Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (29 page)

What Jessica thought of the reality of working-class life in the 1930s – a world of zinc baths, chamber pots, houses ‘where the cracked walls were held together by layers of bulging wallpaper’
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– is impossible to know. She and Esmond worked at J. Walter Thompson’s advertising agency. He was a copy-writer (unlike Gordon Comstock in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, he did not view this job as the gateway to the evil Money God), she was in market research, and for the first time she mixed with the people whose cause she espoused. Jessica was honest enough to admit that her feelings were ambivalent, as they were when she met the Labour Party men whose company Esmond purported to favour; she was accustomed to certain refinements of behaviour, and was uncomfortable without them. She was always protected to an extent, simply by who she was – like the downwardly mobile posh girl in Pulp’s
Common People,
if she called, her daddy could stop it – and she remained Mitford enough to employ a maid. Nevertheless the distance between Rutland Gate and Rotherhithe Street would have been unfathomable. Did she achieve anything, by her great leap from SW7 to SE16? Life experience, of course, but surely that was too solipsistic to be the point. She was
proving
a point, but what? As a reviewer of
Hons and Rebels
put it: ‘There is something rather touching about the notion of these young people [Jessica and Esmond] that they were missionaries of Progress as well as buccaneers... A Leftist young woman of the present day [1960] might well find this book deplorable in its resolute concentration on family jokes, private languages, and activities from which the comrades of the party are automatically excluded.’
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Po-faced criticism, but it hit its mark: without the Mitford background to rebel against, there was no meaning to the rebellion, and not much more to the book.

Similarly with Esmond. Two years later he would say: ‘I wasn’t a Communist, I am not now, and I never will be.’ He was something less defined, perhaps even to himself. He despised the modish aspect of Communism as an abstract creed, and one sees why: most members of the intelligentsia would never have met a working-class person in their lives; a man like Anthony Blunt would have fainted clean away if required to live in Rotherhithe without a Poussin to pore over. At the same time it is hard to know just what Esmond himself was trying to prove, other than that he had the guts to practise – for a time anyway – what he preached. He, too, was protected by who he was. As Diana suggested in her cool destruction of his politics; as Deborah and Nancy implied in their analysis of his character; as even Jessica admitted, when she called him ‘a gifted hater’ – he was
against
rather than for, a natural anarchist rather than an idealistic left-winger like his wife. This can carry its own glamour (think Russell Brand) but it is surely a dead end, as the barricaded Cable Street was to Mosley’s Blackshirts. Esmond attacked Jessica for any sign that she was behaving like a Mitford, like the upper-class person that she harmlessly was. He attacked her family. And this new life was what she had said she wanted; was it not? The only possible response was yes; the only possible attitude was acceptance. If Jessica ever had doubts of the kind that may have assailed Diana when she sat alone in Eaton Square, then she, again like the sister who was now excised from her life, would have died before admitting it.

Nevertheless when Julia died, at the age of five months, she must surely have wondered. The baby caught measles – this, ironically, after the care taken to protect her from Deborah – when an epidemic surged across Rotherhithe. A local clinic, assuming that Jessica had had the disease, informed her that breastfeeding would give the baby immunity and there was no need for inoculation. Measles developed into pneumonia. Her parents watched as Julia’s life ebbed painfully away in an oxygen tent.

And one may imagine the wildfire of chit-chat, rampaging through the society that the Romillys had disowned, blaming them for trying to raise a helpless child in a slum district, for making Julia the sacrificial victim to their ‘ideals’. Esmond had alienated so many, not just by his rhetoric but with his brash Robin Hood antics: he and Jessica would go to parties held by the kind of people they vociferously loathed and steal from their homes. Doubtless Esmond would have regarded aristocratic Fascists as fair game, and Jessica would have gone along with his view, but now their behaviour was being repaid with all the cruelty of which gossip is capable.

