Characters in Search of ...

DAUGHTERS AND REBELS (284 pp.)--Jessica Mitford--Houghton, M/ffif/n ($4).

The English are said to dearly love a lord, and the second Lord Redesdale is there to prove that they dote on a dotty peer--especially if he has six daughters, mostly zany, mostly blonde. An impressive photograph of the six Honorable Misses Freeman-Mitford, in their ironclad British tweeds, appears in this autobiography by one of their number. An industrious, middle-aged newspaper reader with total recall would be able to attempt a quiz about every blessed one of them, roughly thus:

The one glowering on the left would be Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, usually described in the tabloids as Hitler's girl friend. That would explain why she is standing, as Hitler did when he was not saluting, with her hands clasped just below her midriff. Unity shot herself in 1939 under still obscure circumstances and was invalided back home to England (the author says she was despondent over the outbreak of the war, but rumors were that she had been rejected by Hitler).

Next, Deborah, scowling prettily in jodhpurs, would be the Mitford who married a duke--not just any duke, but the Duke of Devonshire who still swings a lot of weight in England.

The next one emerges from her tweeds with a less sympathetic expression. Diana married one of Britain's mighty brewers --Bryan Guinness, stout feller--but got divorced and married English Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley.

Jessica, the one with the slyboots expression, married a Red, Esmond Romilly, but then, he was a nephew of Sir Winston Churchill. In fact, that marriage is what much of this book is about.

The Mitford on the far right, Pamela, was so fond of horses she married a sometime jockey.

The one with the dog married (and divorced) Peter Murray Rennell Rodd, whose business she described as "sailing small boats"; today she is the most famous member of the family. Nancy writes novels and biographies, and invented the U-game, by which it can be determined who is out of, and who is not out of, the top drawer.

The dim male figure smiling uneasily in the midst of these splendid figures is a male Mitford of whom nobody has ever heard. He is Tom, a barrister who was killed in Burma in 1945.

Life with Farve. Having passed or flunked a Mitford quiz along these lines, the reader may find any residual curiosity about the family amply answered in Daughters and Rebels, Jessica's sprightly chronicle. Some things should be settled first. What was Hitler's reaction to Jessica's elopement with Romilly when Unity told the Fuhrer, "My sister Decca has run away to Spain with the Reds"? Hitler sank his head in his hands. "Armes Kind!"1 (poor child), he sighed. What did Mr. Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, do? He dispatched a destroyer to try to break up the match.

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.

Fringe Existence. Symbol and hero of all the infantile leftism of that class and generation was Esmond Romilly, who ran away from school (Wellington) to publish Out of Bounds, an anti-prefect, pro-Communist magazine which reached a circulation of 3,000. largely in Britain's most exclusive schools. After he had fought in Spain, Decca just had to have him. Have him she did, for a fringe existence in proletarian Rotherhithe (a tough Thameside district of London), sharing twilight jobs, semi-spivery and endless left-wing talk at bottle parties.

Jessica's autobiography is really a more touching story than its surface goofiness would suggest. Soon after the Romillys' baby died in 1938, they moved to the U.S., where the same pattern continued--they were guests of the "liberal'' rich, pets of the left-wing intelligentsia. Esmond wound up a bartender in Miami. The war ended his story. After a worried interval while he decided whether the imperialists would really fight against Fascism, he volunteered in Canada and was killed in action in 1941 at the age of 23.

His widow leaves the story at that point, but there are a couple of footnotes. Lord Redesdale died in 1958, and Jessica won another headline: Farve had cut her from his $361,000 will. It seems that Jessica, married to Hungarian-born Lawyer Robert Treuhaft of Oakland. Calif., had called their son Tito, but renamed him for Lenin after Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform. The Halloween party was over; the witches were real after all. It all seems a little sad now, perhaps to be paraphrased thus:

Look, look, what wonderful larks: Christopher Robin is reading Karl Marx.

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