![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceDebo is dead*, and I am finding it hard to articulate how I feel. Sad, lady? I could be sad. She was the Woman of Perpetual Privilege - born to it, married it, clung to it expediently while lesser aristos lost wealth and power and influence all about her - and she died at 94, and there is nothing in that superficial bio to be particularly sad about, and yet.
Boil it down like soup: if my idea, my experience, my model of England is an onion, then the more you peel away the less there is. You can't exactly stratify by decade, any more than you can by class, but crude tools are tools none the less and tell us something. We're losing touch with a definition of something that was nebulous to begin with, that between-the-wars generation that pretty much built the England I was born into. Time is of course an ongoing process, and younger people have other fatter onions of England and far less skin in this game; but when I was born all the Mitford girls bar Unity were still alive and active, and now the last of them is gone and I do feel that as a loss, a diminishing.
Besides, Debo is the only duchess I ever bowled over with a newborn baby, so.
And besides again, my mother is an exact contemporary of Debo's, and she's been outrageously slowed down this year by a minor stroke, so I may be unreasonably sensitive to 94-year-olds.
And besides one more time, I have the inevitable question in my head: if Mars were a province of the British Empire, which Mitford(s) would have gone there, when, and why?
*EtA: I am a little shocked at the silliness of the BBC, labelling her as "the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire" in a photo from 1938, before she even married the Duke, let alone survived him...
Boil it down like soup: if my idea, my experience, my model of England is an onion, then the more you peel away the less there is. You can't exactly stratify by decade, any more than you can by class, but crude tools are tools none the less and tell us something. We're losing touch with a definition of something that was nebulous to begin with, that between-the-wars generation that pretty much built the England I was born into. Time is of course an ongoing process, and younger people have other fatter onions of England and far less skin in this game; but when I was born all the Mitford girls bar Unity were still alive and active, and now the last of them is gone and I do feel that as a loss, a diminishing.
Besides, Debo is the only duchess I ever bowled over with a newborn baby, so.
And besides again, my mother is an exact contemporary of Debo's, and she's been outrageously slowed down this year by a minor stroke, so I may be unreasonably sensitive to 94-year-olds.
And besides one more time, I have the inevitable question in my head: if Mars were a province of the British Empire, which Mitford(s) would have gone there, when, and why?
*EtA: I am a little shocked at the silliness of the BBC, labelling her as "the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire" in a photo from 1938, before she even married the Duke, let alone survived him...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-24 08:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-24 10:02 pm (UTC)However, Diana and Oswald might have gone, too, right? For political reasons? No question that they end up on the opposite side of any question or movement from Decca. Or are they exiled there?
Or---since we're counterfactual here---send Tom.