The problem, for Jessica, was that she may in her heart have believed that the gossipers were right. Her mother had always thought that Julia looked sickly. Even Unity saw that she had legs ‘like Marlene Dietrich’s’. The image of the baby suspended from a window is disquieting. Sydney had offered to send Blor, who had so much kindly understanding of children, but Esmond had refused to allow a nanny in the house (yet he had a maid). He wanted Jessica to be like the working-class mothers of Rotherhithe, surviving and coping as a real woman should. But Jessica was not such a woman; she had not been trained in the tough business of life; she was a formidable spirit play-acting at something that she truly believed, but did not truly grasp. And she had been very much isolated. None of her family attended the baby’s funeral, which surely was not Jessica’s real wish. The questions raised by Julia’s death were harsh: why, after all, should this baby have been spared, when others in Rotherhithe would die of disease, just because her parents had the means to have possibly saved her? Was that what Communism meant, sharing evils that might have been averted by the deployment of tainted capitalism?

The solution, to these unanswerable things, was escape. The couple went to Corsica, leaving behind them some gigantic bills: Jessica had assumed that electricity simply came like magic. On their return to London they took a bedsit in the Edgware Road. In the autumn of 1938, for reasons unknown but surely connected to the loss of Julia, Jessica underwent a termination (some twenty years later she would write with brave candour about this experience, and campaign for the legalization of abortion). Then, in early 1939, the Romillys each did something very typical. Jessica travelled to Swinbrook to find her childhood pet, the now ageing sheep Miranda, which was standing amid a flock but hobbled across the field toward Jessica’s call. Esmond went with Philip Toynbee to Eton and returned to London with a collection of stolen top hats: ‘gallant symbols,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘of our hatred of Eton, of our anarchy, of defiance’.
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More typically yet, Esmond sold the lot. He and Jessica took the money – along with £100 that she had inherited on her twenty-first birthday – and travelled to New York.

XII

Back in the summer of 1937, when Hitler’s predations into the Rhineland were still being batted aside as not
quite
anybody else’s business, Unity wrote a letter to her Boud. Its friendliness and affection was undiminished; they might have been back in the DFD, squabbling idiotically, rather than living out the truth of their divided allegiances. Unity told Jessica about the heat in Munich. She also described how she had gone to the Englischer Garten and, in a semi-pagan ritual, had taken off her clothes in the park and sunbathed naked. Then she had wondered whether Sydney, somehow, knew what she was doing: ‘& I laughed till I ached, if anyone had come along they would have thought me mad as well as indecent’.

Was she mad? Surely yes: although she need not have been. She was a seeker of attention, a boldly confident girl who nevertheless recognized herself as a misfit, not stupid but without sense or control, who fell into the wrong times and the wrong hands. She harboured great and undirected passions. ‘Bobo would have been a religious girl,’ a friend later said. ‘She found it in Nazism instead.’
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She was not evil, although her terrible ravings against the Jews read that way. She was surrounded by evil people whose good opinion she sought. Perhaps they found the evil in her, as well as the madness: like a
folie à deux
, in which the stronger party can induce the other to commit and take pleasure in murder. Yet she had had the power of commanding deep affection. ‘It was not that those who loved her forgave her her beliefs,’ wrote Deborah many years later, ‘they went on loving her in spite of them.’

By 1939 the days in Germany, which had brought her the happiness she so clumsily craved, were coming to their conclusion. There were other endings also. Nancy’s journey to Perpignan with her husband was a brief revival in her marriage, in that it made Peter Rodd somebody she could think well of – which
she
craved. However, her miscarriage at the end of 1938, after five years of trying to fall pregnant, was a kind of death knell: it was not the end of the relationship, but it did end any hope that it might succeed in the long term. ‘The really important thing,’ she would write in
The Pursuit of Love
, ‘if a marriage is to go well, without much love, is very very great niceness –
gentillesse
– and wonderful good manners.’ How true that is. But it was hard-won knowledge, as those were the very qualities that her own marriage lacked. One of the best things about Nancy’s novels, and key to their infinitely consolatory air, is the easy grace with which she hands out wisdom that she herself had struggled to acquire.

