Some of the residents were out for a midnight stroll and, alerted by the noise of the collision, they began to gather around the wreckage. The small crowd of onlookers attracted the attention of two policemen, one of whom dragged Diana’s limp body from the car and laid her unconscious head in his lap. Her cut face and the satin coat, saturated in blood, inspired two elderly ladies walking their dog to a lamppost to caution: ‘Don’t look, it’s too horrible.’ And then, certain Diana was dead, they added, ‘Poor thing! So young, too.’
As she lapsed in and out of consciousness, Diana weakly begged the policemen to take her and the dog home. ‘All right,’ they humoured her. When she came round again, they were carrying her up the steps of St George’s Hospital on Hyde Park Corner. ‘Where’s my dog?’ she asked them. ‘He’s all right, he’s gone home,’ they lied. The dog had spent the night at the police station. Throwing Diana’s limp body onto an examination table, one of the policemen announced: ‘We’ve brought you another street accident.’
After a quick check-up, the doctor roughly examined her limbs and concluded she had suffered no broken bones. In fact, her nose and jaw were broken and her face was badly severed and bleeding heavily. In her semi-conscious state she could hear the medical staff talking over her. ‘Where’s the thin thread?’ the irritated young doctor asked the nurse.
‘Night sister’s locked it up,’ came the reply.
‘Well, haven’t you got a key?’
‘No, and she’s gone off.’
Due to this blunder, the doctor opted to use a coarse, thick thread. Warning Diana it would sting, he added that they could not provide her with anaesthetic, but did not elaborate why. Thoughts of Mosley ran through her mind. She began to fret, what if he was worried and what would he assume when she failed to show up? She was certain the accident would be reported in the morning newspapers and he would wonder if she was dead or alive. In a lucid moment, Diana asked the doctor if she could telephone Mosley. ‘Oh, no,’ replied the doctor. ‘You certainly can’t. You wouldn’t be able to stand up for one thing.’
‘But I must telephone,’ Diana reasoned. ‘You can carry me on the stretcher to the telephone.’
‘We’ll see,’ the doctor punctuated his response by stabbing the needle into the side of her nose. The thread, which felt as thick as rope, was ripped through her skin. After two stitches, Diana could just about stand the pain. ‘This stings,’ the doctor added.
Diana bargained with the doctor, ‘If I don’t scream will you let me telephone?’ He agreed and the entire procedure was carried out without a whimper from Diana, who felt the payoff of getting to telephone Mosley was worth the suffering. It was after two o’clock in the morning when Diana reached Mosley, who was fast asleep in bed. ‘I’m at St George’s Hospital and I’m quite all right,’ she shouted down the static telephone line.
Diana was not all right. She had four stitches along her nose and ten in her chin. Her face was fully bandaged up with two slits for her eyes to peer out of. When she returned home to the Eatonry, Bryan came over immediately. ‘You must see Sir Harold Gillies,’ he told her. ‘I’m going to get hold of him now.’ His careful consideration and quick thinking saved Diana from permanent facial deformity. The renowned plastic surgeon, Sir Harold Gillies, arrived at Diana’s bedside and was horrified at what he saw when he removed the hospital bandages. He could not operate for one week due to the swelling and he replaced the haphazard, coarse stitches with two stitches of silk thread strong enough to hold the gashes together. Diana was warned not to laugh or talk more than she was obliged to.
Sir Harold had no way of knowing the exact dimensions of Diana’s once symmetrical face because photographs had never managed to capture her beauty to its full potential. Once again, Bryan saved the day when he remembered the life mask of her face which he had commissioned in 1930, and he gave it to Sir Harold for reference when it came to repairing her nose and jaw.
In what seemed like famous last words, Cecil Beaton wrote to Diana: ‘My last vision of you was a radiant one …’ Panicking that her perfect face had been ruined forever, her loved ones also shared his sentiment. It hardly mattered to Bryan; he still loved her unconditionally.
One week later, Diana was admitted to the London Clinic to undergo reconstructive surgery on her face. Bryan’s past words to Diana – recalling her diphtheria – in the painful letter he wrote leading up to their divorce, ‘Who did you want when you came to?’ began to ring true. When she came to, Bryan was at her bedside, not Mosley, for he had fled to Naples with Baba.
