by Leslie Brody
Esmond and Decca still liked to have a lot of friends around, but what was once a gambling palace now smelled of diapers. Guests to their transformed casino brought bottles of beer, wine, and liquor; food hampers; and fish and chips wrapped in newspapers. Decca and Esmond shared with their guests and with almost everyone they knew—everyone awake, at any rate—a sense of always needing to be on the alert. Around the Romilly household, there was an enduring brightness, a nimbus of power and energy symbolized by their fabulous electricity bill. Neither Decca nor Esmond understood the social contract in capitalist societies regarding public utilities (like where, when, or how to pay), so they ran up their bill without worry. Other generations of Romillys and Mitfords wasted their fortunes on horses and cards. This all-night parsing of the issues, betting on the future surrounded by light, was another kind of gamble.
In March 1938, while General Franco’s armies were crushing the Republican forces in Spain, Hitler annexed Austria and initiated the threats that would soon lead to German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Despite the wretched news from Europe, Decca and her friends were eager to take on what would come. Esmond had anticipated the loss of Spain. He grieved, but like the practical, perpetual motion machine that he was, he forged ahead. They had new plans, hopes, and dreams. If not Mexico, perhaps they could move to Paris, where Julia would grow up “a little gamine trudging to a lycée with books in a satchel.” In any case, their daughter would be “born to freedom and May Day parades.”
To Decca, those early May Day parades seemed the apotheosis of socialist delight. By the time the May Day march of 1938 came around, there was a feeling in Decca’s circle that the fight against fascism would be long and vicious, but that they and their comrades had the courage, the strength, and the determination to beat back any threat. Starting with its throngs in the street, she painted the day of the march—“the entire community turned out”—full of passion and confidence in their solidarity. With people’s collective power and dedication, they felt that they could stop any juggernaut. Decca carried Julia, with Esmond and their friend Philip Toynbee arm in arm. The trio sang “The Red Flag,” then teased their soberer comrades with altered lyrics—instead of “The people’s flag is deepest red,” they sang, “The people’s flag is palest pink. It’s not as red as you may think.”
Decca and her friends marched with the Bermondsey Labour Party contingent. It seemed that every antifascist organization and person in London had turned out, thousands upon thousands, and thousands more joined at every intersection—the co-ops, the Communist Party, the Independent Labour Party, all with their flags. The unofficial theme of the day was repeated on banners snaking through the parade: “United Front Against Fascism.” The march was good-natured at the start. There were children and baby buggies and flirtations of every variety. It was a long walk to Hyde Park. Along the way, a marcher might rest with a bottle of beer or take off her shoes to cool her feet and wonder at the holes in her stockings. Whole extended families might stop to take tea along the route, amusingly furnished with proper cups and saucers. But the marchers would be wary, too, that Mosley’s British Union of Fascists troopers would line the parade route and at some point attack as those antagonists had been attacking each other in a miniature world war for years.
Decca was ready for the Blackshirts to disrupt the May Day parade, and they showed up on schedule, jeering and harassing. There were fistfights on side streets as groups peeled off and then rejoined the march scratched, bruised, and bloody. At some point, Decca saw her sisters Diana and Unity, both statuesque like twin nautical figureheads, up on some prow pedestal or perhaps just standing on cars and above the crowd as they liked to be, waving their swastika flags and giving the Nazi salute. Decca shook her fist back, though they were too far away to see her. She later said she would have gone for them, too, anything to shake their smug confidence, but Esmond and Philip held her back and then threw themselves into the fray. Decca saw a fascist gang armed with rubber truncheons and knuckledusters beaten back by the Bermondsey faction. Later, Esmond and Philip would wear their bloody cuts and black eyes as badges of honor.
DECCA’S MOTHER AND sisters Debo and Unity continued to visit when Esmond was at work. They brought gifts and fluttered around Julia, whom Muv thought “too thin.” Every week, Decca would bring her baby to one of the Labour Party’s free health clinics to be weighed and for a dose of free cod liver oil. Toynbee admired Decca’s resourcefulness, her “light-hearted maternal competence.” Then Julia caught the measles.
