Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page.
Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page. In fact it is a sad book, taken all in all. Two of the more poignant passages, which will linger in my memory for a very long time, are about her dead babies, and about the alcoholism of her magnificent husband, the 11th Duke of Devonshire.
Mark, Victor and Mary, the babies, lived, respectively, five hours, seven hours and four hours. Only recently was their mother told, by the vicar’s widow at Edensor, the village next to Chatsworth, that the infants were all baptised by ‘Moucher’, the author’s mother-in-law and wife of the 10th Duke.
The three pages devoted to the 11th Duke’s alcoholism, and the ‘tough love’ cure which was imposed upon him — Debo and guests leaving the house; Andrew Devonshire ringing her up and pleading with her to return, and her doing so only on condition that he gave up the booze — are in their way equally moving. She does not flinch from describing the nightmare which his alcoholism caused everyone who had to do with him; but nor does she fail to pay tribute to his very great qualities. I only met him after he had given up the drink and would say without hesitation that he was one of the most exemplary human beings I ever knew — funny, kind, extremely clever, modest and like most interesting people always slightly tormented.
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