Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (21 page)

In fact Nancy responded as women of her kind sometimes do: by getting angry, then blaming herself. ‘I can’t sleep without saying I am so sorry & miserable that I was unkind to you just now,’ she wrote, in her last letter to Hamish. ‘I knew you weren’t
in love
with me...’ It was not until many years had elapsed that she had her revenge, the kind of which chucked people dream: Hamish would creep round to her flat in Paris – where she lived in supremely elegant munificence – and make a nuisance of himself (‘
very
poor and rather pathetic’, as Nancy described him to Evelyn Waugh in 1951). Towards the end of her life he ventured that they might, now, have been married for years. ‘Help!’ Nancy wrote to Deborah.

But back in 1933 her unhappiness, shame, and doubtless excruciating embarrassment were overwhelming. She was now twenty-eight: what to do? The answer seemed like a miracle. A handsome, clever man named Peter Rodd proposed marriage, and within little more than a month Nancy was engaged. ‘Well the happiness,’ she wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant in August. ‘Oh goodness gracious I am happy.’

For once she had the advantage over Diana, who was recently divorced. Hamish’s phone call had come through when Nancy, Pam and Unity were giving support to their sister the day before her court appearance, at which, in an undefended suit, ‘Mrs Diana Guinness of Eaton Square prayed for the dissolution of her marriage with Mr Bryan Walter Guinness on the grounds of his adultery with Isolde Field at an hotel at Brighton in March last.’ In the lead-up to the hearing Lord Moyne (‘may he burn in hell’) had put a firm of private detectives onto Diana, although – perhaps at Bryan’s insistence – any evidence against her went unused. The unknown Ms Field was, of course, one of the girls who in return for payment would pretend to sleep with a man willing to give his wife an easy way out. Like Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s
A Handful of Dust
, who endures a peculiarly ghastly comedic version of this charade, Bryan was through and through a gentleman (with the masochistic tendencies that sometimes attend the breed). His novel,
Singing out of Tune
, which was published in 1933, also describes the Brighton scenario, and a marriage that founders because the beautiful wife ‘seemed to be converted to some worldly heresy of lovelessness’. Please, he begged Diana, make it clear to everybody that this is not our story. It wasn’t, as it happened; their story was
sui generis.

For in another twist that fiction would have rejected as absurdly fanciful, in May 1933 Cimmie Mosley died of peritonitis at the age of thirty-four. She had begun to feel ill during a stay at Savehay – the family home in Buckinghamshire – and had an almighty quarrel with Mosley about his behaviour. His response was to drive off to Diana. In a sombre echo of Nancy’s letter to Hamish – which for all its sincerity was based upon a relationship devised in her own head – Cimmie wrote the next morning to her husband: ‘Darling heart, I want to apologize for last night but I was feeling already pretty rotten and I suppose that made me silly.’ That night she was taken to hospital with a burst appendix. Mosley visited her, then skipped off to lunch with Diana, where he met Unity for the first time. A few days later Cimmie was dead. ‘Oh God what a terrible doom for Tom [Mosley]!’ wrote Irene Ravensdale, ‘and to think that Cim is gone and that Guinness is free and alive and oh! where is there any balance or justice!’ Irene was at rapacious war with her sister Baba for Mosley’s affections, but no sense of this irony seems to have touched her. And she may have been right to think that Cimmie had failed to fight for life, on account of Diana.

Mosley’s grief was great. He was described as ‘like a man demented’.
¹⁵
After his first, typically selfish reaction to her illness, he had stayed at Cimmie’s bedside throughout the last few days of her life. He had never intended to leave her; what Diana chose to do was her business, in the end. Nor had Diana asked Mosley to break up his marriage; she had simply set herself up like Mrs Jordan to his William IV. Nevertheless only a sociopath would have failed to feel appalling guilt, and both Mosley and Diana did feel it. She kept up the façade, attended dinner parties with a face white as chalk, but her position as outcast became more solid, immutable. No wonder she would say, in her old age: ‘Being hated means absolutely nothing to me as you know.’ She had had years of practice. Cimmie dead, eulogized in the newspapers, sanctified within society, was a far darker shadow between her and Mosley than she had been alive. Yet the intrusion of reality into what may, until then, have been something of a social and sexual game, albeit one with high stakes, made Diana’s commitment to Mosley itself more real. As things went wrong for them, so it became ever more necessary for Diana to justify her decision to throw in her lot with this man.

