Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (35 page)

In its way, it
was
a great love story. And in jail these two remarkable people were bonded as few couples are: by separation from the outside, by an intensity of shared suffering, by a knowledge of their pariah status. Diana’s love for the man who had taken her down with him was now absolute. Any choice about that, had she wanted one, was gone. Another woman might still have reneged on him, but that was not her nature. Instead she went the other way and dedicated herself to him even more completely. It was Mosley’s greatest triumph, this subordination of his wife. For Diana, it had to have been worth it. Otherwise, what had it all been for?

V

What Diana did not know, and would not know for another forty years, was that another person had been involved in her betrayal to the authorities.

Probably these private interventions – as made by Lord Moyne – made no difference. Once Mosley was detained, it was perhaps an inevitability that Diana would be too. But Nancy had not been sure of this, back in May 1940, when she wrote to her friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant: ‘I am thankful Sir Oswald Quisling has been jugged aren’t you but I think it quite useless if Lady Q is still at large.’

And so Nancy, still high on her particular cause, did her bit to ensure that Diana would be detained by ringing influential acquaintances, including Gladwyn Jebb at the Foreign Office. When Diana was arrested, Nancy may have believed that this was her own doing. The following day she was summoned to an interview with Jebb. The jolt of reality might have led her to pull back, to speak in Diana’s defence, but instead she did her very best to ensure that there was no early release or house arrest for her sister. Diana, she told Jebb, was ‘an extremely dangerous person’: that phrase again. She ‘advised him to examine [Diana’s] passport’, to see how often her sister had been to Germany. Nancy had known that Diana went to Berlin, but not that these visits were usually to discuss the radio station; she would anyway have put a sinister interpretation upon that deal. One can picture the scene, the distinguished questioner in his stately, secretive office, the elegant woman in her patched-up clothes, sipping from the Crown Derby and speaking in her quick, light drawl the words that would condemn. ‘Not very sisterly behaviour,’ she wrote to Violet Hammersley, ‘but in such times I think it one’s duty?’ The question mark suggests a faint desire for reassurance. Yet the mere fact of confession implies a belief that she was right. Everybody was suffering because of men to whom Diana had played the silken confidante; why therefore should she not have her own term of trial?

Nancy had done precisely what she threatened to her mother, when she wrote that she would ‘join hands with the devil himself to stop any further extension of the disease [of Fascism]’. So had she acted out of principle? Was this her answer to the sisters who had fallen into the arms of ideology – that she should embrace non-ideology with the same fervour, and act to destroy what she saw as her own enemy? It is possible. Nancy also suggested that Pam and Derek Jackson should be kept under observation, given their Fascist tendencies. They were, she told Jebb, ‘anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and defeatist’. Given Derek’s RAF exploits and Pam’s apolitical nature, this was nonsense; but perhaps Nancy believed it.

There is no doubt that she was fierce in the matter of the war. ‘The huns must be fought,’ as the heroine of
Pigeon Pie
put it. Like any Londoner Nancy was in the thick of it, trying to laugh to scorn the bombs that were shredding her nerves, doing her stint for the war effort. After working at the first-aid post she took a job finding holiday billets for ARP workers, and later served as a fire-watcher. In October 1940 she moved back to Rutland Gate with her father – her Maida Vale home was dangerously close to the target of Paddington Station – and had the care of a number of Polish Jews (‘my sweet refugees’). She loved this, of course. It enraged her mother so much. Sydney, she claimed in a letter to Violet Hammersley, had refused to live at the house after the Jewish evacuees had been there. Then she added: ‘Exaggerated?’ Surely yes, by Nancy herself. Her mother did complain about the dirt at Rutland Gate, which was absurd and unfair in the circumstances. But then Sydney was living under near-intolerable pressure. They all were. Given Nancy’s run-ragged days and sleepless nights (‘oh dear there are the sirens again what a horrid life’); her fears for Peter in France and for Tom Mitford, her comrade in war service; her sadness when she contemplated her father, who agonized still over his brief alliance with the enemy; her memories of the pitiful refugees in Spain and the militaristic chaotic horror of the Blackshirt meeting at Olympia – given all this, it may be that she was genuine in her motives when she informed on her sisters. She may have seen herself in the position of somebody who, today, fears that a family member has jihadi sympathies. What does such a person do? Society expects them to inform. If they put personal considerations first, they are politically complicit.

