Fruity’s complaint that Baba deserted him to spend time with Halifax was well founded. She left him in Scotland to return to London on August 21, to dine with the foreign secretary (“His sweetness and love for me is touching,” she wrote in her diary. “Thank God for it as otherwise I would feel very lonely at present”). The tête-à-tête dinners continued, followed by a visit by both Dorothy and Edward to Little Compton in early September. “My dearest Baba,” wrote Halifax after it. “The weekend was delicious . . . that perfect walk. It was wonderful being with you and I loved every moment.”
Baba was determined to do what she could to secure Tom Mosley’s release from prison. One obvious route was Halifax, who saw the prime minister and Herbert Morrison, the home secretary, at every cabinet meeting. “I saw Herbert this morning and he was quite friendly. He said he hadn’t heard about the phlebitis [a recurrent problem for Tom Mosley]. So perhaps something may happen; but I think it is wiser to appear fair so did not press him unduly. He seemed still to be a good deal impressed by the political difficulties of release. More on this when we meet and meanwhile you had better say nothing to anybody.”
Halifax’s caveat about the political difficulties of releasing Mosley was an understatement. Not only would the whole Left have risen against it (as they were to do three years later); moderate opinion too would have been outraged at a time when Britain was fighting for her life. All through that long hot summer, the Battle of Britain raged overhead. The only barrier between the might of the Luftwaffe and probable subsequent invasion were Britain’s pathetically few pilots (on August 21, Fighter Command had a total of just 1,377 pilots at its disposal and on a bad day as many as twenty were killed).
Irene arrived back in London on September 6 after a nightmare journey from Scotland to witness the beginning of the Blitz— September 7 saw the first large-scale night air attack on London. During the following twenty-two days and nights nearly seven thousand tons of bombs were dropped on the capital and the docks blazed almost every night. Within days, she and Baba were part of a loose coterie of friends whose focal point was the London hotel known to them as “the Dorch.”
31
The Dorch
The Dorchester was believed to be the safest hotel in London. Opened in April 1931, it had been built of reinforced concrete from the basement to the top of its eight floors. These were soundproofed with blankets of seaweed (as used by the BBC to deaden sound in their studios) and the walls with cork so that the three hundred bedrooms were exceptionally quiet; although the building shook slightly when a bomb dropped nearby, the explosion was muffled. When war was declared, the hotel’s entrance was hidden by a high screen of sandbags, its curtains lined with heavy black cloth, and the roof covered with a layer of shingle. For those who sheltered in the Turkish baths below the main building, there were twelve feet of concrete between them and any bombs that might fall.
As the air raids began, some of the hotel’s regulars evolved into a “sleeping colony.” Irene’s friend Victor Cazalet was a director of the company that owned the Dorchester and he sometimes invited a few friends down to the ladies’ Turkish baths—the Halifaxes, who stayed there when in London, usually in a suite on the sixth floor, the Duff Coopers, Sir George Clerk, Oliver Lyttelton, Lord Portal (chief of the Air Staff), Oliver Stanley, Walter Monckton, Irene and Baba. Robert Boothby would often join the party when the raids were bad, more for company than anything else. On any one night there might be as few as three of this shifting population or every corner might be crowded. Beds were behind screens and everyone ignored each other’s snores—though some were more difficult to ignore than others. “Victor and Duff snored like bulls,” wrote Baba in her diary. “They went through the whole scale of snores, bass, falsetto, bubbles like a boiling kettle and the swallowing kind. I thought I would go mad but had to stick it out.
“Edward [Halifax] only takes three minutes before he is asleep but manages to yawn loudly and incessantly as a prelude to dropping off into this bottomless, childlike slumber, out of which nothing wakes him.” Woken by the cleaners at 7 a.m., everyone would put on dressing gowns, pick up their washing things and move upstairs—Cecil Beaton talked fastidiously of the hotel’s “expensive squalor.”
