The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  The two men met often during Tom’s leave and on one occasion drove to Swinbrook together, ‘to see Muv and Bobo’. By 1944 Unity had become ‘rather plain and fat, and says she weighs 131¼2 stone,’ Lees-Milne recorded. ‘Her mind is that of a sophisticated child, and she is still very amusing in that Mitford manner . . . she talked about the Führer, as though she still admired him . . . being with her made me sad, for I love this family, and I see no future for Bobo but a gradually dissolving fantasy existence.’20

  Tom left for Burma (now Myanmar) at the end of the year.21 Having come right through the war in Europe and Africa unscathed, he appeared to be charmed, and was popular with his men as well as his brother officers. Although he was initially posted to a position on Staff it is typical of him that he went immediately to see the general and requested a transfer to a fighting battalion. His exact words were, the general later wrote to David, ‘To hell with the Staff.’ He was subsequently attached to the Devonshire Regiment as brigade major commanding Indian troops. On 24t March 1945, he led a force from the 1st Battalion against a small group of Japanese who were occupying a wooded rise. The enemy had several machine-guns, and the company of men that Tom was leading were pinned down by rapid fire. Tom took shelter behind some sheets of corrugated iron but was hit in the neck and shoulders by several bullets from a machine-gun. He did not lose consciousness, and was taken immediately to the field hospital. Forty-eight hours later an operation was carried out, and a bullet was found to be lodged in the spine, causing paralysis. The surgeon decided against removing it, and on 26 March Tom was evacuated by light aircraft to company headquarters at Sagang where there were better surgery facilities. He was not in any pain, and – perhaps thinking of Unity’s experience – he believed he was getting better. Unfortunately he developed pneumonia, which did not respond to treatment, and he died, aged thirty-six, on 30 March. He was buried in the military cemetery near Yangon (formerly Rangoon).22

  ‘Beloved, handsome Tom,’ Lees-Milne mourned when he heard, ‘who should have been married with hosts of beautiful children; Tom, caviar to the general . . . but to me the most loyal and affectionate of friends. It is hell.’23 The core of his grief lay in that Tom had been his first love at Eton. ‘On Sunday eves before Chapel at five, when the toll of the bell betokened that all boys must be in their pews,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘he and I would, standing on the last landing of the entrance steps, out of sight of the masters in the ante-chapel and all the boys inside, passionately embrace, lips to lips, body pressed to body, each feeling the opposite fibre of the other . . . When Tom left Eton it was all over. He never again had any truck with me and turned exclusively to women.’24 The war in Europe was over to all intents and purposes; if only Tom had not volunteered to go to the Far East, he wrote. The tragedy of it seemed overwhelming.

  It was David who heard first. He was in London when, on 2 April, he received a telegram advising that Tom was badly wounded. Sydney was on the island in the most beautiful spring weather for many years when David got the news to her. ‘As the days passed,’ she wrote to Decca, ‘we grew hopeful, and the shock was so bad when it came that I nearly went mad, being so far away at Inch Kenneth. I went to London by the next possible train as Farve was all by himself at the Mews . . . he is sadly down, and you can imagine what it is to us both, and in fact I know all of you, to lose Tom. He was certainly the best of sons and brothers and I think we all relied so much on him.’ It was dreadful to think that all the time they were hoping for his recovery, she said, Tom was already dead, but she was consoled that in all his letters he had said how glad he was to be in Burma. ‘Alas, we are only one family of thousands all over the world, and what a world it has become, all black and dark . . . I have to learn from you darling,’ she wrote, obviously referring to the loss of Esmond, ‘for your great courage was an example for anyone, but you always were such a brave little D.’25

