strange and random happenstance

War Horse
Based on the book by Michael Morpurgo
Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, Matt Milne, David Thewlis, Robert Emms, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Patrick Kennedy, David Kross, Celine Buckens, Niels Arestrup, Nicolas Bro, Toby Kebbell, Julian Wadham, Liam Cunningham, Eddie Marsan, and Pip Torrens
Release Date: December 25th, 2011
Rating: ★★
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Young Albert Narracott's dreams come true when his father, drunken and surly, outbids their landlord for a young colt. The Narracott's were in desperate need of a plow horse but Albert has spent months watching the young colt grow, spying through the various fences of Devon, and knows that he can train him because they were destined to be together. Against all odds Albert succeeds only to lose his horse, Joey, because their crop failed and his father had no other recourse, drunk and bitter from the Boer War, he sells Joey. Another war has begun and Joey is sold to a Captain James Nicholls, an upstanding solider who promises to return Joey to Albert after the war. Albert begs to accompany Captain Nicholls but is too young to join up. Tearfully he promises Joey that they will be reunited. In France Joey a has steep learning curve, especially when it comes to being around other horses. But he quickly bonds with Major Jamie Stewart's black stallion and the two are inseparable, even as their riders are mowed down by German gunfire they remain together behind enemy lines. It is a long war and soon Albert is old enough and enlists and is stationed abroad. Will he find Joey or will they forever be separated?

War Horse, by it's episodic nature following Joey through all his adventures is reminiscent of Black Beauty. Therefore you could basically call this film Black Beauty Goes to War. The problem with this kind of storytelling is that you really have to be invested in the character of the horse. And while the horse who played Joey could easily be singled out as one of the best actors in the film, it still didn't make this film work. The main problem I had was that the film seemed to be taking it's subject matter too lightly. This could be seen in every frame with the overly perfect shutters and thatching on the Narracott's overly large farmhouse to the goose being used as comic relief. I don't think that Spielberg got the memo that England is supposed to be a little gloomy and run down. Instead he artifically lit most scenes, seriously, look at the two light sources in almost every scene! Oh, and that spotlight on Emily Watson when she leans out the window? What the hell? This was the best lit war EVER! The problem with this is that it literally felt like you were watching Babe or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, forever waiting for the animals to start talking or a Teletubby to wander by. I would also totally recommend those films before this one.

This overall stylization makes for a very sanitized Disneyfication of World War I. Yes, I know the lack of blood and the cunning use of windmill blades was to secure that ever important family friendly PG-13 rating to make this the holiday film of 2011, but still... why? Why the hyper exaggerated colors? Why this muted horror? Why tone down The Great War!?! This is an event that forever changed the world and this movie almost makes light of it. Yes, there are moments that pull on your heartstrings, but I don't think it gets across any important message that could be said about this war. If you wanted to really make this film right, don't pull punches. I mean, would you ever seriously imagine the director of Schindler's List pulling punches? This film could have opened up a dialogue with the younger generations who didn't know about the war and everyone could sit around sipping eggnog and discussing the atrocities. Instead it focuses on the more "romantic" nature of the war, wherein instead of soldiers putting down their weapons on Christmas and meeting in no man's land to have a sing-a-long and a game of football they all unite to save Joey from the barbed wire, even with comedic throwing of wire cutters. There shouldn't be comedic throwing of wire cutters people!

Speaking of the comedy... this film highlights the fact that comedy shouldn't be banned from the saga of war, just look to Blackadder! Comedy can be used if done right. Which is why I must hang my head in bafflement that this film was co-written by the co-writer of Blackadder! Richard Curtis! YES! I was just as shocked as you are, I'm assuming you're shocked here by the way. I couldn't believe that a man who handled the first world war with such insight, such nuance, could produce this schmaltz. SHAME ON YOU RICHARD CURTIS! You have let the schmaltz take over. Let's look to your IMDB credits shall we? Comedic and insightful genius through the eighties, I particularly love The Tall Guy and Rowan Atkinson's performance in that. The nineties are a little rockier, I hate Mr. Bean but my love of The Vicar of Dibley outshines anything because it's one of my favorite shows ever. The turn of the century started off strong with Bridget Jones's Diary and then it quickly went to hell in a handbasket. Love Actually, yes I know I'm alone in my hatred of that but I can't be alone in my hatred of the Bridget Jones sequel! Oh, and The Girl in the Cafe! You Richard Curtis have turned into some sort of romantic bleeding heart that has to have a "message" in their work. What happened to the quality of the work emphasizing the message versus the work being solely about the message? You have failed me sir, and you have failed War Horse.

