The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  Diana grew painfully thin because she could not bear to eat the food she was offered, perhaps wisely in view of the number of food-poisoning cases among her fellow prisoners. The BUF prisoners ‘enjoyed’ the same status as prisoners on remand, in that they were not convicts. This entitled them to some off-ration treats if they were prepared to pay for them and they were available, such as a bottle of beer, or half a bottle of wine per day. Because Diana had an account at Harrods she was able to send gifts to friends and family at Christmas, and Mosley sent her a whole Stilton cheese. To augment this she ordered some bottles of ‘grocer’s’ port, which were doled out to her one at a time. She lived for months on a small portion of cheese and a small glass of port every evening. Somehow, the newspapers got hold of this and blew it up into a story, claiming that while the rest of the country was suffering austerity conditions, the Mosleys were living in idle luxury in prison. ‘Every morning his paid batman delivers three newspapers at the door of his master’s cell,’ the Daily Mirror advised its readers. ‘Breakfast, dinner and tea arrive by car. After his mid-day meal Mosley fortifies himself with alternative bottles of red and white wine daily. He occasionally asks for a bottle of champagne . . . his shirts and silk underwear are laundered in Mayfair . . .’ It was laughable, but since Mosley had never requested any wines he decided to sue the newspaper for libel.

  The suit itself was irrelevant, but there was a chance that if they both gave evidence the Mosleys might see each other in court. And this was what happened. They were allowed a few minutes together in the robing room in the presence of their barrister. ‘Looking forward to this meeting and thinking about it afterwards kept me happy for several days,’ Diana wrote. Mosley looked very thin and had grown a beard, but he argued his case well and won a small compensation and costs. The money was passed to Sydney who used it to buy Diana a shaggy fur coat, which was not elegant but warm. Diana wore it all day and it covered her bed at night. She became intensely grateful to the reporter who had invented the story.

  As a concession, in the spring of 1941, the husbands and wives imprisoned under Rule 18B were allowed to see each other for half an hour once every two weeks. Mosley and Admiral Sir Barry Domville, a senior member of the BUF, were brought to Holloway in a police car for these treasured meetings with their wives. One day, shortly after Germany attacked Russia in 1941, when Diana went to see her weekly visitor she found Tom, who was on leave. He told her he was dining with the Churchills that night. ‘Is there anything you want me to say?’ he asked. She asked him to say to Churchill that, if she and Mosley must remain in prison, could they not at least be together.3 Tom was not the only person lobbying on behalf of the Mosleys: Baba Metcalfe and other influential friends, such as Walter Monckton, had worked for months to improve the conditions in which they were imprisoned. However, soon after he had dined with Tom, Churchill ordered the prison officials to find a way to cut the red tape and make it possible for the few Rule 18B husbands and wives still imprisoned to be interned together. This was almost certainly due to Tom’s intervention.

  After eighteen months of separation the Mosleys were reunited in Holloway. ‘Our joy was such that, unlikely as it may seem, one of the happiest days of my life was spent in Holloway Prison,’ Diana wrote.4 Even in the worst days Diana could cope, as long as she was with her beloved husband, and it amused him, even many years later, to recall a morning when they were lying in bed discussing a particularly unpleasant and unattractive wardress. Diana had capped the conversation by stretching luxuriously and declaring, ‘Well, anyway, it’s so lovely to wake up in the morning and feel that one is lovely one.’5

  They were lodged in a small ‘house’ within the prison walls called the Preventative Detention Block, which they shared, initially, with three other couples, but two were soon released and eventually it was used only by the Mosleys and Major and Mrs de Laessoe. Each couple had three rooms and use of a kitchen and bathroom (dubbed ‘a suite’ by newspapers). The men stoked the boiler and grew vegetables in a kitchen garden. All their rations were provided raw for them to cook for themselves, and thus they began to have reasonable meals instead of prison food. Two convicts were recruited to wash down the stairway and passages; sex offenders were chosen for this, Diana was told, ‘because they are clean and honest’. It was the provision of these convicts that Churchill had mentioned to Decca, and which had so infuriated her.

