Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (20 page)

From that moment the Mitford family began to fall apart. Unity and Jessica’s actions would be influenced by Diana’s nonpareil act of rebellion; the Redesdales would succumb to anger, shame and despair; Diana’s own life would be set on a course that led to vilification, pariah status and Holloway jail. The days when Nancy was a cause of concern for her daring novels and silly unrequited passion, when David fretted over money lost in a scheme to make plastic wireless covers – they would seem halcyon, unclouded. In 1935 a photographer would take the last in a long series of Mitford family portraits, but the people that it represented in it would go their separate ways the moment after the shutter had clicked. ‘I often think,’ wrote Nancy in
The Pursuit of Love
, ‘that there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.’

The Mitfords did not let Diana go without a fight. Knowing how much it would hurt, Sydney refused to allow Unity, Jessica and Deborah anywhere near their sister. David made common cause with Bryan’s father, now Lord Moyne, and together they visited Mosley at Ebury Street. Diana and Mosley were two of a kind, all right – the meeting would have led most men to cave in. Instead he merely told Randolph Churchill that he would wear a ‘balls protector’, and shrugged the whole thing off, saying: ‘Diana must be allowed to do what she wants.’ Even today Diana’s act would be viewed as calamitous, setting up alone as
maîtresse en titre
to London’s worst philanderer; an act of madness, walking out on a man who adored her, who had given her everything, to face a future of absolute uncertainty. In 1932, when even divorce was a stigma (worse yet, a bar to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot), open adultery of this kind was scandalous beyond comprehension. It was not the way things were done. One had affairs and kept the family show on the road. But Diana’s radicalism and refusal to tell lies extended, as it were instinctively, into the private sphere.

‘You are SO young to be getting in wrong with the world, if that’s what’s going to happen,’ wrote Nancy, sounding genuinely concerned for Diana and adding that she would always be on her sister’s side. Tom Mitford, whose opinion would ordinarily have counted most, also expressed horror: not least because Bryan was his good friend. Later he and his parents blamed Nancy for supporting Diana’s decision to leave her marriage. Tom also astutely remarked that £2,500 annual maintenance, which Bryan offered for life, would seem like nothing. It wasn’t a small sum, by any means, although after the near-infinite largesse of the past four years it was relative poverty. But Diana rather liked that idea, its purity and newness.

Cheyne Walk, so recently acquired, furnished with such care for every detail, was sold. ‘The servants are resenting you going so much,’ wrote Bryan, in a pathetic burst of ill-directed anger. It was typical of Diana that, having caused such incalculable unhappiness to her husband, she should then find him a flat in Chelsea and decorate it for him. ‘Darling, I really do think you are kind’, he wrote. ‘I do love you for it. I mean, I would if you wanted me to.’ In return he gave her the Cheyne Walk contents – including the two Aubusson carpets, a gift from her now enraged father-in-law – although she refused the Stanley Spencer, which was hung at Biddesden. She also returned the Guinness jewels. Lord Moyne urged his son to behave more like a man (Mosley?) and
do
something
. Bryan’s response was to write more hopeless letters. ‘Are you positive that you love Tom more than me... You were my ewe lamb.’ This abject attitude hints, oh-so faintly, at a desire to induce guilt or regret. How could it not? Nobody could really have been as disinterestedly generous as Bryan, it was beyond nature, as Nancy suggested in a letter to Diana. Having seen Bryan in London, she wrote: ‘He was pretty spiky I thought, kept saying I suppose it’s my
duty
to take her back & balls of that sort.’ This was Nancy, of course, and therefore not entirely to be trusted. But it would be reassuring, really, to think that Bryan was insanely cross beneath all that decency.

Sydney Redesdale, wise beneath her detachment, wrote fine counsel to her daughter: ‘I was so glad I was able to see you the other night and to realize what I did think was the case: the affection you have for Bryan through and beyond everything. His worst fault seems to be a too great fondness for you and perhaps you on your side are too impatient. Do, I beg you, think well before you throw away what is worth while and good for what is nothing and bad.’