Because the thing is, everyone I know who has read the book or seen the stage adaptation has been moved by the brilliance of War Horse. This wasn't brilliant, unless you are talking about the lighting. You can kind of glimpse what made the book stand out if you look for it. What I did find interesting was that by tracking Joey's journey we get to see the war from both sides. It's kind of like he is a prisoner of war, yet the English, aside from the stalwart Captain Nicholls, are just as barbarous and uncaring to their animals as the Germans. So buried deep there is the message hidden from sight that despite their differences, despite being on different sides, both sides are the same, just young boys being killed by the great war machine that cares little for them or animals. So I guess I could say it was nice that this wasn't all one-sided? We saw not very nice Englishmen, and some very nice Germans. And that poor French girl and her grandfather did a nice job representing those caught in-between the conflict. So, I guess what I'm trying to get at is that all the pieces where kind of there, just put together in such a way that the whole didn't work. It was too jumbled, too scattered, too toned down, too saccharine. And the thing is, the movie has kind of turned me off ever wanting to see the play or read the book and what if they really are as brilliant as people say? Then I'm just losing out because of some misguided desire of Spielberg's to make another war movie, but this time for the whole family.

I also can not lie about the fact that I really had to see this movie eventually because of the Hiddles/Cumberbatch confluence. Now, I'm not trying to be biased here, there are performances of theirs I haven't liked so I'm not always fawning on them. Hiddles was in that awful A Waste of Shame and was in the abysmal Cranford sequel, and I can not forget the mess that was High-Rise. As for Benedict... avoid Tipping the Velvet, Starter for 10, Atonement, and all those "Hobbit" but not really The Hobbit movies. Oh, and Parade's End! So when I say they were a highlight of this film I'm NOT playing favorites. But their appearances were more bitter than sweet, because for just a second you could see what this movie might have been. They are true actors, they fully physically embody the characters they play. In fact Benedict's performance as Major Jamie Stewart was fabulous because I one hundred percent hated him. The brusque voice, the posture where it always looked like he had a stick up his ass. This wasn't Benedict in all his goofiness, this was Major Stewart, and he could have been an interesting character if given more screen time. As for the naivety that Hiddles brought to Captain James Nicholls, the ability of him to show the horror of the realization that he is about to die using just his eyes... perhaps the most touching and real moments in this entire film. And there's not much reality to be had here.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Fall of Poppies, Babe, Benedict Cumberbatch, Black Beauty, Blackadder, Disney, England, France, Germany, Horses, Richard Curtis, Rowan Atkinson, Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hiddleston, War Horse, WWI

The Cavendon Luck by Barbara Taylor Bradford
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: June 7th, 2016
Format: Hardcover, 512 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

The Cavendons and the Swanns have weathered tragedy and loss but have always had luck and the wherewithal to marshal their resources and come out on top. They will need that luck more than ever as the clouds of war start to mass over Europe. They see hard times coming and retrenchment will happen, but as long as they can stand as a united front they are undefeatable. The eldest "D" Dierdre is more aware of the dire situation they all face than the rest of the family. After the sudden death of her husband she returned to her covert work with the government. Burying her sorrows in work with a purpose. Now her work has a purpose much closer to home. Her sister-in-law Cecily has a devoted employee whose family is still in Berlin. To make matters worse they are Jewish intellectuals. Dierdre will use her connection at the war off as well as an old friend to attempt to save one family of the millions that will die. But this is just one part of the larger war machine that is starting up. On the homefront there is preparations to be made, jams to be canned, inappropriate alliances to be quashed. While once war breaks out there are children fighting in the fields to worry about, danger from the skies, and worry every single day. Not all the Cavendons will live to see the end of the war. But life during wartime the cruelest of sacrifices are to be dreaded, though sadly expected.

For some reason I feel duty bound to have liked this book or to find something positive to say about it but the only thing I can think of to say is that it was insipid. And that's being kind. Each volume in this trilogy, please say it's only a trilogy, has been declining in quality and the rapid descent from The Cavendon Women to The Cavendon Luck has made me question the need to keep the first two volumes on my bookshelves. Each book has had less and less to make it work to the point where I was severely struggling to even finish The Cavendon Luck. It is not a joke to say that when I hit the half-way point in this book I had to put it down for almost a month to steel myself to push on through to the end. Now I'm not saying this was as heroic as those brave fishermen Bradford incongruously writes about evacuating troops from the shores of Normandy... but I did feel like I was at war with this book just to get through the next page let alone the next chapter with waves of repetitive and self-congratulatory writing buffeting me about. The entire book was a stagnate quagmire with no forward momentum. There's no desire to read on to see the characters develop and grow, which they of course don't. In fact Bradford is continually stating the characters ages in an apparent need to remind us that time is indeed moving, because the sad fact is, Cecily at fifty-something is the exact same as she was as a teenager. And Taylor reminding us? Well, that just shows she knew the flaws existed and didn't bother to fix them.