  The Mosleys spent a further two years in Holloway before their release in 1943. ‘He was so marvellous in prison,’ Diana recalled. ‘It’s rather incredible to be locked up like that with somebody for two years and we hardly ever quarrelled. He used to laugh so much over me and the wardress, and he was so incredibly good-natured when you think what an active person he’d been, rushing about, and we’d both been abroad so much. And there we were locked up like animals in a cage. He was really wonderful and always ready to laugh.’6

  Mosley’s eldest son, Nicholas, was now a serving officer so was granted extended visiting rights beyond the fifteen minutes of Sydney and the others. His arrival heralded a minor celebration and he usually managed to smuggle in a small bottle of spirits, or a tin of ham, and some books in his Army greatcoat. He described how a wardress would escort him across a cobbled yard into a door in the high inner wall, beyond which Mosley would be waiting. They would walk past a piece of ground like a railway embankment where Mosley grew aubergines and Diana’s favourite fraises de bois with cabbages and onions. The building where they lived was like a deserted cotton mill, he said, high, austere and dingy, yet Diana had managed somehow to give their rooms a slight aura of elegance, ‘like that of some provincial museum for shells . . . There was Diana’s old gramophone with its enormous horn that contained tiny sounds like those of the sea . . . Diana would prepare one of her legendary dishes from . . . my father’s vegetables . . . on the gramophone there would be “Liebestod” or “The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla”.’7

  Six months after Esmond’s death, Decca left her part-time job with the RAF delegation at the British embassy in Washington, and went to work for the Office of Price Administration (OPA), a government agency responsible for price control, rent control and wartime rationing policy. Her starting salary as a ‘sub-eligible typist’ was $1,440, but she expected this to be increased soon: ‘It’s about £500 a year, which is swell,’ she reported to Sydney who might possibly have run across ‘swell’ at the cinema.

  Decca explained that she had now moved out of the Durrs’ house and into an apartment in Washington close to her workplace, and that Dinky was being cared for by a black neighbour who had twelve children of her own and twenty-four grandchildren, ‘so she knows about children’. She had taken in two boarders to help pay the rent. ‘I call us the three Boards,’ she wrote. ‘One is a Bawd, the other an ordinary Board and I am just Bored (by them). Actually they only sleep here and don’t have meals with me, thank goodness. [The Durrs] are amazed by . . . the Bawd, as being very respectable people they haven’t seen any before.’ Virginia Durr was now quite famous in Washington, as her bill to abolish poll tax in the Southern states had recently gone through the House. Esmond’s intuition had been spot-on: if he had searched the length of the USA he could hardly have found anyone better to look after Decca than the politically minded and sound Durr family. They had seen her through the dark days and by midsummer she had begun to accept the likelihood that he had not survived.

  Although still grieving, and irritated by the preoccupation of most Americans with material comforts, Decca enjoyed her work, seeing it as the front line in the fight against major business interests, which she equated with Fascism. The majority of employees at the OPA were left-wingers and New Dealers, and she felt comfortable there. Her intelligence and zeal earned her rapid promotion to the post of investigator, which – she discovered to her dismay – required her to be a college graduate. Recalling her long-ago language course in Paris, and realizing that no one could check since Paris was in the hands of Germans, she resolved the p
roblem by writing in the appropriate box, ‘Graduate, Université de Sorbonne’. To Sydney’s repeated requests that Little D come home, she wrote that she had made up her mind to remain in the USA.

