The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  Immediately Sydney wrote, begging Decca to return home. Decca’s cousins, Rosemary (daughter of the late Clement Mitford) and her husband Richard Bailey (son of Sydney’s sister Aunt Weenie), were in Washington at the time, and it was suggested that she return home with them.28 Sydney heard from Decca before her letter could have reached Washington. Worn out by sleepless nights and crushed by alternate hope and despair, Decca wrote on 22 February, almost three months after Esmond was reported missing, that she was still convinced he was alive, a prisoner of war, and that she thought she might not hear anything from him until the end of hostilities.29 She had decided, she continued, to remain in the USA, was continuing with her stenography lessons and had a part-time typing job with the RAF delegation. Decca’s mettle now made itself apparent. The easy option for her would have been to return to England with her baby. There she would have been welcomed, fussed over and cared for. She would hardly have had to think. Instead she was determined to carry on the fight that she and Esmond had begun, against Fascism in all its forms. And she felt she could do that more effectively in the USA, starting with nothing.

  At the end of 1941, while trying to support Decca from afar, Sydney had plenty of problems at home. Debo’s baby, a son, was stillborn. Unity was sent off to stay with friends so that Debo, who was very depressed, could come to the cottage for a while. It was tragic for Sydney that her daughters all seemed at odds with each other. She could never understand it. Nancy, too, had a crisis. Her lively relationship with ‘the charmer’ André Roy had resulted in an ectopic pregnancy in which her Fallopian tubes were found to be damaged beyond saving and so were removed. She was told that she could never have children. Perhaps it was not surprising that in the circumstances Peter’s parents were not sympathetic, but Nancy clearly expected them to be. Her mother-in-law was told by the surgeons that Nancy would be ‘in danger’ for three days. ‘Not one of them even rang up to enquire let alone send a bloom,’ Nancy wrote to Diana. ‘I long to know if they looked under R in the death column . . . Muv was wonderful. She swam in a haze between me and Debo. When my symptoms were explained to her she said, “Ovaries – I thought one had 700 like caviar.” Then I said how I couldn’t bear the idea of a great scar on my tum to which she replied, “But darling who’s ever going to see it?” Poor Debo must be wretched, the worst thing in the world I should think – except losing a manuscript of a book which I always think must be the worst.’30

  Friendly relations had been re-established between Nancy and Diana, and occasionally, when Diana got permission for her elder children to spend a day with her in Holloway, Nancy had twelve-year-old Jonathan and ten-year-old Desmond to stay with her overnight at Blomfield Road to make things easy for them. ‘They are bliss,’ she told Diana, ‘so awfully nice & thoughtful and tidy. The nicest guests I ever had. Jonathan is so funny . . .’31

  In March 1942 Nancy got a job at three pounds a week managing Heywood Hill’s bookshop at 17 Curzon Street.32 George Heywood Hill had been called up, so Nancy ran the shop helped by his wife, Anne. She enjoyed her job, had always loved being surrounded by books, and here her wide knowledge of literature was put to a practical use. She had no objection to the administration side of a bookshop, packing and unpacking, sorting and placing the books in their correct categories, and her friends popped into the shop for a chat whenever they passed. It became a meeting place, with knots of Nancy’s friends standing around ‘roaring’ so that at times other customers might have been forgiven for feeling they were intruding on a private cocktail party. Nancy always had a new story to make droppers-in laugh, such as the one she told of the wife of the American millionaire who met a parson’s daughter wearing a necklace of lapis lazuli. ‘Oh,’ said the American, ‘I have a staircase made of those.’33 She usually walked the two and a half miles to work every morning, and sometimes back again in the evening, so she became fit. The only thing she disliked was the drudgery of working hours. Once she decided to catch a bus and was accosted by an American serviceman who grabbed her round the waist. Nancy rounded on him. ‘Leave me alone, I’m forty!’ And he did.

