The chief difficulty was that both Windsors were massively mistrusted. Halifax was worried that official telegrams would not remain secret. “I should myself feel little confidence in his discretion in this field,” he noted. He also felt that their constant partygoing would soon count heavily against what popularity they enjoyed in America. Once again, it was left to the king to tell his brother that a U.S.-based job would not be possible.
Even the Windsors’ return to France caused apprehension. “I confess I regard without enthusiasm his intention of returning to Paris,” wrote the new foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin. “His friends there turned out to be for the most part collaborators and he will expect to live there in luxury amidst great poverty.” When the duke visited Lloyds Bank in St. James’s Street at the beginning of October and asked for an overdraft of five thousand pounds to be transferred to Lloyds in Paris so that the duchess could draw from it whenever she wanted, alarm bells rang in both the Treasury and the Bank of England, powerless to stop the transaction. “They naturally feel hesitation about large sums of money being made available to the Duke in France when ordinary British subjects there are severely restricted,” wrote a senior Foreign Office official.
Money, jobs and readjusting to a life of peace were also the prime considerations of millions of the duke’s former citizens. Irene began work for charities that sprang up in the first months of peace, like Aid to Greece, got her pearls out of the bank (“after all these War years!”), gave luncheons for Danny Kaye—unfortunately he preferred Baba’s company—bewailed the fact that Virginia cigarettes seemed unobtainable and visited her stepmother Gracie, who was now living with, and caring for, her son Alfred Duggan, the future novelist and biographer. Irene still found it difficult to adjust to the idea of the marchioness of Curzon, noted for the grandeur of her lifestyle even in an era of extravagance, doing the dirty laundry. But she was immensely impressed by the skill with which Gracie had made her small house in South Mimms, Hertfordshire, so pretty.
That August Irene saw Diana again for the first time since she had been to admire her new baby in 1940. The Mosleys, then living temporarily at Crux Easton, near Newbury in Berkshire, had bought Crowood House, near Hungerford, its farmland and piggery worked by some of Tom’s ex-fascists. Tom not only believed firmly in the importance of growing one’s own food but also that it was the best way to build up his and Diana’s health after the privations of prison.
Baba, at Little Compton, was planning a trip to America, her clothes packed and ready in Irene’s house, when the sisters became victims of a cunning robbery. At the beginning of September Annie, Irene’s maid, was called up with the news that her mistress had had an accident and lost her key and would Annie leave hers by the dustbin in the basement area. The caller went on to tell Annie that if she would collect Irene’s luggage from the Dorchester (still treated by Irene like a club), he would bring Irene up to see her doctor. When Annie returned from the Dorchester she found Irene’s room in complete disorder and much missing. With any new garment only obtainable through the few clothes coupons allowed annually, the loss of even one’s oldest clothes was a serious matter.
Baba’s terror that her furs, left in Irene’s room packed and ready for America in a cardboard box, had also been taken affected Irene so deeply that it almost made her disregard the disappearance of her own silver fox fur, camiknickers, stockings, coats, hats, dresses and silk underwear, dressing case and radio. Yet her very real concern did nothing to prevent the jealousy that was now endemic. “Dear God! I was envious of her as a VIP going to Washington. Fruity was not complimentary of her privilege in getting out there through Halifax when tragic cases cannot get back.”
Irene filled her life even more frantically with people and good works. She turned in desperation to the music that was so much a part of her life, going alone to the Albert Hall to hear Yehudi Menuhin, but the aching inner void remained and she stifled tears most days. She sat on endless committees, attended the World Congress of Faiths and the War Workers’ Committee meetings and opened a bazaar for the Salvation Army in Shepherd’s Bush. She took Micky and the twins shopping in Bond Street, followed by tea and a play, for which Fruity joined them. She gave frequent lunches to her friends at the Dorchester or Quaglino’s and suppers at the Savoy. It was a life that many would have found fulfilling. But in Irene’s eyes, everyone else was better off—especially Baba.
