The Pursuit of Laughter (75 page)

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:

‘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 knew 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.

The steadfast loyalty of his political companions who had suffered for their beliefs, in some cases to the extent of five years in prison, was probably the principal reason for starting again with them in the British Union. His own dreams were shattered. With
dreary
regularity, even while we were in prison, the predictions he had made concerning the Empire had come true. Churchill’s ‘we shall never surrender’ was shown to be an empty boast when an army of 130,000 surrendered unconditionally to less than half its number of Japanese at Singapore in 1942; the greatest military defeat in our history. It had been obvious from the very beginning that if we declared war in Europe the world-wide Empire would be lost for ever. That most people now think this is all to the good is neither here nor there. The Empire was a phenomenon which had posed a challenge and an
opportunity
. It contained every human talent, every raw material; it had an unrivalled potential for the prosperity of all its inhabitants of every race. Now it had been thrown away as a result of the war. The prospect of being a big frog in the little puddle that Britain had become hardly interested him, though he thought United Europe a worthy cause.

For me personally it was an idea I could embrace unconditionally. I had never been able to see how ‘colonialism’ could be made to work. It is a source of unending resentments.

He thought he should have a try at getting into Parliament, where with his
outstanding
talents he could have made his voice heard. Naturally ‘against him would have been directed all the malignant efforts of envious mediocrity’, but that he could very easily have dealt with. When he failed in his attempt he concentrated upon his European and
economic
ideas. With regard to Britain, he retained his indomitable optimism for a possibly distant future, but he felt himself to be a European and therefore lived most of the time in France, part of the ‘Nation of Europe’, after he left Crowood in 1951.

At Crowood he had employed two secretaries and written
My Answer
and
The Alternative
, considered by Henry Williamson his best book.

He published a little ‘Mosley News Letter’, but it only reached the converted. He began to speak in public once again; it was the only method whereby he could expound his ideas, as he had no newspaper. The Press only reported meetings if there was a row of some sort; ideas are not ‘news’. Most halls were closed to him by local Labour Councils.

He held big meetings in London at Porchester Hall and Kensington Town Hall; also at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, and in Birmingham. He was an extraordinary
orator
, with a power to move his audience, perhaps for this reason he was banned from radio and, later, television; people went to great lengths to prevent his voice from being heard.

He very often spoke in the streets when halls were refused, and I am not sure to what extent he realized how infinitely less effective open-air meetings inevitably are. It is hard to concentrate when people are moving about, or, as in Trafalgar Square, pigeons are
fluttering
and children playing. Occasionally, if a fight was expected, a television team would appear, and on the news there would be pictures of men bashing each other, but his speech was ignored.

In the late 1950s he was invited to do television interviews, first with Dan Farson and then with Malcolm Muggeridge, both famous television personalities. He wasted a day with each of them—wasted, because not one minute of the interview was shown in either case. A few years later a team came to the Temple where we now lived in France; it
comprised
seven or eight people in two large cars; they spent two nights at a grand Paris hotel, and the outing must have been very expensive.

I said to the head of the team, a son of R.A. Butler the Tory politician, ‘Do you think any of this will be shown?’

He looked at me as if I were mad, and replied: ‘Oh, of course it will!’

On the appointed day we went over to London from France to see the programme, which consisted of a long interview and many shots of Kit in the house, and in the
garden
with his swan. But at the last possible moment someone intervened. Another
programme
was substituted, and so far as I know it has never been heard of again.

There are many facets of Kit that I have no room to mention, and perhaps his attitude to animals is unimportant, but there were two creatures he greatly loved. As a boy he adored his dogs and horses, but as a man dogs, such interrupters of thought and conversation, lost their charm for him. His great love was a ginger cat. I have been told that ginger cats are always male, but we did not know this and to us Goldie seemed a female and was always referred to in the feminine gender. She had been a wild kitten at Crux Easton,
difficult
to approach and to tame, and for that reason she was very devoted to us and we to her. When we went to the Mediterranean on our boat in 1949 we were so happy in the sunshine that we stayed away four months. In her letters our gardener’s wife always told us that Goldie was very well. However, back at Crowood we were met with the terrible news that she had disappeared. For nearly a month she had not come to the kitchen for her food. Despair seized me; I thought she must have felt betrayed by us; we had been
away too long.

Beyond the garden there was a wood. Kit went straight up the hill and stood under the trees, and gave his Goldie cry, a long drawn out ‘A—a—ah! He did it three times. The third time there was a rustle of leaves and she came galloping through the undergrowth and took a flying leap onto his shoulder, rubbing her face against his. She was thin, but well; she was a great hunter.