Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (31 page)

Unity, no longer trapped in vacancy but returned to perpetual childhood, was blessedly oblivious to it all. ‘Oh, Boud, I have a Goat!’ she wrote to Jessica in February. ‘Oh Boud, I AM so sorry to be short, but will write again soon!’ Yet she knew that something was wrong. She believed that doctors had made a hole in her head. ‘Am I mad?’ she asked repeatedly. Nancy’s poignant tease of a reply – that she always had been – again raises a question that cannot quite be answered; other than to say that the
potential
for madness had always been there, and that every single circumstance had allowed it to develop.

Years later, Nancy would say that Unity’s behaviour ‘wasn’t an embarrassment. It was a terrible sadness.’
⁴
When Unity asked her sister: ‘You’re not one of those who would be cruel to people, are you?’ Nancy answered gently that she was very much against that. The family looked on helplessly as the enormous girl rampaged around the cottage in High Wycombe (described in an American magazine as ‘a fabulous mansion’), as lacking in physical control as a Great Dane puppy, shouting at random, spilling her food. She wore Tom’s shoes, as her feet had grown along with the rest of her. The parlourmaid Mabel, who had moved to the cottage to help Sydney look after her, recalled finding Unity in the bath, up to her neck in water, completely still. ‘Now, no games with me, I said and pulled her out. She was not herself, oh no.’
⁵
Deborah, who lived at the house at the time, wrote a letter in which even her fearless spirit seemed subdued. The situation, she told Jessica, was ‘extraordinary and awfully horrifying’.

For David, exposed not just to the ruination of his Valkyrie daughter but to the worst excesses of the press, it was almost beyond enduring. He was a private, uncertain person beneath his aristocrat’s confidence, stumbling around an unfamiliar world with eyes thickened by cataracts. Uncle Matthew’s jousts with journalists, his suspected taste for publicity, belonged to another man altogether; as Nancy knew only too well, when she pictured him through the light-filled prism of her imagination.

Her fictional father would move closer to reality in her last novel,
Don’t Tell Alfred
, although Nancy could never quite bear to allow Uncle Matthew to give up, as David had done. He has a fine carapace of dogged bravery, but beneath it he is weary: ‘he was not well-preserved. He had gone through life with one lung... I can often remember, as a child, seeing him fight to get his breath – it must have been a strain on his heart. He had known sorrow, too, which always ages people. He had suffered the deaths of three of his children and those his three favourites...’ Back in 1940 the actuality of a dead child was still to come for David. But Jessica was gone, Diana had not been seen for eight years, Unity was lost – they had surely done for him, his bright daughters.

And then there was this public loathing, these accusations of Nazi sympathies. A letter to the Home Office in 1940 put the question: ‘Why should British food be used to feed traitors like Mosley, Mitford and Redesdale?’ It was the sort of thing that David himself might have asked, had he not been among those tainted by the handshake of Hitler. His wife’s continued sympathy for the German regime – whose very existence had reduced Unity to a dribbling, halting wreck – was untenable. He blamed Sydney for the perception that their daughter was a fraudulent invalid: she had been quoted as saying that Unity was ‘recovering well’. According to Nancy, the doctors in Oxford had given her mother a degree of hope that they had denied to David.
⁶
This was probably true, but at the same time Sydney was protecting herself, stating publicly that Unity would get better because it was what she had to believe. Her refusal to turn against Hitler may have been part of this delusion: if only Britain could have made peace with him, instead of agitating for war, Unity would still be herself. To David, the argument presented itself the other way around. The couple had the same wrangle about it during every wireless bulletin. It is possible that Sydney was obscurely glad to defy her husband, now that their thirty-six-year marriage had reached this arid place. There was so little left of the man she had married; his splendid animal ease in his own environment had hidden a complete inability to cope outside it. David would have freely admitted that Sydney was the stronger character. If he had given his daughters their ineffable charm, their toughness came from their mother. He had dominated the family throughout the playground years of the 1920s – had behaved foolishly in business, but it hadn’t seemed to matter too much; somehow he had bounced back to his magnificent self. Yet from the moment of Diana’s defection he had begun to crumble. Everything he had ever done seemed wrong. Now it was Sydney who accepted each day without regrets, who took over. She cared for Unity with a saintlike patience: teaching her to crochet, giving an hour of lessons, taking her for unsteady walks, while David watched his daughter through eyes like cloudy marbles, and could not deal with what he saw. ‘Muv has been
too
wonderful & absolutely given up her whole life,’ as Nancy wrote to Jessica. ‘Farve simply beastly, hardly goes near her.’ To Sydney, he had become useless, shamefully so. Yet in a different way she was useless to him – there was no comfort to be had from that impressive, insensitive woman – and the symbol of this rupture was none other than Adolf Hitler.

