The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  Cockburn was no fool: he could see that there was as much mischief in the gesture as romantic idealism, and he recog nized that Decca envisaged a scenario where bands of jolly holidaying Communists might rattle the windows of the Redesdales’ house with rousing choruses of ‘The Internationale’.43 It was the sort of practical joke that the pre-war Esmond might have thought up, but with apparently no thought given to the distress that Sydney, the island’s inhabitant, was suffering following the recent death of her only son. Cockburn saw all this, and was already extremely doubtful as he approached the Communist Party leadership in London with Decca’s offer. He was told: ‘What the hell does anyone think we can do with a small little bit of a desolate island somewhere off the coast of Scotland. Who, in the name of God, goes there and what would they do there if they went?’44

  Subsequently Cockburn met David at the House of Lords to discuss the matter. David had made a special journey to London for the meeting and pointed out that the island was very tiny. ‘I don’t know that any of us – I mean we or the Communists – would be happy under the circumstances’ he said. Cockburn was inclined to agree, and there the matter foundered. When she found she could get no response from Cockburn, although the two remained lifelong friends, Decca revoked the power-of-attorney and agreed to sell her share of the island to the other sisters, who were willing to buy it at market value, to enable Sydney to spend her retirement there. Sydney volunteered to act as power-of-attorney to complete the legalities of a contract in English law. She did not tell Decca that everyone else in the family was so livid with her that no one else was prepared to act for her. In the event Decca’s one-sixth was only worth five hundred pounds – a third of what she had anticipated (an independent surveyor valued the island and property at three thousand), but she saw the matter as a point of honour. ‘To me, it seems that money is an important political weapon,’ she explained to her mother, ‘. . . and that is the only reason why I’m interested in getting any of it, and also why I’m interested in getting the maximum . . . I don’t know whether developments in the last ten years have yet proved to you what a criminal thing it was to have supported Hitler and an appeasement policy . . . but you know what I think about it, so therefore you can see the logic of my . . . using the money from the island in this way.’45 In the event Decca kept her one-sixth share and the sisters unanimously agreed to Sydney’s life tenancy.

  David’s reaction was never recorded and Sydney never responded to Decca’s accusations that she and David (as well as Diana) had been major causes of the war; perhaps she was afraid that if she did so, she would lose touch with Decca altogether, and would never see her two American grandchildren. She never mentioned the matter, writing instead every few weeks, to keep Decca in touch with news of the rest of the family.

  From her mother’s letters Decca learned that Andrew Cavendish was now out of the Army and was going to stand as MP for Chesterfield in the forthcoming elections, that Pam had just suffered yet another miscarriage almost six months into her pregnancy, that Derek had left the RAF and was going to ride his own horse in the 1946 Grand National, that Sydney had to leave the cottage at Swinbrook as it was wanted by someone else. She had decided to return to High Wycombe but Unity loved Swinbrook and wished to remain there. They tried unsuccessfully to find a cottage for her, unable to afford the only ones available for rent. Nancy’s book had gone into a second edition; she had given up her job and was now living permanently in Paris which she said was ‘her spiritual home’. Neither Sydney nor Decca ever referred to Diana, of course. Sydney hoped that once the war was over Decca and Bob would travel to England. ‘Some day,’ she threatened lightly, ‘I shall get into an aeroplane and arrive at your house, seven years is too long. You probably won’t know who it is when I arrive.’46 A year later that is exactly what she did.

  Bob and Decca no longer lived at the inconvenient apartment in Haight Street. In September 1944 they had moved to a house about ten blocks away in Clayton Street, and shortly after they settled in Decca was granted US citizenship.47 Three years later the Treuhafts sold the Clayton Street house and moved across the bay from San Francisco to its workaday neighbour, Oakland. There they purchased an apartment at 675 Jean Street, convenient for the law firm Bob had joined as a junior associate. Gladstein, Grossman, Sawyer and Edises, promptly renamed by Decca as ‘Gallstones, Gruesome, Sewer and Odious’, was the only left-wing law firm in the area, and they specialized in employment disputes, representing trade unions and civil-rights cases. Decca’s friend Dobbie who had first introduced the Treuhafts to the Communist Party was also an associate. With Decca’s assistance Bob was a pioneer in ‘trying to deal with one of the worst police departments in the country. They were mostly whites who had been recruited from Southern police departments and they were extremely hostile and vicious towards the growing black population.’ He engaged in lawsuits against the police, which no one had ever done before. ‘It was not a very lucrative practice, I can tell you that,’ he recalled.48