As soon as she had heard of the latest measles epidemic raging through London that May, Decca had visited her clinic to ask about the danger to Julia. The overworked, inundated nurse explained about the contagion of childhood diseases and the immunity conferred by a breast-feeding mother. But a mother could only confer immunity if she had had the disease herself, and Decca hadn’t. There was no inoculation. A few days later, both Decca and her daughter contracted the disease. Decca suffered with a high fever for two days. Esmond did his best, with nurses to help, but little Julia caught pneumonia and died on May 28, 1938.
Did Decca blame Muv, who believed in the good body’s ability to heal itself? Or Esmond, who had stubbornly refused Nanny Blor? Or herself, for acquiescing? Nanny Blor might have known what to do. Decca couldn’t listen to anyone’s sympathy. Philip hadn’t wanted to, but one drunken night, Decca and Esmond forced him to tell them what people were saying at their dinner parties: It was because they’d exposed their child to the vapors and stink of the East End. Esmond had been roundly excoriated, while she was supposedly some kind of pitiable, mesmerized zombie. Their marriage, strangers and friends alike supposed, would never survive this.
Decca and Esmond left London the day after their baby’s funeral. They wanted to escape and to grieve without the added burden of family solicitude. Esmond had made it his business to put a lot of distance between the Mitfords and them. He knew they would have to run for it before the women in their black clothes led them back consolingly to the bosom of the clan. Esmond and Decca agreed they could best console each other if they got as far away as fast as they could. They made for Corsica, though not before Decca wrote a polite thank you letter to Debo. “Dearest Hen, Thank you so much for writing. We are going tomorrow morning, so I do hope you will write to yr. hen. Please give my love to Muv, & thank her for her letter & for offering to help with the house, but as a matter of fact Esmond has already arranged for Peter Nevile to try & let it for us. If any of you hear of a likely person, would you let him know?”
The Corsican months included many nights of weeping and drinking and regret. Decca swam in the sea and let herself be fussed over by the ladies of the Grande Hotel de Calvi, who had heard the whispered gossip. Everyone knew her secret, though no one was crass enough to say it aloud. They plied Decca with the local delicacies: the sea urchins, strong Corsican cheese, figatelli, donkey sausage, and dark purple wine in ceramic bowls. Down on the beach, some veterans of the Spanish Civil War had pitched tents. Decca and Esmond found a refuge among other young radicals. Though they talked of war and struggle, the way they lived day-to-day was by distraction, trying their best to keep their memories of Spain and their apprehension of the coming European war at bay, in exchange for a few hours of peace.
At night, they sat on their veranda or out on the beach with the campers. Someone would roll cigarettes to hand around; someone would play a guitar, point out a constellation, quote a poem. “Murmur a little sadly, How love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” There were so many stars. Once in a while, someone would hiccup or change positions with a groan. In the quiet, you could hear another cork being pulled.
Esmond and Decca had expected the loss of the war in Spain, but back in England in a happier time, it had seemed more of a diminishing horizon, twilight into darkness. Here, confronted by the most recent events as told by men and women of the International Brigades (from France, Germany, the United Sta
tes, and England) who had witnessed them, the horrors of the endgame took shape. They heard about the retreats, the enemy’s vast superiority in firepower, tanks, and numbers, and the final plunge in morale.
Some of them, in their earliest idealism, had believed that the example of their conviction—their “willingness to fight and die to prevent the spread of fascism”—would have influence. They believed it might take some time, but even if theirs was an underground current, it had the power to charge others. They had to persuade the leaders of neutral Western democracies to finally, even at the last minute, even in a deus ex machina moment, rescue Spain. There were so many lies, so many deaths, such a waste. As they drank their wine around campfires, the veterans on the beach discussed the newest race laws in Germany: laws forbidding Jews from having driver’s licenses, owning radios—even owning carrier pigeons. It was public knowledge that the Communists not already in prison were being arrested. Germany military aggression escalated every day. All of this was reported, every fascist act scrutinized in the English and European papers. With so much at stake, the intoxicated veterans of the International Brigades wondered aloud to their English comrades, Why won’t Britain act?!
