We were given our rations raw, so that one could make quite eatable food. As to the cabbage patch, the men transformed it into a productive kitchen garden. We grew exotic delicacies like the Jersey pea-bean, and fraises des bois. M. got dozens of books on gardening and in one of them he read that weeds, far from being noxious, are an excellent help and make the pea-beans grow. As he did not care for weeding he adopted this theory with enthusiasm; his end of the garden was wildly untidy, but Major de Laessoe’s was like the photographs in a seedsman’s catalogue. I think Major de Laessoe suffered slightly; he loved order and neatness and he worked in his garden for hours and probably wished M. had not come across his unorthodox book, but he was far too loyal to say so.
Into this place we were locked for a further two years. We saw the seasons come and go. We walked round and round our yard, sometimes in snow or fog, sometimes in rain and wind or in the airless heat of a London summer. There was a single tree; the leaves and the pattern they made against the sky were the one beauty. We read enormously; M. had learnt German. He loved the German neo-Hellenists and the English neo-Hellenists, and he read history, economics, poetry, psychology and plays. He loved Faust and Wallenstein and learnt passages by heart. In Bernard Shaw’s opinion prison is less horrible than school, because in prison they do not torture your mind by obliging you to read books written by the Governor or the warders. There is a good deal in his theory. The high thinking we were able to indulge in compensated in some measure for the low living. To have had to read the collected works of our gaolers, Dr. Mathieson, Miss Manley, Herbert Morrison, and Sir John Anderson would have been no joke. All the same, at school there are holidays.
We both pined for freedom, and I pined for my children, more and more as years went by. M. was very thin and he got painful phlebitis. He was far from well.
Needless to say, our new circumstances had not passed unnoticed. The yellow press managed to make it sound once again as if we were living in unimaginable luxury, and (to annoy the readers further) at the taxpayers’ expense. A favourite newspaper word is ‘suite’; it conveys a vision of glamour and comfort, Noël Coward-like dressing-gowns, lace-encrusted négligés. Therefore our cells were described as a suite. Muv, coming to see us on a bus, was amused by the conductor’s calling:
‘Holloway gaol! Lady Mosley’s suite! All change here.’ She was less amused by a huge poster not far from the prison gate: ‘YOUR FREEDOM IS IN DANGER. Lend to defend the right to be free.’
During one bitter winter I became so ill with persistent diarrhoea that M. asked the Home Office to allow my doctor to see me. When permission came I could think of no one except Dr. Bevan; he had been Lady Evelyn’s doctor. He was quite hopeless. The Governor had given him a good brain-washing before he got to me. In my cell the thermometer stood at freezing point; we had heat in our sitting-room but the block was unheated as a war-time economy. Dr. Bevan said, ‘You need a milk diet and warmth. You should go to the prison hospital, it’s warmer there, and they can’t allow you milk unless you do.’ Our ration was a quarter of a pint; the old days of milk from a shop in waxed cardboard were long past; everything was now rationed. I had heard grim tales about the prison hospital where the dyed female doctor held sway. I determined on no account to go; and in any case if I did who was to look after M.? I dreaded being released without him, he was ill and the thought of him going back to Brixton terrified me. After poor silly useless Dr. Bevan had gone I told Miss Davis, a wardress I was fond of, what had happened.
‘Can you imagine,’ I said. ‘The Governor managed to make Dr. Bevan believe that there’s a lovely hospital here.’
‘It’s not so much the hospital,’ said Miss Davis meaningfully. ‘It’s the people in it.’
One evening I was so exhausted by diarrhoea and in so much pain that M. went down to consult Major de Laessoe. After the first war in which he had served with such distinction Major de Laessoe had made his life in Angola. He had recently been given permission to bring a trunk containing all his worldly goods into the prison from a store; he and Mrs. de Laessoe wished to save what clothes they had from being eaten by moths. Among other things this trunk contained Major de Laessoe’s medicine chest from his days in Africa. He said to M. ‘I’ve got the very thing, a pill I used to take if I got dysentery travelling in the bush.’
