During the long time I was locked up with them I got to know these women and girls very well indeed. They were all ages from eighteen to sixty-five, from all classes, from every part of England; some intelligent, others less so, but they had without exception one thing in common: love of country. The idea that they could in any circumstances have betrayed our country was quite simply incredible. It was an idea which came from the political Left which has itself so often harboured traitors, and the people whom Churchill once called ‘the race of degenerate intellectuals of whom our island has produced during several generations an unfailing succession—those very high intellectual persons who, when they wake up every morning, have looked around upon the British inheritance, whatever it was, to see what they could find to demolish, to undermine or to cast away.’22 In 1940 Churchill was in coalition with these people, and although he had the decency to say in parliament that he doubted whether there had ever been a fifth column in England he was apparently obliged to keep us in prison in order to placate them.
I shall mention no names of my fellow-prisoners. Even at this late date, it might injure them in some way.
There was discussion about a cell; there was an empty one on the top floor and to this I was taken. After some whispering between wardresses I was told that after all I must have a cell in the basement. It had not been used because the tiny barred window was completely covered by sandbags; the cell was below ground level and the window, high in its wall, was in the middle of an immense pile of rotting sandbags so that no air could penetrate. The floor was awash; someone had emptied a pail in a primitive attempt to remove some of the encrusted dirt. On the wet floor a thin and lumpy mattress was put; there was no bed. A moment later came the crashes of cell doors being banged shut, then silence fell. I was in pain and the mattress was not very attractive, being both damp and hard. I sat on it and leant against the wall, making no attempt to undress. I could not sleep. I thought of my two babies, and my boys, and M. I wondered if he knew about my arrest. Probably not; probably he had gone to sleep in his bug-infested cell imagining me in my four-post bed at Denham, air scented with honeysuckle coming through the open windows.
There is a frightening look about the metal door of a prison cell because it has no handle on the inside. A small hole enables a wardress to peep in at will. In the wall there is a bit of painted metal about three inches long hanging down; this is the bell; and in the ceiling a naked electric bulb of feeble wattage. A couple of hours later the light was turned off from outside.
After what seemed an eternity, for though daylight came early none filtered through the sandbags, there was a clatter of cell doors being unlocked. The wardress shouted into each cell the words, ‘Are you all right?’ and hurried on her way. I discovered later that this was the only moment of the day when it was in order to ask to see a doctor, or the governor. If one was not ‘all right’ one had to watch the door lynx-eyed in order to capture this fleeting second when the wardress and her notebook were available. A groan from the bed would pass completely unnoticed because of the tearing hurry of the wardress, longing to rush off for her cup of tea.
A crowd of kind B.U. women came to my cell and offered me all manner of delicacies such as biscuits and cocoa, all of which I refused. I was afraid to drink and was not hungry. I ached all over. The great worry was the filth and grime. I washed my hands but they did not seem clean. One had so often been warned by doctors and nurses about the danger of infection and fever in my condition. Nevertheless, and despite the misery of not having the sweet baby, I was profoundly thankful that I had not brought him with me. It was a surprise that the prison should be so dirty; a sort of hospital-like bleak cleanliness was what I had vaguely envisaged. Unlike the Brixton cells, our cells were not infested with vermin, but the whole place was foul beyond words and efforts by the 18B prisoners to clean it had been only partly successful. The lavatories were disgusting and there were queues for them.
A wardress appeared and told me I was to be moved; I was taken to E Wing. In F Wing there were English women, the vast majority being members of B.U. with a few of Captain Ramsay’s Right Club members. E Wing was fairly empty; there were Germans and Italians imprisoned under Regulation 18B rather than as enemy aliens because they had English passports; most of them were the wives of British subjects. I was given a cell upstairs; it was light but dirty. A wardress came with a filthy grey rag and told me to clean the landing. This I refused to do because I was in pain and could not stoop; to move my arms hurt very much. She did not insist; it must have been a little private enterprise on her part because the warddresses never interfered with the prisoners’ arrangements for cleaning or not cleaning their cells and the landings. She knew who I was and probably hoped to annoy.
