Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (27 page)

‘You were the first one of the family to be on posters,’ Nancy told her sister. ‘Boud was so jealous.’ But before the time for jokes there came a period of cold despair, lasting some two weeks, in which the Redesdales sat beside the telephone and simply waited. ‘I don’t think she ever realized the effect it had on all at Rutland Gate,’ Deborah wrote to Diana some sixty years later. ‘It was just as if someone young had died.’ She recalled the absence of the sound of the gramophone, which had previously played all the time. She was still perplexed by how Jessica could have done what she did, in the way that she did it; and still, palpably, distressed by the memory. Forty years after the event, however, Jessica contested the implied accusation – that she had brought such pain to her family – in a letter to Deborah. ‘I honestly think you’ve revised all that, somehow, in yr. mind.’
⁴⁷
But that was not Deborah’s style. And the description of those attenuated days of agony was surely not exaggerated.

In Deborah’s view, Jessica had been in Esmond’s thrall. Yet she had been a willing prisoner. And – very much like Diana, which neither would have admitted – she was determined to have been right: in
Hons and Rebels
, written more than twenty years later, she described Esmond as a beautiful comrade-in-arms, an ‘orchid upon a dungheap’ (this particular phrase was a little too much for Deborah). One reviewer reacted to the book in a way that the sisters saw as closer to the truth: Jessica and Esmond were described as ‘an alarming couple’, with ‘a mutual amorality which at moments approached the sublime’.
⁴⁸
Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy that the book made Esmond ‘quite detestable’ (well, he would say that, Jessica would have replied): ‘She not only gives a nasty impression of the people against whom she has conceived grievances, but about those she presumably loves.’ Certainly there was a great charge of feeling between Jessica and Esmond, in which attraction and a cause each served to strength the passion of the other. There was the glory of defiance: would Romeo and Juliet have fallen quite so hard had there not been that barrier between them? And there also seems to have been an obscure desire for revenge, upon something about her past life that could not quite be identified. Diana had perhaps felt that too, even towards her first husband, although her temperament was such that she expressed it differently, not through a dramatic rupture but with a calm, withdrawing finality. Unity did not: she was the simplest and the happiest in her rebellion.

After two weeks, Esmond’s mother received a letter from him, explaining that he and Jessica were probably married by that time and that any attempts to force her back to London would be met with a leak, to the newspapers, of the ‘truth’ about Unity and Hitler. This was fairly typical stuff. Esmond had already revealed his true colours to Jessica in Bayonne, where the couple were waiting for her visa. They had been in a café where some locals were tormenting a dog; like all Mitfords, she loved animals dearly, and begged Esmond to intervene. He responded with righteous anger. ‘What right have you got to impose your beastly upper-class preoccupation with animals on these people?’ In England, he said, dogs were fed on steak and people left to starve; true, but one sort of cruelty does not justify another; if anything could have sent Jessica home at that point, it was this, yet she stayed. It was as if she was determined that the political should override the personal. On receipt of her visa she sailed with Esmond to Bilbao. There they were accepted into the press corps, living at some distance from the war zone, and Esmond sent bulletins to the
News Chronicle.
Soon he would find a job with Reuters. He
was
impressive – for a boy of nineteen he was extraordinary – but his toughness had a repellent quality. He embodied the antithesis of the Mitford charm, and seemed to relish the fact. When Nancy later said that he changed Jessica, who, despite continued affections, in some fundamental way set her face forever against her family, one sees what she meant.

As the family pinko it was Nancy who was sent to try to persuade her sister home. Unity, who had travelled back from Munich in early March, had been considered for the job and swiftly discounted. Unity’s letters to Jessica from this time are fascinating: they show the acuity that she possessed beneath her mania, and the absolute disregard for her sister’s conversion to the enemy. ‘Your letter is really
extraorder
,’ she said; ‘on reading it again I can hardly believe you wrote it yourself, it’s so unlike you.’ Which was Nancy’s perception, translated into the Unity. She went on to write that ‘the vile aunt Weenie’ had said that Jessica would be better off dead, and that Weenie probably thought the same about her and Diana. Her last, almost amusing shot was to inform Jessica that she had persuaded Hitler to keep the story out of German newspapers. For by this time the publicity around the ‘elopement’ was intense, ‘Another Mitford Anarchist’ and so on. Thanks to the Churchill connection, the then Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, had cabled the consul in Bilbao. The British ambassador had also become involved. Communists though they were, Jessica and Esmond were commanding the attention of the highest authorities, like the members of the upper class that they also were.