But what is remarkable about The Cavendon Luck is that this must be the most asinine handling of WWII I have ever read. This can be broken down into the covert antics pre-war and the stock vignettes during the war. And seriously, I'm not sure which is worse, you'll have to decide. And yes, you can make your decision from my review, I'd never force anyone to read this book. As it was stated earlier, the oldest "D" aka Dierdre, is in "intelligence." A well-known secret in the family that NO ONE talks about or has actually bothered substantiating with Dierdre. So Dierdre takes up much of the narrative with attempting to get the family of Cecily's worker out of Germany. My problem with this is that firstly, Cecily's assistant is a new character, so why should we care about the plight of people who we aren't emotionally invested in? Yes, this might sound callous because all human life is important, but narratively speaking it was Bradford's job to make us care. And she doesn't! But most importantly it's the ludicrous codes and pet names that Dierdre uses in her daily work calling her contacts that makes this plot line unbearable. If this had been done tongue-in-cheek, like say The Avengers, it could have worked. But every time Dierdre was referred to as Daffy Dilly or the weather was mentioned as to gauge how things were in Germany, gag me now. Please. It took something that should be fascinating and made it cartoonish. Just no. And as for that family needing evacuation? Oh, they'll be evacuated and then their plot line will be left dangling with a quick sentence later on thrown to us as a bone.

Yet little did I know that "Daffy Dilly" would be sophisticated to what came later. I groan just even remembering it. For some reason Bradford decided to handle the war itself in the swiftest and most oblique way possible. Little vignettes with people we may or may not know in different defining moments of the war, from the London Blitz to Dunkirk, all book-ended by long quotes from Churchill. And oh gee, wasn't Churchill just the best! It just seems such a weird way to handle the war. A book that's been all about the personal connection to these two entwined families becomes something akin to a WWII special shown for Veterans Day on PBS. A highlights reel of what the brave British endured. But of course we can't have the war overshadow our story, it's only about a fifth of the book. So why even have the war in the book then? I just don't get the handling of time in this series. To luxuriate and draw out say a three week period where the family goes to Europe and have the same page count for the entirety of the war makes no sense. Time stops and starts, juddering about, stagnating and then whooshing by at the speed of light taking many family members in it's wake. But this writing style has been problematic from the beginning it's just in the final volume that I have to say enough is enough. No more of this doggerel.

Sticking with the war, I really want to know how the Cavendons and the Swanns were so omniscient. The ENTIRE book leading up to the war was them discussing the fact war was coming. Yes, war was looming ever since the strictures forced on Germany at the end of WWI, but to have everyone talk about it so blithely and confidentially seemed wrong. There's preparedness and then there's omniscience that comes from a modern writer wanting to make her characters seem smarter and more prescient. Yes, it's great that the WI played such a key roll and actually their jam making and preserves might be one of the only interesting parts of this book, and makes me want to learn more about that, but then there's the flip side. I'm not talking about the whole Churchill is the future and will save us, which is a whole other kettle of fish, I'm talking about Cecily, in particular, being confident in the coming war and not just being a savvy business woman with scaling back her fashion empire, but strategically buying warehouses that the army would need which she would then lease to them. There's a word for that. War profiteering. So not only did I become sick of the love-in between the Cavendons and the Swanns, but I grew to despise them because they come above all else and they will stoop to anything when it comes to preserving the family home. Even profiting from death!

