Her qualities of good housekeeping and parsimony in wartime are perhaps best summed up by her joyous remark to Diana when peace was finally declared: ‘Well, Nard, VE Day and the Bromo has lasted!’ Bromo was the finest lavatory paper, described by its manufacturers as being ‘unsurpassed in quality and purity because it has been cooked for hours until it is of the consistency necessary for toilet paper’. And Pam still had some left with which to start the austerity period …
Nine
The War and its Consequences
For nearly a month the family in England had no news of Unity since communications between England and Germany were severed. Then in early October they received a letter from Teddy von Almasy, brother of Janos, who lived in neutral Budapest. He told them that Unity was ill in hospital but was recovering; he later cabled them to say that she was making good progress, but more than this they could not discover. Then in November they heard from the American Embassy that Unity was in hospital where she was recovering from a suicide attempt. The papers went wild with stories which were generally far from the mark, and finally, on Christmas Eve, David and Sydney had a telephone call from Janos; he was in Switzerland with Unity, who had been sent there by Hitler in a special ambulance carriage attached to a train. He handed the phone to Unity. ‘When are you coming to get me?’ she pleaded.
In spite of it being Christmas, David managed to get hold of the necessary travel documents and Sydney and Debo set off for Switzerland three days later. It was a freezing cold, miserable journey with no trains running on time. Sydney and Debo were appalled by Unity’s appearance. She was very thin and pale and her hair was matted around her head wound. Worse still, she had a vacant expression and she remembered some things but not others. ‘She was like someone who had had a stroke,’ Debo recalled. But she recognised them and was delighted to see them. It turned out that Hitler had paid for her hospital treatment.
Then began the traumatic task of getting Unity home. The journey was cold and took forever and Unity was so very ill. To make matters worse the press were waiting for them at Calais. ‘The Girl Who Loved Hitler’ was not going to escape them until they had heard her dramatic story. Sydney was offered £5,000 for the story which, of course, she declined. By now they had missed the boat and had to stay overnight in a Calais hotel and sail the following morning. David was waiting anxiously at Folkestone with an ambulance and as Unity appeared on a stretcher, he rushed up to embrace her, all differences forgotten.
They were not yet free of the press who besieged them again as they tried to leave the port. Then the ambulance broke down and they had to spend the night in a hotel, suspecting that the vehicle had been tampered with deliberately. Finally, they arrived home – in this case, High Wycombe – where Unity rested before being admitted to hospital in Oxford.
The doctors told Sydney that everything had been done for Unity in Germany and only time could improve her condition now. In fact, although she improved greatly, she never progressed further than the age of 12, she was prone to violent rages, was very clumsy and was incontinent at night. Sydney now made it her life’s work to look after her and a hard task it proved to be. Eventually she, Debo and Unity moved to Old Mill Cottage in Swinbrook where Unity knew her way around and was known and accepted by the local people. She would have liked to take her to the remote Scottish island of Inch Kenneth, which David had bought with some of the proceeds from the sale of Swinbrook, but the authorities would not allow people with the views of Sydney and Unity to live on an offshore island in wartime. Unity achieved a degree of independence and could travel to London alone, do her collage and re-taught herself to write, but the funny, eccentric, attractive Unity had gone forever.
The outbreak of war meant much unusual activity for Nancy. Prod joined the army which meant that they didn’t have to see too much of one another and she was left to her own devices; playing at being a married woman had lost much of its charm. At this time she wrote another book, Pigeon Pie, which was not a huge success but made her some much-needed money. She also began working for the Air Raid Precautions unit (ARP) in Praed Street, Paddington, and was later asked to broadcast a series of lectures on fire fighting. These were later discontinued because many of those who listened found the famous ‘Mitford voice’ so irritating that they wanted to put Nancy on the fire. Even so, a very different Nancy was emerging from the one who had told Pam in 1926, when they had run the canteen for strike-breakers, that she couldn’t manage anything to do with ovens – ‘one’s poor hands’.
