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Saturday 22 November 2008

The Spectator's notes

The Spectator's notes

For ten years, it has been said that Gordon Brown gave independence to the Bank of England.

The newly published Mitford letters (The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters, Fourth Estate) are much more interesting than most of the stuff that pours out about that family. Reviewers have rightly noted the extraordinary range of people whom, between them, the sisters knew — Hitler, Evelyn Waugh, Maya Angelou, J.F. Kennedy, the Queen Mother, Oswald Mosley, Harold Macmillan, John Betjeman, Bernie Ecclestone. But what is even more unusual — and it is so obvious that few, except the book’s excellent editor, Charlotte Mosley, have thought about it — is that this is the history of the 20th century seen exclusively by women. Social historians often make laborious attempts to do this, collating women’s reactions to events which were chiefly shaped by men, but here it all is, effortless, uncontrived, and within a single family. As Diana Mosley puts it to Deborah Devonshire in one letter: ‘One hasn’t got a single male person to rely upon as a result of all these vile wars, so the ones who are left just do as they please which is often dire, eh.’ As a result of this female-ness, the reactions to everything are so much fresher and bolder than those of the men who traditionally record public affairs. For example, Unity’s reports of her café meetings with Hitler (whom she, almost literally, worshipped) tell a great deal about him. They show how he often had plenty of time, how he was so popular in the 1930s that he could hang around in cafés without much anxiety, and how he thought romantically about England. He whistles the whole of what Unity calls ‘the English National Anthem’ to her; he fantasises about a world looked after by the German army and ‘the English navy’; and he muses that the Blackshirts would have much more success in England if they were known by a traditional name. He suggests the ‘Ironsides’. A man’s reports of the great monster could not have got nearly as close to him as did those of this innocent, deluded young girl.

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