Irrepressible

by Leslie Brody

  By the mid-1930s, radical politics was everywhere in the atmosphere. London was plastered with posters announcing protests and demonstrations for or against Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. There were debating societies, student leagues, and action and discussion groups across the political spectrum. Despite the efforts of headmasters and teachers to protect and isolate their ivory towers, boys and girls inside schools, as in the greater world, were choosing sides. Esmond’s growing opposition to the way the OTC boys paraded and drilled excessively had fueled an early interest in pacifism. On Armistice Day, he tucked pacifist leaflets into the chapel prayer books. He requested and was granted an excuse from participation in OTC activities and, until he ran away, was Wellington’s most visible and indefatigable dissenter. Esmond read the Left journals, held a subscription to the Daily Worker, and kept a bust of Lenin in his room. Given any subject and opportunity, he’d argue the left-wing position. He had much to say in favor of progressive education and against sexual repression. More often than not, his arguments attacked Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. And though not himself a party member, Esmond liked to try to convert his classmates to Communism.

  He was two years younger than Giles, but tended to lead his more scholarly, less impulsive older brother into their “joint rebellion.” Esmond was stronger, more assertive, and never at a loss. Giles, with finer features and a more slender build, was perhaps more conventionally handsome. He ran around with a crowd of other handsome comrades. Esmond was beautifully poised when debating politics, but otherwise a sloppy, callow youth for whom the word frivolous was an all-purpose put-down, useful in dismissing anything he didn’t care to do or didn’t know much about. The brothers bickered, though it was clear they adored each other.

  Esmond was fifteen when he made his middle-of-the-night escape from Wellington. (“Mr. Churchill’s Nephew Vanishes.”) He found refuge in a room in Bloomsbury above a radical bookshop, which also functioned as a clubhouse for intellectuals of various Left schools of thought. There he met the fabulous denizens of grown-up bohemia, some revolutionary veterans of assorted international conflicts, and various writers, artists, and dilettantes. At first, being one among these disreputables must have seemed like a fantasy fulfilled. Everyone congratulated him, encouraged his audacity, applauded his courage. He was like a mascot (a characterization that would have driven him into a frenzy, had he believed it). They gave him Craven A cigarettes, tea, chocolates, books, and a camp bed to sleep on and claimed to take him seriously. He met poets and philosophers, and once, even W. H. Auden asked to see the poetry Esmond had himself begun to compose in that milieu. One night, when they were alone together, Auden made a pass at the exciting young pet. Esmond apparently went blind with fury and threw the poet’s clothes out the window. As the story made its way around the demimonde, instead of gaining the sympathy he expected, Esmond found he’d lost both standing and glamour. He was considered even more uncouth, a young “barbarian, possibly prejudiced against homosexuals.” Decca, who found the story funny, later wrote: “Of course the real reason for E’s fury was hurt pride: he thought he’d been asked up because of his intellect, discovered to his chagrin it was for other motives. How many girls have gone through the same?”

  Still, he was very young, and after he repeatedly refused to return to school or to their family home, his parents had him arrested. “We have done all we could. He quite refuses to submit to any control,” his mother, Nellie, told the judge, who sentenced sixteen-year-old Esmond to six weeks in a remand house for delinquent boys. In 1935, out on his own and scrambling again, Esmond teamed up with his brother to write Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles and Esmond Romilly.

  IN JULY 1936, several right-wing Spanish army generals staged a coup to overthrow Spain’s democratically elected government, plunging the nation into a brutal civil war. Like Giles and others, Esmond viewed the battlefield of Spain as the last line of defense for liberalism, modernity, and democracy. At eighteen years old, he had enlisted in the International Brigades. Back in England, as one of only two survivors of his battalion, Esmond began to write Boadilla, a memoir about his experiences in battle.

  When they met for that first time at their relative’s home for dinner, Decca found Esmond thin and surprisingly short, with “amazingly long eyelashes.” He hadn’t been back from Spain long. Decca thought herself plump, but photographs reveal a lovely young woman with high cheekbones and a wonderful grin. Esmond’s closest friend, Philip Toynbee, described her in those days as “very pretty, incautious and enthusiastic.” From their first course to the end of dinner, the couple whispered together. They were hungry but did not note the menu, our heroine and her first love. When he answered yes, he would take her with him to Spain, it was all intensely romantic. Boy with no illusions meets girl with plenty. Who would change whom? Running away was an art form, which Esmond had practiced repeatedly and Decca had dreamed about for years and years.

