The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (25 page)

It was difficult for those present not to be emotionally affected and, indeed, Diana and Unity were not the only visitors impressed by the showmanship of Hitler’s party. Many young Englishmen who visited Germany in the first part of that decade were moved to support Hitler’s regime, even though later some came to despise it. In a recent television documentary examining the attraction of Hitler to the youth of Europe at that time, Nigel Nicholson was just one who stated that he was thoroughly hooked: ‘The catchy “
Horst Wessel
” song, the marching, the torches, the singing and tramping of boots – I was, at that moment, a Hitler youth,’ he said. Michael Burn was another: ‘I wrote home, “I cannot think coherently – it is so wonderful what Hitler has brought this country back to . . .”’ He recalls that he was ‘stunned and excited by the cohesion of Germany after the political disunion in Britain. Then there was the theatre of Nuremberg: ‘great lights in the sky, moving music, the rhetoric, the presentation, timing, performance, soundtrack, exultation and climax. It was almost aimed at the sexual parts of one’s consciousness.’
³³
Over the years that followed most of these young people recognized the true nature of the Nazi movement and defected from it, becoming leaders in the wartime fight against Hitler, but for the moment all they felt was excitement and admiration. For Diana and Unity the only regret of the holiday was that they did not meet Hitler in person. Although with their blonde, tall, slim appearance they were the physical personification of Arian womanhood, Hanfstaengl told them that he did not dare to introduce them as they wore so much lipstick, which Hitler abhorred. They were used to this; Farve felt much the same way.
³⁴

When they returned to England Diana had to face her father’s anger: she was still in semi-disgrace over her divorce, and when Unity gaily told them about the Parteitag David erupted. ‘I suppose you know without being told,’ he wrote to Diana, ‘how absolutely horrified Muv and I were to think of you and Bobo accepting any form of hospitality from people we regard as a murderous gang of pests. That you should associate yourself with such people is a source of utter misery to both of us – but of course, beyond telling you this . . . we can do nothing. What we can do, and what we intend to do, is to try to keep Bobo out of it all.’
³⁵

Mosley was still touring France and the children were staying at Biddesden with Bryan, so Diana left almost immediately for Rome where she spent six weeks at the luxurious house overlooking the Forum, owned by her great friend Lord Berners. Gerald Berners, a homosexual, was a quintessential eccentric; had he possessed no talent at all, he was rich enough to indulge himself as a dabbler in the aesthetic disciplines he so enjoyed, but he was also clever and exceptionally well read, an able musician, composer, artist and writer. He had been posted to Rome as a junior diplomat but while Diana was there he seemed to spend more time working on the score for a Diaghilev ballet. Nancy would later use him as the model for her colourful character Lord Merlin in
The Pursuit of Love
, a compliment that Berners rather enjoyed. At his country home, Faringdon, he kept a flock of doves, which he dyed in pastel shades so that when they rose into the sky it looked as though someone had flung a handful of confetti over the rooftop, a pretty nonsense amusingly described by Nancy. Berners was one of the few friends who accepted Diana’s decision to divorce Bryan without critical comment, and Diana valued him because he was clever, witty and made her laugh – a quality that was especially welcome at that time – but also because he was her mentor: she once said that her relationship with Berners had been the equivalent of reading arts at university.

A sense of humour is an ethereal quality that is difficult to describe but Diana explained Berners’ wit beautifully. She wrote of how, when they drove back to England together in October, they stopped over in Paris where they met Violet Trefusis, notorious as the lover of Vita Sackville-West. Her mother was Mrs Keppel, the favourite of King Edward VII. Violet and Berners decided to pretend they were engaged and in November this was announced in London gossip columns to the astonishment, presumably, of everyone who knew either of them. Violet phoned him to say she had had dozens of congratulations. Berners was delighted; he had received none, he said. When Mrs Keppel insisted that a denial must be made as the joke had gone far enough, he suggested announcing in
The Times
: ‘Lord Berners has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man.’
³⁶

Unity passed the time at Swinbrook working at her collages and painting, and, unknown to her parents, made regular trips into Oxford where she dropped in at the BUF offices and helped to sell copies of the
Blackshirt
. By comparison Nancy’s innocent tea parties with undergraduate friends in Oxford cafés, which had provoked David’s fury a decade earlier, seem tame. Sydney saw to it that Unity did the Season again, so that her social life continued as it had during her débutante year. But whenever she was in London during the run-up to Nancy’s wedding, or during secret visits to the Eatonry after Diana’s return, Unity attended BUF rallies or Mosley’s meetings, proudly sporting a black shirt and her unusual badge, which identified her as someone special in the party ranks. At Swinbrook visitors during that period report that hardly had they set foot in the entrance hall before they were besieged by Unity and Decca demanding, ‘Are you a Fascist or a Communist?’ When one young man answered, ‘Neither, I’m a democrat,’ they retorted in unison, ‘How wet!’ and lost interest in him.
³⁷

