The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (47 page)

At the end of 1941, while trying to support Decca from afar, Sydney had plenty of problems at home. Debo’s baby, a son, was stillborn. Unity was sent off to stay with friends so that Debo, who was very depressed, could come to the cottage for a while. It was tragic for Sydney that her daughters all seemed at odds with each other. She could never understand it. Nancy, too, had a crisis. Her lively relationship with ‘the charmer’ André Roy had resulted in an ectopic pregnancy in which her Fallopian tubes were found to be damaged beyond saving and so were removed. She was told that she could never have children. Perhaps it was not surprising that in the circumstances Peter’s parents were not sympathetic, but Nancy clearly expected them to be. Her mother-in-law was told by the surgeons that Nancy would be ‘in danger’ for three days. ‘Not one of them even rang up to enquire let alone send a bloom,’ Nancy wrote to Diana. ‘I long to know if they looked under R in the death column . . . Muv was wonderful. She swam in a haze between me and Debo. When my symptoms were explained to her she said, “Ovaries – I thought one had 700 like caviar.” Then I said how I couldn’t bear the idea of a great scar on my tum to which she replied, “But darling who’s ever going to see it?” Poor Debo must be wretched, the worst thing in the world I should think – except losing a manuscript of a book which I always think must be the worst.’
³⁰

Friendly relations had been re-established between Nancy and Diana, and occasionally, when Diana got permission for her elder children to spend a day with her in Holloway, Nancy had twelve-year-old Jonathan and ten-year-old Desmond to stay with her overnight at Blomfield Road to make things easy for them. ‘They are bliss,’ she told Diana, ‘so awfully nice & thoughtful and tidy. The nicest guests I ever had. Jonathan is so funny . . .’
³¹

In March 1942 Nancy got a job at three pounds a week managing Heywood Hill’s bookshop at 17 Curzon Street.
³²
George Heywood Hill had been called up, so Nancy ran the shop helped by his wife, Anne. She enjoyed her job, had always loved being surrounded by books, and here her wide knowledge of literature was put to a practical use. She had no objection to the administration side of a bookshop, packing and unpacking, sorting and placing the books in their correct categories, and her friends popped into the shop for a chat whenever they passed. It became a meeting place, with knots of Nancy’s friends standing around ‘roaring’ so that at times other customers might have been forgiven for feeling they were intruding on a private cocktail party. Nancy always had a new story to make droppers-in laugh, such as the one she told of the wife of the American millionaire who met a parson’s daughter wearing a necklace of lapis lazuli. ‘Oh,’ said the American, ‘I have a staircase made of those.’
³³
She usually walked the two and a half miles to work every morning, and sometimes back again in the evening, so she became fit. The only thing she disliked was the drudgery of working hours. Once she decided to catch a bus and was accosted by an American serviceman who grabbed her round the waist. Nancy rounded on him. ‘Leave me alone, I’m forty!’ And he did.

James Lees-Milne was surprised to find that the rebellious Nancy had become rather conventional. ‘It is clearly our duty,’ she lectured him, ‘to remain in England after the war, whatever the temptation to get out. The upper classes have derived more fun from living in this country since the last war than any other stratum of society in any other country in the world. No more foreign parts for us.’
³⁴
And she hissed the final sibilant, almost turning it into a joke. But she was deadly serious about ‘doing her bit’ for the war and she demonstrated it by walking to work, saving electricity by not turning on the water heater, sticking to a four-inch depth of water in her baths, and refusing to attend a ball thrown by Debo ‘because the news was so bad’. Her first love, Hamish, had been taken prisoner, as had Tim Bailey – the only survivor of the four Bailey cousins.
³⁵
Tom was in Libya and Prod was in Ethiopia. While they were dancing in London, she said, the men might be fighting for their lives.

This was a somewhat inconsistent view, for Nancy hardly lived like a nun and had an active social life, which included throwing parties regularly. To fill lonely evenings she had begun work on what she called ‘my autobiography’ but, she told friends, she would not be able to publish it until her parents were dead because it would hurt them.
³⁶
Like Decca, Nancy was bitter that her parents had denied their ‘clutch of intelligent daughters’ an education, and it showed when her book was eventually published, making the Mitford family a household name. She had changed her mind about waiting until her parents were dead and they were hurt, but disguised it because they were so pleased by Nancy’s success. ‘There is a vein of callousness in her which almost amounts to cruelty,’ James Lees-Milne once observed. ‘All the Mitfords seem to have it, even Tom.’
³⁷
Nevertheless, her wit endeared her to a wide circle of friends.

