A few days before we were due to sail the Foreign Office suddenly told our solicitor, Mr. Lane, that we could have passports after all. We had made no secret of our plans, and presumably the politicians had been informed by their lawyers that we were fully entitled to make fools of them in this way and frustrate their knavish tricks. We were delighted to have the passports, denied us for four years after the war ended, because now we could land anywhere we wished.
We set sail in June, with Alexander and Max, aged ten and nine; Max, who had just had his tonsils out, looked white and ill. Unlike Muv, I am no sailor and rather hate being at sea; our journey was rough to begin with. After the rigours of the Bay of Biscay we turned into the calm estuary of the Gironde, and guided by a pilot, for there were wrecks here and there left over from the war, we sat on deck gazing at the historic vineyards which have given so much innocent pleasure to mankind in general and the English in particular.
Bordeaux is a delightful city of noble aspect and with some of the best restaurants in France. It was a disappointment that the boys did not enjoy the fare. The only compliment from either of them was when Max said at the end of a superb dinner: ‘This plain ice is almost as good as them I gets down the village.’ He spoke with purest Wiltshire accent.
As to M. and me, our happiness was boundless. A boat of one’s own gives an intense feeling of complete freedom provided by no other form of travel. We were in our beloved France surrounded by every possible beauty and perfection; the sun shone; we were on our way to the Mediterranean. Our next port of call was Corunna, then Lisbon. We hoisted our sails and stopped the engines. A following wind sent us rushing silently through the sea: a new sensation; the ship seemed to come alive.
The yacht basin at Lisbon is unique, just near the monastery and great church of Belem. As at Bordeaux we lived on board and spent our days sight-seeing ashore. We went over to Estoril for a swim; there were severe rules about bathing clothes. As M. only possessed pants, which were forbidden, I walked into the sea with him and whisked away his dressing-gown as he slipped into the water. That evening we dined with Portuguese friends and I asked what would have happened if he had been caught bathing topless by the beach guards. Their reply made my blood run cold: ‘Une forte amende.’ We were very short of foreign currency; I cannot remember how much one was allowed that year, but in any case a heavy fine at Estoril would have been a body blow.
Outside Tangier we ran into a wild storm. We were all sea-sick except Alexander. I could hear him, when for an instant there was a lull, pattering about over my head on deck. I dragged myself out of bed and managed to warn him to look out for himself. Waves were breaking over the deck and if he was swept overboard he could never be picked up in the dark in such a rough sea. He reassured me; he was strong and agile. He was as happy in the storm as the rest of us were miserable.
In Tangier harbour the wind still blew and the boat danced about; there is no shelter and it is easy to understand that when Catherine of Braganza brought Tangier to England as part of her dowry English sailors valued it lightly. Gibraltar is a very different matter; deep and calm. In Gibraltar there were some repairs to be done after the storm. It is a dreary place, and the food in the restaurants of the strong tea and Brown Windsor variety. M. and I took a train to Madrid.
We were received with the utmost kindness by Serrano Suñer and his beautiful wife Zita. Madrid was baking hot and one night they gave a dinner for us in the country, up in the hills. On the way we stopped at the Escurial; our host had the church opened. The menacing gloom of Philip II’s edifice was enhanced by the mysterious darkness as we stood by the grave of José Antonio.
Spanish hours are so late that by the time we got back to Madrid it was past three. To my astonishment children were playing in the street near our hotel. ‘Their parents let them out because it is the coolest hour,’ we were told.
I had never been to Madrid before and was therefore seeing the Prado in all its glorious splendour for the first time in my life. I decided to go back there as soon as I possibly could, and I have often been since to see our Spanish friends, and eat at Horcher’s superb restaurant, and re-visit the Prado.
We found Alianora and the boys once more at Formentor in Majorca. The coast, the silvery sand on the beaches, and the rich, fertile interior made the place in those days a paradise on earth. I have no desire to see this island smothered in villas and hotels, preferring the memory of what it was.