  The Treuhaft household at Jean Street was happy, noisy and busy, if slightly shambolic. Decca, fulfilled by her work for the party, had no aptitude for housework and domestic occupations, though now and again a spurt of guilt would drive her to some unaccustomed activity such as polishing all the wooden floors in one evening, on her hands and knees. ‘She had to learn from scratch,’ Bob said. ‘All the housework at her childhood home had been done by maids who got up early and were finished by the time the family came down.’ Bob, who had grown up knowing what happened in a kitchen, was a better cook than his wife, and did most of the shopping and cooking. Decca had a few specialities, though – an English roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, a poached salmon, chicken paprika – that she would whip up for guests, and when she put her mind to it she could produce an excellent table for she adored entertaining and her house was always full of visitors. A succession of daily cleaners varied in competence, and six-year-old Dinky took on some household chores because she enjoyed them. ‘She knows all sorts of housework things like cleaning the woodwork, which I have no idea of’ Decca wrote to Sydney. On one occasion Dinky slipped in through the door after school to find her mother on the stairs with a dustpan and brush. She stood for a moment, watching the activity, then said witheringly, ‘Decca, I think you’re supposed to start at the top and work down.’49 Decca much preferred to spend her time raising money for the Communist Party, at which she excelled. ‘If you went to a function run by Decca,’ a friend recalled, ‘you paid the small entrance fee without realizing it was just a downpayment. There would be a twenty-five cents charge for getting your coat back, and another quarter for drinks, or to use the bathroom.’50

  Nicholas was now almost four, and the apple of Decca’s eye. Perhaps because he had several health problems, such as eczema, and because he never displayed the sort of independence that Dinky had shown from the start, he received a greater share of Decca’s time.

  Aranka, Decca’s mother-in-law, was the sort of hands-on mother to which Decca felt she had been entitled and had missed out on, who was involved at a deep, emotional level and interested in everything her child did. Although there were differences between the two women they got on pretty well, and Decca’s warm, chatty letters to Aranka, with sketches, jokes and detailed descriptions of the children’s illnesses and development, are different from those to Sydney, except when she was writing about her children and lost her spiky tone: Nicholas was a wonder child if a little accident prone and ‘He does the most awful things like falling out of the car when it’s moving, eating quantities of sleeping pills (we had to rush him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped) and setting fire to the house with the electric stove . . .’51 Sydney must have blenched at this, thinking of the ordered nursery routine of her own children under Nanny Blor.

  In October 1947 Sydney received a cable telling her, as usual out of the blue, that Decca had given birth to another son, a ‘nine-pounder called Benjamin’. A letter from Dinky shortly afterwards
decided the matter. ‘Granny Muv, could you come over here one day?’ she wrote. ‘Do you know that I do not have Esmond as my father now? I have a father called Bob, at least I call him Bob, and I like him very much . . .’52 Debo had just lost another baby at eight months into her pregnancy and had gone to Africa to convalesce and recover from the inevitable depression caused by the experience. Sydney decided she would fly to San Francisco and meet Decca’s family at last.

  For years Decca had kept her family, friends and comrades amused with tales of her upbringing, and like most raconteurs she never worried about adding a little embroidery to make a good story even better. Dinky had grown up with these stories, with Bob and all their friends falling about with laughter, and now, when she heard that Granny Muv was coming to visit, she began teaching Nicholas to bow. ‘She has a strange idea of our childhood,’ Decca wrote to Nancy. But Decca was apprehensive about the visit. She had convinced herself that she disliked Sydney, and that her childhood had been deeply unhappy. Now, the thought of her cool, austere, disapproving mother arriving in California was almost too much for her to stand. ‘I was in a state of near terror about her visit,’ she wrote to Nancy. ‘And then she tottered forth from the aeroplane (it was a rough trip and she was quite done for), and at once it became apparent that she had come to make friends at all costs.’53 Any reticence was dispelled by Dinky, who sat in the back of the car listening to the awkward silence as they drove from the airport. Suddenly she piped up, ‘Granny Muv, aren’t you going to tell Decca off for running away?’54

  However, the last vestiges of the ice chip that had lodged in Decca’s heart had not yet melted. This occurred several days later when she and her mother were working in the kitchen and the touchy subject of Decca’s childhood came up. Sydney knew Decca felt strongly about not being allowed to go to school and university because many of her letters over the years had contained short, barbed comments such as ‘because you never let me go to school’ or ‘because I was never allowed to go to college’. Suddenly, the accumulated resentment, bottled up for years, burst forth, and with hot tears of rage streaming down her face Decca verbally lashed out at her mother for failing to educate her.55 Although it was an unpleasant experience for Sydney, it was cathartic for Decca.

  The chief purpose of the visit had been to re-establish family ties. ‘I remember watching them,’ Dinky said, ‘my mother and my grandmother trying to negotiate some sort of relationship.’56 And certainly Sydney’s visit helped Decca to get her feelings for her family, or at least her mother, into perspective. She found that Sydney was not as she had remembered or anticipated: she did not mind the untidiness of the house, or her bedroom, which had no cupboards. ‘It was really a sort of downstairs study, disused room, and she had to put her clothes on the piano which rather amused her . . .’57 She was not standoffish or vague; rather, she was friendly and grandmotherly to the children, teaching Dinky to knit, and endlessly amused by Nicholas who answered, ‘Okay,’ to everything. ‘My little Okay,’ Sydney called him. And Sydney’s childlike delight in the convenience of supermarket trolleys (which through a misunderstanding she called panniers, and wrote to The Times to recommend), and her genuine enjoyment in meeting the Treuhafts’ circle of Communist friends, who were enchanted by her, touched Decca. When asked where she wanted to be taken it was not notable sights, such as the Golden Gate, that Sydney wanted to see but ‘a supermarket, a women’s club and a funeral parlour’. The first was understandable, for England was still in the throes of food rationing, and Sydney explained that her desire to see a funeral parlour was the result of reading Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. By the time she flew back to England via New York, where she stayed overnight with Aranka, Decca had come at last to appreciate the more remarkable qualities of her mother and to conclude, to her surprise, that ‘I really rather adored her.’58

