The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  She wasn’t what I had expected – a hard-bitten Dickensian crone. No, just an ordinary middle-aged Englishwoman plying her trade . . . At her direction I undressed and lay on a bed. I was a bit surprised that there was no sign of sterilization of the instruments, which she fished out of her underclothes drawer . . . Her method was injection of soap into the uterus, which would in about five hours induce labour. The procedure was horribly painful, hardly ameliorated when the abortionist cautioned just as I was leaving, ‘If you get sick, don’t call in the doctor, because if you should die, I’ll swing.’ [A reminder that the death penalty was in force] . . . I did get sick, I did call a doctor – and I survived. Years later I read in a magazine that abortion by soap injection was by far the most dangerous of all methods, resulting in a huge number of deaths . . .24

  Because Diana was also pregnant through the summer of 1938, her presence – even accidentally – at any march after August (when Unity was in Germany) is questionable. She certainly felt that her pregnancy was too advanced to attend the Parteitag and was taking things easy at Wootton. That month Debo had paid her a surprise visit accompanied by two young men, one of whom was Lord Andrew Cavendish, younger son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. The couple had met a short time earlier in a restaurant off Curzon Street. ‘I first saw her at Eton, when she was fifteen or sixteen, and stunningly beautiful,’ he recalled in an interview. ‘Then we met at a dinner party . . . and if it wasn’t love at first sight it was certainly attraction at first sight.’25 For the moment, however, they were keeping this to themselves. Debo had been expressly forbidden to visit Wootton and her companions were clearly nervous when Diana introduced Mosley, who had been fishing in the lake with Diana’s two sons from her first marriage. ‘They all looked as if they had seen a ghost,’ Diana reported to Unity. ‘Debo said they were frightened they might be shot at.’26

  Diana’s third child, Alexander, was born in November. Mosley had given up his flat in Ebury Street for a house in Grosvenor Road. It was a five-minute walk from the Houses of Parliament and the windows overlooked the Thames. It was here that Diana had her baby. ‘From my bed I could see across the black November water to the wharves on the far bank: they were blanketed in snow,’ she wrote.27 Later, she took the baby home to Wootton, which became for her, for the first time, a real family home. Nanny Higgs, who had formerly looked after Jonathan and Desmond, ran the nursery.

  Alexander’s birth obliged the Mosleys to make public the fact that they were married. Following a year of concentrated networking in Germany, Diana was advised shortly after the Anschluss, when Germany acquired all the Austrian wavelengths, ‘You have your wavelength, and a very nice one too.’28 The contract was signed and sealed three weeks before Alexander’s birth and work began immediately to construct a transmitter on the island of Borkum in the North Sea. The secrecy felt to be essential in 1936 was no longer a major issue, but Mosley’s name did not feature in the contracts. However, there was a price to pay. The news of the two-year-old marriage was a sensation, and filled the front pages of newspapers with stories trumpeting (incorrectly) that ‘Hitler Was Mosley’s Best Man at Secret Wedding’, and articles such as ‘The Family That Mosley Has Married Into’, which detailed the colourful histories of Diana’s divorce, Decca’s elopement and Unity’s close friendship with Hitler. The Redesdales were upset: they seemed never to grow hardened to publicity about their daughters. But their reaction was tame compared to that of Mosley’s family connections. Nobody in his family knew of the marriage, not even his mother who had supported him and filled the role of ‘first lady’ of the Blackshirt movement since the death of Cimmie, or his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Nicholas, who was then at Eton. They found out about the marriage, and the new baby, from the newspapers.

