Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (34 page)

IV

When Diana was first taken to Holloway, on 29 June, she had just finished packing up at Savehay, where she and Mosley had moved after the disposal of Wootton at the end of 1939. Now Savehay was to be requisitioned in two days’ time, and she was preparing to go to Pam’s house. She was sitting in the garden, reading, beside the pram that held Max, her eleven-week-old baby. When the police arrived, she was told that she could take Max to Holloway with her. She thought it better not. She was also told that she would probably be detained only for forty-eight hours: this was said to most of those arrested under Regulation 18b. On the way to London she asked the car to stop so that she could buy a breast pump, in order to resume feeding the baby when she returned.

Holloway was a terrible place for any woman. One can hardly say that it was worse for Diana because she was used to a life of comfort, extreme cleanliness, good food and beautiful things around her, but the shock of transplantation would have been extreme: like being kidnapped. The first four hours after admission were spent in a metal cage measuring four feet by four with a wire-mesh roof. Then she was locked in a dark cell with one tiny window blocked by rotting sandbags. There was no bed, just a mattress and some dirty blankets.

This was E wing, which also contained the execution shed. It was so damp that the mattresses were soaked through. Diana sat all night with her back against the brick wall. Almost immediately she realized that she would not be leaving in two days.

The physical effect of having been torn, almost literally, from her baby was an expression of the emotional torment: her breasts were excruciating and she was terrified to touch them, for fear of the dirt. She was told to wash down the prison landing, but could not move her arms. Another prisoner helped her. From the first, her status singled her out, and made her something of a heroine with the other BU women in the jail (Mosley held the same position at Brixton). Some of the warders sought to belittle her, remarking that it was all a bit different to what she was used to, eh? She would smile at their jibes in the Mitford way, which denied the concept of shame.

But the sudden enclosing horror of it all, and the knowledge that there was no sense of when it would end, was almost beyond imagining. As she would put it: ‘Those who have not been in prison can scarcely imagine how revolting are the lavatories, how uneatably disgusting the food, how freezing the cells in winter, what complete nonsense the idea that prisoners are being trained for a trade, or fitted for life outside, or that anything at all is being done except to degrade their bodies and unutterably to bore and depress their minds.’ The state, as she perceived, preferred to lie to itself about the redemptive powers of prison: ‘the ponderous machinery of English hypocrisy is always set in motion when anything “unpleasant” is under discussion, whether it be sex, or crime, or capital punishment, or just the diet of some poor wretch condemned to sit for a stretch in one of HM Prisons.’
²⁰
This was a typical Diana sentence, in which the natural Mitford clarity of thought is tuned up by her particular quality of rigour; it is the kind of writing that makes one wish, rather passionately, she had not deployed her citrus-sharp brain on justifying the darkly indefensible.

The sanitation at Holloway was indeed a disgrace: ‘one never stopped dreading the lavatory,’ she later wrote to Deborah. One outside privy was marked with a red cross, for use only by those with venereal disease; more than once sewage flooded the stone floor. Meals, which were served with the pudding on the plate alongside the main course, included a fish pie that even the prison cats could not eat, although Diana found the corned beef ‘delicious’. The cocoa was covered with a layer of grease, which the women used for face cream. They also borrowed books in red bindings from the library, rubbed the cloth with their fingers and transferred the colour to their lips. These small vanities were essential. ‘One of the saddest sights in prison,’ wrote Diana, ‘was the piebald heads, with a few inches of golden, crimped hair hanging down below the black, brown or sometimes grey.’
²¹