In a way, the fact that Nancy also informed on the Jacksons is her ‘alibi’ for the crime of denouncing Diana. Otherwise one might have suspected her of pure and glinting spite. Actually, one
does
suspect her. The alibi was probably of her own making, a means to deceive her conscience. The Jacksons were not going to be sent to jail; for Diana, however, the consequences of betrayal were great, and Nancy knew this. Had she been writing about herself in a novel, she would have made it all too clear that those who purport to act out of principle are rarely as noble as they think they are – take Lord Moyne, for instance, with his little Jane Eyre spy and his friends in high places. In a novel, Nancy would have mocked him, and herself, with a delicate ironic sorrow. But life does not always welcome that kind of clear-sightedness. Otherwise Nancy would have recognized that few people could have done what she did. Jessica, perhaps; after the gift of baby clothes sent by Diana, she turned against her sister for good. The fact that she did not do this with Unity confirms the idea that Diana received all the hatred in Unity’s stead, simply because of who she was: invulnerable, glorious, enviable. With Diana, always, it was personal. The emotions that she aroused in people were so dreadfully strong. For Nancy, the twin power within the Mitford sisters, they were a powerful aperitif of affinity, respect, resentment; above all of jealousy. ‘I think’, said Deborah, ‘that Nancy was jealous of Diana all her life.’
²⁴
There had been mutual anger over the publication of
Wigs on the Green
, which had not dispelled in the intervening five years. Diana had expected her sister to abandon the book, and the much needed money that it might bring, in case what she wrote offended the damn Leader. Nancy had expected Diana to come to herself and laugh about it, even the digs against divorced women. The way in which they reacted to the rupture was typical: Diana, instantly withdrawn and unmoving, Nancy similarly stubborn yet uneasy beneath her cascade of defensive jokes. (‘I saw Diana at a lunch,’ she wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant in 1935, ‘she was cold but contained & I escaped with my full complement of teeth, eyes etc.’)

But this wrangle held so much more for Nancy, after all those years of growing up with that beautiful, unchanging, calmly smiling face in one’s midst. How hard it would have been, dealing with such a sister! Without lifting a finger Diana had compelled admiration from those whom Nancy wanted for herself: Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron. And there were other things, more difficult still. Nancy had miscarried a few weeks before the birth of Alexander in 1938. This wretched piece of timing happened again in 1940, when Max was born. She was obliged to swoon over Diana’s sons (whom she did in fact adore) even as she suffered those sad, bloody little endings. ‘Fancy favourite aunt how blissful’ she wrote to Diana in Holloway, having connived at the separation of these children from their mother. Even Diana’s relationship with Mosley – ridiculous though he appeared to Nancy – revealed the aridity of her marriage to Peter Rodd. How, then, to resist delight, when Mosley was toppled like the statue of a fallen dictator, and dragged Diana through the jeering crowds behind him? She could have done, of course; but she chose not to.

This was the central relationship of the Mitford girls, this push-and-pull between Nancy and Diana. For Nancy, denunciation was a means to even the score with one quick, almighty stroke. Yet it seems that the first attempt had not quite achieved her aim: in November 1943, when the Mosleys were released under house arrest, Nancy strode briskly into MI5 to tell them that the Home Secretary’s decision was wrong. Diana, she reminded them, sought ‘the downfall of England and democracy generally’. It is impossible that she should have believed this, although many others did. There was a public uproar after the release, as nasty in its way as Nancy’s scheming. A crowd marched in Trafalgar Square, carrying Mosley’s crude effigy hanging from a gibbet. By now they could not plead a legitimate fear of invasion: this was merely and grossly vengeful, like the ludicrous press stories about the Mosleys’ personal maid, about their private supply of coal, about a fashion show staged for Diana’s benefit. On one occasion Mosley sued for libel and won the case (the proceeds were spent on a fur coat to protect Diana from the desperate Holloway cold). More usually the Home Office was obliged to deny the stories. They need not have bothered, as everybody had made up their minds. The Mosleys were in the position of today’s ‘sexual predators’: no argument about proofs or degrees of guilt was possible.