In the summer of 1942 Nancy was still involved with André Roy and when Unity turned up ‘looking a mess’ for a party at Blomfield Road, it was the ‘adored Capitaine Roy’ who took her upstairs to apply make-up and fix her hair so that she looked pretty. But fate was waiting in the wings for Nancy. Her relationship with Roy was a light-hearted, affectionate friendship, which provided emotional and social relief from her half-life as Prod’s wife. The Rodds’ marriage had been over before the war but Nancy’s pride had not allowed her to admit it; her friends said her remarkable stoicism over the bombs was the result of her ‘steeling herself to an indifference to Peter’s misbehaviour’.
³⁸
In September 1942 Nancy met Gaston Palewski and, for her, life began.

Palewski, or ‘the Colonel’ as Nancy always called him, was the right-hand man of Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, in London. The relationship between these two men was strong for it had been Palewski, then a rising young diplomat and politician, who had first brought de Gaulle to the notice of Paul Reynaud, Minister of Finance in the Daladier government of 1934. Thereafter, both men had absolute trust in, and respect for, the other’s abilities. At the outbreak of war Palewski volunteered for the French air force and was mentioned in dispatches for his valour in the battle for Sedan.

When France fell, he contacted de Gaulle offering his services to the Free French in London. Palewski spoke English fluently, having done a year’s postgraduate study at Oxford, and he had well-honed diplomatic skills. He spent six months in London from August 1940, acting as interpreter and go-between, but by the spring of 1941 he had become irritated and disillusioned by the constant quarrels and jealousies among the Free French as de Gaulle tried to organize an efficient resistance movement. Feeling he could be of more value in an active role, he asked for a posting to Africa and subsequently commanded the Free French forces of East Africa in Ethiopia until de Gaulle summoned him back to London in 1942 to be his
chef de cabinet
.

Where de Gaulle was austere and absolutely single-minded in his quest, Palewski embraced every pleasure life had to offer. And though the fight against France’s enemies was, for the time being, the most important thing in his life, he was easily able to incorporate this aim into his considerable
joie de vivre
. He was forty-one, charming, intelligent and a brilliant conversationalist; he loved the arts, good food and wine, beautiful women and clever society. He was a welcome addition to London’s café society, and before long was seen everywhere at smart parties, such as those of Emerald Cunard and Sybil Colefax, both of whom he had known for some years.

While Palewski was in Ethiopia he had met Peter Rodd in Addis Ababa and when the subject came up at a dinner party, Palewski was told that Nancy Rodd would welcome first-hand news of her husband. As a result he arranged to meet her at the Allies Club in Park Lane, a short walk from the bookshop, and they talked of Ethiopia, Peter and France. Although she had lost the bloom of youth Nancy had presence, while her chic appearance, despite wartime clothes rationing, and brisk wit interested the Colonel immediately. In his diaries James Lees-Milne provides some vivid vignettes of Nancy at this time. On one occasion he noted her running down South Audley Street to get warm. ‘She made a strange spectacle, very thin and upright, her arms folded over her chest, and her long legs jerking to left and right of her like a marionette’s. I really believe she finds it easier to run than to walk.’
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On another he describes her wearing a ‘little Queen Alexandra hat, with feathers on the brim, pulled down over her eyes, and looking very pretty and debonair’.
⁴⁰

Gaston Palewski was neither handsome nor patrician in appearance; he had none of the aesthete’s effeminacy that had been characteristic of the men to whom Nancy had hitherto been attracted. On the contrary, he was shortish and stocky, with features that owed more to the Polish roots of his grandparents than his innate Frenchness. He had dark hair and a moustache, and his olive skin was pitted with acne scars, yet he was unmistakably distinguished; he dressed well (Savile Row), exuded self-confidence, magnetism and infectious joviality, and Nancy found herself ‘powerfully attracted. He charmed and flattered her; he gossiped, joked and made her feel that she was the centre of his undivided attention.’
⁴¹
Within weeks they were lovers, and for Palewski love-making was an art form.

Nancy fell headlong, obsessionally, in love, as Diana had with Mosley, as Decca had with Esmond. It would last throughout her life but though Palewski was ‘in love’ with Nancy for a time, he never loved her in the sense that she was the only woman in the world for him. She was for him a light-hearted affair, such as Nancy had enjoyed with Captain Roy, a pleasant diversion from the everyday dreariness of war. He liked her tremendously, and she remained one of his dearest friends into old age, but for him she was not the great love and he made this clear to her from the first. In the heady grip of an intense and passionate emotion for the first time in her life, Nancy felt that she could win him eventually. She laughed at the way he parried her declarations of love, telling Diana Cooper, ‘I say to him, “I love you colonel,” & he replies, “That’s awfully kind of you.”’

