Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (38 page)

The wedding reception was held at Rutland Gate, from which the refugees had now departed. Just a couple of days previously a bomb had sliced two nearby houses in half, shaking Deborah as she lay in bed in the mews behind. ‘The poor old house (no. 26), quite empty with all the ballroom windows blown in... looks slightly dreary,’ wrote Sydney to Jessica, describing how it had nonetheless been magically enlivened by the blooms of giant red camellias sent by the Devonshires, ‘from the tree planted by Paxton
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100 years ago’. Jessica – determinedly not giving an inch – sent a faintly sour telegram, saying that Deborah had ‘nearly’ got her duke (Andrew was a second son). Unity, unaware of the press who had watched her every move, wrote happily to Diana: ‘Well, Nard, about the Wedding!!!! Well, it was quite heaven... The only person who looked ghastly was dear old Farve; he looked so sad.’ David, now a private in the Home Guard, wore his uniform, ‘which was also rather depressing as it wasn’t even long enough. Horrors!!’ Unity was quite right about his appearance. He had the air of a man close to death, a study in accustomed grief. But Deborah – ‘she looked MARVELLOUS’ – was as flower-like as the great camellias in her tall wreathed headdress, and an abundance of white tulle like foam on the waves: the dress, by Victor Stiebel, had been made six weeks before the start of clothes rationing and would have taken all her coupons for years to come.

After the honeymoon in one of the Devonshires’ many homes – Compton Place at Eastbourne – Andrew was posted to the 5th Battalion Coldstream Guards, and Deborah moved to the Rookery, a rather dark and damp house on the Chatsworth Estate. As she later wrote: ‘Rationing and coupons ruled our lives.’ She described asking the butcher for a tongue – offal was not rationed – and being told that she was thirty-sixth on the list. A soldier home from Italy brought with him a lemon, which by this time had become an unimaginable luxury. He placed it on the counter of the local post office and charged tuppence for the Red Cross to let people smell it.

Deborah wrote bravely to Diana when her first baby was born in November, a premature son who died almost immediately. It was, she said, nothing like as bad as when Jessica lost Julia, because she had never known the child. What she did not tell Diana was that after the birth the gynaecologist had barked at her: ‘You don’t expect the baby to live, do you?’ Sydney had been there and was, she wrote, ‘quite wonderful’. Nancy said the same thing to Diana about their mother, when Sydney visited the hospital after her daughter’s hysterectomy: ‘Muv was wonderful.’ But she meant it very differently, that her mother was reacting with a vagueness that was too funny to be believed: asking who would ever see the scar on Nancy’s stomach, casually recalling the syphilitic nursery maid. Deborah was cared for by Sydney at Swinbrook after the loss of her baby. Nancy left hospital to go back to her life in London. It is impossible to know whether the fault lay with the mother who did not offer comfort, or with the daughter who appeared not to want it. Something of both: a kind of emotional stalemate.

Deborah would have three healthy children – Emma, Peregrine and Sophia – and Jessica two sons, Nicholas and Benjamin, with Bob Treuhaft. But only Diana was truly fecund. Deborah’s pregnancies became a business of creeping through the days, not daring to buy new baby clothes, in a state of desperate hope that was dashed four times. She had another miscarriage in 1945, as it happened a twin. The other twin was born only slightly premature; after eight hours he suffered a brain haemorrhage. ‘The village nurse... called me Your Ladyship through all the most undignified parts,’ Deborah wrote to Nancy, striving for the Mitford lightness. She lost another baby in 1953. The dead children were named, and baptized – without her knowledge at the time – by her mother-in-law. Meanwhile Pamela had undergone surgery in 1937 to help her fertility, but miscarried that year after Derek drove her over the bumpy roads of Norway. Later both Deborah and Diana would speculate as to whether Pam’s dislike of children proceeded from this vexed personal history. As ever with Pamela, the question is difficult to answer, but there is probably something to her sisters’ belief. Despite her husband’s fairly obvious reluctance she did fall pregnant again, and lost a baby at six months towards the end of the war.

Unity, meanwhile, had wanted a family of her own; and even now still longed for one. A friend of Nancy’s, Mollie Friese-Greene, later recalled her saying ‘when I get married, I should like to have ten children.’
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Naturally enough, Unity had also found God. ‘Nard, I am in the Choir!!’ she wrote to Diana at the end of 1940. After her confirmation she visited a Christian Science practitioner; this was somehow discovered by the
Daily Express
, which reminded its readers of the movement’s strong links to Nazism. Later, however, Unity would try other churches, and spoke to Mollie about her desire to become a Catholic.