M. gave me Major de Laessoe’s pill and I got into bed. It was as if I had been hit on the head; semi-unconscious I never moved all night long. M. slept peacefully until quite late. When he awoke he was frightened by what he saw. I was lying in exactly the position I had been in after I swallowed the pill. He spoke to me, touched me, but I did not wake. He flew for a wardress and asked for a doctor. A woman doctor came, not the one with the long red nails but a nice, clever, sensible young woman; I believe she is now a life peeress. M. showed her the bottle from which the pill had come; she questioned Major de Laessoe. The pills were opium, and very old. The doctor said some drugs change over the years, becoming either weaker or more potent. This opium pill was strong; a little more and it would have been the end of me. I was suffering from opium poisoning. Disagreeable though it was it nevertheless gave me a couple of days’ respite from my other misery. My perfect digestion was almost ruined in prison; for many years afterwards I suffered intermittently from it. When this happened I followed the régime prescribed by Mme de Sévigné for M. de Grignan in like case three hundred years ago: nothing but plain boiled rice. As she truly said, it was ‘adoucissant’. But during the war rice was unobtainable.
A wardress and two convicts came to clean the block; we were not supposed to talk to the convicts but naturally I always did. ‘Don’t worry about them,’ Miss Davis had said. ‘You don’t want petty pilfering so I’m sending sex offenders; they are always clean and honest.’ One of them, a pretty woman of about thirty-five, told me she was a bigamist. It had happened by mistake she said and she had been sentenced to nine months. She said something very true:
‘Prison is not the same punishment for everyone. There are women here who are glad to have something to eat and a bed to sleep in.’ To her, it was clearly a terrible punishment, the wearing of the stained clothes and in every other way. But I told her she was lucky to be able to count the days until her release. ‘We seem to be here for life,’ I said.
Visiting rules were now relaxed. Nicky, who had left Eton and joined the Rifle Brigade, was allowed to come for the day every time he got leave. M. loved talking with him about his new passion, neo-Hellenism. Nicky, whose mind is unlike M.’s, was clever and receptive enough to be an ideal companion at that time. Jonathan and Desmond came in the holidays; they stayed with Nancy who was working at Heywood Hill’s bookshop. Their visits were unalloyed joy. Nancy sent me books; Cherry Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World still conjures up prison days for me. People sent me their books when they were published; Evelyn Waugh sent Work Suspended, Gerald Berners Far from the Madding War. Such small attentions made me feel not quite forgotten in our living tomb. Another benefactor was Derek Hill, who sent me drawings of Jonathan and Desmond. I had them framed and they gave me great pleasure.
A visiting pass marked ‘Lady Andrew’ was for Debo, now married to Andrew Cavendish. She ran across the yard with two graceful whippets. Nancy, Pam, Unity, all came; and Tom whenever he was in England. Also a few friends: Henry and Dig Yorke, Gerald Berners.
In 1943 the Home Office gave permission for Alexander and Max, now aged four and three, to come and stay with us in the prison for two nights. Adorable though exhausting, the little boys rushed up and down stairs and trampled on Major de Laessoe’s neat garden. Mrs. de Laessoe gave them her whole ration of sweets. The second time they came they did not want to leave. Alexander clung, and when he had been torn away there were tears where he had pressed his face against my skirt. I decided—a terrible decision for me—not to allow any more of these visits, which seemed to do more harm than good. Before many weeks went by fate intervened.
As M.’s health was visibly fail
ing, and since Tom was abroad with his regiment, I asked Muv if she would go and see Clementine Churchill just to make certain that the facts about M.’s illness should be known. We knew, because Randolph had said it to Tom many times, that Churchill himself wanted to release us. I was afraid for M. that winter.
