He remembered Grandfather. ‘When we were little kids at Sandringham we looked forward to Lord Redesdale’s visit. He always gave us a little presy.’
‘Did he really? What sort of little presy?’ I asked.
‘Oh, a sovereign. He used to give us each a gold sovereign,’ said the Duke. I loved the way he pronounced Sandringham as if it were two words; he did the same for Devonshire. ‘Is that the Duchess of Devon Shire?’ he asked M. one day when Debo was at the Temple. His accent, formerly tinged with cockney, had acquired more than a touch of American and it made everything he said twice as amusing.
The food at the mill and at the Windsors’ Paris house in the Bois de Boulogne was the perfection of perfection. The Duchess had an extraordinary talent in that department though both she and the Duke had the appetites of canaries and scarcely touched the delicious creations of their brilliant cook. Her clothes too were lovely, I never saw her in an ugly dress. This exquisite taste did not extend to the choice of furniture, pictures and house decoration. Their houses were comfortable and rich but not beautiful, except on occasion the dining-room table could be lovely with its silver and Dresden china.
One Sunday we were lunching at the mill and one of the papers was full of Carrington and her love affairs with extracts from some book, either Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey or more likely Carrington’s own letters edited by David Garnett. There was a huge photograph of her on the front of the magazine section. ‘She wasn’t really quite like that,’ I said to someone; the Duchess heard.
‘Did you know her?’ she asked. ‘Yes.’
‘David! David!’ she called to the Duke across the room. ‘Diana knew Carrington!’
Casting my mind back to Ham Spray I thought how amused and surprised Lytton and Carrington would have been by this unexpected scene long years after they had died.
At Mona Bismarck’s Paris Christmas dinner parties I was always put next to the Duke. One year when there were two tables, M. was at the other table next to the Duchess. Half way through dinner she looked round to see how the Duke was getting on; seeing we were laughing she said to M., ‘It’s all right. They’re talking about those old people.’ She meant the English, and no doubt she had guessed rightly.
In Mona’s library there hangs a large eighteenth-century portrait of two children in long dresses one of whom is beating a drum. Recognizing it as Le Pesne from Nancy’s picture book I told the Duke: ‘That little child with the drum is Frederick the Great.’
He was interested and turned to Mona. ‘Did Eddie inherit that from the old Fürst?’
‘No, sir,’ said Mona truthfully. ‘He got it from Jansen.’
The Windsors always had a bad press. The newspapers were determined to emphasize the emptiness of his life in order to point the obvious moral. He on the other hand was equally determined to prove that the world had been well lost for love, and in addition to his boundless admiration and affection for the Duchess, too consistent and too deep to have been anything but genuine, this attitude which originated I suppose in defiance became so much part of him that if deception there was he certainly completely deceived himself. I always had the feeling that here was somebody with superlative gifts, not of intellect but of sympathy and instinctive understanding of the human predicament, who had lost his chance to use the gifts. True, the loss was his own doing but it was nevertheless a sad waste.
His insistence upon the title of Royal Highness for the Duchess was not simply an affair of good manners on his part. He thought it was her right, and Walter Monckton told me that in his opinion if the Duke had brought an action in the English courts, he would have won it, but this of course was something he would never do. The argument was that Queen Victoria had decreed that the children of the monarch and their wives should be royal highnesses. Although he himself had abdicated the Duke was indubitably the son of a monarch and a royal highness, and the Duchess was his wife according to the law of the land and thus she was a royal highness too.
It was sad when the Windsors gave up the mill, because the garden there was his joy. The sale hung fire for ages and sometimes they went down for a few hours and wandered about like lost souls. Various things had been moved out and everything was different; these visits depressed them. In Gif itself, not far from the mill, unbelievably ugly blocks of flats mushroomed. Their precursor was a relatively harmless petrol station, hated by the Duke. It had a row of flag poles in front of it which he called ‘those ghâstly mâsts’. Far more ghastly were the multi-coloured flats, among the worst in the Île de France which has endured more than its share of horrors in the buildings of recent years.
