Decca went on with her work, and wrote regularly to Sydney: news of the progress of ‘Dinky, Nicky and Benj’ was interspersed with details of her trips around the country on CRC business. She sounded fulfilled and happy, if occasionally downcast by what she regarded as pettiness and the inevitable ‘persecution’ by investigators for the Un-American Activities Committee. The Treuhafts had moved to 61st Street in Oakland, a larger house, which they liked very much. ‘We’ll probably stay here for ever,’ Decca wrote happily to Sydney. There was still no news of their passports, and it seemed that the children would be fully grown by the time Sydney saw them again. Then suddenly, with no warning, this busy, happy life was shattered.
All three children did extra jobs to earn pocket money so that they could buy things they wanted and pay for Christmas and birthday presents. They did chores like ironing Bob’s shirts, or taking out the trash. Ten-year-old Nicholas had a paper round, delivering the Oakland Tribune, after school. On the afternoon of Thursday, 15 February 1955, while riding his bicycle home, he was hit by a bus and killed. Dinky had been on her way to look for him as he was late for supper, and heard the sound of the crash. She ran to the corner of the road to see what had happened and was with her dying brother within seconds. He was probably dead before the ambulance arrived. By then a small shocked and hushed crowd had gathered at the scene. One neighbour voiced her opinion that if Mrs Treuhaft spent more time at home this wouldn’t have happened. Dinky flew at the woman in a blind fury and had to be pulled off.8
Friends rallied round the family but the hurt was too deep for comfort. In the evening, when Decca and Bob returned from the hospital, Dinky remembers wandering around the house with Decca alone in one room and Bob in another, all unable to share their grief. They buried Nicholas in Guerneville, the town where Bob and Decca had been married, and from then on Decca, in the only way she knew how to cope, bottled up her feelings. By tacit agreement Bob, Dinky and Benjamin followed her lead and Nicholas was airbrushed out of their lives, but never their thoughts. Dinky always kept a photo of him on her dressing-table, but shut it away in a drawer when Decca came in. Benjamin lost the person who had been perhaps closest to him. Those who knew them at that time recall the two little boys endlessly play-wrestling on the floor of the living room, sparking each other off with funny remarks. After his brother’s death Benjamin had problems at school, getting low grades and into scrapes. On one occasion, decades later, when Decca was lunching with Kay Graham, her old friend from Washington, Nicholas was mentioned. A few days later Decca wrote, ‘Sorry I damn near blubbed . . . I should have supposed I had totally recovered, not to mention that we were brought up never to cry in front of other people . . . so forgive the unaccustomed lapse.’9
Sydney, desperately upset about ‘my little Okay’, as she called him, and knowing what it meant to lose a son, wrote inadequately to Decca, ‘Your letter came. You are very brave, but I always knew you were that . . .’10 Debo was the only other member of Decca’s family who had met Nicholas, but she was on holiday in Brazil when he died and Sydney decided not to tell her until she returned. For Decca Nicholas’s death, she once said, was the last of the four big losses in her life: Julia, Esmond and Unity were the others.
The aftermath of Nicholas’ death was a grim time for the Treuhafts. Bob felt helpless to comfort Decca and, in any case, she was unable to accept any form of sympathy. Because she had been in charge on the day of the accident, Dinky inevitably felt responsible for what had happened: she had been almost a surrogate mother as well as elder sister to Nicholas, and suffered greatly because she could not talk to either parent. Also there was a shift in her relationship with Benjamin, for Nicholas had been the connecting link between them. Dinky felt that the death of her brother distanced them all in a way and life was never quite the same again.11 At the age of sixteen she developed a gastric ulcer, more usually associated with middle-age executive stress than the carefree life of an American teenager.