After a time a wardress accompanied by a convict came to my cell with my ‘dinner’. I was given a pat of margarine, some sugar in a pot and a bit of bread; also a revolting greasy metal container in two parts. The upper part had some small black potatoes with traces of earth upon their wrinkled skins and some yellowish straw-like strings which had probably once been a very old cabbage. When one lifted this tray and looked beneath, the gorge rose; oily greyish water in which swam a few bits of darker grey gristle and meat. The margarine had an exceptionally disgusting taste, as I quickly discovered. I ate the bread and some sugar on it. The wardress and the convict came and collected the tin and its untouched contents and I went and stood on the landing and looked about me. I had almost finished my book and wanted to save a few pages. I became aware that somebody on the landing below was trying to catch my attention; she held up a newspaper for me to see, the Sunday Express. The banner headline read LADY MOSLEY ARRESTED AT LAST. My thoughts flew to Jonathan; how would it be with him at his unloved school? Would he be bullied on my account? He was only ten. Long afterwards I discovered that Gerald Berners, with rare and sensitive kindness, had been to Summer Fields and taken him out for a treat. Oxford was full of posters about my arrest; Gerald tried to divert his attention and they spent the afternoon in a tea shop.
I soon realized that the policewoman’s ‘week-end’ was fantasy, and that I was in Holloway to stay. After a couple of days I began to feel better and soon after that almost well. I was no longer confined to my cell and the landing but was allowed to mix freely with my fellow prisoners and to read what the Sunday papers had to say about my arrest: ‘Goering’s ideal woman’ and similar rubbish, carefully designed to engender the maximum prejudice and dislike in its readers.
E Wing led on to a sort of apology for a garden. It was very dungeon-like and in fact, though I only discovered this later, it contained what journalists call ‘the hanging shed’. I had imagined this as a separate building within the precincts. The condemned cell, which comprised two cells, led straight into a third cell with a trap door in the floor, the ‘drop’ through which the hanged woman fell. There was a sinister empty cell below. Once when E Wing was being used as a parcel depot the door of the condemned cell stood open and I had a quick look inside before a hurrying wardress banged it shut. The furniture was not the regulation chair, table and bed. It looked more like a very cheap lodging house furnished from the Caledonian Market. This was probably the doing of some well-meaning Prison Commissioner; the only result was that its comic appearance seemed to make it even more sickeningly tragic.
The ground floor cells were really basements and in the ditch outside ivy and laurels grew in profusion. This was the only part of the prison I rather liked; the dark green leaves and the old grey stones were lovely and reminded one of parts of the Forum; I used to imagine myself back in Rome in happier days.
As the status of prisoners held under Regulation 18B was that of prisoners on remand we not only wore our own clothes but could have parcels and food sent into the prison. Everything had to be searched, and a combination of too few censors and a good dose of spite meant that the parcels took a long time to reach the prisoner; this was particularly tiresome in the case of some book one was impatie
ntly waiting for. During these early days in E Wing I was invited to partake of food cooked by a brilliant German cook. She and several others had been there for months and they were well-organized. Rationing was not strict in 1940. One could get eggs, olive oil, charcuterie, almost everything except meat and butter.
The Home Office allowed us to send and receive two letters a week. I asked that I should have one from M. and one from Nanny; I was frantic to know how the babies were faring, and Nanny would also send news of Jonathan and Desmond. So it was that for several months I had no letters from friends or from sisters; I had no idea which of them had written. When at last the rule about receiving two letters was relaxed, I was given a heap which had languished in the censors’ lair unread except by them. The friends whose letters were post-marked the day my arrest was reported were Henry Yorke, Robert Heber-Percy, Mary Dunn, Gerald Berners. It was brave of them to write. Gerald’s letter had evidently been read and reread; it was dirty and full of pin-holes. One soon saw why. ‘What can I send you?’ he wrote. ‘Would you like a little file concealed in a peach?’
