The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (24 page)

During the first weekend in May Mosley went to his country property, Savehay Farm in Denham, Buckinghamshire, where he had arranged to spend the weekend with Cimmie. On the Saturday night they had a terrific row about Diana, and Mosley slammed out of the house. Cimmie spent the night crying, which was not unusual for her at that time. The following morning, she wrote to Mosley, apologizing for behaving unreasonably to him, and explaining that she had been feeling particularly unwell ‘with sickness, and crashing back and tummy pain’.
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Later that day, within a few days of the Mosleys’ thirteenth wedding anniversary, Cimmie was rushed into hospital with a perforated appendix. She was operated on and Mosley dashed to her side. This did not, however, prevent him going straight from the clinic to the Eatonry that night. Appendicitis was not in itself considered dangerous, but in the days before antibiotics there was always a risk of infection, and within three days it was clear that Cimmie was critically ill with peritonitis. The doctors felt that if she fought hard she might win through, but on 15 May she died at the age of thirty-three, without, her surgeon announced, ‘both mentally or physically ever lifting a finger to live’.
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It was a devastating blow to all concerned, and Mosley, who had unquestionably loved his wife, according to his lights, spent ‘hours and hours’ sitting by her flower-bedecked coffin. When it was removed to the chapel at Cliveden, home of Nancy Astor, who had befriended the young Cimmie (whose own mother had died when she was eight),
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Mosley spent hours pacing endlessly about at their home in Denham, in the garden Cimmie had created. Cimmie’s two sisters were so concerned about his demeanour that they had his revolver removed from his bedroom and hidden from him. They knew that when Mosley had walked out after the row on that last Saturday night before Cimmie was taken ill he had gone straight to Diana Guinness. ‘God, what a terrible doom for Tom [Mosley]!’ Cimmie’s elder sister, Irene Ravensdale, wrote in her diary. ‘And to think that Cim has gone and that Guinness is free and alive . . . where is any balance of justice!’
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Upon one matter, Mosley was absolutely insistent: his three children must have no further changes in their lives. They must continue to live at Savehay, the old house at Denham that Cimmie had decorated to her taste, surrounded by the same nursery staff, himself, their grandmother and aunts. It was the best he could do to give them a sense of security.
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For Diana, of course, it seemed like absolute disaster. She had not disliked Cimmie, and had certainly not wished her ill. She knew that Mosley had had affairs with at least a dozen women before her, and she had supposed that Cimmie accepted his behaviour. Now, with the papers full of eulogies for Cimmie, opinion hardened against Diana. Plenty of people gossiped that Cimmie had died of a broken heart, rather than infection. From being the darling of Society a year earlier Diana became a social pariah, as her parents had foretold.

She saw Mosley only for very short periods. Several times a week he would drive to London in the early evening from Denham and be back there by 1 a.m. ‘Who could it be but Diana Guinness?’ Irene Ravensdale wrote in her diary. ‘Baba and I were sick with terror.’
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The sisters could see that Mosley was genuinely ill with grief, that he was doing his best to be a good father to the children and was always sweet with them. But, equally, they thought it hurtful to Cimmie’s memory that Mosley should wish to go on seeing Diana at such a time. How could they know, since he did not tell them, that his relationship with her (they referred to Diana as ‘the horror’ between themselves) was any different from those he had shared with other women in the past? They bearded him about it and he told them frankly that he felt he had an obligation to Diana and he could not ‘shirk’ it. They saw danger signals, too, in that Unity had recently joined the BUF and was keen to become a serious activist. They suspected that in some way Unity was spying on Mosley on Diana’s behalf. With the summer just beginning it was decided between them all that Irene would take the two elder children on holiday, the baby, only a year old, would go with Nanny to the Isle of Wight, and Baba, having cleared it with her husband ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, would accompany Mosley on a motoring trip in France.

