The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (21 page)

That summer Diana was twenty-one and pregnant again, with her second son, Desmond, who was born in September 1931, so she did not travel abroad. When Bryan went away with friends, Sydney and the three youngest girls stayed at Biddesden to keep her company. Even so, and with a veritable army of servants, Diana lay awake at night, frightened of the darkness and listening for footsteps on the paving outside the house – presumably those of General Webb keeping a watch on his portrait. She confided her fears to their neighbour and close friend Lytton Strachey, whose reaction apparently cured her of her apprehensions once and for all. ‘[He] raised both hands in a characteristic gesture of despairing amazement. “I had hoped,” he said, “that the age of reason had dawned.”’
³⁰
Nevertheless, the portrait of General Webb remained
in situ
.

With a real talent for entertaining and love of good conversation, Bryan and Diana encouraged an eclectic circle of friends from the worlds of politics, literature, art and science to stay at Biddesden for extended periods. John Betjeman was there almost every other weekend, with Augustus John, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. Prof [Lindemann] was another frequent guest, as were the Sitwells, the Acton brothers, Harold and William, and the Huxleys. ‘Randolph Churchill almost lived with us,’ a member of the staff recalled.
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Biddesden had a 350-acre dairy farm and a herd of fifty cows. Bryan was only too happy to agree to Pam’s suggestion that she manage it and run the milk round for him. There was a farm manager’s cottage built of brick and flint on the property and Pam moved in, but she was often invited to Biddesden for dinner. The farm workers called her ‘Miss Pam’ and had a healthy respect for her as she worked alongside them, invariably dressed in riding breeches and boots, even when, in the early days, she made a few mistakes. For example, she bid at market for what looked to her like a very fine cow, only to discover when it arrived at the farm that ‘the brute was bagless’. She always had an acute sense of humour about her own limitations and was quite unaware of her beauty, which endeared her to everyone who met her.
³²
Since her broken engagement two years earlier she had formed no emotional attachments, but John Betjeman, who had been a friend of Bryan since 1927 at Oxford when they were successive editors of the magazine
Cherwell
, became a founder member of what he called ‘the Biddesden Gang’ and fell instantly in love with her. Betjeman, or ‘Betj’, as Pam called him, was on the rebound from a frustrated love affair but his affection for her ran deep. In a letter to Bryan he admitted that all his thoughts were of Pam. ‘I hope I am not a bore. Possibly.’
³³
Although quieter than her sisters Pam had the same physical beauty of open, regular features and attractive cheekbones, fair hair, with startling blue eyes, the same colour as David’s.

John Betjeman and she ‘walked out’ for a while. ‘He was mad on kite-flying at the time,’ Pam would tell Betjeman’s biographer. ‘He used to bring his kite down for the weekend.’ Sometimes they drove around Hampshire and Wiltshire together, exploring old churches and villages, picnicking on the downs, visiting his (hated) old school, Marlborough. On Sundays they always cycled down to the old church at nearby Appleshaw for matins, with the glorious ancient liturgy and hymns that David had insisted on at Swinbrook. Once Pam persuaded Betjeman to ride, putting him on a reliable old pony and sending him off into the woods behind the house where he would be ‘safe’. Unfortunately, the local hunt was drawing there: at the sound of the horn the reliable old pony reared with joy, and happily decanted its passenger before galloping off to join in the fun.

Betjeman was too shy to advance his suit aggressively but he persisted quietly for over a year. ‘My thoughts are still with Miss Pam,’ he wrote to Diana in February 1932 from a hotel in Devon. ‘I have been seeing whether a little absence makes the heart grow fonder and, my God, it does. Does Miss Pam’s heart still warm towards that ghastly Czechoslovakian [sic] Count? . . . I do want . . . to hear whether this severe test has improved my chances and done down my rival. I have written a confession of my tactics to Miss Pam today. Was that wise?’
³⁴
Diana encouraged him, and Betjeman continued as a frequent weekend visitor. He recalled that after dinner Bryan did conjuring tricks and guests used to gather round the piano for parlour songs, and ‘rounds’, but the absolute favourites were the old evangelical hymns. Diana’s parlourmaid, May Amende, disapproved thinking that they were mocking them, but they were not, Betjeman insisted, ‘We sang them in the car, too.’
³⁵
Unity’s favourite was also Sydney’s, the old Moody and Sankey hymn about the lost sheep, which was almost prophetic.