So seriously did she take her role as a citizen in wartime England that she informed on Diana, telling Gladwyn Jebb at the Ministry of Economic Affairs that her sister was an extremely dangerous person who had made many visits to Germany shortly before the war (she did not know about the radio station negotiations). Mosley was already in Brixton prison for his British Union of Fascists activities and soon Diana was arrested and taken to Holloway, where she remained until 1943. Nancy later told the authorities that Pam and Derek were dangerous fascists, but this was never taken further as it was obvious that it was very wide of the mark, and probably the result of one of Derek’s teases.
Nancy did, however, stoically stay in London throughout the bombing and grew vegetables in her garden to supplement her rations. Later she ran a hostel for homeless Jewish women at the family home in Rutland Gate, much to the disgust of Sydney who was still pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic.
Nancy’s contact with the intelligence services led to her being asked to do some information-gathering at the Free French Officers’ Club, where she met and had an affair with an officer called Andre Roy. This resulted in an ectopic pregnancy, after which she was unable to bear children. Meanwhile, she got a job at Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street which became a meeting place for her friends, who included Lord Berners, Lady Cunard, the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh and any of the Mitford family who happened to be in London at the time. She loved her time there even though it coincided with the V-1 bombings; it was also around this time that she met the man who was to become the great love of her life.
Colonel Gaston Palewski was General Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man. He was wealthy, sophisticated and sexually, rather than physically, attractive. Nancy fell for him hook, line and sinker as Diana had for Mosley, Unity for Hitler, Jessica for Esmond and, in her much more understated way, Pam for Derek. Her lifelong passion for him was not returned, although after their initial relationship they remained close friends for the rest of Nancy’s life. Due to her deep feelings for him she was able to write, without the brittleness of her previous work, a novel which became an instant bestseller and secured her position as a literary figure and made her financially independent.
The Pursuit of Love is semi-autobiographical. The Radlett family is loosely based on the Mitfords, with Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie having many of the same characteristics as David and Sydney. Linda is close to Nancy and Fabrice to the Colonel; like Jessica, Jassy hoards her running away money, and kind, sensible Fanny, the ‘I’ of the story, though supposed to be based on a cousin, Billa Harrod, has in my opinion many of the characteristics of Pam. The Pursuit of Love is a witty, tightly written novel which is very different from Nancy’s earlier offerings. The book and its sequel, Love in a Cold Climate, lightweight and frothy though they may seem, are literary masterpieces. Nancy richly deserved her success.
The Pursuit of Love was published in 1945 and in the autumn Nancy went to Paris with the purpose of doing business on behalf of the bookshop. Literary success and true love had brought her the sort of happiness she had never felt before. She was jubilant at Atlee’s election victory, as she had always been socialist at heart, but she soon decided to make her home in France. In many ways Nancy’s war was the making of her.
The same could hardly be said for Diana, though she endured the privations of Holloway with remarkable stoicism and made a life for herself and Mosley when the war was over. When she was imprisoned, Max, her youngest son, was
11 weeks old and had yet to be weaned. She chose not to take him to prison with her, fearing that he would succumb to infection in the filth of Holloway, but this meant, although she did not know it at the time since she expected to be released within days, that she only saw her children intermittently for the next three and a half years. The food in prison was grim, she was allowed only limited visits from her family, and letters were similarly restricted and strictly censored.
Family letters and visits kept her going. Sydney, despite the time spent caring for Unity, managed to visit once a week, braving the bombs and enduring inefficient transport in order to see her daughter, bringing eggs and vegetables to supplement her woefully inadequate diet. Pam also visited, as well as giving a home to Alexander, Max and the formidable Nanny Higgs, and later Diana was able to have visits from her children, her other sisters and from Mosley himself. She and Mosley appeared separately before an Advisory Committee at which they were examined by Norman, later Lord, Birkett who was to be one of the judges at the Nuremberg Trials. Since neither were prepared to renounce their views, it was deemed necessary to keep them in prison.
