Goethe tells in his memoirs, Dichtung und Wahrheit, that the French officers who were billeted in his parents’ house in Frankfurt during the Seven Years’ War used to take him to the Comédie Française, which had taken over a theatre to entertain the troops. The whole of the eighteenth century is in this episode; compared with our own time the change has been notable. First there is the difference between the Comédie Française and Ensa, Racine and Corneille in place of Joyce Grenfell and Vera Lynn. Then when the war was over, if one transposes to the Second World War, Goethe’s parents would most likely have been accused of wicked collaboration if their boy had been taken by German officers in Paris to hear Weber or Mozart or Wagner sung in German. Yet the importance of what happened cannot be overrated; it awoke in Goethe, who was seven when the war began and fourteen when it ended, his passion for the theatre, and for the theatre as a civilizing influence, in which he believed all his life.
I visited Frankfurt for the first time in 1974 for the Book Fair when M.’s book My Life was published in German. (M. made a splendid speech about his European ideas, speaking to a large and crowded hall, in German, without a note, on the same occasion.) I went to see Goethe’s old home, which has been lovingly reconstructed since the bombs. A thousand details from Dichtung und Wahrheit came into my mind in that house. Who can be certain that we do not owe Faust to those French officers? Goethe was always torn between science and art, and devoted an enormous amount of his time to his Farbenlehre (theory of the colours of the spectrum) and his idea of the Urpflanze, the sort of Adam and Eve of all vegetation.
Nancy translated La Princesse de Cléves for Euphorion Books and wrote a long preface, and we published Desmond Stewart’s first novel, Leopard in the Grass. The greatest success Euphorion had was with Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Stuka Pilot. Rudel had performed extraordinary feats with his dive-bomber. He had destroyed more than five hundred Russian tanks, and he had sunk the Russian battleship Marat. Having won all the medals for gallantry a special medal was invented of which he was the unique possessor. Rudel was admired for his skill and bravery by airmen of every country; our edition of Stuka Pilot had a foreword by the English hero Douglas Bader, and the French had a preface by Pierre Clostermann.
M. had his secretaries at Crowood; he was very busy with his writing and the farm. But naturally his chief concern was politics. The day the war ended he said the future of England lay in Europe, united Europe, it must become a great power to match America and Russia. His pre-war vision of a powerful and prosperous British Empire having been thrown to the winds by the politicians, the new vision must take its place.
Ramsbury and the other villages near Crowood were picturesque and country neighbours abounded, but owing to our circumstances we were completely immune from this pest of country life. We had our friends—Gerald at Faringdon, Daisy Fellowes at Donnington, the Betjemans at Wantage. Gerald and Daisy had guests every week-end and there was constant coming and going. Daisy, the daughter of a French duke and an American mother, had bought Donnington at the end of the war. It was a lovely eighteenth-century gothic house; she made it luxuriously comfortable and very pretty. There were strict rules about how much one was allowed to spend on decorating a house.
‘Daisy has been so clever with her £10,’ said Gerald. She even had a cinema in the basement for Monsieur, as she called Reggie Fellowes, who was in a bath chair and unable to dash about as she did.
At the end of the war and for a couple of years afterwards Duff Cooper was British Ambassador in Paris. It was a time when austerity was only tempered by black market, and the embassy must have been an oasis of comfort and fun where friends met and life seemed to have gone back to normal. The moment came when Duff Cooper retired; he and his beautiful wife went away to live at Chantilly and their place in the Faubourg St. Honoré was taken by a duller pair called Harvey. A pro-Cooper faction, of which Nancy was a keen member, never tired of contrasting the brilliant yesterday with the drear today. Daisy, although she was a great friend of both Coopers, evidently thought all this had gone far enough; in any case it gave her an opportunity to tease. One night at Donnington when she had several Paris friends staying and we were dining, she exploded her little bomb. ‘Moi, je trouve que Maudie Harvey est une femme délicieuse.’ Nobody spoke. Daisy fixed Christian Bérard with a beady eye. ‘N’est-ce pas, Bébé? Elle est charmante?’ Bébé wriggled and breathed loudly into his beard. ‘Oui, oui. Tout à fait charmante,’ he said. I could not resist describing this scene in my next letter to Nancy. She was incensed by Daisy’s appalling disloyalty. She reproached Bébé, who was by way of being strongly pro-Cooper. ‘Ah!’ he said sadly, ‘c’est que vous ne connaissez pas le coté punitif de Daisy!’
Not only at Faringdon and Donnington was the company scintillating and the food delicious, we ourselves had a wonderful cook who stayed with us the whole five years we were at Crowood and then went to Debo for another five. Perhaps I speak too often about food in these memoirs of my past life; my excuse is that for so long I was deprived of the joy of ‘eating anything savoury’ as Churchill put it. Ages ago, Eddie Marsh had told me that he and Winston found themselves in a very poor district of Liverpool, and that Winston, looking around at the misery, had said: ‘Imagine how terrible it would be, never to see anything beautiful, never to eat anything savoury, never to say anything clever.’ These words often came back to me when I was in gaol. Prison is a slum from which there is no escape. One cannot, as even the poorest Londoner can, walk on grass in a park, visit a picture gallery, wander by the river, feast the eyes upon the Jones collection at the Victoria and Albert, read in a public library, or worship the scent of lilacs and roses with the sun on them. The best things in life are free, but they are not available to a prisoner. As to saying anything clever, there is nothing intrinsically impossible about that whatever one’s circumstances, but there is no doubt that wit and good talk flourish best at a good table. Gerald provided all these joys, so did Daisy and her guests, and so, I think, did we at Crowood.