Going beyond the war, looming or otherwise, the basic framework of the D's has always been very much influenced by the Mitford sisters. In this installment it got absurdly so. In fact so much of the D's and in particular their trip to Germany was ripped right from the life of the Mitfords that I felt it was veering on plagiarism. Bradford even compounded this problem by mentioning the Mitfords at one point. If you've read any of the biographies written on or by the Mitfords the whole feel of Berlin was lifted almost verbatim from their pages. Yes, this series originally intrigued me because it was like a mirrored Mitford life, but once it left homage and veered into stealing outright, this has become the darkest timeline. Just don't read this series anymore. From the beginning of the book I was thinking that this series would continue on because poor DeLacey has never been showcased. Turns out DeLacey is the Pamela or Unity Mitford of our tale, first relegated to the sidelines and them unceremoniously killed in an air raid. And, as someone who felt sorry for her, I came to the conclusion that her death was the best for all of us. Hopefully it means no more books about the Cavendons. Seriously. This is my biggest wish for the future.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Backlog Bonanza, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Berlin, British, Germany, Mitfords, Pamela Mitford, PBS, Swanns, The Avengers, The Cavendon Luck, The Cavendon Women, Unity Mitford, Veterans Day, Winston Churchill, WWII

Myself When Young by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: Virago Press
Publication Date: 1977
Format: Paperback, 176 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Daphne Du Maurier had a somewhat typical childhood with a-typical interludes. She was taught at home with her two sisters, was finished in Paris, and spent her spare time outdoors with her dogs or indoors reading. A-typically she was the daughter of a famous actor and was surrounded by playwrights and authors and other actors growing up. Therefore a flair for the dramatic was in her blood, and while she made up stories and kept a journal, it wasn't until she was a little older that she contemplated being a writer. She wanted a way to make a living that WAS NOT acting. Retiring and loving solitude over parties, when she finally started to venture to Cornwall her path in life was clear. Her path was to live in Cornwall and write... she just had to make that happen.

I don't want to make a sweeping generalization here, but it seems to me that all female British authors of a certain generation have 97% the same stories of their upbringing in print. This past year I read a lot about the Mitfords and their upbringing. A LOT. Daphne Du Maurier's upbringing could slot right in there easy as can be. I've never really thought overly much on the class system of England, but it can not be denied that people went in sets and you'd see the same group over and over again at parties and shoots. This leads to a sameness of experience in those certain classes. A certain Britishness that carries on as they finish their children in Paris, take jaunts for health treatments, Switzerland or Italy, visit Germany and hopefully not befriend too many people who will become or are Nazis, and then a nice family vacation spot to get away from it all and live the outdoor life.

The more you read these biographies, the more you gloss over. Ah yes, they are now in Paris and sneaking out, the right of passage of  British schoolgirls abroad, which movie will they see? Who will they kiss? Oh naughty they kissed a relative in secret. Now they are outdoorsy, to the hunt! I'm of two minds here. I find it reassuring that there was such a set way of life. So if I was dropped in a time machine during this epoch I'd be all set. At the same time how boring would life be? I mean reading Myself When Young felt like I was reading something I'd already read a long time ago and couldn't quite remember all the details because I'd heard it too many times and had started to consciously block it. What would you talk about with people who all had the exact same life experiences as you? The things that make life interesting are our differences not our similarities. Yes, our similarities might be what bring us together, but they aren't what keep us together. And they aren't what kept me reading this book.

Where Du Maurier differs from her peers is totally in creep value. While she doesn't mention her father much in this book, most likely because she exhausted the topic in his biography she wrote of him, little hints give you the willies. He's overprotective, overemotional, and why is she comparing how he kisses to another kiss she gets? You can see why the incest rumors started. Yet her father is nowhere near as creepy as her cousin Geoffrey. Geoffrey is responsible for her "sexual awakening" at fourteen, when he was in his thirties! Nothing "happens" till they are both older, but eww. Gag me with a spoon. You shouldn't be getting up to hanky panky with people related to you by blood. Especially people who are basically pedophiles, look to her cousins and J.M. Barrie for more proof! Though all this just seems to be water off a ducks back to Daphne as she says her family has a Borgia vibe. Ok, why not just start killing each other then. Please, it would be a relief to what you are getting up to.

But maybe all this human interaction didn't matter to Daphne and that's why it is water off her back. She never got on very well with others and is more at home in nature and with animals, so people can just bog off. Or the cynic could say her experiences with her family drove her from seeking solace with humans and she found comfort in nature. Either way you look at it it's her connection to nature, and to Cornwall in particular, that makes her work resonate. She understood the world around her and this translated into her writing. When you read her work, you are walking towards Menabilly, down that long and twisty three mile drive. You hear the crash of the surf and the cry of the gulls and the screams of the men as the ship goes down. The world around you is so present in her writing that you can't help but feel like you are there with her by your side.