  Decca had fifty pounds in running-away money. She needed a visa and an outfit to fight in. Farve had a charge account at the Army Navy store, where she bought “a brown corduroy ski suit with military-looking jacket and plenty of pockets.” Esmond suggested they sew in name tags: Jessica Mitford—Inglesa. Next they concocted a story to cover their escapade. Decca’s friends, a pair of twins, would write to invite her to visit them in Dieppe, the French town on the English Channel. Do say you’ll come! the twins chanted in a phony letter written by Esmond. To keep their escape under wraps, Decca and Esmond planned to procure her visa in Paris. For days, she kept up the deception until she and Esmond could meet on the train to France.

  Muv and Farve saw their daughter off at the station. Her mother made small talk as Farve tucked a rug around his daughter’s knees, to keep her warm. He waved to his laughing child—the rebel with the wonderful smile. She made him laugh, made him furious, too, with all that sulking and insolence. It was February 8. Decca knew her accomplice was lurking somewhere on the train, and she needed all her acting skills just to sit and wait.

  They rendezvoused as planned, and on the train, the two runaways drew up a practical budget: visas, cigarettes, pens, notebooks, wine; they wouldn’t need much food (Muv had given Decca a hamper filled with delicacies, which they could stretch). Their largest expenditure would be lodging—separate hotel rooms, so they’d have to be thrifty. Soon they were in Paris.

  At the Spanish consulate, the couple met their first disappointment. The Spanish consul had been called to London. His assistant said he was sorry, but Señor Lopez was the only one who could administer a visa for Miss Mitford. They followed the consul back to London, and their savings dwindled.

  That night, Esmond came to her room and admitted, “I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love with you.” How satisfying that must have sounded, out of the mouth of he who was unafraid of everything: the people in power, tyranny, war. Afraid he was in love! In London, they heard that Señor Lopez had departed abruptly, but surely they would find him in Paris this time. Off they went, mailing cards like mad from France to Decca’s family, keeping up appearances. In subsequent hotels, they would register as married, although they were in no hurry to do the deed. Both of them were under twenty-one and would need parental permission to wed.

  Decca finally succeeded in applying for a visa, and she and Esmond awaited its arrival in Bayonne, France, on the border of Spain, where an international press corps was gathering.

  Fashioning themselves as freelance reporters in Bayonne, Esmond and Decca hunted for news and story ideas. They dogged government officials and tried to get the real scoop from refugees. Many of the reporters and photographers Decca met held passionate commitment to the antifascist cause. Objectivity, she learned, was a luxury; accuracy the truth to aim for. The press corps were young, agitated, eager to talk, and lonely. To Decca, these journalists seemed heroic. She was young and lovely, made tea, took notes, listened to their tales of the front and their stories of home. Finally, her visa arrived and the couple too
k ship for Bilbao, on the Spanish front.

  If their escapade was the embodiment of Decca’s ambitions to run away and seek freedom, she could now add a crazy, urgent love. Esmond was a sort of rainmaker, a fireplug—all sex appeal; nabbing Decca Mitford might have been the pièce de résistance of his pirate’s life. Once they were out on the road together, it took less than twenty-four hours for their romance to turn Esmond into a devoted lover. She fascinated him.

  Decca admitted that she felt “completely, deeply committed.” At first Esmond had seemed like a project to be undertaken, but soon she felt ravished. He was “like a star around which everything revolved. A wind, a star, he represented to me all that was bright, attractive and powerful.” Later she would also find him “deeply moody.”

  Because he was young and a bit aggressive, people knew he couldn’t be pushed around. But Decca wasn’t cowed. He didn’t know much about girls, living as he had among men and considering this arrangement normal. So she had something she could teach him. Meanwhile, she thought she understood that his alpha traits were the result of his life on the streets, in the juvenile reformatory, and on the front lines. She saw how he’d honed the ability to trounce his antagonists by both force and guile, and she watched as he out-consuled consuls, out-judged judges, and strategically, categorically, out-snubbed snobs.