Their parties were always enjoyable and never dull; this was the Duke’s doing, and the Duchess was an excellent hostess. When his health began to fail his courage was exemplary. One suffered because he tried so hard to talk at dinner; sometimes a whisper came out, sometimes a bark. The last evening I ever saw him, when the time came to say goodbye he was nowhere to be found. He was out on the drive talking to Jerry, our driver. We dined there ten days later and he was too unwell to come down. Not long afterwards he died. He was a kind friend to M. and me and we mourned him deeply. Looking back, I like to think of him as he was at the mill, for example at a big luncheon party when we took Kitty Mersey, who was with us at the Temple, over to Gif. Kitty and I sat on either side of him which was, I suppose, quite wrong as there were several French ladies present. He and Kitty name-dropped to each other for hours; he had quite an orgy that day of talking about those old people, a game at which she was far more adept than I could ever be.
Some may have been surprised that when he lay in state at Windsor no less than sixty thousand men and women made the journey to pay their last respects. It was thirty-six years since he had left England, and as I have said he never had a good press. But he had never been forgotten, and spiteful books by censorious ladies and faithless friends will not succeed in demolishing this unusually sweet and lovable man.
26.
THE ANTAGONISTS
Two famous men whom I chanced to know fairly well were Churchill and Hitler. I knew them in a superficial way, simply as an occasional guest, and never for example worked with either of them. But they interested me greatly, and I observed them as closely as I could when I had the opportunity.
Modern war is so devastating in the suffering it brings that it should be the first aim of every politician to avoid it. Neither Hitler nor Churchill, whatever they may have said on the subject, really believed that war was the ultimate evil. They were fascinated by problems of strategy, by weapons, by tactics, in short, by warfare. They admired the qualities it calls forth in men more than they deprecated the appalling cost in disaster they give rise to. Courage, endurance, loyalty and other virtues are displayed in their most spectacular way in wartime, but the other face of war is destruction, injustice and vicious revenge.
Whether a conference and a decision to hold plebiscites in disputed areas—‘self-determination’—would permanently have defused the European crisis in 1939 can never be certain because it was never tried. Churchill’s was the most powerful voice in England in favour of war. M., who for years past had pressed for re-armament, wanted peace with strength. Since those days, our continent has never ceased to be an armed camp; there has never been peace. Britain is no longer a world power, and the 1939 situation will never recur for us. I am just as much opposed to interventionist wars against communist states now as I was to intervention against national socialist Germany in 1939. As to ‘evil things’, they have proliferated in Europe, and will continue to do so wherever communism rules.
Hitler and Churchill had more in common with one another than perhaps either would have been prepared to admit. To begin with, love of country, a deep and romantic love, was strong in them both. They were wordspinners, speakers, talkers, charmers of their fellow men with the spoken word, self-intoxicated by their own oratory. They worked at night; they liked to sit up until the small hours, talking, thinking as their own
words stimulated ideas, getting up late in the morning. They were fearless, physically and morally brave, bold and imaginative, ambitious and incorruptible. Both were brilliantly clever, neither had the advantage of an university education. Churchill was first and foremost a writer, Hitler a speaker, but both dealt in words. Both were soldiers as young men and politicians for the rest of their lives. Both liked their cronies and being surrounded by old familiar faces, and sitting a long time over dinner telling tales of days gone by.
Churchill was, I believe, loved by those who worked for him in his household; so was Hitler, as witness the book of reminiscences by his chauffeur, Kempka, written and published at a time when it was unpopular, even dangerous, to defend his memory in any way at all.
