The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  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.

  Cockburn was no fool: he could see that there was as much mischief in the gesture as romantic idealism, and he recognized 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.