Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (28 page)

So the Redesdales were not so exceptional, although it was somewhat out of the ordinary that, in the summer of 1937, Sydney should have taken Deborah to tea at Hitler’s flat. Writing to Jessica about this, Sydney said: ‘He is very “easy” to be with and no feeling of shyness would be possible, and such very good manners.’ He had, she reported, asked after ‘little D[ecca]’. One would suspect a desire to enrage, but that is not the tone of the letter; rather Sydney seemed eager to placate, to deny this foolish insistence upon political divisions. If so it was beyond naïve. Deborah probably did better by making a joke of the episode. She wrote to tell Jessica that their mother – ‘wasn’t it killing?’ – had asked Hitler if there was a law specifying the quality of flour in German bread. At just seventeen, and with part of her attention on Royal Ascot the following week, Deborah was inclined to see the whole thing as a romp; or perhaps she deliberately chose to do so. Like Pamela, however, she was essentially immune. She described Unity ‘shaking so much she could hardly walk’ as if this were a natural but alien phenomenon. Of Hitler she wrote, in her diary, that he looked less hard in the flesh than he did in his photographs. Years later she expressed her lasting amazement that he had delayed his departure to the Obersalzberg, his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, for two hours simply to talk to them all.

In the autumn of 1937 the Redesdales, along with David’s sister-in-law Helen (whose daughter Clementine was then a follower of Hitler), attended the annual Parteitag. They would do so again in 1938: ‘Lord and Lady Redesdale have arrived in London from Nuremberg,’ as the court pages of
The Times
politely reported. But before that, in March, David had given another remarkable speech to the Lords. He launched a long defence of the
Anschluss
, Hitler’s annexation of Austria. It was, he said, childish to think that any part of the hysterical welcome had been staged. He, Redesdale, was ‘firmly convinced that the change which had taken place in Austria was one which was the sincere desire of the majority of the Austrian people’, and he hoped that friendly talks would be opened with the German government.

It was, replied another member of the Lords, the argument of German propagandists. David had learned his stuff well. Little wonder that Diana wrote to Deborah in June, informing her that the Führer had ‘talked a lot about Farve and his speech’ and was extremely grateful. Furthermore: he ‘
specially
’ wanted Deborah to attend the Parteitag that year! ‘Isn’t he kind and sweet.’ This, Deborah did not do.

The views that David expressed in the Lords were Unity’s, who had written to Winston Churchill explaining that the
Anschluss
was a wonderful thing. He replied civilly that a ‘fair plebiscite’ would have shown a large majority of Austrians to be against Nazi rule. Yet Unity herself had watched the scenes in Vienna, which to a believer seemed undeniably pro-Hitler, and in high manic mode wrote to Diana, describing how Austrians would ask her – in tones of quasi-religious awe – if they could kiss the hand that the Führer had touched. Sometimes, inevitably, Unity displayed competitiveness with her beautiful sister over their relationship with Hitler, and sought to prove her particular closeness. ‘Fancy you being in Berlin again,’ she wrote rather sharply in 1937. ‘I imagine the Führer is there isn’t he?’ – for all the world as if he were a potentially unfaithful boyfriend. Diana, in turn, gives an occasional sense of stoking up Unity’s passion. Again in 1937 she related, in great detail, an evening with Magda Goebbels, at which the guests played ‘Analogies’ and decided that if Hitler were a flower, he would be a Madonna lily. She also described a photograph of Hitler at the 1929 Parteitag: ‘it makes me cry with rage to think we were alive and yet missing
everything.
’ Can that really be true? Well, perhaps.

What is certainly true is that by 1938 Sydney had fallen under the spell of Hitler, rather than of mere theoretical ‘Fellowship’ (he is, wrote Nancy, ‘her favourite son-in-law’). So too, to a degree, had her husband. David had dealings with Hitler when Unity fell ill in August, oddly enough after a performance of
Die
Walküre
at Bayreuth, where she was an honoured guest. With the force of the disciple she rallied to attend a huge march-past in Breslau with Hitler – ‘of course I would rather have died than miss that’ – and took a different aeroplane back to Bayreuth as she was terrified of giving him her flu. In fact she had pneumonia. Hitler asked Winifred Wagner to look after her, and at 3 a.m. called out his private doctor. ‘The Fuhrer is the kindest man in the world isn’t he?’ replied Diana. Again, can she really have meant it? But these actions had an effect upon David that the rantings at Nuremberg may not have done. Hitler had paid for Unity’s stay in hospital, a bill that David – replacing his wife at their daughter’s bedside – insisted upon reimbursing. In the course of this transaction he met Hitler several times, man to man, and found him likeable.