Muv was extremely reluctant; she hated to seem to be asking a favour of people whom she regarded in a very poor light. She looked upon Churchill as one of the architects of the war itself, quite apart from his disgraceful complicity in our imprisonment. However, she did go. Needless to say, Clementine irritated her beyond measure, first by remarking: ‘Winston has always been so fond of Diana,’ and then by saying that we were better off in prison, because if we were released the furious populace would be after us. Muv replied that we were perfectly willing to risk that. I can picture her cold and proud demeanour. The two had known each other for a long time; Clementine had been one of my mother’s bridesmaids nearly forty years before.
Whether this démarche had any result I do not know, what is certain is that the report of Dr. Geoffrey Evans who came to the prison to examine M. gave the Home Office a fright. He said that if M. got a chill, or influenza, in his present condition he would not answer for the consequences.
On a dark, cold morning in November 1943 I was standing by the kitchen stove making porridge when Miss Baxter rushed in, threw her arms round me and said: ‘You’re released!’ She was in tears.
‘How do you know?’
‘I heard it just now on the wireless,’ said Miss Baxter. I flew to M. and told him. It was like coming to the end of a dark tunnel and seeing a glimmer of sunshine. I was filled with inexpressible joy; M. was saved, our own particular nightmare was over, life was to start again with the family re-united, even though the war dragged on.
The Governor came and told us details. There were many restrictions; we must not be in London but must go to the country, somewhere approved by the Home Office, and there we should be under house arrest and not permitted to travel. We were not to see any of our former political associates. No motor car was allowed. We were not to give interviews to the press. Denham was occupied by the War Office, our flat was in London, Muv was living in a minute cottage with Unity, Nancy was in London, Debo was following the drum. We asked Pam and Derek. In their usual splendid way they immediately said yes. The Home Office agreed.
Meanwhile outside the main gate of the prison a crowd of reporters and photographers had gathered. They erected a scaffold which was manned night and day, waiting for us to appear. Communists began to organize protest marches (Nancy said that in order to get into an underground station she had to chant: ‘Put him back, put him back.’). Only on the third day, before it was light, did two police cars drive us away; we were led in pitch darkness across the whole prison compound to a little door in the wall outside which the motors were waiting with their engines running. We were driven fast through the dark, sleeping city; the police kept looking behind them but we had given the journalists the slip. As day broke and revealed the frosty country landscape M. and I thought that nothing so beautiful was ever seen by human eye.
At Rignell a wonderful welcome awaited us. Derek had got leave, Muv used her month’s allowance of petrol and came over with Debo. We had delicious food, beautiful wine, talk, laughter, perfect happiness. Then, for the first time for three and a half years, we slept in soft, fine linen in soft, warm beds.
With disgraceful cynicism the Home Office gave Major and Mrs. de Laessoe an order of release the very day we were freed. Nothing could have been more obvious: they were released in order that the P.D. Block could be emptied and shut. Penniless, and with nowhere to go, or possibility of getting a job (they were in their sixties) they must have been desperately worried. However a kind former 18B, Iris Ryder, took them in. All this I discovered later; no contact between us and them was allowed.
Bernard Shaw was the only public figure who openly mocked our adversaries. Asked: ‘Would you think it too strong to say that the Home Secretary’s decision… is calculated to cause alarm and despondency among the masses of the people who responded to his exhortation to “go to it”? he replied: “I do not think it is a strong proposition at all. It makes me suspect that you are mentally defective. I think this Mosley panic shameful…. Even if Mosley were in rude health, it was high time to release him with apologies for having let him frighten us into scrapping the Habeas Corpus Act. Mr. Morrison has not justified the outrageous conditions—the gag in Mosley’s mouth and the seven-mile leg-iron. We are still afraid to let Mosley defend himself and have produced the ridiculous situation in which we may buy Hitler’s Mein Kampf in any bookshop in Britain, but may not buy ten lines written by Mosley.”’
I never went back to Holloway to see my friends Miss Andrews, Miss Baxter and Miss Davis, but many years later a prison visitor, Anne Tree, told me Miss Davis had said to her: ‘We’ve never had such laughs since Lady Mosley left.’
