Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (25 page)

Meanwhile Diana took Mosley to Munich in April 1935, and Hitler gave a rather dull lunch for him. The following year she suggested to Winston Churchill that he should meet Hitler – she was the only person in the world who could have introduced them socially – and although Churchill refused it was, in some way, an opportunity missed. (Churchill did quiz Diana about the German leader. She told him that Hitler found democracies problematical: ‘One day you are speaking to one man, the next day to his successor.’) Some thirty years later the memoirs were published of Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and later a prisoner at Spandau. He wrote that Diana and Unity ‘strengthened Hitler’s belief that there were two elements in Britain’: one dominated by Jews and Parliamentarians, the other recognizing the blood relationship with Germany. Idiotic though this sounds, it is not so far from the philosophy of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, as admired by both Hitler and the sisters’ paternal grandfather.

The Minister for Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, who by rights should have been delighted by the prize of the two Mitford girls, was in fact extremely suspicious. His diary references to them – stark, charmless, narrow-eyed – give a glancing but vivid sense of what was going on, the sheer grim oddity of the whole thing, and how those on the outside (including MI5) must have wondered and gossiped about it. ‘Again to the Führer,’ wrote Goebbels in 1936. ‘Mrs Genest [Guinness] there. Three short films of the Mosley party. Everything is still very much at the beginning but it will probably work out. We, also, began that way.’ (If he thought that then Goebbels was less clever than his reputation.) Diana’s motive in showing these films was to ask for money; the subs from Mussolini had come to an end. Even when the BUF was at its height in the mid-1930s, it was haemorrhaging cash, and by 1936 the organization was nearly bankrupt. Mosley himself had put in £100,000. Hitler must have authorized something because Goebbels wrote of funds being released by the Führer in December. But in February 1937 he said: ‘Mrs Ginnest wants more money. They use up a fortune and accomplish nothing. I am having nothing more to do with this thing.’

The daring of Diana is breathtaking. Or perhaps not, to her; she was used to asking for, and getting, what she wanted. She must have known that Goebbels was resistant to her charm, as a small number of people were, but it seems not to have bothered her. The thought of being in a room with such a man, with his ventriloquist dummy eyes watching one’s every move and calculating its motive, is somehow very frightening – more so than the thought of sitting together with an attentive, mannerly Hitler, although that does not conjure an image of ease either. Of course there is hindsight at work here, but by 1936 the Nazi regime had revealed plenty about itself: the occupation of the Saar, the Nuremberg Laws that enshrined Jewish repression in the constitution; although Diana agreed with the first, she would not have denied the dire implications of the second. Perhaps she simply did not find these men sinister. Goebbels, she later wrote, ‘was clever, good company, always ready with a sarcastic witticism’. Hitler ‘was exceptionally charming, clever and original’. At the same time there is this vague, powerful impression that she liked sailing close to the darkness. Some women do, and sometimes these are privileged women: posh girls who go out with gangsters, idealistic girls who form relationships with lifers in jail, and the like. Diana was bored by too much comfort, not bodily but spiritually, intellectually. Although supremely female, she required more than a straightforward female life. Mosley had opened this up to her. Now the proximity of the Nazi high command – whose cruelty she later condemned unequivocally – fulfilled something similar but in one sense greater; because they had power.

She was also using these men for Mosley, perhaps demonstrating to him the strength that she herself possessed, that remarkable persuasive allure. She asked Goering about the possibility of setting up a commercial wireless station on German wavelengths, broadcasting light entertainment programmes and generating funds for Mosley’s political career. The BBC had a monopoly of the wavelengths in Britain. It therefore made sense to ask Germany. Advertising revenue was extremely healthy for commercial radio (some £1,700,000 in 1938) and could, in theory, have bankrolled the BUF movement. A company was set up, from which Mosley’s name was carefully omitted; those involved in negotiations included the brother of the then Home Secretary (Deborah’s old skating partner Sir Samuel Hoare, later a leading appeaser). MI5 would subsequently find it hard to believe that there had been no propaganda intention in this, and one sees their point. What the Germans thought, it is hard to say. Diana was turned down flatly by Goering in October 1937, but her persistence was formidable. She went with the proposal to the top man, who expressed himself willing to discuss it. The agreement for the station was finally granted in 1938. She had sat long into the night with Hitler, pleading Mosley’s cause, talking, enjoying herself.