In February 1940, David told Nancy that he felt he could no longer live with his wife. Sydney moved back to Swinbrook, to the stone cottage next door to the pub, beside the busily rustling mill; a very beautiful setting, a metaphorical retreat to the childhood that Unity now inhabited, just a few steps from the churchyard where she would be buried. David removed himself to Inch Kenneth, taking with him a parlourmaid named Margaret Wright, with whom he formed a close (presumably sexual) relationship. She treated him as no other woman now did, as if he were still a man of importance, and this was essential to him. He maintained a closeness to Nancy, perhaps because he intuited that she shared some of his feelings towards Sydney. For ‘personal and private reasons’ he resigned as director of the National Employers’ Mutual General Insurance Association, the last in the succession of his many dutiful public posts, although later – as if in an act of atonement – he would pull himself together sufficiently to join the Home Guard in London
.
And in March he wrote to
The Times
, a long letter that was his own bewildered
De Profundis
.

I have had, during the last few months, to put up with such a volume of publicity in certain sections of the Press, invariably followed by a flood of anonymous letters of abuse, that I am prompted to ask if you will be so generous as to allow me a short space in which to make a statement.

All this has now been resuscitated by the decision of His Majesty’s Government to refuse to allow me to take my daughter to my home in Scotland... It would be highly improper of me to question it. What I do resent, however, is the undoubted undercurrent of suspicion and resentment created by the publicity to which I refer...

My only crime, if it be a crime, so far as I know, is that I was one of many thousands in this country who thought that our best interests would be served by a friendly understanding with Germany. In this, though now proved to be wrong, I was in good company... there is many a man in this country who has changed his mind on this matter since the days when the Prime Minister flew to Munich. I could not pretend that I have ever rendered this country any signal service. But I am satisfied in my own conscience that my military record is one of which I have no reason to be ashamed, and certainly today my only desire is to see the earliest possible victory for the Allies. One other matter which I find very wounding is that I am constantly described as a ‘Fascist’. Now, I am not, never have been and am not likely to become a Fascist...

Reading this sincere and hopeless document, it is not hard to understand why Nancy – who knew her father’s weakness, and reproached him for it, but held to the memory of his strength – offered him the gift of Uncle Matthew, with his eternal hatred of the Hun.

II

Had Unity returned to Britain hale and hearty, she might have been imprisoned under the Emergency Defence Regulations. Whether anything worse would have happened to her, it is impossible to know. The usual charges against her – that she was a friend of Hitler, an admirer of the Third Reich – did not equate to traitorous activity. But Herbert Morrison had flung out the accusation that she had assisted the enemy. Doubtless there were many who did believe that she had been some kind of agent for the Nazis. What would one have thought, as a member of the public back in 1940? Probably just that.

How much truth there would have been to such a perception is difficult to say; and this nuance, this need to draw a line between pro-Nazi sympathies and unpatriotic sentiment, between those who wanted peace with Germany and those who supported German aims, would become a peculiarly vexed, quasi-philosophical point. Of course it was not really a good time for arguing subtleties of this kind. War was not High Table. And it was quite natural, to see present guilt within past allegiances. Whether it was
justice
, to condemn outright those whose behaviour had formerly been legal, if distasteful, and now looked suddenly dangerous, is another question. But such was war. The enemy was also anybody who had ever supported the enemy.