  Decca’s pregnancy and Benjamin’s birth had made it necessary for her to leave her job and stay at home for some months. This proved convenient while Sydney was visiting, but in the longer term her domestic ineptitude, she claimed, caused Bob to beg her to go back to work so they could employ a cleaner-cum-babysitter. The result was that Decca became involved in the Civil Rights Campaign (CRC), a legal-defence arm of the American Communist Party formed in 1945 with the aim of establishing civil rights and civil liberties for blacks. With the end of the war black workers from munitions factories and the armed forces found themselves unable to get work, or when they did found that they were paid lower rates than white workers. Long before it became fashionable or politically correct Decca had identified the implications of statistics and studies of racialism, and was active in breaking through racial barriers. She met and came to know black people, was accepted into their homes and even went into their churches. It was the terrible unfairness that spurred her to oppose the injustices. Soon she became secretary of the East Bay CRC, and these activities, together with her membership and former executive post in the Communist Party, made her a prime target for the McCarthy witch-hunts, which were just beginning to gather pace.

  For Nancy, too, there were gathering problems. In 1947, Palewski’s fears over his connection to The Pursuit of Love had been substantiated.

  A heavy blow has fallen [she wrote to Diana], which I must say I’ve been expecting for some time – a hateful weekly paper here has come out with an enormous headline ‘Hitler’s mistress’s sister dedicates book to Palewski’. I haven’t seen it & the Col won’t let me because it is apparently too revolting – but he is in a great-to-do about it and really I think I shall have to go away from here for a bit. You see he is such an ambitious man & you know how the one thing that can’t be forgiven is getting in their way politically. Of course it was madness, the dedication, and what I can’t tease him with now is that it was entirely his own doing . . . he insisted on having his entire name . . .59

  There is a mystery here. The left-wing paper to which Nancy referred had indeed planned to run the story but a strike by printers prevented publication for three months and the piece never appeared. Surely Nancy must have known about the strike. But if she believed what the Colonel told her, it implies that he lied to her. ‘It is bizarre,’ Diana wrote recently, ‘Colonel invented it, and why didn’t she ask to see the article?’60

  One can only assume that Palewski wanted Nancy out of the way for, whatever lay behind the matter, Nancy went to England for a few months, apparently at his request. Her letters show that she missed him, but she was kept busy as she was now in great demand, working on film scripts, writing articles and seeing family and friends.

  18

  Truth and Consequences

  (1948–55)

  In early May 1948 Sydney arrived back in London. Unity had been staying with friends while her mother was in America, and it was arranged that on her return they would both go immediately to Inch Kenneth for the spring and summer months. David was now living permanently at Redesdale Cottage in Northumberland, where his mother had spent her final years.

  The two women had only just arrived on the island when they heard from a distressed Debo that Kick Kennedy Hartington had been killed in an air crash in France. After her husband’s death Kick had settled in England, and had made a new life for herself. A few people, including her brother Jack, who had spent some time in England, knew that she had fallen in love again during 1947, and they were happy for her, although once again there were difficulties; the man she chose, war hero Peter Fitzwilliam, was married. His wife was an alcoholic and the marriage was unhappy, but lawyers advised him that divorce was out of the question.

  On 13 May 1948 the couple chartered a twin-engine De Havilland Dove to fly to Cannes for the weekend. In the Rhône Valley they flew into a storm and were advised to turn back. Fitzwilliam decided to continue and the plane crashed into a mountain near the town of Privas.1 There were no survivors. Kick had quarrelled with her mother again, for she was determined to marry Fitzwilliam if he could divorce his wife. At their last meeting Rose Kennedy t
old her that if she did so the family would disown her. The matriarch’s reaction when she heard of her daughter’s death was ‘That airplane crash was God pointing his finger at Kick and saying no!’ The Devonshires organized Kick’s funeral and buried her at Chatsworth. The Duchess chose her epitaph: ‘Joy she gave/Joy she has found.’

  Unity was a good deal improved physically by 1948. Indeed, it had now become a source of concern to Sydney that Unity might outlive her, for although Diana and Pam had both told her they would always look after their sister, Sydney doubted that they were prepared for the amount of personal care involved. Unity led a reasonably active life, visited her friends, went to the cinema and shopping in High Wycombe or London, and while at Inch Kenneth travelled to Mull or even the mainland for concerts and ceilidhs.* But she was still incontinent, and her temper was unreliable: she was liable to burst into fury at the slightest provocation. Her chief consolation was a restless pursuit of religious activities. In England she attended church services of all denominations; on the island she conducted her own services in the old ruined chapel. She enjoyed planning her own funeral, choosing the hymns that would be sung.