When Unity became ill with tonsillitis, David insisted on staying on to look after her. His English self-confidence coupled with his bumbling manner both endeared him to her and irritated her. The ice rink was closed and he could not skate, which made him determined to dislike the entire trip. ‘He refuses to take the least interest in anything and pines for home,’ Unity complained to Sydney. ‘He had much better let me come alone, like I planned. I must say one thing, he is very good-tempered.’ Most of the waiters and hotel staff in Munich spoke a little English, but David had only to hear one word of English, she said, before addressing them exactly as he would a waiter in London. ‘On the train he suddenly said to the dining car man, “I don’t think much of your permanent way, but the rolling stock is pretty good going on. These cigarettes are killing me by inches!” Then he fires questions at them,’ she continued, ‘like, “Do they sell Brambles [a type of country hat] here?” or talks about her ladyship and expects them to know it’s you. The poor things are so confused. I think they think he’s cracked.’3
After her contretemps in June Unity had no option but to submit to her father’s presence with good grace. Her brief notoriety had upset her parents badly and she was fortunate to have been allowed to return to Munich at all. The situation had not been helped along by the publication of Nancy’s Wigs on the Green at the end of June, just as the papers got wind of Unity’s interview. Unity took her cue from Diana: it was not acceptable to mock either Mosley or Hitler.
Nancy was well aware that the timing was bad and contacted both sisters, writing to Diana (firmly): ‘A book of this kind can’t do your movement any harm. Honestly if I thought it could set the Leader back by so much as half-an-hour I would have scrapped it . . .’4 and to Unity (winningly):
Darling Head of Bone & Heart of Stone,
. . . Please don’t read the book if it’s going to stone you up against me . . . Oh dear do write me a kind and non-stony-heart letter to say you don’t mind it nearly as much as you expected . . . Oh dear I’m going to Oxford with Nardie [Diana] tomorrow, our last day together I suppose before the clouds of her displeasure burst over me . . . oh dear, I wish I had called it mine uncomf now because uncomf is what I feel every time I think about it. So now don’t get together with Nardie and ban me forever or I shall die . . . oh dear, OH DEAR!5
Perhaps it was asking too much of Diana, who had pinned her colours so positively to Mosley’s mast, to see the book in quite the gleeful way Nancy intended, and realizing this, albeit late in the day, Nancy had tried to soften the blow by forewarning her sister while she was writing: ‘Peter says I can’t put a movement like Fascism into a work of fiction by name so I am calling it the Union Jack movement . . . & their leader Colonel Jack . . . but I don’t want to Leadertease,’ she wrote appeasingly, ‘as the poor man could hardly have me up for libel under the circumstances!’6 Diana was allowed to read the manuscript and although she suggested a rash of edits, which for the most part Nancy agreed to, both she and Unity had told Nancy they would never speak to her again if she published it. But Nancy had little option as Prod was not working and their only income besides her tiny allowance was the royalties from her books. She was unable to make their funds meet their outgoings and she had become used to visits from the bailiffs and receiving handouts from her father-in-law. ‘I really couldn’t afford to scrap the book,’ she told Diana.
One problem was that the game had changed somewhat between the time that Nancy conceived Wigs on the Green and its publication. From being ‘almost respectable’ eighteen months earlier, Mosley had become, as Bernard Shaw put it, ‘ridiculed as impossible’.7 Since the infamous BUF Olympia rally in 1934, a scene of unprecedented violence in British politics (though worse was to come), Mosley had lost all chance of leading a conventional party. On the other hand, the active membership of the BUF had reached ten thousand with, Mosley’s biographer estimated, a further thirty thousand non-active members and supporters.8 Mosley pointed out that Fascism in Britain had grown faster than anywhere else in the world, and there was evidence of a significant amount of support for it as a political ideal from uncommitted voters. When one of the first Gallup polls asked interviewees to choose which they would prefer, Fascism or Communism, 70 per cent of people under thirty chose Fascism. In the upper echelons of society there is plenty of proof that the Cliveden set and a large slice of the upper classes, while not actively pro-Mosley, were supportive of a Fascist style of government because they were all terrified of the threat of Communism.