Twelve weeks later, to their immense surprise, the passports for which the Treuhafts had applied with dreary regularity over the previous five years arrived in the post. Decca lost no time in arranging a trip to England for her, Bob and Dinky. She felt Benjamin was too young to appreciate the trip, so he was to stay with his grandmother Aranka, in New York. She was horrified to discover the cost of the journey but there was still some money in her old running-away account at Drummonds bank that they could draw upon while they were in London. They had tried unsuccessfully to have this transferred to them shortly after Sydney’s visit, and at Decca’s request Sydney had arranged a meeting with the manager, to see if there was some way round the currency restrictions, as they were desperately short of money. ‘Now let me see, your ladyship,’ said the accommodating manager, ‘we are unable to send the money to the United States, unless there is some strong mitigating reason such as that the money is needed for school fees, or to pay hospital bills and so forth. What is the money required for?’ He could hardly have given a stronger hint. ‘Oh I think she wants to give it to the Communist Party,’ Sydney answered truthfully.12 Whereupon the manager assumed a stern expression and refused the application. It had annoyed Decca at the time – as well as spawning a dozen after-dinner stories – but now the money would prove useful.
The travelling party was to include Nebby Lou, the daughter of friends. ‘They were black intelligentsia with connections in New York,’ Bob recalled. ‘They were desperate about Nebby, she was at Berkeley High and had no interest in politics. She seemed unaware that there were any racial differences and was friends with, and stayed with, mainly white girls, shopped with them for cashmere sweaters and so on, all that high-school scene.’ They asked Bob and Decca if they would take Nebby with them to broaden her horizons, and the trip was the start of a long friendship between her and Dinky. The Treuhafts planned to spend several months touring the UK and Europe, but their first call would be at Inch Kenneth, to visit Sydney. Decca wanted to show the others the high points of the English Season, such as Ascot, Henley and Lords, ‘But where are they?’ she asked Sydney. She had forgotten. ‘Also I long to show them the Widow [Violet Hammersley]. I had a very nice letter from her not long ago, all about plans for her death bed. Perhaps she could arrange to have it while we’re there? . . . About Farve, I quite agree we should see him, only he will have to agree to be nice to Bob, Dinky and Nebby Lou and not to roar at them. Does he still?’13 Sydney had been delighted that Decca would have this holiday to take her mind off the tragedy of Nicholas, but her relationship with David was just as important. She would never brook what she considered to be impertinence about him. Nebby Lou was very welcome, she replied firmly, but since Decca had chosen to lay down conditions about visiting her father, it was better that she didn’t see him after all.
David was still living at Redesdale Cottage. Nancy, Pam, Diana and Debo visited him at least once each year, Debo more often than the other three who were living on the Continent. Once when Diana visited him, he asked if she would like the fire lit. When she said she would he took out his keys, opened the safe and took out a firelighter. ‘Nothing else was kept in the safe,’ she said, recalling that he had done the same thing at Asthall to prevent the children taking firelighters to make the damp logs burn on the schoolroom fire. ‘It was a relic of the old days. At Redesdale Cottage there were no children to take his firelighters but the idea they might was ingrained. Farve’s safe would have been a grave disappointment to burglars.’14 David and Sydney still met occasionally at Rutland Gate, during his increasingly rare visits to London, and she sometimes went to visit him in Northumberland. Like Sydney he was never sure whether to be flattered or annoyed by his portrayal in Nancy’s novels. ‘It shows how savage I must have been,’ he wrote to Sydney once, ‘but without knowing it.’15
After a succession of jolly send-off parties from their friends, Decca, Benjamin and Nebby Lou set off by train for New York where they were to spend a week with Aranka. Dinky was already there and Bob was t
o fly to New York just before the ship departed. Dinky met them at Grand Central Station with terrible news. A cable had arrived, demanding that the passports be returned. They had apparently been granted by mistake and representatives of the State Department had been to the house at Oakland, to Bob’s offices and Aranka’s house, looking for Bob and Decca. By now skilled at evading officialdom, Bob had eluded them and was on a flight to New York, due to arrive at any minute. They drove straight to the airport and met him. During the flight he had made alternative plans. They would hide at his sister’s house overnight. He had discovered that a ship was sailing for Europe on the following day, the SS Liberté. If they went straight to the agent they could try to get on that, pretending, if they were stopped, that they had not received the cable.
