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Even before this and other events in his daughters' lives had given him cause, David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, second Baron Redesdale ("Farve'' to his girls), had the reputation of being a slightly gaga aristocrat. Hitler took him seriously as a Fascist sympathizer, but few others took him seriously on anything. For one thing, he had made one of his rare but passionate speeches on the subject of limiting the powers of the House of Lords. He was against it — on the grounds that the proposals struck at the foundations of Christianity. He was also pretty savage about a proposal to seat peeresses. Even the Conservative press laughed at his views, as did his six daughters. Nancy thought she knew his real reason : there was only one W.C. in the House of Lords. As a parsimonious peer bringing up six daughters in a di minishing series of houses where the plumbing had not been much improved since the Black Death, his lordship knew how inconvenient females can be.

Decca & Boud. The reader who feels at this stage that he has wandered into an early Evelyn Waugh novel will not be far wrong. Waugh might indeed have written another Decline and Fall based on Jessica's chronicle. There is even a Waughlike Mitford uncle who was the author of one book, a privately printed volume of his letters to the London Times and other publications, notably on the subject of manure; his notion was that the greatness of Elizabethan Eng land was due to the widespread use of sheep droppings in producing an organically based diet and thus a sound society. But more than the shortage of sheep droppings is needed to explain the anemia of English society between the general strike of 1926 and World War II, and the madcap Mitford story charts some of the more alarming symptoms of a class in deep trouble with history and itself.

Jessica tells her tale with girlish gush, brilliantly preserved a generation after the events, and there is enough intra-family whimsy to stop A. A. Milne him self in his Teddy bear tracks. They all had special names: the narrator is "Little D." to "Muv," and "Decca" to the rest of the world. They even had a private language, examples of which are merci lessly given. It is all very charming at first, but less so when Decca and Boud (big, "sullen," "baleful" Unity) get past the hair-pulling stage and make the big world their playroom. Boud took to scratching swastikas on the window (she had a diamond, of course), and Decca just naturally scratched hammer-and-sickles over them.

There is something magnificently arrogant about the way Boud and Decca extracted the last yard of mileage out of their hyphens as they joined forces—Fascist and Communist—dedicated to the destruction of aristocracy. Boud, before she met Hitler, insisted on taking her pet rat to debutante balls. With Philip Toynbee (Historian Arnold's son), Decca raided Eton College chapel and decamped with a carload of top hats.