Then there was Mosley’s style of dressing, which had hitherto been a neat black shirt under a well-cut dark suit. Suddenly, for marches and rallies, he and his lieutenants adopted a uniform that was distinctly military in design. The black jacket had brass buttons and epaulets, and was worn with a Sam Browne-type leather belt, and an officer’s peaked hat. Brown riding breeches were tucked into gleaming riding boots. It drew some pejorative comments from onlookers: ‘They look like Nazi jackboots’ was one obvious remark. ‘More like King Zog’s Imperial Dismounted Hussars’ was the retort. And, increasingly, BUF marches and grandiose rallies, apparently based on European models, became an excuse for aggressive and vicious thuggery. Bands of Communists and some who were simply anti-Fascist would begin by heckling or throwing missiles, and eventually order would deteriorate with the exchange of blows. Mosley never openly advocated anti-Semitism, but plenty of his supporters were willing to act against East End Jews in the name of the BUF. In the event the uniform was short-lived, for the wearing of it was banned by the Public Order Act of 1936, but it was not forgotten by the public.
News of the treatment meted out to Jews in Germany was filtering through to the United Kingdom: national newspapers ran small reports of how Jews were increasingly being stripped of possessions, their shops and businesses closed and looted, and how they were being generally humiliated. German towns put up signs boasting that they were ‘Jew free’, park benches were marked ‘Aryan’ and ‘Jew’, shops proclaimed that Jews would not be served. Such news items were tucked away, a forerunner of what was to come. Those of the silent majority who read the reports did not know how seriously to take them, or decided that it was ‘not our business’, so there were no demonstrations of public anger, but some opprobrium inevitably clung to Mosley’s movement and – whether it was true or not – he was widely perceived as anti-Semitic. When questioned about the Nazi regime’s attitude to Germany’s Jewish population, he replied, ‘Whatever happens in Germany is Germany’s affair, and we are not going to lose British lives in a Jewish quarrel.’9
Because of her affection for Diana, Nancy had accepted Mosley up to a point, had even casually joined the BUF with Prod and been present at the Olympia fiasco, but her allegiance soon waned. The Rodds decided that they did not like the direction in which British Fascism was moving. When they received an invitation, written in German, from Joachim von Ribbentrop to a function to celebrate his appointment to the London embassy, Prod declined for them both – in Yiddish.10 But Nancy had never really taken to Mosley; her book was the equivalent of a modern television satire and lampooned what he stood for. Mosley took himself very seriously, and though he never minded opposition, derision was a different matter.
The publication of Wigs on the Green caused a serious rift between Nancy and Diana. In November, almost six months later, in a letter to a friend, Nancy wrote: ‘I saw Diana at a lunch . . . 2 days ago, she was cold but contained & I escaped with my full complement of teeth, eyes, etc.’ But even had Diana forgiven her, Mosley would not have done so. For the next four years he refused to allow Nancy to visit Diana at the house they acquired in early 1936. Indirectly, this rift led to more serious repercussions. Unity, too, was unforgiving, telling people she met in Munich that she was never going to speak to Nancy, so that Nancy could only reply affirmatively to John Betjeman’s query on reading the book: ‘I suppose it will be all up with Unity Valkyrie and you?’ Years later, when she had become a distinguished writer, Nancy refused
to allow Wigs on the Green to be reissued, saying that too much had happened for jokes about Nazis to be considered as anything but poor taste, but one suspects that the problems it caused within the family were just as likely to have been the reason.
Unity attended the 1935 Nuremberg rally with Tom and Diana. On the eve of the event they met Hitler and Streicher at the opera; on the following day when they found their reserved seats they had been seated prominently, next to Eva Braun who had recently become Hitler’s mistress. There are many photographs of the trio of Mitfords in newspaper archives because by now the British press thought the Nazi rallies important enough to cover, and both Unity and Diana made good copy. So, there are photographs of Tom and Diana flanked by Nazi banners, of the two women against a backdrop of marching storm-troopers, of Unity giving the Nazi salute, and any number of poses that would later compromise them.
