34
Sisterly Jealousy
That autumn the Halifaxes needed all their strength to survive two devastating blows. The first was the news that their second son, Peter Wood, had been killed on November 1, 1942, in the Battle of El Alamein. Halifax wrote to Baba on the day this news was received. “I can’t write you a proper letter because I’m so snowed under with letters from kind people about Peter.”
El Alamein had seen the defeat of Rommel and the tide of war turning—up to 40 percent of the Axis shipping between Italy and North Africa was being sunk (leaving Rommel’s Afrika Korps desperately short of supplies), Tobruk had been recaptured, and the Soviets had begun their counterblow at Stalingrad. But for the Halifaxes there was another tragedy.
On December 30, 1942, their youngest son, Richard, who had only just joined his regiment in the Middle East, lost both his legs in an attack by a Stuka dive-bomber.
At first, Fruity’s arrival at Little Compton went well. But coming back to England must have been a desperate disappointment to him—as Cairo itself had been, despite his high hopes. No turn of events could have underlined more forcefully just how completely his life had been derailed.
Wartime Cairo was a fashionable place to be. In neutral Egypt, it suffered few if any of the privations endured by countries actively waging the war. It was a focal point for young officers on leave as well as for the women who wanted to follow their men as close to the theater of battle as possible. In the bars and nightclubs a spirit of frenetic gaiety prevailed among those who would, perhaps the next morning, return to the dangerous and dirty business of war. Everyone who had business in the Near East passed through the city, spies as well as soldiers, and it was the headquarters of command operations in the vicinity.
The most famous hostess in wartime Cairo when Fruity had arrived there in November 1941 was Maud (“Momo”) Marriott, the rich, elegant American wife of Brigadier John Marriott. She entertained constantly, presiding over a wartime salon that drew everyone of interest. As she was a great friend of Baba’s, Fruity naturally expected at least to be invited there on a fairly regular basis, if not to become one of the habitués of the house. But Momo made it clear that he was not important enough. He was a humble flight lieutenant whereas every other man of his age wore crowns, pips or wings; and he was being cold-shouldered by the very people from whom he could have expected friendship.
Fruity must often have reflected on the decline from the bright fulfillment of his younger days, from being the beloved husband of a well-known society beauty to deceived spouse, from chosen companion and devoted servant of a prince to this position on the sidelines, from a promising career in the Indian army to a junior rank in a service he had come to hate.
It was hardly surprising, in a man formerly so convivial, that the drink to which he turned for solace now tightened its grip; and that, by now set in his ways, he made few concessions to changed wartime circumstances. When he arrived back at Little Compton the servants to whom he had been accustomed all his adult life, first in India and then during his marriage to Baba, were still there; his wardrobe was still intact; and rationing had made little impact on him. With nothing to do, almost a visitor in a house in every respect run by his wife, there was no real pattern to his life. General Lee, as good as his word, produced an unending supply of American officers so that the Little Compton household ran on oiled wheels, much as it had done before the war, except for the new emphasis on vegetables and livestock. The ducks survived, but Baba soon gave up her attempts at rabbit breeding.
By the end of January 1943 Fruity had found a job, working for Filipo del Guidice, owner and founder of Two Cities Films, in the public relations department, living at the Grosvenor House Hotel during the week and coming down to Little Compton on weekends.
The Halifaxes were looking forward to a visit from Victor Cazalet; more important, their son Richard was reported to be steadily improving. “We had a long letter from him last week—very cheerful—coming here perhaps to get fitted up and then all home together,” wrote Halifax on January 25. For the next two months, his letters consisted largely of news on Richard’s progress.
Irene, in her mid-forties aware that her “chances” were slipping away and that the children she had looked after for so long would soon be leading independent lives, had a fit of misery and regret when Victor took her down to spend the weekend at Great Swifts. Looking out of her window at the dazzling display of yellow crocuses on his lawn she tortured herself for her haste in turning down Victor’s offer of marriage—“and yet I cannot!” She cheered up later when two other guests arrived, Victor produced champagne, sloe gin and brandy and they had some good bridge after dinner.
