The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  But the author’s claims were only half the problem as far as the family were concerned. It was what was perceived as Decca’s disloyalty that most offended. And when some photographs, which Pam recalled having last seen in Sydney’s photo album, appeared in the plate section, she wrote to Decca in cold anger: ‘I suppose you gave them to him, you could have asked us first. The album . . . that Debo always had in her drawing room is missing and can’t be found anywhere. Did you borrow it perhaps, as I believe you are writing your own life? If so we would all like to have it back.’29 Decca was livid and wrote a furious reply, which put her and Pam on ‘non-speakers’ for more than a year.

  Decca had not provided the pictures, and it is clear from correspondence between her and Pryce-Jones that a cousin had supplied the items in question from her own collection. When her immediate anger subsided Decca wrote in hurt tones to Debo, the only sister with whom she was still in regular contact: ‘I don’t know where we stand . . . [and] I am terrifically sad to think that perhaps this means it’s curtains for us.’ Lots of old hurts were aired, including the fact that Decca had been totally excluded from any contact with Harold Acton when he was writing his biography of Nancy (published a year previously). ‘He asked if he could quote from Hons and Rebels, & I said of course and he did, extensively, but only to contradict everything I’d said. You and Woman were closeted with him . . . but not me. I admit that at that point a certain stubbornness set in. I mean, why should you be the final arbiter of everything about the family?’ On and on, the letter went, listing the hurts and slights. ‘Not only didn’t I steal your photo album, I sent you all the Muv letters from the island . . . ’30

  Debo was equally upset by the episode. ‘For goodness’ sake don’t let’s quarrel,’ she begged. ‘Here we are getting old, I couldn’t bear it . . . I suppose what we must do is face the fact that we are deeply divided in thought about many things, but that underneath our ties are strong.’ Nevertheless, she was deeply unhappy about the book, and felt she must state her case before the matter was shelved. She deprecated the Pryce-Jones portrait of Unity, and like Diana, Pam and the cousins she blamed Decca for co-operating in its production. Mainly, though, she said, she was deeply saddened that none of Unity’s good qualities were revealed: ‘her huge, bold truthfulness, funniness, generosity, honesty and courage’. She explained that, like Diana, she had been contacted by many of those interviewed, claiming to have been misquoted in the book, and particularly offensive, to those who had sight of the manuscript, had been a claim by one interviewee that Unity had performed a lewd sexual act. ‘How can you, as Muv’s daughter, condone such writing?’ Debo asked sadly. In the event Andrew persuaded the publishers to remove this paragraph before publication.

  An uneasy truce followed with Debo and Decca trying hard in their correspondence to act as though the accusation of theft of the scrapbook did not lie between them. Decca visited England in early December in connection with a television documentary. She and Debo enjoyed a pleasant dinner together but they did not touch on the subject of Unity; nor was the joint letter, which Pam, Debo and Diana sent to The Times on the eighteenth of that month, mentioned. The letter alleged that the book was at best an inaccurate picture of Unity, and stated that they held letters from a number of interviewees who claimed to have been misquoted. Also they had Unity’s papers, including her diary, to which the author had not had access. Cousin Clementine, daughter of the long-dead Uncle Clement, David’s elder brother, now Lady Beit, wrote to Decca to say that the biography, when it was released, ‘did not cause as much fuss as the scrapbook! The hysteria about the PJ book was violent and did untold harm to the sisters’ cause . . . It was difficult to be objective about the book when it appeared. It was as if Bobo just lay there inert, with mud flying and her tragedy totally misunderstood. The book, for me, started as a quest and turned into a witch hunt and I felt David [Pryce-Jones] grew to hate her . . . I felt he did not want to understand her.’31

  Perhaps at the heart of the matter was that Decca had long ago crossed an invisible line of behaviour acceptable to her family in England. People of her parents’ generation, and even most of her own, lived by a strict code that Decca never accepted, hardly recognized. By running away, by treating her parents as she and Esmond had done, by her active Marxism, by the hurtful, small exaggerations in her book, funny though they were, she had broken this code and although she was still loved and welcomed back, her loyalty was never entirely trusted.

