Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (33 page)

Lord Moyne was naturally genuine in his vehement anti-Nazi stance (it is a grim irony that within four years he would be assassinated by the Stern Gang, a Zionist terrorist group). So too in his fears for national security. The lawns of Sussex were rumbling with tremors from the guns in Dunkirk and Dieppe. Spies were seen everywhere, Nazis in the guise of nuns and so on. A woman named Olive Baker was charged with ‘intent to assist the enemy’ after sending postcards scrawled with propaganda, one which read: ‘What a lot of English people are pro-German!’ and was signed ‘Unity Mitford’. That particular family association did not help Diana’s cause.

So Moyne was doing his duty, as he saw it. But his bitterness towards Diana is palpable. The tactics employed against her read shabbily, and his report contained an alarming amount of hearsay. After reading the letter the Home Office took the view that Diana should be observed, not arrested. Lord Swinton, however, was ahead of them. Without hesitation he set in motion the order for her detention, whose co-signatory wrote to the Home Office: ‘I understand that the presence of Lady Mosley at large is the subject of wide and universal comment... In view of present circumstances I do feel very strongly that this extremely dangerous and sinister young woman should be detained at the earliest possible moment.’

Put like that, it sounds unanswerable. Described in those terms, it is easy to see Diana as a terrible figure. Those pale fanatic’s eyes, that appalling charisma. Far more than Mosley, she had the power to compel adoration. The fact that so many people loved her, for those characteristics of cleverness, humour, kindness, tolerance, warmth and charm that gleamed above her political beliefs – is this enough to exonerate her?

Diana had her own intricate belief system, constructed with her own fierce logic, underpinned by a refusal to repent. It made complete sense, and no sense, at one and the same time. To her, Germany was a ‘success story’. Of course she said none of this at the time, having no public profile; but later she wrote: ‘The economic revival of Germany under the National Socialists was speedy and impressive. Hitler’s thesis, that a country’s riches consist of the quality of its people (
Volk)
made him reject the idea that it was ruined... It was their work that could enrich it. Industry, agriculture and the building of a modern infrastructure absorbed the unemployed, and Germany became prosperous in a remarkably short time.’
¹⁶
This was what she admired in Hitler and his Reich, and what she believed – or wanted to believe – that Mosley could replicate in the tired, confused, bankrupt Britain of the 1930s. She wrote that ‘attentive audiences listened to Sir Oswald Mosley’s economic and social policy for what was then a very sick country with over two million unemployed’.
¹⁷
She despised the compromises of democracy. After the war she became an advocate of a united Europe. What she would have thought when the Eurozone began its descent into hell, the tumult that raged in noble countries like Greece, who knows: probably that Mosley should have been in charge. She believed in large solutions, grand plans, big men. The fact that such thinking carries with it the inevitable implication of destruction, including that of the civilizations that she valued so dearly, did not seem to worry her. In a part of herself, she liked it. And it was – to be frank – part of what fascinated those who fell under her spell: they bathed in the light and wondered about the darkness.

How much of this thinking was Diana’s, and how much Mosley’s? The quality of Diana’s loyalty was such that she would continue to support his aims, long after it had become apparent that he had no political future. What she herself would have believed, had the love of Mosley not entered her soul, is impossible to say: perhaps she would still have thought all these things. More likely not. The other elements in her nature would have allowed for scepticism. She expressed a faint hint of this when, in 1966, she wrote to Deborah – always the person to whom she could speak most freely – that she had faith in Mosley as ‘an outstandingly clever person who is about eighty per cent right in his ideas’. Back in 1940, there was no room for even twenty per cent’s worth of doubt. Having come this far with Mosley, Diana had above all to convince herself that she had not set herself apart from society on account of a bunch of deluded buffoons in jackboots. As with Unity and the Nazis, there was a powerful sense in which she had been caught up in a
folie à deux
.