WHEN DECCA AND Esmond returned to London in August, they found that the government both counseled circumspection and continued to play down the growing dangers. A few years before, a scare had gone around the East End Jewish community. The rumor was that if Edward VIII hadn’t abdicated, he would have cut a deal with Germany to trade Britain’s Jews for entente. Decca felt nothing but contempt for the influential aristocrats and elite politicians (among them her relations) in favor of appeasement or a friendly alliance with Germany. “Their furled umbrellas so symbolic of furled minds.”
Back from Corsica, with a wider perspective and now unprotected by the happy family’s haze that had surrounded them in Rotherhithe, Decca and Esmond set themselves on track. They told one another that the best way to commit to the antifascist cause was to abolish illusions and be single-minded.
They moved to a smaller place in Edgware, to which they were soon tracked by a debt collector demanding action on Rotherhithe Street’s huge unpaid electricity bill. Since they were just scraping by, payment of such an enormous bill was “unthinkable.” It outraged them (they said only half-jokingly) to think that electricity, which ought to be free, was in fact a privilege. They considered a countersuit and brainstormed a strategy “on the grounds that electricity is an Act of God—an element like fire, earth and air.” A “pale, sad-looking youth in the employ of the London Electric Company” paced the pavement outside their house and did his best to tail them to the underground and the shops, but they were light-years ahead of him, donning goofy disguises and skittering past. One day, Esmond might emerge wearing a Groucho Marx mustache, another time in a top hat. Decca would tuck her hair under a worker’s cap or wear her starlet dark glasses. It took longer than they imagined for their “tormentor” to catch on, and dashing past him was only fun before they realized how slow and naturally confused he seemed. Then they stayed inside and watched him through their window watching them.
“Esmond had a theory that it was illegal and in some way a violation of Magna Carta to serve process on people in bed,” so they nested there for a couple of days at a time. But they also felt besieged, while Esmond skipped work and their larder grew bare. “Obviously, life in England had become untenable, in more ways than one,” Decca wrote.
On September 11, 1938, Decca turned twenty-one. She had come to expect nothing much from her family. She saw Debo sometimes. Unity was swanning around with her swastika badge in London, racing back and forth to Germany. She hadn’t managed to make it to her niece Julia’s funeral the previous May, because just then she’d been arrested in Prague, confidently advertising her Nazi connections in that tinderbox.
But Muv, whose consolation Decca had limited at the time of Julia’s death, still indefatigably kept in touch. At her children’s birth, Muv had begun a savings account for each of them and deposited sixpence on their behalf every week. When she turned twenty-one, Decca received the balance of one hundred pounds. When she had first heard that she would be coming into money, Decca had experienced one of that traumatic year’s greatest pleasures. Her bonanza was enhanced by a certain triumph over her elder siblings, all of whom had invested their own trust funds in one of Farve’s crackpot schemes (in this case a treasure-hunting globe that descended the seas and, like the claw in a carnival game, was meant to scoop up precious ornaments fit for a sultan). The globe’s inventor had absconded with the Mitford family’s investment, so only Decca and Debo had received their trust funds intact. This, thanks to Muv, who despite Decca’s childhood pleas for permission to invest her own money, had said that at seven years old, Decca had been too young to do so. Decca remembered feeling envy and fury, so the pleasure of her inheritance when it came, with the process server still pacing outside, was spiked with schadenfreude.
Esmond and Decca spent their hours in bed considering their windfall. They were torn, but instead of paying their electricity bill, they decided to save their money and start a new running-away account.
