The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  Infinitely worse for me than the drear and squalid discomfort of prison was being parted from my four children. Max, the youngest, was a few weeks old, and his brother Alexander nineteen months when I was taken away from them. I missed the years when, as Mrs Hammersley once put it, they were at the zenith of their sweetness. The older boys, too, were changing, and perhaps missing me as I missed them. They were undergoing what for so many English boys is the most hateful part of their childhood, the years at a preparatory school.

  In our block of Holloway there was another couple. Major and Mrs de Lassoe. They were in their sixties, tactful and unobtrusive. He used to fetch our weekly rations from the prison store, and one day he called me to look at the dust and grime mantling the dried beans and peas.

  ‘Disgracefully dirty,’ he said.

  ‘Oh well, Major de Lassoe, isn’t one supposed to eat a peck of dirt a year?’ I asked.

  ‘No Lady Mosley. A peck of dirt in a lifetime,’ he said angrily.

  The all-pervading dirt in the prison was a surprise to me, as the wardresses dispose of an abundance of slave labour and I had wrongly imagined a hospital-like cleanliness.

  In ordinary life Kit was always well, even elegantly dressed, but in prison he wore his oldest and shabbiest country clothes until they were frayed and out at elbow. I think his down-at-heel appearance rather annoyed the governor, a Dr Mathieson, but Kit considered he was suitably dressed for his environment. Once when the governor came to fetch him for some special reason, perhaps a conference with counsel, I walked with them to the gate of our yard. Kit was wearing a degraded old overcoat; two buttons were missing and a third hanging by a thread.

  I said: ‘Your coat! It’s a disgrace!’ and turning to the governor, ‘I ask you to look at his buttons!’

  The governor gave me a hostile glance and said primly, ‘Most people would say it was the wife’s job to sew on her husband’s buttons.’ ‘Heavens, that would never do,’ I said. ‘Apparently only tailors know how to sew them on. He would never let me touch his clothes.’

  The governor was silent. Kit smiled. He knew the governor and I disliked one another.

  Near our gate there was a sinister little mortuary, usually kept locked but occasionally scrubbed out by a convict. One old wardress disliked passing it alone at dusk; she had been fond of Mrs Thompson who was found guilty as accessory before the fact when her lover, Bywaters, was convicted of the murder of Mr Thompson; she was hanged at Holloway. Even twenty years later the mortuary reminded Miss Davis of horrors. Kit knew this, and always said, ‘Shall I come with you to the gate?’ and they walked down the path together. Then out came her bunch of keys, she unlocked the gate and as she locked it behind her, said gratefully, ‘Good night, Sir Oswald.’ It was hard to know who was guarding whom.

  One day two men appeared with paint and brushes and went into the primitive grimy bathroom. I could hardly believe my eyes. Although it badly needed painting it would have been an event so unlikely as to be incredible that the prison should be in any way cleaned or smartened up. They took out a tape measure and exactly five inches from the bottom of the bath they painted a thick green line on the chipped enamel. Apparently King George VI had had an idea about saving water: he considered five inches was plenty to bath in. I never quite understood the point; we have such a nice rainfall in England and water is not a commodity which has to be imported. The green line was called King George’s Line; I suppose we shall never know how many people had shallow baths, and how many disloyally wallowed. It probably did save water. According to my father, his sister, my aunt Iris, for whom a hint from the King was the equivalent of a command from the Trinity, said her breakfast coffee was to be made from the water in her hot water bottle. Many people got a perverse pleasure from any form of rationing.

  Kit finally became seriously ill for want of air and exercise. Walking round and round our little yard beneath the enormous wall was not enough. Despite his lame leg he had fenced twice a week whenever possible: public schools fencing champion at the age of fifteen, he was a member of the English fencing team and seemed to need the exercise. Phlebitis, to which he had always been prone, became a real danger. He lost four stone in weight, and at last even the Home Office doctors insisted upon his release, in November 1943.

