Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (39 page)

From July 1944, after D-Day, Sydney was allowed to take her daughter to Inch Kenneth, where they would thereafter spend half the year. Sydney farmed sheep, kept Shetland ponies, goats and – her old standby – hens. She made butter and cheese, while Unity wound a sheet around her waist to serve as a cassock and took possession of the island chapel. This, then, was a kind of peace.

Nevertheless a woman whose family ran the post office on the mainland, who held Unity in some affection, later said that she had not seemed happy: ‘You would see it in her eyes. I often think she’d known what she’d done.’ Wisdom after the event, perhaps. Yet it was confirmed, in a sense, by the letter that Unity had written to Diana in November 1941, in which she explained her situation as well as could be done, with a simple grasp of its complexities. ‘You see, when I first came back, I thought all this was a play, and I was looking on. Now, I know I have a part to play, & I can’t bear acting it!’

VIII

After their release from Holloway early on the morning of 20 November 1943, the Mosleys went to stay with the Jacksons at Rignell House. This was where Diana had been planning to go when she was arrested more than three years earlier. Savehay was still requisitioned, and they were forbidden to live in their flat in London. (Clementine Churchill had anyway told Sydney that there was a danger they would be lynched on the streets if released; Sydney replied coolly that they would take that risk.) By this time Derek was working as Chief Scientific Officer at Fighter Command Headquarters. He was not often at home, but Diana was nervous of imposing upon a man who did not even particularly like Mosley, despite his sympathy with the Fascist ideal. Nevertheless Derek showed his mettle. ‘Of course they must come.’ Pam, too, was impressive. She had not liked Mosley either but was shocked out of such judgments by his sickly appearance. Neither Jackson was frightened by the thought of the encroaching press, the crowd that had gathered at the gates of Holloway waving banners. So much anger, still, from so many people; while Desmond Guinness sent a letter to Diana from his school that began: ‘Darling Mummy, What News!’ Herbert Morrison, heckled loudly as he made a public speech, proclaimed: ‘This issue is a conflict between a dangerous emotionalism and mob rule and a reason respect for law and the constitution.’ George Bernard Shaw bravely, and truly, wrote of a situation in which the public could buy
Mein Kampf
in a bookshop but would not allow Mosley to defend himself. The Home Office, overwhelmed with letters of protest, stated: ‘Lady Mosley’s release is an almost greater source of aggravation than her husband’s.’ Such was the woman’s fate.

‘Nothing so beautiful was ever seen by human eye,’ Diana later wrote of the autumnal Oxfordshire landscape through which she and Mosley were driven, on their way to spend their first evening at Rignell. Sydney, who had used her month’s allowance of petrol, was waiting there with Deborah; Pam had used her stock of anthracite to feed the boiler; there was wine and clean linen. The idyll was brief, however. The house was instantly under siege: the phone rang incessantly, reporters hid behind every tree, Pam was shadowed and bellowed at as she walked her dogs. What Diana later described as the ‘sub-stockbroker’ Rignell was described in the press as the Mosleys’ stately home retreat. ‘Woman is being simply too killing,’ Diana wrote to Nancy, recounting how Pam would rush outside and say to the pressmen: ‘I dislike you intensely.’ Of the demonstration in Trafalgar Square, where Mosley’s effigy dangled from a gibbet, Diana – at her most mysteriously Mitford – said: ‘I wish I could go.’ Nancy replied that a friend had been caught up in the protests while trying to catch the Underground, and that only by chanting ‘Put Him Back’ was she allowed to join the queue for the tube.

Diana’s sang-froid was extraordinary, like everything else about her. Perhaps the joy of release was so great that nothing else mattered. At the same time it
did
seem as though the world outside meant nothing to her. It had, after all, done its worst. Hence the mantra of ‘being hated means nothing to me’. If any other woman on earth had said those words, one would doubt their truth. Not so with Diana. She had achieved a state in which the blithe Mitford confidence reached a heightened and insurmountable level. She genuinely did not care what anybody thought of her: a near-unique condition. The exception to this was Mosley, of course.
His
opinion, she would bend herself to accept. For the others, she trusted to the imperishable magic of ‘lovely
One
’: as long as people allowed her to do so, she knew that she could still cast her spell.

