A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  At Grosvenor Place there were crowds of people; Bryan’s Oxford friends were all there. Robert Byron suggested we might meet in Cappodocia later in the year. ‘Oh yes,’ I cried, ‘we will. Let’s all meet in Cappodocia soon.’

  ‘I don’t particularly want to go to Cappodocia,’ said Bryan drily.

  Lady Evelyn was a vision in cream velvet trimmed with sables. Just as we were going away Bryan rushed over to where she was standing and threw his arms round her. ‘Good gracious, Bryan!’ she said, in the little voice usually reserved for Lady.

  8.

  BUCKINGHAM STREET

  Next day we took the train to Paris. Exactly two years before I had been on that train with Randolph and his father; then I was a child, sent hither and thither at the will of the grown-ups. In this short space of time I had become a grown-up myself, with a husband and a maid and a trunk full of new clothes made by Gladys. Miss Osmond was at Victoria to see us off, she gave us sheaves of newspapers and our tickets. The papers had descriptions of our wedding and pages of photographs. There was nothing unusual about this; every big wedding filled the newspapers and there were lists of guests and of wedding presents in The Times which probably partly accounted for the deluge of lamps and vases.

  We went to the Guinness’s flat in the rue de Poitiers. Lady Evelyn’s bedroom had a grey satin canopy over the bed with pink satin roses, three-dimensional ones, sewn on it. The curtains matched, and there was a daybed with little lace-covered pillows near the fire. It was a wood fire, it had a fine-meshed brass blind which one could let down when one left the room to stop the sparks flying. The whole thing was charming. In the drawing-room, for the most part faux Louis XVI, there were touches of orange, purple and black here and there where art nouveau had left its mark, but it was pre-gothic.

  Bryan’s parents almost never used the flat, and the people there seemed pleased to have us. The cook made a wonderful pudding called tête de nègre which I asked for every day. Soon we went on, to Sicily; I saw the Mediterranean for the first time, and Greek temples among almonds in blossom and olive groves. I would willingly have stayed there for ever. It seemed to me a mystery why anyone who is not obliged to do so by work should choose to live elsewhere; the shores of the Mediterranean had everything the human heart could desire in those days. Too many people have since had the same idea; they have ruined the coast with concrete and polluted the once sparkling sea. A Bar examination loomed for Bryan and we went back to London, stopping in Paris on the way. I bought a dress; white faille with a wide pale blue sash, from Louise Boulanger.

  We went to live at 10 Buckingham Street, a pretty house designed by Lutyens. The furniture had been bought in a hurry; Bryan had insisted on a certain amount of refectory tables and worm holes. Two empty rooms were stacked with wedding presents. My bedroom was pink, with a blue brocade bed on a dark blue velvet dais; fixed to the back were lamps set in silvered iron-work. I knew it was hideous, but it was not altogether my fault; the bed lady had taken the bit between her teeth while I was abroad. Colonel Guinness did not interfere with the choice of house: he only stipulated that we must have a bathroom each. ‘There is nothing so barbarous as for a husband and wife to share a bathroom,’ he said. ‘Barbarous’ was a favourite word with Bryan’s parents. Later that summer when Lady Evelyn was presenting me at Court on my marriage she said just as it was about to be our turn to go into the throne room: ‘We ought to have been practising our curtsies all day but I forgot.’

  ‘So did I,’ I said, ‘I’ve been doing household accounts.’ ‘Household accounts!’ in horrified tones. ‘How barbarous of Bryan.’

  The accounts were nothing whatever to do with Bryan, but had been urged upon me by Muv whose hobby they were. She gave me a leather-bound book for them with my initials in gold, but it remained virgin for I never thereafter returned to this barbarous occupation.

  We found some new faces at Buckingham Street, and a few old ones. May, Bryan’s favourite parlour maid from Grosvenor Place, had come, and Turner from Swinbrook as driver. The cook was very good and I was only too thankful to leave the food to her. Faced with a bit of blank paper on which to write a menu only one idea came—dressed crab. I was making up for lost time by eating all the dishes proscribed by Moses, but one could not live exclusively on dressed crab.

  Farve had a black labrador retriever he called Rubbish; at the time of my marriage he no longer wanted this dog, which was gun-shy; he knew I loved him and he offered him to me.