  James Lees-Milne was surprised to find that the rebellious Nancy had become rather conventional. ‘It is clearly our duty,’ she lectured him, ‘to remain in England after the war, whatever the temptation to get out. The upper classes have derived more fun from living in this country since the last war than any other stratum of society in any other country in the world. No more foreign parts for us.’34 And she hissed the final sibilant, almost turning it into a joke. But she was deadly serious about ‘doing her bit’ for the war and she demonstrated it by walking to work, saving electricity by not turning on the water heater, sticking to a four-inch depth of water in her baths, and refusing to attend a ball thrown by Debo ‘because the news was so bad’. Her first love, Hamish, had been taken prisoner, as had Tim Bailey – the only survivor of the four Bailey cousins.35 Tom was in Libya and Prod was in Ethiopia. While they were dancing in London, she said, the men might be fighting for their lives.

  This was a somewhat inconsistent view, for Nancy hardly lived like a nun and had an active social life, which included throwing parties regularly. To fill lonely evenings she had begun work on what she called ‘my autobiography’ but, she told friends, she would not be able to publish it until her parents were dead because it would hurt them.36 Like Decca, Nancy was bitter that her parents had denied their ‘clutch of intelligent daughters’ an education, and it showed when her book was eventually published, making the Mitford family a household name. She had changed her mind about waiting until her parents were dead and they were hurt, but disguised it because they were so pleased by Nancy’s success. ‘There is a vein of callousness in her which almost amounts to cruelty,’ James Lees-Milne once observed. ‘All the Mitfords seem to have it, even Tom.’37 Nevertheless, her wit endeared her to a wide circle of friends.

  In the summer of 1942 Nancy was still involved with André Roy and when Unity turned up ‘looking a mess’ for a party at Blomfield Road, it was the ‘adored Capitaine Roy’ who took her upstairs to apply make-up and fix her hair so that she looked pretty. But fate was waiting in the wings for Nancy. Her relationship with Roy was a light-hearted, affectionate friendship, which provided emotional and social relief from her half-life as Prod’s wife. The Rodds’ marriage had been over before the war but Nancy’s pride had not allowed her to admit it; her friends said her remarkable stoicism over the bombs was the result of her ‘steeling herself to an indifference to Peter’s misbehaviour’.38 In September 1942 Nancy met Gaston Palewski and, for her, life began.

  Palewski, or ‘the Colonel’ as Nancy always called him, was the right-hand man of Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, in London. The relationship between these two men was strong for it had been Palewski, then a rising young diplomat and politician, who had first brought de Gaulle to the notice of Paul Reynaud, Minister of Finance in the Daladier government of 1934. Thereafter, both men had absolute trust in, and respect for, the other’s abilities. At the outbreak of war Palewski volunteered for the French air force and was mentioned in dispatches for his valour in the battle for Sedan.

  When France fell, he contacted de Gaulle offering his services to the Free French in London. Palewski spoke English fluently, having done a year’s postgraduate study at Oxford, and he had well-honed diplomatic skills. He spent six months in London from August 1940, acting as interpreter and go-between, but by the spring of 1941 he had become irritated and disillusioned by the constant quarrels and jealousies among the Free French as de Gaulle tried to organize an efficient resistance movement. Feeling he could be of more value in an active role, he asked for a posting to Africa and subsequently commanded the Free French forces of East Africa in Ethiopia until de Gaulle summoned him back to London in 1942 to be his chef de cabinet.

  Where de Gaulle was austere and absolutely single-minded in his quest, Palewski embraced every pleasure life had to offer. And though the fight against France’s enemies
was, for the time being, the most important thing in his life, he was easily able to incorporate this aim into his considerable joie de vivre. He was forty-one, charming, intelligent and a brilliant conversationalist; he loved the arts, good food and wine, beautiful women and clever society. He was a welcome addition to London’s café society, and before long was seen everywhere at smart parties, such as those of Emerald Cunard and Sybil Colefax, both of whom he had known for some years.

