Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (46 page)

Nancy also wrote a regular column in
The Sunday Times
, commissioned by ‘handsome Mr Fleming’ – Ian – and, in 1955, the essay on ‘The English Aristocracy’, with its strictures on ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’. Boringly, and reductively, this short piece of writing would overwhelm the rest of her career for years to come (including in her
Times
obituary). True, it was the construct of a sweetly teasing agitator, which was definitively Nancy. But it was also perceived as the work of a snob, a woman who treasured a class structure that placed her on top, and she was more complicated than that: complicated, indeed, in every way.

Far more revelatory was the book that she published in 1954, her brilliant
Madame de Pompadour
. It was lit with the clarity of perception that characterized every word of her mature writings. Her grasp upon the difficult business of history was sure, strong, always directed by her unfailing instinct for human motivation. Some historians (notably a rather rude A. J. P. Taylor)
²⁰
viewed this through the prism of their own snobbery – the intellectual kind – but in doing so they failed to see that politics
is
about the personal: as nobody knew better than a Mitford. More to the point, however, the book was a homage to the things that Nancy truly believed in, and that made life, in her view, a happy business: civilization, prettiness, formality, jokes, love conducted with an intensity of courtesy, the gardens at Versailles, France. And it ended, as events decreed that it must, at the moment when a shadow would begin to move inexorably towards them all.

In 1957 Gaston Palewski was appointed French ambassador to Rome. Nancy cabled to him from Venice, where she now spent her summers: ‘
O
DESESPOIR
.
O
RAGE
.
O
FELICITATIONS
.
NANCY
.’
²¹
The divorce that she had finally obtained from Peter Rodd – whose stubborn presence in her Parisian life had been unbearable, but had perhaps constituted some sort of shield against the knowledge that Palewski would never marry her – was now no more than a bagatelle in her life. A relief, no more; bringing with it a faint sense of melancholy, of failure and guilt. From that point, the will to happiness would be more necessary than ever, and Nancy did not fail to conjure it. But it was as she wrote in the last line of
Pompadour
, which falls like the thud of a blade upon the page: ‘After this a very great dullness fell upon the Chateau of Versailles.’

It had fallen almost twenty years earlier upon the life of David Redesdale, and he now crept, without resistance, towards the death that had befallen two of his children. At the end of 1957 Nancy had visited him at the cottage in Northumberland that he shared with Margaret Wright, an icebox with its safe filled with firelighters. ‘I loathe going there, it fills me with nervous terror,’ she wrote to Theodore Besterman, the scholar with whom she was corresponding as she worked on her new historical biography,
Voltaire in Love.
Again she was impelled by a kind of guilt: ‘I must see my relations who are getting too old to come and see me here.’

Before this, haunted perhaps by a sense of so much that had been lost, David had written further letters to Jessica, but still received no answering forgiveness for his nameless crimes. Yet he made a full rapprochement with his adored Diana, whom he visited at the Temple de la Gloire. He sent her a large cheque with which to curtain her giant windows: a Nancy-like gift in its indirect kindness. He also became friendly at last with ‘the man Mosley’ – who could be immensely charming, remarkably good company: how else could he have seduced as he did? Mosley, who behind his urbanity was also fundamentally frustrated by his native country’s refusal to want him, had in 1956 seized upon a cause once more. The Union Movement was to be regenerated, like Dr Who. This time its focus would be upon the West Indian immigrants who had begun to arrive in Britain after the war, and who he believed would be ultimately destructive to the country’s economy. ‘Let the Jamaicans have their country back and let us have ours,’ Mosley would argue, from his newly curtained Temple at Orsay.

He began hustling back and forth, using the pretext of politics to take in affairs on the side – just as he had done to Cimmie Curzon – and courting women in Paris and London. ‘There is no jealousy like sexual jealousy,’ Diana wrote to a friend, in the authentic voice of Nancy. She was still beautiful, and she could still have left. Instead she lent her support once more to Mosley as, in early 1958, he officially re-launched the Union Movement and began hurling his apparently reasoned rhetoric at a crowd of aggressive young men who had no desire to listen to ideas, only to have a punch-up.