At the end of the 1938 Nuremberg rally, Hitler made promises to the Germans in the Sudetenland that were effectively a provocation, and a threat to the Versailles agreement of 1919. The Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia wanted to join the Fatherland: who could deny them this right? Three days later, the prime minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich in an attempt to avert war – an outcome that far more people wanted than they would later admit – and the Czechs were required to hand over the Sudetenland. The blissful Führer was clawing back his Rhineland, chunk by chunk. After the talks, Chamberlain told his aide Alec Douglas-Home that he thought Hitler was mad. Unity, too, was showing signs that a blind person could scarcely have missed. Earlier that year, after two Sudeten Germans were wounded in a tavern brawl in Czechoslovakia, it was reported in
The Times
that ‘Miss Unity Mitford, who has been wearing a swastika on her coat in Prague, was held up today on her way to Carlsbad by motor car when entering a zone in which special military regulations are in force. She was detained and then released after a few hours.’ She had been parading herself in the most flagrant way, flaunting her Nazi insignia. Afterwards she complained of her treatment at the hands of the hated Czechs, who had accused her of carrying Hitler’s photograph. Her behaviour, still that of a hysterical young show-off, was also ragingly dangerous; she was an oversized out-of-control child playing chopsticks around the nuclear button.

As early as 1934, Peter Rodd had written to David telling him to get Unity away from Munich. Beyond question he had more brains than most of the Mitfords, but according to Nancy his letter was dismissed as ‘impertinence’. Four years on, however, it is truly remarkable and dreadful that the Redesdales did not force Unity to leave Germany with them. Of course they would have believed that, as long as Chamberlain succeeded in achieving an agreement, Hitler would view it as binding. But the apparent acquiescence in Unity’s view of the Führer was beyond naive. And there is a strong sense that David, certainly, was in a bewildered state that led him towards Germany because he no longer knew what to think. He did not want a war – who would? Perhaps there was a chance that Unity and ‘the man Mosley’ (as he called him) were right, that Britain and Germany could indeed be friends? Sydney was obdurately against war, and remained so even throughout its entire six years. Like her politicized daughters, she was incapable of abandoning an opinion once it had been fully formed. But this is not really the point: the Redesdales’ desire for appeasement did not mean that it was going to happen. Rather it was as though, having lost two daughters, they were determined to hold on to this one by giving her everything that she wanted.

Back in London, Sydney had a final Mitford girl to present to society, and dealing with the entirely satisfactory Deborah, buying dress material at John Lewis and Ascot hats from Madame Rita’s in Berkeley Square, created the necessary illusion that the world had not changed. Nor had it, if the court pages were one’s guide. In the same old faithful way they transcribed Deborah’s progress through her debutante season: a coming-out dance at Rutland Gate in March, for which Pamela gave a dinner party; a ball attended in Eaton Square; a presentation at the Palace in May, at which not a sheet of writing paper, nor a single chocolate, was stolen.

This normality may have been Deborah’s own particular form of rebellion. What better way to thumb her nose at her fanatical family than by spending late August 1939 at a house party for York races? Or perhaps, like Fanny in
The Pursuit of Love
, she was simply born sane. And, like the divinely pretty ‘Northey’ in
Don’t Tell Alfred
, she was made to charm: a ‘violent little fascinator’, in Nancy’s phrase. Northey is a fairly exact, if exaggerated, portrait of the young Deborah. She has eyes of brilliant blue and a habit of wriggling like a puppy as she speaks. She is obsessed with animals (her pet badger builds a sett on the back lawn of the French Embassy). Almost every remark made to her (‘Is that a badger’s sett?’) is met with the refrain of ‘oh you
are
clever’. She is also, beneath the twinkling and sparkling, very much on the ball. Deborah had to be: she had to trace the steps of the pavane with care. Her sisters had cast a shadow across the family name. Worse, they had made it something of a joke. To the press, the girls were the Hon. Kardashians, styled in black shirts and red flags. Deborah herself had been named in the
Daily Express
as having eloped with Esmond Romilly, and newspaper apologies are never quite as noticeable as they might be. In April 1938, bang in between Deborah’s coming-out ball and presentation, Unity was attacked by a crowd in Hyde Park. A newspaper headline read: ‘At it Again, the Mad, Mad Mitfords’.