  America is a much better place to bring up children, people are so much nicer to them here & the free schools are better. Also I doubt if I could earn enough for us to live on there. I know you realise that I couldn’t ever come and live with the family. After all I was told once [by Farve] never to come home again, which I know wasn’t your fault, but it still means I never shall . . . Of course I do hope one day I’ll see those members of the family I’m still on speakers with; probably after the war.8

  As part of her job Decca was sometimes assigned to assist senior members of staff on surveillance operations. One of those she worked with was a clever young Harvard-educated Jewish lawyer, Robert Treuhaft. After one successful case in which they had apprehended the Norwegian ambassador using petrol for ‘pleasure driving’ (the ambassador and his wife had driven to a nightclub, in defiance of regulations), Bob Treuhaft delighted Decca by sending her a poem.

  Drink a drink to dauntless Decca

  OPA’s black-market wrecker.

  Where there is no violation

  She supplies the provocation.

  Smiling brightly she avers

  ‘Je suis agente provocateuse . . .’9

  It was only to be expected that Decca would catch the eye of many young men. At twenty-five she was at the height of her beauty, poised and independent, intelligent and supremely funny; her slender figure, wide blue eyes, soft curling hair and remarkable presence made her a head-turner. She was attracted to Bob as a friend, without in any way surrendering her feelings for Esmond, and after the first anniversary of Esmond’s death she began to accept Bob’s showered invitations to dinner. She enjoyed his company, not least because they had a shared sense of humour and were political allies, but also perhaps because he was so different in appearance from Esmond. Shorter, slim and black-haired with large black eyes that positively twinkled, she repaid his hospitality by inviting him to escort her to a series of Christmas parties, including an exclusive ball. She had made many friends in Washington Society through the Durrs but the attention paid her by Churchill had not gone unnoticed, either, and she was in demand once she began to accept invitations. At first she attended parties as a form of saving on her housekeeping bills, as taught by Esmond, and she could have eaten out most nights had she cared to. In general, though, she lived quietly, spending as much time with Dinky as she could.

  On 28 December 1942, Bob Treuhaft wrote to his mother Aranka of the ball to which he had escorted Decca. It had taken place at

  a tremendous colonial mansion with white columns, footmen etc . . . all the women were seven foot tall and looked down their noses. I was probably the only non-congressman, non-commissioner or non-delegate, and certainly the only non-Aryan.’

  My sudden appearance on the Washington social scene – the ball was only the climax of two weeks of similar activities – is connected with my wild, uncontrollable and completely futile infatuation for the most terrific female the world has ever seen.

  You’ve probably heard of Unity Mitford . . . and her sister. One of them is reputed to be Hitler’s girl friend . . . and the other is married to Oswald Mosley, leader of the English fascists. Well, this is their sister, the only non-fascist member of the family and consequently disowned by them years ago as a radical.

  She married Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew, and went to Spain to fight with the loyalists in the Spanish war . . . he joined the RAF and has been lost 2 years [sic], and she has a beautiful 2-year-old baby. I discovered her working here at the OPA . . . and we’ve become good friends. She’s constantly sought after by the local aristocracy and diplomatic set, and she’s constantly throwing them out of her house because she hates stuffed shirts . . . Besides being beautiful she is exceptionally talented and shines with a kind of fierce honesty and courage. All this will undoubtedly make you very, very sad, because it is another lost cause. But you shouldn’t feel that, because I’ve never enjoyed anything so much in my life and . . . the situation is under control.10

  Since Aranka knew that Bob was on the verge of an engagement to a young woman called Mimi, this letter called forth an anxious query as to what he thought he was playing at. ‘Mimi went to Detroit and wants to come back in two months and marry me,’ he replied soothingly, ‘don’t worry. Nothing rash will happen before I see you again.’11 When Decca learned, at a New Year’s Eve party, of Bob’s understanding with Mimi, she was deeply shocked, not by the relationship but by her own reaction. ‘For the first time in my life,’ she wrote, ‘I was assailed by the bitter, corrosive emotion of jealousy. I could not quite understand this myself, but it brought home to me what I had begun to suspect: that my feelings about Bob were in a hopeless muddle.’12 She felt such pleasure in Bob’s company and looked forward to seeing him more than anything else in her life except Dinky. Yet she was still grieving for Esmond, still had that tiny doubt in the back of her mind about his death, and she believed that she would never, could never, love another man. She told herself that she had ‘no call over Bob’s affections’ or even the right to mind who he went out with. At this point, unable to handle the matter, Decca ran away for the second time. She learned of a vacancy in the OPA in San Francisco, which paid $1,800 a year, and she put in her application for a transfer.