If anything could have stopped Diana, it was that letter. But the obduracy she had shown when she wanted to marry Bryan now returned, to the power of a hundred, and being told not to leave him made her all the more determined. Later she wrote: ‘In a strange way I think Kit and I both knew it was “pour la vie” and that we should always love each other.’

She was right: they did stay together. And is it so hard to understand why she fell for this man, who erupted into her life with the bounding force of Pilgrim the wolfhound?

Perhaps as much as anything she wanted freedom. Bryan was both perfect and entirely wrong for her. Devotion was something that she could command with too much ease to value it. Mosley represented the first real challenge she had ever encountered; he pursued her but he did not fall at her feet; he continued to live with his wife, to sleep with his sisters-in-law; in trying to prise him away from all this Diana had something to get her teeth into. Rather as rich aristocrats, for whom the world lay on a Sèvres plate, have historically hurled vast quantities of time and money at the thoroughbred racehorses that never quite did their bidding, so Diana remained intrigued by the mystery of her lover. And he would have been a proper lover. Our old friend sex played a huge part in all of this. Bryan was a very good-looking man, but the diffident young upper-classes are not noted for their Casanova qualities. Mosley brimmed with the particular confidence of the sexually successful; probably Diana had never met such a creature before he turned the full blast of his masculinity upon her. And a relationship that begins with irresistible physical attraction – unless this turns to repulsion – always retains something of that memory. One only has to look at photographs of the Mosleys in later life to understand that Diana fancied him until the day he died.

Again, the weight of history makes this seem barely comprehensible. Mosley became a demonized figure, a terrible symbol of authoritarianism, up to and beyond his death in 1980. Even pop culture used him as a kind of shorthand for all that must be resisted in politics: Elvis Costello’s first album in 1977 contained an attack on him – ‘calling Mr Oswald with the swastika tattoo’
¹⁰
– that was not entirely accurate (Mosley was never a Nazi) but showed how, almost forty years after the threat he represented had been contained, he remained a uniquely powerful totem. ‘He loved Britain and has been waiting for its call,’ wrote Clive James in 1976, ‘all unawares that the best reason for loving Britain has always [to date] been its reluctance to call him, or anybody like him.’

In 1932, when Fascism meant Mussolini – with whom the British were quite comfortable, and who later helped fund the BUF
¹¹
– Mosley symbolized something different. Although the days were gone when he had been seen as a future prime minister (for the Conservatives, at first, as well as for Labour), he was not a political leper. He did not have the vast following that he wanted, but he could command serious support. ‘The origin of the BUF,’ he wrote, ‘was the formation of an emergency group of men and women to advocate a practical policy capable of being put into immediate operation in order to meet a specific plan for the crisis in Britain.’ And there
was
a crisis – financial panic, mass unemployment, the Communist threat: it was not as unreasonable as it now seems to portray democracy as too weak to cope. In the ten months between its inception and August 1933 the BUF expanded so quickly that it had to move to large premises on the King’s Road in Chelsea – the ‘Black House’ – which was said to be ‘filled with students eager to learn about this new, exciting crusade’.
¹²
The party gathered together the various little strands of Fascism (such as the body that had abused Mosley back in 1927) that had been waving alluringly since the early 1920s. Even today it is apparent that Britain, for all its innate and healthy scepticism, has a weakness for people who spout solutions that they will never be called upon to enact: the mainstream is muddy with compromise, while those outside it can stand clean and clear, dangling the great glittering hypnotist’s tool that is ‘change’. This is the word that still holds its magic, and nobody promised it more than Mosley. Lord Rothermere’s
Daily Mail
was behind the BUF until as late as 1934: ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ was a headline in January that year. The BUF was perceived as the party of ‘youth’. In other words, it embodied that other political shibboleth, the need to inspire young people, which always sounds so good and can lead to such extremes of idiocy. Lloyd George declared that ‘Sir Oswald Mosley is a very able man and he is making considerable headway.’ To the members of the Fabian Society, of all people, George Bernard Shaw made a speech, saying that Mosley ‘is a very interesting man to read just now... you instinctively hate him because you do not know where he will land you, and he evidently means to uproot some of you’.