But it had been her decision to associate with the Nazis in Germany, and there is no denying that she had enjoyed it. She had glimpsed their evil and deliberately shut her eyes, even though she herself was not evil. For this she
would
later repent, although she did not do so in the full-blown confessional way that would have convinced, and few really believed her. Meeting Hitler ruined her life, she would say, and that of her husband. It is difficult to understand how so intelligent a woman could not have foreseen this at the time. What she had thought would happen – whether she had believed that there would be no war with Britain, or that Germany would help to advance her husband’s career – is another imponderable. In her way, again like Unity but without the madness, she had seen herself as playing a part in politics, the old-fashioned woman’s part that cajoles and suggests, that achieves by flattery.
She
had been flattered, by the regal, sidelong position in which she had been placed by men of power. It was such a bizarre and interesting deployment of her beauty, which made its own rules. That, she had probably been unable to resist.

Perhaps some natural law decrees that if a woman is given every single gift, the Wicked Fairy at the christening must also have her say. One cannot help but wish that it had been otherwise, and that Diana had channelled all that she had in some other direction. The editor of her collected writings later wrote, astutely: ‘If Britain liked intellectuals in the way France does, she might have wanted to be one’
¹⁸
– that indeed was what she most naturally was, albeit of the radical tendency. If she herself ever thought this way, that she had taken a fundamental wrong turning, she would never have admitted it. Her own choices had brought their consequences, and she dealt with them like the person that she was: one in a million, for good and for ill.

In October 1940, she was questioned like all other detainees by the Advisory Committee, which met at a hotel in Ascot. Its chairman was Norman Birkett, for whom Tom Mitford had once worked as a junior barrister. One of the members sent Diana a bottle of claret for her lunch. There was a sense, still, behind the formalities, of Diana being treated in a particular way because of who she was – ‘lovely
One
’; except that it was precisely because of who she was that she was there at all. Diana was not the only woman interned under Regulation 18b. But she was the most notable, and she suffered correspondingly. Whether one likes it or not, a woman will always be blamed more than a man for the same transgression, unless she seeks forgiveness in appropriate self-abasing style. That is the way of the world. And Diana, who looked so feminine, was indeed beautiful to a degree that would have aroused great envy, scorned to conduct herself in a manner appropriate to these looks. She was forbidding, restrained, ‘masculine’ in her self-containment. To the public she was a hate figure, as only a woman can be. She was exposed to the equivalent of today’s Twitter mob (#bangupmosleybitch). The Advisory Committee would have been all too aware that Diana risked physical attack if she were freed. House arrest at Rignell was an option, but it would have been so deeply unpopular. As Diana spoke, she knew this.

Her interrogation was a long one, and her brave, cool answers are extraordinary, oddly reminiscent of Anne Boleyn some four hundred years earlier, who had also been found guilty of crimes framed to achieve that particular end. Diana ‘made no pretence of being anything other than contemptuous,’ wrote Nicholas Mosley. In one exchange she was asked whether Hitler was still a friend of hers. She replied: ‘I have not seen him for some time.’

‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Do you still entertain the same feeling for him?’

‘As regards personal and private friendship, of course I do.’

‘Did you hear the bombs last night? That is Mr Hitler, as we suggest. Does that kind of thing make any difference to you – the killing of helpless people?’

‘It is frightful. That is why we have always been for peace.’

She was asked about the proposed radio station, and her answers were convincing with regard to its purely commercial intent. The damage, as far as the Committee was concerned, was rather the way in which the concession had been won: because she was so close to Hitler.

‘Did you convey to him,’ she was asked, ‘the idea that you were rather sympathetic towards his point of view?’

‘Well, yes, I was.’

‘That is quite honest. And therefore you conveyed that idea to him?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘That was rather siding with him against this country?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘It was rather saying, “My country is in the wrong”?’

‘Not my country. I absolutely differentiate between my Government and my country.’

