The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  Shortly afterwards, all the empty rooms in the house were requisitioned for other Jewish families evacuated from the East End.51 When Sydney arrived in London after a bomb dropped in Swinbrook and damaged the roof of the cottage, she could see no humour in the situation and was ‘beastly’ to David and Nancy. Although it had already been decided that the house must be sold as soon as possible because they could no longer afford to keep it on, Nancy wrote, ‘she says if she had all the money in the world, she would not ever live in the house after the Jews have had it’.52

  What had actually caused Sydney’s outburst of anger was that her once immaculate house was so unkempt. In mitigation Nancy had only one maid to help her while Sydney had run the establishment as a family home with half a dozen loyal staff. Nancy admitted that the house was rather dirty, ‘but it’s only floor dirt which can be scrubbed off’. Even had she been able to afford staff it was impossible to find anyone: all the young women who had once gone into domestic service were now in the services or munitions factories. Nevertheless, the incident caused a chill between mother and daughter for some time. And after a winter living with David, and trying to cater to his requirement of a main meal containing meat every evening, and putting up with his irascibility, Nancy was pretty fed up with her father, too.

  Like all other families, the Mitfords each had their own worries, which the war somehow made harder to shoulder. Nancy, tired from working and trying to run the house, and fully aware of Prod’s serial adultery, was depressed that her marriage was a failure, David, increasingly ill and lonely, was missing Sydney but was unable to live with her ridiculous support of the enemy. Sydney was worried about all her children and grandchildren: Tom in the Army, Diana in prison, the babies staying with Pam, Decca in the USA, Debo who was now unhappy even at her beloved Swinbrook, and, of course, the full-time care of the incontinent and mentally impaired Unity. It is not surprising that tempers flared occasionally. But despite her disagreement with Sydney even Nancy saw how unfair it was that the burden of caring for Unity should fall entirely on her mother. ‘Muv has been too wonderful with her and has absolutely given up her whole life,’ she reported to Decca, while their father was being simply beastly about Bobo. ‘He hardly ever goes near her, and has never been there to relieve Muv and give her a chance to have a little holiday.’53

  As the bombing worsened, Tom wrote advising Sydney to prepare for invasion. Nancy’s version of Sydney’s reaction to the Jews occupying her house must be compared with Sydney’s own letters at the same time. On the subject of evacuees she wrote to Decca, ‘we have about 70 at Rutland Gate . . . about 50 of them Jews, but it’s not very comfortable [for them] as there is no furniture but straw palliasses on the floor. The families have a room each to themselves which they go into during the day time but they all troop down to the basement at night . . . it is really sad to see the plight of the homeless . . .’54 Nancy was so fanciful in her letters, and sometimes in her speech, that it is difficult for the researcher to know what is fact and what is invention but in this case Sydney’s own mild reaction appears more likely to be the accurate version of the incident. As Sydney was wont to say, ‘There is a small knife concealed in each of Nancy’s letters.’55 As soon as the mews was habitable Nancy returned there and together with Mabel, the parlourmaid, two or three friends and a cook from the Women’s Volunteer Service, she looked after the constantly shifting residents of 26 Rutland Gate.

  It was a chance request from a friend in the War Office, at this point, that changed the course of Nancy’s life, although this is only evident with hindsight. She was asked to ‘worm’ her way by any means possible into the Free French Officers Club and find out what they were up to. ‘They are all here under assumed names,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘and all splashing mysteriously large sums of money about and our people can’t find out anything about them and are getting very worried.’56 With her social contacts it was only a matter of time before Nancy was able to comply with the request and as a result she met André Roy,57 a thirty-six-year-old ‘glamorous Free-Frog’, with whom she fell in love and had a light-hearted affair lasting into the following year. Nancy had never complained about Prod’s infidelities though she was deeply hurt and often lonely. During her relationship with André Roy, she came into her own again, sparkling, shimmering and wittily ornamenting London Society.