Nor would the public believe the main reason for the Mosleys’ release, which was their state of health. Mosley had recurring phlebitis and, despite his staunch efforts to maintain fitness, had lost almost fifty pounds in weight. Diana was skeletal and white, with a low body temperature and feeble pulse. She became too ill even to play with her children when they visited. During an apparently incurable attack of gastric flu, she fell into a deep coma for four or five days when a fellow internee, the former BU member Major de Laessoe, cluelessly medicated her with an opium pill (‘one would have felt so awful for the poor Major if one had died’). Take castor oil, said the prison doctor, if it happens again. But Churchill was deeply uneasy about the prolonged imprisonment without trial. Sydney had visited his wife Clementine (who, in another life, had been bridesmaid at her wedding to David Mitford) to make a last desperate appeal. Soon afterwards, a medical report was sent to the Home Office, suggesting that to keep Mosley in jail for another winter might lead to his death and subsequent martyrdom. Herbert Morrison, nervous of his party, remained against the release. Nevertheless Churchill persuaded the Cabinet; it was back to the conundrum of what was Britain fighting for if not justice, even for the vilified; although these arguments meant little to a public worn down by bombs and bereavements. It is quite astonishing, at this remove, to consider what the government braved by releasing this couple, who would surely have been hated less had they been devoid of physical glamour. As it was they loomed like two great waxworks in the collective imagination: the pale-eyed Nazi bride and the rapacious Dracula, who could be pictured without rage only when contained within their cells. Once sprung from jail they provoked abusive mail, protests from the TUC, an angry debate in the House, and an open letter from Jessica to Churchill that read: ‘The release of Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley is a slap in the face of anti-fascists in every country and a direct betrayal of those who have died for the cause of anti-fascism.’ Nancy, no stranger to deceit, remonstrated with Jessica for writing what she did.

In the face of this, it is easy enough to see why Diana clung to Mosley as her companion in dishonour, and why she found such precious treasure in her mother’s loyalty: the quality that she came to value above all others. There was no logic to this public opprobrium. It simply served a purpose of expiation. Britain had suffered, and to attack those it had branded as traitors made it feel better. Let them suffer too. It was human nature, like Nancy’s
et tu Brute
betrayal. Nancy, said Diana many years later, ‘was the most disloyal person I ever knew’.
²⁵
In that sense, assuredly, the women could not have been more different. Yet in other ways they were very much alike, and recognized each other as such. Nancy, like Diana, could behave with great warmth and kindness. Both were abundant in humour, intelligence and imagination. Within them lay a well of emotions that went deeper than in the other sisters (except Unity?), a passionate capacity to feel, an inability to put up barriers without some cost to themselves. Nancy did not present the same mystery as Diana; she was deeply complex, ‘a very curious character’ as her mother put it; but she could be explained. Yet both sisters did things that cannot be excused.

Back in 1941 they were exchanging kindly letters: Holloway had, at least, healed the breach caused by
Wigs on the Green
. Nancy’s jealousy or rage against Diana had been assuaged by her act of treason, which would need to be repeated after the release from Holloway. Diana gave her sister money with which to buy herself presents – stockings, a Guerlain lipstick – ‘it brings tears to the eyes,’ wrote Nancy, probably sincerely. In November 1941 Diana arranged for grapes to be sent to the University College Hospital in London, where Nancy had been admitted after being seized with agonizing stomach pains during a stay with friends in Oxford. It was an ectopic pregnancy; her condition was serious and required immediate surgery. She begged the surgeon to preserve her fertility, but awoke from the anaesthetic to be told that her fallopian tubes had been removed. ‘Therefore,’ she wrote to Diana, ‘I can never now have a child.’

To her mother, Nancy had confessed that she could not bear the thought of the scar. ‘But darling who’s ever going to see it?’ It was also at this time that a doctor asked Nancy whether she had ever been infected with syphilis, and Sydney admitted to having employed a nursery maid who had had the disease. As ever with Nancy, the truth of what she wrote is hard to establish. Yet there is a powerful sense of a failure of sympathy in her mother: this, surely, she did not entirely invent. It was absurd, but not entirely incomprehensible, that Nancy thereafter blamed her mother for her inability to carry a child to term.