A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  He had painted a rather gloomy portrait of Harold Acton and many superb portraits of Edith Sitwell. His style, constantly evolving, was at its most poetic at this time. His portrait of me and the boys is the picture I love far the best of all the many painted of me. Pavlic imagined long flowing golden hair for us, all three, hair like rain, and our faces gold with blue shadows and blue eyes. He had a bad time with the boys, then aged four and two and a half. He was unable to entertain them as he spoke no English. They sat separately, accompanied by Nanny Higgs, and she came back from the sittings full of complaints. ‘Mr. Tchelichew was so kind, oh he was kind, but Desmond turned his head and wouldn’t look, even when Mr. Tchelichew gave him a sweet.’ However the result was not only a magic work of art but exactly like both children. Pavlic’s design had been for three heads and six hands, but he had to paint out Desmond’s right hand which was lovingly posed on my shoulder. The sight of it enraged Jonathan. ‘I won’t have Desmond hugging her. I won’t sit,’ was his threat, and Pavlic gave in.

  Edward brought Kurt Weill to dine with me once or twice. I had heard the Dreigroschenoper in Berlin and Lotte Lenya’s marvellous gravelly singing voice. Kurt Weill had not yet been canonized for his association with Brecht and his tunes were not yet known to the English public. There is an early portrait by Lucian Freud of a short man standing among potted plants, the short man is the very image of Kurt Weill as he was in those days, soon after he fled from Germany.

  That summer M. took a furnished house by the sea in the south of France for his annual holiday where I stayed for a couple of weeks with him and his children. From there I flew to Rome, on my way to stay with Edward James who had got the Villa Cimbrone at Ravello. When I arrived I telephoned Cimbrone; Edward had not turned up, though he was expected any day, I was told. None of the acquaintances I had made during my visit to Gerald was in Rome in August. The only exception was Mrs. Strong, an old English lady archaeologist. Gerald said that when she was young, at the turn of the century, Mrs. Strong lectured on archaeology from behind a screen because her beauty was sublime and it distracted the students. By the time I knew her she had become a noble Roman matron. I went to see her a few times and when several days passed and still no Edward appeared, and Rome was hot as an oven, I asked her advice as to what I should do.

  ‘Is your maid with you?’ she asked. ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that case, go to Cimbrone and wait there for Mr. James,’ said Mrs. Strong. This I did, and spent a few lovely days in the scented garden with its pool and distant view of brilliant sea sparkling far below.

  Then Edward arrived, accompanied by Henri Sauguet, composer of the Diaghilev ballet Les Forains. Edward, kindest of hosts, whizzed us about in a huge open motor. The coast road made one feel sick; at every hairpin bend there was a warning; SVOLTA! Sauguet and I dreaded these twists and turns; ‘Le supplice des svoltas’ he called them.

  We went to Paestum. In those days the temples stood quite solitary in the flat swampy landscape. Unlike Agrigento, unlike Athens, there was no spectacular rocky setting. Yet in many ways Paestum seemed to be the very essence of classic Greece, uncompromising, bare, even grim; superb.

  In the evenings up at the villa we laughed all the time as we sat under the stars in the warm scented air. Sauguet, like most Frenchmen in those days, was not a traveller; I believe he was seeing Italy for the first time. He was brilliantly clever and witty, with an incomparable gift of mimicry. His imitations were supreme

  People who possess this gift of mimicry have amused and delighted me all my life. The most talented I have known were Sauguet, John Sutro, Oliver Messel; and, many years later, Elizabeth Winn, and my son Max.

  There was no shadow upon this visit to Edward at Ravello; I look back more than forty years and see perfect beauty and amusement and enjoyment; sun, sea, Greek temples, scented gardens, and the wild laughter and fun of the fantasies of our brilliant French companion.

  12.

  HITLER

  Meanwhile Unity had got her way; she had spent several months in Munich, learning German. She stayed with a dear old lady who took English girls; Pempy and Angie Dudley Ward had both been there and were the adored favourites of Baroness Laroche. The Baroness was not a National Socialist, far from it, but she was well accustomed to the girls in her care having this or that Schwärmerei. Often it was for opera singers, but often too for Hitler, long before he came to power. Never before, however, had she known a girl like Unity, who set herself with passionate single-mindedness to learn German so that when she met the Führer, as she felt convinced she would one day, she would be able to understand what he said.