  Sydney, Debo and Unity returned to life at the cottage at Swinbrook, and although they were away from the terror of London bombing raids, life was anything but idyllic. As Unity recovered her strength she became as irrational and as temperamental as David had once been, but without his fun and charm. Debo was the one most affected by this, just as she had been the most affected by the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. On one occasion when David visited them for a weekend Debo wrote to Decca graphically describing the tensions in the house. ‘Muv and Bobo are getting awfully on my nerves. I must go away soon, I think. There was a dreadful row at breakfast this morning and I shouted at Muv in front of Mrs Timms. Farve shook me like he did you after you’d been to Mrs Rattenberg’s [sic] trial.’58 Despite this, she admitted, ‘I hadn’t seen him for ages . . . he was heaven. He was bloody at the scene where he shook me, but otherwise very nice.’59 Unity had commandeered two large tables in the small sitting room for her collage work, Debo wrote,

  and if I so much as put my knitting on one of them she hies up and shrieks BLOODY FOOL in my ear which becomes rather irksome . . . She absolutely hates me . . . She is completely different to what she was and I think the worst thing . . . is that she’s completely lost her sense of humour and never laughs . . . Muv is fairly all right but awfully bitter and therefore it is sometimes very difficult. I must say she’s wonderful with Bobo and never loses her temper or gets impatient even when she’s being maddening . . . if you ever come across the Kennedys (the Ambassador here) do take note of Kick, she is a dear girl and I’m sure you’d like her.60

  Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy had fallen in love with Andrew Cavendish’s elder brother, Billy, Lord Hartington, who was heir to the Duke of Devonshire, the massive Chatsworth estate, land and properties in Yorkshire, Sussex and Ireland, and an income of a quarter of a million pounds a year. Kick was eighteen and Billy was twenty when they first met but while Billy’s antecedents were so impressive that he had been suggested as a possible future husband for Princess Elizabeth, the Kennedys, despite Joseph Kennedy Senior’s ambassadorship, were still regarded by many Americans as upstart Boston Irish who had made good only within living memory. But it was neither the age of the couple nor even their cultural differences that cast doom upon the relationship. The Cavendish family were staunch Protestants and ferociously anti-Catholic. ‘I am a black Protestant,’ the Duke of Devonshire was wont to say, ‘and I am proud of it . . . Papists owe a divided allegiance, they put God before their country.’61 The Kennedys were bitterly entrenched Catholics. The couple knew from the start that there was no future to their courtship because of irreconcilable religious differences, and Billy described it as ‘a Romeo and Juliet affair thing’.62 Kick was heartbroken when her father insisted she return to the USA in 1939 and by the time Debo wrote her letter to Decca, Kick was already working for the Herald Tribune in Washington, the rival paper to the Meyers’ Post.

  By now Debo and Andrew Cavendish had announced their engagement, and to make things easier at the cottage Debo often went to visit friends or family, and spent some time with Andrew’s parents at Chatsworth. Andrew was at Sandhurst before he joined the Coldstream Guards, but the couple were able to meet occasionally.63 Their wedding was scheduled for the following spring when they would both be twenty-one. In the meantime Debo worked in the garden, for which she developed an interest that surprised her, and rode a four-year-old piebald horse that she had bred from her old hunter. She trained it to pull a pony cart, which she painted blue and red – ‘It is very useful now there is so little petrol,’ Sydney wrote to Decca.64 Everyone was pleased about the engagement: Nancy wrote, ‘He i
s a dear little fellow & I am sure she will be happy. Also it will be easier for Muv as she [Debo] and Bobo get on so badly.’65 In December Debo moved out of Swinbrook when she was loaned a cottage at Cliveden, where she had agreed to work in the canteen of the Canadian Military Hospital.