  Mosley’s Curzon sisters-in-law could scarcely believe it was true. Initially, one reporter got the detail wrong and asked Mosley outright whether it was true that he had been married secretly in Munich a year earlier. Mosley denied the story cleverly, stating simply that he had not been in Munich for the previous two years, and there is a strong suggestion here that even at this late stage he would have preferred that the marriage remained secret. But it was soon evident that there had been a marriage, and it was confirmed in the BUF newspaper Action. Baba, who was on a train between London and Paris when she read the news, was understandably distraught since her relationship with Mosley had continued unchecked since the summer following Cimmie’s death. Later she stated that she would not have allowed the affair to continue, had she known that Mosley and Diana were married. Since she was married herself this seems a curious morality, but that is another story. Mosley claimed to journalists that the reason for secrecy was that he was concerned Diana would suffer abuse and even personal danger were it known she was married to him. Diana was confident that the real reason was the secrecy necessary to establish the radio station without any traceable link to Mosley. But Cimmie’s sisters, Irene Ravensdale and Baba Metcalfe, and Nicholas Mosley, always believed that the real reason was that Mosley did not want his affair with Baba to end.29

  Irene Ravensdale was in America when the news broke, and she wrote in her autobiography that she nearly fainted when she was told. There had been a vague rumour a year earlier about a marriage, but Mosley had categorically denied it to her. Now it appeared the story had been true, and ‘that Hitler had been the best man [sic] and Goebbels the chief witness’. She claimed to have found this shocking,30 but she wrote this twenty years later, after Hitler and the British Fascist movement had been thoroughly discredited. Irene Ravensdale was a keen supporter of Mosley and the BUF throughout the thirties, and her latterday statements seem designed to distance herself from that. She knew all about Mosley’s affair with Baba, and sanctioned it as a means of weaning him from Diana, so her remark that she felt Mosley’s ‘excuses of the need for secrecy . . . were pretty sordid’31 sounds much closer to the truth.

  That summer Nancy had also discovered, to her great joy, that she was pregnant. Like Pam she had been trying unsuccessfully to have a baby for some years and the conventional treatment, dilation and curettage (also used for legal abortions), was, no doubt, why she referred to foetuses as ‘the scrapage’. Having submitted to this treatment in the spring of 1938 her pregnancy was confirmed in July. She was advised to remain in bed for the first four weeks and thereafter to rest as much as possible. In August, when Sydney flew home from Munich, leaving Unity in hospital, she took Nancy to stay with her friend Helen Dashwood at West Wycombe. After this Nancy went to the cottage to look after Debo, while Sydney returned to Munich for the Parteitag.

  After a week the two sisters moved to Rutland Gate, where Nancy kept up her chatty teasing correspondence to amuse herself during the tedious ‘resting’ stage. As usual the Rodds were desperately short of money, and could scarcely afford to live themselves, let alone raise a child. ‘Of course it is lunatic really,’ she wrote happily to Robert Byron, ‘I quite see that but one must never be deterred from doing what one wants for lack of money don’t you agree?’ An aunt had written and hoped it would be a boy so that it could inherit from Lord Rodd, but Nancy said, ‘If I thought for a minute it would be a boy I’d go for a bicycle ride here & now – 2 Peter Rodds in 1 house is unthinkable.’32 By the time David and Sydney arrived at Rutland Gate from Munich, on 17 September, Nancy was in bed recovering from the miscarriage that had occurred a day or so earlier. Nancy never wrote about her loss, but it seems that she felt it deeply. She was thirty-four, and although her doctor had told her there was no reason why she should not conceive again it seemed unlikely to her as Prod had embarked on yet another of his serial love affairs. Added to which he was out of work again. She blamed her inability to conceive on her mother: apparently, as a small child, she had suffered from an infection of the urethra and, of course, Sydney had refused to call a doctor. Nancy always felt that the damage this caused was the reason for the gynaecological problems she suffered as an adult.33

  Decca was t
aking part in a market-research survey in Southampton when the Prime Minister returned from Munich in apparent triumph but, of course, having given in to all of Hitler’s demands over Czechoslovakia. A visitor who called on the Romillys at this point recalls that, although she was young, her ‘intellectual brilliance in matters of political vision made her almost clairvoyant: she predicted the Nazi attack on Poland and on the Soviet Union, and . . . the incredible period of suffering for the British people’.34 Decca firmly believed, and did so for a long time, however, that it was just her ‘class’, people like her parents, uncles, aunts, and the suited members of the Cliveden set ‘with their furled umbrellas, so symbolic of furled minds’, that was the cause of Britain being swept into war, because of their acceptance – or even active support – of Fascism in Europe. Perhaps this view was hardly surprising when half of her family was in Germany that month, enjoying Hitler’s hospitality.

