The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  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-cumbabysitter. 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 told 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.8 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.

  Three weeks after they arrived on the island Unity developed a feverish chill and was put to bed. There was no telephone but there was a crude signalling system. At Gribun the postmaster would hang a large black disc on Sydney’s garage door to signal that mail or parcels were awaiting collection, and Sydney scanned for signals every day with her binoculars. There was a similar device on the island to summon help in an emergency, but although the doctor was called, high winds and a rough sea prevented him from reaching Inch Kenneth for several days and during this time Unity’s condition worsened. She complained of severe headaches and had attacks of vomiting. One morning she suddenly looked up and announced loudly, ‘I am coming.’2 Sydney said that her heart sank. When the doctor came across Unity was treated with Sulphathiazole and improved but her temperature stayed obstinately high. On the third day, the doctor noticed that the scar on Unity’s right temple was bulging and tender; by this time Unity could not tolerate any disturbance, or answer questions.

  Suspecting a cranial abscess or meningitis, the doctor called in a consultant, who diagnosed meningitis, and Unity was transferred from the island to the main
land. The journey was traumatic for Sydney and she could never bear to talk about it afterwards. They arrived at the West Highland Cottage Hospital in Oban at midnight on the evening of 27 May and Unity was treated with penicillin. Arrangements were made to move her to the neurosurgery unit at Killearn Hospital on the following morning, but before she could be loaded into the ambulance she had an epileptic fit. She remained unconscious until she died at ten o’clock that night.3 It was concluded that she had died of pneumonococcal meningitis, caused by an infection in the site of the old head wound.

  When Sydney left California she had asked Decca if she had any message for Unity, and Decca said, after some hesitation, ‘Just give her my love.’ The sisters were no longer in regular contact but in one of her last letters Unity wrote of how she had asked her father who he would best like to see coming through the door, and he had answered at once, ‘Decca.’ On hearing of Unity’s death Decca wrote, ‘Of course, I mourned for my Boud years ago when I first realized we couldn’t be friends any more.’ (Dinky, however, recalled that her mother had been ‘heartbroken’ when Unity died.4) Sydney replied that Unity had mourned Decca in exactly the same way. ‘She knew you would probably never meet again, but her love for you was quite unchanged. She was always going back in her mind to when you were both young and m’Boud was a constant topic of conversation . . . when I gave her your love when I came back she knew it was with one part of you. I could see by her face. I think you both understood each other.’5 Unity had been Sydney’s life for eight years and her death so soon after Tom’s was a cruel blow. Her only consolation, she wrote to a friend, was something Unity had said to her while she was ill: ‘No one ever had such a happy young life as I did up to the war.’6

  David came up to Oban from Northumberland, and he and Sydney accompanied the coffin on the long journey south, by train, to Swinbrook. Unity was buried on 1 June, close to the church, and with the hymns she had planned. Most of the family attended, including the Mosleys. Although there was sadness, most felt, as Decca did, that the old Unity had died on the morning war was declared. She was one of the first casualties of the war, they were wont to say, just as Tom had been one of the last. On the tombstone Sydney had ordered the epitaph, ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth,’ a line from the work of nineteenth-century poet Arthur Hugh Clough, and said to be Winston Churchill’s favourite poem during the war years. At the funeral David and Mosley did not speak to each other, but a few weeks later Diana received a touching letter from her father, apologizing for this, and saying that it had been inadvertent on his part. It was a welcome hint at reconciliation.

  The Mosleys had been living for some time in Crux Easton, a small country house near Newbury. Having found it, Diana - hungry for beauty after the bleak years in Holloway and the temporary lodging at the Shaven Crown - wasted no time in turning it into a comfortable home with her usual flair. She got the Wootton furniture out of storage, and employed a cook and a gardener. To supplement the war rations they bought a cow, which gave them butter, milk and cream, and they had fresh vegetables and fruit from the eight-acre garden. ‘I had the joy of the children,’ Diana wrote, ‘and of seeing Mosley get better day by day.’ Although they remained under house arrest until the end of the war in August 1945, with fresh air, good food and a sort of freedom, the immediate horrors of Holloway receded. They used bicycles to get around the countryside, and from the house they had wonderful views over Berkshire and Hampshire. Diana’s two younger sons were seven and five now, and she taught them to read and write and do simple arithmetic.

  Their education caused their parents considerable concern for no school could be found to take them. The name Mosley was like poison. It was John Betjeman who eventually found a prep school for them. ‘You really are an angel,’ Diana wrote to him, ‘to have found a school which might accept Alexander and Max as pupils - or should I say a genius . . . Thank you so, so much for all the trouble you have taken. I was beginning to despair, as I had so many furious refusals. Isn’t it odd in a way? If I had a school I should welcome reds, in the hope of converting them.’7 Although the Mosleys could not travel until the end of the war they received visitors, and Tom had spent several periods with them while he was at Sandhurst before being shipped to Burma. ‘I was so thankful,’ Diana wrote, ‘that we had him with us for his leaves that year . . . Muv came and Bobo who loved little Max.’ The tradition of entertaining continued after the war: ‘Randolph [Churchill] wanted to come and was indignant when we refused . . . Of course Gerald Berners came and stayed.’8

  Unlike most people, Mosley foresaw that rationing of food and other necessities would continue long after the war ended. He decided that the only thing to do to mitigate this would be to farm. Although they loved Crux Easton, its eight acres were patently insufficient, so they bought the eleven-hundred-acre Crowood House estate, near Ramsbury in Wiltshire. It was beyond the seven-mile perimeter and they were forced to purchase the property without having seen it, but fortunately, when Rule 18B was lifted and they moved there they found the eighteenth-century manor house, built of grey stone, ‘quite perfect’. The uprising against the Mosleys, prophesied by Clementine Churchill, never occurred. They were ostracized by some elements of local society but they also met with ‘wonderful kindness’ from others, ‘mixed with curiosity no doubt,’ Diana says.