  Until the end of the war we lived under house arrest, with a policeman nearby. The Home Office moved us from our first stop, where Pam and Derek Jackson had hospitably received us, and we finally found a nice old house at Crux Easton in Berkshire. As Kit’s health gradually improved, when summer came we got bicycles and flew round the countryside on them. From a bicycle one can see many things hidden from a motorist, people’s gardens in villages, over hedges and across fields. Tom, back from North Africa, came often when he was on leave; he said he wished he could stay a year, reading. A van had brought our extensive prison library from Holloway in addition to our other books.

  Best of all, I was reunited with my four children. Kit loved the two little boys, now aged five and nearly four. He invented endless rhymes and songs for them. He decided to farm in order to feed his large family, and as there was no land at Crux Easton he bought Crowood, unseen, as the Home Office with its customary spite refused us permission to go the few miles necessary to look at it. Seven miles was our limit.

  Just forty years later an old friend, Robert Swann, whom we had meantime quite lost sight of, offered to add his memories of those days to mine. He wrote:

  I first came to know Kit and Diana because Jonathan Guinness, Diana’s son by her first marriage, was my ‘best friend’ at Eton. We were both tugs [King’s Scholars] though singularly unimbued with the College spirit, a rather high-minded version of traditional Etonian values. My first visit to the Mosleys took place at Crux Easton where they were closely restricted in their movements; subsequently on several occasions at Crowood after the war. Like many other boys of my age I liked to think of myself as grown up and sophisticated but I must admit to wondering with a touch of trepidation what the ‘notorious’ Mosleys would be like.

  He goes on:

  Diana’s laughter swooped onto every plan one made, every subject one discussed, but I suppose the biggest surprise was really Kit. I don’t quite know what I had imagined—not, anyhow, someone so ‘normal’. Photographs in the Press when the Mosleys were released had selected a Blackshirt leader image, very different from Mosley in his own home talking to Jonathan and Jonathan’s friends about books, history, school gossip (he particularly enjoyed our slightly teasing portraits of the Eton beaks).

  He was tremendously easy to talk to because he was never condescending; I noticed exactly the same thing when he talked to farm labourers. He might occasionally talk over our heads about philosophy but even that was flattering as it assumed we were frightfully well-read. He also had the marvellous gift (surely a little bit deliberately cultivated?) that I also remember in Maurice Bowra of taking some fairly banal remark one had made as if it were almost a revelation, embroidering on it and transforming it just enough so that one seemed to have said something dazzlingly intelligent.

  Kit was totally unembittered. The only reference to prison life I remember is that one of the cows was named after a particularly pleasant, or, more likely, unpleasant prison wardress. This, I seem to recollect, delighted Alexander who also had a rich collection of swear-words and a strong local accent. Kit loved to get him to talk in Wiltshire with as many of the forbidden words as possible.

  He was not a very demonstrative father, though he loved to see Ali and Max doing something a little bit wild. Perhaps because he didn’t constantly dote they obviously loved his approval. On one occasion, when my mother was staying, Diana and she organized charades in the version where people choose whom they want to portray; Ali wanted to be God, Max his (not His) father.

  Kit spent a lot of time reading, walking or on the farm. Meals—delicious by war-time and immediately post-war standards—were a time of great relaxation. He loved fun and jokes, though one sensed tha
t he had a relatively low boredom-threshold. Diana orchestrated everything so that he should be happy and there were obviously lots of semi-private, but never mawkish, jokes between them.

  I never saw him angry though I’m pretty sure he could have been terrifying, and just once or twice there was a faint suggestion that it might be a good idea if people didn’t make too much noise while Kit was reading.

  As I got to like Kit I began to think I ought to tell him that my politics were (and are!) pale and pink, pansy Liberal. This I did—somewhat pompously, I’m afraid—and though he must have been laughing inside he had the tact to pretend to take it all very seriously. On my side I remember being impressed that he had had as political as well as personal friends many of the writers I most admired, like Osbert Sitwell and Christopher Hobhouse.