  The row rumbled on until, in December 1977, the scrapbook was discovered, unaccountably where it was always supposed to have been, in Debo’s drawing room. No one knew how it had been missed in the searches. It was ‘very strange,’ Decca wrote pointedly in answer to Pam’s explanation for ‘it was the size of a table’. But she also noted that ‘there was never a word of apology’, for the inference that she had stolen it. Nevertheless, after relieving herself of a few home truths, she said she was prepared to forget the whole unpleasant matter. She was going to be in London for a few nights on her way to Egypt where she was to write an article on the tomb of King Mut (‘an ancient fore-bear? ’ she joked). ‘Perhaps we could meet on neutral ground? (“But we have met,” as Uncle Geoff said to Aunt Weenie.)’

  When she tried to pin people down about what so offended them about Hons and Rebels she was given nebulous answers about old annoyances. There was the grass snake round the lavatory-chain story that was ‘a complete invention’, the grave with railings at Swinbrook church in which Decca claimed she had left her pet lamb Miranda while attending Sunday services - ‘impossible for the purposes of enclosing a lamb,’ said her siblings. She had tried, she told Debo, ‘to explain about Boud; a near impossibility to get her down as she really was, so no doubt I failed. To this day I dream about her, arriving fresh from Germany in full gaiety, with all her amusingness etc. but Hen, don’t you see how awful it all was?’ The trouble was that they could all see how awful it was, but they wanted the awfulness to be left to history and remember the bold, lively, inventive Unity in private; they did not want her life continually disinterred. Nor, since most of them had either actively fought or opposed Hitler from the grimness that was wartime England, did they especially care for Decca’s general dismissal of them all as Fascists.

  Despite all the squabbles and period of non-speakers Decca remained in touch, mainly due to Debo who, following Sydney’s death, became the heart of the immediate family. Decca regarded Debo as ‘over-protective’ of the family story, without realizing, probably, that Debo had been the sister most affected by everything that had happened. As the youngest child, Debo’s adolescence had been rocked by the scandals of Diana’s divorce and remarriage, Decca’s elopement, Unity’s involvement with Hitler and her subsequent suicide attempt. At each crisis David decreed that the sister concerned must not be visited or contacted. The others all had homes of their own in the years when the ideological quarrel between Sydney and David was as its height; Debo was the only one left at home to watch the painful disintegration of the marriage. And during the war, Unity’s behaviour made it impossible for Debo to remain with her mother in the year before her marriage to Andrew. It is hardly surprising that she was unhappy at having it all regurgitated. But it is clear that Debo’s strongest desire was to keep the family together.

  The correspondence between her and Decca kept them in touch with the pattern of each other’s family life, the marriages of children, births of grandchildren, the deaths of old friends and the previous generation, the daily domestic trivia that was so different for each woman. ‘Derek Jackson came and stayed [for the wedding of Debo’s daughter, Sophia]. It is so queer that he still thinks of us all as his family after 5 [sic] wives since Pam,’ Debo wrote. ‘She said, “Hallo, horse,” when he came in, as though nothing had happened.’ Sometimes, letters would contain phrases in Boudledidge (confusing to a researcher) such as, ‘Jaub, Dzdiddle no zdmudkung [yes, still no smoking] - I long for a puff,’ and a scribbled message on the outside of an
envelope, ‘Jegg engludzed [cheque enclosed]’.

  By now Decca had a well-established and large circle of friends in England, completely unconnected with the Mitford family, but still she felt the pull of blood ties and she and Debo usually met whenever she was in England. Because they wanted desperately to save their friendship the two sisters found a formula by which they were able to put aside their accepted differences, and this worked well except every now and then when Debo would mutter, ‘All those lies, hen.’32 But there was always restraint in Decca’s relationships with the greater family, and even with Pam for a while. There was no relationship at all with Diana: the brief truce during Nancy’s illness was never reinstated. Curiously, although Decca liked Diana’s son Desmond enormously, she could not bear his elder brother Jonathan. She had not seen him since he was four years old when he offended her by giving the Nazi salute, and when he became chairman of the ultra-conservative Monday Club (1970-72), he was forever branded by her ‘a dangerous neo-Nazi’.