  While Palewski was in Ethiopia he had met Peter Rodd in Addis Ababa and when the subject came up at a dinner party, Palewski was told that Nancy Rodd would welcome first-hand news of her husband. As a result he arranged to meet her at the Allies Club in Park Lane, a short walk from the bookshop, and they talked of Ethiopia, Peter and France. Although she had lost the bloom of youth Nancy had presence, while her chic appearance, despite wartime clothes rationing, and brisk wit interested the Colonel immediately. In his diaries James Lees-Milne provides some vivid vignettes of Nancy at this time. On one occasion he noted her running down South Audley Street to get warm. ‘She made a strange spectacle, very thin and upright, her arms folded over her chest, and her long legs jerking to left and right of her like a marionette’s. I really believe she finds it easier to run than to walk.’39 On another he describes her wearing a ‘little Queen Alexandra hat, with feathers on the brim, pulled down over her eyes, and looking very pretty and debonair’.40

  Gaston Palewski was neither handsome nor patrician in appearance; he had none of the aesthete’s effeminacy that had been characteristic of the men to whom Nancy had hitherto been attracted. On the contrary, he was shortish and stocky, with features that owed more to the Polish roots of his grandparents than his innate Frenchness. He had dark hair and a moustache, and his olive skin was pitted with acne scars, yet he was unmistakably distinguished; he dressed well (Savile Row), exuded self-confidence, magnetism and infectious joviality, and Nancy found herself ‘powerfully attracted. He charmed and flattered her; he gossiped, joked and made her feel that she was the centre of his undivided attention.’41 Within weeks they were lovers, and for Palewski love-making was an art form.

  Nancy fell headlong, obsessionally, in love, as Diana had with Mosley, as Decca had with Esmond. It would last throughout her life but though Palewski was ‘in love’ with Nancy for a time, he never loved her in the sense that she was the only woman in the world for him. She was for him a light-hearted affair, such as Nancy had enjoyed with Captain Roy, a pleasant diversion from the everyday dreariness of war. He liked her tremendously, and she remained one of his dearest friends into old age, but for him she was not the great love and he made this clear to her from the first. In the heady grip of an intense and passionate emotion for the first time in her life, Nancy felt that she could win him eventually. She laughed at the way he parried her declarations of love, telling Diana Cooper, ‘I say to him, “I love you colonel,” & he replies, “That’s awfully kind of you.”’

  They were discreet for the sake of Nancy’s reputation, and also for Palewski’s, for he told her that de Gaulle would not have approved of him having an affair with a married woman. They were caught out on only one occasion. After dining at the Connaught Hotel they were on their way upstairs to Palewski’s room when they were stopped by a disapproving receptionist who pointed out that ladies were never allowed to visit the bedrooms of male guests. The mere mention of this incident was enough to make Nancy’s cheeks glow with embarrassment, and sometimes, to tease her, the Colonel would end his letters, ‘P.S. Connaught Hotel!’

  Eight months after they met, Palewski went to Algiers with General de Gaulle where he remained for just over a year. He and Nancy kept in touch by letter and when he returned in June 1944 their affair resumed. Because of Nancy’s writings we know how she felt when he reappeared. In The Pursuit of Love Palewski is instantly recognizable as the character Fabrice de Sauveterre. The heroine, Linda, although a mixture of Diana, Debo, Decca and Nancy at various times in the plot, is pure Nancy when the telephone rings and she hears Fabrice’s voice, after a long absence during the war, saying he will be with her in five minutes. In his absence London had been grey and cold, but now ‘all was light and warmth . . . sun, silence and happiness’.42 One biographer likened Nancy to Scheherezade,43 using her gift as a storyteller to keep her lover amused and entertained with anecdotes of her childhood and her family. Indeed, it was Palewski’s endless delight in hearing these recollections that made Nancy recognize their potential as material for a book that would set her on a course for undreamed-of fame.44

  16

  Women at War

  (1943–4)

  During the first year of Diana’s incarceration she had been allowed a weekly visitor. Usually this was Sydney, who made the journey no matter what the conditions. In winter months the weekly treks were especially tiring, for petrol rationing meant that she could rarely drive there, even though she got a small extra petrol ration for producing her goat’s cheese. So she travelled on a series of packed, chilly trains and buses, returning home long after the blackout. Sometimes Nanny or Pam went along instead. The children’s occasional visits could be traumatic and once two-year-old Alexander had to be torn away from Diana after soaking her clothes with his tears.

