The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  Churchill arranged a place on an RAF flight for Kick, and she turned up at Chatsworth looking small, pale and absolutely lost. Rose Kennedy had apparently done a good job of convincing her daughter that in marrying Billy she had committed a mortal sin, so in addition to her deep grief over the loss of her husband and her favourite brother, Kick was concerned about her immortal soul. She and Billy had spent only five weeks together as man and wife, and she could not help reflecting that so much of their time before their marriage had been overshadowed by discussions about the religion of any future children. She said bitterly to a friend, ‘Well, I guess God has taken care of the matter in His own way, hasn’t He?’9 Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, sister of Billy and Andrew, said that in all her life she had never seen anyone so desperately unhappy as Kick at that time. The Cavendish family liked Kick a great deal and rallied round, supporting her as much as they could. The Duchess told her, ‘All your life I shall love you - not only for yourself but that you gave such perfect happiness to my son whom I loved above anything in the world.’10 Some months later Kick took up Red Cross work in London.

  The obvious significance of Billy’s death was that - as soon as it was established that Kick was not pregnant - Andrew now became heir to the dukedom. In that, there was no joy for Andrew and Debo and, indeed, it took years for Andrew to come to terms with the fact that he had inherited through a frightful incident. He was serving in Italy, and Debo, who was constantly fearful for him, was staying with Diana at Crux Easton when the news of Billy’s death came. She took her two babies to stay with the grieving Devonshires. ‘Poor little Debo is quite distracted,’ Nancy had written to Sydney a short time earlier, ‘all these deaths must terrify her for Andrew,’ although Prod had assured her that the worst was over in Italy.11

  Sydney and Unity stayed with Debo for two days in July on their way up to Scotland. Following the successful invasion of France a few weeks earlier, Unity had been given permission to visit the island and it was to be her first visit there since the outbreak of war. Debo had driven them over to Chatsworth in a flat farm cart pulled by her piebald horse. ‘She puts a mattress in it . . . and you can sit propped up with masses of cushions. The whole thing looks very queer but really it is most comfortable and the horse goes at a steady trot up hill and down for miles and miles.’ They had admired the gardens at Chatsworth but did not go inside as it was being used as a girls’ school and Sydney could not face ‘rows of hideous little iron beds everywhere’. Meanwhile, Nancy was coping well with the new and terrifying flying bombs in London, Sydney reported, and Tom had returned home for a few months having been promoted to major. He had to undergo a period of training at the Army Staff College but he had gone directly to the island to see her as soon as he landed.12

  Nancy was coping with the flying bombs, as her mother said. Indeed, after the first few weeks of the war she had adopted a fatalistic attitude and more or less ignored the bombing, never going into an air-raid shelter. She coped so well that after one raid in which she helped to deal with incendiaries, early in the Blitz, she was thrilled to be asked to deliver a series of lectures to trainee fire-watchers. After the first lecture she was sacked: apparently her upper-class vowels irritated her listeners so much that they wanted to put her on the fire. But despite the insouciance of her letters, Nancy was less able to cope when her husband suddenly put in an unexpected appearance.

  One morning Prod simply appeared in the shop, having come straight from an Italian beachhead. Within no time at all he was living up to his nickname of Toll-gater and regaling Nancy with boring diatribes. ‘I felt quite faint,’ she reported to Decca. ‘3 years he was away. So you can imagine there was some wonderful toll-gating. He is toll-gating round the place now . . . and completely blissful the dear old fellow - a Colonel . . . . “Is the Colonel in for dinner?” You must say it’s funny.’13

  James Lees-Milne came across the couple celebrating at the Ritz. Peter looked tough and bronzed, well, and slightly drunk. ‘Even so,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I expected he might lash out at Nancy at a moment’s notice and on the slightest provocation. Nancy, apprehensive and solicitous, plied Peter with questions but he never answered any. Instead he talked incessantly in his boring manner . . . the sad truth is that one should believe only a quarter of what Peter says.’14 Fortunately for Nancy, Prod had left again by the time the adored Palewski returned in June, but he was only there for a week, then left for France with de Gaulle.

  ‘I must go. Au revoir, Linda.’ [Fabrice] kissed her hand politely, almost absent mindedly, it was as if he had already gone, and he walked quickly from the room. Linda went to the open window and leaned out. He was getting into a large motor-car with two French soldiers on the box and a Free French flag waving from the bonnet . . . As it moved away he looked up. ‘Navette - navette,’ cried Linda with a brilliant smile. Then she got back into bed and cried very much. She felt utter despair at this second parting.15

  After a short stay with Sydney at Inch Kenneth, Tom returned to London. A few days later as James-Lees Milne was walking past the Ritz he suddenly heard Nancy’s voice calling him, and he turned round to see her with Tom ‘back from the Mediterranean after two and half years’ absence. He almost embraced me in the street, saying, “My dear old friend, my very oldest and dearest friend”, which was most affecting. He looks younger than his age, is rather thin, and still extremely handsome.’16 When the two men dined together a few nights later, Tom told Lees-Milne

  that he must marry and asked my advice which of his girls he should choose. I said, ‘Let me know which are in the running?’ So he began, ticking them off one by one on his fingers. He told me with that engaging frankness with which he always confides in me, the names of those he had already slept with, and how often, and those he rather loved, and those he merely liked, until I stopped him with, ‘But all this sounds most unromantic to me. If I were one of those girls and knew how you were discussing me, I wouldn’t dream of marrying you’ . . . and he roared and roared with laughter.17

  When Lees-Milne asked Tom if he still sympathized with the Nazis, ‘he emphatically said Yes’.18 He said he knew a lot of Germans and the best sort were Nazis, also that he was an imperialist by nature. Shortly after this conversation, Tom requested a transfer to Burma: ‘He does not wish to go to Germany killing German civilians whom he likes,’ Lees-Milne wrote. ‘He prefers to kill Japanese whom he does not like. Tom makes me sad because he looks so sad.’19

  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 131ł2 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 aga
inst 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 no
ne 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