  After leaving Ravello I joined her in Munich. We had planned, through Hanfstaengl, to go to the Parteitag again. This time he refused to help. He had no tickets to give away, he said, and he told Unity he had been criticized the year before for being surrounded by foreigners who all wore lipstick.

  This was very bad news. He was our one hope, and not only had he failed us but he indicated that in any case we should be unwelcome. Unity was rather cast down. He had strongly advised her not to go to Nuremberg; there would be bigger crowds than ever, he said, and certainly not a room to be got anywhere near the town. Every hotel room had been requisitioned for the week.

  Unity told me all this and we pondered what to do. I was for giving up; there was so much to see around Munich. I envisaged us sitting up all night in the Nuremberg station waiting-room. Unity, of course, would not hear of such weakness; we must go, she said, even if it was only inside a day. We took an early train next morning.

  There was a vast mass of people crammed into the town. Every café and restaurant was packed, the streets were jammed solid with humanity. It was like a dozen Cup Final crowds concentrated in a town the size of Oxford.

  Unity was undaunted, in fact her spirits rose and she kept saying, ‘Aren’t you glad we came? Isn’t it lovely? Do be glad we came.’

  I could not help wondering where we were going to sleep that night; going back to Munich was quite out of the question, Unity would never consent to it while this jamboree of her dreams was in progress.

  ‘It doesn’t matter about not having a room, does it? It’s really all the better, because we can get such marvellous places for seeing the Führer go by tomorrow if we stay in them all night,’ she said.

  At that moment we spied two men getting up from a table in a beer garden; we nipped into their chairs, thankful to sit down. Unity spoke politely to the other occupants of the table; I had been struggling with Hugo’s German Self Taught and could understand most of the talk. The easiest thing, in a foreign language one is learning, is small talk which runs along familiar lines. These lines were boringly familiar: ‘Are you English? (Or sometimes are you Swedish?) How do you like it here in Germany? Are you a student?’ and so on.

  One old man with white hair sitting at our table was wearing the gold party badge, which meant he was one of the first hundred thousand members of the NSDAP. Unity spotted this at once. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am a very old member. I am number one hundred in the party.’

  ‘Number a hundred!’ Unity was very impressed. ‘Then you must know the Führer?’

  ‘Oh yes, I knew him in those days,’ said the man.

  When he discovered that we were in Nuremberg with no tickets and no room to stay in, number 100 looked very sorry for us. He wrote something on a bit of paper and told us to go to the office which arranged accommodation. On our way there Unity was hopeful. ‘Nard,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine the luck! Parteigenosse Nummer Hundert! I’m sure he will introduce us the Führer.’ She had quite lost faith in Hanfstaengl.

  We were given a room in a little inn and tickets for everything, as a result of the kind intervention of Number 100. We found him and thanked him, and next day he sent us a book he had written called Zehn Tausend Kilometer Heimweh. I think it described the campaign of White Russians in Siberia after the first war.

  That year the Arbeitsdienst paraded with their shining sp
ades; this was said to be militaristic by the English press. Again we listened to speeches. They gave an account of the astonishing progress made in a year, unemployment dwindling, houses built, new roads begun, industry and agriculture flourishing. When the hectic exhausting days were over I went back to England and Unity to Munich. I resolved to learn German and went a few times to the Berlitz School.