Some of the regulars treated the Dorchester as an extension of their own home or estate. The immensely rich Edwardian hostess Maggie Greville gave dinners here from her wheelchair, supplementing the Dorchester kitchens with eggs and cream from her home farm (she died in the hotel in 1942) and Sibyl Colefax continued to entertain freely. Emerald Cunard, who had gone to America at the beginning of the war, returned to live on the seventh floor when her house at 7 Grosvenor Square was bombed. Her suite had a large sitting room, bedroom, bathroom and maid’s room and was crammed with as much of her own furniture as possible, from Buhl cabinets, Louis Quinze chairs and sphinxes to eighteenth-century bookcases, crystal bibelots and console tables resting on gilt eagles. When bombs fell she retreated under the table with a volume of Proust.
Wartime controls allowed restaurants to charge a maximum of five shillings per meal, which could be of no more than three courses; luxury establishments like the Dorchester could add an extra “cover” charge to cover the cost of linen, butter, rolls and so forth and a further two shillings sixpence if there was music and dancing. At first, Dorchester menus still included oysters, cold lobster, smoked salmon and roast grouse, and even as late as 1942 there were delicacies like gulls’ eggs, salmon trout, quails, asparagus, ices, savories and fruit. By 1944, the sandwiches contained tasteless soya paste.
In September 1940, on the fourth night of the Blitz, the two Curzon sisters slept in the Turkish baths for the first time, sharing a cubicle. Both had lunched with Edward and Dorothy Halifax in their suite, with the Russian ambassador and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Maisky, Sir Horace Seymour and the ambassador to Denmark, Mr. Malet. At five o’clock Victor Cazalet called to ask Irene and Baba to dinner, where the other guests were the Halifaxes and Archduke Otto of Austria; and at midnight, with bombs falling, Victor had suggested sleeping in the basement. Down everyone went, carrying water, glasses, candles and pillows.
As the Blitz continued, both sisters did what they could to help. Baba worked in her St. John’s uniform hard and long at London Bridge tube station, where about eight thousand people congregated every night; Irene took victims of the Blitz to Baba’s house or her own, bringing them mattresses, candles and food. Afterward she frequently dined at the Dorchester, where long evening dresses were still worn (“Diana Cooper very unsuitably dressed in black lace with roses in her hair”) and spent the night in the Turkish baths where the drone of German planes, bomb explosions and the deafening barrage from the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park could scarcely be heard.
The night of September 13–14 was particularly dreadful. Irene spent it fully dressed in a dugout near her house, with the men’s lavatories too close for comfort and the thud and crash of exploding bombs until first light. At 5 a.m. she got up and helped make tea and sandwiches for those in the air-raid shelter and the ARP wardens—exhausted and dirty-faced beneath their tin helmets yet unfailingly cheerful. At 5:45 she went out and saw what had so shaken and deafened them the night before: the hospital opposite was badly hit on two floors, an office building damaged and nearby Radcliffe Street a shambles—“One woman was dragging out stuff from her shattered kitchen and yelling with rage at the Germans.” A few days later, walking to Selfridges to buy an air-raid suit, she noted that all the windows of Londonderry House had been blown out and Mrs. Leo Rothschild’s house and garden, 5 Hamilton Place, had had a bomb in the garden.
Baba still managed to get down to Little Compton most weekends, where Fruity was living while waiting for a job he had been promised with the RAF, his former sweet nature soured by recent events. When Georgia Sitwell went to stay for the weekend of September 25, finding not only Baba but Fruity, David and his tutor there, she noted: “Fruity more absurd and less agreeable than usual.”
/> Irene was not the only person intrigued by Baba’s relationship with Lord Halifax. “Discussed with Victor Cazalet Baba’s extraordinary power over Lord H and that she rang him at any moment over minor things and that he always responded and that it was always Baba first and then his family,” recorded Irene. Victor responded crisply that it was Dorothy Halifax who was the saint, not her husband.
Halifax was doing what he could to help Baba in her pursuit of freedom for Tom Mosley.
