The Other Mitford (13 page)

In the end, common sense prevailed and the Jacksons were left alone, which was just as well because when the Mosleys were eventually released from prison in November 1943, it was Pam, urged on by Derek, who gave them a temporary home at Rignell. Derek must have known how difficult the situation would become since he was involved in top-secret scientific work with the Telecommunications Research Establishment; but he liked the Mosleys and he was always a loyal friend and a disregarder of authority.

Derek obtained overnight leave so that he could greet the Mosleys on their arrival at Rignell and they were treated to a feast laid on by Pam and attended by Sydney and Debo. For a few days they were able to enjoy the luxury of being looked after by Pam and having nourishing food for the first time in three years; but this was not to last. Within days the press discovered their whereabouts and kept the house under constant surveillance, waiting for the Mosleys to make an appearance. In fact, Pam was the only one they ever saw when she took her dogs for a walk, often after dark, through ploughed fields covered in snow and wearing her wellington boots – she knew that the lightly shod reporters would never follow her over such terrain. On 28 November Diana wrote to Nancy (of whose betrayal she had no idea): ‘Woman is being simply too killing, we are besieged by hordes of pressmen and photographers and every now and then she rushes out and says, “I dislike you intensely,” or when photo-ed, “You foul man.” She doesn’t in the least realise what a wonder-working woman she is being.’

In spite of Pam’s efforts, the
Daily Express
reported that the house was being guarded by dogs (the dachshunds) and that an air of menace surrounded it:

Night time in the park gives the house an eerie gloom, with the wind howling in the fir trees, the dogs whining plaintively and the horses neighing at the approach of footsteps … The secret of Mrs Jackson’s visitors has been well kept by the villagers of the neighbouring hamlets round the estate, where Squadron Leader Jackson was ‘the squire’ before war broke out.

Although Squadron Leader Jackson was highly entertained by such wholly inaccurate reports, feelings against Mosley by a nation at war were extremely inflammatory and soon Derek was forbidden by Home Secretary Herbert Morrison to return to Rignell until the Mosleys had left. Derek was furious and told Morrison exactly what he thought of a man who had been a conscientious objector in the First World War and saw fit to tell a much-decorated RAF officer who he could or could not entertain at his home. There is no record of this interview and Derek’s language can only be imagined. In any case, Derek’s secret work was incomprehensible to anyone not a physicist.

Diana and Mosley had to go. Lady Redesdale found a home for them to rent at The Shaven Crown, a partly deserted inn at nearby Shipton-under-Wychwood, and for the first time since 1939 Diana, Mosley and Diana’s four boys were together for Christmas Day. They spent the day with Lady Redesdale and Unity, all crammed into the tiny dining room of Old Mill Cottage at Swinbrook where, due to the lack of turkeys and geese, they ate ‘a large, enormous chicken which was almost as good’.

When the war ended Derek became increasingly disillusioned with post-war Great Britain and the tremendous tax burden which the new Labour government levied on people as wealthy as him. He was offered the post of Professor of Spectroscopy at Oxford – and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society – but he and Pam decided to settle in Ireland where taxes were not so high and where he could resume his love affair with horses, racing and hunting.

Derek was not an ungenerous man – he made grants to Oxford University for the benefit of the Clarendon Laboratory and made a substantial contribution towards the installation of a spectroscope at the Oxford Observatory. His spat with Herbert Morrison – now number two in the Atlee government – over the Mosleys did nothing to make him want to stay in England. The last straw was the Inland Revenue’s attempt to make his wartime earnings subject to surtax, when he had intended to donate the money to a trust for RAF widows. He declared his intention to leave England for good.

As well as the advantageous tax laws, it was a visit to Lismore Castle in County Waterford, where Derek and Pam stayed with Debo and her husband Andrew, which finally persuaded Derek to choose Ireland as his home. Lismore is a fairytale castle and one of the great sights of that part of the world. Derek was seduced by the good weather and the prospect of endless hunting and racing in this Land of the Horse. It must have been hard for Pam to leave her native Oxfordshire but, presumably, in her usual way, she fell in with Derek’s plans. In fact, it was she who was happiest in Ireland while Derek in the end became bored.