After a week we sailed away, this time for France. We landed at Cassis. Nancy was staying with the Tvedes at Monredon; she and Mogens came to greet us. Mogens’s wife Dolly was dreadfully worried because Nancy had told her that every communist in nearby Marseilles would be on the alert for our arrival, and that if it became known that we had been so much as to tea with her the cottage would instantly be burnt down. Nancy’s love of teasing had not diminished with the years, and she had every reason to be pleased by the effect she produced upon her hostess. She told me with delighted shrieks how she had succeeded in frightening the unfortunate Dolly.
However Dolly bravely invited us, and we had a swim from the rather dirty beach the other side of the main Marseilles road. At the cottage Nancy had got some tree frogs in a glass box, she fed them with mosquitoes. At night the mosquitoes avenged the death of their fellows by stinging. D.D.T. had been invented and every evening after dinner, according to Mogens, Nancy said: ‘Spray Mogens, spray!’ and he sprayed the bedrooms. We used similar sprays in our cabins, but the smell was so foul that I preferred the mosquitoes.
Nancy was completely happy with the Tvedes at Monredon. She never noticed the busy main road or the paper blowing about on the stony beach; she was living in a flowery meadow by the blue sea. Such was the power of her imagination, of which numerous other examples could be cited.
Mogens also loved Monredon, but when Daisy Fellowes appeared in Sister Anne he could not resist her invitation to come on board. She had kept her promise to us, that wherever we landed in France she would come along the coast in her yacht and greet us. Unlike Dolly, one felt she half hoped there would be trouble of some sort; there was nothing she enjoyed more than a row, or a situation fraught with difficulty and risk. As Alianora followed Sister Anne from port to port along the Riviera and all was peace and joy Daisy may have been slightly disappointed. Later on, as will be seen, she found a way to ginger things up.
Alexander and Max left us to spend the rest of the summer at Inch Kenneth. I begged them not to fight too much, as it worried their grandmother. Alexander said firmly: ‘Granny Muv is so lovely and deaf she never knows whether we are fighting or not.’ Both boys looked splendidly well and strong after their weeks at sea as I saw them off on the train.
Nancy stayed with us for a while on Alianora, and after her Hugh Cruddas, a perfect guest. The only fly in the ointment was our English crew. It turned out that they hated the ‘Med’ as they called it; they felt much too hot and never seemed to enjoy a swim or indeed anything else. One heard them grumbling quietly on deck just above the cabins; their grumbles drifted in through the open port holes. Nancy heard one say: ‘If only we were at Burnham on Crouch!’
Most of the time we were at Antibes or Monte Carlo, ideal harbours for yachts. The coast was noisy and crowded, but nothing like the sea-slum it was subsequently to become. Such is the man-made pollution that the Mediterranean is now said to have lost its sparkle, but in those days it sparkled brilliantly.
One evening Hugh, M. and I were sitting in a small restaurant in Cannes when a figure from the past, Brian Howard, appeared. He was accompanied by a giant Indian. He immediately spotted us. ‘Can we sit with you, my dear?’, and to M., ‘Of course you, my dear, are the wickedest man in the world.’ We talked for a while and it became apparent that Brian, formerly wonderfully amusing especially when he was at his most outrageous, had turned into a repetitive bore. He soon rounded on his Indian friend and said: ‘As to you, my dear, you are nothing but a great big black booby.’ Whereupon we thought we had had
enough and got up to go. Brian insisted on walking with us to where the boat was moored. He insulted us all in a fairly genial way, reserving his more spiteful barbed attacks for the Indian. We were determined not to let him come on board, and said a firm goodbye. He went off into the night with his unfortunate companion; I never saw him again. Hugh told us it was well known that his rudeness was a deliberate attempt to induce someone to hit him, but that nobody ever did so because Brian had become frail and thin and quite unable to hit back.