My dearest Baba [he wrote on September 16]. I saw Herbert M this evening at the Cabinet and told him that the “indefatigable young lady” had shown me the latest report on O.M. which looked as if he might well die if not let out, and that I could not suppose that he wanted that and that if it happened it would be a scandal. He began by saying that their prison doctors had not always formed the same judgment as the outside consultant and I said that of course he could check up in any way he liked but that having myself seen the report of the consultant, who was presumably a responsible man, I could not myself doubt what was the right course. You have certainly done all you can. I loved our evening together.
Much as Irene longed to see Micky, she wrote to Nanny at Wootton to tell her not to return to Denham yet—Andrée reported that there were German bombers overhead every night. Micky, setting off for school, was told simply to say “yes” and nothing more if asked whether he was Oswald Mosley’s son.
The busy social life at the Dorchester continued nonstop—bridge parties with Duff Cooper, Loelia Duchess of Westminster, Bob Boothby and Lady Beatty; chats with Jean Norton and Leslie Hutchinson (the glamorous colored piano player who had been a lover of Edwina Mountbatten); Lady Maureen Stanley’s cocktail party where the hostess was tipsy. Whenever Irene ran into Lord Halifax, as at lunch at the Chinese embassy, where he was guest of honor, she noticed that he brought the conversation around to her sister.
Not everyone found Baba so intoxicating. When she went to stay with Georgia, taking David but not Fruity, her hostess found her irritatingly determined to visit her lover Michael Lubbock; when he put her off she decided to stay on with the Sitwells instead. “Baba is so charming and I am very fond of her,” wrote Georgia, “but oh! she is so catty, so smug, so condescending about so many things.”
Baba had some reason for complacency. In the midst of his busy ministerial life Halifax was writing to her constantly, affectionate little notes that made it clear how much he relied on her company. “I am hoping to do pictures and cinema with you on Saturday. I have alas! been summoned to Chequers on Saturday evening to talk U.S. with Winston and Philip L[othian]. But I needn’t start down till four or five if you are free to play about till then.” He confided to her his war aims: “I wished to fight long enough to induce such a state of mind in Germany that they’d say they’d had enough of Hitler! The real point is, I’m afraid, that I trust no settlement unless H is discredited.”
“Edward never tires of asking me why I like him,” records Baba’s diary of those months. “I answered: ‘because you make me feel sunny all through.’ When I asked him what he liked about me he said: ‘I can’t put it in any crisp phrase like that but I love you very much.’ ”
Their affection was so apparent that Walter Monckton, another of her admirers, referred to Halifax as “my hated rival.” Fruity, now in the RAF and stationed near Reading, was nowhere in the equation: although he appeared at the Ritz from time to time, his life and Baba’s had become essentially separate.
When Baba’s busy social life, with its amorous overtones, threatened to overflow into Irene’s “territory,” it aggravated Irene’s jealousy of her sister. Not yet the constant, corrosive emotion it was to become, it nevertheless began to color her attitude. Irene had always thought of Victor Cazalet as her friend; now that he had become so close to the foreign secretary that he accompanied him every Wednesday morning on his daily walk to the Foreign Office to feed him gossip, Cazelet included Baba in his parties more often than Irene.
Because of her friendship with Lord Halifax, Baba met Foreign Office mandarins and visiting dignitaries—exactly the sort of people who fascinated Irene. One of these was Gaston Palewski, chef de cabinet to the young General de Gaulle, who was rallying the French Resistance movement from London under the banner of France Libre. (De Gaulle’s first, historic broadcast to the French people had been made on the evening of June 18, concluding with an inspiring call to arms: “Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not and shall not go out.”) Palewski, who later had a love affair with Diana’s eldest sister, the novelist Nancy Mitford, was clever, entertaining and an inveterate womanizer: that autumn, staying at Little Compton, he attempted to seduce Baba but was rebuffed.
Irene’s feelings were exacerbated by the way Baba casually made use of her, as she had done so often in the past. She treated Irene’s room at the Dorchester as her own, frequently hogging the hot water and the telephone. “Very dirty and quite exhausted I came in from the East End to find all Baba’s things strewn there. I could have wept—no place of my own.” “Her consternation and acidity on my simple dirty East End toilette passed description. Tried to answer some letters while Baba phoned and phoned.” “Victor was pretty indignant at Baba always taking Sir George Clerk’s vacant bed in the baths.” “Traces of Baba were in my room in orchids and silver foxes left behind.”