  But Decca was astonished when Chamberlain returned, clutching his furled umbrella and waving his bit of paper, to find that the working people she spoke to were overjoyed. ‘But it’s peace,’ they told her, ‘peace in our time. That’s good, isn’t it?’ More than anything she wanted to finish her work and get back to London and Esmond, for surely, she thought, there this capitulation to Fascism would have made people sit up and take notice. But she found Esmond profoundly depressed: the storm of public indignation he had anticipated over Czechoslovakia had simply not materialized.35 In a sense this put an end to what Philip Toynbee referred to as ‘the wild and comical capers . . . cut by Esmond and Decca’. People suddenly woke up to the fact that war was now a strong possibility, despite Mr Chamberlain’s signed contract with Hitler, and the government began to take the measures to prepare for conflict that Winston Churchill had advocated for several years. What Diana calls ‘war fever’ now affected everybody in Britain. Gas masks were issued to every citizen, trenches were dug in London parks, conscription was to be brought in, and armament production speeded up.

  Esmond was no coward, as later events proved, but he realized that if he stayed in England he would be among the first to be called up. He had no objection to joining the fight against Fascism, but until war was declared he had no wish to be sucked into the maw of British Army life, which would condemn him to the sort of discipline he considered pointless and against which he had always fought: the Army bull, the shined boots, and ‘salute everything that moves’ attitude of his boarding-school’s OTC. Yet what could he and Decca do? They had no money and were incapable of managing on what was considered a reasonable white-collar income. Following their return to England in August they had spent a good deal of their time dodging a writ-server. No one had told Decca that electricity had to be paid for so she left lights, heaters and stoves burning all day and night at Rotherhithe, and the huge bill was still unpaid.

  Since their return from Corsica they had lived in a small bed-sitter in a street off the Edgware Road near Marble Arch. They had decided that it was too traumatic to return to the place where Julia had died, and their new accommodation was more conveniently situated for Esmond’s job on the Strand. But the Electricity Board tracked them down, and an unfortunate young man was sent to serve them with a court order. They either disguised themselves with dark glasses and false moustaches and slid past him in the communal doorway befor e taking to their heels down the street or stayed in bed while he rapped at the door. ‘Sometimes we stayed in bed for as long as two days,’ Decca wrote, ‘[but] though enjoyable to us, these lost days were becoming a source of irritation to Esmond’s boss.’ At this period, Philip Toynbee recalled, there was little evidence of the careless optimism normally displayed by the independent and ‘fanatical Decca’,36 and Esmond, with his peculiar blend of intellectual idealism, mulish pugnacity, boyish charm and ‘irresistible horse laugh’37 was unusually depressed.38 Enthusiasm was at a low ebb in the Romilly household.

  Shortly after Decca’s return from Southampton, however, things miraculously changed for them. Three weeks earlier, she had celebrated her twenty-first birthday, in those days the legal coming-of-age. When each of her children was born, Sydney had opened a savings account for them. Every week she paid a small amount into each account, to be given to them when they reached twenty-one. Decca had either forgotten about this nest egg, or perhaps thought that in the circumstances her mother would not give it to her. But when she met Sydney for lunch in London in early October, she found herself the recipient of a hundred pounds. These undreamed-of riches provided Esmond with the answer to all their problems: they would emigrate to America and work there until war was declared. They would make a fortune from lecturing before he joined up.

  Immigration visas were in great demand, and difficult to obtain without demonstrable means of support. The three hundred dollars with which the Romillys would have been left after paying their steerage passage would not last long, but Esmond and Decca appeared before the American consul with sincerity and enthusiasm for the American ethos shining out of their handsome young faces. They laid it on pretty thick, stressing how they were impressed by the freedom of the people and ‘the land of opportunity’, and it worked. At about the time that the papers were full of Diana’s marriage to Mosley, the Romillys heard that they had been granted visas and the all-important green-card work permits.