He grieved, but he did not change. Although deeply attached to Diana, he continued to dally with the Curzon sisters. Rivals though they were, they united against ‘Guinness’. Mosley took Baba on holiday to France; this, he told Diana, was an excellent way of diverting attention from their own relationship, but in fact the affair with Baba was quite genuine (as Diana surely knew). Irene wrote: ‘I pray this obsession with her [Baba] will utterly oust Diana Guinness.’ In an attempt to boost her own credentials, and impelled by the urge to protect Cimmie’s offspring, Irene moved into Savehay and took charge of the Mosley children. Diana, who had time on her hands while Mosley played away, briefly visited Swinbrook, where her father refused to speak to her. Later that year – and again in 1935 – she was obliged to terminate a pregnancy; a dodgy business, even for women with the means to avoid a backstreet abortionist; but it was impossible in the circumstances to have Mosley’s baby.

The sordidness of the whole thing is overwhelming, so too the temptation to travel back in time and say to Diana, what in hell do you think you are doing? Even more so when, in July 1933, she attended a Communist rally and held up her arm in a Fascist salute. Only when one of Mosley’s boys stepped in was she saved from attack. By now the BUF’s ‘youth’ appeal had translated into something rather less innocent. Mosley had a de facto bodyguard of young Blackshirts trained, military style, at the Black House in Chelsea. It was becoming clear that young men, full of rampant energy in search of a direction, were attaching themselves to Fascism because it gave them what is now called an ‘identity’. Some of them would have been simply harmless and excitable;
¹⁶
quite a lot were looking for a full-scale punch-up. They were not much different to football hooligans, the seriously tough kind who organize themselves into ‘firms’ and travel to matches in straightforward pursuit of aggro. Who the opposition was did not much matter, so long as it existed, and in this case it was Communism. And, of course, Jews.

‘For years Red hooliganism has reigned unchecked at political gatherings,’ wrote a correspondent to
The Times
, defending (as many did) Mosley’s claim that any aggression by his men was merely retaliatory. Again, the idea was that Communism was the real threat. Fascism was patriotic, Communism was alien. Another letter, printed after the 1934 Olympia rally that degenerated into mass violence, described ‘young men, mostly Jews’, who ‘were clearly in a fighting mood – and they got what they wanted!’ The anti-Semitism issue is central, although oddly confused. Mosley, who had asked Diana’s Jewish friend John Sutro to stand as a candidate for the New Party, stated in 1933: ‘Hitler has made his greatest mistake with attacks on the Jews.’ Yet if he had sought to disassociate himself from this particular German policy, he did so in the same year that the BUF sent a delegation to Nuremberg. To his sister-in-law Irene, Mosley admitted that the Jews were useful to him, in that every movement needs a scapegoat (quite true). Given that Irene clung so to Mosley, it is interesting that she should have turned up at a 1934 charity première in aid of German Jews. Perhaps this was intended as a snub, and if so it was probably connected to Mosley’s relationship with Diana.

In the same year, meanwhile, he denounced the Conservatives because they ‘worshipped at the shrine of an Italian Jew’ – meaning Disraeli – and made a ghastly speech at a rally in Manchester, in which he referred to the ‘sweepings of the Continental ghettoes, hired by Jewish financiers’. This was the argument, that the Jews backed high finance, and that therein lay corruption. ‘One felt that the City was feathering its nest while 3 million unemployed were starved,’ as Diana later wrote. Yet at the same time Jews were also identified with Communism: the concept of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ was a prevalent nonsense, propagated in Germany during the 1920s, not just in
Mein Kampf
but in an influential pamphlet
¹⁷
that identified Moses as a Communist. A conspiracy theory can flourish only if enough people want to believe in it, and certainly Mosley touched a nerve when he claimed that the Jews were attacking his blameless patriotic movement. An uneasy comparison exists with today: the pervasive loathing of ‘bankers’, identified as the guilty party in our national sufferings; the revival of an anti-Semitism that does not quite know what it is saying, only that it means it.

Many years later Mosley still held to the argument that any attacks by his followers upon Jews had been made in self-defence: ‘you will never catch Sir Oswald admitting to anti-Semitism’, wrote Clive James. ‘All he does is embody it.’
¹⁸
As for Diana: her heritage had given her a natural affinity with German culture and philosophy. Her grandfather had believed in Teutonic supremacy; her brother had a profound adoration of Wagner and Goethe; it was instinct in her to be gladdened by the image of an Aryan Europe, pale and pure, warlike and noble. Fascism touched something deep, almost subliminal, in a woman who also revered the civilizations of France, Rome, Greece. The Nazis drew up a ‘Black Book’, a list of people to be taken into ‘protective custody’ after a successful invasion of Britain; along with Churchill, Eden and the like, one of the names listed was that of Lytton Strachey – dead since 1932 – on account of his dangerous aestheticism, his intellectual iconoclasm, his Bloomsbury politics, probably his homosexuality. This was a man whom Diana had loved. Yet in some way she responded to the Nazi creed that sought his destruction. A few years after the war she wrote that one of her greatest delights was to read the memoirs of St-Simon, those
petit-point
samplers of life at the court of Louis XIV. Yet she had sat at the BUF rallies, surrounded by uproar and aggression, like the Mona Lisa at Upton Park: her thoughts an irreducible mystery.

