by Leslie Brody
The style of this action recalls Esmond and Philip Toynbee’s theft of top hats from Eton a few years before. At that time, they had still been children: two rogues and a nymph, an adventuress and her highwaymen. Decca’s “pee-in” was another kind of action, born not of boredom but of indignation. She believed she was defending the weak, using her brain, plotting a tease, and having a laugh—and in all this, she felt her power.
Esmond phoned the hospital nearly every day. Decca adored hearing from him, but telephoning was pricey and simply not enough. Letters could be read and reread. During her hospital stay, they had their first extended disagreement since Esmond had been away. She thought they might name their child Esmé, but he vetoed that. Then, since she had been reading In Place of Splendour, the autobiography of Spanish Civil War heroine Constancia de la Mora, she suggested Constancia. In his return letter, he said he was wary of nicknames (like Connie) and nixed Constancia. Then Decca, from a proud, nicknaming tribe, replied:How extremely thoughtful of you to decide against Constancia just after I’d filled in the certificate form & got everything arranged. I don’t much like Carol for a girl & Ann Carol would be a shade arty don’t you think? On the other hand I adore Constancia & don’t at all see why it means the Donk will be called Connie any more than I’m called Jessie. We could call her Stan for short (after Laurel & Hardy) or Cia.
He’d done nothing except assert his prerogatives, and she was being impatient. The strain of the distance between them was starting to show. It’s hard to always be good. In a subsequent phone call (in euphoria disregarding the cost), they compromised on their child’s name: It’s “Anne Constancia,” but, “If you really want to change it we can,” Decca wrote.
In March, Decca packed up her newborn, still called Dinky-Donk for short, and went to meet Esmond in Hamilton, Ontario. She had planned to visit for the weekend, but decided to stay and rent an apartment near his base.
Decca borrowed a pram, and she bathed the baby in a big saucepan. Although the town was full of young women like herself, temporary residents there on account of their soldier husbands, she felt terribly lonely. Esmond visited their apartment as often as he could get leave, one day out of four, but he lived on the base. Decca had been brought up in a teeming household, with a phalanx of sisters, a kennel full of dogs, a parade of weekend visitors, the constant presence of Muv, and Nanny plus rotations of governesses. When her father roamed through the house, he filled the corners, his every mercurial mood noted. Decca would say that she often felt alone in her youth amid the tumult, perhaps a loneliness tied to an adolescent sense of feeling misunderstood by those she counted on most. Her loneliness in Canada was of a different stripe. In New York, on the road, and in Florida, as a dynamic duo she and Esmond had rocketed forward—there were always new things to observe and to adjust to. She had been on her own when Esmond worked in the bar, but he always came home at the end of the day, and if she had been bored, she could have visited him. Besides, she had her own job. She may not have thought she enjoyed anything about her celebrity, but she missed the attention. This was the first time she felt completely without it.
IT’S EASY ENOUGH to imagine Esmond as the young soldier, sick of any place in which he was a foreigner, alone, moving from one martial environment to another. Canada’s winter was long, and he had spent it far from his young wife, missing the birth of his daughter. He’d chosen this path, he studied hard, and he was no sentimentalist, but the war was going badly, and there were deep doldrums. But he was glad to be back together with Decca. They made love, made jokes, made much of their darling child. They danced and sang along with the radio, drank and ate (the remainder of the hampers of delicious, exotic food, courtesy of the Meyers—prewar pâté de foie gras, cornichons, marrons glacé), caught up on the news and family gossip, and planned for their future.