In June Unity was back in the papers again, this time for her provocative antics in Prague. At the same time, in a different world, Deborah was at a dance held for the daughters of Joe Kennedy, now US ambassador in London. She became friendly with the family. At a ball given by Lord Mountbatten she danced with Jack Kennedy, whose presidential inauguration she would later attend; in her diary she wrote that he was ‘rather boring but nice’. She met her future husband Andrew Cavendish, second son to the Duke of Devonshire, just two weeks into her debut season. ‘That was it for me,’ she later wrote: she had found her man. If Deborah had ever seen herself as a package of perfect goods damaged by the brutal knocks from those around her – what eligible type would marry into a family of nutters? I mean, what would the mater/the vicar/nanny think? – then there was no sign of relief at this early entrance of Lord Right. Not that she would have admitted to such a thing.

Andrew, who was then at Cambridge, was not the type that Mitfords usually fell for, and this perhaps added to his appeal: unlike those forceful egomaniacs he was languid, humorous and self-deprecating. He had an immense capacity for pleasure, and his charm was the kind that did not have to try. As a young girl Deborah had had an immense crush on Derek Jackson, who in style could not have been more different, although both men were dedicated to racing. (Andrew was also an elegantly fervid gambler: ‘chased by a Ladbroke’s man the length of a train at Victoria station’.
⁵¹
) But Deborah had sense, she had seen her sisters coping with strident alpha males who knew it all yet sulked like little boys when thwarted. Later Andrew would say that Deborah was the bossy one: ‘but I like that in a woman’. In August 1938 the couple, plus a friend, descended suddenly upon Wootton – this was still technically forbidden to Deborah, as the Mosley marriage had not yet been announced – where they found the great Sir Ogre fishing peaceably, surrounded by children. They stayed ‘literally ten mins’, as Diana wrote to Unity. The men, she said, ‘seemed incredibly babyish’ (Diana, one senses, was born a woman). Certainly the eighteen-year-old Andrew would have cut a callow, bashful figure compared with the jackbooted chaps with whom Diana was then consorting. He was, according to Nancy, a ‘dear little fellow’ (although to Evelyn Waugh she later wrote that he reminded her somewhat of Lord Sebastian Flyte in
Brideshead Revisited
, by which she meant, presumably, a casual intensity of aristocratic charm.) Again, this was surely part of what Deborah liked.

They did not marry until the spring of 1941. Although not good-looking, Andrew was popular with women; it was reasonable that he should wait until the great age of twenty-one before plunging. Sydney, meanwhile, had been unsure. She was worried by examples of what she saw as Andrew’s nonchalance, as when Deborah drove to Oxford to meet three trains, all of which he had failed to board. Nevertheless by the first summer of her season Deborah regarded herself as unofficially engaged, and was invited to meet the Devonshires. Her mother – still anxious, still clinging to the rules – wrote her a stiff letter, saying that she hoped the invitation had come from the Duchess herself, not merely from Andrew. This was the Sydney of old, in the days before her power had been overridden. It reads absurdly, in the face of other events. Yet there is something pathetically staunch, indeed admirable, in her attempt to make sure that this daughter, at least, achieved a happy ending.

Deborah also visited Jessica, who had returned to London and now had a baby named Julia. The Romillys were living in the working-class area of Rotherhithe, slum-ridden at the time, close to the docks that would soon be bombed by the Luftwaffe. Jessica wrote brightly to her sister in December 1937, when Julia was just two days old, saying that the baby was very strong ‘& you could have seen me and at any time if you hadn’t been such a young germ carrier’: Deborah had had measles. But in fact it was not easy to see Jessica, as Esmond was so opposed to visits from any Mitford. (Tom was an exception, evidence of his ability to be all things to all men.) When Deborah finally went to Rotherhithe, and found Julia suspended in a cradle from an open window, Esmond was not at home; there were, however, a couple of ghastly occasions when she did see him. He was, Deborah later recalled, extremely nasty about her mother. He was probably left ignorant of the fact that Sydney had been driven to see Julia by Unity, in a car full of things for the baby including a dress from Diana, for which her sister Jessica wrote a graceless letter of thanks asking her sister not to send any more presents, ‘as Esmond doesn’t like it’. The fact that Bryan Guinness, now remarried, was made so welcome at the house probably says as much about the couple’s attitude to his former wife as about Bryan himself. Nancy was persona non grata after her ‘betrayal’ at St-Jean-de-Luz, as was Pamela for having married a Fascist. And so it went on, life according to the gospel of Comrade Esmond.