They were discreet for the sake of Nancy’s reputation, and also for Palewski’s, for he told her that de Gaulle would not have approved of him having an affair with a married woman. They were caught out on only one occasion. After dining at the Connaught Hotel they were on their way upstairs to Palewski’s room when they were stopped by a disapproving receptionist who pointed out that ladies were never allowed to visit the bedrooms of male guests. The mere mention of this incident was enough to make Nancy’s cheeks glow with embarrassment, and sometimes, to tease her, the Colonel would end his letters, ‘P.S. Connaught Hotel!’

Eight months after they met, Palewski went to Algiers with General de Gaulle where he remained for just over a year. He and Nancy kept in touch by letter and when he returned in June 1944 their affair resumed. Because of Nancy’s writings we know how she felt when he reappeared. In
The Pursuit of Love
Palewski is instantly recognizable as the character Fabrice de Sauveterre. The heroine, Linda, although a mixture of Diana, Debo, Decca and Nancy at various times in the plot, is pure Nancy when the telephone rings and she hears Fabrice’s voice, after a long absence during the war, saying he will be with her in five minutes. In his absence London had been grey and cold, but now ‘all was light and warmth . . . sun, silence and happiness’.
⁴²
One biographer likened Nancy to Scheherezade,
⁴³
using her gift as a storyteller to keep her lover amused and entertained with anecdotes of her childhood and her family. Indeed, it was Palewski’s endless delight in hearing these recollections that made Nancy recognize their potential as material for a book that would set her on a course for undreamed-of fame.
⁴⁴

16
Women at War
(1943–4)

During the first year of Diana’s incarceration she had been allowed a weekly visitor. Usually this was Sydney, who made the journey no matter what the conditions. In winter months the weekly treks were especially tiring, for petrol rationing meant that she could rarely drive there, even though she got a small extra petrol ration for producing her goat’s cheese. So she travelled on a series of packed, chilly trains and buses, returning home long after the blackout. Sometimes Nanny or Pam went along instead. The children’s occasional visits could be traumatic and once two-year-old Alexander had to be torn away from Diana after soaking her clothes with his tears.

With the exception of Diana, all the BUF women with children were released by Christmas 1940. Following this, the Mosleys’ lawyer campaigned vigorously for Diana’s release but it was never a possibility: constant hostility to the Mosleys in the newspapers had made her the most hated woman in England. He was told that public opinion against her was too strong. Churchill still had a soft spot for Diana, though, and on hearing of the atrocious conditions in which she was held, he tried to help. In December 1940 he sent a memo to Herbert Morrison asking why the Rule 18B prisoners could not have daily baths, and facilities for exercise and games: ‘if the correspondence is censored, as it must be, I do not see any reason why it should be limited to two letters a week . . . what arrangements are permitted to husbands and wives to see each other, and what arrangements have been made for Mosley’s wife to see her baby from whom she was taken before it was weaned?’
¹
He wrote to the Home Secretary on 15 November 1941 asking why the BUF couples could not be interned together. ‘Sir Oswald Mosley’s wife has now been eighteen months in prison without the slightest vestige of any charge against her, and separated from her husband. Has the question of releasing these internees on parole been considered?’
²
The response was that it was simply not possible to cope with married prisoners living together, but he was able, at least, to insist that Diana be allowed to take a bath each day. Diana was sent for by the Governor and told that a message had come in from the government saying that Lady Mosley was to have a bath every day. ‘I looked at him,’ Diana wrote in her autobiography. ‘He knew, and I knew, that it was not possible. There were two degraded bathrooms in the wing, and enough water for four baths. We took turns and got a bath roughly once a week. It had been a kindly thought of Winston’s who had I suppose been told that this was one of the hardships I minded.’

The Mosleys appeared separately before an advisory committee set up to hear their appeals against the injustice of their imprisonment. By the time Diana appeared before Norman Birket, the committee’s chairman, she was already deeply prejudiced against him. Mosley had been questioned for several days by Birket, three months earlier, and there was no movement towards his release. Both the questions and Diana’s haughty responses were hostile and somewhat pointless, as in this exchange concerning Hitler:

Q: How many times do you think you have seen him between 1935 and 1940?

A: I do not know.