‘Nothing’, she wrote to Deborah at the end of her life, ‘would ever make me pretend I was sorry to have had this unique experience.’

IX

For Unity, who had all her sister’s bravura but none of her sophistication, the friendship with Hitler was without this kind of ulterior motive; it simply delivered complete happiness. When Mosley, some forty years later, said that Unity’s was the ‘simple, tragic story of a gel who was what we called stage struck in those days’,
⁴¹
he was not entirely wrong. But there was a madness in Unity, an instability that had been hinted at when she left the security of home for boarding school, and which now found its fatal response in the shiny black world of Nazi Germany.

In June 1935, she wrote a letter in German to
Der Stürmer
, a publication edited by the raving anti-Semite Julius Streicher. ‘If only we had such a newspaper in England! The English have no notion of the Jewish danger. English Jews are always described as “decent”. Perhaps the Jews in England are more clever with their propaganda than in other countries. I cannot tell, but it is a certain fact that our struggle is very hard...’ The letter ended with a PS: ‘If you find room in your newspaper for this letter, please publish my name in full... I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater.’ The question of how truly Unity believed what she wrote is impossible to answer. She was in the grip of hysteria by this time, and more than anything she sought to impress Hitler. But perhaps she herself would not have wanted this defence, such as it is; perhaps she meant every word.

The fact that Streicher not only printed Unity’s letter, but headed it with the information that she was related to Winston Churchill, suggests in turn that he, at least, saw value in this girl. She was invited to make a speech at the midsummer festival at Hesselberg. ‘Call me early Goering dear/ For I’m to be the Queen of the May,’ Nancy wrote to Unity, as if the Mitford mockery might yet work its magic: not a chance. A photograph from the festival shows Unity to have the eyes of a fanatic, fixed yet vacant. The news of the Hesselberg speech made it into the British press, and the Redesdales summoned Unity home. Then they let her go back again. It was almost as if they were faintly in fear of their daughter, or at a loss as to what to do with her if she did
not
return to Munich. According to Jessica in
Hons and Rebels
, that summer Unity tried to pin up an autographed photograph of Julius Streicher in the Swinbrook DFD. It was also said that she visited some friends and was found shooting with a pistol in their garden. Practising to kill Jews, she explained. The gun was a relatively new acquisition, of uncertain provenance.

On her return to Germany, Unity attended the 1935 Parteitag at Nuremberg with Diana and Tom. By this time Sydney had also met Hitler (‘He said he would like to see Muv’), at the Osteria Bavaria in April. Unity effected the introduction with the jittery excitement of a child introducing her playground boyfriend, but was disappointed in her mother’s non-conversion: ‘The most she will admit is that he has a very nice face’ [sic], she wrote to Diana. Nevertheless the Redesdales were edging closer to the pro-Nazi position that David would publicly express the following year. It was as if they, too, had been hypnotized by the Hitler of Unity’s imagination.

In 1936, however, when Sydney took Unity, Jessica and Deborah on a cruise, she was probably hoping that it would restore some kind of normality to Unity’s behaviour. In fact it simply gave her a new stage on which to show off. She continued her political arguments on board ship, and was set upon in Spain for wearing a swastika badge. More realistically, Sydney may have been trying to amuse Jessica, whose discontentment was becoming transparent. Deborah rather poignantly remembered the holiday as a succession of jokes shared with her sister, although Jessica would later write, coolly: ‘as I remember us in those days, we weren’t all that adoring.’
⁴²
There is little doubt that her first debutante season had done nothing for her, and that she longed for something different; as in her way Unity had found.