She spent the lead-up to war in a house in Maida Vale’s Blomfield Road, with Peter (mostly) and with her beloved French bulldogs, Milly and Lottie, which produced the babies that she could not. Milly, she told Robert Byron, ‘is very anti-appeasement’. She was also editing the letters of the Stanleys of Alderley, whose sane Whig politics and settled belief systems constituted a wondrous respite from the present day; and from Peter. The first volume of letters,
The Ladies of Alderley
(1938), contained an acknowledgment of the encouragement given by ‘my husband’. The second,
The Stanleys of Alderley
(1939), did not. The books, cleverly done and well reviewed, were a fillip to Nancy’s treasured pride. Nevertheless her life, at this time, held no particular promise. War would at least provide a solution as to what happened next. Her judgment upon the world situation – and by extension upon her family – was bored, despairing and somehow detached. ‘There isn’t a pin to put between Nazis and Bolshies,’ she wrote to the family friend Violet Hammersley. ‘If one is a Jew one prefers one & if one is an aristocrat the other, that’s all as far as I can see.
Fiends!
’

Swinbrook had gone, and now David advertised the house at Rutland Gate as to be sold, or let, furnished. His daughters were all ‘out’; there was no need of it any longer, although in fact the war would forestall the sale. By 1938 the Redesdales’ main home was an island, Inch Kenneth, off the west coast of Mull, with a single large dwelling, a chapel and a private boatman. David bought it after meeting the man who had built the house at his club, a characteristic childlike impulse: he was very like Unity in that sense, heedless and eager, without much thought as to consequences. Dr Johnson and Samuel Boswell had been entertained in the original house, ‘an elegant retreat’ in Boswell’s phrase. Its replacement was less beautiful (‘something of a Home Counties mansion’).
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It was also exceedingly remote. Reaching it required an overnight sleeper, a long ferry ride to Mull, a fifteen-mile drive, then a boat trip; what Nancy called ‘the worst journey in the world’. Deborah later wrote that she ‘veered between wanting to live there for the rest of my life, and hating it’. The weather made more difference to Inch Kenneth than to anywhere else that she knew: it was sublime in sun and grim in gloom. Sydney, who had spent so much of her childhood surrounded by sea, found an affinity with the place. David had Scottish blood – the Airlie mother – and like most men of his class he loved Scotland. But the impression is that he was hunkering down, like a tired old animal. One wonders what he thought about his marvellous girls, who had danced through their childhood, teasing and provoking, making him their fantasy lord and master, weaving a spell of enchantment in his immutable Oxfordshire acres.

One also wonders whether David sensed what had to come, as the Munich accord was revealed as a sham, Hitler strode on towards Prague, and he himself reverted – with some relief, as if the hypnotized conversion at Nuremberg had never been – to his old hatred of Germany. Sydney, meanwhile, became more pro-Hitler than ever, and raged against the idea of war. Still 1939 had to play itself out. Unity moved to a new flat: ‘it belongs,’ she wrote, ‘to a young Jewish couple who are going abroad.’ Unforgivable? Yes, beyond a doubt. In March she wrote to Diana as if nothing much had changed. The Führer ‘was in his very sweetest mood’, sympathetic because England and Germany were becoming enemies. In the summer she visited London – again, how was she ever allowed to go back to Munich? And with a car full of furniture given by Sydney for her new flat? She attended the Mosley rally at Earl’s Court. Outside the house at Rutland Gate, she said a fond goodbye to the parlourmaid, Mabel. ‘Don’t say Hitler’s name to me,’ Mabel warned. ‘Mabe, you don’t know Hitler, you’d like him.’

But by July, as she wrote to Diana, the sweet Führer ‘was in his least forthcoming mood, you know, all preoccupied’. The two sisters went to Bayreuth, where Unity was greeted with flowers, and they watched
Götterdämmerung
. They lunched with Hitler. Conversation was sober, adult; at least between Diana and the Führer. She told him that Mosley would continue to campaign for peace for as long as this was legal, although he might not be the right man to avert war. Hitler replied drily that by doing this he would risk assassination. He also said to Diana, with regard to a British declaration of war: ‘I am afraid they are determined on it.’

After lunch Unity told Diana that she did not wish to live if England and Germany went to war. Nevertheless she asked her sister to return for the Parteitag that year, as if such a thing still might happen. Diana went home to Wootton, where she prepared for the baby she was expecting, and for war. Unity lunched with Hitler on two more occasions. Presumably they discussed the situation; they always had in the past, and she may have been urging peace even then. Albert Speer wrote in his memoirs that ‘Lady Mitford’, as he called her, ‘even in the later years of international tension persistently spoke up for her country and often actually pleaded with Hitler to make a deal with Britain. In spite of Hitler’s discouraging reserve, she did not abandon her efforts through all those years.’ A friend of Unity’s, Rudi von Simolin, later said: ‘She had been on a pedestal, and therefore was mistaken into thinking she had influence.’
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