Her condition had improved somewhat, and would do so increasingly, at least in a physical sense. By 1941 she was able to go for little expeditions on her own and take the bus into Oxford. There she would lunch at the British Restaurant – a wartime café where meals cost a shilling – but her appetite was uncontrolled, as were her table manners. She would go up for a second meal, which was not really done, especially for Unity Mitford; Nancy, not unkindly, said that one could get an extra bowl of soup by wringing out Unity’s sleeves after she had eaten. She worked briefly in a canteen in Burford, until the woman who had employed her was told that she had to go: ‘You can’t have her in the house.’ More intriguingly, a Home Office file – classified under the 100-year rule, but opened prematurely – suggested that Unity had had a boyfriend: a married RAF test pilot, with whom she was said to have been ‘consorting’ in November 1941. The problem with information of this kind is that it is extremely hard to assess – who reported it? How reliable was their judgment? Does the detail of the pilot’s married status imply malice on the part of the informant? And who was this RAF man, who got his kicks out of dallying with Hitler’s brain-damaged lady friend? It is not impossible that Unity did have a bizarre little romance, but the hard evidence of her sisters’ letters – as written at the time – do not portray an image of a likely adulterous seductress. Unity’s own letters, meanwhile, make the scenario seem even less feasible.

So too does the recollection of Mollie Friese-Greene, who worked with Nancy at the bookshop Heywood Hill in Curzon Street, where Unity would occasionally visit when she and Sydney were staying in London. Nancy had taken the job of managing the shop – at the suggestion of James Lees-Milne – in March 1942. She was still thin and fragile after her hysterectomy, but the work was a civilized delight to her; not merely because it paid £3 10s a week. Heywood Hill himself became a friend, and she made the shop into something like her own club. The enchanting interior was filled with her old friends, de facto members like Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, Harold Acton, Gerald Berners, the Sitwells. (It was in Heywood Hill that Osbert Sitwell, after the result was declared in the 1945 General Election, ran in and seized the till, crying ‘Labour has begun!’) Heywood Hill was indeed another heavenly boost to Nancy, along with the entrée to France and the affair with
le capitaine
Roy. The admiring Acton later described her crisp, chic vigour – she walked from Maida Vale to the Mayfair shop every day – and her ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds’ prettiness. She sent quantities of books to Diana in Holloway, and wrote to tell her of the shop’s merry social ambience; a delayed revenge, perhaps, for the days when her friends had decamped
en bloc
to worship at the feet of the young Mrs Guinness in Buckingham Street.

Mollie Friese-Greene, who was Nancy’s assistant at Heywood Hill, later recalled how one day a ‘stranger came up and said, Do you think it is wicked to commit suicide? I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it, I said, let’s have a chat.’ This was her first meeting with Unity, who would come to the shop in between afternoons at the Curzon cinema across the road – she had always loved films. The sweet-natured Mollie would sit with Unity looking through a newspaper called the
Matrimonial Times
, a sort of dating agency publication (imagine turning up with your carnation to find Unity Mitford waiting for you). Again, this does not suggest that Unity was having a genuine love affair. Nor does the way in which Nancy would say, in a tone of brusque fondness: ‘Now Miss, you’re being a perfect nuisance, go away.’ It was, as Mollie put it, ‘like having a child’. The Mitfords were typically unembarrassed by her, and in 1946 – for instance – she would spend Christmas at Edensor House on the Chatsworth Estate, although care was taken to keep her away from the vicar as (according to Deborah) she was liable to ask if clergymen enjoyed sleeping with their wives. In public, however, she could still provoke an uneasy reaction; even when the war was over a crowd of women were angered by the sight of her waddling down a London street: ‘Oh! it’s disgusting
.
’

Another imponderable is how aware Unity was, how restored her memory of the recent past and what she now thought about it. Although her mental age was said to be that of a ten-year-old, and her letters prove that she had difficulty in writing, she still had her skewed Mitford sharpness, as with her remark about her father’s too-short Home Guard uniform (very much the sort of thing that Nancy would have said). James Lees-Milne observed that she expressed herself like a ‘sophisticated child’. And she does seem to have remembered a certain amount. As early as May 1940 she was rather surprisingly taken to a tea party, together with Deborah and Sydney, at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, where Churchill held secret meetings during the war. Among the guests was Duff Cooper, who had been chief among anti-appeasers and had resigned after the Munich agreement. (‘Such little influence as he was able to exert in the 1930s was a dangerous influence,’ Diana later wrote: she despised Cooper.) In a letter to Jessica, Deborah remarked that she feared for a moment that Unity would not shake his hand at the party: ‘however she just did’. Unless Deborah was merely showing concern for her sister’s manners, this of course implies that Unity knew precisely who Duff Cooper was, and what he represented.