At the end of November Irene paid a visit to her stepmother, Gracie, living at Blanche Farm near South Mimms, Hertfordshire, in much reduced circumstances. Gracie was commendably frank about her own responsibility for her misfortunes. Against a background of guns and the distant crump of bombs, both women talked more freely than ever before. “She made a full and frank confession of her follies with Scatters, her financial difficulties and his ruining of her,” wrote Irene. “How Edwin Montagu and Rupert Becket had each loaned her £500 to tide her over her difficulties, that Scatters lost her £20,000 in the City, and yet though people told her again and again of his betrayal of her, even King George, she deliberately carried on, till finally some squalid behaviour broke her spirit.”
Cliveden was a sharp contrast to the cottage at South Mimms. With twenty guests, jewels, pearls, blazing fires, soft beds, servants, delicious food, the usual earnest talk and belief that most problems could be solved by discussion among the influential bien-pensants who gathered there so frequently, it was difficult to believe there was a war on. When Tom Jones gathered everyone in the library before dinner on November 30, 1940, so that people could air their views on the war, the consensus of opinion was that the government had no clear war aims and Britain was bound for defeat. After breakfast next day the same group assembled for the same discussion, with an article by the military historian Basil Liddell Hart, which completely dismissed any hope of a British victory, lending weight to the argument. When Nancy brought out her false teeth and did her imitations after dinner the usual Cliveden atmosphere was complete.
Back at the Dorch, Irene found that gossip was rife about her sister and Lord Halifax. Her friend Alice Massey warned her that it looked bad when Baba called him in the middle of dinner with other people present who might talk. The very next night, the prime minister, who always kept late hours, wished to get hold of Lord Halifax at 12:45 but could get no reply: Halifax was so sound a sleeper and the door of his cubicle was locked. Without hesitation, the Dorchester telephone operators called the person they believed had the greatest access to him—Baba, who was sleeping next to Irene.
Baba acted with commendable briskness. Pulling on a dressing gown, she found Halifax’s detective and sent him in search of a key. Eventually a night porter was found—Irene meanwhile holding the receiver to keep the connection with the prime minister’s office open—and Baba slipped in to wake the snoring foreign secretary. Finding Halifax (who was suffering from an infection) drenched in perspiration, she gave him aspirin, changed his sheets and made him change his pajamas, finally emerging from his bunker half an hour later. “What must the detective and porter have
thought?” wondered Irene.
It appeared to her such a compromising situation that the next morning when Baba was dressing to go to early church with Lord Halifax she expostulated. When Baba flared up, saying that he had restored her religious faith and that their relationship was on the highest moral plane, Irene pointed out that she had only meant that their emerging together so early in the day was not fair to Halifax: people in the hotel could so easily put the wrong construction on it. Baba went to church alone.
Halifax was sublimely unaware of these nuances. On December 10 he was writing to Baba from the Foreign Office: “I think I shall have to stay up here on Friday night so come up and do your Christmas shopping and bring your knitting for after dinner in case I have a lot of work. There will be a fire in my room after tea on Friday so let me find you there on my return from the office. Would you like to suggest that we give Leo [d’Erlanger, whom Baba had asked to stay as “chaperon” at Little Compton that weekend] a lift down in the car or can we manage to keep it to ourselves? I look forward to the weekend very much. Perhaps we could have a walk on Saturday?” Afterward he told her that it had been “a very perfect two days.”
On December 12 came news of the death of Lord Lothian, British ambassador to Washington. Like his beloved Nancy Astor, he was a Christian Scientist and, when he developed uremic poisoning, refused the orthodox medical treatment that would have cured him. Speculation as to who would succeed him was feverish. “Nancy says one me, two Waldorf,” Halifax told Baba. It was Halifax.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 39