Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (26 page)

That said, there is no question that Jessica’s left-wing politics were genuine. As a writer, she became a fighter for noble causes such the civil rights movement in the US; in 1961 her car was torched by white supremacists in Alabama, which may have made her proud. Anyway it was not something likely to happen to certain other Mitford sisters. In middle age Jessica’s stance was, in fact, pretty much that of the straightforward liberal left, and in some respects shared by Nancy (for instance in 1967 they both signed petitions in
The Times
criticizing the Vietnam War). Not that Jessica herself necessarily saw it that way. She robustly dismissed Nancy as a ‘Gaullist’ (as if this were akin to ‘Mosleyite’) and Deborah as a ‘Conservative policeman’. Both were simply anti-extreme – one more to the left, the other to the right – but this was the thing that Jessica could never bear to be. She sought to be a radical, like Diana and Unity, and in a way that would purge their allegiances. Whether this was
really
her nature is an imponderable. It must have been, in the sense that she embraced radicalism so fully; it is hard to believe that she would have done this, had the others not gone before her. Like Unity, she was intensely susceptible to influence.

Jessica’s extremism is more acceptable to history than that of her sisters. Such is the luck of the left. Nevertheless she remained a Communist until 1958, by which time there was no excuse for being unaware that the Soviet regime under Stalin had not been not much different to the Nazi one. Two years earlier a speech by Khrushchev had been published, a sort of Communist confession to the mass murder committed by his predecessor, but still Jessica hung on: ‘I had never been as thoroughly convinced as most comrades were of Soviet infallibility,’ she wrote. ‘Terrible as the revelations were it seemed to me that the very fact that Khrushchev had seen fit to lay them out before the world signified that the Soviet leadership was set on a course of fundamental change.’
⁴⁴
This was reasonable, in the sense that Khrushchev sought ‘de-Stalinization’. But Jessica admitted that she had been wrong to believe him so wholeheartedly. As for Stalin: it is often said that he killed more people than Hitler, although very recent research suggests otherwise, that Hitler killed some 11 million non-combatants to Stalin’s 6 million.
⁴⁵
These figures, so grotesquely casual on the page, are not merely disputed but in a sense an irrelevance. The two men were both liquidators of life. Stalin’s Great Terror, in which the Soviet version of ethnic cleansing obliterated an approximate 700,000 people, took place in 1937: the year that Jessica became a full convert to the cause. To be fair, she was hardly alone in this. Communism was the intellectual creed of the time, although many on the left felt betrayed by the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 (‘
Susan
Stalin how could you let him’ was Nancy’s reaction: for reasons unknown, she and Jessica called each other ‘Susan’). When the pact disintegrated and the Russians entered the war against Hitler, George Orwell – who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War – wrote in his wartime diary: ‘One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten.’

Communism and Stalinism were not the same thing, of course. As Jessica said, she was not a Soviet apostle. Her own Communism was in one sense an expression of natural left-wing instincts, therefore perfectly honourable. But she was directed towards extremism by circumstances: of the times, and of the family.

