The Other Mitford (12 page)

The Pursuit of Love
was published in 1945 and in the autumn Nancy went to Paris with the purpose of doing business on behalf of the bookshop. Literary success and true love had brought her the sort of happiness she had never felt before. She was jubilant at Atlee’s election victory, as she had always been socialist at heart, but she soon decided to make her home in France. In many ways Nancy’s war was the making of her.

The same could hardly be said for Diana, though she endured the privations of Holloway with remarkable stoicism and made a life for herself and Mosley when the war was over. When she was imprisoned, Max, her youngest son, was 11 weeks old and had yet to be weaned. She chose not to take him to prison with her, fearing that he would succumb to infection in the filth of Holloway, but this meant, although she did not know it at the time since she expected to be released within days, that she only saw her children intermittently for the next three and a half years. The food in prison was grim, she was allowed only limited visits from her family, and letters were similarly restricted and strictly censored.

Family letters and visits kept her going. Sydney, despite the time spent caring for Unity, managed to visit once a week, braving the bombs and enduring inefficient transport in order to see her daughter, bringing eggs and vegetables to supplement her woefully inadequate diet. Pam also visited, as well as giving a home to Alexander, Max and the formidable Nanny Higgs, and later Diana was able to have visits from her children, her other sisters and from Mosley himself. She and Mosley appeared separately before an Advisory Committee at which they were examined by Norman, later Lord, Birkett who was to be one of the judges at the Nuremberg Trials. Since neither were prepared to renounce their views, it was deemed necessary to keep them in prison.

Diana got on well with the other prisoners, since she never tried to play the fine lady, and also with her warders. ‘We’ve never had such laughs since Lady Mosley left,’ declared her favourite warder, Miss Davies, much later.

Eventually, Mosley was permitted to join Diana in Holloway, mainly thanks to Tom who asked Churchill if this would be possible. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison opposed it, but Churchill pressed his point and the Mosleys were able to occupy part of the Preventative Detention Block in Holloway. All their children were allowed to visit, Diana was given their rations to cook with, instead of prison food, and Mosley grew vegetables in the prison garden. They stayed in this ‘suite’, as it was described by a hostile press, for two years and then Mosley contracted serious phlebitis from a First World War wound. It became so bad that it was feared he could die and, rather than have a martyr like Mosley on their hands, the government released the couple at the end of 1943.

They were received with open arms by Pam and Derek at Rignell and Pam became ‘Wonderwoman’ by dealing with the press corps which camped outside the house as soon as the Mosleys’ whereabouts were discovered. Nevertheless, Derek’s work was top secret so Herbert Morrison would not allow them to stay in spite of Derek’s protests. They moved to a partly disused pub not far away where Diana had to clean and cook, making the meagre rations go round the family.

Later they moved to Crux Easton in Hampshire and then to Crowood, near Ramsbury, in Wiltshire. Diana made both houses attractive, even in wartime, as only she knew how, and they were visited by all the family and friends like Lord Berners, who never wavered in his loyalty to Diana.

When Jessica and Esmond arrived in New York they first enjoyed the luxury of the Shelton Hotel while they contacted several influential people whose names they had been given, the most useful being Katherine Graham whose father, Eugene Meyer, owned the
Washington Post
. Jessica and Katherine became good friends and Meyer later lent Esmond $1,000 to buy a liquor licence for the very successful cocktail bar he was running in Miami. Before this, however, Jessica and Esmond took a variety of jobs while being welcomed into New York society, where their entertaining personalities made them poplar wherever they went. Jessica still missed Unity, her favourite sister, and, in spite of their political differences, she refused to speak to the American press when the news of Unity’s attempted suicide became known. Her greatest sadness was that she could never talk about her feelings for Unity with Esmond, who thought of her – and the rest of the family – as rabid fascists.

While he was successfully selling silk stockings in Washington and serving cocktails in Miami, Esmond was watching the situation in Europe carefully because the congenial life he and Jessica were living in America had in no way diminished his determination to fight for his country when it became necessary. By the summer of 1940 he knew that the time was ripe and he travelled to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to join the Canadian Royal Air Force. Jessica enrolled for a stenography course, which was to stand her in good stead for the rest of her life, and stayed with friends in Washington. What Esmond didn’t know was that Jessica was pregnant again.