Daisy had a villa at Cap Martin where we often spent our days by the sea-water pool, she had bought it years before from Kenneth Clark’s father. In his memoirs Lord Clark says his father sold Les Zoraïdes to a character out of Les Liaisons dangereuses, without mentioning Daisy’s name. Gerald, who loved and admired her, also compared her to Mme de Merteuil. While admitting the partial truth of this analogy I am bound to say that Daisy was a very good friend to me and to M. and to all my four boys. She showered kindnesses upon us, whether at Donnington, Cap Martin or at her house in the rue de Lille in Paris. She was a life-enhancer and she had a real talent, denied to many rich people, for surrounding herself with beauty and the delights of the senses. She had a rather false-sounding laugh and her society was not reposeful; one never knew what she might do next.
When Desmond came to stay with us Daisy suggested we should all go to St. Tropez, then a mecca of the young. He quickly transferred himself from Alianora to the infinitely more comfortable Sister Anne; Daisy became his heroine. He was seventeen. One evening at St. Tropez Daisy and Desmond got themselves up to match. They wore black trousers, she had a leopard patterned chiffon blouse and he a wisp of the same chiffon, and round his neck a massive diamond necklace lent by Daisy. When they appeared thus arrayed at the restaurant where we were having dinner and began to dance, there was an angry murmur of intense disapproval from the French at the other tables. It was not long after a much publicized robbery of the Begum Aga Khan’s jewels and one man shouted at them, ‘À bas la Begum!’ The murmur became quite embarrassing. Mogens and M. tried to look as though they did not belong to us; Hugh, Emmeline de Castéja and I wondered how it would end. When Daisy judged she had caused enough sensation and enough annoyance to us, she left. Desmond escorted her to the yacht and then came back wearing an ordinary white shirt which mollified everyone. Mogens afterwards painted a brilliant little picture of the scene in the restaurant which he gave me and which I treasure. Nowadays it would be no use trying to create a sensation at St. Tropez, or anywhere else for that matter, by dressing in an unorthodox way; fancy dress is the norm. In Daisy, Desmond had found a twin soul. His books and his lectures on Irish and American eighteenth-century architecture have made him a serious reputation but he has never lost a positively Daisy-like predilection for doing the unexpected and giving everyone a surprise; not always a pleasant one. Like her, he does it for his own amusement; it is so to speak art for art’s sake.
We realized that Daisy had been angelic for so long that in the very nature of things there was bound to be a reaction. As M. was having his first real holiday for twelve years and was deeply averse to rows in private life we said goodbye and went for a few weeks to Italy accompanied by Hugh.
We stayed for some time in the pretty but noisy little harbour of Portofino where we found several friends, and we went on down the coast to Ostia and Rome.
Back at Antibes, our last guest came, Debo. The summer was almost over and we planned to motor home through France. Once we had left the yacht Debo insisted that we should share expenses, francs being in short supply. The first day of this new régime we went to a delicious but very expensive place where we had an enormous luncheon lasting well into the afternoon. When M. was given the bill Debo snatched it away saying it was her turn. Before the astonished eyes of the waiter, Mademoiselle (as he had called her throughout, for she looked about sixteen in her cotton shorts) pulled huge sums out of her purse. The waiter looked at her, and then at M. ‘C’est Monsieur qui a la chance!’ he said in admiring tones.
Debo drove us to Paris along the road we knew so well. Eleven years, war, occupation and near-civil war had left no visible traces. The food was wonderful, M. Point of the Pyramide at Vienne still supreme.
When we got to Paris we found Nancy in the charming flat at 7 rue Monsieur which was to be her home for twenty years. She had the ground floor of the eighteenth-century house, between courtyard and garden. Her garden was dark and full of ivy and old trees; green reflections from it made the rooms seem cool and countrified. The courtyard, where we sat among her pots of geraniums, was sunny on those early October days. Paris seemed almost too good to be true, but we had to go back to an England still gripped in austerity.
Near Crowood there were islands of resistance to the encircling gloom, Donnington and Faringdon among them. At Faringdon I found Gerald far from well. He had a bad heart, a condition which notoriously makes its victims pessimistic and miserable. He often came to stay with us for quite long visits; he liked the change of scene and I loved his companionship.