At Little Compton—now the only real center of Curzon family life—she listened while Baba read out to her and Charles Peake and his wife two letters that were so intimate that they showed perhaps more than anything else how strongly Halifax felt about her. One was from Peter, the son who had been killed, and the other from Richard, describing how his legs had been amputated in a small tent in the middle of the desert. Irene could not restrain her tears. “The heroism and cheerfulness of it was fantastic,” she wrote that night. “As if he had had a small scratch—full of jokes. Oh! the gallantry of these young men. Then I was shown Peter Wood’s letter to his parents in case he was killed (which he always felt he would be).”
Despite his bereavement, Halifax’s flow of letters to Baba continued unabated. Many featured the sort of intimate political gossip she loved, such as Anthony Eden’s suggestion that he, Halifax, should go to India as viceroy after the war—presumably to preside over partition. “Whatever else might be said, I’m sure I would be in an impossible position with Winston as P.M., whatever assurances he might feel like giving.” He was also anxious that she keep some part of their correspondence secret: “Let Victor see my diaries but not any PSs.”
In April Irene listened avidly while Nick, on leave from France, where he was an officer in the Rifle Brigade, told her about his regiment, his men, his reactions to fighting and his talks with his father, whom he now visited in prison as regularly as he could. She was glad when Nick told her that he found Tom’s company encouraging and inspiring and delighted that although his men knew he was Oswald Mosley’s son, no one attempted to take it out on him in any way.
Back at the Dorch, Victor reappeared. Yet again, he proposed to Irene. “But if I could not stand him round me when I am ill,” she wrote reasonably, “it is certain he would still get on my nerves as a husband and permanency.”
On May 11, 1943, Churchill arrived in Washington for talks with Roosevelt. Winston’s visit, Halifax told Baba, was exhausting but very worthwhile because he was getting to know the president well. “Your account of Tom Mosley is grim,” he added. “I wonder whether he will ever find his movement reviving after the war.”
He went on to revert to the question of absorbing interest to them both. Baba, the daughter of the man who had been arguably India’s greatest viceroy, and Halifax, a former holder of the same great office, enjoyed speculating as to who would become India’s first postwar viceroy, with all that the position entailed in terms of the delicate political negotiation required in the run-up to independence, straightforward organization and “image.”
India is causing Winston a lot of worry [Halifax wrote on May 27]. And I gather he has been and is quite seriously considering Anthony for it and that A is quite seriously considering it for himself. Not necessarily to be a peer and therefore ineligible for future leadership. But it would leave the Pooh still less controlled than at present. For Heaven’s sake keep all this to yourself. With all his faults of egocentricity, total lack of the right sort of humility and utter inconsiderateness for anybody but himself I do take off my hat to the sheer confidence, vitality and vigour of the man. There is nothing artificial about it and the stream seems quite inexhaustible. It’s that that impresses people here.
One morning at the beginning of June, Lady Mosley tel
ephoned Irene to tell her that Tom was so ill his doctors said he would die if he was forced to remain in Holloway. In Baba’s absence, Irene left a message with the Little Compton butler and dashed off to the House of Commons, largely to hear the prime minister report on his American visit but also to lobby whatever influential friends she saw there about Tom’s desperate situation.
Baba was insistent that only the prime minister could order Tom’s release and that it would carry more weight if Irene appealed to him rather than her, as everyone knew how much Irene disliked Tom. She added that Tom had said he was not interested in Micky and that Irene could keep him. Far from feeling relieved that her loved one would not be taken from her, Irene was again deeply shocked by Tom’s parental indifference.
A few days later the Mosley family doctor, Dr. Kirkwood, telephoned to say that Lady Mosley had got everything out of proportion: he had never said that Tom’s life was in danger—although he would certainly be better out of Holloway.
The question of the new viceroy continued to exercise both Baba and Halifax.