Sometimes, Esmond just wanted to sleep. He was so tired of people telling him what to do. It wasn’t easy assembling 197 parts of a machine gun, as he was expected to. She thought she might be able to do it, though, given the chance. It wasn’t always easy to submerge her own emotions. Sometimes, she’d been up in the night with the baby, and much as she might have liked to look fresh and be receptive, she sometimes felt aggressive. A soldier’s wife had a role to play, she knew, but he wouldn’t love her as much if she were less smart or less pretty because she was climbing the walls from boredom. She longed to be with him always, but did they really want to expose their new child to the hardships of travel? This child could not be allowed to get ill. It would help, she knew, to get another job. In Washington, the Durrs’ Alexandria home had been crowded, she’d had to fight to carve out a space, but they’d been kind and she had fit in to her satisfaction. From the distance of Canada, it looked like an excellent place to be, if only Esmond could be there, too. He wouldn’t be. They would transfer him to someplace in Canada that was even colder and more godforsaken, and then they’d ship him overseas first to England, then to Europe. There was no doubt about that. He was in training to drop bombs.
Decca’s letter to her mother in April spoke of the many things she was turning over in her mind.
April 9, 1941. To Lady Redesdale. Toronto. Darling Muv . . . I don’t like Canada at all, it seems to me like an awful copy of America, & the people are horrid. They are very anti English & anti American but vastly inferior to both. I expect it was quite different where you were, & Esmond says the West is fairly nice where the people are more of Central European rather than English extraction. I’m only staying here 6 weeks unless I decide to go out West when Esmond goes, but it’s 2,000 miles away & the Donk might not like such a long journey so I expect I’ll carry her back to Old Virginnie. There are several English refugees here & I really feel sorry for them (tho not for those in America as they are very well treated & anyway America is such heaven).
Decca returned to Washington while Esmond went on to Manitoba for the final phase of his flight training. In England, her sister Nancy had been working in a first-aid post; then she had opened up the Mitfords’ London house at 26 Rutland Gate and taken in homeless evacuees. First, the Mitfords sheltered the family Sockolovsky and, later, other Jewish refugees, most of them Polish. Nancy was brave and graceful under pressure, a sister to admire. Her observations of those first days of the bombing had been suitably apocalyptic, but now she had her “sweet refugees.” She was just scraping by, not much of a housekeeper, but she managed the coupons and the food and fuel. Meanwhile she was writing away—books, articles, letters. From Nancy, Decca learned that Farve and Muv had become so deeply divided over their politics that they were living apart. Before the war, both parents had been champions of Hitler, but recognizing the Nazi threat, Farve had turned violently against Germany. Muv still defended der Führer as a courteous and maligned friend of her daughters Unity and Diana. To prove a point, Muv had once kicked Nancy out of her car for making rude remarks about the German leader. Nancy generally cut her mother a lot of slack, but now England was in a war against fascism, and the daughter was fed up with her mother’s ignorance.
In her letter to Decca, Muv simply evinced sympathy for the homeless refugees. “Little D.” had turned out in some ways to be as ferocious as Farve, and Muv didn’t want to give this daughter another grudge to harbor. Times were difficult on all fronts. Her husband was a particular disappointment. He wasn’t at all able to bear being around Unity, as she had become childish, sloppy, and incontinent as a result of her injury. Muv was caring for Unity in a cottage near Swinbrook House. She had hoped to live with her daughter on Inch Kenneth, the family’s island home in Scotland, but the area was declared a coastal protected zone and Muv and Unity were forbidden access because of their fascist sympathies. In 1940, Farve stayed on Inch Kenneth for six months. The rest of the year, he lived with Nancy in London. Diana was also in London, detained in the Holloway women’s prison. Sister Pam looked after Diana’s sons while managing a large farm.
In April 1941, Decca’s youngest sister, Deborah, mar
ried Andrew Cavendish, the son of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, at the Mitfords’ London home. Muv covered the windows broken in the Blitz with thick wallpaper that looked just like brocade. The Cavendishes sent up one hundred red camellias from their Chatsworth estate, and the families invited over three hundred guests. Nancy, Pam, Unity, and Tom attended.
In May, Decca wrote to Nancy from Alexandria. She had now spent nearly a year at the Durrs’. She had become independent and much more aware of the way things worked, of her own place in the big picture. She had pretty good judgment and wanted to let Nancy know that she hadn’t been wasting her time in America. On the contrary, she’d been acquiring an excellent education. You just had to breathe the air in Washington to absorb political science, social philosophy, and economics. All of prolabor America seemed to find itself at the Durrs’ table. A year of dinners there was equal to a graduate degree in organization and administration and campaigning. Decca read every newspaper and magazine she could get her hands on, and her earnest letters show off a growing political acumen. At this point, impressing Nancy with her focus and analysis had become important to Decca.