It would have pained both women to acknowledge it, but Diana and Baba were not dissimilar. Both were dominant in the marital home and over their husbands; Fruity Metcalfe, like Bryan, felt helpless when he tried to prevent his wife from seeing Mosley. There was not a shred of remorse in Mosley, who looked upon such extra-marital rendezvous as ‘terrific fun’ and as such, he claimed, they should be treated as a joke.
Ever the manipulator, Mosley and Baba agreed to treat Irene with the utmost kindness. An act that, she thought, was sincere in its delivery. But this courtesy towards Irene had been a motive between the lovers to convince her to ask her friend, Lady Rennell, if she would rent out her villa at Posillipo in Naples for the entire month of August. With baby Micky in Irene’s care, Baba, Mosley and his two children boarded a small plane at Croydon airfield for Italy. Unlike the Toulon holiday, where Mosley had exercised an approach of veiled honesty with Baba and Diana, inviting each one to spend two weeks separately with him and the children, he refrained from divulging the details of this trip. Diana, recovering in the London clinic from her surgery, was unaware that Mosley was with Baba. And Baba, who was in Naples, did not know arrangements had been made for Diana to come to the villa.
Since forming a positive opinion of Hitler during a visit to Germany, David had thawed towards Diana. He was at her bedside when a wire arrived from Mosley, its words lifting Diana’s spirits when she read: ‘Hurry up and get better!’ She looked at her father and wailed, ‘I shall never get well here because I hate it so much.’
‘What do you want to do?’ David asked with his usual no nonsense approach.
‘I want to fly to Naples, but they say I must stay another week.’
David admired gumption and he agreed with Sydney’s disapproval of hospitals and clinics. He must have been unaware that the wire was from Mosley, for he still loathed him, and so agreeing with Diana he hatched a plan for her escape. Knowing the routine of the staff, Diana advised David to arrive in his car before dawn when the night nurses were at breakfast and the day nurses were still asleep. Diana dressed quietly and David assisted her down the stairs – they did not dare to risk taking the lift, given the din it would have caused in the long and echoing corridor. He whisked Diana off to Croydon Airfield and she caught a plane to Marseilles, changing in Rome for Naples.
The villa, a ‘crazy jumble of styles’, was perched high above the sea overlooking the bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. Diana thought it an absurd house and she was baffled by its architectural design. It was a physical example of the frivolity of the upper classes before the First World War. At the Roman embassy, twenty years before, Gerald Berners and his friend Gerry Wellesley had held a competition to see who could design the most hideous house and the price for such an achievement would be hung pride of place on the wall of the Chancellery. During a routine visit, Lady Rennell happened to see the drawing. ‘My dream house!’ she cried, and promptly asked if she might borrow the drawing. She used the design to create the Posillipo villa.
Although a fan of irony, the ridiculousness of the villa did nothing to lighten Diana’s mood. There was a sense of urgency behind her visit, although ‘fiasco’ would have been a better description. For the second time in two years, she was pregnant with Mosley’s child.65 Arriving jet-lagged from her early start and connecting flights, Diana looked battered and bruised from the accident and surgery, only to see Baba, tanned, snake-hipped and aloof. It must have given D
iana a sense of how Cimmie had felt three years previously when she was pregnant with Micky and, feeling wretched, had been confronted by her husband’s beautiful mistress.
Diana’s timing could not have been worse; she arrived in the middle of a formal dinner party given in honour of Baba’s friends, the Crown Prince and Princess of Italy. She did not enter the room, but sent James, one of the footmen, who whispered in Mosley’s ear: ‘Mrs Guinness has arrived.’ Between stage whispers, Mosley coolly told Baba that he had wired Diana not to come until Thursday. ‘Lie!’ Baba seethed. Knowing that Baba would not directly challenge him in front of their guests, Mosley slipped out of the dining room to find Diana in bed. ‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ he said to her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Diana replied. ‘But I did send a wire.’ Five minutes later the wire arrived.