  With the exception of Diana, all the BUF women with children were released by Christmas 1940. Following this, the Mosleys’ lawyer campaigned vigorously for Diana’s release but it was never a possibility: constant hostility to the Mosleys in the newspapers had made her the most hated woman in England. He was told that public opinion against her was too strong. Churchill still had a soft spot for Diana, though, and on hearing of the atrocious conditions in which she was held, he tried to help. In December 1940 he sent a memo to Herbert Morrison asking why the Rule 18B prisoners could not have daily baths, and facilities for exercise and games: ‘if the correspondence is censored, as it must be, I do not see any reason why it should be limited to two letters a week . . . what arrangements are permitted to husbands and wives to see each other, and what arrangements have been made for Mosley’s wife to see her baby from whom she was taken before it was weaned?’1 He wrote to the Home Secretary on 15 November 1941 asking why the BUF couples could not be interned together. ‘Sir Oswald Mosley’s wife has now been eighteen months in prison without the slightest vestige of any charge against her, and separated from her husband. Has the question of releasing these internees on parole been considered?’2 The response was that it was simply not possible to cope with married prisoners living together, but he was able, at least, to insist that Diana be allowed to take a bath each day. Diana was sent for by the Governor and told that a message had come in from the government saying that Lady Mosley was to have a bath every day. ‘I looked at him,’ Diana wrote in her autobiography. ‘He knew, and I knew, that it was not possible. There were two degraded bathrooms in the wing, and enough water for four baths. We took turns and got a bath roughly once a week. It had been a kindly thought of Winston’s who had I suppose been told that this was one of the hardships I minded.’

  The Mosleys appeared separately before an advisory committee set up to hear their appeals against the injustice of their imprisonment. By the time Diana appeared before Norman Birket, the committee’s chairman, she was already deeply prejudiced against him. Mosley had been questioned for several days by Birket, three months earlier, and there was no movement towards his release. Both the questions and Diana’s haughty responses were hostile and somewhat pointless, as in this exchange concerning Hitler:

  Q: How many times do you think you have seen him between 1935 and 1940?

  A: I do not know.

  Q: Is he still a friend of yours?

  A: I have not seen him for some time.

  Q: Absence makes the heart grown fonder. Do you still entertain the same feelings for him?

  A: As regards private and personal friendship, of course I do.

  Q: The history of Hitler in recent years has not affected your view about that?

  A: I do
not know what his ‘history’ has been.

  Q: . . . Did you hear the bombs last night? That is Mr Hitler as we suggest. Does that kind of thing make any difference to you – the killing of helpless people?

  A: It is frightful. That is why we have always been for peace ...

  And so it went on. For Diana the issue was that she was locked in a filthy prison, parted from her four children, merely for seeing Hitler. Yet, she reasoned, many other people, including Churchill’s niece Diana Sheridan, had visited Hitler – it had not been illegal to visit Hitler. Upon what grounds had she, Diana Mosley, been singled out? Mosley always said that he had been grossly misrepresented and misunderstood by critics who made no allowances for the fact that he detested war; that he had fought in the First World War and had campaigned ceaselessly for peace. It is clear that neither Diana nor Mosley was in tune with ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ who wanted peace, too, but not under a regime where basic freedoms were not available to all. Nor did the Mosleys ever seem to recognize that the thug element attracted to the ethos of the BUF was deeply offensive and even frightening to decent-thinking people. The cleverness, and often the validity, of Mosley’s oratory was missed because of the alien posturing and what looked remarkably like Nazi-style exhibitionism. At least during the first years of the war, there was never any chance of their release and the advisory committee had been a sop to the Mosleys’ lawyer.