  In February she and Dinky set off for California. Bob offered to see her off but was taken aback when he came to help with her luggage, which consisted of a large suitcase, Dinky’s tricycle, and a dozen bulging carrier-bags tied up with string. He commented that he hadn’t expected matched luggage but he thought she might have tried at least for matched carrier-bags. He was unable to stand the thought of parting from Decca and stayed on the train with her for a few stops, before catching a bus back to Washington. They promised to write to each other. For the rest of the three-day train journey Decca had plenty of time to reflect that in running away from her feelings for Bob she had put three thousand miles between her and her American friends, and she was going to a place where she didn’t know a soul. She tried to override the unusual diffidence that she experienced after Bob got off the train, telling herself that she had now left everything behind her, including the still bitter memory of Esmond’s death. She was heading for a new life. It was exciting. Wasn’t it?

  During the first few days she found temporary lodgings (forty dollars a month, room and board) and someone to care for Dinky while she settled into her new job. It was important that there was not too much interruption in her income and, she told herself, there would be time later to look for a better home. For Decca the regional office was more interesting than Washington’s for it was a hotbed of warfare between radicals and conservatives and there were fierce clashes over political issues. The radicals fought for the rights of government employees to join unions, and for rent and price controls. The conservatives were suspected of planting stool pigeons in the unions, and liaising with the Apartment House Owners Association and business interests generally to sabotage the work of the OPA. This sort of activity was right up Decca’s street, yet she was listless and could hardly take an interest.

  Then there were Bob’s letters. They were not love letters: they were the letters of a dear friend who told her indirectly that he missed her and Dinky. ‘It’s no good Dec, having all those miles of Field between us.’13 As the weeks wore on she found she missed him a good deal, and that the distance she had put between them had not put him out of mind as she had intended. She wrote to him once a week, telling him all the small details of her new life, and of incidents that she thought might amuse him such as when her landlady confided in her that her former husband had been a beast. ‘He ruined my bladder,’ Mrs Betts14 told Decca mysteriously as they washed up the dishes after supper. Bob’s response to this information delighted Decca. It was another poem set to the tune of a popular song: ‘. . . In a fit of depra
vity/He filled the wrong cavity/ . . . What’s the madder, You ruined my bladder/You took advantage of me.’ And Decca realized that ‘more and more I found my only source of real pleasure and sustenance was Bob’s letters’.15

  The room that Decca and Dinky inhabited in Mrs Betts’s boarding-house was at 1350 Haight Street near Ashbury. Two and a half decades later, in the Summer of Love of 1967, the Haight-Ashbury area would become the world centre of hippie culture. Now it is a trendy suburb where tourists shop and take coffee in sunny pavement cafés. In 1943, however, it was an area of run-down working-class homes, shops and cheap boarding-houses. Most important to Decca was that the motherly Mrs Betts agreed to look after two-year-old Dinky, along with her own two small boys, while Decca worked. A secondary factor was that it was convenient for her job, and was within her limited budget: she had still to save enough to buy furniture when she found an apartment. She trudged around the city following up rental advertisements but too many people were chasing too few apartments. When, after a few weeks, the occupant of the unfurnished apartment below Decca’s room moved out, she persuaded Mrs Betts to let it to her. It was the epitome of inconvenience: two small rooms, a minuscule kitchen and a boarded-up shop-front facing on to Haight Street. It could be reached only by going through the boarding-house and descending an outside wooden fire escape, or through a pitch-black alley and climbing up the fire escape. She bought second-hand furnishings and tried to make it a home.