Baba returned on December 6, 1945, to be met at Waterloo by Fruity with a large van borrowed from the Dorchester for the sixteen cases stuffed with American booty. For once, the sisters had a cozy evening alone together, talking of Irene’s many friends in America and those Baba had met. Both were distressed when Tom Mosley held a fascist reunion party in Russell Square, followed by a dance for a thousand supporters. “Why cannot the man keep quiet?” wrote Irene crossly.
Christmas, predictably, was a matter for despair to Irene, especially when the contents of Baba’s sixteen cases were revealed. “Baba brought back trunks of clothes, hats, shoes and stockings for the twins. The children got furs, boots, wristwatches from Lady Halifax, pretty presents. I came up after breakfast and cried my heart out, I desperately am in need of all these things and have not got one. A green summer dress length from Baba, a pair of black gloves, pink sequin bedroom slippers and oh! the dress I bought with my own money was nowhere near what I wanted. I cannot see why I am so desperately unlucky in gifts. Baba had exactly what I wanted.”
Two days after Christmas Fruity and David left Little Compton. Though regarding her brother-in-law as an irritation factor was now almost axiomatic for Irene, she noticed at once that with Fruity’s departure all gaiety had gone from the house. “There is a barrier invisible all the time to naturalness and a stifled atmosphere pervades the place,” she wrote. Another rare evening of warmth with her sister, when the barriers of restraint were lowered and the old intimacy returned, merely pointed up the normal sad difference. “Fruity lays down the law on plans, Baba gets argumentative on anything he says, the twins do not utter, David half reads a book and I am apprehensive from beginning to end,” she wrote. The beloved little sister of those early years at Hackwood seemed to have vanished as if she had never been.
36
Envoi
After the war, the sisters’ lives diverged. Irene’s never regained the vivid momentum, the sensation of being close to great events or involved in deep emotions, of earlier days. Seeing less of Baba also meant that the discrepancy between their lives was less of a cause for unhappy comparisons.
The war and Tom’s imprisonment had put an end to the Mosley family home, Savehay Farm at Denham, which was sold by Tom on January 1, 1946. Irene mourned its loss as a place to which the grown-up Mosley children would return like homing pigeons. Her own large, rather gloomy house at 9 The Vale, in Chelsea, with none of Denham’s childhood associations, did not exert the same appeal. It was, though, a good base for all her committee and club work, and for the numerous speeches she was still asked to make. “I could not be my father’s daughter and not inherit a small part of his great power of public speaking,” she wrote of this part of her life.
She missed Denham for another reason. At Denham, she was at the heart of the household. It might not have been her house, but it was largely her money that had maintained it, and when there was any decision that had to be made she was the one consulted by Nanny or Andrée; more important, her presence there was pivotal to the children. At Little Compton, which had replaced Denham as the family center, she felt marginalized.
Her jealousy of Baba, which to a large extent ruined the latter part of her life, continued virtually until her death. She felt that her sister both dominated—“Baba bosses everything”—and ignored her, making it less and less possible for her to keep on an even emotional keel. She sought psychiatric help, usually returning after such consultations to the womb of the Dorchester rather than to her own house. One psychiatrist told her that she was running away from herself, another diagnosed h
er sister as the trouble (“He thought I had become completely defeatist largely because of Baba and that I must not leave this question but face it squarely”).
It was a verdict that troubled her so much that she began to be physically ill. Sensibly, she came to the conclusion that “these delvings into the past do no good.” Irene herself attributed her troubles to the difficulties of her relationship with Baba, years of overwork and her “ageing years” (menopause had affected her badly). “All have taken their toll and temporarily I have cracked and am bankrupt of health and belief. It mortifies me beyond belief.”