Eventually they were forced to board a destroyer, the HMS
Echo
, together with some 180 refugees; the ambassador had the wit to tell them that if they did not do so the refugees would not be evacuated, and they would be blamed. On 10 March
The Times
reported that Jessica and Esmond were ‘returning to London this evening’, but this was optimistic intelligence from somebody who did not grasp whom they were dealing with. When the destroyer had reached St-Jean-de-Luz – which was as far as Esmond was prepared to travel – the couple were met by Nancy and Peter, the moment of reunion played out in front of a chorus line of reporters. ‘We saw them at the end of the gangplank,’ wrote Jessica in
Hons and Rebels
, ‘Nancy, tall and beautiful, waving at us with her gloves...’ According to this account Nancy spoke to her sister in a highly frivolous tone – ‘Nanny keeps saying you didn’t have any suitable clothes to fight in’ – although in a letter written at the time, in July 1937, Jessica took Nancy to task for telling her that living with Esmond was not respectable. Meanwhile Peter, who thought that he could handle any situation, simply hardened her resolve. ‘He was dying to be the heroic brother-in-law who rushed out... (expenses paid by Farve) to bring you back,’ wrote Unity. Peter told Esmond that if they returned to England, Jessica would be given an allowance by David. He was right to think that Esmond wanted money (within a couple of months the young couple would be begging from Sydney), but it was still very much the wrong thing to say to a man who posed as being above such concerns.

It was Sydney, in fact, who resolved matters, if not in the way that she would have wished. She visited Jessica, now in Bayonne, who confessed to her mother that she might be pregnant (which indeed she was). A return to England was no longer the issue; now a wedding became the priority. This had been the couple’s intention, but they were prevented from marrying at once because both were under age. Sydney also confronted Esmond, accusing him of cowardice for not having approached David properly to ask for Jessica’s hand: ‘what you would expect from a Communist’. He appeared to accept this, but vengefulness was in his nature, and back in England Sydney received a series of very nasty letters: first Esmond suggested that he and Jessica might not bother to marry after all, then he threatened to bar Sydney from a marriage ceremony that she herself was arranging. His dislike of the Mitfords had quickly become non-negotiable. He would have told himself that this was because they were all Nazis (his loudly expressed view), but it was – as so often – the personal that was guiding him: a hatred of their charm, their correctness, their sense of entitlement; a guilty grudge against their wholly legitimate distress. It was illogical, yet it became Jessica’s view also. For the Redesdales, the Romilly marriage – which took place in Bayonne on 18 May 1937, in fact attended by both mothers – was comfort of a sort, but not much. They knew perfectly well that Jessica was lost to them.

Yet Sydney wrote bravely to Deborah about the wedding, telling her of the silk dress from Harrods that she had taken for Jessica to be married in, and of the gramophone that she had bought as a joint present from Deborah and Unity (it may be imagined what Esmond made of this tainted marriage gift, and of the necklace sent by Diana.) In the end it was probably David who suffered the most. He did not know that he would never see his daughter again – although at the time he did not
want
to see her – but he had borne the full force of the publicity that her behaviour had generated. Reporters had doorstepped him at Rutland Gate and demanded a statement. The
Daily Express
had blasted the story across its front page, naming ‘The Hon. Deborah Freeman-Mitford’ as the daughter who had disappeared. With Tom as a member of her legal team, Deborah was awarded £1,000 for the damage to her reputation; but at the High Court in June it was said that David had supplied ‘certain information’ to the press (in other words, had blabbed hopelessly) in the belief that it would help ‘in the trouble which had arisen. He was very greatly distressed at the time...’ Thereafter he was trapped in the sticky maw of the newspapers, where his name appeared repeatedly. Sydney handled these things far better. When the
Daily Express
reporter asked whether he might know when consent had been given for the Romilly marriage, she replied that he could ask but she would not answer. David, in contrast, was absolutely without the worldly wisdom that would have helped him to deal with this kind of person; he was like a great ageing bear, cleverly baited, lashing out with force but no accuracy. Subsequently he tried to allege press intrusion, but was fobbed off with the usual ‘public interest’ defence.