  For someone so original he was rather conventional, though one of my friends told me that Kit once said to him, almost wistfully, that he so liked to try almost anything once that he rather regretted he’d never had the least homosexual urge! I must say I can’t see him very convincingly in that particular role.

  It was some considerable time later, in 1947 or early 1948, that he reappeared in politics in public. Jonathan and I were doing our National Service and dressed as two conspicuously unmilitary Privates escorted Diana to one of his first meetings which the Jewish ‘43’ [A violently anti-Fascist group that tried to break up BU meetings, and constantly assaulted our members. D.M.] tried to break up violently. Kit had some fairly dotty idea that we might discourage aggressors from Diana, who, typically, had insisted on being there. I can’t imagine J and I would have deterred anyone. I did get a glimpse then—and on one other occasion—of his extraordinary oratory.

  If I had to find one adjective for him it would be a curious one—gallant.

  This account of our family life from 1944 to 1948 by someone who was fourteen when he first met Kit evokes those years, the little boys’ accents and Kit teasing them. We used to have tea in the nursery; Alexander came in one day saying he had had a fight with a boy from the village.

  ‘Heavens,’ I said, ‘he’s twice your size.’

  ‘Oh, that didn’t matter. You see I looked at him and hypnotised him.’ Kit immediately began to sing:

  Big Oyes, you hyptonoise me

  Huge oyes, you hyptonoise

  Great velvet oyes you hyptonoise me

  Enormous oyes—it is your soize.

  ‘Silly,’ said Alexander.

  Robert Swann mentions Osbert Sitwell, who wrote to Kit on 15 April 1945: ‘Yes, the inadequacy of time is appalling; and to have been unjustly deprived, as you have been, of a period of time, is beyond bearing. The only comfort for you must be that it is impossible to blame you for anything that happened in those years.’

  At the end of the war my second personal tragedy happened: Tom was killed in Burma. His loss was something from which I never recovered for the rest of my life. The first tragedy had been Unity who, though no longer paralysed, was a completely changed person as a result of the brain damage she suffered when she shot herself. The exuberant, fearless, irresistible companion of my youth had become a shadow of what she once was. Often she stayed with us at Crux Easton and Crowood. My mother cared for her; she died, as a result of her wound, in 1948. Kit was devoted to her, but her intemperate remarks to the Press at various times had often embarrassed and sometimes enraged him; they in no way reflected his own views, and yet because she was my sister they gave newspapers a useful weapon for attacking him.

  Nicholas was demobilized and came to stay from time to time; like Jonathan, he brought friends. One or two of them might conceivably, like Robert Swann, have sent reminiscences; but they have mostly become clergymen and might be scolded by their bishops. Kit wished Nicholas well in his chosen profession of novelist, though he did not go so far as to read his books. He cared for few novels, Goethe’s and Stendhal’s, and in some moods the romantic prose poems of d’Annunzio, sufficed. The only contemporary novel I remember him liking was Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoires d’Hadrien.

  Nicholas joined an Anglican sect, the Community of the Resurrection; he showed us the programme of a weekend Retreat there which began ‘Friday 6 pm. Cocktails’. Kit was delighted, and said, ‘Nicky is so lucky. He has double fun, the fun of sinning and the fun of repenting.’ A disloyal friend of Nicholas’s told Kit that ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Let’s be weak together,’ was his son’s approach to double fun.

  After a while he married and went to live in Wales, but he embraced every radical chic cause from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to, later on, unrestricted coloured immigration. When Nicholas was marching from Aldermaston in the usual bitter English Easter weather Kit always generously hoped he might have a little double fun on some haystack by the wayside.

  Kit was a believer in Wahlverwandschaft, relationship by choice. He never thought the accident of near relationship should dictate friendship. In my family he liked Pam, Tom, Unity, Debo, and above all my mother. When I discovered that in 1940 Nancy had told Gladwyn Jebb, a Foreign Office official, that in her opinion I was ‘dangerous’ (she told Mrs Hammersley this in a letter), my first thought was profound thankfulness that Kit had never known of it. He would not have forgiven her.