Well: Unity had certainly done that, and in her
sui generis
position she had also been a potential conduit for information, from Germany to England and the other way about. In 1937, for instance, she had nonchalantly told the British ambassador that Hitler did not like Mussolini. And Hitler had remarked, in a recorded conversation, that the Mitford sisters ‘are very much in the know, thanks to their relationship with influential people’. He had then said something else: that on one occasion, in 1939, Unity had ‘exclaimed that in the whole of London there were only three anti-aircraft guns!’ Diana, who was present at the time, was described by Hitler as staring at Unity ‘stonily’. She was used to her sister’s loose-cannon behaviour, but this was something rather more. Later, Diana was at pains to make clear that Unity was probably repeating newspaper gossip; that she was in no position to hold such lethal information in 1939. Nevertheless what Unity said teetered dangerously close to treason. Britain
was
ill prepared for war. The fact that Germany would have known that anyway was hardly the point. Perhaps it was simply the old desire to tell Hitler things that would please, with no thought to what they might really mean. Unity, in Diana’s words, ‘was incapable of disloyalty to England’.
⁷

In April 1941, however, the Commons was again contesting this assertion. Unity had been seen in public that month at Deborah’s wedding to Lord Andrew Cavendish, at St Bartholomew’s church in Smithfield. Some families might have thought it politic not to have her there, but the Mitfords (and the Devonshires) were not the kind to be influenced by what ‘people’ might say. Unity was Deborah’s sister and that was that. Ever alert, the press glimpsed a woman among the guests who put a small handbag in front of her face; like a clue in a bad detective novel, the bag was embossed with the letters ‘U.M.’. So the furore started up again.

There is no question that in a photograph of the wedding, showing Unity outside the church with her old friend Mary Ormsby-Gore, she looked almost as good as new – certainly far better than her father. This was illusory, but it was understandable that a Labour MP in the House should have seized upon Unity’s resumption of her social life. Now that she was ‘recovered’, should she perhaps be detained? Perhaps her illness would be best described as ‘Quislingitis’,
⁸
for which the most appropriate treatment would be found on the Isle of Man, in an internment camp?

Herbert Morrison, by this time Home Secretary in Churchill’s coalition government, clearly knew more about Unity’s true condition and had subtly shifted stance. If her health and circumstances changed, he said firmly, then her situation would be reconsidered, but at that time it was unnecessary. ‘What my honourable friend is putting to me is that I should put people I do not like under detention, and I cannot do that.’ When a Conservative MP asked, disingenuously, why Morrison did not like Unity, there was a Labour heckle of: ‘Hitler does.’

Another MP referred to the ‘widespread feeling’ among the public that Unity had been given special privileges. To this Morrison said: ‘It is not a special privilege for a British citizen to be at liberty.’

A dignified reply, in the face of the urgent desire for retribution against Unity; but if she had not been damaged, if she had not replaced her love of Hitler with that for her goat, would the principle thus stated by Morrison have been upheld? At the start of the war, Nancy had written to Deborah, saying that everybody she met asked whether their parents had been interned yet. This was Nancy in teasing-cum-righteous mode, although it was true that Lord Londonderry, that erstwhile supporter of Anglo-German fellowship, had been obliged to deny publicly his own detainment. There is something almost comical about the thought of these former appeasers, running around excitably and proving their patriotism. Sydney, however, did not do so. Quite the opposite. In October 1939 she had written to her MP to complain about attacks upon Hitler. ‘Last war she would have found herself in jail,’ wrote Nancy to Jessica, in a spirit of shared leftism, before going on to say that another family Fascist, Oswald Mosley, was going about his activities unchecked.

Again, with that peculiarly Mitfordian conflation of the personal and the political, Nancy – who had never liked Mosley – was now even more antagonistic. This was not just because of the war, but the war conveniently justified any dislike. Similarly, she was also both irritated and obscurely pleased by the new closeness between Sydney and Diana, who from this time on would be conjoined in a mutual loyalty and affection. Nancy stood outside that particular enclave: her relationship with her mother was what it was, and there had been no rapprochement with Diana since the publication of
Wigs on the Green.
Ordinarily she would have minded, but the outbreak of war had, in a sense, freed her from the cling of those tiresome old emotions. The resentment of her mother, the jealousy towards Diana, could be channelled into the fact that they were a pair of old Hitlerites: most satisfactory. Nancy’s mood, febrile from all the dark nights at her first-aid post scribbling away at
Pigeon Pie
, was full of enjoyable fury towards anybody who was insufficiently anti-German. This did not include her husband, who had straightaway applied for a commission in the Welsh Guards. Diana’s husband was a very different matter; as the authorities were all too aware.