I think you can allay your anxieties about India [he wrote to her on June 6], but Dickie Mountbatten is certainly a new idea. Pooh I guess is thinking rather more about some super-Minister of State to heat up the war effort there, and recognise Burma, than about trying to govern India and find a way out of the log-jam.
If this is his idea I think he is wrong, for the Viceroy is going to have to make an awful lot of difference to the war against Japan, whereas he ought to be able to do quite a lot for better or worse on the political side. If I were dictator I might try somebody like Peter Fleming—though Freya Stark would be good!
Ten days later Halifax, though delighted at the prospect of a visit from his former private secretary Charles Peake, was writing sadly: “A telegram came last night telling me of Wavell as Viceroy. How your father would have spat. And I cannot help thinking, though perhaps for different reasons, that he’d have been right. I think between ourselves W is a bad choice, tantamount to saying: ‘We don’t care a d—n about the political side.’ Still, I’m glad it isn’t John Anderson, or Anthony or Duff Cooper—and still more that it isn’t me.”
When Irene ran into Chaim Weizmann in the lobby of the Dorchester on July 4, he gave some news that desolated her. Both Victor Cazalet and General Sikorski had been killed in a plane crash on leaving Gibraltar.* Irene was so stunned she scarcely knew what to do. In a daze she allowed the friends who were taking her to lunch at the Bagatelle to carry her off, thinking that perhaps the best thing was to control herself and carry on.
After lunch she rushed back to her hotel room to telephone Baba with the news, then thoughtfully rang Victor’s household at Great Swifts, thinking that the shock would be terrible for them if they first heard it on the evening news bulletins. Later on she went to a cocktail party but could not face the chattering crowds, so she walked back with someone who understood how she felt—the banker Henry Tiarks, who had just lost his baby son.
Upstairs in her room, she finally broke down and wept bitterly, her sobbing intensified by the sympathetic friends who telephoned her to express their sorrow. She found it difficult to come to terms with this sudden, arbitrary tragedy. “Dear Victor only did good in this sad world even though I failed him in not being able to marry him and it was the last thing he said to me—he would hope again when he returned.”
She felt battered and alone. Louis Greig told her the details of the accident: the big Liberator had only just taken off when all four engines apparently failed and it crashed three hundred yards out from the Rock, with everyone still waving farewell. Of the seventeen passengers and crew the only survivor was the Czech pilot.
“Victor’s loss comes very close to us all, doesn’t it?” wrote Halifax on July 8. “We laughed a lot [at him]—but there was solid virtue behind what we laughed at. And he was such a good friend, loyal, devoted, unselfish, humorous.”
As July wore on, Halifax’s thoughts were turning increasingly toward home. From Portland, Oregon, he wrote to Baba on July 19 with another reference to the mysterious “PSs”—“I loved your PS and only distance and the uncertainty of how long this letter will take to get to you prevents me answering like with like!”—before discussing holiday plans, the prospect of a night or two in London, and how he could time his stay in Garrowby for a date when Baba would be free to come up there. “If you don’t meet us (as I dream constantly with prayers that you will), leave full instructions at the Dorch for us to make contact at the earliest possible. I think of little else.”
At Little Compton, Irene’s underlying resentment of Baba had resurfaced as a result of her sister’s attitude to her struggle against alcohol. Victor’s loss, with all that it implied, had no doubt hit her harder than she realized, for her drinking had since become more persistent. Although Irene despised her own weakness, even more did she loathe Baba’s strictures. When she received a long letter of reproof she replied that Baba’s constant surveillance had a worse effect on her than anything; what she, Irene, needed, was cheerful cooperation in her attempt to break her habit.
Fruity’s presence, however, altered the balance of the sisters’ emotional equation, providing a focus for their joint annoyance, with his silences, his view that rationing was for others and, almost the worst crime in those days of desperate fuel shortage, his hogging of the hot water. In spite of the water shortage, Simpson (the butler, who also acted as Fruity’s valet) would run deep baths for Fruity. Furiously Irene tackled him about this, to which Simpson replied that if he had demurred Fruity would have paid no attention and done it himself. “How I got through dinner I do not know.”