After a time I was taken back to F Wing. I was given a corner cell on the third floor. It had a tiny gothic window instead of the usual square window with shallow Roman arch. Like them it was high up near the ceiling, one had to climb on the table in order to see out and then there was nothing but a prison view. Two small leaded panes could be opened for air; this never worried me because the prison was so cold, even in summer, that my requests to my faithful visitors—usually Muv, sometimes Pam—were for woollen clothes and hot water bottles. Somehow this became known, and Driberg put a sarcastic paragraph in his Hickey column. As it was in August I suppose it ranked as a joke. Long afterwards the governor admitted that many hot water bottles had arrived at the prison; none of them reached me, but the news of them warmed my heart.
Some old House of Commons friends visited M. in Brixton: James Maxton the I.L.P. leader, Bob Boothby and Walter Monckton. The latter also came to Holloway to see me. To my first question, how did he find M., Walter replied, ‘Oh, all the old brilliance.’
The cells were six feet by nine; each contained a hard bed, a hard chair and a small heavy table. Under the bed was a chipped enamel chamber pot with a lid upon which in dark blue was a crown and the royal cipher. There was a battered jug and basin and a small three-cornered shelf. The sheets were made of canvas, painful if it touched one’s chin.
Before I arrived the 18Bs had decided to eat together at trestle tables set up in the space between the cells on the ground floor. They took it in turns to fetch the food in huge metal containers from the prison kitchen, and to wash up. Washing up was a nasty affair, the plates were battered enamel, the forks bent and old, there was no soap and very little hot water. As soon as I decently could I abandoned this, communal style of living. I got a china plate of my own and avoided the dreadful enamel. In any case I could not eat the prison food, except for the delicious bully beef; I made my ration of this last several days, otherwise I lived on prison bread and Stilton cheese sent me by M. We all shared our parcels from friends and relations. On my bread and cheese diet I became very thin though I was quite well; however it was partly to blame for something I afterwards regretted.
Although there was no trial for 18Bs since they had committed no offence and could be charged with no crime, there was an Advisory Committee which heard each prisoner and advised the Home Secretary as to whether he or she should be released. He was not bound to take the advice of the Committee; the Home Secretary was a little autocrat whose word, or whim, was law. Dozens of B.U. women were released as the autumn of 1940 wore on; they had been arrested during the panic in May and June. I fully expected to be released myself. I imagined that when the authorities had had a good hunt among all our belongings, and had broken open our safes and looked at what they contained, and had searched our bank accounts (which they had frozen) and everything connected with our private lives as well as studying M.’s speeches, articles and books, that they would certainly release us. I supposed that there would be a rule against free speech for the remainder of the war.
The Advisory Committee was presided over by Norman Birkett, a lawyer who had been readily scored off by M. a few years before when he appeared for the Star in a libel action brought by M., who had won the case and had been awarded £5,000 damages and costs against the newspaper. The Committee sat in a house in Burlington Gardens, which was destroyed by a bomb. For this reason I did not appear before it until the autumn. By then, with M. still in prison after a hearing of several days the previous July, I could not take it seriously. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that our politicians behaved in a totally dishonest way, first of all in arresting us and later, far more dishonestly yet, in holding us silent in prison after the panic about invasion had died down. British Union was a patriotic, possibly too nationalistic movement; we thought the war a tragic mistake, but nothing could ever have induced any of us to harm our own country; it would have run counter to our deepest feelings and beliefs. I was convinced that Churchill knew this perfectly well; he was the prisoner of his coalition with M.’s old enemies in the Labour Party. As to Birkett, a mealy-mouthed Nonconformist, he was in my opinion the paid creature of these unprincipled men.
Therefore when I heard I was to be taken to Ascot, where the Committee was now installed, I looked upon it as a delightful outing. I had been told that the hearing was to be in a requisitioned hotel, and that one could have luncheon there. When I set off with my escort on a heavenly morning in October I felt I was on pleasure bent. I thought more about the menu than the Committee. A low diet generates fantasies about feasting.