  The news had spread quickly and family and friends converged on the mews to offer what comfort they could to the bereft parents. Nancy and Peter, Pam – Derek was in America – Debo and Andrew, and Nanny all came as soon as they heard. Diana and her family were at Crux Easton. Mosley called Whitehall but without waiting for permission to leave the seven-mile zone, Diana borrowed a Daimler and drove to London with Mosley and two policemen in attendance. Although Sydney and Unity often went to stay at Crux Easton Diana and David had not spoken for many years, and there was a sharp intake of breath when Diana walked into the room. But David greeted her affectionately and ‘At once, like the old Diana,’ James Lees-Milne wrote, having been told of the incident by Nancy, ‘[she] held the stage and became the centre of them all.’26 It was David, ‘in his sweet old-fashioned way’, who remembered the two policemen sitting outside, and insisted on sending out cups of hot sweet tea, which he said policemen always liked best. Diana had not mentioned that Mosley was also sitting in the car, and took Nancy to one side to explain and ask for help in keeping David away. But when she got up to leave he insisted on taking her downstairs despite Diana’s protests, saying that of course he must escort her to her car. Finally, she had no option but to explain gently, ‘Farve, the Man Mosley is waiting in the motor for me,’27 at which David smiled regretfully, and allowed her to go.

  Soon afterwards when James Lees-Milne called into Heywood Hill’s bookshop he saw a frail bent figure leaning heavily on a stick. It was David, waiting for Nancy. His face was lined and shrunken, his features twisted, and he wore round spectacles of the sort of thick glass that magnifies the eyes. ‘Oh, the onslaught of age!’ Lees-Milne wrote, of the man who had once been capable of reducing him to a quivering wreck. ‘Last time I saw him he was upstanding and one of the best-looking men of his generation. I suppose Tom’s death has helped hasten this terrible declension. I melted with compassion.’28 David and Sydney never recovered from Tom’s death. The great tragedy was that the ideological differences between them had made it impossible for them to live together and console each other.

  Everyone felt for Decca, knowing how she had always adored Tom, and that she was unable to grieve with anyone else who had known him. Debo, Pam and Nancy wrote to her immediately. They were all amazed at how well their parents were taking the news. Perhaps for the first time they saw their real mettle. Decca was heartbroken.29 ‘I do wish I were there,’ Decca wrote to Nancy. ‘It seems like a lifetime since that day in 1939 when Tuddemy saw us off [for New York] at the station – he and Nanny . . . And he was one of the few people in England I was really looking forward to seeing again.’30 All the old childhood memories were stirred, such as those Sundays in Swinbrook church when the girls had tried to make Tom giggle by nudging him whenever the word adultery was mentioned.

  In Nancy’s letter to Decca she had casually mentioned the book that she had once described as her autobiography. She had changed her mind about saving the material for her old age and had recently gone back to work on it: ‘[It’s] about us when we were little,’ she wrote. ‘It’s not a farce thing this time but serious – a novel, don’t be nervous.’31 Sydney also wrote about it, telling Decca that Nancy had left the bookshop for two months to work on her new book. ‘It’s about all of you as children, the heroine appears to be Debo, and you appear in it of course, and Farve and I, but I’ve only read a little.’32 To her friend Evelyn Waugh, Nancy explained that although people might think she had copied from his recently published success Brideshead Revisited, in that she was relating the narrative in the first person, her book was ‘about my family, a very different cup of tea, not grand and far madder. Did I begin writing it before B’head or after – I can’t remember . . . I’m awfully excited. My fingers itch for a pen.’33 As she recycled her youthful experiences she found the book almost wrote itself as the words flowed. Never before and never again would Nancy find it so easy to write.

  The characters in The Pursuit of Love were all drawn from real life and easily recognizable despite the Nancyish distortions of David as Uncle Matthew, Sydney as Aunt Sadie,
Hamish and Prod as several personalities and Palewski as Fabrice, le Duc de Sauveterre. The heroines were amalgamations of herself and her sisters, but their experiences were unmistakable: here was ‘Jassy’ with her ‘running-away money’, and ‘Linda’ welling with hot tears over the little houseless match, and falling headlong for Fabrice. In June she showed the manuscript to Hamish Hamilton and was thrilled to be offered an advance of £250, the most she had ever received. Having only read a chapter or two Sydney was rather doubtful about it: ‘This family again,’ she wrote somewhat mournfully to Decca, unconvinced of Nancy’s prediction that it might earn her as much as a thousand pounds.