They spent an anxious hour at the travel agent’s. The ship was fully booked but there was a last-minute cancellation in cabin class. They decided to take it. Then they found that the price of their original tourist-class tickets was not refundable unless the agency could sell on the tickets to someone else. Decca saw her trip disappearing, but Aranka came to the rescue and offered to pay for the cabin, then whisked Benjy away before Decca had a chance to say a proper goodbye to him. Next morning there were heart-stopping moments at Customs and during the boarding process; at every moment they expected to be recognized and stopped. They did not dare to go to their cabin but mingled on deck among the other passengers until the ship steamed out and they knew they were clear. After that they enjoyed five days of peace and unaccustomed luxury on the voyage to Southampton.
Bob spent his time reading a series of humorous books on how to survive in a Society environment, Lifemanship, Gamesmanship and One-Upmanship. When Decca asked what he was reading he showed her and told her he was going to practise on her family. ‘Decca exploded with laughter. She knew what a dim chance I’d have; they wrote the rules,’ he said.16
Debo met them in London with ten-year-old Emma and eight-year-old Stoker, and they travelled up to Inch Kenneth together. It took only slightly longer to get to the island, Debo told them, than it had taken her to fly to Rio de Janeiro. Sydney was waiting on the dock as the Oban ferry arrived. ‘It was one of the happiest moments of my life,’ Sydney wrote later.17 She and her boatman had brought two cars to drive them across Mull to Gribun, where the launch was waiting for them. ‘The drive was a bit terrifying,’ Decca wrote. ‘We went with Muv in her 1930 Morris, she has bad palsy but drives like a New York cab driver, honking like mad at anything and everything in sight.’ At one point on the single-track road she made a truck driver reverse for over a mile so that they could pass. While they were being rowed over to the island Sydney said to Decca, ‘You and Bob are to sleep in the tent.’ They were aghast, but found later that it was a tented four-poster in a comfortable room. Decca had long been concerned that her mother was living on a bleak island, and had pictured her scraping a lonely living. She was quickly disabused of this idea, as she wrote to friends in California: ‘Muv’s lonely barren life here is relieved, we find, by six servants (a cook, a housemaid, a boatman and three others to take care of the sheep, cattle and goats). The house is large and comfortable (10 bedrooms and four modern bathrooms).’ As usual Sydney had furnished the house simply but with tremendous style, although Decca thought the French furniture out of place on the hauntingly beautiful island.
Sydney loved her island. To her it was the next-best thing to living at sea, and she was happy pottering with her farm, her animals and her garden, helped by people she knew well and trusted. Although in her seventies she still swam most days in the icy Atlantic waters. ‘I’m just going for a little plonge, dears,’ she would say to guests, and off she would go to Chapel Beach for a health-giving dip. The guests shuddered at the thought.18
To Decca the whole thing, the trip, the sight of rolling green fields and pocket-sized gardens from the train windows, Cockney voices, seeing her mother and Debo again, all had a curious dreamlike quality about it. For the others it was merely the coming to life of the amusing and incredible stories that Bob had heard from Decca since they first met, and with which Dinky had grown up. When Sydney had visited California in 1948 she had been invited to give a talk to the children of Dinky’s school and chose to talk about her life on the island. One of the children had asked about her neighbours. ‘I don’t have neighbours, only sheep and cows,’ Sydney said. ‘What do you do there?’ ‘Oh, we have the sheep to shear, and we make blankets from the wool . . . and we have the cows,’ Sydney continued. ‘They give us milk . . . and they go to market in Oban.’ ‘How do they get there?’ ‘They swim across. I just take them down to the water and say, “There you are – in you go!”’ The children had been captivated: it was like a fairy-tale, but here were those same cows, and here was the sea they swam across to go to market, and the bull – tethered to the back of the Puffin – swam across to the island each spring to service the cows. At dinner there were no napkins – the penny-pinching peeress still saved money on those – yet she sent all the other linen to Harrods by train in a huge laundry hamper, just as she ordered her groceries from Harrods’ food hall and sent dirty banknotes to Harrods’ bank to be exchanged for nice crisp new ones. She even had her library books sent from London. It was all true.