Both men were leaders. It has often been told how Churchill encouraged with his speeches the will to resist and the will to fight of his countrymen. Hitler did the same. General de Gaulle wrote:
‘L’Allemagne, séduite au plus profond d’elle-méme, suivit son Führer d’un élan. Jusqu’à la fin, elle lui fut soumise, le servant de plus d’efforts qu’aucun peuple, jamais, n’en offrit à aucun chef…’
Churchill was fifteen years older than Hitler and he lived almost twenty years after Hitler’s death, so that he had thirty-five more years on earth, the last of them hardly worth living, I imagine. Nobody could have loved their respective countries more than these two men, and each firmly believed he was leading to greatness and glory. In the event, both countries were diminished and weakened, the victor and the vanquished, a result for which each blamed the other. Both of them were ruthless; yet gentle and kind in private life. Both rather liked the company of women but seem to have had monogamous natures. Both strove for power, and liked it when they got it.
Both were builders, each according to the means at his disposal. Churchill built a wall at Chartwell, Hitler built halls, and palaces, and had grandiose projects to build more. I remember when he came back from a visit to Rome he could talk only of Michelangelo, whom he considered Europe’s greatest architect. Some of Hitler’s buildings were destroyed during the war; any that were left intact were blown up after the war, for reasons best known to the dynamiters. I never understood why, because if they were as meretricious as they were supposed to be, surely they should have been preserved as an object lesson? Chartwell and its wall, on the other hand, is a place of pilgrimage for tourists.
Neither of them liked modern art, nor left-wing intellectuals, about whom they had strikingly similar things to say. Neither was partial to the goody-goodies. Randolph told me that his father, during his years as prime minister, refused to read the lesson in the church at Chequers, as most prime ministers apparently do; had there been a church on the Obersalzberg I have no doubt that Hitler would have refused to do whatever the Catholic equivalent of reading the lesson may be. Hypocrisy was not among their failings.
Of course there were many differences too. Churchill was a bon vivant, Hitler was not. Hitler loved music, Churchill preferred six-pack bezique for relaxation. If some stage production appealed to them they went to its performance over and over again: Hitler to The Merry Widow, for example, Churchill to a brilliantly realistic play, St. Helena, about Napoleon’s imprisonment on the windy island.
Probably the supreme moment in Hitler’s life was when he drove into the old Ostmark at the time of the Anschluss; to Braunau where he was born, to Linz where he had been at school, to Vienna where, as a very young man, a ‘failure’; he had dreamed of a great German Reich which, by his efforts, had now become reality. Everywhere he was greeted by crowds of cheering people throwing flowers in his path. It must have been a pinnacle, far surpassing his conquests during the first years of the war.
Churchill’s moment of triumph was flawed. At the time of victory he already knew well that the victory was hollow. The conferences at Teheran and Yalta had made it abundantly clear to him that having defeated Germany he had helped to bring communism into the heart of Europe, and that President Roosevelt, every bit as much as Stalin himself, was bent upon the destruction of the British Empire. There is a famous photograph of the three of them sitting together at Yalta of which de Gaulle remarked: ‘Two farmyard pigs and a wild boar’; the wild boar was Stalin. Churchill already knew that England was too weak to be heeded, let alone to resist its all-powerful allies. The title he gave his book about the end of the war tells it all: Triumph and Tragedy.
Hitler died by his own hand in the agony of total defeat, and with him died a few of the people who had loved him best. Churchill lived on for endless twilight years. He too was surrounded by people who loved him. Who knows what his thoughts may have been as he sat gazing absently into space? During the war he had enjoyed himself, perhaps too obviously. Photographs of him in the papers, wreathed in smiles, accompanied by one or two lovely daughters in assorted uniforms, may slightly have irritated his fellow countrymen as the war dragged on. Be that as it may, when in 1945 they had the opportunity to do so they voted him out of office.
Probably the protagonists of these exceptional men will disagree with the analogies I have drawn. Soon after the war I met an old Australian lady who told me she admired Hitler. ‘You knew him,’ she said, ‘is it true that he had beautiful hands?’ I replied that his hands were white and shapely, and I added: ‘Strangely enough, they were very like Churchill’s.’ ‘Oh no,’ she cried, ‘I can’t believe that! I’m sure Churchill has got ugly hands.’ (In point of fact his were the finer.)