Leaving Diana to rest, Mosley returned to Baba, who had bid goodnight to their guests. Dodging her wrath and remaining calm, he convinced Baba that he had been unaware that Diana was coming and that he, too, was furious with her and had ordered her to remain in her bedroom. Furthermore, Mosley managed to paint a pathetic picture of Diana, portraying her as a besotted ex-lover who would not leave him alone. Baba accepted his story and Mosley explained in a most chivalrous manner that Diana might as well stay and convalesce. To Diana, Mosley justified his affair with Baba as a form of recompense to Cimmie, who adored her younger sister. Before Diana could react, Mosley whisked Baba off on Vivien, his 30ft, three-cabin motor yacht, to Sorrento and Amalfi, where they ‘honeymooned’ in luxurious hotels, leaving his children and their nanny on board. Afterwards, Baba flew to Tunis and Mosley returned to the villa.
In Mosley’s absence, Diana had been left in the care of the servants. She disliked the afternoon sunlight, as the heat irritated her wounds, and her mood at having been abandoned for Baba was understandably sour. Such an expert at arranging his love life to suit whatever predicament he was in at the time, Mosley managed to hide Diana from his children and he did not bother to tell them of her arrival. Following his usual morning routine, Nick approached Baba’s bedroom door – the room Diana now occupied – but was halted by Cimmie’s maid, Andree. ‘Where are you going?’ she questioned him.
‘To say good morning to Auntie Baba,’ he replied.
‘It’s not Auntie Baba in there,’ Andree hissed. ‘It is Mrs Guinness.’
Naivety prevented Nick from discovering the sordid details of his father’s affairs. He had been used to Diana’s presence since the holiday in Toulon and he was accustomed to his father bringing Aunt Baba along on their trips, too. He did not realise at the time that his father was simultaneously sleeping with both women.
Diana regained her strength and had recovered enough to tackle the hundreds of steps leading to the beach to join Mosley and the children. She chose to ignore Baba’s presence and she never mentioned the topic to Mosley. The children approached her with caution, intimidated by her beauty and peculiar speaking voice with its swooping intonations. Sometimes Mosley would imitate this and she would smile.
The older children noticed that, unlike their late mother, Diana never argued with Mosley and they appreciated the harmonious atmosphere she created. It was different from the life they had shared with him at Savehay before Cimmie died. As a father, Mosley could be ‘a mixture of unpredictable tyrant and indulgent parent’. One moment he roared in ‘incendiary rage’ at some frustration or at an unsuspecting servant. At other times, he adopted the eccentric ritual of wandering naked round his rose garden, composing his political speeches. Easily riled, he did not suppress displays of violence in the presence of his children. One occasion scarred them when, irritated by the barking of the family dog, he ‘discharged both barrels of a shotgun from his study window at the animal’. There was a vast turnover of staff, especially male servants, who could not tolerate their master’s rudeness. Concealing this side of his character in front of Diana, the older children were beginning to wonder if she was, in fact, good for their father. It certainly made life more bearable, for the duration of the holiday, anyway.
Throwing herself into Mosley’s family life, Diana made an effort with the children and presented herself as a playmate. It was a contrast to Baba. Even though they loved their aunt, she did not have an easy manner around children and often banished them from grown-up life. Their father’s ‘friend’ Diana, they decided, was just as fun as their beloved aunt Irene.
Despite this vision of Diana as an attentive stepmother, it still did not inspire Mosley to marry her. And so, for the second time in two years, she aborted his child. Again, Diana had to go through the indignity of approaching an understanding doctor who would carry out the procedure. In those days, a sympathetic gynaecologist would perform an abortion if the pregnancy was in its early stages. It was expensive, but it was the preferred option for women in Diana’s position who could afford it. For poor and uninformed women there was still the backstreet abortionist. Either way, it was still a criminal act, carried out in secrecy and putting the woman’s life at risk.
The aftermath of the abortion triggered a change in Diana. Although she loved Mosley and would have done anything to please him, for her own physical and mental health she could not continue to terminate each pregnancy at his request. The obvious solution would have been to cut her losses and leave him, as he was still seeing Baba and had no intention to stop. She could not give him up. The only alternative was to force Mosley to commit to her and, avoiding marriage as best he could, he agreed to an engagement. Words were of little consequence to Mosley and to him the engagement signified nothing. As for Diana, it gave her hope.
NOTES
* Government records released in 1983 revealed that Mosley planned to deport all Jews and abolish elections if his movement had come to power.