The boys were growing up; on Saturdays Max often left Nanny and went to Swindon to watch football. He was a fan of Swindon Town. One day he came back very silent and glum. He had taken his autograph album hoping for the signature of his hero, Tommy Lawton, but had not been able to get near enough to ask. Bob Boothby was staying with us and good naturedly suggested that he might sign the book. ‘I’m very well known,’ he said. M. also offered to sign, saying: ‘I’m famous. Surely Tommy Mosley is just as good as Tommy Lawton?’ Max gave them a withering glance as he put his autograph book in a drawer. ‘No thank you,’ he said.
At the end of the war Nancy wrote her first really successful novel, The Pursuit of Love. She gave it to me to read in typescript and I knew at once that it would be a best-seller. It was romantic and sad but wonderfully funny, all Nancy’s comic genius is in that book and its successor, Love in a Cold Climate. She made Farve into one of the great comic characters of fiction, Uncle Matthew. Soon after The Pursuit of Love came out, when Nancy was still working at Heywood Hill’s bookshop, one of her regular customers, an old Jew from eastern Europe, came to tell her how much he had enjoyed it: ‘Onkel Matthew!’ he cried. ‘E eez my father!’
Nancy told Evelyn Waugh of this unexpected compliment, and Evelyn said: ‘Yes, Uncle Matthew is everyone’s father.’ Farve himself liked being Uncle Matthew, he even went so far as to read the book.
Now that she had made some money Nancy had left the bookshop and gone to live in Paris. In France she was both happy and successful; all her books were best-sellers. Her life had taken a wonderful turn for the better, as she richly deserved that it should. Her cleverness and wit were rewarded financially as well as by the devotion of her friends. She often came to stay at Crowood, dressed by Dior, the glass of fashion. At a meet of the local hounds we heard a little girl say: ‘Look! There’s a lady come out in her dressing-gown!’; so long and voluminous did the new clothes seem after years of wartime parsimony.
In 1945 Nancy t
old everyone she had voted Labour. When the result of the election was declared, belatedly because of the soldiers’ votes, some of Nancy’s friends pretended to think that she, alone and unaided, had brought socialism to Britain. Osbert Sitwell ran into the bookshop and seized the till crying ‘Labour has begun!’ as he carried it into the street.
When Nancy left Blighty, as she called it, for Paris, Evelyn Waugh felt betrayed. Not content with voting socialist, he complained, she had left him to live with the fruit of her folly.
The Betjemans were not very far from Crowood. Gerald Berners was devoted to them, and it is John Betjeman who has best described him, choosing exactly the right things to say, so that those who never knew him can get some idea of this original, gifted, charming man, and understand why he was so beloved by his friends. This is not at all easy, for some reason; his personality is curiously elusive.
Penelope Betjeman organized a mystery play in her village church for which Gerald composed the music; he played the organ during the performance. I asked him about it afterwards, he said it had been a great success. ‘Penelope in her nightgown was God the Father and she chased the children out of the church.’
‘Out of the church?’
‘Yes. You see they were Adam and Eve, and the church was the garden of Eden,’ said Gerald.
Farve practically lived at Inch Kenneth during the war; he and Muv now preferred to live apart. During the war Unity was not allowed to go to the island which was in a defence area, but as soon as restrictions were lifted she and Muv went back there in the summer. Farve, who had become accustomed to being on his own, left for his cottage at Redesdale where he lived for the rest of his days.
As the years went by Unity had reached a certain degree of recovery which was no doubt the maximum possible given the brain damage she had suffered. She was able to drive her car again, and she travelled about and visited friends and sisters. She was apt to forget things; one day on the boat to Oban she found she had left her bag and tickets behind at Inch Kenneth. She went up to the first man she saw and asked him for £10 which he immediately gave her. When she arrived in London she had already lost the address of her benefactor; Muv managed with difficulty to discover him and repay.
Her great amusement during those years was to go from one Christian sect to another, from church to chapel, striking up acquaintances among Catholic priests, Protestant clergymen, Christian Science Readers and so forth, half promising her adherence to each and every one in turn. She never quite settled which to prefer above all others, probably because she knew she could not resist the temptation of change and variety. I am not suggesting that the clergy she frequented were proselytisers who hoped to convert; on the contrary she was doubtless rather a time-waster for them. They were generally patient and often kind. If one asked which she was favouring at the moment she laughed, but it was only half a joke. She was genuinely seeking something or other.
In the spring of 1948 I went with her and Muv to see them off at the station on the night train for Scotland. Unity would have preferred to stay in London; her hobbies were the cinema and church-going and neither was available on the island. Inch Kenneth must have been very dull for her.
