Hons and Rebels (New York Review Books Classics)
by Jessica Mitford
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jessica MitfordIntroduction: Christopher Hitchens
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-09-30
ISBN: 1590171101
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Book Reviews of Hons and Rebels (New York Review Books Classics)
Book Review: A Girl Gone Wild
Summary: 5 Stars
Wodehouse always averred that he based all his characters (Bertie and chums) on actual characters he had known coming of age in an England roughly contemporaneous with the one Jessica (Decca) Mitford chronicles here. People, even ardent fans, have tended toward the skeptical side regarding Wodehouse's claim. This memoir should lay much of this skepticism to rest. Decca, her sisters and extended family come across as nothing so much as non-fiction Wodehouse - No, not an oxymoron! Above all, this memoir is full of the beauty, eccentricity, insouciance and joy of youth which comes to know sadness and tragedy all too soon.
The only way to effectively convey the rum atmosphere of the rural gentry in which Decca was nurtured - now completely vanished from England - is to proffer some select passages. Here, for example, is the family wending their privileged way to the parish church on a typical Sunday:
"Every Sunday morning, rain or shine, we stumped off down the hill with Nanny, governess, Miranda, several dogs, Boud's goat, Enid, her pet snake, and my pet dove. Some of the graves in Swinbrook churchyard were conveniently surrounded by high railings for better preservation and privacy. These made good cages for the assorted animals, whose loud yelps, cooing and baaing blended nicely with the lusty voices of the village choir and effectively drowned out most of the ten-minute sermon."
And we have eccentric Uncles instead of Wodehouse's eccentric Aunts, but again, real ones:
"Uncle Tommy presided as magistrate at the local police court, and in this capacity doled out his own ideas of justice to the local citizenry. He was particularly proud of having given a three months' jail sentence to a woman driver who accidentally ran her car into a cow on a dark night: `Clap `em in the brig! That's one way of keeping these damn' women off the road.'"
I'm afraid that such options are no longer open to us, fellows!
Of course, most of this book is given to Decca's break with her Wodehousian upbringing, her elopement with Esmond Romilly and ensuing adventures in Spain, the time back in England in the commune on Rotherhithe Street (which, curiously, was the only part of the book which could have been set in England during the 80's when I was an adolescent - just mix in loud music and illicit drugs) and their final idyllic excursion to America. There's a piece on American and British English which is priceless. Americans, you do pronounce your "t" s as "d" s without being aware of it. Don't believe me? - Say "thirty-three" quickly, without thinking! - But that's alright; you remain a much friendlier people and more open society, as Decca and Osmond found.
The ending is circumspect, as befits the onset of war and Osmond's death in it. And, of course, there's much to and fro amongst the Mitfords and their biographers about just how scrupulously honest Decca has been here. But the intrepid reader should put such quibbles aside. As Jessica Mitford puts it here:
"It is perhaps futile to try to interpret the actions of another - one may be so completely wrong;"
And this memoir is so filled with sparkling actions, enchanting circumstances and the wild joys as well as tumbles of any youth worth the having, that I can't imagine any reader not taking delight in it.---I can't think of any laud higher for such a book.
Summary of Hons and Rebels (New York Review Books Classics)
Jessica Mitford, the great muckraking journalist, was part of a legendary English aristocratic family. Her sisters included Nancy, doyenne of the 1920s London smart set and a noted novelist and biographer; Diana, wife to the English fascist chief Sir Oswald Mosley; Unity, who fell head over in heels in love with Hitler; and Deborah, later the Duchess of Devonshire. Jessica swung left and moved to America, where she took part in the civil rights movement and wrote her classic exposé of the undertaking business, The American Way of Death.Hons and Rebels is the hugely entertaining tale of Mitford's upbringing, which was, as she dryly remarks, ?not exactly conventional. . . Debo spent silent hours in the chicken house learning to do an exact imitation of the look of pained concentration that comes over a hen's face when it is laying an egg. . . . Unity and I made up a complete language called Boudledidge, unintelligible to any but ourselves, in which we translated various dirty songs (for safe singing in front of the grown-ups).? But Mitford found her family's world as smothering as it was singular and, determined to escape it, she eloped with Esmond Romilly, Churchill's nephew, to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. The ensuing scandal, in which a British destroyer was dispatched to recover the two truants, inspires some of Mitford's funniest, and most pointed, pages.
A family portrait, a tale of youthful folly and high-spirited adventure, a study in social history, a love story, Hons and Rebels is a delightful contribution to the autobiographer's art.
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