In the afternoons we used to take carriage exercise, I drove him about the neighbourhood and once far from home we had a puncture. In the back of the car were Jonathan and an Eton friend, Christopher Shuldham. Both boys were in uniform doing their national service. None of us had the slightest idea of how to change a wheel. I made them all hide behind a hedge and finally managed to induce a saintly motorist to stop and do it for me. It took some time, finding the tools and so forth. Just as he was screwing the last of the screws, kneeling in the dirt, he was astonished to see two able-bodied young soldiers and an elderly man in a long black overcoat get silently into the car. My shame was deep; all I could do as I drove away was to call ‘Thank you, thank you’.
I reproached them all bitterly for not hiding until the saint had gone on his way. There was a long silence, then Christopher said: ‘Well, you see, Lord Berners says it’s teatime.’
Once when Gerald was staying with us I had to go up to London for the day. When I returned he was on the doorstep. ‘What did you do? Who did you see?’ He was always avid for news. I said I had lunched with Evelyn Waugh. ‘He says he prays for me every day,’ I added. Gerald looked quite put out. ‘God doesn’t pay any attention to Evelyn,’ he said crossly.
During the early spring of 1950 he more or less took to his bed. When he could no longer come to us I constantly went over to Faringdon and tried my best to think of stories to amuse him. Robert Heber-Percy and Hugh Cruddas performed wonders; they kept the house alive and prevented Gerald from falling into too deep a depression.
Mogens Tvede, who had done a charming little painting of Nancy, came over to England and painted Debo at Edensor and me in the Crowood drawing-room. We took him to see Gerald, who was in bed and very depressed. Gerald turned his back on Mogens and simply said: ‘Tell me something amusing.’ Mogens has never forgotten this difficult moment. ‘Oh my God! What can one say? Something amusing! My God!’
In April dear Gerald died. I miss him always. He was a perfect friend through thick and thin and we had many a laugh. He had always said he wanted no religious service at his funeral. This is not easy to arrange, but Robert had the minimum of ceremony. One of Gerald’s great preoccupations had been to try and make sure Robert could continue to live at Faringdon. He would have been happy to know he is still there a quarter of a century later, and that Faringdon has become if possible lovelier than ever in his imaginative care.
After our four months away we had felt ready to face the winter and the myriad trivial annoyances inseparable from life in England under a Labour government. M. redoubled his political activity, writing and speaking. There were the usual barriers to free speech, but whenever he did get a hall there was always a full house and an enthusiastic audience, in Manchester and Birmingham as well as London. His political ideas of those days are worth studying; everything he predicted then has happened since, though often it took longer than he imagined it would. At each turn of events he
advanced a constructive policy, but he was unheeded.
We were still the object of special treatment, and not only with regard to halls for M. to speak in. After a complicated tax case when the verdict was given against him, M.’s counsel said: ‘I should have won that case for anyone in the country except you.’ Never in the least bitter, because our opinion of our political opponents was not very high and therefore their behaviour caused little surprise, M. nevertheless began to think there was something to be said for living outside England. As he put it, referring to the politicians: ‘If you are trying to shift a load of manure you don’t start by putting yourself underneath it.’ There was no hurry, but he determined to have a look round.
The day the war ended he had said: ‘Now we must work for United Europe.’ He guessed rightly that the Empire was irrevocably lost as a result of the war; his old dream could never now become reality. For my part, I was entirely in sympathy with his new ideas. The loss of the Empire was a great blow to M. and his supporters, and also to Churchill and many Conservatives. My own predilection had always been for Europe. Beyond any personal consideration M.’s European ideas decided us to leave England and live in France, whence it is easy to travel all over the Continent. He wanted, he said, to become a European, in a way that is hardly possible for somebody living in England. He always kept in close touch with England and innumerable English friends and supporters, speaking at public meetings wherever he could get a hall, and spending almost three months every year there. When the BBC ban was finally lifted in 1968 at the time his autobiography, My Life, was published, and a whole Panorama programme with James Mossman was devoted to him, the fact that the ‘ratings’ showed M. to have had a record audience made it obvious that public interest in him and his ideas was as alive as ever. He was a Cassandra, predicting crisis, which he said was inevitable unless the politicians who had administered our country since the war completely changed their economic policies.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 26