Derek, magnificent despite his oddity, and a renegade of the Mosley stamp, fought to keep his house guests after the Home Office informed him that they must go. Derek was privy to highly secret scientific information; Mosley – somewhat amazingly, given that events were turning so inexorably against Germany – was still considered a security threat. Perhaps suspecting that the real reason was official bloody-mindedness, Derek rang the Home Office and demanded to speak to Herbert Morrison (whom he knew to have been a First World War conscientious objector). Again amazingly, he was put directly through. He said to Morrison: ‘When you’ve got the DFC, the AFC and the OBE for valour, you can tell me what to do.’ This must have been rather satisfying, but it was also pointless; the Mosleys were effectively on the run, and finding an empty house at the time was almost impossible. Sydney suggested that they move to a half-derelict hotel near Swinbrook called the Shaven Crown (doubtless what some of the protesters would have liked to do to Diana). There they spent a strange Christmas with Diana’s four children; before she went searching, accompanied by police and still in a very weakened state, for a more permanent home. Eventually she found Crux Easton near Newbury. It was a large manor house with ten bedrooms: almost as if nothing had changed.

Whatever else happened to him, Mosley always had money to live somewhere nice – he gave £3,000 for Crux Easton – and to pay for staff. Within a short time, Diana had made a home for her king, with servants including a wonderful cook who had formerly worked for Gerald Berners. Mosley bought a cow. They had their own vegetables, and eggs from Sydney. People began to visit: Nancy, who had asked immediately if she could stay; Pamela; Tom, home from Italy; Deborah, back at Swinbrook while Andrew was on active service; the children, including Mosley’s three from his first marriage. There were also friends such as Osbert Sitwell – who wrote that ‘to have been unjustly deprived, as you have been, of a period of time, is beyond bearing’ – and Berners, who remarked of Diana’s police escort that nobody but she could now afford two footmen. John Betjeman later found a prep school willing to take two young boys with the devil’s surname. Life was an island, as it had to be. It was house arrest, as well as almost total social ostracism; the Mosleys could not own a car, nor travel beyond a seven-mile radius. But it was a return,
en petit
, to the cosmopolitan broad-minded civilization that Diana loved, in the face of the political beliefs that she refused to deny.

And this paradox was a nonsense, yet she would not change. She could not, had she wanted to, because Mosley was all. Because of him, the couple’s good friend Randolph Churchill was not invited to Crux Easton. (‘Why will they see Berners and not me?’ he asked Nancy). The simple reason was that Randolph’s father had urged war with Germany, and Mosley blamed Churchill indirectly for his and Diana’s imprisonment; despite her appeal to the old friendship with Clementine, Sydney also held Churchill responsible. This was really rather outrageous. Randolph had carried the message that brought the Mosleys together in Holloway, and his father had got them out of the place. Yet Mosley never forgave Churchill, whom he seemed to view as the demon agent of his own political downfall. Therefore Diana, of whom Churchill had always been very fond, did not forgive either. She had delicately mocked him to the Advisory Committee in 1940: ‘I think in his own character he is a person who enjoys war, and always saw himself as a great leader.’ Plenty of others had shared this view. Probably it was not too far off the mark. But ten years after the war, when the devastation of much of Europe – as predicted by Mosley – had revealed itself and Communism had triumphed in the East, Diana knifed Churchill with all the delicate ferocity of which she was capable when she reviewed his own account of the war. ‘He wishes,’ she wrote, ‘to show the world how great was the effort he made during the last year of the war to avoid the results of his colossal errors of judgment.’ Her argument was that Churchill’s sole focus – upon defeating Hitler – blinded him to ‘Russian intentions in Europe’: that going to war to free Poland from the Nazis had delivered it to the Soviets.
⁴⁰
She had a point. But in making it she closed her eyes, in that way she had, to certain unanswerable questions.

So too did Sydney, who was still unable to accept that the war had been necessary. Perhaps, like Diana, she felt that she would lose too much by that admission. Her response to all the ruptures was to plough on regardless and hope that family affections would win out in the end. She sent Jessica news of the Christmas of 1943, omitting all mention of the Mosleys. Perhaps seeking to please with a display of egalitarian ideals, she wrote brightly that she imagined few people would seek to return to ‘a house full of servants’ after the war. (Actually a lot of them wanted nothing better, Diana for one; post-war novels such as those by Agatha Christie are positively obsessed with the dream of good staff.) ‘Things like carrying coals and keeping fires going and ordinary housework are
so easy
and quickly done,’ Sydney nonetheless wrote, and she for one was probably sincere. She was now sixty-three, condemned to what would have surely seemed like a life sentence with Unity. Yet the sheer busyness of the war suited her. Such a capable woman; rather wasted by that marriage to odd, handsome David. Today she would probably be a CEO, dealing calmly with whatever was thrown at her (which would almost certainly not include seven complicated children).