The radicalism implied therein appealed to an agitator like Shaw, and to Diana. This is the unfathomable paradox within her: that she was a woman of the most intensely civilized values, a woman of profound humour, a woman who craved personal freedom, a woman who enjoyed without apology all the beauty that life could offer and that she herself embodied; and that she was, in her deepest soul, attracted to something dark, harsh, dictatorial and violent, something that above all took itself absolutely seriously. How, one wonders, did the Mitford love of laughter not cause her to fall about at the sight of Mosley in his black and his boots? Similarly – how could she have watched Hitler, screaming his nonsense at full volume, without the family sense of the ridiculous kicking in? Well: it didn’t.

Diana was not, like Miss Jean Brodie, ‘a born Fascist’. But that quality of
will
in her, the strong reverberating rod of steel inside her, responded to the same thing in Mosley. Over dinner, his son Nicholas recalled, he would offer his variation on the theories of Nietzsche. ‘And then he would do his trick of flashing his eyes on and off as if they were a lighthouse.’
¹³
It is easy to think how incredibly silly this would have looked. Perhaps, as they say, one had to be there. Or one had to be receptive, to feel a quasi-religious faith in what Mosley called ‘the will to achievement’.

In her later writings, which are taut, rigorous and full of cogent arguments against ideas such as the rightfulness of going to war against Germany, Diana shows quite clearly the unyielding nature that would have responded to Mosley’s certainties. Reviewing a book about British politics in the years leading up to the Second World War, she wrote crisply: ‘For members of Parliament, to declare war on Germany was the answer to many things. All the great neglected problems of the day, unemployment, housing, poverty, were solved at a stroke... Oswald Mosley is denounced for predicting “collapse”, but he has unfortunately been proved right in the event.’
¹⁴

This was the thing: Diana believed in Mosley. ‘It was this,’ she said, ‘which gave me the courage to survive ostracism, the anger of my parents... the disapproval of absolutely everyone.’ She fell in love with the man, not the ideology, but it was
because
he brought with him that unparalleled force of conviction, that charge of aggression with its sexual undertow, that she fell so heavily. It is not unknown: the response of pale protected girls to a mysterious male force is the stuff of the vampire myth, of romantic poetry, of laser-lit rock concerts. And Diana was, it must be reiterated, extremely young. Of course she stayed loyal to Mosley all her life but, had she been ten years older when she met him, she might have found him easier to resist. ‘You only do great things in a great way,’ he later said; to a girl who saw democracy as an innately compromised system, incapable of making things better, this would have sounded like a magnificent creed. And the kind of man who could say it was magnificent, also.

So she went off to ‘the Eatonry’, as she called her little house in Eaton Square, and sat there in all her goddess splendour to wait for Mosley, who fitted her in between his wife, the two Curzon sisters and plans for political dominance. He probably felt rather pleased with himself. What further proof of his fabulousness could he want, than the willingness of the most beautiful girl in London to chuck everything on his behalf? If Diana ever felt a qualm, nobody ever knew it. It had been clear to her from the days in Paris with Paul César Helleu that somebody who looked as she did could make her own rules of life. Beauty annihilated convention. So far, she had got away with anything she chose to do, had been handed everything that she ever wanted. It may have interested her, to see what happened when she loaded the dice against herself as heavily as she knew how.

V

Nancy, whose unconventionality remained within the barriers that Diana had just dismantled, stuck by her sister. She visited the Eatonry as often as she could; so too did all Diana’s friends, although she was completely cut by the more established members of society, and rumours (such as the one spread by Henry Lamb – how gallant – that she had had an affair with Randolph Churchill) naturally circulated.

It was at Eaton Square, in June 1933, that Nancy received a phone call from Hamish St Clair-Erskine, telling her that he had become engaged to another woman. He had warned Diana of what he planned to say; there was no truth in it but it was, he thought, the only way to put their increasingly ludicrous association to an end. ‘You must be very careful,’ Diana said to him. ‘She might do herself an injury.’