Soon she was transferred to F wing, along with the other internees, and this was better. The women were allowed to wear their own clothes. There was a small kitchen, in which they would fry up tiny potatoes found in the garden; they were also permitted to order in small amounts of food and in one letter Diana, whose standards remained refined, asked Pamela to send her some dill. The cells were very dark, especially during air raids, so there was no possibility of reading after lights out. Nevertheless books were a great solace. In prison, as Diana said, ‘The need is for either beauty, wit and elegance, or for what the Germans call “
das Erhabene
” (which can be more or less translated as “the sublime”).’
²²
Where others might have sought mindless escapism, Diana read Racine. Mosley sent her a whole Stilton, and for weeks she lived on this, together with a small glass of port. She received one half-hour visit per fortnight, usually from her mother, who would later bring Deborah, and Diana’s children. At first she was allowed just two letters a week, and these were from Mosley. If he felt any guilt about the pass to which he had helped bring his wife, he did not show it, but neither would she have wanted that – far better was his cheerful encouragement: ‘You are such a brave and wonderful Percher.’ (This nickname came from the magnificent white Percher horses, which Mosley thought she resembled; tellingly implying strength as much as beauty.) A very early letter had come from Gerald Berners, perfect in his lightness and loyalty, never remotely embarrassed about Diana’s situation. He had written to ask whether he should perhaps send a peach containing a small file? The Home Office kept the letter for months.

When the restriction on post was lifted in August, Deborah – equally immune to the notion of shame – wrote: ‘Oh, I do long to see your cell.’ Deborah’s world at this time was a lesser hall of hell, despite her engagement to Andrew Cavendish. She was living at the Swinbrook cottage with Unity, who had taken possession of the small sitting room and had conceived an irrational dislike of Deborah (‘she
so
hates me’). To be normal within such a family was a strange situation indeed. The bright good humour of Deborah’s letters is therefore all the more impressive, although she later condemned herself for selfishness, saying that her thoughts at that time were almost wholly with Andrew, and very little with her sister and mother. At the age of sixty Sydney moved doggedly back and forth between Swinbrook and Holloway, where the buses stopped to the conductor’s cry of ‘Lady Mosley’s suite!’ (good old English humour, nothing like it). Diana’s admiration for her mother now hardened, as the true quality of Sydney’s character revealed itself. On one occasion she did break: she confessed that she was at her wits’ end with Unity. ‘And you, Diana darling, who could do something with her, locked in here...’ But it was a brief moment of weakness. Generally, all was strength. She sent warm clothes; she put money on account to be spent in Harrods:
malgré tout
these women remained who they were. She wrote repeatedly to MPs about her daughter’s imprisonment without trial. The question of 18b was raised in the House by some of its braver members. Churchill was also increasingly uneasy; he asked for the detainees’ conditions to be improved (and for Diana to have a daily rather than a weekly bath, a concession that amused her for its naïvety. Such a thing was impossible in Holloway).

But to be jailed with no notion of when one will be freed is a peculiarly refined kind of torture. Hope remains – perhaps this will be the day? – then as the day passes, and nothing changes, hope becomes merely a mockery. When the bombs fell on London in 1941, and thirty-eight incendiaries exploded in the grounds of Holloway jail, what Diana minded was the noise; the possibility of death was an irrelevance. What she had said to the Advisory Committee, that she did not think a woman in her situation would be imprisoned in Germany, was a bad joke (as she surely knew). Yet her words were powerful: ‘I am sure they would never take a woman from a tiny baby.’ This separation without end, not just from Max but from her three other sons, was endured in the knowledge that other BU women with young children had been released by Christmas 1940. She spent a night in her cell, waiting for news, while Jonathan was taken to hospital for an emergency appendectomy: permission to see him was denied by the Home Office. Alexander, aged two, was brought to see her; he ‘often had to be forcibly dragged away from Diana, his tears soaking her clothes’.
²³
After a visit, his nanny wrote that Alexander ‘enjoyed his day I am sure but the time was far too short. He keeps saying “Mummy today”.’ Whatever Diana had done – and she had done nothing, really, except be who she was – this was surely itself a kind of evil? The children spent time with Bryan at Biddesden but in the main were cared for by Pam, who took them in with their nanny. In one letter Diana wrote asking her sister to give ‘Miss Gillies’ her love.