  As soon as we got back Rubbish was sent from Swinbrook. He was the most exceptionally sweet dog, and the joy of my life, though his nervousness made me anxious.

  After a few weeks we decided to go to Berlin. ‘You will love Berlin, my dear,’ said Brian Howard when I told him. ‘It is the gayest town in Europe; in fact, my dear, you’ll never have seen anything like it.’

  We went to all the famous nightclubs where men pretended to be women and vice-versa. At one of them there was a telephone on each table, but we could not see a soul worth ringing up. The night-clubs were not in the least amusing; grim would have been a more appropriate word.

  At the embassy we made the acquaintance of Harold Nicolson. ‘You are very young,’ he said to me. ‘What you must do is plant trees, now. Then you will enjoy them when you are middle-aged.’

  ‘Yes, but where?’ I said. ‘We haven’t got a country house.’ ‘Well, get one at once,’ said Mr. Nicolson.

  We wrote to Turner to meet us at Harwich, with Rubbish. The car was there, but no dog. ‘He’s ill,’ said Turner. ‘He ran away one night when they took him out. The police brought him back. He’s very ill.’

  ‘Oh!’ I cried, ‘but I said he was never to be let off the lead.’ ‘I know,’ said Turner, ‘but he just got away.’

  What had happened was that he heard a car back-fire and thought it was a gun. With one leap and tug he had torn away from the maid who was holding him, and hunt and call as they would he was not to be found. Two days later the police had brought him back with terrible gashes in his side; he must have speared himself on some railings he was trying, in his panic, to jump. When 1 saw him lying in his basket unable to move I knelt on the floor with my head on his, imploring him not to die.

  The vet said he must on no account lick his wounds, and arranged a huge cardboard funnel round his neck to prevent it. He could soon walk again and I took him out in the quiet little street; he found it difficult to sniff a lamp post, the funnel was in his way. ‘I can’t help laughing at your dog,’ said Chips Channon, who lived across the road. ‘I’ve never seen a dog wearing a lampshade before.’

  We went to Berlin again another year to see Tom who was studying law at the university. He was full of German politics. ‘There are fights all the time among the students,’ he told us. ‘Sozis against Nazis. The other day one lot threw the other lot out of a window.’

  ‘Out of a window!’

  ‘Well, not a very high window. But sometimes they do kill each other.’

  This was the first time I ever heard the word Nazi. ‘Do you take sides?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Tom. ‘It’s their own affair. But if I were a German I suppose I should be a Nazi.’

  ‘Would you?’ said Bryan.

  ‘Yes; no question. It will be either the Nazis or the Communists.’

  In May 1929 there was a General Election. We joined Lady Evelyn and Colonel Guinness in his constituency, Bury St. Edmunds. Their prettiest house was in Bury, a panelled, Georgian house giving on the street with a garden at the back. Lady Evelyn went there so rarely that, like the rue de Poitiers, she never bothered to gothicize it. It was full of chintz and muslin furbelows in the taste of the early years of her marriage.

  Walter Guinness hated electioneering. He was a clever, knowledgeable but very fastidious man; he was not much good on the platform. He had a little book of jokes and tried to weave them into his speeches and give a popular touch, but the whole business bored him. He told me once that he always drank half a bottle of
champagne before any constituency function to help him to get through it. He was being driven in a car to stay the night with constituents where he knew he was going to be very bored, opened his writing-case, found his champagne and drank it straight out of the bottle. To get rid of the body he threw the empty bottle out of the window and in so doing managed to break the glass. The chauffeur stopped, but Colonel Guinness told him, ‘Drive on, it’s quite all right.’ It was so impossible to explain to his hosts what had really happened to the window of their motor that he did not even try. ‘I didn’t mention it,’ he said, ‘and nor did they.’

  At this election the ‘flappers’ voted for the first time, in other words women of twenty-one and over. I was not yet nineteen and therefore had no vote but in any case I could not have voted for Colonel Guinness for I was strongly anti-Tory; I should have abstained.

  My father-in-law was returned with a reduced majority, the Tories were beaten and a Labour Government was formed. Out of office, Colonel Guinness boarded his yacht even earlier than usual.