Micky, infected by the general malaise, chose this moment to be unexpectedly rude to Irene, the episode not made easier by the twins remarking that if it had been them, Baba would have sent them upstairs for the rest of the day. Then, after an afternoon’s croquet, all the children had to be sent out into the hall because Fruity would not stand for noise in the drawing room, and Irene had to listen while one of the Americans spent twenty minutes on the telephone to his girlfriend.
The Halifaxes returned in mid-August. Shortly afterward, they asked both Curzon sisters to a luncheon party at the Dorchester—the other guests were the Halifaxes’ son Richard, their daughter Anne (married to Lord Feversham) and Charles Peake. Neither Baba nor Irene could have foreseen that this innocent invitation would trigger a quarrel so bitter that it is doubtful that their relationship ever recovered.
As the luncheon was held in Victor Cazalet’s former sitting room, it put Irene into an unhappy mood from the start, no doubt exacerbating the loneliness of which she constantly complained in her diary. “I felt embarrassed from beginning to end as the whole thing was so intimate with Baba’s asides to Edward that I felt like an outcast. I wonder what Anne and Dorothy really feel about her?”
Nick’s departure after embarkation leave did not make Irene any happier. She was also worried about her health; her doctor, who thought she might have a small internal polyp or cyst, had sent her to a nursing home to await an X-ray. Lying in bed there she had been delighted and touched to receive a basket of tomatoes, eggs and fruit from Baba. Few presents could have been more welcome; fresh eggs were a real luxury. It was the last surge of pure, uncomplicated sisterly affection.
Back at the Dorch, Irene’s pleasure at Baba’s recent thoughtfulness disappeared when she found Baba using her room to make a stream of telephone calls. She told her sister that as there was no space for her in her own room, she would go to Viv. Her remark was a flashpoint. Baba flared up and told Irene not to be a martyr. Irene responded that Baba was too fond of her own comfort and extremely selfish—and then came out with the accusation that set the tinder alight: “I said if it had not been for one or two loyal friends to protect her, her name was mud over Edward Halifax.”
Then, in Irene’s words: “Baba hit me savagely in the face and I told her to get out.”
It was the biggest breach the sister
s had ever had. In the immediate aftermath, Irene rushed down to her friends the Masseys and on emerging ran into Charles Peake, on his way to see Baba, who advised Irene to be patient “and things would sort themselves out.”
Irene, made frantic by what had happened, took her telephone off the hook, as she could not face the thought of a broadside from Baba before a broadcast she was due to make on October 3. Balked of the telephone, Baba wrote a furious letter to her sister. Irene managed the broadcast successfully but was so nervous of Baba that she returned to the shelter of the nursing home.
On October 7, when she was back at the Dorchester, Viv came to see her. The message she bore was that Irene had allowed the wonderful platonic friendship Baba enjoyed with Edward Halifax to become smutty, like the minds of those around her.
The estrangement continued. At the Requiem Mass for Gracie’s son Captain Hubert Duggan MP at Farm Street Catholic Church in early November, the sisters sat together but did not speak.
Rumors of Tom Mosley’s imminent release were spreading. When this was confirmed, Halifax wrote tenderly to Baba: “I see by the papers that Tom is being let out. From your letter, I fear you will feel it is too late. But with all my heart, I pray it may not be so and that better and changed conditions may work favourably. Do let me know how things go with him and how you feel about it.”
The news that Tom would be released was the signal for countrywide protests. Trade-union workers marched on Downing Street and the Home Office. Factory workers downed tools and questions were asked in Parliament. So great was the uproar that when the Mosleys were finally released, at 7 a.m. on November 20, 1943, it was through the unobtrusive side entrance of Holloway Prison, known as Murderers’ Gate, to a car with its engine already running, with an unmarked police car ahead and behind. A thick fog aided the small convoy’s unnoticed departure.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 43