Diana and Mosley had been together for more than three years. Their initial passion had stood the test of time and out of this a remarkably close intellectual friendship had also grown between them. They remained very much in love; and they wrote to each other, and often spoke to each other in the baby talk of lovers.11 As Mosley’s son, Nicholas, attests ‘There was an aura around her and my father such as there is around people who are in love.’12 Mosley, it is true, still flirted and continued to have casual affairs with other women. He was still sexually involved with Baba Metcalfe and there were numerous other infidelities during the thirties that are a matter of public record. There was even a bizarre court action brought by one woman for slander after she had initially alleged ‘breach of promise’.13 In view of his unquestionable love for Diana it is difficult to explain away his infidelities but many powerful men share the unattractive characteristic of sexual incontinence – Palmerston, Lloyd George, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton among them. One thing is for sure, neither Mosley nor Diana was ever wholly happy when they were apart.
Diana tended to treat Mosley’s philandering as he had once advised Cimmie to do, as a tiresome ‘silliness’ that he somehow could not help. In 2000 she wrote that she was sometimes jealous, but ‘I was so confident about him. I knew he’d always come back to me.’14 But to very close friends at the time she admitted that she suffered ‘agonies of jealousy’,15 and during 1935 there is evidence of at least one major row between the two, concerning his relationship with Baba. That summer Mosley was staying with two of his children, Nicholas and Vivien, on the Bay of Naples; he had bought a thirty-foot motor yacht, which was moored below their rented villa16 and used for day trips to the islands and swimming. The arrangement was that Baba would spend the first half of the holiday with them, and Diana the second.
Diana had been injured recently in a car accident, and needed quite extensive plastic surgery to her face. While she was convalescing in a London clinic, Mosley wrote to her: ‘Hurry up and get well as this place is lovely – 1,000 steps down to the beach – soon get used to them – we run up and down them now – saying, “Won’t they be fun when Diana arrives!” I feel so badly being away while you are so bad . . .’17 The letter, with its promise of recuperation in the sunshine and Mosley’s company, was too much for Diana: with her face still in bandages she discharged herself at five-thirty one morning, a week earlier than her surgeon recommended. With David’s help – he hired a car and booked her plane ticket – she drove straight to Croydon airport and flew by seaplane to Naples. It is interesting to reflect that although this was only two years after her divorce David was prepared to assist her to get to Mosley.
She arrived at the villa four days earlier than planned – during a dinner at which Mosley and Baba were entertaining the Crown Princess of Italy – at almost the same time as the cable she had sent advising Mosley that she was coming. Diana recalls that she was ‘half-dead and only wanted to sleep’.18 Vivien remembered hearing a row between the grown-ups that night, and Nicholas recalls doors banging, and being prevented on the following morning from going into one of the bedrooms. ‘Do not go there,’ a servant warned him. ‘Eet ees Mrs Guinness.’19 With hindsight, Nicholas wrote that the situation was ‘a social and a personal challenge worthy of the mettle of someone like my father – on his tightrope, as it were, juggling his plates above Niagara!’20
After breakfast Mosley left with Baba and the children for Amalfi, where the adults booked into a hotel and the children slept on the boat. Diana was left alone with the servants at the villa, sitting in the shade and enjoying the peace until Mosley and the children returned on the date originally fixed for her arrival. She soon recovered from her injuries, and took boat trips with them, sitting on the prow with ‘an air of stillness about her like that of the sphinxes and classical statues that looked out over the sea from the terraces of the villas on Capri’.21
If she was annoyed with Mosley, Diana was quite likely to close the Eatonry and go abroad to stay with a friend in luxury and sunshine. She knew that the removal of her loyal support and love was effective punishment. Her beauty gave her a sort of invulnerability, for she always attracted admiring men wherever she went, and at a personal level this must have been the proverbial double-edged sword for Mosley. He was ‘apt to be jealous’, said Nicholas, when he was apart from Diana.