  One evening at the opera we saw Lady Cunard; Lytton Strachey was in her box with her. She invited us to go back to supper afterwards, and when we arrived at 7 Grosvenor Square we found a large party, and supper tables laid in the upstairs drawing-room where the Marie Laurencin pictures were. Lytton Strachey sat down beside me and we became instant friends. He was everything I loved best; brilliantly clever and willing to talk for hour upon hour. He never seemed to be in a hurry, or to want to go away. To begin with I was rather shy of him, and afraid of boring him, but as time went on this feeling disappeared and gave place to admiring affection.

  Emerald Cunard also became a great friend, though almost my first remark rubbed her up the wrong way. ‘You knew Helleu, didn’t you?’ I asked, hoping to be able to talk of my dear old friend of two years before. ‘Helleu? Of course I knew Helleu. Everybody knew Helleu,’ she replied, almost angrily. I soon found out that she could not abide to be reminded of dead friends: it was only the living she cared to think about.

  We were lent a small house at Bailiffscourt almost on the beach. Pool Place was frankly hideous; it had been built just before Lady Evelyn’s arrival and she meant to pull it down. Meanwhile we painted its inglenooks white and went there from time to time.

  At the end of the summer we stayed there with Rubbish; Nanny and Decca and Debo came too. Lady Evelyn was at the Huts nearby.

  Great changes had come about at Bailiffscourt since my visit the summer before. The landscape was no longer treeless. Forest trees had been bought where they stood and dug up, with their roots. The roots were wrapped carefully and individually; the trees were hoisted as gently as invalids on to trailers and driven across country to Bailiffscourt. There huge holes awaited them, into which they were lowered by cranes, the roots being unwrapped one by one and friable soil packed round them. When they were in position each tree got a coat of plaited straw and a rubber belt put round it, or rather a wire hawser concealed in rubber, to which a dozen guy-ropes were attached, their ends firmly pegged to the ground. This was because of the wild gales to which they must inevitably be subjected in that exposed position so near the sea.

  Even in crowded England, I thought, surely a seaside place might have been bought where at least there were trees—ordinary trees—and even, possibly, an old house? I put this to Rosalie one day. ‘Not for Aunt Evelyn,’ she said. ‘It would never be quite right. She must do it all herself.’

  While we were there that summer Rubbish got hysteria. He tore round in circles, giving little cries. I caught him at last and we lifted him into the car and flew to the vet, who gave him a calming injection. ‘It’s no good,’ said the vet. ‘He’ll bite somebody in the end. They never recover.’ So he died, and with him the last scrap of my childhood. He had been a link between me and Farve, between me and home.

  We went away to Paris, and with us a great new friend—at least he was new to me, though Bryan had known him at Oxford—Evelyn Waugh. That autumn and winter we were seldom apart. It was at the time when Evelyn’s short-lived marriage with Evelyn Gardner had come to an abrupt end; she had left him. He was by way of being shattered by this, but I must admit he showed few signs of it. Possibly his pride suffered, but never was anyone more amusing and high-spirited. There was no hint of painful depression, a misery I subsequently often encountered in other friends, and to which he himself was no stranger in after years.

  He stayed with us at the rue de Poitiers and so did Nancy. Bryan was writing a book; Evelyn and Nancy were writing too. While I sat in bed in the mornings reading, everyone wrote. When the ink would not run Bryan shook his pen violently and spots appeared all over the grey satin curtains. I was expecting a baby. All day long wherever we might be, in Paris, or in London, or at Pool Place, kind Evelyn was there to chat and keep me amused. We went for little walks or drives or sat at home; when Evelyn was there it was impossible to be dull for an instant.

  Back in London Bryan bought me a huge puppy. The last thing I wanted was another dog but of course I soon got fond of him. He was a tall and gawky Irish wolfhound called Pilgrim, who had overgrown his strength. Evelyn told me that Wenborn, the man at Pool Place, had said to him: ‘That Pilgrim! He’ll never make a dog.’ In order to prove him wrong, I fed the wolfhound myself; he was fussy and only liked to eat his disgusting raw meat if it was offered to him between finger and thumb. I could hardly bear to touch it, but my reward was to see him grow strong. I even took him to a dog show at the Crystal Palace where he won various silver goblets and prizes.