Clashes between Fascists and Communists took place regularly throughout 1934, but the Olympia meeting in June was climactic. It was described in
The Times
in measured terms that nonetheless read like utter madness. The Communist presence was highly organized, with Jessica Mitford’s future husband, the seventeen-year-old Esmond Romilly, among its number. Hecklers were systematically ‘seized ju-jitsu fashion and dragged out’ by Mosley’s stewards. Fighting broke out, including between young women; knives and knuckledusters were wielded. Meanwhile much of the 12,000-strong crowd, poor and middle-aged, looked on in bewilderment. Afterwards Lord Rothermere withdrew
Daily Mail
backing from the BUF. There was a genuine fear, or for some a hope, that the 1935 election could lead to ‘rule by dictatorship’.

Before Olympia, Diana gave a dinner party at Eaton Square, where the guests included the fantastical aesthete Lord Berners, a man who filled his mini-stately home with doves dyed like confetti: again, how was it possible? Also present was Nancy, who went on to the rally with her brother Tom. This was not her sole experience of the BUF: in November 1933 she had attended a meeting in Oxford with her new fiancé, Peter Rodd. Her motives are unclear, but curiosity was probably top of the list. Peter, who was described by Jessica as ‘on the left, which suited my thinking’,
¹⁹
was briefly convinced by the notion that the BUF held a solution to Britain’s social problems. He looked, as Nancy later wrote to Evelyn Waugh, ‘very pretty in a black shirt. But we were young & high spirited then and didn’t know about Buchenwald.’ Nancy wrote an account of the meeting to Diana, saying that Mosley had ‘brought along a few Neanderthal men with him and they fell tooth and (literally) nail on anyone who shifted his chair or coughed’. This would not have gone down well. Later Diana described Mosley’s guard as ‘a disciplined body of men [who] were allowed to use only their bare hands when ejecting troublemakers or resisting attack’.
²⁰

Worse still came when Nancy – black shirt consigned to the dustbin – wrote a satire on the Fascist movement entitled
Wigs on the Green,
published in 1935 and portraying Mosley as ‘Captain Jack’, leader of the Union Jackshirt Movement. As it were incidentally, the book also contained an ambivalent commentary upon the married state. Her wedding to Peter Rodd, or ‘Prod’, as he became in Mitford parlance, had taken place on 4 December 1933 at St John’s, Smith Square. Nancy wore a very lovely white chiffon dress, paid for by Bryan Guinness. Among the guests was Adelaide Lubbock, a cousin of Nancy’s through the Stanley connection, who within five years would become one of Peter Rodd’s girlfriends. Unlike Hamish, Peter was extremely heterosexual, but this too posed its problems.

Nancy’s decision to fall for Peter – who had, according to legend, proposed to several women on the night she accepted him – revealed itself, quite quickly, to be a bad bet (‘Fantastic what a girl will do on the rebound,’ as a character in her novel puts it). She remained loyal to him for far too long, putting a very good face on the situation, as was her way. The couple set up home in Strand-on-the-Green, near Kew Bridge, and Nancy took a wifely delight in playing house; she had her mother’s gift for making a home attractive, she had her two French bulldogs – Milly and Lottie – and she was, at last, freed from the stigma of ‘the shelf’. Her new husband was extremely bright, a Balliol man, and from a good family: his father Lord Rennell of Rodd had been British ambassador in Rome. (Later Nancy would conjure him as the stately, vacuous Lord Montdore in
Love in a Cold Climate
, and delightedly plundered her mother-in-law’s worst traits for the ‘she-wolf’ Lady Montdore.) Peter, however, was childish and self-destructive. Not a bad person; although Harold Acton, who thought he treated Nancy abysmally, called him ‘a superior con-man’.
²¹
But he was simply, and hopelessly, unable to live the life that he ought to have had. Rather like David Redesdale, he grew up in the shadow of a paragon older brother, and this seems to have made him fatally rebellious. He could stick at nothing, was terrible with money – ‘One feels a little scared about the young couple,’ wrote Lord Rennell ominously, ‘and I am wondering whether their house is healthy or whether they get enough to eat and keep warm’; this at a time when Peter had just chucked a job worth £600 a year. The couple lived in the main off Nancy’s writing and an allowance from the Rennells. Diana’s £2,500 a year from Bryan (a sum that was her right to name, as the ‘innocent’ party in a divorce suit), had been a deliberately frugal demand; to the Rodds, who lived on about one-fifth of that amount, it would have been wealth beyond their dreams.