The cruise was also an escape from England at a time when David – whose relentless financial incompetence had reached crisis point – was disposing of Swinbrook House and 1,500 acres of precious Oxfordshire land. At first the estate was let, then finally sold in 1938, as was customary with David at the bottom of the market. He sold the Swan pub, the adjacent cottage beside the mill, the trout fishing, the coverts. He got rid of furniture. Diana, in the process of moving with Mosley to a beautiful house in Staffordshire – Wootton Lodge – rescued the better stuff: a Heppelwhite bedstead, a Sheraton sideboard, all bought with just a few pounds of Bryan Guinness’s money. Nobody except David and Deborah had liked Swinbrook, but its loss was powerfully symbolic. Although the Mitfords still owned the cottage at High Wycombe, from now on the collective memories of chubb-fuddling, hunting, the Hons’ Cupboard, would live only in the world of Nancy’s novels. Many years later Deborah wrote to Nancy that leaving the house, riding for the last time through the woods, ‘broke my heart.’ Back in 1935 David received a letter from Unity. ‘Poor old Forge, I AM sorry you have had to leave Swinbrook... I do think it’s dreadful for you.’ This was a glimmer of the real girl, now lost as surely as her home.

After the cruise Unity went back to Germany. She and Diana attended the infamous Olympic Games in Berlin – as did Nancy’s in-laws the Rennells – then stayed at the lakeside villa belonging to the Goebbelses. Magda Goebbels had become very friendly with the sisters, although her husband remained wary: ‘I had a row with Magda about the visit.’ Nevertheless it was at Dr Goebbels’ ministerial house in Berlin that Diana married Oswald Mosley in a ceremony on 6 October 1936, attended by Hitler. ‘That’s not all right with me,’ Goebbels spat into his diary. ‘But the Führer wants it to be so.’ Diana told her parents, who were glad to have her union with Mosley regularized, and also told Tom. Unity, renowned for indiscretion, was not informed. The marriage remained a secret until the birth of the Mosleys’ son, Alexander, in November 1938. As Mosley revealed all, the newspapers blared that Hitler had been his best man (untrue), and the two Curzon sisters – that mini Greek chorus who had stood on the sidelines of Diana’s life chanting imprecations of doom, and now raged with a sense of betrayal – declared war on Mosley also.

Two days before the wedding, the violence generated by his movement – now called the British Union – had reached an apotheosis with the Battle of Cable Street. A giant march had taken place through the East End of London, with Mosley strolling along at the head looking like Errol Flynn in his suave double-breasted jacket. It was met by predictable resistance, and finally brought to a halt in a barricaded Cable Street. Two thousand police had been called in, almost one for every Blackshirt. The police were attacked with bricks, chair legs and milk bottles; their horses slid on the marbles thrown into the street. The vast majority of the eighty-five arrested were anti-Fascists, and Mosley’s men were, in a sense, the innocent party, unless one believes that an act of such deliberate provocativeness rendered them guilty. Having brought the march to an abortive end, as the police now asked him to do, Mosley addressed his neatly assembled Blackshirts: ‘The Government surrenders to Red violence and Jewish corruption. We never surrender... within us is the flame that shall light this country and shall later light this world.’ The response from the London District Committee of the Communist Party was: ‘This is the most humiliating defeat ever suffered by any figure in British politics.’

To those inclined to see Communism as the most fearsome force of the time, the relative impassivity of the Blackshirts in the face of such extreme aggression (they did not retaliate as they had at Olympia) would have seemed like proof of ‘Red violence’. At the same time Mosley – described in Parliament as being ‘surrounded by his bodyguard like a dictator or a gangster’ – was recognized as a hugely incendiary figure, and even he later admitted that he had been wrong to dress his Blackshirts in military-type clothes (these uniforms were now banned under the new Public Order Act). A week after Cable Street a gang of Fascists ran through the East End attacking Jews. This behaviour was dismissed by the BU as contrary to orders. To the sane people of Britain it must all, every bit of it, have read like a horror show.

To Jessica Mitford, meanwhile, the Fascist and Nazi sympathies of her sisters were the springboard from which she could jump into the arms of the other side. It has been said
⁴³
that much of Jessica’s dissatisfaction with her privileged upbringing came after the moment of her leaving it: that she was on the whole a joyful girl, until she decided upon a cause that required her to have been unhappy. And there is surely truth in this. However aware she was of the scarred landscape beyond Swinbrook, however much she dreamed of some idealized school where she would exchange unknown thoughts with enlightened people, the image of herself – as portrayed in
Hons and Rebels
– as a frustrated activist among smug socialites is a literary construct, rather than the more ambivalent reality.