  The Grosvenor Place Christmas was terrific, as Rosalie had said. First came the traditional food, and on each plate there were three or four little parcels as well as elaborate crackers. Then we all went up to the drawing-room and one was given a pair of scissors. Huge piles of presents were grouped in the corners and along the walls. Having found one’s name the opening began. Every parcel was a work of art, like the parcels some Paris shops produce with multiple bows of satin ribbon and tinsel and flowers decorating them. They represented the concentrated work of weeks. I think Grania’s nurse gave a hand, but the bulk of it was done by Lady Evelyn herself. After an hour or so, all the presents opened, we were given log baskets in which to carry away our loot. The curious thing was how little loot there seemed to be. It was almost impossible to believe it had shrunk to this little measure. Of tissue paper and cardboard boxes and ribbon there were mountains, of course.

  Later in the day Evelyn came to Buckingham Street. He told us he had been to midnight Mass with Tom Driberg on Christmas Eve. It was high Anglican, he had not yet become a Roman Catholic. Our friend Henry Yorke, who wrote under the name Henry Green, had just published Living, his novel about a factory. We gave away twenty copies of it that Christmas; now they would be rarities, I imagine.

  Evelyn’s delightful companionship made the remaining months of my pregnancy go by more quickly but each baby seems to take an age. Grandmother said that January: ‘When do you expect the baby?’

  ‘In the beginning of March,’ I replied. ‘In fact it might be born on the 13th.’ The thirteenth of March was Farve’s birthday.

  ‘Oh, I hope not!’ cried Grandmother. ‘Poor darling Dowdy! Always so unlucky!’

  At the time, her remark surprised me. My parents still seemed to me impregnable beings, the masters of their fate, and certainly not associated with luck.

  Bryan had a real passion for the theatre. In theory I loved it too. As children we had been taken to Stratford-on-Avon every summer, and in Paris to the matinée classique on Thursdays. I soon realized, however, by working through almost every play in the list, that Eddie Marsh was only too right about some plays being diviner than others. It is extraordinary how boring a boring play can be, how draughty the theatre in which it is performed can seem, how unending the intervals. On the whole it was worth while because there were plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Tchekov, and Shakespeare as well as new plays, a few good, many mediocre. Bryan belonged to various clubs for
Sunday performances.

  Occasionally, if there was nothing left to see, we went to musical comedies. A year or two later at the first night of Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet I ran into Eddie Marsh. ‘What do you think of it? Isn’t it divine?’ he said, his monocle glittering with delight.

  ‘Well, not very,’ I said, ‘but I’m glad we came because it won’t run, will it?’ I thought it was bound to flop.

  ‘My dear Artemis, it will run for ever,’ said Eddie. He knew what was what. I loved being invited to luncheon with him in his flat at Gray’s Inn. The walls and even the doors were stuck all over with pictures and drawings. He showed me the first picture he ever bought, a landscape by Richard Wilson: for the most part his collection was by living English painters.

  That winter if we had an evening at home I dined in bed and the guests at a table in my room. ‘Mind the step!’ I said after dinner when they tripped over the stupid dais as they came to sit on my bed for chatting purposes.

  In March my son Jonathan was born. When I saw him sleeping in his elaborately trimmed cot beside my bed I felt completely happy, and it was the same when each of my sons was born. Unlike Muv, who thought her babies too ugly for words, I thought mine perfect and love for them blotted out any memory of pain or of the boredom of pregnancy. Many women feel depressed after childbirth; I felt elated, and as they grew I loved and admired the babies more and more. Before Jonathan’s birth I had bought clothes for him from Wendy. I chose the prettiest dresses no matter whether they were for boys or girls, they were like doll’s dresses covered in frills and furbelows. Nobody now would dress a newborn baby in such elaborate clothes. Even the nightgowns, made of fine linen lawn with hundreds of little tucks, had pearl buttons so tiny that they and the fiddling little buttonholes were almost invisible. Doing them up took ages, and while the unfortunate baby was dressed in this absurd way he screamed and made himself into a furious arch with scarlet face in his despair at having to wait for his food. It was not the mothers who insisted upon all this, but the nurses and nannies, who would have been so ashamed to belong to a baby dressed in a single comfortable garment that they would have given notice on the spot.