Unity was not alone in attending Mosley’s meetings: the elder sisters all turned up occasionally, out of loyalty to Diana if nothing else, but they were all interested to a greater or lesser degree in politics. In November Nancy wrote to Diana about a meeting in Oxfordshire, within striking distance of Swinbrook, so of course she and Unity found a way of attending. ‘T.P.O.L.’s [the Poor Old Leader’s] meeting was fascinating, but awful for him, as the hall was full of Oxfordshire Conservatives who sat in hostile and phlegmatic silence – you can imagine what they were like. I think he is a wonderful speaker & of course he is better still with a more interesting audience . . .’
³⁸
Even Pam attended one or two meetings, but there is no record of her opinions.

Although Diana would never construe it in such a light, her long uncomplaining absence during that summer and autumn brought Mosley to heel. When he became ill that winter with phlebitis, from which he had suffered previously, he was advised to spend some time in a warmer climate. After Nancy’s wedding, following which the newly-weds went to Rome for their honeymoon, Mosley asked Diana to accompany him to Provence where they lived near Grasse in a rented house for a month or so at the beginning of 1934. Despite his illness, they were happy. It was the first time they had been free to be together without attracting disapproving looks or worrying about the King’s Proctor, or lectures from friends and family. Although Diana was now in touch with her parents again, they regarded Mosley as ‘that man’ and it was tacitly understood that he was not to be introduced into the conversation. David even went so far as to write Mosley’s name on a slip of paper and lock it away in a drawer: he believed strongly that this practice would bring an enemy to grief.

In the meantime, Decca finally achieved a taste of the freedom for which she so longed. In the autumn of 1933 Sydney arranged for her and Cousin Idden to spend the customary year abroad – a year in Paris to be ‘finished’ and improve their French before their coming-out year. Sydney took them to France to settle them in but while she was with them the girls’ hearts were in their mouths as they attracted admiring glances from young men, even the odd pinch (and once in the cinema, a groper, but Decca made sure Sydney did not find out for fear she would refuse to leave them). Sydney, more used to English restraint in ogling, was irritated at the attention the girls attracted and with Diana’s experience still fresh in her mind made cross little threats every now and again: ‘If this continues I shall have to take you both home.’ At last, to Decca’s heartfelt relief, she left them and went on a short cruise, before returning home to see Nancy married to Peter Rodd.
³⁹

A few weeks later there was some rioting on the streets but it died down quickly, too quickly for Decca who found it rather diverting. Nor was she especially sorry that she missed Nancy’s wedding for there had been a coolness between her and Nancy since the latter had joined with Mrs Hammersley in teasing her about being ‘a ballroom Communist, a cut below a parlour pink’.
⁴⁰
The truth stung, for the closest Decca had been able to get to Communism before her departure for Paris had been on those occasions when she had slipped away from Nanny during a walk in the park. Then she was able to join the groups gathered round the Communist orators at Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner, which inevitably included a stirring rendering of the anthem ‘The Internationale’ and an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with the clenched-fist salute.

In Paris, free of parental control for the first time in her life, Decca had no intention of behaving herself in the way her mother expected – nor, probably, would many teenagers in those circumstances. On the other hand, she was careful in her letters home to be circumspect and she did not repeat Diana’s mistake in keeping an incriminating diary. She told Sydney as little as possible about the riots, but quoted a good deal from the Communist newspaper
L’humanité
.
⁴¹
In the evenings, telling Madame, their guardian – who seems not to have cared much what they did – that they were going to the opera, they visited picture-houses, nightclubs and even the Folies Bergères with various boys, and accepted numerous invitations to dinner. Decca ‘fell in love’ with a married man called Émile, who was too passionate for her comfort, but the relationship soon ended with no harm done. Idden fell in love with a poet called Maurice and smuggled him into their room, causing Decca to worry that they might throw her out.
⁴²
In the event he was too shy even to kiss Idden so that relationship did not last either. For one date with a much older man Decca wore a tight satin suit, the chief attraction of which was that she knew Sydney would not have approved of it. After dinner, instead of going on to a nightclub as Decca expected, her companion steered her to a bordello. She pretended nervously that this was all quite normal for her, but when he showed her a salon ‘
pour les sadistes
’ she felt anxious and Nanny’s warnings came back to her. She could almost
hear
Sydney say, in a dampening manner, ‘Not at
all
a nice place, Jessica, I shouldn’t think,’ and after a brief struggle with her companion, she made a hasty exit. It was all very daring and even though they were still attending school (the Sorbonne) – which in itself was
wonderful
– Decca felt very much a woman of the world and even her handwriting, which had formerly been the neat, stylized script of the schoolroom, changed into the hasty scrawl that characterized her letters for the rest of her life.

