Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (23 page)

Pam did not interfere in Derek’s Fascist allegiances – which included friendship with Hitler’s then closest confidante, Putzi Hanfstaengl – but there is no indication that she shared them. With regard to Deborah, meanwhile, one of her cousins claimed to have taken her (together with Sydney) to one of Mosley’s big rallies in London,
²⁶
although there is no corroborative evidence whatever for this. Deborah’s attitude to the whole thing was probably best summed up by a letter sent to Diana in 1933. Thanking her sister for an expensive evening bag, she added lightly: ‘I even forgive you being a fascist for that.’

So the score among the sisters was: Fascists 2, Communists 1, Neutrals 3. Then there was Tom: definitely present at Earl’s Court, where he gave the Fascist salute to Mosley as he passed. The complexity of Tom’s attitude is typical of his withdrawn and reticent character. And in the same way that the sisters had argued about their mother, with their conflicting memories becoming less about Sydney than their relationships with each other, so too they would bat back and forth opinions of their brother’s politics: each side trying to claim him for their own. What Tom had actually believed became less important than what the sisters
wanted
him to have believed, and what that said about his loyalty to each of them.

In 1980, the five surviving Mitford girls took part in a BBC documentary about Nancy.
²⁷
Jessica, sensing an opportunity for what Diana called ‘tiresome political spite’, agreed to appear only if she was allowed to read out a letter written by Nancy in 1968. Referring to the publication of
My Life
, a memoir by Mosley, Nancy wrote to Jessica: ‘He says he was never anti-Semitic. Good gracious!... Also I’m very cross with him for saying Tud [Tom] was a fascist which is untrue though of course Tud was a fearful old twister and probably was a Fascist when with Diana.’ In reply Jessica claimed that Tom was a Communist when he visited
her
and that her first husband, the violently left-wing Esmond Romilly, had adored him.

Jessica’s insistence upon making this letter public hauled to the surface the giant, coiled, semi-submerged monster of the Mitfordian past. Diana wrote to Deborah that it ‘shows the depth of seething hatred Decca feels for us’. Deborah, less personally involved, soothed and cajoled, while remonstrating with Jessica for ‘revealing’ that Tom had hated Mosley (who was then very old and frail). Diana and Jessica both wrote to Pam, pleading their different cases and seeking her support. Nancy, still agitating from beyond the grave, was mysteriously held to be the guiltiest of them all.

Diana’s default position was that Nancy lied about everything. This was not the case, but with regard to Tom she was certainly making assertions unsupported by fact. It was typical Nancy to exonerate or reinvent the people she liked; when she portrayed her father as the fearless, funny, immutable, German-hating force that is Uncle Matthew, it was almost as if she were willing David to be that man again – the best side of himself. Similarly with Eugenia in
Wigs on the Green
: she was the enchanting, harmless Unity who
could
have been. And with Tom, whom Nancy worshipped, and often saw during the war – it was quite natural that she should want him to have been the Tom that he was with
her
, sceptical about Germany, highly critical of Diana’s relationship with Mosley. If he had been a member of the BUF – ‘which he just
was’
, as Diana said
²⁸
– then that was a joke, a meaningless act, like Nancy’s own attendance at Olympia; and like his (undoubtedly) pretended belief in Communism in the presence of Jessica.

Tom was wise to bob and weave in this way. But it was simply not true to say that he had hated Mosley (although he had opposed the break-up of Diana’s marriage); nor that he was entirely affecting an allegiance to Fascism. According to Diana he had completely agreed with Mosley about politics, which was not quite true either: he categorically rejected anti-Semitism (Mosley did this too, but one begs leave to have one’s doubts). Tom did, however, attend several BUF rallies. In 1935 he went to Nuremberg, and in 1937 to a Nazi rally.

Of course he was, by nature, a lover of Germany; and as such had influenced his childhood companion Diana. He had chosen to live in Austria after Eton and his then host, Janos von Almasy, later close to Unity, was a Nazi sympathiser. Back in 1928, when Tom was staying in Berlin, he was visited by Diana and Bryan. He described the high tensions in the city between Communism and Fascism – which Hitler would later use to such advantage – and said that he himself found Communism unacceptable. Therefore, he admitted, if he were a German he would probably be a Nazi.