THEY BOTH WENT back to work—Esmond returned to Graham and Gillies, and Decca took up her job as a market researcher. She traveled to Southampton with her team, where they spent their days going house to house to interview homemakers about the new convenience products they used. It was hard to concentrate on the desirability of one kind of breakfast food compared with another when on the border of Czechoslovakia, the future of the world seemed so precarious. But it was also exciting to be out on her own earning money again, and sometimes, the housewives Decca met were fascinating in their convictions. A half-dressed woman might throw open her door in the middle of a lover’s tiff, or a lonely person might ask her to share some meager meal. There were suspicious types, flirts, and enthusiastic shoppers. Apparently, some people really did care deeply about their cleansers.
It was harder to be away from Esmond at night. She wasn’t anything like the baby she’d been on the job before she’d had Julia. Some of the girls knew how she had lost her daughter; they were sweet and gave her the breathing room she needed. But this type of work took being in a certain mood, and she would have preferred to have spent her days in a Lyons tea shop poring over the newspapers. The banner headline announcing the Munich Pact signed on September 29, 1938, quoted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s speech: “Peace in Our Time.” There was an eerie placidity that day in the population of Southampton. Where were the outraged crowds? Listening to the radio, Decca homed in on news about the latest wave of refugees. She was shocked to learn that some people, including one young woman in her market research group, took the Munich Pact not as tragedy but as reassurance and with a sense of relief. “Oh—Chamberlain,” she said vaguely. “But the paper says he’s for peace. That’s good, isn’t it?” All the stillness seemed such a topsy-turvy response.
Decca liked to move on things. She had so much energy, and much of it was concentrated in her politics. Politics gave her inspiration, but waiting while someone else made the decisions, old men who had gotten so many things so wrong so often before—men like her father—made her feel like jumping out of her skin. The misguided power at the top grated; the apathy and lethargy of the bourgeoisie was maddening.
Decca had never seen Esmond so depressed and restless. His sadness must have been painful for her to absorb since he was naturally so sure of himself. His moods were so intense, and he was unable to let his guard down except with her. On October 9 and 10, 1938, they read in the papers about violent mobs that were led by German storm troopers who shattered the windows in Jewish synagogues, shops, and homes in Germany and Austria. Orchestrated by the Nazi leadership, Kristallnacht—crystal night, a strangely poetic name for such terror and anguish—was a German pogrom that signaled the start of a systematic anti-Semitism, leading to the so-called Final Solution. In the days that followed, observers noted the shattered glass laye
red over the streets, in some places deep as their ankles.
The previous autumn, Decca had been full of hope. Now, the first anniversary of Julia’s birth was approaching.
SOMETIME THAT AUTUMN, Decca had an abortion. With five one-pound notes and an address in her handbag, she traveled alone by bus and tube to the East End of London. Sheila sent me, she said to the woman who opened the door and who then checked the street for prying neighbors or police. There had been no telephone to reserve an appointment, and if Decca had felt apprehension or dread, she was relieved just to have found the address. Paying her money in advance—five pounds was the going rate that day in the East End for a soap-induced abortion—she was ushered into where the deed would be done. It interested her to find the practitioner no “Dickensian crone,” but “an ordinary middle-aged English woman plying her trade”:At her direction I undressed and lay on a bed. I was a bit surprised that there was no sign of sterilization of the instruments, which she fished out of her underclothes drawer. Never mind, I thought, she knows what she’s doing; and she went to work.
The deed itself consisted of the abortionist introducing grated carbolic soap into Decca’s womb through a syringe. It was “horribly painful,” and after several hours finally induced labor. It was also horribly dangerous for the patient and for the practitioner, the latter risking arrest, imprisonment, and capital punishment. Death by hanging was still the punishment for the crime.
Why hadn’t Esmond accompanied her or, at the very least, sent her in a taxi? At the time, Decca and Esmond had been together for nearly two years. Defiant as she may have been to others, it was unusual for her to oppose him, but it would have been even less likely for him to leave her to have an abortion on her own. The idea that this might have been another man’s child (a drunken night in Corsica?) is possible but seems unlikely.