To start with, however, it seemed like a good decision. Derek and Pam bought a more modest castle called Tullamaine, in County Tipperary, and Pam was delighted to be close to Debo when she was at Lismore. Tullamaine was a Gothic-style castle with plenty of stabling built in the 1830s in the heart of Tipperary Hunt country. The nearest town was called Fethard (pronounced feathered) and Pam, the poultry lover, would tell her friends that she now lived ‘in a Fethard world’. She settled in quickly, became involved in village life, loved the local countryside and, as always, was entirely happy surrounded by horses, dogs and chickens.

At first, Derek also enjoyed life in Ireland. He hunted regularly, riding like a jockey with short stirrups and, endearingly, always giving his horse a hug at the end of the day. He was granted a trainer’s licence and rode as an amateur jockey. But it wasn’t enough for this brilliant, restless man. He went on lecture tours to America, but he refused to be enticed back to Oxford by Lord Cherwell, his old boss, and he became bored with Irish rural life; he enjoyed little success as a trainer and took scant interest in local affairs. In spite of Pam’s wifely qualities, excellent culinary skills, their still-shared love of horses and dogs and the frequent company of Pam’s young nephew, Desmond Guinness, who was a lively riding and racing companion, he began to spend time in Dublin, England and sometimes America. As well as venting his anger and frustration on Pam, who certainly did not deserve it, he began to be unfaithful, which she didn’t deserve either.

She seemed to accept his behaviour, probably believing that if it had not been for the war he might well have left her by now. Even so, when he announced to her his intention of marrying Janetta Kee – already twice married and with a child by another man, but more sharp-witted, intellectual and politically aware than Pam – she was bitterly hurt. She had lost her only brother, Tom, right at the end of the war, and Unity had died of meningitis in 1948; now Derek was leaving her after fourteen years of marriage. They were divorced in 1951.

Pam stayed on at Tullamaine after Derek left and was kept busy by visits from her family, particularly the Mosleys who lived with her while they too looked for a home in Ireland, eventually buying an old bishop’s palace in County Galway. Her companion of the time was a Swiss riding teacher called Giuditta Tommasi whom Pam had met while she was teaching equestrian skills to the two Mosley boys.

Pam was then faced with the dilemma of whether to move to Switzerland with Giuditta or to Germany to be near her friend Rudi von Simolin. She and Rudi had met when Pam had travelled to Germany with her mother at the end of the war to thank her for visiting Unity every day when she was in hospital. Pam and Rudi became lifelong friends, though in the end, Pam chose to move to Switzerland with Giuditta, having also bought a house in the Cotswold village of Caudle Green.

P
am and Derek were not the only ones to move from England after the war. It had been such a traumatic time for the family that new starts were necessary. Nancy’s move to France was the most permanent. Having gone there at the end of the war ostensibly to do business for Heywood Hill’s bookshop but really to be near her beloved Colonel, she had such success with her novel
The Pursuit of Love
that she lived in Paris and later in Versailles for the rest of her life. Initially she lived in small hotels or rented flats on the Left Bank, near to the Colonel, and finally settled at 7 rue Monsieur where she remained until 1966. There she was looked after by her devoted maid Marie and shared the flat with a ginger and white cat given to her by Diana and a white hen. The cat and the hen never bothered one another.

Her happiness at being financially independent at last was marred by the fact that although she was in love with the Colonel for the rest of her life, his passion for her was largely over by the time she came to live in Paris. They remained close lifelong friends but she had to share him with other women and also with General de Gaulle, in whose government he served, and make the most of the time they spent together. She now had plenty of money, however, and was able to enjoy her life in Paris and indulge her passion for haute couture, being one of the first women to wear Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ with its long elegant skirts and fitted waists which so suited her slim figure and were the opposite of the short skirts and wide shoulders of wartime ‘fashion’.