  Shortly after the row about the Unity biography, Diana published her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts - ‘the truth,’ she teased, ‘but not necessarily the whole truth’. It was extensively reviewed, and generally accepted as having been well written, but it was slated all the same. Many reviewers used the same phrase: Lady Mosley, they said, was ‘unrepentant’. In the main this referred to the fact that Diana wrote her memories of Hitler, the man she had liked and admired, as though none of the things he did later (and none of the things which he was doing at the time, and which came to light afterwards) had occurred. That subsequent historical perspective did not change her original memories rankled. She did not condone the horrors perpetrated by his regime, but merely stated what her own reactions had been at the time. In turn, she had been offended by the factual inaccuracies published about Hitler by journalists and successive biographers; the fact was, she wrote, that she had observed a charming, cultured man, who did not rant and foam at the mouth (as was frequently claimed), with well-manicured hands (not roughened and nail-bitten), a fastidious man who ate sparingly (rather than the cartoon character who stuffed himself with cream cakes). Her lack of criticism brought fury raging down on her head, and her account of her time in the filthy conditions of Holloway invited the comments that many millions of women were incarcerated in far worse conditions during the war, thanks to Hitler and his supporters. A recent biography of Diana suggests that although the book answered some questions and repaid some recent slights it was substantially a vehicle for continuing the campaign that Diana had waged for the past fifty years: that of supporting and defending Mosley.33 As every author knows, controversy never hurts a book and A Life of Contrasts sold well. ‘Diana’s style is better than Nancy’s,’ James Lees-Milne wrote in his diary. ‘It lacks N’s debutante touch, and is confident and adult.’34

  Despite the hostility of her reviewers, Diana decided to write another book and her subject was hardly less controversial. Quite close to the Mosleys’ Temple de la Gloire was the Moulin de la Tuilerie. Nancy had once considered buying the property when it was an unrestored old mill, but at the time she could not bear the thought of moving so far from the Colonel. Subsequently it was purchased by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and converted into a sumptuous home. Neighbourly invitations were exchanged and when the Windsors first went to visit the Mosleys at the tiny temple, the Duchess said, ‘Yes, it’s very pretty here, but where do you live ?’35

  The Windsors and Mosleys liked each other and got on well. Perhaps part of the reason lay in the fact that both couples suffered from a perpetual bad press, and that the lives of each, despite the happiness of a sound marriage, were tinged by the underlying waste of unfulfilled promise. The uncharitable, among whom was Decca, saw it as a natural friendship ‘given their mutual support of Hitler’, though the Duke of Windsor’s so-called ‘support’ of Hitler’s regime is even now far from being proven. But it would be surprising if there was no understanding between two women who had each devoted her life to supporting a man deprived of what he regarded as his destiny. Diana regarded the Duke’s treatment by the Royal Family as unfair. It was monstrous, she thought, ‘to stop him doing anything and then to put it about that he was frivolous and lazy’.36

  After the Duke’s death, when the Duchess had slipped into a long-term comatose state, Diana’s old friend Lord Longford (formerly Frank Pakenham), who was a director of Sidgwick and Jackson, visited the Mosleys at the Temple. He persuaded Diana to write a biography of Wallis, to correct the many ‘lies’ that proliferated about her friend.37 The result is an interesting review of an enigmatic personality, and could hardly be otherwise for Diana had known the Duchess well at a personal level for some years. But it was roughly treated by many reviewers, and condemned as ‘a hagiography’, presumably because Diana did not subscribe to bringing down her subject, which more and more seems regarded as an essential part of a biographical study. Present-day Royal researchers, however, see Diana’s treatment as an important book in the Windsor canon and it sold a respectable 23,000 copies in hardback.