Having gained a commission as a pilot officer, Esmond was sent to Europe. In February Jessica gave birth to a baby daughter who was christened Constancia but always nicknamed Dinkydonk, Dinky or just The Donk after the donkey which was the symbol of the Democratic Party. As she grew up, Dinky developed the womanly qualities which reminded Jessica of Pam.

In early December 1941 Jessica and Dinky were due to travel to England to be with Esmond, but just before they left Jessica received a telegram to say that he was missing on active service. For a long time she refused to believe he had been killed, but eventually she accepted that he had drowned in the North Sea. She decided not to return to England and vented her anger on the Mosleys (but never on Unity), whose views she felt were responsible for the situation in Europe.

Six months after Esmond’s death, Jessica got a job with the Office of Price Administration (OAP) which was responsible for wartime rationing policy. She was rapidly promoted and found herself working for a Jewish lawyer named Bob Treuhaft, whom she later married. They had both moved to California and they were married there in secret because Jessica didn’t want the press getting hold of yet another Mitford story, particularly in view of the anti-Semitic members of her family. But a letter which she wrote to Churchill after the Mosleys’ release from jail, demanding that they should be re-imprisoned, alerted the press to her whereabouts and she and Bob spent several days hiding in their apartment with the blinds drawn. She later regretted the tone of her letter but in the short term it led to her being asked to join the Communist Party. She and Bob both rose in the party ranks and for the next few years Decca’s life was devoted to the party and the Civil Rights Movement. In 1944 she gave birth to a boy named Nicholas Tito. She told Nancy that she had called the baby after Lenin and Marshal Tito to annoy her parents. She never changed.

For Debo the time following the outbreak of war was miserable. The rescue of Unity from Europe had been traumatic for her but what made her even more unhappy was Unity’s subsequent dislike of her. This led to a very unpleasant atmosphere at Old Mill Cottage where Sydney, Unity and Debo were all cooped up together, with Unity usually venting her bouts of rage on her youngest sister. ‘Muv and Bobo are getting awfully on my nerves. I must go away soon, I think,’ she wrote to Jessica in 1940. However, in April 1941 Debo became engaged to Lord Andrew Cavendish and they were married the following month, both aged 21. She followed him round to the various training grounds to which he was posted, but when he was sent to Italy with the Coldstream Guards, she went to live on the Derbyshire estate of her in-laws, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, where she remained for the rest of the war.

During the war years Debo had three children: a premature son who died almost immediately in November 1941; a daughter, Emma, born safely in 1943; and a son, Peregrine, always known as Stoker, the following year, three weeks before Jessica’s son Nicholas. Although they didn’t know this at the time, Stoker was to be the future Duke of Devonshire.

When they married there was no hint that Andrew would inherit the title. His elder brother, Billy Hartington, had been groomed for the job and was expected to succeed eventually. Billy was engaged to and later married Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy, sister of the future US president; this was in spite of opposition from both sets of parents, but especially the Kennedys, because they were Catholics and the Devonshires were staunchly Protestant. They finally married in 1944 and five weeks later Billy was killed fighting in Belgium. As with David during the previous war, Andrew found himself next in line to the family title.

In spite of his support for Nazi Germany, in 1942 Tom joined the Rifle Brigade and fought in North Africa and Italy. As with everything else he ever did, he acquitted himself well and in 1944 he returned to England for a course at the Staff College. He then asked to be sent to Burma as he did not want to have to kill Germans during the Allied occupation of Germany, which clearly was going to take place. Once in Burma he requested a transfer from Staff to a fighting battalion. On 24 March he was leading a force against a group of Japanese armed with machine guns. He was severely wounded and died six days later. He is buried in the military cemetery near Rangoon.

For the sisters it was the greatest tragedy they had ever had to face. Tom was the only one who was always on ‘speakers’ with all the others; they loved him dearly and remembered with great affection the times when they had made him ‘blither’ in church, when he had saved them from unwanted partners at debutante dances and introduced them to his much more interesting friends. In all that had happened he was never censorious, keeping in touch with Diana and Mosley yet seeing Jessica and Esmond off to America. He visited Unity and Sydney as often as he could – Unity was always at her best with him – and he spent much of his final leave with Nancy. The fact that he had come unscathed through the greatest part of the war and was the last person they felt would not survive made his death even harder to bear.