Her relationship with Micky, the son she always wished she had had, was no longer straightforward as it had been when he was the lovable cuddly baby or uncomplicated small child who had ruled over her heart since she first took responsibility for him; he was now a boy entering adolescence, with an adolescent’s need for privacy. As the 1950s passed, she felt lonelier than ever: she was well into her fifties, her sexual life was over and the admirers had dropped away, she was childless and the family she had made her own—though their love for her was as strong as ever—had grown up and were leading their own lives, while Baba had begun increasingly to regard her as a tiresome irrelevance.
The tippling in which Irene had always indulged increased again—this time she turned to sherry—but again, it did not stop her from constantly seeing friends, traveling and pursuing a successful public career. She worked busily for her clubs, she went to conferences all over the country and she was in great demand as a church speaker—she was an excellent orator on a simple, revivalist level. Once, her nephew Nick was traveling down Piccadilly on the top deck of a bus when he heard her voice booming out over a loudspeaker. Looking down, he saw her preaching outside St. James’s Piccadilly, with a large lunch-hour crowd gathered around her.
“She inherited something of her father’s oratorical powers,” said The Times in its obituary, “and what she lacked was balanced by her manifest intensity of feeling and conviction.”
She went on traveling, often with Micky. They would set off for Africa, South America or Indonesia, spending anything up to three months on such a trip. She also wrote her first and only book, a memoir titled In Many Rhythms. The publisher George (now Lord) Weidenfeld, whose habit it was to suggest to any attractive or important woman who sat next to him at dinner that she should “do a book” for him, absentmindedly issued this invitation to his old friend Irene. It struck an immediate chord. Next morning she was on the telephone to his office and a book was duly published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1953. Although it sank instantly without a trace, Irene was delighted with it.
She was now chairman of the Franckenstein Memorial Musical Scholarship, run by the National School of Opera, to be awarded to an advanced singing student or professional singer of either sex with a knowledge of German and a reason for desiring a period of study in Austria. Irene took immense trouble in finding teachers in Vienna for the winner, Miss Joan Edwards, and gave a farewell party for her.
The Life Peerages Act in 1958 marked a dramatic change in Irene’s status as a result of the work she had carried out virtually all her life—as chairman of the Highway Clubs, vice president of Girls’ Clubs and Mixed Clubs, treasurer of the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund and joint president of the London Union of Youth Clubs. As well as creating the first life peers, the act (which received royal assent on April 30) was also the first recognition of a woman’s right to sit and vote as a peer, something for which Irene had always campaigned. She became Baroness Ravensdale at Kedleston, one of the first four life baronesses in the country—the others were Stella, Marchioness of Reading (widow of the first marquess), Katharine Elliot (widow of Walter Elliot, Minister of Agriculture in the prewar national government) and Barbara Wootton (Mrs. Wright), a former professor of social studies at London University and a well-known broadcaster. “We must be cautious and wise because we have taken twenty-five years to get in,” said Irene in answer to congratulations. “We must have caution and dignity and only speak on those things we know about. I might not speak in the House for months, unless it has anything to do with a subject I know a lot about, like schools or the Wolfenden Report. If the grammar school question comes up, for example, I might bound up and make my maiden speech right away. Or I might not say a word for five months or so.”
Two years later, in a debate on the Street Offences Act, she made a speech that generated more publicity than anything she had hitherto done. Speaking of the prostitutes who frequented the disreputable clubs and cafés in the East End she knew so well, she told her fellow peers authoritatively: “These girls charge a fiver for a long spell and one pound for a quick bash.” Her elegant appearance, said one newspaper, “was a strange contrast to the deliberately strong language with which she jolted the men peers into attention.”
Irene’s later life brought her much more happiness and fulfillment, but sadly her health had begun to decline. On February 9, 1966, at the age of only seventy, she died, her deep religious faith sustaining her to the end. “No one could have been a more inspiring and active president [of the World Congress of Faiths],” said The Times in its obituary. “She was a tower of strength . . . her warmth and understanding of the religions and philosophies of the east were invaluable.” And, in a sentence that summed up her whole life, it remarked: “In everything she did she was passionately involved.”