  I asked M.’s advice and he agreed it would be a good idea to go to Munich for a few weeks and learn German. Unity found me a charming flat with Biedermayer furniture and a good cook; she stayed with me there and we followed, in a rather desultory way, a special course for foreigners at the University. At twenty-four I was by no means, to my surprise, the oldest person in the lecture room. There were several white heads among the students. I loved Munich. It is bitterly cold in winter but the houses have double glazing and efficient central heating. The icy air out of doors had a special smell, so that had one been set down there blindfold one would have known at once it was Munich. Possibly the smell was of brewing, combined with the little cigars the men smoked. On Sunday mornings before it was light there was quiet movement in the streets; hundreds of people making their way to the station carrying skis on their backs. In less than an hour they were up in the mountain sunshine and they came home when it was dark once more. It was not only the rich who could afford these outings, which cost very little and meant that young people in Munich never lost their brown holiday looks even in mid-winter. Another thing they enjoyed for nearly nothing was music. Standing room at the opera cost 50 pfennigs, about eightpence, and quite a good seat two marks, less than three shillings. The Alte Pinakotek had a superb collection of old masters; the gallery was bombed in the war and they are now in the Haus der Kunst, one of the few things Hitler built not to be blown up by the Allies after the war was over.

  We often had guests at the flat, girls from Baroness Laroche’s and acquaintances of Unity’s. Among them was a handsome Norwegian boy, son of the Nobel prize winner Knut Hamsun; he had been allowed to join the S.S. as a favour to his father who was a great admirer of the new Germany.

  Unity had discovered from her German teacher that Hitler often lunched at the Osteria Bavaria when he was in Munich. He stopped there on his way to the Obersalzberg. ‘He goes there as a private citizen,’ said Fräulein Baum. It was a tiny restaurant with a little garden at the back where one could eat out of doors in summer. Unity knew as if by instinct when he was likely to be there. She followed his doings in the newspapers, chatted to the doorman at the Brown House, looked to see if there was a policeman in the Prinzregentenplatz where he had his flat. If she considered it possible that he would turn up at the Osteria we lunched there. He kept Spanish hours, it was after two o’clock that a couple of black Mercedes cars drew up, he walked in and sat at his table in the corner, accompanied by an adjutant and a few friends. Nothing would induce Unity to leave until he did. She willingly waited an hour and a half if necessary for the pleasure of seeing him go by her table on his way out. Naturally he noticed her; she was what the Germans call auffallend, tall and beautiful.

  Two of the waitresses at the Osteria were her friends; Ella and Rosa. They were like kind old parlourmaids. One day Ella said to Unity: ‘The Führer asked me who you were.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Unity. ‘I hope you said an English Fascist and not just an English student.’

  She urged me on with my German. ‘You will feel such a fool if we meet him and then you can’t understand everything he says.’

  We stood in the crowd outside the Theatinerkirche on the 9th of November to see the ceremony commemorating the sixteen men who had died in the narrow street near the Feldherrnhalle during the 1923 putsch. My English maid went too, and was given a place where she was very near Hitler. ‘What did you think of him?’ we asked.

  ‘Well, he was quite different from what I thought he would be.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He’s got such beautiful hair,’ was the unexpected answer.

  I left Munich after five or six weeks and Unity installed herself in a Studentinnenheim. I was as usual pleased to get back to Eaton Square, with my little boys upstairs and M. rushing in and out and Tom not far away, and to see my friends again.

  I went to the theatre less often than formerly, but Tom and I went to concerts and I was a cinema fan. In the seventies one dreads disgusting films in which people bash and torture, or get eaten alive by sharks, or where every sexual cruelty imagined by Sade in his prison is dwelt upon in revolting detail. In the thirties there were also films to be dreaded; the sugary and embarrassing sentimentality and drivel coming from Hollywood was hard to bear. Sometimes in those days I went to the cinema with Nigel Birch. We chose our films with care, but there was no guarantee that a child, or a dog, would not loom up on the screen. Nigel simply refused to look. He kept a large handkerchief which he put on his head and which hung over his eyes until the scene changed. It was called ‘covering up’. ‘I’m afraid I shall have to cover up,’ he would say, and one told him when the time came for him to uncover again. Henry Yorke, another hypersensitive cinema companion of mine, also detested sentimental scenes; once we had to go out in the middle of a film. It is strange that popular taste should have changed thus radically, from idiotic slush to unendurable violence and violent sex. Presumably the film moguls cater for popular taste, for they must know what fills the coffers.