How remarkable she was! Whatever one thinks of what she said, one can hardly deny her that. Similarly, when asked whether Hitler was somebody who could be trusted, she replied: ‘We should not put ourselves in a position where we should have to trust.’ And the Committee, compelled by her despite itself, as so many people were, was forced to say: ‘You are exceedingly intelligent on these matters... you do betray, in the real sense of the word, an intelligent view about these things.’ Doubtless they had expected something like Diana’s fearless display, the image of glacial superiority that she presented; nevertheless it must have impressed them, and perhaps confirmed the belief that she could indeed be dangerous. But she was unable to behave otherwise. She would not deny what seemed to her the truth. In fact she seems almost to have taken pleasure in making it sound worse than it was; certainly that is the impression, as if Diana were conducting a perverse and deadly Mitford tease. Yes, she had liked Himmler. With regard to the reports she had read about the Gestapo: ‘I did not believe them very much.’ Yes, she knew Streicher. ‘He is a very simple little fellow... I do not know that he is as bad as he is made out to be.’ No, she was ‘not fond of Jews’. This was in contradiction of the fact that she had a number of good Jewish friends. Of course she did not then know all that would happen to the Jews. Years later she would write to Deborah that Hitler was ‘a part of history, a terrible part, but important’.
¹⁹
Yet to have said what she did in 1940 is a self-indictment: the irreducible part of Diana that cannot be explained or excused.

To the Committee, she refused to move beyond her stated position that Britain should negotiate peace with Germany, that the retaking of German ‘colonies’ had been Hitler’s right. Asked why he had then marched on to Belgium, she replied in her unmistakeable, unshakeable Mitford voice: ‘Hitler does not want Belgium. If you have ever been to Belgium, you will know it is a horrible place. It is just because they have to have the ports to fight on.’ When the war was over, she said, Western Europe would again be free. Her belief that the East would fall into the hands of the Soviets, which would be a bad thing, was indeed correct.

Expressing herself as she did, there was no sense in which Diana could ‘win’ her arguments, yet she did score one intriguing victory. Do you, she was asked, ‘have a great contempt for democracy?’

‘Yes.’

‘And so has Hitler?’

‘Yes.’

‘How can you say then that he admires this country, which is a democratic country?’

‘Because he admires England tremendously for its general characteristics.’

‘But I should have thought the characteristics of this country for years were democratic?’

‘I do not think it was democratic when we got the Empire and so on. We did not go to the Negroes and say, “Look here, you vote to have your rulers.” We went and took bits of the world.’

‘I see what you mean...’

Diana’s argument against her detainment was extremely straightforward. What she and her husband believed was not the issue. Now that the BU was banned, and therefore neither she nor Mosley had any propaganda vehicle, there was no reason to detain them. They had no desire for a German victory over Britain, and would never do anything to advance this: ‘my husband is the most tremendous patriot and adores his country. I feel it very strongly.’ And she was right, which made not the slightest difference. What she represented to Britain was something unacceptable. This was the other side of the issue, the public view. Two days after the hearing, the Committee wrote that she was ‘an attractive and forceful personality’ – quite true – who ‘could be extremely dangerous if she were at large’: most unlikely. It was also suggested that ‘the views of Hitler on the British statesmen have been to some extent coloured by the views put forward by Lady Mosley.’ Diana admitted to discussing Churchill with Hitler (and vice versa), although what she had said – that Churchill was ‘hurrying on with our armaments as much as he can’ – was hardly in the realms of treachery.

The most succinct exchange came when the Committee asked Diana why she thought she had been detained. She replied: ‘It was because I had married Sir Oswald Mosley.’

But there was more, as she later came to believe. It was also because she was the sister of Unity Mitford. The ‘crimes’ of which Diana was accused were more truly Unity’s; the questions she had been asked would have been more aptly put to Unity – but Unity, who had always been vulnerable in a way that Diana was not, had escaped a public trial and sentence. Therefore Diana had to endure it for her. This was not something that could be proved; nevertheless there is a logic to it. When the desired scapegoat is elusive, another must be found in its place. And so because of who Diana was, who her husband was, who her sister was, she was transported away from Ascot, back to Holloway jail. ‘My darling Boud,’ she wrote to Unity in December, ‘We have just been told that we may write one extra letter (for Christmas) so of course I shall use mine to you.’ Unity replied: ‘Oh Nard, I do so HOPE you had a lovely and beautiful Christmas, I prayed about it a terrific lot.’