Q: Is he still a friend of yours?

A: I have not seen him for some time.

Q: Absence makes the heart grown fonder. Do you still entertain the same feelings for him?

A: As regards private and personal friendship, of course I do.

Q: The history of Hitler in recent years has not affected your view about that?

A: I do not know what his ‘history’ has been.

Q: . . . Did you hear the bombs last night? That is Mr Hitler as we suggest. Does that kind of thing make any difference to you – the killing of helpless people?

A: It is frightful. That is why we have always been for peace ...

And so it went on. For Diana the issue was that she was locked in a filthy prison, parted from her four children, merely for seeing Hitler. Yet, she reasoned, many other people, including Churchill’s niece Diana Sheridan, had visited Hitler – it had not been illegal to visit Hitler. Upon what grounds had she, Diana Mosley, been singled out? Mosley always said that he had been grossly misrepresented and misunderstood by critics who made no allowances for the fact that he detested war; that he had fought in the First World War and had campaigned ceaselessly for peace. It is clear that neither Diana nor Mosley was in tune with ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ who wanted peace, too, but not under a regime where basic freedoms were not available to all. Nor did the Mosleys ever seem to recognize that the thug element attracted to the ethos of the BUF was deeply offensive and even frightening to decent-thinking people. The cleverness, and often the validity, of Mosley’s oratory was missed because of the alien posturing and what looked remarkably like Nazi-style exhibitionism. At least during the first years of the war, there was never any chance of their release and the advisory committee had been a sop to the Mosleys’ lawyer.

Diana grew painfully thin because she could not bear to eat the food she was offered, perhaps wisely in view of the number of food-poisoning cases among her fellow prisoners. The BUF prisoners ‘enjoyed’ the same status as prisoners on remand, in that they were not convicts. This entitled them to some off-ration treats if they were prepared to pay for them and they were available, such as a bottle of beer, or half a bottle of wine per day. Because Diana had an account at Harrods she was able to send gifts to friends and family at Christmas, and Mosley sent her a whole Stilton cheese. To augment this she ordered some bottles of ‘grocer’s’ port, which were doled out to her one at a time. She lived for months on a small portion of cheese and a small glass of port every evening. Somehow, the newspapers got hold of this and blew it up into a story, claiming that while the rest of the country was suffering austerity conditions, the Mosleys were living in idle luxury in prison. ‘Every morning his paid batman delivers three newspapers at the door of his master’s cell,’ the
Daily Mirror
advised its readers. ‘Breakfast, dinner and tea arrive by car. After his mid-day meal Mosley fortifies himself with alternative bottles of red and white wine daily. He occasionally asks for a bottle of champagne . . . his shirts and silk underwear are laundered in Mayfair . . .’ It was laughable, but since Mosley had never requested any wines he decided to sue the newspaper for libel.

The suit itself was irrelevant, but there was a chance that if they both gave evidence the Mosleys might see each other in court. And this was what happened. They were allowed a few minutes together in the robing room in the presence of their barrister. ‘Looking forward to this meeting and thinking about it afterwards kept me happy for several days,’ Diana wrote. Mosley looked very thin and had grown a beard, but he argued his case well and won a small compensation and costs. The money was passed to Sydney who used it to buy Diana a shaggy fur coat, which was not elegant but warm. Diana wore it all day and it covered her bed at night. She became intensely grateful to the reporter who had invented the story.

As a concession, in the spring of 1941, the husbands and wives imprisoned under Rule 18B were allowed to see each other for half an hour once every two weeks. Mosley and Admiral Sir Barry Domville, a senior member of the BUF, were brought to Holloway in a police car for these treasured meetings with their wives. One day, shortly after Germany attacked Russia in 1941, when Diana went to see her weekly visitor she found Tom, who was on leave. He told her he was dining with the Churchills that night. ‘Is there anything you want me to say?’ he asked. She asked him to say to Churchill that, if she and Mosley must remain in prison, could they not at least be together.
³
Tom was not the only person lobbying on behalf of the Mosleys: Baba Metcalfe and other influential friends, such as Walter Monckton, had worked for months to improve the conditions in which they were imprisoned. However, soon after he had dined with Tom, Churchill ordered the prison officials to find a way to cut the red tape and make it possible for the few Rule 18B husbands and wives still imprisoned to be interned together. This was almost certainly due to Tom’s intervention.