  During their nights in Bayonne, between bottles of cheap, rough wine, Esmond recounted his war experience. How had he survived—only one of two to do so in his brigade? There was no real explanation. He wasn’t more skilled or stronger; nor was his urge to live any more powerful than that of the other young men he fought beside. He didn’t believe in destiny. No, neither did she. The bullets just missed him. He was fortunate. Was that it? So random? All those other boys.

  She learned a little more about him. He was “a committed partisan of the fight against fascism.” He was also completely incapable of making the most basic mechanical gadget work. He could barely open and close a door. “He would get into a fury of frustration with his portable typewriter, the workings of whose ribbon and the shutting of whose case were quite beyond him.” It wasn’t that he lacked consciousness of the actual lived-in world—the one beyond war and struggle, world politics and passion, love and sex. He knew the present, but the future was unimaginable. That gave him license. Drunk or sober, he could be oblivious, insensitive, irresponsible. Trying to test if a pair of scissors worked, he cut up her best suit. Theirs was a world in which nothing must be owed to the old snares of property and propriety. So much of their life was about untangling the debt they’d inherited.

  Esmond and Decca hurtled on at a high pitch. He expected her to bear up under discomfort, and she surprised herself. But before they boarded the boat to Spain, they had their first argument. Sitting in a French café, they saw a man start to beat his dog. Decca begged Esmond to intervene. Instead, he gave a lecture: “What right have you got to try to impose your beastly upper class preoccupation with animals on these people? . . . French people and Spaniards don’t give a damn about animals, and why should they? They happen to think people are more important. If you’re going to make such an unholy fuss about dogs you should have stayed in England, where they feed the dogs steak and let people in the slums die of starvation.” Decca held her ground. Kindness was kindness everywhere, and cruelty was its opposite.

  On the short trip across the Bay of Biscay to Spain, Decca became violently seasick. As Esmond nursed her, she observed the “glimmerings” of his kindness. Not an overwhelming endorsement of kindness, “glimmerings,” but their passion filled the vacuum. She was far from home on her own; life had a cruel edge, but it was sexy. Life had, she said, “far more the quality of a dream than of a dream come true.” Suddenly, they were in a psychosexual crucible, with all the vino and cheap gin they could drink. He had a bitter edge. She had a wicked mouth. Finally, they were just kids.

  In Spain in 1937, Decca and Esmond were surrounded by violence; garbage piled up in the street, and there was little food in the noisy, refugee-crowded “grim, serious town of Bilbao.” Decca described herself as “bemused, a convalescent barely out of anesthetic after a major operation which had severed at one great sweep of the knife all old ties.” She was “trying to get in focus,” to “understand the heroism.” Esmond’s salient characteristics were determination, intelligence, and courage, she said; she had these herself, but just then, she was so dazed that the world had a “sense of unreality.”

  Esmond was already starting to boil over with the responsibility of their mission, desperately trying to hold it all together and watching the finely drawn outline of himself start to melt. What could he do? He was in love. Meanwhile, Decca was no longer following docilely. They’d just been on the road a few days, and she was coming into herself.

  CHAPTER 3

  WHAT WERE THEY fighting for? Light in the darkness. They were against the cult of the leader, against conformity, against being pawns in a capitalist game. They were with Spain and against the enemies of its democratically elected government. They were against the flirtation of their own leaders with Germany. (And in Decca’s case, her own sister’s very real flirtation with Hitler.) They opposed silence in the face of aggression. Esmond wrote:I am not a pacifist, though I wish it were possible to lead one’s life without the intrusion of this ugly monster of force and killing—war—and its preparation. And it is not with the happiness of the convinced Communist but reluctantly that I realize that there will never be peace or any of the things I want, until that mixture of profit-seeking, self-interest, cheap emotion and organized brutality which is called fascism has been fought and destroyed forever.

  In Bilbao, the press corps was tougher, more impatient, filthier. There was less to eat. Decca continued her writer’s apprenticeship, observing how journalists spoke and acted, sharpening her own political acumen. She conducted interviews with refugees and bureaucrats and helped Esmond type his freelance dispatches (with titles like “One Night on the Spanish Front”).