Diana got on well with the other prisoners, since she never tried to play the fine lady, and also with her warders. ‘We’ve never had such laughs since Lady Mosley left,’ declared her favourite warder, Miss Davies, much later.
Eventually, Mosley was permitted to join Diana in Holloway, mainly thanks to Tom who asked Churchill if this would be possible. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison opposed it, but Churchill pressed his point and the Mosleys were able to occupy part of the Preventative Detention Block in Holloway. All their children were allowed to visit, Diana was given their rations to cook with, instead of prison food, and Mosley grew vegetables in the prison garden. They stayed in this ‘suite’, as it was described by a hostile press, for two years and then Mosley contracted serious phlebitis from a First World War wound. It became so bad that it was feared he could die and, rather than have a martyr like Mosley on their hands, the government released the couple at the end of 1943.
They were received with open arms by Pam and Derek at Rignell and Pam became ‘Wonderwoman’ by dealing with the press corps which camped outside the house as soon as the Mosleys’ whereabouts were discovered. Nevertheless, Derek’s work was top secret so Herbert Morrison would not allow them to stay in spite of Derek’s protests. They moved to a partly disused pub not far away where Diana had to clean and cook, making the meagre rations go round the family.
Later they moved to Crux Easton in Hampshire and then to Crowood, near Ramsbury, in Wiltshire. Diana made both houses attractive, even in wartime, as only she knew how, and they were visited by all the family and friends like Lord Berners, who never wavered in his loyalty to Diana.
When Jessica and Esmond arrived in New York they first enjoyed the luxury of the Shelton Hotel while they contacted several influential people whose names they had been given, the most useful being Katherine Graham whose father, Eugene Meyer, owned the Washington Post. Jessica and Katherine became good friends and Meyer later lent Esmond $1,000 to buy a liquor licence for the very successful cocktail bar he was running in Miami. Before this, however, Jessica and Esmond took a variety of jobs while being welcomed into New York society, where their entertaining personalities made them poplar wherever they went. Jessica still missed Unity, her favourite sister, and, in spite of their political differences, she refused to speak to the American press when the news of Unity’s attempted suicide became known. Her greatest sadness was that she could never talk about her feelings for Unity with Esmond, who thought of her – and the rest of the family – as rabid fascists.
While he was successfully selling silk stockings in Washington and serving cocktails in Miami, Esmond was watching the situation in Europe carefully because the congenial life he and Jessica were living in America had in no way diminished his determination to fight for his country when it became necessary. By the summer of 1940 he knew that the time was ripe and he travelled to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to join the Canadian Royal Air Force. Jessica enrolled for a stenography course, which was to stand her in good stead for the rest of her life, and stayed with friends in Washington. What Esmond didn’t know was that Jessica was pregnant again.
Having gained a commission as a pilot officer, Esmond was sent to Europe. In February Jessica gave birth to a baby daughter who was christened Constancia but always nicknamed Dinkydonk, Dinky or just The Donk after the donkey which was the symbol of the Democratic Party. As she grew up, Dinky developed the womanly qualities which reminded Jessica of Pam.
In early December 1941 Jessica and Dinky were due to travel to England to be with Esmond, but just before they left Jessica received a telegram to say that he was missing on active service. For a long time she refused to believe he had been killed, but eventually she accepted that he had drowned in the North Sea. She decided not to return to England and vented her anger on the Mosleys (but never on Unity), whose views she felt were responsible for the situation in Europe.
Six months after Esmond’s death, Jessica got a job with the Office of Price Administration (OAP) which was responsible for wartime rationing policy. She was rapidly promoted and found herself working for a Jewish lawyer named Bob Treuhaft, whom she later married. They had both moved to California and they were married there in secret because Jessica didn’t want the press getting hold of yet another Mitford story, particularly in view of the anti-Semitic members of her family. But a letter which she wrote to Churchill after the Mosleys’ release from jail, demanding that they should be re-imprisoned, alerted the press to her whereabouts and she and Bob spent several days hiding in their apartment with the blinds drawn. She later regretted the tone of her letter but in the short term it led to her being asked to join the Communist Party. She and Bob both rose in the party ranks and for the next few years Decca’s life was devoted to the party and the Civil Rights Movement. In 1944 she gave birth to a boy named Nicholas Tito. She told Nancy that she had called the baby after Lenin and Marshal Tito to annoy her parents. She never changed.