Nancy – whose iconoclasm derived from a kind of extreme common sense – believed what she wrote in
Wigs on the Green
, that with women the personal counted above the political. The mere fact of saying this was probably designed to annoy. As usual, she was making light of the dark passions aroused by the 1930s, hoping thus to dispel their clouds. At the same time, she had a point. Jessica’s act of rebellion – throwing in her lot with her Communist cousin Esmond Romilly – was ideologically motivated and also a consequence of being a Mitford girl, both at the same time. The simple catalyst for her particular act of rebellion was Unity’s move to Munich. Political, therefore, but also deeply personal. How could her Boud jump ship so boldly, and leave her Boud on the deck in her white satin from Worth? Deborah later speculated that Jessica had been jealous of Unity, all the attention and excitement she was getting. Peter Rodd, who was no fool despite behaving like one, thought the same thing (he told the
Daily Mail
that Jessica had become a Communist to ‘get even’ with her Fascist sister). Yet Jessica also admitted to jealousy of Deborah, and this had nothing to do with politics: it was personal envy of her sister’s looks – Jessica was remarkably attractive, but believed Deborah to be ‘much prettier’ – and her well-adjusted character. (Deborah had privileged status as the adorable youngest, although she herself thought that Jessica was Nanny Blor’s favourite.) Jessica had a tricky position within the sororial hierarchy, squashed down the bottom, but even there hemmed in by Deborah. She was fascinated by Nancy, with her casual, gallant demeanour and her crisp satirical talent. She hero-worshipped Diana, so much so that her perfect older sister later became the focus of her anti-family rage (nobody ever had weak feelings about Diana). She was bracketed with Deborah as the two ‘little ones’, but their ‘Honnish’ closeness seems to have generated odd frustrations. With Unity, companion in ‘Boudledidge’, the relationship was intense and fond; she never found Unity unforgivable as she did Diana. Perhaps she saw Unity’s behaviour as having been inspired by Diana, which was surely
au fond
correct, although Diana was also right to disclaim responsibility; she could not have predicted the mad force of her sister’s commitment. Diana clearly distanced herself from acts such as Unity’s letter to
Der Stürmer
, and from Jessica’s later claim that she was complicit in this rabid anti-Semitism, that she had called the lunatical Julius Streicher ‘a kitten’. This was rubbish, as Diana put it, and one completely believes her. She was not a Nazi. She admired what the regime had achieved in rebuilding Germany, she had views on race that were rigid, a product of heritage and of faith in Mosley (yet contradicted by her circle of Jewish friends). Although she refused for years to acknowledge the sheer scale of the Final Solution, she condemned it – and Hitler – absolutely; but it did not suit Jessica to nuance this kind of thing.

So Nancy was right: the personal did come first; but because of the times, the personal and the political became indecipherable, and in ways that Nancy herself could not encompass. That first decisive act of Diana’s, the cool shattering of every convention that went with setting herself apart from society as Mosley’s mistress, set it all in train. From then on the competitive, combative relationships between the sisters would carry on until the causes had been used up; because of the times, those three with the radical strain in their natures were taken to limits that they would not otherwise have reached. And, because they were all young women, there would always be a man in it. As Nancy wrote in
The Pursuit of Love
, when her heroine Linda takes on the Communist creed of her second husband, Christian. ‘Linda has always felt the need for a cause,’ says her cousin Fanny, to which the novel’s touchstone of worldly wisdom, Lord Merlin (a portrait of Gerald Berners), replies: ‘My dear Fanny, I think you are mixing up cause with effect. No, Christian is an attractive fellow...’ Nancy had hit the nail on the head, but perhaps it was the wrong nail.

X

Jessica’s man was Esmond Romilly: Mosley with a red flag. Diana, naturally, did not see him in that way. Some years later, Romilly’s comrade Philip Toynbee wrote a memoir of himself and his friend, which Diana took apart in a typically dry review:

The highly disciplined Communist party, to which they naturally turned in their revolt from bourgeois society, also failed to make them conform and found them intractable material, useless for its purposes. Perhaps they did not become Communists because of any positive ideological agreement with Communist political theory, but for the same reason that they stole dozens of top hats from Eton boys while they were in chapel.
He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases
...

But to the debutante Jessica, prancing through balls looking as pretty as a porcelain doll, willing herself to dislike every second of it, her cousin Romilly was a convenient god. ‘She was ripe for change and it happened to be him,’ Deborah later wrote, adding ‘he was such a strong personality and so against EVERYTHING.’ But Mitford girls had a weakness for strong men. And Esmond, among all the other things that he was against, was specifically anti-Fascism. He and Toynbee protested at Mosley’s meetings (Diana would have retained a piercing memory of this). He ran away from Wellington, where he had tried to incite rebellion. Together with his brother Giles he distributed pacifist literature, refused to join the Officer Training Corps and edited a left-wing magazine called
Out of Bounds
. ‘Red Menace in Public Schools! Moscow Attempts to Corrupt Boys’, was a
Daily Mail
headline in 1934, an example of the hysterical fear of Communism that then raged. He was sent briefly to a remand home, then wrote a book – again entitled
Out of Bounds,
a portrait of his life to date – which was well received. Nevertheless his mother, Nellie Romilly, effectively gave up on him, which may have increased his sense of alienation and, to Jessica, his romantic aspect (vulnerable beneath the bravura). Aged just eighteen, he joined the International Brigade and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he took part in the battle at Boadilla del Monte before being invalided home with dysentery. He wrote another book,
Boadilla
, published in 1937 (and reissued in 1970, as Jessica proudly proclaimed to Deborah). So although he was, in Nancy’s view, ‘the most horrible human being I have ever met’,
⁴⁶
he was also by any standards formidable and courageous.