There were nine and ninety that safely lay

In the shelter of the fold

But one was out, on the hills away,

Far off from the hills of gold . . .

Betjeman proposed twice. Pam turned him down flat the first time but on the second occasion he asked her to take some time to think it over. A month later, however, he was writing to an old friend, ‘I suppose you have heard about the death of poor old Lytton Strachey [of cancer] and how about a fortnight later [sic] Carrington borrowed Bryan Guinness’s gun and shot herself down at Biddesden. You may have heard too that I fell slightly in love with Pamela, the rural Mitford. I don’t know whether I still am . . .’
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Later still, with no favourable reply from Pam, he added a light-hearted PS in a letter to Nancy: ‘If Pamela Mitford refuses me finally, you might marry me – I’m rich, handsome and aristocratic.’
³⁷
Finally he wrote to Diana that Pam’s fondness for the Austrian count, Tom’s friend Janos von Almassy, ‘that “Austrian Betjeman” about whom I am continually hearing, and about whose success I have had little reason to doubt’ had killed his love for her and that he was now interested in ‘another jolly girl’.
³⁸
Years later Pam told Betjeman’s daughter, ‘Betj made me laugh. I was very, very fond of him, but I wasn’t in love with him . . . He said he’d like to marry me but I rather declined.’
³⁹
The future poet laureate, first person to use the term the Mitford Girls – in print, at least – consoled his disappointment by writing a ditty ‘in honour of The Mitford Girls, but especially in honour of Miss Pamela’:

The Mitford girls! The Mitford Girls

I love them for their sins

The young ones all like ‘Cavalcade’,

The old like ‘Maskelyns’
⁴⁰

SOPHISTICATION, Blessed dame

Sure they have heard her call

Yes, even Gentle Pamela

Most rural of them all
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Betjeman and the girl who subsequently became his wife, Penelope Chetwode, were frequent visitors to Biddesden over the years that followed despite the effect of the house on him. Like Diana, he was affected by the supernatural ambience and on one occasion had a disturbing dream in which he was handed a card inscribed with a date. He declined to reveal the details but said he was convinced it was the date of his death.

To celebrate Diana’s twenty-second birthday in June 1932 the Guinnesses held a party at Cheyne Walk. She was then at the height of her beauty, had been painted by half a dozen leading portrait artists and her face – which had become virtually an icon for the era with its classical planes – carefully composed, so as not to encourage wrinkles, appeared in newspaper Society columns regularly. She was the woman who apparently had everything: youth, riches, a happy marriage, a charming husband who worshipped her, and two healthy children. For her party she dressed in pale grey chiffon and tulle, and wore ‘all the diamonds I could lay hands on’.
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Their guests included Winston Churchill, Augustus John, first-time visitor Oswald Mosley, and ‘everyone we knew, young and old, poor and rich, clever and silly’. It was a still, warm summer night and dancing went on until the glassy surface of the river was gilded with the pink and orange of sunrise.

There was a singular significance to this one party out of all the others for Diana, which is no doubt why she recalls it so graphically. A short time earlier, during the spring of 1932, she had met the dashing and dangerous Sir Oswald Mosley and had fallen madly in love with him. It was the real thing, a love that would triumphantly defy the world no matter what the cost, and endure for the rest of her life, but she could not have known that then, only wonder, perhaps, at the intensity of her feelings.