The Durrs & most of the people I know here think that at the present time in Washington there is great dissatisfaction with Roosevelt for not moving fast enough, & also for putting Republicans & big business people in key positions. Part of the trouble is that here, as in England, people all want to fight for different things; some for the supremacy of the British Empire & America, some for the destruction of Fascism. Very few people follow Lindbergh, who is considered a dangerous defeatist. Americans on the whole talk as though they were already in the war, & all think it will be only a matter of months before they are . . .
Decca didn’t receive her sister’s reply until July 1941. By that time, the Germans had invaded Russia. Nancy didn’t spare much time in analysis. She wanted to talk about her new niece. “I think Constancia a heavenly name & I am going to make a will & leave her all my things.” And she wanted to talk about Russia. “Up the Reds! Aren’t they heaven? Quite my favorite allies.”
WHEN DECCA AND Esmond had first come to America, they had spent several weeks on Martha’s Vineyard. In those last four days before Esmond would board a troop ship for service in England, they returned to the island together and reluctantly left five-month-old Dinky with Virginia.
Coming in on the ferry from the Massachusetts mainland, Decca and Esmond saw a scene almost identical to the one they had left two years before. In the distance were white sailboats and family fishing boats, swimmers in the water, and umbrellas on the beach. It all looked unchanged, a lost universe, an excellent harbor. They stayed again at the Menemsha Inn, whose every building and path was framed with flowers: pink hydrangeas, blue hyacinths, red geraniums. Their housekeeping cottage had a screened-in porch smelling of citronella, calamine lotion, damp, and the creepy tang of flypaper. There were wood-chipped paths to follow down to the ocean through fields sectioned off by stone fences. The ocean had a wonderful brackish smell, and from the beach you could see the Gay Head Lighthouse beacon. Later that day, they planned to meet their friends Selden and Hilda Rodman for dinner and drinks.
The Romillys had first met the Rodmans on Martha’s Vineyard in September 1939, a month after Stalin had signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler. That news had naturally dominated their joint vacation. There was an interesting symmetry to this reunion on June 22, 1941, because Germany had spectacularly broken the agreement by invading Russia, and it became, in Decca’s words, “a whole new ball game.” The foursome listened to the radio together as Winston Churchill declared, “Any man or state who fights against Nazism will have our aid.” By then, they were all used to the thrill of Uncle Winston’s oration, but this was a turning point and everyone knew it. England had been fighting alone against the Nazis; now it would be England and Communist Russia: Liberals, Tories, and Socialists all on the same side. All this they discussed and absorbed over local lobster and clams. It was important to maintain perspective, to keep a healthy skepticism, and to have some more blueberry pie and another Tom Collins.
From hour to hour, their time was as full of play as politics. Selden recorded their tennis and their swimming and one raid on a neighbor’s ice-box for lemonade. Esmond mocked with tongue in cheek the local “over-abundance of resources. Too many tennis courts, too many beaches, many too many cars and much too much ocean.” Once, when they were alone, Selden, who had received his draft notice, asked Esmond if he had any “misgivings about going on a raid.” Esmond answered, “None,” and added, “I have no doubt at all that I will survive this war whether shot down or not.”
Survival was the theme that Decca and Esmond embraced when they were alone. The future was unsure, but one thing was known: Flyers could survive and had. His brother Giles was by then being treated as a protected prisoner of war. Perhaps he was being considered a hostage to trade. The same thing might happen to Esmond. But those possibilities were all down the line.