One evening Mosley visited Diana at her request. Afterwards, according to Irene Ravensdale’s diaries, he told his sisters-in-law that he had asked Diana, referring to the divorce proceedings, ‘Have you jumped your little hurdle yet?’ She had been wounded that he should take so lightly the enormous sacrifice she had made, crying, ‘It’s my whole life!’
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There was a terrible row, he reported, and he left after telling her that he was going on holiday to France with Baba. Diana refutes this. ‘He did not say, “Have you jumped your hurdle?” Nor did I say, “It’s my whole life.” We always understood each other perfectly.’
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It appears, then, that either Mosley or Irene Ravensdale invented the incident. Nevertheless, Diana cannot have been happy to hear that Mosley was going on an extended holiday with Baba and it is probable that hot words were exchanged.

All this had occurred between Cimmie’s death and the gathering of the elder Mitford sisters at Diana’s house a month later, on 14 June, on the eve of the divorce hearing, when Hamish told Nancy of his fake engagement. If ever Diana had been in need of sisterly support it was then. She was just twenty-two with two small children. At a time when she might have reasonably expected strong support from the man for whom she had broken up her marriage, he was involved with his own crisis and was available only occasionally. Worse, she had just learned that he was going on holiday with another woman. Although she is too loyal to Mosley to have ever said so, she must have felt utterly alone and defenceless. One or two friends, having overcome their initial disapproval, had begun to invite her to dinner parties, and mutual friends told Cimmie’s sisters that Diana was looking grim, with her face ‘dead-white’.
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Perhaps Diana already suspected that Mosley’s interest in Baba was more than platonic or strictly familial for, astonishingly, Mosley began a long-standing affair with her that summer. It was an open secret within the family: Irene Ravensdale, who had enjoyed a brief, unimportant romp with Mosley before his marriage to her sister, wrote, ‘I pray this obsession with her will utterly oust Diana Guinness.’
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With hindsight Diana says she did not mind about Mosley’s affair with Baba, because ‘I was somehow always confident that he would come back to me’, though she admits to periods of jealousy.
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At the time, however, she was more deeply in love with Mosley than ever, and though she and Mosley quickly patched up their quarrel, it must have been a difficult period for her. One surprising thing happened: through Unity Diana was advised that she might visit Swinbrook for the weekend of 6 June. She and Unity spent most of the time sitting in the garden for David refused to speak to her, but it was ‘the thin end of the wedge’ in his parlance.

In the following week Unity was admitted to the BUF as a member, and she was thrilled to receive, on that eventful day of 14 June from the hands of ‘the Leader’ himself, a BUF coat badge, which Mosley removed from his own lapel. Her membership was known to her siblings and to others outside the family, but was kept secret from David and Sydney.

What of Decca and Debo during this turbulent period? They were living quietly at Swinbrook doing much the same things that the four elder sisters had done, with perhaps a little more freedom, although never enough for Decca. Still, the rebellious unhappiness that she details in her memoir is nowhere in evidence in her contemporary correspondence. Nor did her friends regard her as unhappy. One, who met her for the first time in 1932, was fourteen, about a year older than Decca, when he was taken to Swinbrook by his mother so that she could discuss Women’s Institute matters with Sydney.

I sat quietly and covertly looked about me while the ladies talked [he recalled]. Then the door opened and with what seemed a single swift movement Jessica was in the room, closing the door behind her, standing straight, feet together, smiling. She was wearing a print frock and a black patent leather belt tight to the waist. Her brown hair was short and thick. Her eyes full of amusement, and also friendliness, as they took me in. She shook hands, and sat down, feet together, back straight, the very picture of
une jeune fille parfaitement bien élevée
, but with such an expression of intelligence and humour as I had rarely seen in a girl her age . . . Decca at that time would have been thought of as a child by most elders . . . nevertheless there was nothing childish about her, in any sense implying weakness or silliness or inability to hold her own in her own world. That first summer afternoon I swiftly came to know that my first impression of originality had been quite correct; here was a spirit both lively and adventurous, a keen mind fed by a highly varied diet of reading, a sparkling sense of humour and all allied to a delicious appearance . . .
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If Decca had been as deeply unhappy as she claims, it was never obvious to her new friend. It seems more likely that the discontent with her life at home was something that flowered in the years that followed and was so traumatic that it coloured all her early memories.

