Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (40 page)

Andrew, now the Devonshire heir, wrote to Deborah how glad he was that she had moved back to the Rookery on the Chatsworth Estate, with her daughter Emma (born 1943) and her new son Peregrine (nicknamed, and always known as, ‘Stoker’). She would, he said, be a great comfort to his parents, for whom Deborah did indeed have deep affection (although she always respectfully called them ‘Duchess’ and ‘Duke’). The grief-stricken Duke of Devonshire, Eddy, never went to Chatsworth again, except for the occasion of his daughter’s wedding. In his letter Andrew mentioned, as it were in passing, that he had been awarded the Military Cross – ‘most undeserved’. This, Deborah commented, was typical of her husband, to make light of courage. He had received his MC for ‘the cheerfulness and leadership he displayed’ in Italy, when his company had dug in under heavy shelling and was trapped for thirty-six hours with neither food nor drink.

Thereafter Deborah’s fear for Andrew was ever more intense. ‘Oh dear, I am nearly off my head,’ she wrote to her mother, when she received the news that he would come home for good in December 1944. For Peter Rodd, Nancy had feared in a more oblique way (bearing in mind that on his leaves he would, as Harold Acton later wrote, ‘ask me not to tell Nancy that he was in London’). He had returned from Italy in Easter that year; it had been, he told Nancy, ‘hell on earth’. To Jessica she wrote casually, in reference to the old family nickname for her husband: ‘He is toll-gating round the place.’

Meanwhile Tom Mitford, who had fought in Libya and Italy with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, came back to England in 1944 as a major. He underwent administrative training at the Army Staff College in Camberley, from where he visited Diana at Crux Easton. In July he was in London on leave. By chance, he and Nancy met James Lees-Milne outside the Ritz. ‘He almost embraced me in the street’, wrote Lees-Milne in his diary, ‘saying “My dear old friend, my very oldest and dearest friend”, which was rather affecting. He looks younger than his age, is rather thin, and still extremely handsome.’

It was while dining with Lees-Milne on this leave that Tom admitted that he still had sympathies with the Nazi viewpoint, that the best Germans he knew were Nazis and that he did not wish to kill them. Yet he was not anti-Semitic; that has never been suggested, rather the opposite (similarly, his friend Janos von Almasy was a Nazi who had no dislike of Jews). By now the first camps, at Sobibor and Treblinka, had been liberated by the Russians. So the paradox of Tom’s ‘confession’, so late in the war, can be resolved only by reference to his deep love of Germany, of some romanticized idea of the German identity as conjured by Wagner, rather than Hitler. But it is almost impossible to understand. His commanding officer, who thought very highly of him, said that Tom ‘was not the easiest man to get on with. He held strong views which he defended with skill and wit and he did not suffer fools gladly.’ Perhaps this unyielding quality, very much like that of his sister Diana, was what drew him similarly to a stern creed. Lees-Milne, who loved the Mitford family but Nancy the least of them, once wrote: ‘There is a vein of callousness in her that almost amounts to cruelty.’ He added: ‘All the Mitfords seem to have it, even Tom.’ How true this was; while at the same time they were capable of warmth, passion, generosity, all the things that Lees-Milne found in his boyhood lover: yet this tough snaking wire was what held them firm as they drove through life. It lay within their jokes, and enabled them to withstand blows that would have destroyed other people. It was certainly very apparent in Nancy, although Lees-Milne was wrong to imply that it was especially strong in her; alone among the Mitfords their father did not have it.

Over dinner, Tom – whose complexity extended to his love life – said that he thought he should get married after the war. He was, after all, the future Lord Redesdale; and from the look of his father that future was not too far away. He listed all his girls, those he had slept with, those he might love, those he merely liked, and asked his friend’s advice. ‘If I were one of these girls and knew how you were discussing me, I wouldn’t dream of marrying you,’ said Lees-Milne, adding: ‘he roared and roared with laughter.’ Then he wrote: ‘Tom makes me sad because he looks so sad.’

Tom, who preferred to fight the Japanese rather than the Germans, went out to Burma at the end of 1944. He requested a transfer from Staff to a fighting battalion, and his letters home were resolute and cheerful. In March 1945 he led a force against a small group of Japanese armed with machine-guns, against which his battalion sheltered behind some sheets of corrugated iron. The cover was insufficient. Tom was hit several times in the neck and shoulders, yet he remained conscious and was taken quickly to a field hospital. Like Unity, he was found to have a bullet lodged inside him: in his spine. Although paralysed, he was expected to survive, and was accordingly transferred to another hospital. There he contracted pneumonia. He died on 30 March at the age of thirty-six.