  In this darkest time of the war, when Britain was fighting for its life, little thought was given to the appalling conditions suffered by those imprisoned under Rule 18B. Indeed, large segments of the population would have been heartily in favour of making things as uncomfortable as possible for internees. Diana’s scorn of the dirt, poor food, filthy lavatories and inadequate washing facilities helped her to rise above the horror of it all. She ignored the noise of the nightly bombs that fell terrifyingly close, shaking the walls of the prison and setting her fellow inmates screaming or whimpering, because she hardly cared whether she lived or died. But when Jonathan was taken to hospital for an appendectomy and she was refused permission to visit him, she found her situation almost unbearable. All day and all night, she paced the floor of her cell, worrying about her child lying seriously ill, and probably asking for her. In that first winter in prison she began to suspect that her imprisonment might be intended to last for the duration of the war. This was the nadir of Diana’s life.

  As 1940 drew to an end, things were tough for the rest of the Mitford family too, but not as gloomy as they might have been. None of them had been bombed out or injured, and they had Debo’s wedding to look forward to. Debo and Andrew were to live in a small house in Stanmore, Middlesex, close to where Andrew was to be stationed. Pam and Derek had a house near by. ‘I expect we will be terrifically poor,’ Debo wrote to Diana, ‘but think how nice it will be to have as many dear dogs and things as one likes without anyone saying they must get off the furniture. I do so wish you weren’t in prison, it will be vile not having you to go shopping with, only we’re so poor I shan’t have much of a trousseau.’66

  15

  Gains and Losses

  (1941–3)

  On 9 February Decca gave birth to a six-pound ten-ounce girl in the Columbia Hospital in Washington. She had a bed in a five-bed charity ward,1 and was inundated with flowers, fruit and gifts for the baby. Virginia Durr, an indefatigable networker, had introduced Decca to everyone in Washington worth knowing, including Virginia’s ‘kissin’ cousins’ Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson (‘I looked up Lady Bird in the Peerage,’ Sydney is said to have written to Decca, ‘but could find no trace of her’). At innumerable Washington cocktail parties Decca had been introduced as ‘the wife of Winston Churchill’s nephew’, which, she told Esmond, while it made her cringe, she had to admit was very effective.

  Even so, considering she had been such a short time in the country and had no background there, the flood of visitors she received in hospital seems to testify to Decca’s personal charm and energy. When Eugene Meyer sent a photographer to take a picture of Decca and the baby for the Washington Post, it caused a sensation in the ward and the nurses suddenly became ‘very deferential’. Typically, Decca saw the humour in the situation, writing to tell Esmond how a rather coarse woman in a bed at the end of the ward, whom she heartily disliked, had announced loudly to no one in particular, ‘Why’re they taking her picture? Was her baby born with teeth?’2

  Initially Decca wanted to call the baby Esmé, after Esmond, but then suggested Constancia because she had been reading a book about Constancia de la Mora.3 Esmond agreed but then panicked and wrote saying he thought Carol was better as the baby would undoubtedly be called ‘Connie’. Decca countered that she didn’t see why, since no one ever called her ‘Jessie’. So Constancia it was, though to her family and friends she was always the Donk or Dinkydonk (and is still known universally as Dinky). This stemmed from that July weekend when Esmond left for Canada and Decca attended the Democratic Convention with Virginia Durr. Decca was already suffering badly with morning sickness and Virginia suggested that it was the Democratic Donkey, symbol of the Democratic Party, kicking up its heels. Thereafter Decca always referred to her bump as ‘the Donk’.

  In England the family celebrated another happy event with Debo’s marriage to Lord Andrew Cavendish, on 19 April at the church of St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield. There had been heavy bombing and many of the windows and the curtains of 26 Rutland Gate were damaged, and there was glass everywhere. But the mews cottage remained intact and the Mitfords were virtually the only family in their circle who could still live in their own home. ‘The Airlies, Wernhers, Jack and Iris and the Devonshires are all bombed out, and we have even got gas!’ Sydney reported. The refugees had all left No. 26 so it was decided to hold the wedding reception there. ‘Of course it is empty and looks hideous with so many broken windows, but it seemed the best place. The caterers will bring tables and chairs . . . We have asked such a lot of people, the Devonshires asked nearly 500 . . . everyone seems to like a party in these days when there aren’t many.’4 Sydney got hold of several rolls of heavy wallpaper and made ‘curtains’ with it for the large drawing-room windows.