They met first at a dinner party, and little could the hostess have realized the part she was playing in history by seating them next to each other. Diana was not especially impressed with him that evening, but she found what he had to say interesting. Although he had not been previously introduced to her, they moved in the same circles and he had certainly noticed her on several occasions. The first time had been at a ball given by Sir Philip Sassoon at his magnificent Park Lane home. ‘She looked wonderful among the rose entwined pillars,’ Mosley wrote of Diana in his autobiography, ‘. . . as the music of the best orchestras wafted together with the best scents through air heavy laden with Sassoon’s most hospitable artifices. Her starry blue eyes, golden hair and ineffable expression of a Gothic Madonna seemed remote from the occasion but strangely enough not entirely inappropriate . . .’
⁴³
He spotted her again during a visit to Venice but they did not meet then either. At the back of Diana’s mind was the knowledge that Mosley had a reputation as ‘a lady-killer’, which did not dispose her to favour him.
⁴⁴

It was only a matter of time, however, for soon the popular princess of London Society was completely under the spell of the man who was rapidly earning for himself a reputation as the
enfant terrible
of British politics. They met everywhere, trying to discover which function the other was attending – such as the coming-of-age party thrown by the Churchills for Randolph – seeking each other out at every opportunity, trying to suppress their feelings but unable to draw back from the delicious thrill of being in each other’s company. As the attachment deepened they were both aware of the need for discretion, and of the furore there would be if word of their attraction got out. Also, Diana genuinely cared for Bryan and was mindful of how she could wound him. But when she compared what she felt for Mosley with her affection for Bryan it was as the sun to a candle. At her birthday party Mosley declared for the first time to Diana that he was passionately in love with her. On the following morning Diana’s parlourmaid, May Amende, answered the phone. With his customary impatience, Mosley paused long enough only to identify the voice as female before he asked, ‘Darling, when can I see you again?’
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Prior to meeting Mosley, Diana had been miserable following the deaths of Strachey and Carrington; Carrington’s upset her particularly, because she had innocently loaned her the shotgun. Diana has a good mind, and during this period she began to use it. On the face of it she had everything, just as the papers simpered, but she concluded that, with the exception of the birth of her babies, her existence since her marriage to Bryan had been trivial and that there
must
be more to life. She began to recognize dimly that much of what her parents had said was right, and that she had really married ‘in order to escape the boredom, and sort of fatal atmosphere that families make when too cooped up together’.
⁴⁶
She also began to notice the world outside her cosseted existence.

The teenage Decca was not alone in the Mitford family in recognizing that there were unacceptable aspects to Society, ‘although,’ Diana wrote, ‘it was not necessary to have a particularly awakened social conscience to see that “Something must be done.” The distressed areas, as they were called, contained millions of unemployed kept barely alive by a miserable dole. Undernourished, overcrowded, their circumstances were a disgrace which it was impossible to ignore or forget. The Labour Party had failed to deal with the problem, the Conservatives could be relied upon to do the strict minimum, yet radical reform was imperative.’ More than most Diana realized that, for the rich, life had gone on as before the depression had struck, and would continue to do so. ‘Nothing will stop young people enjoying themselves,’ she continued.
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Unlike Decca, Diana did not accept that axiomatically the rich had to be brought down in order to raise the poor: she felt instinctively that there must be a way of resolving the conundrum. She was seeking some sort of answer that she had not yet identified. When she met Mosley, and listened to his stirring ideas, the missing piece seemed to fall into place.

To anyone who lived through the Second World War the name Oswald Mosley has a sinister ring. During those years he became – after members of the German Nazi regime – public enemy number one. But a decade before the war Mosley was admired, fêted and listened to with respect. Arguably one of the most brilliant young politicians of his time, in the late twenties and early thirties he was widely regarded in political circles as a prime minister-in-waiting. It was simply a matter of time, and of him finding his place. By the time Diana met him, Mosley had already begun to take the bold steps that would sever him for ever from conventional politics.