For the Mitfords, the war had finally done its worst.

IX

In her letter to Jessica describing the Christmas of 1943, Sydney had written: ‘Very horrid not being with Farve and I greatly hope that next Christmas we may be together.’

By 1944, things should have been a little better. Diana was released. David had an operation for his cataracts, which was successful, although he was obliged to wear very thick glasses (he looked, wrote James Lees-Milne, ‘like a piano tuner’). Jessica, happily remarried and now a US citizen, had given birth to her son, Nicholas. For the first time in seven years her father reached out to her: ‘Just to send you my love and every good wish for him and his future. Some day, when things are in a more settled state, I greatly hope to see you all, and judging from all news and the look of things it seems to me that there is some prospect that I may last that long – I should much like to. Much love, Farve.’

Sydney got her wish of being with her husband for a time, in so far as she and Unity – now permitted to visit Inch Kenneth – joined him on the island in the summer. Yet Deborah, who stayed with them in August, described the situation as ‘misery’. If there was regret for the end of her marriage on Sydney’s side, there appeared to be none on David’s. In Deborah’s view, he seemed to hate his wife. His housekeeper-cum-lady friend, Margaret, was in occupation as surely as the Germans had been in France. She was a boring woman, unfriendly to the Mitford sisters, the sort who took possession of the teapot in order to show Sydney who was boss. But her sheer ordinariness – and lack of political opinions – made her some sort of solace to David. After dinner, at which he sat in grim silence behind his distorting lenses and Margaret talked banalities, the pair scuttled off to the kitchen to do the washing-up together. Unity dragged her mother and sister to the island chapel, where she staged a service with herself in the guise of clergyman. Like a fractious child she became angry and mortified when she forgot the words to the Te Deum and Jubilate, and stomped back to the house alone.

After this, Sydney did not visit the island when her husband was in residence, although she was staying there with Unity when David’s telegram came, from London, to say that Tom was dangerously wounded. For Unity, it was consolation that her brother had been fighting the Japanese, not the Germans. One wonders whether she and her mother had ever talked about what was happening in Germany, the remorseless march of the Red Army towards Berlin and the heavenly Führer in his bunker. The city of Breslau was now under siege; this was where, almost seven years earlier, Unity had watched a march-past, 150,000 people by her account, all clamouring for their leader: ‘I never expected to see such scenes again,’ she had written ecstatically to Diana. What did Sydney now think about her cosy tea party in Hitler’s flat, when she saw the footage of rubbery, flaccid bodies piled into pits? She never spoke of it, so far as is known; as with Unity’s denials of the mass murder supervised by her old friend Himmler, there had to be an element of self-protection. One wonders, too, whether by March 1945 Sydney had allowed herself to hope that Tom would be saved. She believed it for a while after the arrival of the telegram. ‘As the days passed,’ she wrote to Jessica, ‘we grew hopeful, and the shock when it came was so bad I nearly went mad.’ She continued: ‘I had to learn from you darling, for your great courage was an example for anyone, but you always were such a brave little D.’

Scorning the rule that confined her to a seven-mile radius of Crux Easton, when Diana received the news about Tom she instantly hired a Daimler and drove with Mosley to Rutland Gate, her police guard beside her. At the mews she found Nancy with Peter, Deborah with Andrew, Pam, the family nanny Blor, and her parents, together perforce. Diana had not seen her father for thirteen years, but she strode into the room in all her dynamic serenity, without embarrassment or hesitancy, and he greeted her affectionately. In James Lees-Milne’s account, which he had from Nancy, she ‘at once, like the old Diana, held the stage and became the centre of them all’. If Nancy had been capable of jealousy at such a time, she might have then felt it; but she was not. She had adored Tom. To Jessica, she wrote: ‘It is almost unbearable oh
Tud
if you knew how sweet & nice & gay he has been of late & on his last leave.’

He had been necessary to the family, a shadowy but steady magnetic pole. Whatever their other feelings, they were united in the fact that they all loved Tom: a man who had known Mosley and Romilly and had found the respect and liking of both. His death had come less than five months before the end; had he not sought to fight the Japanese instead of the Germans, he might have been spared: in that sense he was, like Unity, a casualty of that mysterious affinity. ‘I do envy Tom,’ she said, in one of her lightning moments of strange acuity, ‘having such fascinating arguments with Dr Johnson now.’