For Debo the time following the outbreak of war was miserable. The rescue of Unity from Europe had been traumatic for her but what made her even more unhappy was Unity’s subsequent dislike of her. This led to a very unpleasant atmosphere at Old Mill Cottage where Sydney, Unity and Debo were all cooped up together, with Unity usually venting her bouts of rage on her youngest sister. ‘Muv and Bobo are getting awfully on my nerves. I must go away soon, I think,’ she wrote to Jessica in 1940. However, in April 1941 Debo became engaged to Lord Andrew Cavendish and they were married the following month, both aged 21. She followed him round to the various training grounds to which he was posted, but when he was sent to Italy with the Coldstream Guards, she went to live on the Derbyshire estate of her in-laws, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, where she remained for the rest of the war.
During the war years Debo had three children: a premature son who died almost immediately in November 1941; a daughter, Emma, born safely in 1943; and a son, Peregrine, always known as Stoker, the following year, three weeks before Jessica’s son Nicholas. Although they didn’t know this at the time, Stoker was to be the future Duke of Devonshire.
When they married there was no hint that Andrew would inherit the title. His elder brother, Billy Hartington, had been groomed for the job and was expected to succeed eventually. Billy was engaged to and later married Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy, sister of the future US president; this was in spite of opposition from both sets of parents, but especially the Kennedys, because they were Catholics and the Devonshires were staunchly Protestant. They finally married in 1944 and five weeks later Billy was killed fighting in Belgium. As with David during the previous war, Andrew found himself next in line to the family title.
In spite of his support for Nazi Germany, in 1942 Tom joined the Rifle Brigade and fought in North Africa and Italy. As with everything else he ever did, he acquitted himself well and in 1944 he returned to England for a course at th
e Staff College. He then asked to be sent to Burma as he did not want to have to kill Germans during the Allied occupation of Germany, which clearly was going to take place. Once in Burma he requested a transfer from Staff to a fighting battalion. On 24 March he was leading a force against a group of Japanese armed with machine guns. He was severely wounded and died six days later. He is buried in the military cemetery near Rangoon.
For the sisters it was the greatest tragedy they had ever had to face. Tom was the only one who was always on ‘speakers’ with all the others; they loved him dearly and remembered with great affection the times when they had made him ‘blither’ in church, when he had saved them from unwanted partners at debutante dances and introduced them to his much more interesting friends. In all that had happened he was never censorious, keeping in touch with Diana and Mosley yet seeing Jessica and Esmond off to America. He visited Unity and Sydney as often as he could – Unity was always at her best with him – and he spent much of his final leave with Nancy. The fact that he had come unscathed through the greatest part of the war and was the last person they felt would not survive made his death even harder to bear.
For David and Sydney, whose marriage had fallen apart because of their irreconcilable differences in relation to Nazi Germany and Hitler, the death of Tom, their only and much-loved son and heir, must have seemed like the end of the world.
Ten
Pam’s War and its Aftermath
There were many times during her life when Pam came to the rescue of her sisters, but none was more heroic than when she took in Diana and Oswald Mosley’s two tiny children when their parents were imprisoned during the early years of the war. Urged on by Derek, Pam had 11-week-old Max and 18-month-old Alexander, together with Nanny Higgs, to live at Rignell for almost two years. While Derek was stationed at Middle Wallop he would sometimes pick up Jonathan and Desmond Guinness, Diana’s two sons by her first marriage, from their prep. school near Oxford and take them to Rignell for the weekend.
The Other Mitford Page 9