Hons And Rebels

Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels is the family memoir for anyone who has ever looked at the British upper classes and wondered whether the whole thing was perhaps a long-running practical joke with servants. The Mitfords had titles, houses, nicknames, alarming opinions, political extremities, social confidence and the sort of childhood in which eccentricity appears to have been issued at breakfast with the marmalade. Into this decorative riot comes Jessica, known as Decca, who looked around at privilege, found it insufficiently persuasive, and began plotting her escape.

This is aristocratic childhood with the wallpaper peeling at the edges. There are sisters, nannies, governesses, country houses, private languages, family legends, parental oddities and the grand old English habit of making emotional chaos look like tradition. The Mitford household was not so much a family as a small ideological zoo in pearls, with one sister drifting toward fascism, another toward Hitler’s circle, another into literature, and Jessica herself marching off in the opposite direction with communism, rebellion and a healthy dislike of being told what people “like us” do.

The book’s great pleasure is its tone: dry, sharp, amused, unfooled. Mitford writes about her own extraordinary upbringing without reverence, as if she had been raised inside a costume drama and spent the whole time looking for the fire exit. She is affectionate when she chooses to be, lethal when required, and wonderfully alert to the absurdity of a world where wealth and manners could sit beside ignorance, snobbery and political lunacy without anyone knocking over the tea.

Then comes rebellion in earnest. Jessica does not simply roll her eyes at the drawing room and remain there being witty. She runs away, elopes with Esmond Romilly, throws herself into anti-fascist politics, heads for Spain, and begins the process of turning herself from Mitford daughter into radical adult. It is a coming-of-age story, but one where “coming of age” involves rather more ideological explosives than usual, and considerably less concern for whether Aunt Somebody approves.

The irony, of course, is that this rebellion could only have come from someone who knew the old world intimately enough to mock it properly. Decca understood the codes, accents, hypocrisies and little padded absurdities of the class she fled, which makes her escape both personal and very funny. She writes like someone slipping out of a stately home through a side door, taking the best anecdotes with her and leaving the silver behind.

For readers of Mitfordiana, memoir, aristocratic oddness, political awakening, literary families, or the twentieth century behaving badly in evening dress, this is a cracking volume. It has childhood, class, sisters, rebellion, fascists at the edge of the lawn, communists over the horizon, and one of the sharpest voices ever to emerge from a nursery full of nicknames.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A respectable survivor of an entirely disrespectful memoir, ready for any shelf that enjoys watching inherited privilege have its cushions kicked across the room.

Keep browsing: See more Biography books Other books by Jessica Mitford