Seeking to comfort, Nancy wrote to Jessica that ‘Muv & Farve are being simply wonderful & much much better than we had feared at first.’ It was not true. Again to Jessica, Sydney described her husband as ‘sadly down’; this, too, was understatement. She could not look for consolation from David for the death of their son. Now he would retreat still further into his lair, and move to Redesdale Cottage in Northumberland with the wretched Margaret, leaving Sydney to the wilderness of life with Unity. It was a strange end for the couple who had shared such beguiling beauty, had inhabited the English fairytale world of Asthall with that lively, leaping litter of children. The steep stumbling descent that had begun in 1932, when Diana left her marriage for Mosley, had at last come to an end. Yet even now, when he might have sought it, David could make no full rapprochement with Diana. As she left the mews he insisted on escorting her to the car – his manner still survived – until she explained gently: ‘Farve, the man Mosley is waiting for me in the motor,’ at which David let her go. The divisions in the Mitfords, which Tom might have bridged had he lived, were now as fixed as the wall that would soon be erected across Berlin; indeed some would outlast it.

Nor did the hand that David had stretched towards Jessica receive an answering grasp. Before Tom’s death, his father had made Inch Kenneth over to him; but Tom died intestate, perhaps as a bright wave to fate that he intended to get through the war, and according to Scottish law the island now passed to his sisters. They all chose to hand it to their mother for her lifetime. All, that is, except Jessica, who wrote that she wished to deed her share to the Communist Party in England: ‘to undo some of the harm that our family has done, particularly the Mosleys, and Farve when he was in the House of Lords’. A vein of callousness indeed. Given the circumstances in which Jessica had received the bequest of Inch Kenneth, her action was cruel: it was not something that many people could have done. It was also terribly silly. David struggled to a meeting with Jessica’s appointed attorney, to whom he suggested that on such a very small island neither the family nor the Communists ‘would be happy under the circumstances’. The Communists wanted nothing to do with it either, and clearly thought the arrangement quite mad. Jessica, as was her nature, could not back down. Her share of the island was worth just £500, but she ranted on to her mother that she wanted that much – more if possible – because ‘money is an important political weapon... I don’t know whether developments in the last ten years have yet proved to you what a criminal thing it was to have supported Hitler and an appeasement policy...’ From her new position with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, she stood pure and fiery on the side of the righteous. The behaviour of the Red Army in Berlin was proof, at that time, that the capacity for evil lay not merely within Nazis, but in human nature itself; the point was not made, however, as nobody was willing to speak to Jessica at the time. Only her mother continued to write the letters that ignored it all and reached out to ‘Little D’. In the end it was agreed that Sydney alone should keep the island as her home, but that Jessica would hold on to her own share, on a point of political principle.

On one sixth of Inch Kenneth, as across tracts of Europe, the red flag flew.

PART IV

‘There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life.’

From
The Pursuit of Love
by Nancy Mitford (1945)

I

It was now Nancy’s job to reimagine the family that no longer existed, and make of it an enduring English myth.

She herself had moved into a different world, so much so that even the death of Tom could not entirely pierce her happiness. She had met her own life-changing man, the one who would allow her to move away from the Mitfords and inhabit the landscape of her imagination; not just in books, but in France. Although Nancy’s love for Gaston Palewski would create its own kind of thraldom, he was also, paradoxically, the means to a glorious freedom.

It was in September 1942, in the garden of the Allies Club in Park Lane, that Nancy was introduced to Palewski, then aged forty-one, a colonel (as she would always call him) in the Free French forces and
chef de cabinet
to his revered Charles de Gaulle. She encountered him in very much the same circumstances as Grace, the heroine of the 1951 novel
The Blessing
, meets her Frenchman: he had been in Ethiopia at the same time as Peter and offered news of him. In
The Blessing
, Charles-Edouard de Valhubert – who brings news of Grace’s fiancé – is a tall, dark, superbly elegant viscount with the usual collection of houses, who very soon announces: ‘Perhaps I will marry you.’ In almost every respect, Nancy’s real-life situation was different. Palewski was a small man with a small moustache, he had pitted skin and receding hair, his family was of Polish descent. He had a flat in the Rue Bonaparte and that was all. And he could not propose marriage, even if he had wanted to, given that Nancy was
hors de combat.
Yet her feelings for him were exactly those of Grace: she was ‘in love as never before’.