As an endorsement this was hardly unequivocal, not least because in 1928 a Nazi was not necessarily a crazed Jew-hater. Nevertheless the testimony of his friend James Lees-Milne takes Tom a little further down the road. In 1944 they dined in London, and Lees-Milne asked whether Tom still had sympathy with Nazism: ‘He emphatically said “Yes”.’
²⁹
The best Germans, he said, were Nazis; this is near impossible to understand from somebody who shunned race politics, yet such was Tom’s belief in the ideal of Germany. He was, indeed, a mystery. But also, as Diana put it, ‘very deliberate in his actions always’. Having joined the Territorial Army in 1932 – while pursuing his career at the Bar – Tom became a second lieutenant in 1938, and was quick to react to the unsatisfactory truce at Munich. ‘He was,’ Lees-Milne later wrote, ‘overwhelmed with misery and misgiving in fear that England was throwing away its traditional title in the European hegemony. And so... with his usual thoroughness [he] threw himself heart and soul into what to him was a new-found romance – the science and art of warfare.’ His family affections ‘trumped his principles, even if they affronted him’.
³⁰
Which meant what, exactly? Perhaps that none of his sisters, so confident in their beliefs – even when these were a belief in nothing that was on offer – quite understood the ambivalence of his own.

VII

Unity, for instance, had been wary of introducing Tom to Adolf Hitler. She had thought her brother insufficiently pro-Nazi, and in the sense that she meant this was true. But all was well: ‘He
adored
the Fuhrer.’ They lunched with Hitler twice. ‘So really I think no harm is done...’

This was from a letter to Diana, written in June 1935. By then Unity had known Hitler for four months. By the time that war broke out, just over four years later, every member of the Mitford family – except Nancy and Jessica – would have met him.

Back in September 1933, the decision to go to Germany with Diana came about almost accidentally. Unity had wanted to visit France. Diana wanted to go somewhere – anywhere – while Mosley was on his motoring tour with his sister-in-law Baba Metcalfe. Earlier that year she had met Putzi Hanfstaengl, a long-standing friend of Hitler’s who dealt with the British press on his behalf (and who claimed to have invented the chant ‘Sieg Heil’). Now Hanfstaengl – smooth, supremely connected – suggested that Diana attend the forthcoming Parteitag at Nuremberg: the first major rally of Hitler’s chancellorship. There she and her sister, those fabulous specimens of Aryan womanhood, could meet the new German leader himself. Presumably Hanfstaengl thought they might be of some use, somewhere down the line.

Even at this early stage, Unity was extremely excited; nevertheless she did not manage to meet Hitler in 1933, and her obsession with Fascism might therefore still have been a teenage phase, like her love of cinema, with the Führer in the guise of Errol Flynn. Jessica, of all people, wrote to Diana after the visit to Nuremberg, in a manner that makes a fond joke of the whole thing, and refers jauntily to Unity’s ‘semi romance’ with Hanfstaengl. It was the Redesdales who saw danger. David, who was anyway in a prolonged rage with Diana, wrote to her: ‘I suppose you know without being told how absolutely horrified Muv and I were to think of you and Bobo accepting any form of hospitality from people we regard as a murderous gang of pests... What we can do, and intend to do, is to try to keep Bobo out of it all.’ Thus David revealed an awareness of the susceptibility in his daughter – and of his own essential powerlessness.

In 1937, Unity would be a part-agent in Putzi Hanfstaengl’s fall from grace, when she informed Hitler, in her apparently inconsequential way, that Hanfstaengl had criticized him. Four years earlier, when he first met her in London, the power was his. He recalled that she was ‘very much second string to her sister, tagging along’.
³¹
He was also frustrated by the attitude of the British press towards the Nazi regime. ‘Hitler will build a great and prosperous Germany for the Germans,’ explained the urbane and exasperated Hanfstaengl. ‘If the Jews don’t like it they can get out.’ The first camp was established that year at Dachau, holding Socialists and writers as well as Jews, but not yet a death camp. As Clive James later wrote, in reference to Mosley’s claim that the Jews were not under dire threat at this time: ‘Before the war, apparently, Dachau had been like Butlin’s.’
³²
The great question of how much was known, or feared, about the regime is answered to an extent by
The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror
, a prophetic piece of writing, listing 250 murders committed by the Nazis after the burning of the Reichstag (which led to the declaration of a state of emergency, then to dictatorship). This was published in Britain by John Lane around the time of the Mitford girls’ visit to Nuremberg, and in 1935 seized upon by Jessica. Later Diana would say that she ‘did not pay much attention to it’. The book was quite easily dismissed as a Communist production. With politics, after all, people generally hear only what they want to hear; Jessica was equally willing not to know about Stalin’s murderous propensities.