The island was said to be haunted, but for Decca on that first trip the ghosts were childhood memories: everywhere she turned there were reminders of Swinbrook and Asthall, from the high-backed Jacobean chairs that used to inhabit the closing room, to the six drawings of the sisters by William Acton all in a line in their red brocade frames, from the old records to which they used to sing and dance, ‘Isn’t It Romantic’, ‘Dancing Cheek To Cheek’ and Unity’s ‘Horst Wessel Lied’, to the great photograph albums kept religiously by Sydney where those early family groups full of hopes and dreams smiled or glowered at the camera according to whichever phase they were going through. She would never again see Tom and Unity, but she hoped to see Nancy and Pam during her trip. She had made up her mind, however, not to see Diana. She wrote,
I could not have borne [it]. When I was a small child she, seven years older, was my favourite person in the whole world. She was in all ways marvellous to me; she took me riding . . . taught me to speak French, encouraged me in the forbidden sport of ‘showing off’ in front of grown up visitors, was my staunch protectress against the barbs of Nancy, my ally in fights with Boud. I could see her in my mind’s eye, a radiant beauty of seventeen shrieking at my jokes. Teaching me, helping me through childhood, in general being the best of all possible elder sisters . . .
It might have been possible for her to meet Diana again, she thought, ‘if I hadn’t once, long ago, adored her so intensely. To meet her as an historical curiosity on a casual acquaintance level would be incredibly awkward, on a basis of sisterly fondness, unthinkable. Too much bitterness had set in, at least on my part.’19
From Inch Kenneth they all went down to stay with Debo and Andrew at Edensor House. Naturally they wanted to see Chatsworth, where an army of painters, plumbers and decorators had taken over prior to the proposed move there of Andrew and Debo, now the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. ‘Chatsworth is only slightly larger and grander than Versailles,’ Decca wrote to her friends in California, ‘[with] 178 rooms and no baths. Because of the Death Duties the poor dears cannot afford to live in Chatsworth, so they live in “the lodge” (which they own) in the village (which they own) and they make do by opening the house to trippers . . . This year they had 250,000 trippers at 2 shillings and sixpence a head.’20
Joking apart, the death-duties question still exercised Andrew’s mind. He plotted and planned and worked for years to resolve the conundrum of how to pay the tax bill while keeping the house and at least part of the estate in the family. Speculation, both at national and local level, about the future of Chatsworth had acted as a spur. There was talk in the newspapers that it should become a branch of the National Gallery. So many old estates and so much family wealth were affected by the n
ew taxes; fine old houses were left to moulder into ruins because institutions had neither the knowledge nor the resources to care for them. It took decades for the public to recognize that in keeping these magnificent buildings intact, functioning properly as the living heart of a country estate, for the public to view, the old families were almost performing a public service. When families were turfed out – one newly inherited duke was reduced to living in a terraced house on the south coast – the best that could happen to a great house would be for the cash-impoverished National Trust to take it on, when so often it became a sterile museum21 with many of the treasures sold off to pay the Treasury and fund maintenance, or it would be sold, converted into apartments and lost for ever to the public.
As part of Andrew’s plan, sales of Cavendish land began immediately after the death of his father. The 12,000-acre estate in Dumfriesshire went first, followed by 42,000 acres in Derbyshire, woodlands and property in Sussex, and a house in London. All were all handed over willingly to save Chatsworth. The nine most valuable paintings and art treasures, works by Rubens, Holbein, Rembrandt and Van Dyck among them, also went to pay off part of the crippling debt, then 141 precious books, 60 of which had been printed before 1500. Two years before Decca’s visit Andrew offered the house where the Cavendish family’s fortune had been founded, and Bess of Hardwick’s beautiful Hardwick Hall (‘The most beautiful house in the world,’ said Debo) was tipped into the maw of the Inland Revenue. Painful though this was, the sacrifice of Hardwick secured Chatsworth – and the family could no longer have supported two great estates anyway. As it was, money that should have been used for the upkeep and repair of Chatsworth, now regarded as a national treasure, had been lost for ever, and the Devonshires still faced an uphill battle. Not until 1974, twenty-four years after the death of Andrew’s father, were all Revenue debts settled. In addition, Andrew had worked to change the public perception of houses and properties like Chatsworth. In the early days the county council had wanted to drive a major new road through the estate. Today the destruction of such beautiful parkland, always open free of charge to the public, would be termed vandalism, but Andrew had to work hard to prevent it in the post-war years.
The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family Page 45