Life at Swinbrook, Decca wrote, was akin to living inside a “fortress or citadel of medieval times.” Lord Redesdale was an avowed xenophobe who was wary of strangers, and his wife was happy to follow his lead. The Mitford girls were prohibited from attending school—they were meant to be sparkling society wives, and so were given lessons at home, supervised by a collection of insufferable governesses. Locked away in a dull, remote part of the country, the sisters were forced to entertain themselves. They invented nonsense languages and private jokes—their taunting banter came to be known as the “Mitford tease”—and became one another’s most passionate obsessions. “We were as though caught in a timeproofed corner of the world, foster children, if not exactly of silence, at least of slow time,” Decca wrote. “The very landscape, cluttered up with history, was disconcertingly filled with evidence of the changelessness of things.”