  My darling Little D,

  Debo’s wedding was on Saturday and all went off well and happily. It was a pouring wet morning, which was rather horrid as of course there was so much coming and going . . . The poor old house (No. 26), quite empty with all the ball room windows blown in (the last came in on Wednesday night), looks slightly dreary, but Aunt Sport [Dorothy – wife of Uncle Tommy] had sent up some lovely spring flowers and great branches and so with these on the mantelpieces the places where the pictures used to hang looked less bad. And about 100 huge blooms of great red camellias had come up from Chatsworth from the tree planted by Paxton 100 years ago. I put them in an enormous washbasin and they were lovely.

  My curtains made of wallpaper in grey and gold really looked just like brocade, and pelmets were tacked on in the same paper. Those huge windows looked so ugly without any curtains. The ballroom I had to leave, just sweeping away the glass. The Mayfair Catering Co. did the party – the last in the old house. I wonder really that they can still do it. They brought tables, chairs, linen and silver and crockery etc, and of course the food, of a plain variety. The wedding cake was one they had made some time ago, of course, no icing as that is not allowed, but they put on a white cardboard casing which looked quite nice and was taken off to cut it.

  Debo’s dress was all white tulle . . .very pretty and she had a bouquet of white orchids. Nancy and Peter were there, and the Woman (but not Derek) and Tom, who showed people to their seats . . . The party lasted quite a bit and Debo went to the Mews to change her dress . . . they had quite a lot to do after they left Rutland Gate as they had to get Debo’s identity card and ration card altered to her new name, and then go on and register for National Service as she was born in 1920 . . . They have taken a tiny mews cottage near Regents Park and hope to go straight there after their honeymoon [in Eastbourne] in about a week . . .

  All greatest love, darling,

  Muv.5

  Photographs of David arriving at the church with Debo show an old man. Dressed in his Army greatcoat over his old uniform, he looks grim and wretched. One wedding guest described him as ‘a broken man’.6 Among the wedding telegrams were messages from Diana and Mosley, Joe, Jack and Kick Kennedy, and Decca, who hinted that Debo had nearly got her duke. ‘A very counter-hon remark,’ Debo commented.7 Considering the reduced size of newspapers the wedding and going-away of ‘Lord and Lady Cavendish’ were covered in surprising detail.

  The life of the story was extended when journalists noticed that Unity appeared ‘quite normal’. Why, since she was able to attend her sister’s wedding, they asked, was she not in prison like Lady Mosley? But no one seeing those photographs and comparing them with Unity before the shooting could regard her as ‘normal’ – even her eyes were not properly co-ordinated. The matter was brought up in Parliament when a Labour MP asked the same question. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison answered coolly that he was aware of Unity’s medical condition and the circumstances in wh
ich she was living. At present, he said, there were no grounds that made it necessary, in the interests of national security, to take her into custody.

  In the eighteen months since the shooting Unity had made a recovery of sorts. By 1941 she was able to take the bus into Oxford and she even advised Decca that she had applied for a provisional driving licence to take driving lessons. In Oxford she had lunch at the British restaurant, where meals were fixed at a shilling, and Unity used to rejoin the queue to get another shilling’s worth, which was greatly disapproved of as she was recognized.8

  By the time Decca received all this news she was staying in Hamilton near Toronto, having taken Baby Dinky up by train. She rented a small flat near the military camp for a few weeks. ‘Esmond comes home to dinner every night,’ she wrote to Sydney, ‘but next week I am going back to Va’s because he goes west for final training.’ It was marvellous for them both to be together with the baby. In late June Esmond flew down to see them for a few days before shipping out for England. They spent a week at Martha’s Vineyard with friends. When someone asked him if he was nervous about flying on raids over Germany he replied, matter-of-factly, that he had no misgivings. ‘I have no doubt at all,’ he said, ‘that I will survive this war whether shot down or not.’9 On 27 June Esmond left to take a ship to England.