As Mosley was touring in France with Baba, Diana decided to go to Europe that summer on holiday too. Unity asked if she could go with her, rather hoping, she confessed later, that Diana would choose to go to Italy or France. But Diana chose Bavaria, partly because Tom was there and spoke so glowingly about it, and partly because she wanted to find out more about the regime, especially about the new German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, in whose activities the newspapers took such an interest.

In the immediate aftermath of Hitler coming to power there were outbreaks of violence against anyone who had opposed his election, or who ‘did not fit’ an accepted profile. Those rounded up were imprisoned in hastily erected concentration camps such as Dachau outside Munich. Then the camps resembled conventional prisons rather than the places of systematic murder they became less than a decade later. The improvements in the German economy were the envy of other European governments and most people accepted the unpleasantness – extreme as it was – as an almost inevitable cost of a new, radical regime.

Although Germany had not been her first choice, Unity was immediately mad keen on Diana’s proposal. She was just nineteen and with her increasing interest in the BUF she wanted to see for herself how the system worked. Unity was not yet wholly committed to Fascism – indeed, John Betjeman, who knew her reasonably well, thought she was more interested in film stars and the cinema. But that trip to Germany, Diana wrote in her autobiography, unquestionably ‘changed Unity’s life’.
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The streak of obsessive behaviour in Unity’s character, which might have made her ultra-religious had she leaned towards the Church, fastened instead on Nazism.

Earlier in the year, before Cimmie’s death and her divorce, Diana had met a German called Putzi Hanfstaengl at the house of one of Bryan’s relations. Hanfstaengl was the Harvard-educated son of a rich Munich family of art dealers, and an old friend of Hitler. When the National Socialist putsch of 1923 failed, Hitler was wounded and several of his comrades-in-arms were killed. Hanfstaengl took Hitler into his home and hid him for a while, and after Hitler’s arrest he continued to support him throughout the two years of imprisonment that followed, during which Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf
. In the period of political wilderness after Hitler’s release, Hanfstaengl remained loyal to his friend, and when things improved he obtained hard currency from the United States (his family had a gallery in New York) to help fund Hitler’s return to politics. His donation of a thousand US dollars during the financial chaos of Germany’s years of hyperinflation was a lifesaver to Hitler, so it is not surprising that when the Nazis came to power Hanfstaengl was rewarded with a senior appointment as Hitler’s public relations adviser, and he made it clear that he worshipped the Führer.

At the party where Diana first met him, Hanfstaengl was annoyed. All one read about Germany in the English newspapers, he complained, was of the regime’s attitude towards the Jews. ‘People here have no idea of what the Jewish problem has been since the war,’ he told his listeners hotly. ‘Why not think of the ninety-nine per cent of the population, of the six million unemployed? Hitler will build a great and prosperous Germany for the Germans. If the Jews don’t like it they can get out.’
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Recalling this meeting, Diana was certain that if she called on Hanfstaengl in Munich, he would introduce them to Hitler, but at first the trip consisted of sightseeing with some of Tom’s friends. Eventually, however, Diana made contact with Hanfstaengl.

He was hospitable, providing the two young women unexpectedly with tickets to privileged seats for the first Parteitag in Nuremberg, and finding them scarcely obtainable accommodation near by. The rally, which began on 31 August and lasted four days, had a major effect on both young women. The carnival atmosphere was vibrant with enthusiasm as crowds milled about and revelled to the sounds of oompah-bands playing old favourites along with regular insertions of the popular ‘
Horst Wessel Lied
’ that had become the Nazi anthem. Some four hundred thousand people attended the event. ‘The old town was a fantastic sight,’ Diana wrote. ‘Hundreds of thousands of men in party uniforms thronged the streets and there were flags in all the windows . . . the gigantic parades went without a hitch. A feeling of excited triumph was in the air, and when Hitler appeared an almost electric shock passed through the multitude.’ It was, she decided, ‘a demonstration of hope in a nation that had known collective despair’.
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