18.
CRUXEASTON
At Rignell we made M. stay in bed. He was weak and desperately thin. The newspapers took various points of view about our release, all more or less hostile. The Daily Worker had an article saying I should be put back in prison at once because I was ‘in rude and vigorous health’. This was illustrated with a photograph; I recognized it as having appeared some years before in a magazine, of me and Randolph at the Derby. The Daily Worker had cut Randolph out. I certainly looked blooming with health in the photograph.
It was not long before the journalists discovered our whereabouts. They laid siege to Rignell; every laurel, shrub and hedge or ditch concealed some unfortunate half-frozen reporter. They got little change from the near-by villages because nobody had seen us arrive. They made up thrilling stories about a mansion, and baying hounds. The baying hounds were the Jacksons’ dachshunds, Wüde and Hamelin. Finally they chucked it and went away. M. stayed in bed, partly in order to cheat the journalists of their prey and partly because he was very weak.
I was able to see Alexander on his fifth birthday a day or two later; Muv had a little party for him at the cottage. Nanny had dressed him and Max in party clothes that had belonged to the older boys in palmier days; plum coloured moiré with white chiffon jabots. They looked happy; they knew there were to be no more heartrending partings.
We had not been many days at Rignell when the Home Office moved us in a hurry. Derek was doing secret scientific work for the Air Ministry, and according to their mythology we had been ‘directed’ to the wrong house. Derek, who had won several medals for gallantry as a rear-gunner in the R.A.F., was sarcastic to the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, and told him he required no lessons in patriotism from a man who had spent the first war dodging about in an apple orchard. However, we had to go.
We found an inn at Shipton-under-Wychwood, the innkeeper used the bar but the rest was empty. Into the Shaven Crown we moved, with Nanny, Alexander and Max, and when the holidays began we were joined by Jonathan and Desmond, and there we spent Christmas, our first free Christmas since 1939. For the feast on Christmas Day we all squeezed into the Swinbrook cottage with Muv and Unity.
The newspapers went on with their absurd tales, and one day a photographer who had been hiding in some nettles jumped out and got a picture of M. carrying coal across a yard. They said we were living in an immense hotel, they made it sound rich and luxurious. But they also said that nobody would work for us so that I was obliged to do all the work myself. It was quite one of their best efforts. It conjured up a vision of me living in a country Ritz with my large family, keeping the enormous place clean all by myself as well as cooking and shopping and minding the children. The result of these newspaper stories was a flood of letters from people who wanted to come as cooks and butlers and housemaids. At breakfast each morning I read the letters aloud; the applicants gave themselves glowing references. Nanny was scornful: ‘H’m. She sounds pleased with herself,’ she said. Among the dross there was one golden letter, it came from a former cook of Gerald
’s, Mrs. Nelson. She had been his London housekeeper and when I stayed at Halkin Street she used to chat when she brought my breakfast tray. She and her husband came; they only stayed a few months but they saw us into our next house.
All the boys got whooping cough at the Shaven Crown; Alexander was really ill. The Burford doctor of our childhood days, Dr. Cheatle, came. He brought us gifts of eggs as well as medical advice, and he told us news of a petition which the local communist was trying to organize, objecting to our presence at Shipton. ‘None of the village people have signed,’ said Dr. Cheatle.
Gerald came to stay. I said, ‘Are you frightened of germs? The boys have got whooping cough.’ ‘No, I’m not frightened of germs I’m frightened of bombs,’ was the answer. I loved his visit except that I knew we were not making him comfortable.
We laughed and talked and went for little walks. I was not allowed to go to him at Faringdon, it was miles out of bounds. One morning Muv telephoned. I went back to the sittingroom and said: ‘Bad news.’
Jonathan looked up from his book. ‘Bad news! No sausages at Hammett’s?’ in anguished tones. Sausages, the only unrationed ‘meat’, were infinitely precious.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 23