This was a very long way from the behaviour of Uncle Matthew, who in
The Pursuit of Love
is similarly besieged when his daughter Jassy absconds to Hollywood, and chats merrily to reporters about her intention to track down and marry a film star named Gary Coon. Nancy, as was her way, had sought to dispel the nightmare by rendering it ridiculous (and, using the other part of Jessica’s story, by giving a charismatic yet deadly Communist husband to Linda). As was also her way, she had urged her fictional father back to his old, magnificent, seemingly indestructible self when she wrote of journalists braving his stock whips and sneaking into his house: ‘Isn’t that the damned sewer I found under my bed?’ Uncle Matthew would say, devouring one of their ludicrous reports. ‘He greatly enjoyed the whole affair,’ wrote Nancy. She added: ‘He also seemed greatly to enjoy reading about himself in the newspapers and we all began to suspect that Uncle Matthew had a hidden passion for publicity.’

As Nancy was all too aware when she wrote this last sentence, it would become even more remote from the truth after the outbreak of war.

XI

From Esmond Romilly’s point of view, it may well have seemed that the Mitford family were all Nazis. Consider the evidence, as a person with his affiliations might have seen it.

When he and Philip Toynbee tried to disrupt the Blackshirt meeting at Olympia in 1934, Nancy and Unity were in the audience. When they similarly protested at the meeting at Earl’s Court in 1939, Diana, Unity and Tom were present – also, just possibly, Deborah and Sydney (see page 157) – and Tom gave a Fascist salute. Nancy’s
Wigs on the Green
, which set her right-wing sisters so firmly against her, should have been evidence of scepticism, but the tone of the book was infinitely too frivolous to exempt her from a metaphorical execution.

In 1935, when Unity was in Munich, Tom lunched twice with his sister and Hitler. That same year Unity was visited by Pamela (who the following year would marry a Fascist sympathizer), and again there was a meal with Hitler, who had been struck by Pam’s marvellously blue eyes. Her stolid nature was proof against the nonsense of extremism, but Esmond would not have seen it that way.

Then there were the Redesdales; where the evidence does indeed pile up. Sydney had met Hitler first in 1935. The following year her husband began evincing pro-German sentiments in the House of Lords. The couple attended dinners of the Anglo-German Fellowship, whose supporters included the Duke of Wellington, David’s old friend Lord Nuffield and Edward VIII, who was soon to abdicate but held fast to his pro-Nazi views. (In the
Anglo-German Review
of December 1936, a German observer was reported as saying: ‘You have a splendid King. Why don’t you let him out of his cage?’) In 1937 the Redesdales attended a reception at the German Embassy, along with the Duke and Duchess of Kent, the Churchills and the Chamberlains – as Nancy put it, von Ribbentrop’s embassy was the most elegant in London (although there, at least,
she
was in the clear. Peter Rodd had replied to an invitation in Yiddish). In reciprocal spirit the Londonderrys held a reception for the ambassador, attended by the prime minister, at which the Redesdales were again present. This, more than anything, proves Nancy’s later assertion that when it came to the German embassy, ‘everybody went. They deny it now, of course.’
⁴⁹
As the historian Andrew Roberts wrote: ‘There was no shortage of people in 1930s Britain who would have viewed a British accommodation with Hitler positively, if not with enthusiasm. This feeling extended far beyond the lunatic fringe of anti-Semites...’ Imperialists, conservatives, press barons, businessmen – they all contained advocates of appeasement within their ranks. ‘Perhaps most interestingly, a significant proportion of the British aristocracy had strong pro-German and sometimes even pro-Nazi leanings.’
⁵⁰
Ribbentrop won over plenty of people. Lord Derby invited Goering to his house for the Grand National.