The hoarse old warrior was now sixty-one. His followers had been replaced, so too had his scapegoat, but in all other respects everything was the same; even the ensuing violence, whose vicarious outlet Mosley seemed to crave while, at the same time, condemning it. If it was true that the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 were not directly caused by the Union Movement, it was no less true that Mosley sought to exploit them. Through the battleground of the fighting, he saw his chance for one more shot at political glory. Without a thought for the time and dedication that Diana had expended on the venture, he abruptly closed the
European
and began spending money on support for his campaign to stand as candidate for Notting Hill in the 1959 General Election. He was right to believe that racial divisions were intense at this time, as they would remain (and as the Treuhafts could have told him). Nor would his economic arguments lose their sting; indeed, as UKIP voters might say, they still have not. And so his self-belief was high as he canvassed, scattering his ‘Keep Britain White’ leaflets in streets that fifty unimaginable years later would be home to bankers and film stars, but then were rife with post-war poverty, writhing miserably beneath the control of the slum landlord Peter Rachman. Yet the appeal of Mosley remained limited to a core of the discontented. He won less than 3,000 votes, around 10 per cent of the poll.

Himself to the end, he thought of bringing a legal suit to investigate irregularities in the poll, and he did not abandon hope. He remained in contact with extreme right-wing groups across the Continent; albeit with the aim of discussing a united Europe, which was then in its very earliest phase of development. Of course the past clung to him. In 1962 Nancy wrote to Diana – possibly with the idea of helping, or possibly stirring – with the news that French radio had claimed that Mosley wanted ‘to send all Jews & Niggers out of England – not a word about making Europe. Is it worth his while to contradict this?’

In London that year, Mosley was subjected to a vicious physical assault (his son Max was arrested for defending him). He remained almost uniquely provocative, such a convenient hate figure – rather like Margaret Thatcher twenty years on, albeit without the power – that in 1966 he actually sought to get the BBC committed for contempt of court, claiming that the corporation’s output attacked him repeatedly, yet allowed him no right of reply. But at the same time, in an odd and very English way, he had become a more accepted figure: an eccentric part of the landscape, like Stonehenge. On one occasion he was lunching with Lord Longford, who as an undergraduate at Oxford had been set upon while protesting at a Blackshirt meeting in 1936.
²²
They were approached by Michael Foot, whose politics leaned so far to the left as to topple him over, yet who said courteously: ‘What a pleasure to see you again, Sir Oswald.’ An interview with
The Times
, in which Mosley gave advance warning that he had written a first draft autobiography
²³
totalling 225,000 words, confirmed this ambivalent status. Mosley set forth his belief in Europe as the only cure for Britain’s balance of payments deficit (not so UKIP there); he was portrayed as a figure from the past, whose big ideas had had their day, but only scant trace of the sinister remained: ‘From darling to ogre’, the article concluded, in reference to his political journey from future PM to Fascist menace, ‘and now, perhaps, a tiny step or two back?’ He even stood one last time as a General Election candidate, in Shoreditch – his old East End connection – in 1966 (an event that Diana dreaded, as she admitted to Deborah). There, memories were longer. Mosley received 1,600 votes. It was over; it had been over thirty years earlier. ‘I am afraid dear Kit can’t win whatever he tries’, wrote Diana, ‘I wish to goodness he wd see it’. The Leader’s occupation was gone.

But Mosley would never say, as David Redesdale did towards the end: ‘All the savagery has gone out of me.’ It was to his wife that he spoke these words. A kind of reconciliation was achieved with Sydney – indeed they had corresponded throughout the later period of their separation – when she visited him at Redesdale Cottage in March 1958 for his eightieth birthday. Margaret became part of the insubstantial present as the past returned to the fore: Sydney, together with Deborah and Diana, who later wrote: ‘I shall never forget the expression on Farve’s face when Muv appeared at his bedside, and his smile of pure delight. All their differences forgotten, they seemed to have gone back twenty years to happy days before the tragedies.’ Three days later, when his wife and daughters had departed, David died. His funeral was held at Swinbrook, where a memorial had been erected to Tom, and where Unity lay in her grave. As Nancy described to Jessica, their once huge and vital father entered the church as a small box of ashes: ‘the sort of parcel
he
used to bring back from London, rich thick brown paper & incredibly neat knots... Alas one’s life.’