  One day in Bilbao, about two weeks after their elopement, the Spanish proconsul found them and told them that a coded telegram had arrived, addressed to the British consul, who was out of town. Esmond and Decca deciphered it together: “Find Jessica Mitford and persuade her to return.” Using the same code, Esmond replied: “Have found Jessica Mitford—stop—impossible to persuade her to return—stop.”

  When the British consul returned, he was not sympathetic and insisted that Decca return home. Apparently, all hell had broken loose in the Mitford household. Decca’s family imagined she had gone to Russia. Then Scotland Yard, the Foreign Office, and the press all got involved. It was front-page news. The headlines blared: “Peer’s Daughter Elopes,” “Consul Chases Peer’s Daughter,” “Misfit Mitford Feared Lost.” At home, when Farve finally heard whom she had run away with, he said, “Worse than I thought.”

  The day after the telegram arrived, Decca and Esmond learned that Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, was sending a warship to collect Decca. She agreed to meet the ship, but promised nothing further. The consul gave her a lift to the harbor, where she sat in the rain while the ship docked. In time, the ship’s handsome captain invited the soaking Decca to join him in his cabin for a delicious lunch. Their menu was to be homey British food, roast chicken and bread sauce, and after weeks of chickpeas and gray bread in Bilbao, the thought of it made her mouth water. She phoned Esmond for advice, and he warned her not to get on the boat. “Have them bring it out on a tray. As a matter of fact, you might bring some of it back here for me.” The captain, suitably offended, declined to provide takeout, and Decca went home hungry. Back in Bilbao, another telegram arrived, this one declaring that Decca, still just twenty and still under the age of consent, had been made a ward of the Chancery Court. She would have to have the court’s permission before entering a legal contract. This meant they’d be breaking the law, and Esmond threatened with jail, if they wed. The couple intended to get around to marrying, but heari
ng their plans forbidden moved them at once to a public betrothal.

  Over the previous weeks, Decca had harbored a fantasy about bringing Esmond home. She relished the idea of seeing her love in debate with Unity (who would undoubtedly flounce off after a few moments), Diana (whose arguments he’d crush like so much dust), and especially Nancy (a clash of titans!). She had not reckoned on the passion with which Esmond forbade any consideration of this, but she still thought she might persuade him. In the midst of the Bilbao chaos, she daydreamed about life’s “normal progression” back in England, “breakfast, lunch, tea, the six o’clock BBC news, and bedtime.” But what was normal about Unity’s following Hitler around? Or parents who rationalized such behavior? Or Diana’s becoming the first lady of British fascism? (Just the year before, Diana had married Oswald Mosley at the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, with Unity Mitford and Adolf Hitler as witnesses.) This outrage in particular galvanized Decca. Esmond liked to recite a poem from Federico García Lorca that contained the line “No es sueño la vida. ¡Alerta! ¡Alerta! ¡Alerta!” Life is not a dream. No it wasn’t. She and Esmond declared “total war.”

  The British destroyer’s guns apparently not sufficiently persuasive, the consul pulled out his ace. The Spanish government was counting heavily on British facilities to evacuate refugees, but unless Decca left Spanish territory, Britain would refuse to do so. The couple agreed to leave, but only as far as the south of France, where Nancy and her husband, the debonair Peter Rodd, would meet them in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

  Nancy was disappointingly on the side of the grown-ups. She tried to warn Decca of the dangers and discomforts in store for anyone of their class shunned by society. She didn’t like Esmond (and later would call him loathsome). His refusal to acknowledge surfaces, to keep up deceptive courtesies (which both Esmond and Nancy knew were fraudulent), and to consider the long view seemed to Nancy almost—horrors!—American. She appreciated some socialist ideals, but his revolutionary (and importunate) nature annoyed her. Worst of all, she simply could not charm him. His castle was impenetrable, defended by secret spells—charms to ward off the charms of charm. He was an authority against authority. Nancy told Decca of the sadness and madness back home in the wake of her elopement. If was as if there had been a death at home. People came around to condole and brought flowers. Muv and Nanny wondered if Decca had enough clothes for the weather.