And it's her writing that is when her life really begins. For pages and pages it's the same old story, but once she writes, and I mean really writes, sequestering herself away that, well, in one regard the book fails and in another the book succeeds. It fails because it's a headlong rush to the end and her marriage and the end of this book, but in another regard it's success because everything else falls away and it's just her words on the page that matter now. The stories bursting to come out that have become classics that I, among many other, have adored throughout the years. Who cares if this book is cut short, it was so that the other books could come into the word. She really had a calling to write, but until she found that connection to nature she was bottled up. She was more concerned with curfews and jaunts to Paris then finally setting about making a career for herself. Yet she did make it a career. She stopped faffing about and an author was there all along.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: British, Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier, Du Maurier December, France, Gerald Du Maurier, Germany, Incest, J.M. Barrie, Menabilly, Mitfords, Myself When Young, Nazis, Paris, The Borgias

A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography by Diana Mitford
Published by: Gibson Square Books
Publication Date: 1977
Format: Paperback, 281 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Diana Mitford felt stifled in her life with her family. When she went to Paris she got a sense of the enormity of the world and how she was admired for her beauty and wit. As soon as she could she made a prosperous marriage to the heir of the Guinness fortune and started her life surrounded by artists and poets and writers to fill the void she felt in her life. Yet this wasn't her true calling. Her true calling was to Oswald Mosley, the dynamic and married politician who founded the British Union of Fascists. She left her husband for him and spent her life dedicated to his causes and his happiness. They did eventually marry in Germany with Hitler as one of the only guests at the ceremony, which was one of the reasons they spent much of the war in prison. In A Life of Contrasts, Diana finally tells us her side of the story that captured headlines and made her one of the most memorable to those very notable Mitford sisters.  

Frank Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford, had said of Diana in a review of her memoirs that she "lacked a dimension." I can think of no more perfect an insult than this for a woman who in her own writing comes across as a shallow, unfocused, self-centered, self-impressed, socialite. She is one dimensional, never bothering with anything below the surface. In fact, if you were to scratch her, I bet there would be more surface below the surface. Apparently being "the most glamorous Mitford Sister" means being the most superficial. Before reading about her life in her own words I wasn't predisposed to like her based on what I knew, but after reading Mary S. Lovell's book The Sisters, I was willing to give Diana the benefit of doubt. I was fully willing to let Diana surprise me with insights and details to the events of her life. To hear more about her feelings and thoughts on her marriages. But none of this presented itself. She had no depth coupled with a scattered writing style wherein she would change the subject every paragraph and sometimes every sentence. She never picked a thought and stuck with it unless it was to parrot Walter Mosley's ideologies to such an extent that I was made sick to my stomach and she literally disgusted me as a human being. I was left with the distinct feeling that the world would have been a better place without her in it, because really, what good did she ever contribute to society? Being pretty doesn't count, just FYI.

Diana's shallowness is evident in every line she writes in this book. Like minor celebrities she name drops like no tomorrow assuming that we will know who everyone is and be impressed with how much they love and adore her. Guess what Diana? Your day has come and gone and so have all your comrades in arms. Name drop all you want, all it shows is your own flaws in being needed to be validated by those around you because you had no inner life to sustain yourself. To need constant validation with artists demanding to paint her or draw her just made me want to smack her. The fact that Evelyn Waugh (one of the few celebrities I actually knew) was in love with Diana makes me not think more of Diana, but makes me think less of Evelyn.

Diana is also infuriatingly self-impressed, by all means Diana, don't translate all the French, Italian, and German for those who don't speak or read it to show us how worldly you are, I'm not going to bother to look it up on the assumption that it's just more of the same shit that came before. Also, with the book, she was given the chance to tell her side of the story, a story that has had many commentators and writers over the years, and she failed miserably. Her wedding to Bryan Guinness was glossed over in two seconds, as was her second marriage to Mosley. The fact that her sisters have written in more depth on her life shows that Diana has absolutely nothing to offer us.

Yet, it was this shallowness counterbalanced with bizarre political tracks that made me furious with her. You could feel at those times that it wasn't her voice by that of her master's, Walter Mosley. She was too shallow to have any true beliefs of her own so when she latched onto her idol Mosley, well, she took him all, even his opinions. Now that I've reached the "political tirade" section of my review, I firstly want to address the Hitler question. Diana has taken a lot of flack over the years for being unwilling to change her view of Hitler after the outbreak of war and his true desires and ambitions were revealed. Personally, I don't think that this in particular is what she should be criticized for. Hitler had to have been a charismatic and personable man in order to amass such a following and accomplish all that he did. I'm sure in a one on one setting he could be delightful. Therefore I don't blame Diana for being unwilling to take something back when her own experiences where different to public opinion. It was her opinion, one she is perfectly willing to stick to.