As well as the row in Italy that year, Diana became pregnant and had a termination. In those days illegitimacy was a serious stigma, not something to inflict lightly upon a child, and had Diana borne Mosley a child at this point the old scandal would have reopened, with all the resultant bad publicity for him, and hurt for the Redesdales. But the abortion provided some sort of catalyst in the relationship, for Diana loved her babies. Although by modern standards she spent little time with them, and even when she was at the Eatonry they were cared for by Nanny, rather than her, this was not unusual in their circle. Her son Jonathan insists that he and his brother saw as much of their mother as did any of their acquaintances. Diana is on record as saying, ‘Marriage meant nothing to me, yet three years after his wife’s death we did marry, because we wanted children, and in those days it was supposed to be better for children to be born in wedlock.’22
In the early part of 1936 Diana and Mosley decided to marry, but for various reasons that would become obvious – Baba for one, presumably – Mosley did not want news of this to leak out, so they had to find a way to do it in secret. At first they thought it would be possible to marry in Paris but discovered that the banns would have to be posted at the British consulate. Meanwhile there was the question of where to live. The Eatonry was too small: they needed a family home in the country.
Mosley’s two sisters-in-law were still running his home, Savehay Farm, and looking after the children with the help of dedicated and loyal staff. Diana occasionally visited there, always to a cool reception, and Nicholas recalled being instructed by his nanny that he must ‘never speak to Mrs Guinness’. Although Cimmie had been dead for nearly three years, Mosley knew it would have caused ructions if he had tried to move Diana in, so Diana set about looking for a suitable home, where they could accommodate all the children of their respective earlier marriages. It had to be convenient for Mosley’s campaigning, which continued unabated, especially in the Midlands and industrial north. She found Wootton Lodge in Staffordshire.
Wootton has been called ‘one of the most beautiful houses in England’, and is vast, magnificent, romantic, if somewhat impractical as a family home. It was built in 1610 and had been a Royalist stronghold during the civil war. Its architecture is reminiscent of the more famous Hardwick Hall (‘more glass than wall’) with huge mullioned windows, which give it an ethereal appearance. The estate agent openly regarded it as a white elephant – for in the prevailing economic climate it seemed unlikely to be taken off his hands – but Diana fell in love with it and persuaded the owner to lease it to her ‘for almost nothing’ with an option to buy later. Mosley paid the rent and installed a heating system, but they agreed that Diana would have to be responsible for the upkeep and staffing. Bryan had made her a generous
settlement but she was not rich and she knew that living at Wootton would mean sacrifices. Fortunately for her, David chose this moment to have one of his regular ‘furniture sales’ Swinbrook was to be sold and already he, Sydney, Decca and Debo were living more or less permanently at Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe. Diana was able to buy some of the best pieces of furniture and family paintings to furnish her beloved Wootton at a discount.
It was not quite so fortunate for Sydney: ‘From Batsford Mansion, to Asthall Manor, to Swinbrook House, to Old Mill Cottage’ was the derisive chant coined by Decca and Debo to describe the decline of the Redesdale family fortunes. Despite Sydney’s financial prudence, David’s various moneymaking schemes – the gold mine, and investments in ventures such as diving to a sunken galleon to raise gold bullion – ate into the Redesdale inheritance. He turned down schemes that subsequently made money, such as the first ice-cube-making machine to be introduced to England. Even worse, he seemed to have an uncanny knack for investing at the top of a market, and selling at the bottom.
As before, when David was selling their homes, Sydney took herself well out of the way. She, Decca, Debo and Unity, whose year of study was now over, went on holiday. After a week in Paris the party boarded the Donaldson-Atlantic Line’s SS Letitia on a ‘cultural cruise’ of ancient sites and places of architectural and archaeological interest such as Napoleon’s house in Corsica and the Parthenon in Athens, and there were a number of public-school parties on board. But there were enough passengers of the right sort to create some interest, and when Decca wrote to Nancy telling her ‘there is a Lord on board called Ld Rathcreedon, he’s rather nice too. His brother is travelling also . . .’ Nancy replied inimically:
The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family Page 21