  I often stayed with Gerald Berners at Faringdon. It was a mecca of beauty and fun, delicious food and comfort. Once I took Jonathan and Desmond with me, a foolhardy enterprise. Forty years later Desmond published a description of this visit: he remembered Gerald’s pigeons dyed saffron yellow, shocking pink and turquoise blue which fluttered about the garden looking exotic, also the printed notice Gerald had found and hung on the stairs: MANGLING DONE HERE. The little boys, aged six and seven, were made to share a bed; it was a huge bed but my heart sank when I saw it. I put a bolster between them, but they were still much too near together and I felt sure there would be a fight or a series of fights. They might very well burst out of their room and fight on the landing, and wake everybody up in the middle of the night. I implored them not to. Desmond recalls, ‘My brother was horrid to me, so clever, and forever reading books with the light on,’ but he adds, ‘there was a magical atmosphere at Faringdon, the house of a musical eccentric.’

  Mrs. Hammersley, with her deep hollow voice and black shawls and veils, always looked and sounded tragic, but in reality she was not only witty and original but often in high spirits. One day she telephoned and asked me to go round; it was when she was living in a house in Tite Street that had been Sargent’s studio. Like all her houses she had made it lovely, and her portrait by Wilson Steer, dressed in a voluminous white satin gown holding a straw hat and sitting beneath a Gainsborough-like tree was shown there to best advantage.

  When I arrived I realized something was very amiss. She was lying on a chaise longue, her face yellow with incipient jaundice, and with tears squeezing out of her tightly-shut eyes. She told me that deep depression had got her in its grip. She said I must talk to her and invent a thrilling journey we could make together; we could motor to Cornwall, for example. I did as I was bid, though the mere idea of motoring to Cornwall with Mrs. Ham, and of the unending complaints, was daunting. However, she did not wish, as the Christian Scientists say, ‘to make a reality of it.’ She simply wanted to be told stories that would help to lift the clouds of misery engulfing her. I did my best. She recovered fairly quickly, and Cornwall was forgotten.

  In the future I was to go through similar agonies with Gerald. It is no good exhorting people suffering from depression to count their blessings, no good telling Mrs. Hammersley how lucky she was to be lying in her lovely drawing-room with friends at beck and call. She knew it already and was none the less in despair. Depression is irrational. Once I said to Gerald: ‘Remember, you’ve been like this before, and you’ve always come out of the tunnel into the light,’ but he replied: ‘One does
n’t always. My mother had depressions and she died in the middle of one.’ I could think of no optimistic rejoinder.

  Boris Anrep, a Russian mosaicist who was a Bloomsbury figure, asked me to be one of the nine muses in a group he was doing for the floor of the National Gallery. Osbert Sitwell sat for Apollo, Clive Bell for Dionysos, and the muses were mostly friends of the artist with the exception of Greta Garbo, a star from a distant firmament. I was to be Polyhymnia, muse of sacred music and of oratory, the latter presumably in honour of M.

  Boris’s floor is still there, one walks upon it every time one visits the gallery. Strangely enough the portraits are very like the models, but the colours are typical dreary Bloomsbury colours. If Anrep, who had real talent, had lived in Paris rather than London after he fled from his own country, his mosaics might have been influenced by the brilliant gaiety of a Matisse rather than by the puritanical muddiness of a Roger Fry.

  One day at about this time I went down to Oxford to visit Roy Harrod and we had a strange adventure. There is a drain, or water tunnel, linking the two branches of the river. Roy hired a boat and we rowed into the tunnel; the arched roof was festooned with ferns and mosses. After a while as we left the entrance behind it became too dark to see much, but it was obvious that the water was high and that we were very near the roof; we crouched in order not to be beheaded, and the space on either side of the boat was too narrow for rowing so Roy shipped his oars. We were carried along by the current. I was profoundly thankful when light appeared and we came out into the sunshine, and I pretended a sang-froid I did not feel when it seemed a distinct possibility that we should drown in the dark.

  Early in 1935 Unity’s wish came true. Hitler, seeing her sitting so often by herself in the Osteria Bavaria, sent over to invite her to join him at the table in the corner. She wrote an ecstatic letter and begged me to come to Munich so that I too could meet Hitler.