What I do think Diana should be criticized for is her parroting of horrid antisemitism. Yes, she is entitled to this view, but that doesn't mean it makes me like her, accept her, or even settle my nauseous stomach at some of the things she said. I came to not only really dislike her on a human level, but I revolt against all her ideologies. She actually states that what happened in the Holocaust could have been prevented if the Jews had just left Germany. Apparently they had plenty of warning, so they should have just moved on. Forget that these people have homes and lives and families, if they had just got up and gone history could have been different. In fact, in her opinion, if everyone would just go back where they came from, everything would be better for her. She didn't even want immigrants in England! While she never really outright states that she hates those who are Jewish or Black, the fact that she wants everyone to go back to where they came from shows a severe xenophobia that appears to be the sole aspect of her personality that isn't about her appearance. Also, extra ironic seeing as she lived in France and was therefore an immigrant herself. So by all means, if you want to read about a narcissist who will occasionally expound vitriolically on Jewry, well, Diana Mitford Mosley is the Mitford for you. She definitely isn't the Mitford for me.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Life of Contrasts, Antisemitism, Autobiography, Diana Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Facist, Germany, Hitler, Mitford March Mach Deux, Oswald Mosley, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, WWII

Unity and Pamela are possibly the most diametrically opposed of the Mitford sisters, with Unity being the most notorious for her relationship with Hitler, and Pamela being the most unobtrusive, settling for a life out of the limelight with her horses. The warrior and the woman.

Unity Valkyrie Mitford was ironically conceived in Swastika, Ontario, where her parents would occasionally work a gold mine they owned. Later when she became involved with the Third Reich she would take this as a sign that she was destined to be with Hitler. By the time Unity was debuting in society her family had already made quite a ruckus, with her sister Diana leaving her husband, the heir of the Guinness fortune, for Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists. Unity was never the wit or the beauty of the family and seemed to set herself apart through her shock value. She notoriously would bring her pets to balls and when things got a little boring she would spice them up by saying her rat or snake was on the loose. She longed to find the perfect tease and initially she thought she had found it by joining the BUF and setting up against her younger sister Jessica and her fervent communist beliefs. But Unity's tease seems to have become real devotion, if a bit fanatical, to fascism. 

Unlike her sisters she didn't want to be "finished" in France and begged to go to Germany. Her parents relented and soon Unity found her place in the world and in history, dubious though it may be. She became obsessed with the Nazis and worshipped Hitler, spending months and months figuring out his routine and how she could cross paths with him. Her months of stalking paid off and she soon became a confidant of Hitler's, one of his inner circle. No one knows the extent of their relationship, but they were frequently in each others company. There is every chance that it was just true friendship and not salacious at all, but their closeness as war loomed on the horizon made Unity one of the most reviled women in England, along with her sister Diana. As war seemed more and more inevitable those close to Unity worried about her because she began to make cryptic messages about not being around if there was war because she couldn't face the two countries she loved fighting. On the day war was declared between England and Germany Unity shot herself in the head, but survived. She would live to see the end of the war in a bizarre infantile state brought on by the brain damage the bullet wrought. She would never make a full recovery and contacted meningitis and died before she was even 34 years old.

Unlike Unity, Pamela was quiet and retiring, the rural Mitford. She was called "Woman" by all her family members for her domestic aptitude and her love of home and hearth, becoming "Tante Femme" to her various nieces and nephews whom she adored. Pam also loved the horse and hounds life even though she had problems with one of her legs due to a case of polio as a child, which would trouble her more and more as she aged. She married and divorced without making waves and spent several of the war years caring for her sister Diana's children while Diana was in prison, but was sadly not blessed with her own children, suffering several miscarriages. Living for years on the Cavendish estate in Ireland, she eventually settled down in Zurich where she lived with an Italian horsewoman, Giuditta Tommasi. Much like Unity and Hitler, there was much speculation even among the other siblings about the relationship between Pam and Giuditta. Pam was still living an active life till the end, not letting age (and considerable age at 86) slow her down. On her deathbed her main concern was "Who won the Grand National."

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: BUF, Diana Mitford, Fascists, Germany, Hitler, Jessica Mitford, Mitford March Mach Deux, Oswald Mosley, Pamela Mitford, Suicide, Tante Femme, Unity Mitford, Woman, WWII