The smallest transgression-a child spilling her food or being a minute late-could send him into a towering rage. But he could also be impatient and had a violent temper.
She wrote that when he and Nancy started sparring they were better than anything she had ever seen on stage, 'a pair of comedians of the first order'. Deborah remembered him as 'charming, brilliant without being clever' and uproariously funny when in a good mood. Strikingly handsome, with the brilliant blue eyes that passed down to his children, he was kindhearted, jovial and the source of much of the fun that was had in the family. Lord Redesdale was hurt by the family's dislike of his dream project and began to spend more time at 26 Rutland Gate, a large London house overlooking Hyde Park that he had bought when Asthall was sold.
The younger children found some warmth and privacy in a heated linen cupboard, later immortalized in Nancy's novels as the 'Hons' cupboard', while the older children had to share the drawing room or sit in their small bedrooms. Worst of all, unlike Asthall where the library had been in a converted barn some distance from the house and where the children were left undisturbed, there was no room at Swinbrook that they could call their own. All the sisters except Deborah, who was six when they moved, disliked the new house, which was cold, draughty and impractical. In 1926, they moved to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, a grim, ungainly edifice that Lord Redesdale had built on top of a hill near Swinbrook village. Unluckily for his family, country sports did not exhaust his energies and Asthall, which the children loved, was not to his liking. Life in the country was far better suited to this unbookish, unsociable man, whose happiest moments were spent by the Windrush, a trout river that ran past Asthall, or in the woods where he watched his young pheasants hatch. Before the First World War, David Redesdale, or 'Farve' as he was known to his children, lived in London where he worked as office manager for The Lady, the magazine founded by his father-in-law. When the letters begin, the family had been living for six years at Asthall Manor, a seventeenth-century house in the Cotswolds, which the sisters' father, Lord Redesdale, had bought when he sold Batsford Park, a rambling Victorian pile that he had inherited in 1916 and could not afford to keep up. Nancy's main family correspondent at the time was her brother Tom, and Pamela-who confided mostly in Diana-was the least prolific writer of the sisters. By 1925, only Nancy, aged twenty-one, and Pamela, aged eighteen, had gone out into the world the four youngest children were still in the nursery or schoolroom. Nor are there many letters dating back to the eight years covered in this section.
There are few letters to record the Mitford sisters' childhood and early youth, and such letters as they did write were mostly to their mother and father.
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