The Advisory Committee consisted of Birkett, who was chairman, Sir Arthur Hazlerigg and Sir George Clerk. I had not seen Sir George Clerk since lunching with him ten years before at our embassy in Constantinople where he was Ambassador. Hazlerigg was a dear old boy who blinked in friendly fashion.
Birkett’s line was to ask silly questions about Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and other National Socialists among my acquaintance. Why had we been married in Berlin? Because we wanted to keep the marriage secret for a while. Why had Hitler arranged this for us? Because I asked him to. Birkett pounced. ‘This friend of yours is now bombing London.’ I said that since Britain had declared war on Germany and we had bombed Berlin it was rather obvious that the Germans would bomb London. Birkett asked me when I had last seen Hitler. In Bayreuth in August 1939, I replied. And what had I said to him about Britain? Had I said that Britain would not fight? I replied that Hitler told me that he was certain Britain would declare war; he was convinced of it. There was a theory current at that time, which even now crops up, to the effect that Hitler had been deceived by Ribbentrop into imagining that England was decadent, or at any rate not prepared to fight. I have naturally no idea what Ribbentrop may have told Hitler; all I know is that Hitler saw what was perfectly obvious to everyone, that the English guarantee to Poland, even if it was not much help to the Poles, had made war practically inevitable. Birkett seemed rather put out; possibly he was one of those who preferred to believe a myth.
The whole thing lasted about an hour. At the end Birkett said: ‘Your husband was very worried about your health when we saw him in July.’ I said: ‘Thank you, I am perfectly well now.’ I regretted this subsequently. It is a fault of our upbringing that it should be considered unthinkable to allow the enemy to see that he has crushed one, or to admit to weakness, misery or despair. This should have been my cue. Instead of thinking about driving out of London and seeing woods and fields and ordering luncheon in an hotel, I ought to have prepared a devastating indictment of the unprincipled politicians and their disgraceful behaviour with an unvarnished description of the foulness of the prison. I ought to have enlarged upon the monstrosity of a system which could imprison innocent people and hold indefinitely the mother of four young children. From these dishonest politicians and this monstrous system no court in the land could protect one. It was the t
riumph of rumour, gossip, spite and lying tongues, and it was done in the dark, underhand, where the light of reason and truth could not penetrate.
I do not suppose for one moment that my words would have moved Mr. Birkett, but Sir Arthur Hazlerigg and Sir George Clerk would at least have been made to feel uncomfortable, and they might even have put in a plea for me and my companions. As it was, they did perhaps have a glimmer of something like remorse. When the moment came for the famous luncheon, brought on a tray to the stables where my wardress had taken me, I was touched by being given a bottle of claret ‘with the compliments of Sir Arthur Hazlerigg’. The food was mediocre, as was inevitable. How could I have ever dreamed it would be otherwise?
While we were held silent in gaol the gutter press hit upon a new way to whip up popular prejudice against us. There were articles saying that at a time when the entire population was cheerfully putting up with wartime austerity, we were living in idle luxury. M. in Brixton ‘called for alternate bottles of red and white wine’, while the Holloway prison dustbins were choked with empty champagne bottles after our orgies.
Prisoners on remand, which was our status, are allowed a bottle of beer or half a bottle of wine a day, if they care to pay for it. Spirits are forbidden. I ordered some half bottles of port, which were doled out one by one. A glass of grocer’s port and a bit of Stilton cheese helped me through many a sad evening, locked in my cell and sitting on my hard bed freezing with cold and straining my eyes to read by the tiny dim ceiling light. In M.’s next letter after these newspaper stories he said he had had no wine or beer at Brixton and that we should bring a joint action for libel. Fortunately my port did not wreck his plans. The hearing of the libel action provided another delightful outing, more wonderful by far than the visit to Ascot because for the first time since my arrest I was to see my beloved.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 21