This is typical of many people who reject truth in even the most trivial matters if it conflicts with a prejudice. It applies not only to enthusiasts but to some who should know better, including university dons who write ‘history’. They are so carried away by their likes and dislikes that they leave the path of truth. It is all of a piece with literary critics who cannot bring themselves to praise a book, even a novel, written by a political opponent. This intellectual dishonesty makes the critics themselves look foolish. I cannot remotely imagine pretending not to admire or enjoy Aragon’s novel La Semaine Sainte, for example, or Sartre’s play Le Diable et le bon Dieu, or his brilliant book Les Mots, simply because I do not share the political opinions of these gifted writers. Left-wing critics are now getting to work on Solzhenitsyn, who has committed the sin of saying that communist dictatorship has proved more brutal than dictatorships of the Right. Because of this they are beginning to say that Solzhenitsyn is not much of a writer after all. He will not suffer from this; he shines, as a man and as a writer, above and beyond such people.
I have not mentioned a hobby shared by these great antagonists: both were amateur artists. Their pictures make large sums in the salerooms, but this is doubtless not unconnected with their fame in other spheres.
Schiller says: ‘Verwandt sind sich alle starke Seele’—all strong spirits are related. Churchill and Hitler were strong spirits, and they were related, and perhaps each contained within himself a seed of destruction, something which is by no means an inevitable ingredient of a ‘starke Seele’. General de Gaulle wrote about Hitler’s death words which may be true:
‘Pour le sombre grandeur de son combat et de sa mémoire, il avait choisi de ne jamais hésiter, transiger ou reculer. Le Titan qui s’efforce de soulever le monde ne saurait fléchir ni s’adoucir. Mais, vaincu et écrasé, peutêtre redevient-il un homme, juste le temps d’une larme secrète, au moment ou tout finit.’
If so, the tear will have been for Germany; not for himself.
Among the fulsome eulogies which accompanied Mao Tse-Tung to his grave a discordant note was struck by a writer who pointed out that not only had Mao fallen upon the peaceful neighbouring country of Tibet and destroyed it, with its ancient culture, utterly; he had also killed many millions of his countrymen for the crime of not being communists. Yet the Chairman’s foreign visitors, leading politicians in their own countries and not particularly gullible, found a man of immense charm and gentleness. Is it a mystifying paradox? In my view, it is not.
27.
My grandmother died when I was twenty-one, and her funeral at Batsford was the first I ever attended. Her coffin was carried by her four surviving sons. The service astonished and shocked me, with its emphasis not only on sorrow but on misery. How could the glorious world, filled with varied beauties both natural and manmade, with the pleasures of all the senses, not to mention the joys of friendship and love, how could all this be described as nothing but a vale of tears? It seemed like sacrilege to me then, and wholly unsuitable for Grandmother, whose long life had been so happy, and who was good and beloved. Now that I am old I see that the vale of tears and my youthful vision of a perfect world exist side by side, the shade and the light. Both happiness and unhappiness are transitory, and therefore the secret of life is to treasure every moment of good luck and to bear the other with what fortitude one may.
In the spring of 1963 we sold our Irish house, and henceforward the Temple was our only dwelling. We had spent most of the winter in London, and I thought Muv seemed very frail; so much so that we made a half-hearted attempt to stop her going to the island, and Pam tried to persuade her to spend the summer with her in Gloucestershire, but she was determined to go up to Scotland. Madeau Stewart volunteered to look after her on the journey, and hardly had they arrived than telegrams flew to us all to say that Muv was ill.
Nancy, Pam, Debo and I hurried up from various directions as quickly as we could. I flew from Paris to Glasgow and there I caught a bus to Oban. I had no heart for the picture gallery, and although I knew I should be stuck in Oban overnight it seemed desirable to get there because nearer to my objective. It was not quite eight when I got to the hotel. I was given a room, but no dinner, and I was told there were no restaurants in Oban where one could eat after seven.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 31