Esmond had an almost mystical sense that he would survive the war. Decca had to feel this complete and total belief, too; anything less, any hesitation, could tear the fabric. They spoke to give comfort, heart, and courage to one another. Decca would write, “The unutterable blankness of such a separation loomed menacingly for both of us, and we each tried rather unsuccessfully to reassure the other that it wouldn’t really be for very long, that soon we should be together again in England.” The atmosphere was charged with unresolved questions about their future, but one immediate question, when to join the Communist Party, seemed settled at last. Years later, Decca would say:Once the Russians got into the war . . . that to us changed the entire complexion of one’s dedication to the idea of Communism. Now we were allies. We never dreamed that capitalism would survive the war. We thought that obviously it would be socialism everywhere, and we would join the Party . . . and we’d bring Dinky up as a Communist.
On the night before Esmond left, the two couples played poker until midnight. In the morning, after a week of fair weather, a nor’easter brought with it fierce wind and heavy rain. Decca stood on the dock watching Esmond board the ferry to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he would join his ship to England. In a letter written soon after, she told him, “I was so miserable when you left but now feel as though I was recovering from an illness, better each day.”
That week, the residents of Washington, like much of the rest of the world, were fixated on the extraordinary events in Russia. The Communist press, as Decca and Esmond had presumed, made an immediate turnaround in its editorial position from opposing intervention to emphatically endorsing it. In Congress, a coalition of Southern segregationist senators filibustered the poll-tax repeal to defeat, to Virginia’s great disappointment. Meanwhile, Virginia’s mother sank into a morbid depression, and the house filled with the sound of her weeping.
Decca struggled to take herself in hand and avoid indulging in her own fantasies of gloom and doom. There was no knowing where Esmond would eventually be stationed after his initial English posting and how long it would be before she could join him. She wasn’t constituted to wait patiently: “My two main preoccupations were to find and to join the Communist Party, and to equip myself to be useful once a member.” Her letters were cheerful and illustrate her growing imperative to establish herself. She wanted to escape the “dead-end world of market research, retail selling and the like, and acquire some training.”
Returning to her long-cherished idea of becoming a serious journalist, Decca considered how best to ask Eugene Meyer for a job. First, she planned to enroll in a short summer course at the Columbia School of Journalism. Such useful training would go a long way toward helping her “feel much more confident about a possible Post job.” Esmond was all for it. They had come a long way from the days when he had run the show.
But Decca never did take that journalism course. The way she came to tell it, she had been all set to go until she realized Columbia University was in New York and not the Distri
ct of Columbia. “By the time I discovered my mistake—and learned that to qualify for enrollment one must have an undergraduate degree—I was thoroughly settled in with the Durrs and disinclined to move.” She’d been stymied once more by her old nemesis, lack of formal education. Here, as elsewhere and often, she turned a disappointment into a punchline.
CHAPTER 9
ABOUT A MONTH after they separated, Esmond wrote that he was stationed in England. Decca discovered she was pregnant again and started looking for transportation to join him sooner rather than later: “I think it would be more difficult to get a passage if I was huge.” They needed money, she had to get a job, but being pregnant meant she couldn’t work in dress shops anymore. She left it up to Esmond to decide how much this news would change things. She was in a safe place with reliable comforts, but those weren’t the most important considerations. She wanted to be with him. “However the whole decision is yours & whatever happens don’t worry about it, but just say what you really think because I will be terrifically all right & happy whatever we decide.”
Esmond had arrived in Halifax to find himself promoted to officer’s rank. He hadn’t looked for a commission and considered rejecting it, but was too aware of the time it would take and the tribulations guaranteed if he were to reject the commission. Since school at Wellington, Esmond had been practiced at avoiding the worst excesses of the officer class, and it wounded him to think he’d be automatically lumped in with all the ghastly types he had run away from. His worst scenario materialized soon after he had boarded the boat to England, when a Canadian sergeant preferred not to drink alongside the uppity officer he supposed Esmond to be. But during some late-night poker playing, their long conversation turned to what they held in common. They were, they discovered, fellow travelers on this crossing. In a political sense, both were men of the Left, and in a practical sense, they were passengers on a warship threatened by German U-boat activity in the ocean around (at any moment perhaps even dependent upon one another for survival). They drank some more whiskey and played another game. Fortuitously, their ship dodged the U-boats and made it safely across.