Baba’s life after the war continued to be as social as ever. There was a rapprochement—less than willing on Baba’s side—with the Windsors. The duke and duchess had returned to Paris in September 1945 to find that the freehold of their house in the Boulevard Suchet had been sold and that they had to vacate it by the end of April 1946. They then moved south to the Villa La Cröe, which had survived the war remarkably unscathed, although the windows had been blown in by shell fire, the seafront mined and the sheltering trees cut down to provide a clear field of view.
The duke at least was pleased to be back there: to him it was more of a home than anywhere he had lived since Fort Belvedere. It was more relaxed, the entertaining there was less formal than the grand Parisian luncheons and dinners given by the duchess, and he could wear his kilt, practice his bagpipes and wander freely around the grounds. Within a few weeks they were back to almost prewar levels of comfort—almost anything was available for those who could pay for it. The duke was also able to slip across to England unobtrusively to visit his family, in particular his mother.
It was on the first of these trips, in the autumn of 1946, that Walter Monckton approached Fruity one day in White’s Club with the words: “The Little Man would like to see you.” The indirect approach through Walter was, perhaps, to save the duke’s face in case of rebuff—it was the first contact since the brutal abandonment in Paris six years earlier—or possibly because he feared that a telephone call might find the implacable Baba at the other end of the line.
Fruity agreed at once. He took with him his son David, the duke’s godson, arranging for David to wait in a side room at Marlborough House, where the duke was staying, so that the two former friends could meet alone. When father and son returned to Wilton Place, Baba was waiting in the drawing room.
“Well?” she demanded, putting all the intensity of her question into the single word. “How was it? Did he apologise?”
Fruity, his son remembers, looked embarrassed and said: “Well, he just held out his arms wide and said”—here Fruity imitated the duke’s tone of deep emotion—“Oh, Fruity!”
“Is that all he said?” asked Baba.
“Yes, Babs, that was all he said,” replied Fruity.
Baba gave a furious snort of disgust and turned away. But the ice was broken. As far as Fruity was concerned, all was forgiven and forgotten and the old affection restored.
Baba could not hold out on her own, especially when the duchess wrote from La Cröe in May 1948: “Dear Baba, Being here once again has brought back so many pre-War memories that the Duke and myself wondered if you and Fruity
could come out to stop with us for a bit. We shall only be here until August 15 as we are giving up La Cröe.”
The relationship continued cordially, and in April 1949 the duke was writing to Baba warmly.
Dear Baba,
Thank you a million times for our lovely visit with you and Fruity. We could not have enjoyed being with you all again more and seeing your enchanting house and all those gems of Cotswold villages and gardens.
It was all a great treat. The comfort was of a high order and the fare delicious in spite of your predictions. I do hope you won’t have to part with Little Compton; that would be a great shame and maybe you will be able to resolve the financial and domestic difficulties.
But I must confess I was a little shocked over the state of Fruity’s wardrobe. Not that I find his morale low or in need of building up; but after all it is “debutante year” [the Metcalfes’ twin daughters came out in 1949] and I believe I have been able to work something out to help him!
We do hope we will all meet this summer and please tell us your plans as soon as you have made them. Thanking you again and with our love to you all.
There was also an affectionate letter from the duchess. After saying “how delightful it was to be with you both and to have the pleasure of knowing your ‘grown up’ family,” she urged Baba to retain Little Compton. That summer Baba, who oversaw every detail of her daughters’ debut, had decreed that there was not enough room for the entire family at Wilton Place, despite its six bedrooms and three bathrooms. She installed Fruity and David, who had just come out of the army, together with a butler, in a house in nearby Motcomb Street, buying its lease for three thousand pounds, although their life was still based around Wilton Place, where they dined most evenings. Nancy Astor offered her house in Hill Street for the twins’ debutante ball.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 45