David left no money to Jessica, which amazingly made headlines (‘Red Sheep Cut out of Will’). She had hurt him badly with her ridiculous attempt to give her share of Inch Kenneth to the Communists, the party that she and her husband in fact left in 1958. Nancy, ever generous in her spiky way, now gave her own share of the island to Jessica. Later, when she inherited some money from the Romillys, Jessica bought the whole thing and gifted it to her mother for her lifetime; thus that particular little saga, which like so much in the Mitford story had caused ripples of unnecessary hurt, came full circle.

The truth about why Jessica never saw her father after 1937 was not, however, entirely straightforward. She had agreed with her mother that she would visit him when she came to Europe in 1955, but wrote – quite jokily, if very much typically – that David would have to agree not to ‘roar’ at her family. ‘Does he still?’ Sydney, who could be so craven with Jessica, suddenly withdrew into chilling obduracy. ‘Since you have imposed conditions it would be better not to see Farve.’ It was an extraordinary thing to write to a woman who had just lost her son. Sydney herself had good cause to know that. Perhaps it was a sudden spurt of revenge for all the lack of sympathy that Jessica had shown in the past; perhaps she thought to protect the husband for whom she still had feelings of a kind: as ever, the complexities proliferate. But that act of coldness may help to explain
Hons and Rebels.

Jessica notwithstanding, it seemed that David had been happier before his death than throughout the twenty years that preceded it. He had even, in his old way, entertained the women of his family: ‘Remember me to the hall porter,’ he called to Sydney, as she left for the Oban Hotel. It had something of the flavour of his exit from Nancy’s last novel,
Don’t Tell Alfred
– published in 1960 – when Uncle Matthew takes his leave of Fanny at the embassy in Paris:

‘I shan’t come and disturb you in the morning, Fanny – I know you’ve never been much use before seven and I want to be off at half-past five. Many thanks...’

‘Come again’, I said.

But Uncle Matthew was gone.

V

Five years later, the same Mitford girls who had buried at Swinbrook the remains of their father were assembled, watchfully, on the island of Inch Kenneth.

Sydney, not easy to love, impossible not to admire, had lived out her late years with the regal stoicism that characterized her. The ghost of Unity flickered through the chapel, among the goats that Sydney still tended. The grief for her son did not alleviate. ‘It was so kind of you to think of sending a word for Tom’s birthday,’ she wrote to Diana, in January 1957. ‘I fear the sorrow for him gets no less.’ She mourned her husband, perhaps more than he deserved. She did not show emotion, but she felt it; in this she was more like Nancy than she may have cared to admit, which perhaps was their problem.

When Jessica signed the contract to write
Hons and Rebels
, published in 1960, Sydney wrote to her: ‘What exciting news... I thought a lot of yours so good, that you sent me.’ This was a very different reaction from the dour ‘This family again’ that met the publication of
The Pursuit of Love.
Later Sydney would ask Jessica to remove some minor passages in the book, and later still attacked her for some of what she wrote. But she relented in a way that she did not towards Nancy, whose far less critical essay on her childhood – ‘Blor’, published in 1962 – caused her mother to withdraw into her icebox. Sydney never dared to go this far with Jessica. She intuited that beneath their joking veneers Jessica was a tougher character than Nancy, and might cut herself off completely; something that Nancy, whose nature comprised layers of spikiness and vulnerability, could never quite bear to do.

Interestingly, it was Sydney’s sister ‘Weenie’ – who had no time for any of the tyrannical Mitford girls, and would have seen the entire Mitford myth as a nonsense built around some silly, self-aggrandizing show-offs – who flew at Jessica with a rant that came dangerously near the knuckle: ‘I for one will never forget the savage cruelty with which you treated your mother and father. And now, you filthy little cad, you come back and write a lot of horrible things about your mother and come and sponge on her...’ Which was a kind of truth, if you like, as surely as
Hons and Rebels
purported to be.