  Apparently Jebb asked her what she knew about my visits to Germany, and she replied: ‘Very little.’ She should have said, truthfully, ‘Nothing.’ I was not in the least surprised to learn of her démarche, it meant nothing at all, it was just Nancy. We were fond of one another, enjoyed one another’s company, saw each other constantly when we both lived in France, telephoned every morning, wrote when we were apart. Kit was apt to complain of having to see too much of her. None of her brothers-in-law was particularly attached to Nancy, and although Kit never disliked her, as for example Derek Jackson did, he would have been quite pleased with an excuse for not seeing her quite as often as I wished. It had nothing to do with her attempt years before to guy him in a novel, Wigs on the Green. He never read it, but he had used it as an excuse not to invite her to Wootton. It had been long forgotten when we became neighbours in France after the war. He never read her novels, but there was nothing odd about this. It was simply that with very few exceptions he did not care for fiction. He thought her U and non-U controversy very silly, and agreed with what the Duke of Windsor said to me about it: ‘She shouldn’t have done it.’

  By degrees, however, Kit and Nancy became friends. She was careful not to ‘plant a dart’, as my mother called it, in him. She knew the riposte would be instant and painful. If she was willing to wound and yet afraid to strike she vented her feelings in letters to people who disliked him and therefore welcomed her little attacks. When she came to the Temple, which she did the whole time, they enjoyed each other’s company.

  It would have been terrible for me if, during her four year illness, I had been prevented from going over to Versailles to sit with her, as I did nearly every day towards the end, or from having her to stay at the Temple. Yet had Kit known about Jebb…

  To say, in 1940, that somebody was dangerous could mean only one thing. Did she mean it? I suppose she was in a panic when she said it, but it is almost impossible to credit that she believed it, since had she done so she would surely not have wished to make a bee-line for Crux Easton, Crowood, the Temple, as she always did. She even stayed with us on board the Alianora. If I had thought of someone what her words to Jebb seem to imply, I should not have had much desire to see that treacherous person.

  She was kindness itself to all my children, and I think I am the only one of her sisters to whom she dedicated a book, Frederick the Great. I miss her to this day. She was so quick to grasp a point, so appreciative; she had many qualities besides her wit and humour. She was extremely generous, for example, with the money she earned, giving it away with both hands.

  Early in the war she invented attacks on my mother, but she chose the recipient of her falsehoods with care: it was to Mrs Hammersley she wrote, who kn
ew Nancy well, was devoted to my mother, and could be guaranteed not to believe a word of it. The thought of her horrified shrieks amused Nancy, and the letters amused Mrs Ham. But the Jebb story would not have amused Kit.

  He was deeply sad about her illness, and spent much time interviewing her doctors and doing what he could to help.

  *

  The day the war ended, Kit said: ‘Fascism is dead. Now we must make Europe.’ It was obvious that our Empire was no more; he thought that if what was left of Europe after the disastrous Russian advance into the middle of our continent would unite, it could be a powerful third force to balance America and Russia. Much later, after many opportunities had been thrown away by Britain, there was the question of the Common Market; though always in favour of joining, he predicted endless disputes unless Europe was politically united. When we finally signed the Treaty of Rome many aspects of it were not to our liking, which had we helped to draft it, need not have been the case. The idea of ‘Europe a Nation’ was the focus of his thought for the rest of his life. It remains an ideal and a dream; perhaps nationalism is still too strong for it to become a reality. He tried to persuade people, in various countries, whose patriotism was exclusively nationalistic, that the future of us all depended upon European unity. In many cases he succeeded.

  He also devised solutions for Britain’s economic problems as it swung between wage freezes and reflation, false dawns of temporary prosperity followed by runaway inflation. During the years of full employment he always predicted that mass unemployment was bound to recur. The economist Roy Harrod, who often talked to him about these intractable problems, tried to persuade him to write a book setting out his whole economic theory. Unfortunately he never did so, but his ideas can be found scattered through the notes he wrote for our magazine The European in the fifties, and in the broadsheets he published until the end of his life, as well as in his books.