different, very privileged world, and it's not a comfortable view.