  Decca, predictably, deplored it, and dismissed it in her correspondence as ‘Woman’s Own writing’. She always displayed a certain amount of schadenfreude when Diana was castigated in the press. In answer to one letter from her, Rudbin replied, ‘Actually I’m rather enjoying it and Diana is forgiven all for me by the glorious quote: “Come, come, said Tom’s father, at your time of life/You’ve no long excuse for playing the rake/It is time that you thought, boy, of taking a wife/Why, so it is father: But whose wife shall I take.”’38

  Some years earlier Mosley had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He staved off the worst symptoms longer than is usual because he was so strong and fit, had an agile brain and quick manner. In 1968 he had been the subject of a prestigious Panorama programme on BBC Television. Over eight million people tuned in to watch his hour-long interview with James Mossman, at that time a record audience. Throughout his seventies he was always happy to be interviewed on television or radio, to argue his corner, to write articles, and shine at dinner parties, but from his eightieth birthday in 1976 there was a clear deterioration. The drugs he needed to take in increasing doses caused him to fall over from time to time.

  James Lees-Milne found Mosley physically frail but in good spirits when he visited the couple at the Temple in May 1980. Mosley was now, he wrote in his diary,

  a very old man. Shapeless, bent, blotched cheeks, cracked nose, no moustache, and tiny eyes in place of those luminous, dilating orbs. I sat with him after dinner on a sofa and talked for an hour . . . Sir O has mellowed to the extent of never saying anything pejorative about anybody . . . I asked boldly if he thought he had made a mistake in founding the New Party. He admitted it was the worst mistake of his life. [He said] the British do not like New Parties . . . that if he had led the Labour government he would have kept Edward VIII on the throne. He [the King] was eminently suited to be an intermediary between his country and the dictators. Said that critics of himself and Duke of Windsor never made allowances for the fact that they detested war, having experienced the horrors of the trenches. They wanted to avoid it happening again at all costs . . . He stands unsteadily, but assured me his head was all right. Held me by both hands and said I must come again. ‘Why not come tomorrow? Come and stay.’ Charming he was.39

  It was the last time Lees-Milne saw him. Mosley died quietly and suddenly in bed in November 1980.

  For Diana it was as though her own life had come to an end. She had been utterly devoted to Mosley during the whole of their forty-four years of marriage and now her family wondered how she would ever cope without him. And though it was a shock, in a sense they were not surprised when Diana suffered what appeared to be a stroke and partial paralysis within a year of Mosley’s death.

  Further investigation proved that it had not been a stroke, but a brain tumour, and just as Nancy linked the trauma of the Colonel’s marriage to the development of her cancer, Diana suspected that the
development of the tumour in her brain was connected with her devastation at losing Mosley.40 It was thought that she could not survive. She was flown to a hospital in London where the tumour was confirmed and an operation was scheduled to remove it. ‘Oh, hen,’ Debo wrote tearfully to Decca, ‘she is a person one thought nothing could ever happen to. A rock like figure in my life and lots of other people’s.’

  Against all the odds - Diana was seventy-one and frail after Mosley’s death - the surgery was a complete success. Her paralysis gradually diminished and she was able to get about. Visitors to nearby wards were startled by the shrieks and roars of laughter that emanated from her room as a constant trickle of old friends dropped in to keep her company. It was a reminder of the words of her former wardress at Holloway to a journalist: ‘We’ve never had such laughs since Lady Mosley left.’ Her doctor thought at one point that she might be hysterical and ought to be watched. But it was just typical Diana; like her sisters, she is simply so inherently funny that it is impossible not to be amused by her.

  One of her most frequent visitors was Lord Longford, who had become a national figure, known, among other things, for his championship of lost causes in the British prison service. As a director of Sidgwick and Jackson, he was one of Diana’s publishers, and he and the Mosleys had been in the habit of meeting for luncheon whenever they all happened to be in London, their political differences put to one side. But Diana was touched by his visits to her in hospital. ‘Frank’s so faithful, the way he comes all the time,’ she told her son. And she paused for a moment, before adding, ‘Of course he thinks I’m Myra Hindley.’41