After eighteen months of separation the Mosleys were reunited in Holloway. ‘Our joy was such that, unlikely as it may seem, one of the happiest days of my life was spent in Holloway Prison,’ Diana wrote.
⁴
Even in the worst days Diana could cope, as long as she was with her beloved husband, and it amused him, even many years later, to recall a morning when they were lying in bed discussing a particularly unpleasant and unattractive wardress. Diana had capped the conversation by stretching luxuriously and declaring, ‘Well, anyway, it’s so lovely to wake up in the morning and feel that one is lovely one.’
⁵

They were lodged in a small ‘house’ within the prison walls called the Preventative Detention Block, which they shared, initially, with three other couples, but two were soon released and eventually it was used only by the Mosleys and Major and Mrs de Laessoe. Each couple had three rooms and use of a kitchen and bathroom (dubbed ‘a suite’ by newspapers). The men stoked the boiler and grew vegetables in a kitchen garden. All their rations were provided raw for them to cook for themselves, and thus they began to have reasonable meals instead of prison food. Two convicts were recruited to wash down the stairway and passages; sex offenders were chosen for this, Diana was told, ‘because they are clean and honest’. It was the provision of these convicts that Churchill had mentioned to Decca, and which had so infuriated her.

The Mosleys spent a further two years in Holloway before their release in 1943. ‘He was so marvellous in prison,’ Diana recalled. ‘It’s rather incredible to be locked up like that with somebody for two years and we hardly ever quarrelled. He used to laugh so much over me and the wardress, and he was so incredibly good-natured when you think what an
active
person he’d been, rushing about, and we’d both been abroad so much. And there we were locked up like animals in a cage. He was really wonderful and always ready to laugh.’
⁶

Mosley’s eldest son, Nicholas, was now a serving officer so was granted extended visiting rights beyond the fifteen minutes of Sydney and the others. His arrival heralded a minor celebration and he usually managed to smuggle in a small bottle of spirits, or a tin of ham, and some books in his Army greatcoat. He described how a wardress would escort him across a cobbled yard into a door in the high inner wall, beyond which Mosley would be waiting. They would walk past a piece of ground like a railway embankment where Mosley grew aubergines and Diana’s favourite
fraises de bois
with cabbages and onions. The building where they lived was like a deserted cotton mill, he said, high, austere and dingy, yet Diana had managed somehow to give their rooms a slight aura of elegance, ‘like that of some provincial museum for shells . . . There was Diana’s old gramophone with its enormous horn that contained tiny sounds like those of the sea . . . Diana would prepare one of her legendary dishes from . . . my father’s vegetables . . . on the gramophone there would be “Liebestod” or “The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla”.’
⁷

Six months after Esmond’s death, Decca left her part-time job with the RAF delegation at the British embassy in Washington, and went to work for the Office of Price Administration (OPA), a government agency responsible for price control, rent control and wartime rationing policy. Her starting salary as a ‘sub-eligible typist’ was $1,440, but she expected this to be increased soon: ‘It’s about £500 a year, which is swell,’ she reported to Sydney who might possibly have run across ‘swell’ at the cinema.

Decca explained that she had now moved out of the Durrs’ house and into an apartment in Washington close to her workplace, and that Dinky was being cared for by a black neighbour who had twelve children of her own and twenty-four grandchildren, ‘so she knows about children’. She had taken in two boarders to help pay the rent. ‘I call us the three Boards,’ she wrote. ‘One is a Bawd, the other an ordinary Board and I am just Bored (by them). Actually they only sleep here and don’t have meals with me, thank goodness. [The Durrs] are amazed by . . . the Bawd, as being very respectable people they haven’t seen any before.’ Virginia Durr was now quite famous in Washington, as her bill to abolish poll tax in the Southern states had recently gone through the House. Esmond’s intuition had been spot-on: if he had searched the length of the USA he could hardly have found anyone better to look after Decca than the politically minded and sound Durr family. They had seen her through the dark days and by midsummer she had begun to accept the likelihood that he had not survived.

Although still grieving, and irritated by the preoccupation of most Americans with material comforts, Decca enjoyed her work, seeing it as the front line in the fight against major business interests, which she equated with Fascism. The majority of employees at the OPA were left-wingers and New Dealers, and she felt comfortable there. Her intelligence and zeal earned her rapid promotion to the post of investigator, which – she discovered to her dismay – required her to be a college graduate. Recalling her long-ago language course in Paris, and realizing that no one could check since Paris was in the hands of Germans, she resolved the problem by writing in the appropriate box, ‘Graduate, Université de Sorbonne’. To Sydney’s repeated requests that Little D come home, she wrote that she had made up her mind to remain in the USA.