  Before they sailed for New York aboard the SS Aurania, in mid-February, they spent time calling on friends. During a trip to Oxford they detoured to Swinbrook as Decca wanted to say goodbye to Miranda before she left. She went to the field where she had discovered that Miranda was kept, ‘walked over to the flock of sheep and called out, “Miranda.” She came hobbling out to me – her feet all full of foot rot. I was in floods of tears,’ she wrote to Nancy.

  Following that, the couple planned a final salute to Esmond’s Out of Bounds period. It was a raid on Eton College, with Philip Toynbee acting as gang member. Decca knew the layout because of her many family connections who were Old Etonians, and she took them to the anteroom of the chapel where they relieved the hat pegs of all the top hats they could carry away. They returned to London flushed with victory and thirty hats, ‘gallant symbols of our hatred of Eton, of our anarchy, our defiance,’ Toynbee wrote.39 Later, Toynbee lost his girlfriend over the incident for when he told her about it she turned huffy and said it was stealing. And it is difficult, with hindsight, to put any other interpretation on it. Had the trio repaired in good humour to a Thames bridge and cast the lot into the river, it might have been viewed as a prank, and a snub to a society they abhorred. But instead Esmond sold the hats to a second-hand clothes dealer and pocketed the cash. Which seems to smack as much of opportunism as any form of idealism.

  13

  No Laughing Matter

  (1939)

  Decca and Esmond spent their first few weeks in the United States in New York, wallowing in unaccustomed luxury at the Shelton Hotel, which Peter Nevile had recommended to them. At $3.50 a day it was rather more than they could afford but Peter had told them that they should put on a ‘good front’ if they wished to impress the natives. He was right. Within no time at all, the letters that they wrote on Shelton writing-paper introducing themselves (‘My good friend Peter Nevile suggested that I should contact you . . .’) brought results and they were able to move out of the hotel and go visiting real Americans. At one grand house Decca met Katherine – Kay – Graham, daughter of Eugene Meyer, who owned the Washington Post. Kay was Decca’s age, and even then an ardent Democrat and ‘New Dealer’. The two women were destined to be good friends, and both Decca and Esmond liked the Meyers because, although they were rich Republicans, they were also anti-Fascist.

  To Esmond’s chagrin the lecture circuit was uninterested in them, and his English style of copywriting failed to impress Madison Avenue advertising agencies. They told him his British experience was a positive handicap, so Decca helped the exchequer by inventing a history in the fashion trade and landing a job in a dress shop. It gave her a real thrill to take home a
wage. Her former occupation as a market researcher had brought in occasional sums of money through Esmond’s agency, but this was a real job that she’d found for herself, and she was proud of it. Among the upper classes in England the term ‘shop girl’ was used pejoratively, and Decca was probably the first woman in her family ever to work for a living. To Decca these were plus factors. In the meantime the couple were welcomed open-handedly by New York society for the bubbling enthusiasm they carried around with them: they were lively, good talkers, entertaining company and they loved America. Decca found a second-hand clothes shop where she bought a couple of evening dresses at six dollars each, but it cost more to outfit Esmond: his dinner jacket alone cost them $6.50.1

  When they moved out of the Shelton they rented a room in the walk-up apartment of two actors in Greenwich Village. It was, said a visitor, as untidy as a schoolboy’s bedroom but always ‘gloriously happy’. Esmond juggled with apples while Decca cooked supper and chided him for scuffing his shoes. He pretended contempt at being told off, but he was noticeably attentive and would dart across the room to light her cigarette.2 Interviewed by the New York Daily Mirror and Life magazine, Esmond said he was going to become an American citizen as soon as possible, but he was anxious to correct any impression that he had left England to avoid fighting and pointed to his experience in Spain: ‘I wasn’t a Communist, I am not now, and I never will be, but in the beginning Madrid was a symbol to me. If England is drawn into a war now I shall go back and fight – because of all the things that are dear to me and Decca will be drawn in . . . but I have no illusions about England fighting for democracy.’ Since Munich, he told them, the last democracy in Europe, Czechoslovakia, had fallen. ‘It is imperial England against imperial Germany now.’3