After eighteen months the nanny moved with the boys to Diana’s former home, Swinbrook House, in which they stayed as paying guests (they also visited Deborah, where Alexander and Max told her ‘not to talk at table’). For Diana this was a relief; many years later she wrote to Deborah of how she had dreaded Pam’s letters. Pam seemed unable to perceive what Diana was suffering, separated from her children. On one occasion she boasted merrily of taking Alexander for a walk through a field full of thistles. ‘It’s not her fault, she doesn’t like babies.’ She also wrote, quite as if giving normal news, of having Diana’s beloved dog and mare put down. ‘It would have been better
not
to tell me about the animals.’ This was not cruelty on Pam’s part; she had offered to have the children, which in itself was a kindness. She was not spiteful, nor capable of the kind of glancing darts shot by Nancy or Jessica (although Diana later said that her children would have been better off in Nancy’s care). Pam was deficient in imagination, which was strikingly unlike the rest of the sisters. Her muted obtuseness had begun in childhood, partly due to her attack of infantile paralysis, and no doubt also to Nancy’s brittle teasing. It would have helped her to cope with Derek, now in the RAF and flying night raids over Germany with his usual brusque efficiency (‘he behaved much as he had on the racecourse,’ wrote Deborah). It made her unaware of what she was doing to Diana. It was not until more than thirty years later that she suddenly said to her sister: ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t always kind to Nanny & the boys.’

It is perhaps inappropriate to say that Diana showed bravery in prison, given that there was nothing she could do but live through what was happening to her. Yet her spirit was unbowed: a very Mitford quality. They
were
brave women. They passed through calamitous events and remained themselves. Even Unity did, in so far as she was able. This was Sydney’s nature, although not David’s. Much of the fascination of the Mitford girls lies in this indestructible sense of
One
that they carried so lightly. Even the image of Diana in jail does not convey abasement or ugliness; rather a tall, straight, undiminished figure, glowing with the fervency of outrage.

She had spoken a little scathingly of Churchill to the Advisory Committee – ‘He is more interested in war than anything in the world’ – yet it was he, more than anybody, who was working on her behalf. Baba Metcalfe, a less bitter woman than her sister Irene, had approached Churchill to ask if something might be done for Mosley, who was declining physically. Tom Mitford, now a serving officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, also sent a message to Churchill through his son Randolph. Tom had visited Diana several times in Holloway and knew what she wanted more than anything except freedom: to be imprisoned with her husband.

Whether impelled by family loyalties, or a sense that justice required him to do so, in November 1941 Churchill sent a letter to Herbert Morrison. ‘Feeling against 18b is very strong,’ he wrote. ‘Sir Oswald Mosley’s wife had now been 18 months in prison without the slightest vestige of any charge against her, separated from her husband.’ Morrison felt unable to order the Mosleys’ release, given how strongly the public wanted them to remain in jail. Nevertheless he did what he could: the order was given that the fifteen couples held under 18b be transferred to married accommodation. A separate block at Holloway, formerly the parcels office, was prepared to receive three of these couples, including the Mosleys.

Diana’s husband moved in with her on 20 December. She later wrote that ‘one of the happiest days of my life was spent in prison’. The two years that they would then spend together in the Parcels House, growing vegetables, occasionally having their children to stay, fused their marriage into indissolubility. Out in the world, Mosley had been a rover and a bounder. Now, in this little island of domesticity within the cold clutch of Holloway, he was Diana’s only. She had seen off all the competition: the Curzon sisters, the army of Blackshirts. And Mosley was a good companion, full of jokes and kindness towards the woman whose life he had destroyed.

Although it was he who had given cause for jealousy, it is not surprising that he was the one who displayed it: Diana would never have been unfaithful, but Mosley knew exactly what most men thought of her, and there was surely a sense for him, too, of holding her captive at last. This possessiveness would grow stronger after their release. It had already been made apparent, as Diana suggested many years later, when she wrote to Deborah that her husband had perhaps felt safer when she was living at Wootton, away from all her adoring friends. Indeed her removal in 1936 to that house in Staffordshire, beautiful though it was, had marked an end to her London life (Germany was another matter). Yet to Deborah she wrote that, such was her love for Mosley, ‘I look back on Wootton as a dream of happiness.’