62 ‘She had quite a masculine streak in her. She would go off to BUF meetings in Oxford, donning her black shirt which couldn’t be taken seriously. She enjoyed doing it to provoke.’ Statement made by Unity Mitford’s friend, Claud Phillimore, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–45, Julie V. Gottlieb.
63 Printed in Der Stürmer, July 1935.
64 ‘… because of the heat she drank champagne liberally.’ Diana Mosley, Anne de Courcy.
65 Jessica Mitford made reference to this in a letter to Unity: ‘I went to see Cord [Diana] after her operation, she looked terribly ill. I kept nearly having to leave the room because she and Muv would keep talking about an awful thing called the afterbirth.’ Month unknown, 1934. In chronology, the letter is placed between 4 August and 19 September, The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters, Charlotte Mosley (ed.).
31
THE IMPORTANCE OF
UNITY MITFORD
Once she had become an established member of Hitler’s inner circle, Unity delighted the Führer with tales of the 1933 Parteitag and how she and Diana were discouraged from meeting him because of their make-up. Hitler laughed and said it was typical of Putzi Hanfstaengl, who had ‘bored him over and over again with old American women not to introduce just for once somebody he would have liked to see’. Hanfstaengl, Diana came to realise, ‘was an inveterate gossip and just the sort of man one doesn’t want set loose on hostile foreign journalists’. Under ordinary circumstances, Hanfstaengl would have ‘been dropped years before but Hitler kept him on for old times’ sake, he was a bit of a joke’. Aside from Hanfstaengl’s error, Hitler was further amused by their gate-crashing of the 1934 Parteitag, through obtaining tickets from the old Nazi member ‘Number 100’. This determination impressed and flattered him. He impulsively promised Unity that she and Diana would be among his guests of honour at the 1935 Parteitag.
Hitler extended invitations to other members of the Mitford family, ordering Heinrich Himmler to contact Nancy and her husband Peter Rodd to invite them to Germany to view a concentration camp, all expenses paid. Germany’s first concentration camp had been opened at Dachau in March 1933 by Himmler and its first prison
ers were political detainees arrested after the burning of the Reichstag. Loathing fascism and refusing to visit ‘the nasty land of bloodbaths’, Nancy commented: ‘Now why? So I could write a funny book about them?’
Nancy and Jessica were the only two to shun a private audience with the Führer, much to Unity’s dismay. Pamela visited and found him very ordinary, ‘like a farmer in his brown suit’. And Deborah, aged 16, was more observant of his monogrammed towels and his incessant ringing of a service bell which nobody answered. For Unity, Hitler was the equivalent of a messiah.
In England, another politician was eager to have an audience with Diana. Such gracious hosts during her visits to Chartwell, it had been years since Diana last saw her beloved cousins, Winston and Clementine Churchill. After a session of small talk in the drawing room of their flat near Westminster Cathedral, Churchill wanted to hear about Herr Hitler. Among the political topics they discussed were Italy, foreign sanctions and the Abyssinian War. Echoing Mosley’s point of view, Diana asked if it would be dangerous for a British fleet in the Mediterranean, where it was easy for Italian aircraft to attack the ships if provoked. ‘No,’ stated Churchill, ‘an aeroplane cannot sink a battleship. Their armour is impenetrably thick.’ Diana thought he was naïve, but having no proof with which to contradict him, she refrained from arguing her point.
Diana was further encouraged in her opinion of Churchill and the Tories being short-sighted in international politics when Gerald Berners returned from Rome with stories detailing the fury against Anthony Eden and England’s policy of sanctions. The Duchess of Sermoneta told Berners that she wished she could open her veins and banish every drop of her English blood. In Diana’s opinion, England was the aggressor abroad – a view she held long after the Second World War.
Diana’s political point of view was in the minority and Mosley was still preaching a message about the danger of international Jews. During his meeting with Hitler months before he was interviewed for the Fränkische Tageszietung, which printed a chilling verdict on 24 June: ‘Mosley very soon recognised that the Jewish danger may well work its way from country to country, but fundamentally it poses a danger to all the peoples of the world.’ It played to the brutal anti-Semitism in Germany and that same year, in September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed and further sanctions were placed on the Jews. It became a crime to marry anyone with Jewish blood, Jewish names were erased from war memorials and the most basic human rights were stripped from the Jews.
Mrs Guinness Page 21