In Pursuit Of The Mitfords

A festive walk around Oxfordshire’s Asthall Manor conjures images of the famous ‘child hunts’

- Fiona Reynolds

I WAS thinking of Christmas Day at home,’ said Linda. ‘I always feel sentimental at Christmas.’ Linda is the fictional alter ego of the author Nancy Mitford and her family home, Alconleigh, is Asthall Manor in the Cotswolds where the six Mitford sisters and their brother, Tom, grew up.

Both Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love and her sister Jessica’s (Decca’s) Hons and Rebels describe a chaotic country upbringing with the clever girls—they were virtually uneducated in the formal sense—sharing secrets and teases in the ‘Hons’ (airing) cupboard.

It was the last gasp of a society in which coming-out balls and ridiculous clothes were being put aside by determined young women capable not only of fearful scrapes, but of penetrating the highest echelons of political life: fashionable Paris (Nancy), the Spanish Civil War and American Communism (Decca), Hitler’s Fascists (Diana and Unity) and England’s aristocracy (Debo). After Tom’s wartime death, only the oldest sister, Pam (‘Woman’), kept out of the public eye, absorbed by dogs, horses, chickens and gardening.