  In the event Sydney could hardly have been more wrong. The book was a success from the moment of publication and sold two hundred thousand copies in the first year. It has hardly been out of print since, is regarded as a classic of its genre, and spawned a crop of plays and films. Nancy had discovered her métier, at last, although it took her a little longer to realize this. For her the most important thing in her life was still her beloved Colonel. And before she knew that her book would be successful she made an attempt to get him back into her life. In the late summer of 1945, David somewhat surprisingly made Nancy a gift of three thousand pounds. Perhaps it was because he no longer had a son to provide for that he was sympathetic to her musings that she would like to open a bookshop of her own. She used some of the money in September 1945 to go to Paris, ostensibly to buy second-hand books for her shop, but really to see Palewski. Her letters home positively glowed with happiness and reflected none of the discomforts of post-war existence – the black bread and acorn coffee, or the fierce restriction of water for washing.

  I am so completely happy here . . . I must come and live here as soon as I can. I feel a totally different person as if I had come out of a coal mine into daylight . . . Diana Cooper [wife of the British ambassador] is being too angelic. I am captivated completely by her beauty and charm . . . She gave a literary cocktail party for me and John Lehmann34 & we met all the nobs, you must say it was kind. And she really persuaded me to stay on here . . . Oh my passion for the French. I see all through rose coloured spectacles . . .35

  She borrowed a flat at 20 rue Bonaparte (‘you must say it’s dashing to have a flat in the rue Bonaparte’), close to where Palewski lived at number 1. He was deeply involved in the French elections and although Nancy saw him from time to time he was too busy to devote much time to their affair. ‘What strikes me,’ Nancy wrote to Randolph Churchill, ‘[is that] you never see attacks on General de Gaulle. All the attacks, and they are many and venomous, are directed against Palewski, who is presented as a sinister Eminence grise l’ennemi du peuple. G.P.R.F. (Government Provisoire de la Republique Francais) which is on all their motor cars is said to stand for Gaston Palewski Régent de France . . .’36

  Nancy was back in London in December for the publication of her book. She was as surprised as anyone when it roared into bestseller status, and gratified that those who mattered in contemporary English literature, such as Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly and Rupert Hart-Davis, to name a few (although they were her friends), were fulsome in their praise not only in correspondence but in the all-important reviews. Betjeman wrote privately, ‘You have produced something that is really a monument to our friends. It is exactly how we used to talk at Biddesden . . . It cannot be that the wonderful, unforgettable Uncle Matthew is really like Lord Redesdale, can it? He is my favourite character in the book . . . Oh you clever old girl.’37

  Suddenly, for the first time in her life, Nancy had enough money to do the things she wanted to do. What she did not have was Palewski, and because of her book a small embarrassment lay between them. He was initially flattered and later worried that the book had been dedicated to him. Although she had killed off Fabrice and Linda at the end of the story he became concerned that French Communists would somehow make the connection between himself, Nancy and Unity. Furthermore, Nancy had committed a cardinal sin by using the real name of one of his lovers in the book.

  Diana says you’re cross with me about the boring Lamballe woman [she wrote to him]. Don’t be cross. I can’t bear that . . . Tell her to write a book about me – I am very vulnerable. I hate her – hateful Lamballe who deserted you when you were a lonely exile and ran off with her own soul. It was a mean and shabby trick. All the same, I will take her out of the American edition if you think it worthwhile . . . Come soon to London dearest Col – don’t be cross . . . you must be rather pleased with Fabrice really he is such a heavenly character and everyone is in love with him!38

  Palewski forgave Nancy – since he had encouraged her over the dedication he could hardly do otherwise – but as passion cooled for him, their relationship assumed a different character. For Nancy this meant years as a supplicant and having to be content with crumbs of affection from Palewski. He was always open with her about his feelings, and his relationships with other women, which were legion, were never deliberately concealed from her. It was a take-it-or-leave-it situation and it made Nancy miserable, but she recognized early on that if she could not look the other way she would lose him altogether, and she could not face that. In April 1946 she decided to live in France. Her book had made it possible financially and she was convinced that if she were always available then the Colonel would perhaps be more constant. She confided in Sydney her true feelings for Palewski and her sincere admiration for de Gaulle only to have Sydney ask in exasperation, ‘Oh, why do all my daughters fall for dictators?’