I was never to see her again. A few weeks later the old wound in her head began to hurt terribly. Poor Muv took her on a nightmare journey to Oban hospital. She could never bear to speak of it, ever. She telephoned me at Crowood and told me on no account to come, it was too late, Unity was unconscious. An hour or two later she died.
Muv and my sisters all came to Crowood and from there, on one of those brilliant days which mock sorrow, we went to Swinbrook for Unity’s funeral. It was the saddest day of my life. Brave, original and beloved, she had died by her own hand when England declared war on Germany. Great skill and devoted care had inexorably brought her back to life after many weeks, but only to a half-life. She certainly had happy moments, but the main-spring was broken.
After the first grief I think Muv felt a profound relief. Her agonizing worry had always been the thought that when she died there would be nobody to look after Unity. We often spoke of it, and however much I said we would all share it she felt she alone was the right person. Unity had the qualities Muv most admired: fearlessness, generosity, independence, a total absence of deviousness. She was perhaps my mother’s favourite child. ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’ were the words she had carved on the tomb.
A few weeks later M.’s mother died. She had often stayed with us at Crowood and for her last years she too had lived in the country, near her son John in Norfolk. Thus for both M. and me the summer of 1948 was a time of mourning.
20.
ALIANORA
Having been incarcerated for so long we craved the Mediterranean, the feel of hot sun, the taste of French food and a sight of Paris. A spiteful Labour government refused us passports. We applied over and over again, always with the same result. In its little way the Labour government was just as determined to keep us in England as East Germany is to keep its citizens behind the Berlin wall, or as Soviet Russia is to prevent the Jews from leaving. Not allowing free travel is one of the typical features of socialism everywhere.
M. wrote to Brendan Bracken, who replied that the Tories would give us passports when they got back; but in 1947 we could look forward to several years more of Mr. Attlee and his colleagues. An old friend, Hugh Sherwood, raised the matter for us in the House of Lords. Jowitt, the Lord Chancellor, reminded the House that we had never been charged with any offence, let alone convicted of one. Nevertheless the passports were refused.
Daisy Fellowes wrote offering to lend us Les Zoraïdes, her villa on Cap Martin, but we could not accept this kind invitation. Daisy herself often went to the south of France and when she was there she sometimes saw Churchill, who was Reggie Fellowes’s cousin and who stayed with his publisher near Monte Carlo. Apparently one day they were talking about me and Churchill said bitterly: ‘During the war Diana said I ought to be shot.’ Daisy told me this; at first I denied it, then I remembered my outburst to Mr. Hickson the solicitor when everything in the prison had broken down and I was cold and grimy and there was no water and the lavatories were choked and we were locked in with all this so that our circumstances were unbelievably foul. It all came back to me. Yes, I had said it.
Daisy begged me to write to Churchill. She was so insistent that I did so. No sooner had I posted the letter than I regretted it. However a few days later I got a telegram thanking me signed Winston, and then a letter. Fatal as I thought Churchill the politician had been for our country I never ceased to feel something approaching love for Churchill the man. How admirable, for example, was his loyalty to some of his children however eccentric their behaviour and however distressing to him the publicity inevitably surrounding it. He had a great heart.
We spent the month of August 1947 with Muv at Inch Kenneth. We, and my four boys and Nanny, our cook and his wife and two children, she welcomed us all. It chanced to be a hot summer and we even swam in the cold Scotch sea. After dinner it was still day and we used to climb up the Humpies to a height from which, seated on the short and scented grass, one could look out to a sea bathed in the yellow light of sunset upon which floated the other islands of the Inner Hebrides. They seemed to hang between sea and sky. In such weather the Hebrides are beautiful as the Aegean islands, but it seldom lasts and most of the time, clad in oilskins and gumboots, one is battling against wind and driving rain.
The following summer we bought a motor boat and went to the Channel Islands. We made various small journeys in the boat; Daisy stayed with us on board, and Robert Heber-Percy, and Muv, at various times.
M. had an idea. He discovered that under Magna Carta a British subject has the right in peacetime to leave his country at will and return to it at will. Nobody has the power to stop him, it is a right enshrined in ancient law; it has nothing to do with the rather absurd Atlantic Charter cooked up by Churchill and Roosevelt. Despite this right, however, no aeroplane or ship w
ill carry you away from the British Isles unless you have a passport issued by the Foreign Office. As all the world knows, the Foreign Office at that time harboured a nest of communists, some of whom were Soviet agents: Maclean, Burgess and Philby among them.
The only answer to our dilemma was to buy a boat of our own and simply sail away. M. bought a sixty-ton ketch, the Alianora, whose owner had built her to withstand the storms of the Atlantic west of Ireland. He engaged a skipper and an engineer and explained our circumstances to them, that we should have to slip away quietly. He sent a man to Portugal and Spain to ask whether we should be allowed ashore if we arrived with no passports, and the Portuguese and Spaniards said certainly we could come. We stocked the yacht with tinned food and supplies, and prepared to set forth in the early summer of 1949.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 25