Already in the gym at 11 months
As she publishes her new thriller featuring the infamous siblings, the Downton Abbey creator’s niece ponders our enduring interest in their lives
FITNESS fan Pippa Middleton has reportedly enrolled her baby son at a gym so he can follow in her footsteps.
The younger sister of the Duchess of Cambridge takes Arthur – her son with husband James Matthews – to a baby gym for regular workouts, even though he has not yet reached his first birthday.
In her column forWaitrose Weekend magazine, Pippa, 36, wrote: “Now that Arthur is 11 months old and more mobile, I have been trying to come up with different activities to do with him.
“I needed to find something more than just park walks in the pram. Our local baby gym has been a saving grace. It’s a big space full of fun, soft objects, playmats, stairs, balls, swings, mini trampolines and more to stimulate and physically engage babies and toddlers.
“The classes have structured activities that help promote movement, balance and strength, but there’s also free play.
“Arthur burns lots of energy in this safe environment and learns many physical skills.
“I have also noticed him building his confidence with each visit.”
THE Mitfords were six aristocratic sisters who came of age between the wars and lived in a past that is not merely another country but feels like another galaxy. Their aspirations, their lifestyles and their politics bear little relation to anything a modern woman would lay claim to.
And yet, their fascinating, shocking, sometimes scandalous story of wildly differing politics, elopement and adultery, continues to fascinate.
Exactly why that should be is a question I’ve spent a fair amount of time pondering, having written three novels with the Mitford sisters at their heart.
The Mitford Murders series mixes fact and fiction, using the siblings to draw readers into a time and place – upper-class households between the wars – with fictional protagonists and events that embroil the family in solving crimes. If you don’t know who they are, here’s a quick rundown in descending order of birth: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah.
There was also a brother, Tom, born before Diana, who was perhaps inevitably, overshadowed by his sisters, and was killed in action in 1945.
The girls came of age in the inter-war years, and each came to represent a different facet of that period of tumultuous political upheaval and decadence.
They were born upper class, but their father only became the 2nd Baron Redesdale after his eldest brother was killed in the First World War. The family was not poor, but never considered itself rich either, with their mother selling eggs to pay the governess’s wages.
IT WAS an eccentric upbringing – brilliantly characterised in Nancy’s novels Love In A Cold Climate and The Pursuit Of Love – though viewed through our 21st-century eyes it’s hard to separate true eccentricity from some of the norms of the day.
Whatever went on in their childhoods – a subject upon which all the sisters never entirely agreed – it certainly created six highly individual personalities.
Nancy was a novelist and satirist of her class,
ONLY BROTHER: Tragic Tom died in action while remaining completely of it; friends with many of the leading literary figures of the day with whom she gossiped while working at Heywood Hill bookshop in London’s Mayfair (it’s still there). Pamela was the rock of the six, calm and unflappable, fond of horses, dogs and housework. Diana was a famous beauty, marrying Bryan Guinness, an heir to the brewing fortune and future Baron Moyne, when she was just 18 years old, only to leave him a few years later for Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. After his wife died, he and Diana married in Goebbel’s drawing room. Hitler was a witness. In spite of her consequent ostracization from society, she never renounced her fascist beliefs, for which she was interned for three years in the Second World War. Of the same mould, Unity travelled to Germany prewar and became obsessed with Hitler, stalking the restaurant he lunched at for 10 months until he invited her to join his table.
She was soon a part of his inner circle, announced herself a “Jew-hater” and, when war broke out, tried to kill herself in the English Gardens in Munich.
Shooting herself in the head with a pistol given to her by Hitler for her protection, she survived but lived her remaining years with the mental capacity of a 12-year-old.
Jessica eloped with a cousin, Esmond Romilly, a communist only just back from the fighting in the Spanish CivilWar.
Like Diana, she espoused her husband’s views with an unshakeable will; Esmond was killed in the war but she went on to marry American radical Leftist Robert Treuhaft.
Last was Deborah, of whom everyone was disappointed she had not been born a boy and it was said that no-one except the family nanny even looked at her