Temporal proximity to the Second World War has made the war in Spain seem a relatively minor conflict. Yet as a fight between Republicans – democratic, but supported by the USSR – and General Franco’s Nationalists it was, in some sort, the great struggle of Communism and Fascism made flesh, and a lot of flesh died. The casualties were estimated at around half a million, with atrocities and executions carried out by both sides (by far the greater part by the Nationalists). Esmond’s company lost two-thirds of its number in twelve days. Britain and the US took a position of neutrality, which was opposed by the perhaps naïve, but well-intentioned left-wing intelligentsia; Orwell, Hemingway and Laurie Lee were among those who travelled to support the International Brigade. In 1939 Nancy and her husband Peter Rodd went to Perpignan to help war refugees – in fact Nancy, who absented herself philosophically from the times, did more actual war work than the rest of her sisters put together – and she was confirmed for good and all in her hatred of ideology. ‘How odd the Spanish upper-classes must be,’ says her proxy Linda in
The Pursuit of Love
, ‘they don’t raise a finger to help their own people, but leave it all to strangers like us.’ Her brother, who is fighting there in the person of Esmond Romilly, replies: ‘You don’t know Fascists.’

It was during a dinner at the home of Esmond’s kindly, de facto adoptive mother that Jessica met the battle-hardened boy, in early 1937. She knew about his exploits – said she was already half in love with him, which was probably true, such is the girlish imagination – and he behaved much as Christian does with Linda: ‘planted his elbow, bare through the rent, onto the table’, thus dismissing one of the dinner guests completely, and focused his attention upon the lovely girl to his other side. Esmond was not as handsome as Christian – he was short, thin, with a fierce and unyielding Churchillian face – but his intensity was compelling and probably rather sexy. According to her own account, Jessica asked Esmond whether he would take her to Spain. He said yes. And that was that.

Here, then, was an encounter to compare with those
coups de foudre
experienced by her sisters; but Esmond – as Jessica saw it – was on the side of the angels. Which he was, at the moment of their meeting. She told him that she had £50 saved: her ‘Running-away Account’, as she called it in
Hons and Rebels.
He told her to travel as his secretary. Together they wrote a letter that purported to invite her on a trip to Dieppe with some friends. Back in London, the letter was opened by Jessica in the presence of her mother. Sydney not only agreed to the holiday, but gave her £30: this was to be spent on clothes for a world cruise that had been planned for Jessica and Deborah. Cruises seemed to be Sydney’s solution to everything – she knew that Jessica was not entirely content in her role as debutante, and surely did not want another rebellion on her hands; frosty and inadequate though she may sometimes have been, one can only feel pity at the thought of her pleasure at this excitingly extended holiday for Jessica, and her fingers-crossed hope that it would bring her daughter happiness. On 7 February 1937 she and David took Jessica to Victoria Station. David gave her £10 spending money and the Redesdales waved goodbye as Esmond lurked in the shadows. From that time David never saw his daughter again; a few years later, when Unity asked in her direct way whom her father would most like to see walk into the room, he answered instantly: ‘Decca.’

And it is hard to think of what these parents went through, when it transpired that Jessica was not in Dieppe, nor anywhere that could be imagined. ‘I nearly went mad when it seemed you had quite disappeared,’ Sydney later wrote to her daughter. ‘I knew you were unhappy, but the cause of it all was beyond me, except that like many girls you had nothing to do. I ought to have been able to help you more... Farve is better now but it was frightful to see him so down, I have never seen him like that.’ It was indeed from this point that the fine and handsome David, who was not yet sixty, became an old man.