The Nuremberg rally was not exactly an epiphany for Diana. She had already had hers in the ballroom at Cheyne Walk. But to see a crowd of some 400,000
sieg heiling
and marching was to see the Fascist dream realized: ‘a demonstration of hope in a nation that had known collective despair’. Which it had, after the First World War. The exigent demands of the Treaty of Versailles were still gaping wounds; unemployment was at 7 million; civil war raged on the streets: it is not hard to see why a figure like Hitler could unite and dominate as he did. Nor, given the Communist threat, is it impossible to grasp why he was welcomed by some members of the British Establishment; or why, given the prolonged depression, ‘what we need is an ’Itler’
³³
became a refrain within certain parts of British society. What is almost incomprehensible – even without hindsight – is that a non-German could be a witness to that quasi-religious spectacle of mass hypnosis, could listen to Hitler’s screaming voice with its razor rasp, its death rattle, and find it something magnificent: even beautiful. Diana claimed to Unity that this was her own experience, although her interest in Hitler actually developed when they talked privately and he behaved very differently. But Unity really did respond like a disciple. Although she too was at conversational ease with Hitler, Deborah wrote that in his presence ‘she was shaking all over’. The image of her at the Parteitag, removing her lipstick – as Hanfstaengl instructed – then putting it stealthily back on again, has something of a schoolgirl’s juddering excitement as she waits at the stage door. At the same time it was as if the semi-dormant madness in Hitler had found the same thing in her, and let it loose.

Back home, Unity became ever more possessed with her cause. Her social behaviour grew more extreme. There was a fashion at the time for recording one’s voice on to a disc, and Unity’s friend Mary Ormsby-Gore recalled them doing this together at Selfridges: Unity’s recording allegedly consisted of a Blackshirt chant, ‘The Yids, The Yids, We’ve got to get rid of the Yids.’ This from a girl who in her first debutante season had attended a ball for her friend Nica Rothschild, and who had happily accompanied the producer John Sutro to watch a day’s filming at Elstree (Sutro seems to have fallen into the category of ‘I don’t like Jews, but you’re different’). Unity continued to appear at the aristocratic houses of London, for instance a ball at the Howard de Waldens on Belgrave Square, which ended in a dawn walk through Covent Garden with none other than Hamish St Clair-Erskine. But a fellow deb recalled – presumably accurately – that Unity would also spend her days in the East End (where the Blackshirts marched through Jewish areas) to play ping-pong with ‘the boys’, meaning Mosley’s muscly young followers. One can imagine it, the comfortable sense of
de haut en bas
shot through with dark intimations of lust. Just as Diana had responded to Oswald Mosley’s rather more manicured seduction techniques, so Unity was getting a serious kick from the straightforward hard-edged maleness of the Fascist movement. ‘All those men,’ as Nanny Blor had said; how right she had been! The nature of Unity’s sexual curiosity was hinted at when she planned what she called ‘an orgy’ at Diana’s Eaton Square house. Of course it was nothing of the kind. ‘Everybody had been sick, and there had been a lot of necking,’ recalled an art-school friend, who was told about it after the event. That too was probably an exaggeration. But the mere fact that Unity talked in this way – half sincere, half seeking to shock – hints at how fascinated she would have been by her sister’s affair with Mosley, and what pleasure she might have got from being the centre of attention among all those uniformed young men.

Blackshirts, for the time being; not yet Stormtroopers. Later there would be lurid tales of her ritualized sexual antics with ‘the darling storms’, but this is just the kind of thing that
would
be said, as it were translating Unity’s mysterious passions into the recognizable. Even the alleged affair with Tom’s friend Janos von Almasy is unproven, as is the rumoured liaison with the SS officer Erich Widemann. In 1970 Nancy spoke to Unity’s future biographer, David Pryce-Jones, and was rumoured to have told him that Hitler had wanted to marry Unity but was put off by her promiscuity with SS men. This ‘information’ was never printed. If Nancy said such things, she did so at a time when she was ill and made excessively spiteful by pain. In fact the only evidence of Unity’s sexual activity, such as it is, is that she saw a gynaecologist for contraception advice.
³⁴
She expressed a passionate desire for children – the life that she might have had – yet there was always something of the Joan of Arc about her, something virginal and untried, as perceived by her childhood governess.