Given Sydney’s truly unusual strength, her supplicating letters to Jessica are peculiarly touching. She was so determined not to let her daughter go completely that she endured Jessica’s jibes against her beloved Diana, simply behaving as if they had never been made. Perhaps it was the same attitude that she had adopted when Unity had longed so much to be in Munich; let her daughter go with a good grace, let her do what she wanted, else she might never forgive. Sydney was like this with her girls. It could be seen as a kind of evasiveness, a refusal – even a reluctance – to confront them; or perhaps it was a brave willingness to make difficult compromises. Either way it was an attitude that never seems to have been extended to Nancy: the difficult eldest, who had come shrieking into Sydney’s life when she was young and not naturally maternal, and who made affection so hard to give. When Nancy wrote that her mother disliked her, this was surely an exaggeration. Nevertheless, it is very hard to imagine Sydney writing to Nancy in the way that she wrote to Jessica, although Nancy – a susceptible character beneath her metallic veneer – would probably have been more fundamentally receptive.

Jessica did not even reply to the letter about the family Christmas, so Sydney wrote again. Then came the explanation, with its grudging coda: ‘The main reason I haven’t written... is because you haven’t told me about the Mosleys. I see in the papers that they are now living in Shipton [at the Shaven Crown], so I suppose you do see them. I was so disgusted when they were released... that it actually made me feel like a traitor to write to anyone who had anything to do with them. However I see that it is difficult for you, and not your fault...’
⁴¹
This, too, was starting to read like nonsense. The Mosleys were not responsible for the war. They had obviously endorsed anti-Semitism, which was in itself unforgivable, but their private lives did not uphold those grim idiocies. The Communist Party of which Jessica was now a signed-up member had done its own share of killing – Jessica could not distance herself entirely from that knowledge – and had its own authoritarian tendencies. As with Diana, great questions remained unanswered in Jessica’s blind faith. Indeed the similarities between the two sisters were remarkable, each adhering to beliefs no more substantial than Unity’s imaginary services in the chapel on Inch Kenneth. Yet Diana had more forgiveness in her nature. Years later she wrote to Deborah that she was unable to forget the public statements made by Jessica after the Mosleys’ release from jail – ‘in my wildest nightmares I cannot imagine myself doing that about either of her husbands’ – but there was no desire in her for revenge or retaliation.

Jessica had taken a direct hit with the death of Esmond. But the thought process whereby she attached blame to Diana was absurd; according to that argument Nancy could have blamed her sister when, for instance, her adored Robert Byron was drowned at sea after his ship was torpedoed in 1941. Not such a terrible loss, of course, although Byron’s mother wrote to Nancy: ‘He loved you the best.’ Yet the principle remained the same. If Diana could be held symbolically responsible for one death, then logically this was true of
all
the deaths; also of the fact that Mark Ogilvie-Grant languished in a German prison, and that Hamish St Clair-Erskine had been captured at Tobruk. The laughing aesthetes had become men of war, as had Deborah’s merry young dancing companions. In 1944 she lost her four best male friends. That same year her brother-in-law Billy Hartington was killed at the age of twenty-six. Part of the Allied advance after D-Day, he was marching ahead of his battalion at the Belgian border when he was shot through the heart.

Four months earlier, Billy had married Kathleen Kennedy (‘Kick’), sister to Jack and a friend of Deborah’s from her debutante days. There had been a strong
Romeo and Juliet
style opposition to the match: the Devonshires were ‘Black Protestants’, the Kennedys were Irish Catholics. Eventually it was agreed that any boys would be brought up Protestant, and any girls Catholic, although Kick’s mother Rose, tough bird that she was, remained antagonistic to a marriage that would have made her daughter the Duchess of Devonshire. Not long before the wedding Billy had contested the Derbyshire West by-election, a seat that had been held by the Cavendish family since the sixteenth century. But as Nancy would observe throughout
The Pursuit of Love
, the landowning classes, with their belief in
noblesse oblige
, no longer held their appeal (except in novels). In a prefiguring of the General Election the following year, Labour won the seat – which Deborah deplored, as she would the result in 1945; she disliked ‘any Socialist government and their pretences’, and had no fear whatever of saying so. Albeit indirectly, the loss of the by-election led to Billy’s death. ‘I am going out now to fight for you at the front,’ he proclaimed to cheers after the result was announced; a woman next to Deborah muttered: ‘It’s a shame to let him go, a great tall man like he is, he’s such a target.’ In fact what had made him so visible was his absurd officer’s outfit, pale trousers and a swagger stick.