Debo Mitford on her childhood at Asthall Manor, from Nancy's 'coming out' dance to Unity's peach-pinching ways

The late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire originally penned this piece for a 2009 issue of Country Life — and her words were recently rediscovered. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

After my father sold Batsford Park, Moreton-in-Marsh, and its surrounding estate in 1919, he looked for a more modest house near the land at Swinbrook that he still owned.

Asthall Manor was on the market and was the ideal solution. It is the archetypal ancient Cotswold manor house, hard by the church, a garden descending to the River Windrush with the prettiest village imaginable and farms to match.

The house needed much restoration, and, with great foresight or perhaps just by luck, my father converted the barn a few yards away into one big ground-floor reception room with four bedrooms above. He also built a covered way to link the two buildings, which we called ‘The Cloisters’.

My parents settled happily there. My mother’s talent for homemaking and her flair for interior decoration, helped by the best of the Batsford pictures and furniture, made Asthall Manor as good as it could be.

There were six children, soon to be to seven when I arrived in 1920. Nancy was 16, followed by Pam, Tom, Diana, Unity and Jessica. The teenage members of the brood had their own domain in the barn, completely separate from the grown-ups and the younger children, who were still very much in the nursery. It was an ideal arrangement. Tom had his piano there. Nancy and Diana always said that what education they had came from their own choices of reading picked from books from Grandfather Redesdale’s Batsford library that lined the downstairs room. Politics had not arrived on the scene to make the family divisions that were so well documented later on.

When Nancy was 18, her ‘coming-out’ dance was given at Asthall. My parents were not at all social and only saw the aunts, uncles and cousins who lived round about. Gathering enough young men for this event was beyond my mother. She collected a few undergraduates from Oxford, but, according to Nancy, my father went to the House of Lords and roped in some middle-aged fellows, who must have been surprised to be invited to a debutante ball.

It was a glorious place for all of us to grow up. There was a pool in the river where we flopped about in hot weather, wearing the bathing dresses of the 1920s, which seem so comical now.

In John D. Wood’s prospectus for the sale of the house in 1925, they make special mention of my father’s installation of electricity — ‘ELECTRIC LIGHT is generated by water power. The dynamo, with 55 cells, is more than sufficient to light the whole house and buildings’. A quotation from the prospectus describing the fishing is positively poetic: ‘THE FIRST-RATE FISHERY comprises a lovely reach in the River Windrush and affords exclusive rights on both banks. The water is of the most attractive character to a fisherman, including rapids, gentle swims and pools, whilst its very tortuous course affords more than an average number of deep pools and corners which harbour trout of great size.’

The churchyard was almost part of the garden and the monuments to the wool merchants topped by stone ‘fleeces’ still stand in their great beauty after many centuries.

Diana played the organ and had a theory that if the voluntary was played slowly enough it did not matter what tune it was. Tea for Two was her favourite.

The kitchen garden was across the road and the glasshouses were banned to us children; glorious white peaches being reserved strictly for the grown-ups. My sister Unity and a cousin got into real trouble for sneaking in and helping themselves. It seems that children come first now and no one would think anything of their crime.

My mother’s herd of Guernsey cows produced the milk for the house as well as endless butter and cream, which rose in shallow pans in the dairy — a little building (still there) under vast elms that disappeared with the rest of their clan in the 1960s. Putting your finger in to taste the cream was a treat; so thick and yellow and untreated by heat or anything else.

My mother started the Asthall & Swinbrook WI, which became an important part of village life. She gave a Christmas party for the village schoolchildren, still remembered by some of the ancients.

For family entertainment, we wore fancy dress on Christmas Night; nothing grand, we just picked up what was to hand. My father’s only concession was to wear a red wig and he never appeared in the photographs as he was behind the camera.

So passed seven years, and then my father was bitten by the building bug. He enlarged an old farmhouse at South Lawn, 1 1⁄2 miles from Swinbrook village. Asthall Manor was sold in 1926, and we left for Swinbrook House. I was only six, but these early memories are indelible. I did not see the inside of Asthall Manor for decades, but when it was for sale after the death of Tony Hardcastle [in 1997], I had a look round and, to my delight, found the lino we had known in the nursery was still there.

It was an idyllic time so very long ago.