  Nancy would never live in England again. In the first months she was delirious with joy. Palewski had been ousted in the elections and was at a loose end; Nancy was available and entertaining, and her open adoration of him was balm to his wounded spirit. She had money to buy wonderful clothes and wore them beautifully. She was funny and good company, so in demand socially, usually on the arm of Palewski. Soon she had settled into the apartment that would become synonymous with her greatest literary successes: number 7 rue Monsieur. Here she began the sequel to The Pursuit of Love, which would secure her financial independence. The family began to refer to her as ‘the French lady writer’.

  The end of the war brought joy, of course, but it also engendered sadness when Sydney took stock of the cost to her family. There were the deaths of Esmond, four nephews who had been childhood playmates of her daughters, and Billy Hartington. And then, at the end of the war, there had been the death of her own beloved Tom. Several young relatives had been prisoners-of-war and were still trickling home in various degrees of ill-health. Unity’s life had been ruined. Diana’s children had been deprived of their mother during their important formative years. And then there had been Sydney’s own irreconcilable differences with David.

  This permanent separation was not of Sydney’s making; indeed, she found it ‘sad and inexplicable’ that David chose to live at Redesdale Cottage in Northumberland, so far away from his family. Like her daughters, she disliked Margaret Wright, who had assumed ‘airs and graces’, and was downright proprietorial to David’s visitors. When anyone called, she insisted on acting as the lady of the house and pouring the tea. Had David been a younger man in good health one would have suspected a romantic liaison (Decca and Bob believed this probably was the case: ‘He did that old-fashioned thing and ran off with the parlourmaid,’ Bob said), but it seems unlikely given his poor physical condition and sad demeanour. Although crushed by Tom’s death, Sydney made every effort to keep herself occupied by working the farm at Inch Kenneth, her regular bread-making, cooking and running her homes on the island and at the mews with minimal help. David had little to occupy him, or distract him from his unhappiness. He could no longer see well enough to shoot or fish, he could not skate, and he no longer cared to go to the House of Lords. His surviving children were dispersed far away from him, and may have been discouraged from visiting because of Mrs Wright, though Diana visited him every year, ‘and always loved it, despite Margaret’. His letters were cheerful and he described
himself as living in comfort, but he became increasingly bored and lonely. ‘I never think he gets enough to eat,’ said Sydney briskly.39 Occasionally they attended family functions together, such as the wedding of the Churchills’ youngest daughter Mary to Captain Christopher Soames.40

  As 1945 drew to a close the aftermath of Tom’s death caused yet another rift in the family. Only a month before Sydney had written to Decca,

  Farve has made over the island to Tom, and I have come to manage the farm while Tom is away . . . It is not very ideal for Farve as he can’t enjoy himself with the boats etc. But you know how he always gets tired of a place after about 5 years so perhaps it would have happened anyway . . . I must try to make the farm, if not pay, at least not lose too much. We have to have a boatman as well as a farm man & wife, and of course with wages very high and nothing coming in . . . I don’t want to ruin poor Tom . . . The house is absolutely hideous . . . in no way beautiful, but comfortable inside, and the sea and rocks are so lovely . . . Bobo and I do the housemaiding, it takes no time at all.41

  Somewhat surprisingly, in view of his legal training, Tom died intestate, and when his estate was being administered it was discovered that as the deed of transfer of Inch Kenneth had been made under Scottish law, ownership of the land and property now passed in equal shares to Tom’s siblings, not to his next of kin (David and Sydney) as would have happened under English law.42 The Redesdales inherited only the chattels. Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity and Debo decided to hand the property back to Sydney for her lifetime.

  Decca did not go along with this. She wrote that she would like to deed her share to the Communist Party in England, ‘to undo some of the harm that our family has done, particularly the Mosleys, and Farve when he was in the House of Lords’. Sydney responded unemotionally that they would, of course, comply with her wishes, and Decca appointed Claud Cockburn as her power-of-attorney to see the matter through all legalities. Cockburn was then a journalist on the London Daily Worker. Decca and Esmond had admired him from afar in the days of the Spanish civil war for his essays on Spain and his ‘muck-raking journal’ (this description by Decca was intended as a compliment) called the Week. Decca first met Cockburn at the founding convention of the United Nations in San Francisco, just after the details of Tom’s will had been relayed to her. She asked him to act for her in donating her share of the island to the Communist Party of Great Britain.