  This did not unduly worry Diana, for several old friends lived close enough for regular visiting. The Betjemans lived at Wantage, and Daisy Fellowes was in Donnington. Diana’s old friend Lord Berners, who had visited her in Holloway, lived near by in his amazing house, Faringdon. Nancy described it in The Pursuit of Love as Merlinford, home of Lord Merlin. Betjeman also described life at Faringdon: ‘on a sunny summer evening. The bells of Faringdon church tower are playing “Now the day is over” across the grass terraces. Pigeons dyed blue are still strutting about in front of the limestone façade . . . All day long from early in the morning, Lord Berners will have been at work either composing on the piano in the dining room - a piano with a huge gilt fish perched upon it - or he will have been writing in the drawing room where [are] . . . the early Corots, the Matisse seascape, the Constable paintings, the Dufy of the races. A third thing . . . would have been painting the lake from his terrace or . . . the willowy flat valley of the Upper Thames with the Cotswold Hills rising blue in the distance.’9 This was the Mosleys’ calling circle, and with this, and occasional visits by Diana’s family and Cimmie’s grown-up children, Vivienne and Nicholas, Diana was content. The prep school Betjeman found was not a success: Alexander hated it and lasted less than a term. Thereafter, an old recluse who lived near by taught the boys, and later Diana employed a tutor to teach them at home.

  As soon as he recovered his health and vigour, Mosley began to write. While they were living at Crowood he produced two books, My Answer and The Alternative. No publisher would touch them but this did not deter the Mosleys: they set up their own publishing house called Euphorion Books. There was some difficulty in obtaining paper, and printer after printer turned them down as soon as the name Mosley was mentioned, but these difficulties were overcome. The woman who had persuaded the Nazi hierarchy to give her a radio airwave was not to be put off easily by a few rural printers.

  Eventually they produced a list, which included reprints of classic works as well as Mosley’s books. One new book even became a bestseller: Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Stuka Pilot, with an introduction by English flying ace Douglas Bader. The profits from this one book underwrote the costs of Euphorion. My Answer set out to explain and defend Mosley’s policies. ‘As well as a future to be gained, there was a past to be justified . . .’ his biographer wrote, ‘a past which Mosley recognized now constituted a new and major barrier between him and the British people.’10 The Alternative, however, was clearly intended to launch his post-war political career. He worked up to this slowly, careful not to give the government any excuse to rush in any new legislation to prevent him speaking in public. Of one thing Mosley was always conv
inced: the war meant the end of the British Empire; therefore, the future for Britain now lay in Europe. A United Europe, he said, must become a power to match that of the USA and the USSR. This was his vision, and the nature of his work after the war. He was a politician by instinct: all that had happened during the war had not changed this. His reading during the years in prison had been focused on a European union, and he had also learned German, fluently enough to be able, several years later, to deliver a speech in that language without once referring to his notes.

  From November 1947 he began to address meetings of a new movement, which he called the Union Movement, based mostly in the East End of London. He was always willing to speak whenever he could get a hall, but most remained closed to him. Now his battle cry was that if a union of European countries was linked to the rich resources of a developing Africa, the two continents could form ‘a force which equalled any power in the world’.11 In the following year he returned to active politics, campaigning for ‘Europe a Nation’. Had he remained in conventional politics during the 1930s who is to say what might have been his destiny?

  But in the pre-war years the general populace had come to revile his ideas. Though extant papers tend to confirm his claims that he was never personally anti-Semitic and that the Jews formed no part of his doctrine, he was - and probably always will be - branded with the label anti-Semite to the mass of British voters. Once the full horror of Nazi rule became common knowledge there was never any chance of Mosley’s restitution as a serious political leader. Astonishingly, neither he nor Diana seemed to recognize the finality of this, or if they did, they chose to ignore it in the hope of winning through in the long term. He battled on for a while, speaking where he could (a core of faithful old BUF members always turned up to hear him), fighting against print unions who refused to produce posters for his meetings and newsletters. Plans to launch a newspaper had to be cancelled when he was refused a newsprint quota but he was constitutionally unable to admit defeat. Years later, in 1956, he addressed a series of public meetings - his first in five years: 600 turned up in Kensington, 1,500 in Manchester. ‘After all these years’, a Daily Telegraph reporter wrote, ‘I thought some of the fizz might have gone out of him. Not a bit of it. Alone, he held a packed proletarian audience - only a few velvet collars - for 75 minutes, pulverising each party in turn.’ 12