As soon as she had a settled home, Nancy started work on
Love in a Cold Climate
, the sequel to
The Pursuit of Love
. The same characters appear but they are no longer centre stage, this position being given to the grand and wealthy Montdores and – a real departure from the novels of the time – the colourful and eccentric homosexual Cedric. The ‘I’ of the novel is still Fanny, now married to an Oxford don, giving Nancy the opportunity to use her sharp wit against the rarefied world of academia. Fanny and her family take the central role in a further sequel,
Don’t Tell Alfred
, published in 1960, in which Fanny’s husband is unexpectedly made British ambassador to Paris. The book did not enjoy the success of the first two, but is equally enjoyable and still very funny. In it Nancy draws on her friendship with Duff and Diana Cooper whom she visited often during her early days in Paris, when Duff was British ambassador and Diana a superb hostess. In between these two novels she wrote
The Blessing
– an account of a small child playing his estranged parents off against the other. All ends happily – and the characters appear again, very much married, in
Don’t Tell Alfred
.

Nancy also adapted and translated
The Little Hut
, a farce by André Roussin, which had a very successful British tour and a good London run. In contrast, she began to write historical biographies, starting with
Madame de Pompadour
and following it with
Voltaire in Love
. Although these initially received mixed reviews, Nancy, who stopped writing novels in 1960, became respected as a biographer, going on to write
The Sun King
, the life of Louis XIV, and finishing
Frederick the Great
not long before she died.

Apart from the success of these books, Nancy is best remembered for her send-up of class snobbery which first appeared in the magazine
Encounter
in November 1955. Entitled ‘U and Non-U’ it distinguishes between upper- and non-upper-class language and was originally written with linguistics professor Alan Ross of Birmingham University. So popular was this piece that
Encounter
went into a reprint (unheard of for an intellectual monthly magazine) and the article was turned into a slim volume entitled
Noblesse Oblige
. It was the subject of John Betjeman’s poem ‘How to get on in Society’, and to this day there are those who still can’t decide whether to call a toilet a lavatory – or vice versa, a lounge a drawing room, or if a serviette is really a table napkin.

The Mosley family, in contrast to Nancy, were going nowhere after the war as their passports were still confiscated. They had moved to Crowood in Wiltshire because the house had farmland attached to it and it gave Mosley something with which to occupy his time. Mosley was only 49 when the war ended and he needed something more to do with his undoubted energies than live the life of a country gentleman – but what? The name Mosley was hated in post-war as well as wartime England, to the extent that very few schools would accept Alex and Max, who ended up being educated by a tutor. Diana realised very soon that there was little chance of her husband ever getting back into politics but she made it her life’s work to encourage him to think that he might do so. His first course was to champion a united Europe which would be a bastion against communism, and in this he was well ahead of his time, but first he had to get his views aired in public. He started the monthly
Mosley Newsletter
, followed by the weekly
Union
, later called
Action
. He founded a new party called the Union Movement but it was difficult to hire a hall once the owners learnt his name. He did actually stand for Parliament in 1959 and 1966 but each time lost his deposit. More successful was the Mosleys’ founding of a monthly intellectual magazine,
The European
, which Diana edited between 1953 and 1959. It never made money and eventually Mosley closed it down, but it had attracted some formidable right-wing writers and, more importantly, it had illustrated that Diana too had the literary flair inherited from both her grandfathers.

By 1947 the Mosleys were still having their request for passports turned down. To get around this Mosley bought a 60-ton ketch, the
Alianora
, and arranged with his contacts in Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal that they would accept him and his family without passports. Just as they were about to sail in 1949 their passports were granted, but they kept to their plans and spent the summer sailing in the Mediterranean with Alex and Max.

This episode and the loss of a tax case convinced Mosley in 1950 that it would be a good idea to emigrate; the death of Diana’s dear and loyal friend, the aesthete Lord Berners (on whom Nancy had based the character of Lord Merlin in
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
), removed one of the only obstacles which would have persuaded her to stay. Pam and Derek had already established themselves at Tullamaine Castle, and Debo and Andrew spent time at their Irish property, Lismore Castle. In 1951 Mosley sold Crowood and bought Clonfert Palace in east Galway and the Temple de la Gloire at Orsay outside Paris. Clonfert and most of its contents were burnt down two years later and thereafter the Mosleys made their home at Orsay, which meant that Nancy and Diana saw each other often. Nancy and Mosley did not get on but years of being polite to one another for Diana’s sake eventually established a sort of friendship. Strangely, in view of their very differing political opinions, Mosley and the Colonel got on well, possibly because Mosley never got involved in French politics as he did in Spain, Italy and Germany.