In the autumn of 1995 Jessica Mitford, the youngest of the sisters, known to one and all since childhood as Decca, sat down at her desk in Oakland, California to answer a list of questions put to her by a journalist. ‘Yes, still consider myself a communist!’ she wrote, adding, ‘So do the undertakers, I’m sure.’ At the time, she was working on a revised edition of her great work, the 1963 bestseller The American Way of Death, which exposed and mocked the grotesque practices of the funeral business; outraged undertakers had indeed tried to discredit her as a card-carrying red. She was still working on the new edition when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer less than a year later, and instantly embarked on treatment. ‘Point of brain radiation is to spruce it up a bit so one can get on with the book etc,’ she wrote to her sister Debo, the Duchess of Devonshire, otherwise known as Hen. Three weeks later she was dead. ‘Isn’t death too tiresome for words?’ as she once wrote to an old Party friend.
Reading straight through this dauntingly massive volume of Decca’s letters, edited by one of her Californian friends and fans, it is striking how consistent she is. From childhood, she was funny, fierce and imperious. Her allegiances and opinions, once formed, were for life. She belonged to two tribes with diametrically opposed values, and contrived to be loyal to them both: the Mitfords and her comrades of the American Left — the Old Leftovers, as she called them.
Her childhood letters confirm the familiar picture — the pack of handsome, wilful children growing up in upper-class eccentricity at Swinbrook, teasing each other and their parents without mercy, the Hons’ cupboard, the nicknames, the private language (poor Sussman grapples solemnly with this, explaining ‘Boudle- didge’ in scholarly footnotes).
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