For David and Sydney, whose marriage had fallen apart because of their irreconcilable differences in relation to Nazi Germany and Hitler, the death of Tom, their only and much-loved son and heir, must have seemed like the end of the world.

T
here were many times during her life when Pam came to the rescue of her sisters, but none was more heroic than when she took in Diana and Oswald Mosley’s two tiny children when their parents were imprisoned during the early years of the war. Urged on by Derek, Pam had 11-week-old Max and 18-month-old Alexander, together with Nanny Higgs, to live at Rignell for almost two years. While Derek was stationed at Middle Wallop he would sometimes pick up Jonathan and Desmond Guinness, Diana’s two sons by her first marriage, from their prep. school near Oxford and take them to Rignell for the weekend.

In times of ever-increasing rationing and austerity, with staff leaving to work for the war effort, it was no mean feat for Pam and Derek to help out with Diana’s four boys, especially as they had no children of their own. Much later in life, in a letter to Diana, Pam admitted that she really didn’t like small children much and felt that she might not have been as kind as she might have been to the boys. Jonathan remembers that she was kind but not affectionate like his mother. Although, in Diana’s view, it was a pity that it wasn’t possible for the boys to go to Sydney – whose time was completely taken up caring for Unity – it says even more for Pam’s courageous spirit that she took on such an enormous task which she couldn’t fully enjoy.

There is no hint of these feelings in any of the letters that she wrote to Diana in Holloway prison, where she visited regularly, in spite of the bombing and petrol rationing, taking with her fresh vegetables and eggs from Rignell. She tells her sister how Max – who was still being breast-fed when his mother was imprisoned – was now getting milk from an Ayrshire herd in the village, which is the very best he could have: the milk was not only Tuberculin Tested but also Attested. In the same letter she says that Alexander is having a scarlet woolly coat knitted by Nanny Higgs, as well as the blue one which ‘looks lovely’, but says, rather significantly, that she teases Nanny who thinks that she pays more attention to the dogs than the babies. Later she writes: ‘Both Alexander and Max are extremely well. Apparently Alexander was heard calling this last night when he was meant to be going to sleep, “Trude, Trude, dogs, dogs, dogs!” and as far as he could he was copying my voice. Isn’t that extra tum? [a word for sweet invented by Pam and Derek].’ She goes on to say: ‘I do wish you could have them. I always feel so awful when I can see as much as I like of them and you are unable to do so.’

Sydney, who heroically visited every week, was much preoccupied with the care of Unity; Deborah had recently married and was following her soldier husband, Lord Andrew Cavendish, to different training grounds around the country; Jessica was in America and, because of their very different ideologies, was not in contact with Diana; while Nancy had played a significant part in getting Diana imprisoned, informing MI5 of what she considered to be her sister’s unpatriotic behaviour, mainly based on Diana’s frequent visits to Germany immediately before the war. In this she was joined by Diana’s former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, and Mosley’s former sister-in-law, Irene Ravensdale. Apart from their mother, only Pam, in her quiet, courageous way, was able and willing to give regular support to Diana.

In fact, it was no thanks to Nancy, so often a thorn in Pam’s flesh, that she and Derek were able to have the boys at Rignell at all. Nancy, presumably feeling she was doing her patriotic duty, told a MI5 officer that Pam and Derek were ‘fanatically anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and defeatist’. She also wrote to a friend at the end of 1940 stating that they ‘talk such fascism that the whole town is speculating how they manage to stay out [of prison]’. According to Pam’s great friend Margaret Budd, who knew Pam during the war and for the rest of her life, she was completely non-political and would never have had such views, let alone expressed them publicly. The most likely explanation for Nancy’s statement is that Derek was teasing her by saying that Germany would win the war and that England deserved to lose it and that Pam nodded her agreement. Derek was prone to winding people up but it is hard to believe that this war hero was defeatist, and although he did not particularly like Jews his closest colleague and friend, Heinrich Kuhn, with whom he worked at the Clarendon Laboratory before the war, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.