KEY POINTS:
In June 1937, Deborah Mitford visited Munich where she took tea with Adolf Hitler. "I went with my sister Unity and our mother to his flat," she recalls. "The atmosphere was rather awkward because neither my mother nor I could speak German. Unity and Hitler talked away while
we sat there not being able to understand what they were saying.
"Hitler's towels, I remember, had `A.H.' embroidered on them. I've always thought that was so strange, so unlike what you would expect of someone like that. I remember, too, that he rang a bell several times and no one came. That was a bit odd, too."
Yet what seems oddest of all in retrospect is how little impression the occasion made on her. In a letter to her sister, Jessica, Deborah barely mentioned it, being far more interested in describing a cafe violinist whom she had fallen for.
"Well, I've never been very interested in politics, you see," she says, laughing. "And the truth is that I didn't give it much thought. If you sat in a room with Churchill you were aware of this tremendous charisma. Kennedy had it too. But Hitler didn't - not to me anyway."
Deborah Mitford is the last of the infamous Mitford sisters. All her five siblings have died, as has her husband, Andrew, the former Duke of Devonshire. But at 87, Deborah hums with vivacity, a slim, immaculately coiffed woman with bright blue eyes.
She's sitting in a studio in the garden of the former vicarage where she now lives. All around her, on steel shelves stretching from floor to ceiling, are files containing letters the Mitford sisters wrote to one another. A selection of these letters, edited by Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley, has now been published.
The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (HarperCollins, $79.99) is more than 800 pages long, but it represents only five per cent of the letters the sisters exchanged. They wrote to one another almost every day, sometimes more than once, a correspondence that lasted from the 1920s until 2003, when Diana died.
"I still go on writing to Diana in my head because she is the person I had a particular affinity with."
In conversation, Deborah expresses herself with great economy and clarity. Yet to read the sisters' letters is to be plunged into a torrent of gushing adjectives and elaborate nicknames. While Unity may have been the champion gusher here - "The Fuhrer was heavenly," she writes at one point - Deborah doesn't lag far behind.
The youngest of the Mitford girls, Deborah was brought up at the family home in the Cotswold village of Swinbrook until she was 16. While her sisters couldn't stand the place, Deborah loved it and was devastated when the family moved out. Almost 40 years later Deborah wrote to Nancy, "It broke my heart. Nothing had ever taken its place and nothing ever will... Worse than anything that has happened since, the loss of three babies, my four greatest friends being killed in the war - nothing has saddened me like the going from Swinbrook."
"Did I write that?" she says now, her eyes widening in surprise. "That was going very far. But I think there was a sense that it was the end of childhood for me. An air of harmony prevailed at Swinbrook that didn't prevail afterwards."
A year later, Jessica Mitford [Decca] caused a scandal by eloping to Spain with Esmond Romilly. The couple subsequently married, but Romilly was killed in action in 1941.
Up to this point, the two youngest Mitfords had been particularly close, but there's a sense that their relationship never fully recovered from the shock and betrayal Deborah felt at the time.
At almost the same time as Jessica's elopement, Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. They married in Goebbels' living room with Hitler in attendance. Meanwhile, Unity had become hopelessly infatuated with Nazism in general, Hitler in particular. While Deborah does not seek to excuse what Unity did, she hopes publication of the letters might make people see her more sympathetically.
On the day war broke out, Unity tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in the head. She only just survived. Hitler arranged for her to be taken to a hospital in Switzerland where Deborah and her mother went to collect her.
Severely brain-damaged, Unity needed constant care - she died in 1948.
"I don't think there was ever any realistic expectation that she would make a recovery. The bullet had destroyed quite a lot of the brain. Afterwards, she developed these enthusiasms for various religions. Like her old enthusiasm, but not so violent, of course. She was a Christian Scientist, then a Roman Catholic... everything that came along."
Nine months after the outbreak of war, in June 1940, Diana and Oswald Mosley were interned. Their cause wasn't helped by Nancy Mitford telling an official at the Foreign Office that she thought her sister was "an extremely dangerous person". Diana did not discover this until 10 years after Nancy's death.
With one sister imprisoned for being a Nazi sympathiser and another so besotted with Hitler that she shot herself, one might assume that some stigma would have stuck to the Mitford name.
Deborah insists she was never aware of any. "I mean, I'm sure there must have been, but I certainly never lost any friends as a result. They were just very sad for all the horrible things that had happened."
Nancy, the eldest sister, a successful novelist and historian, fell hopelessly in love with an ugly yet unstintingly unfaithful Frenchman called Gaston Palewski. "He was a complete wastrel, really. Very charming, but you'd rather die than say you found him prepossessing."
Deborah was luckier in love. In 1941 she married Andrew Cavendish _ he became the Duke of Devonshire when his father died in 1950 - and inherited Chatsworth, with its 175 rooms, 21 kitchens and 17 staircases. They did the house up and transformed it into a hugely successful business.
Life as the last Mitford sister can be lonely. "When Diana died it was awful," she admits. "But you know life goes on. I'm so lucky with my children and grandchildren - I've got 15 great-grandchildren - so there's plenty on, if you know what I mean."
- Detours, HoS