In November 1942 Unity attended another party, this time thrown by Nancy, who by now was back in her Maida Vale home. Nancy was good to Unity; she found disinterested kindness easy. She ‘crammed’ her sister into one of her own dresses, perforce left undone down the back but covered with a coat. Unity refused to make up her face, but André Roy – the most good-natured man Nancy ever had relations with – did it for her. ‘So in the end,’ Nancy wrote to Diana, ‘she looked awfully pretty.’ However another guest at the party, Osbert Lancaster, took a different view. Nancy had placed him next to Unity, with Roy to her other side, and Lancaster later recalled ‘this Mitford giantess, unmistakable, aggressive’. When Roy suggested politely that she spoke better French than he did English, she reportedly fired back: ‘Thank the Lord, not a word of the beastly language.’
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There were suggestions that she held to her fanatical pro-German stance, although her way of showing this was surreal. Another friend of Nancy’s, Billa Harrod – upon whom she based the sane, calm, satisfying Fanny, narrator of
The Pursuit of Love
– was asked to ‘be nice to Bobo, she runs up to everybody like a huge big dog wagging her tail, and nobody is nice to her’. Billa recalled Unity again saying that she wanted children: ‘the eldest to be called Adolf’.

Diana, Deborah and Pamela protested strongly against the biography of Unity in which such information appeared.
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Nevertheless James Lees-Milne, who saw her at Swinbrook in 1944, reflected similar views in his diary, writing that Unity ‘talked about the Führer, as though she still admired him’. Despite the damage to her brain, her memories of Germany and Hitler appeared intact. As to her opinion of them: her old friend Mary Ormsby-Gore did recall one strange, sudden moment when Unity asked: ‘Why didn’t you stop me?’ ‘We tried to,’ said Mary. Yet when she saw footage of the liberated concentration camps Unity apparently dismissed it as propaganda; perhaps she had to do so, to protect herself from too much reality. Diana did the same thing, to an extent, but with Unity the evidence is especially confused as her mind had always been a mystery; ‘the inner Boud is almost impossible to describe’, as Jessica put it.
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. How much more so now that she was still herself, but a ruined self. James Lees-Milne wrote that he found the sight of this heavy, plain young woman extremely sad; although he did not seem to think that Unity was unhappy.

Which makes her first question to Mollie Friese-Greene an interesting one: was Unity referring to her previous attempts at suicide, asking whether her act had been a wicked one? Or was she thinking of trying again? How deep, in other words, was her sense of her essentially hopeless situation? At times she appeared contented, lumbering about with her peculiar gait, writing excitedly to her sisters about their new babies and enjoying occasions such as Deborah’s wedding. Her obsession with going to church was a consolation, a conduit for her vast emotions. Yet she had expressed appalling frustrations when Deborah was living with her at Swinbrook, raging randomly, taking a fierce dislike to her sister. To Osbert Lancaster, who spoke to her of his fear of the air-raid sirens, she said: ‘It’s so odd for me, because I want to die.’

She was deeply distressed when told that she could not see Diana in jail; although in late 1941 this restriction was lifted, at which she expressed similarly excessive joy (‘Oh, Nard! Oh, Nard!’). In the spring of 1943, by which time the Mosleys were together in the Parcels House, a report was written on one of Unity’s visits: ‘Lady Mosley was most anxious to hear what [her children] did but Miss Mitford didn’t wish to talk about it. Somebody had told her that she was very beautiful but she did not make the best of herself [was this the kindly André Roy?] and she was anxious to have Lady Mosley’s opinion.’ Diana would have been patient, wonderfully reassuring as she could be, but the strain must have been great; and worse still the realization of what her mother had to bear every day with the incessant gabbling questions, the inability to concentrate or engage, the delusional desire for children (and, every night, the incontinence). It was around this time that Sydney at last confessed to Diana her despair: ‘I don’t know what to do with her.’