The two girls went home for Christmas, and during the holidays Unity began a determined campaign to persuade her parents to let her spend her ‘year abroad’ in Germany. All the other sisters had gone to France to polish up their French, which Unity had refused to consider. Her trip with Diana in the previous year, though, had made her want to learn German, she said, as Tom had, and she wanted to go to finishing-school in Munich. Since Sydney had spent some years trying to get Unity interested in anything, one can only sympathize with what she probably regarded as a new and positive attitude in this lovable but difficult daughter. She did some investigation and learned of a Baroness Laroche who had a house at 121 Königinstrasse, which operated as a sort of informal finishing-school where English girls could study German under a governess. Mary St Clair Erskine, sister of Hamish, and other English girls of ‘the right sort’ from families known to Sydney, had stayed with the Baroness. Sydney therefore approved her daughter’s request.

Looking back, it seems that 1933 was a pivotal year for the Mitford family. By the start of 1934 Sydney probably believed that the worst of their problems were now behind them. Although she and David still disapproved of Diana’s affair with Mosley, the initial scandal, which had caused them extreme distress and embarrassment, seemed to have died down. Nancy was married and wrote home of her ecstatic happiness; Decca was successfully established at school in Paris and would come out at the end of the year. Tom, who never gave any trouble, had recently qualified in law; Pam was still working at Biddesden for Bryan. Only Debo, a reasonably contented child apart from an occasional adolescent outburst, was still in the schoolroom at Swinbrook. Miss Hussey had given a term’s notice and Sydney reasoned that it might be easier to send Debo to school for a year rather than recruit a new governess. Even Unity had found an interest.

No one could have foreseen the tragedy that resulted from the Redesdales’ decision to allow Unity to go to Germany.

8
Unity and the Führer
(1934–5)

In the spring of 1934 the Rodds, back from their honeymoon, attended several BUF rallies, and even bought black shirts. ‘Prod looked very pretty in his black shirt,’ Nancy wrote years later to Evelyn Waugh, ‘but we were younger and high-spirited then and didn’t know about Buchenwald.’
¹
Prod had flirted briefly with Fascism at Oxford, before transferring his political allegiance to the Labour Party, and for a few months early in their marriage he and Nancy supported Mosley’s movement by paying a subscription. With hindsight, however, and bearing in mind Nancy’s lifelong support of socialism, it is more likely that they were actually supporting Diana, though they must have been interested in hearing what Mosley had to say. Equally importantly, Nancy was gathering material for another book. Later that year, from her small house at Chiswick, she began working on
Wigs on the Green
, probably the least known of her novels. This time the leading character was Unity. One cannot say it was ‘Unity to the life’ because Nancy’s characters were always larger than life, unmerciful caricatures, but it was clearly Unity to everyone who knew her, despite Nancy’s disclaimer that ‘all characters in this book are drawn from the author’s imagination’.
²

‘BRITONS, awake! Arise! Oh, British lion!’ cried Eugenia Malmains in thrilling tones. She stood on an overturned wash-tub on Chalford village green and harangued about a dozen aged yokels. Her straight hair, cut in a fringe, large pale-blue eyes . . . well-proportioned limbs and classical features, combined with a certain fanaticism of gesture to give her the aspect of a modern Joan of Arc . . .
³

This was guaranteed to make the sisters, at least, scream with laughter, for to their merriment, and to the astonishment of the postmistress, Unity had taken to appearing in Swinbrook’s only shop (Chalford was Swinbrook to the life) and throwing up her hand in a smart Nazi salute before ordering a twopenny chocolate bar.

‘The Union Jack Movement is a youth movement,’ Eugenia cried passionately, ‘we are tired of the old . . . We see nothing admirable in that debating society of aged and corrupt men called Parliament which muddies our great empire into wars or treaties . . . casting away its glorious colonies . . . And all according to each vacillating whim of some octogenarian statesman’s mistress—’

At this point a very old lady came up to the crowd . . . ‘Eugenia, my child,’ she said brokenly. ‘Do get off that tub . . . Oh! When her ladyship hears of this I don’t know what will happen.’

‘Go away, Nanny,’ said Eugenia . . . The old lady again plucked at Eugenia’s skirt. This time, however, Eugenia turned and roared at her, ‘Get out you filthy Pacifist, get out and take your yellow razor gang with you.’

It was all there, TPOM and TPOF, the insults that Decca and Unity hurled at each other in pseudo-earnestness, a brilliant parody of the BUF anthem sung to the tune of ‘
Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles
’; and sly little digs at Fascism. ‘“I really don’t quite know what an Aryan is.” “Well, it’s quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes . . .”’
⁴

When Decca came home from Paris for the Easter break she was fascinated to hear the grown-ups tut-tutting about the latest prank of one of the unacceptable Romilly cousins, Esmond. A year younger than Decca he had run away from Wellington College where he had been running a left-wing magazine called
Out of Bounds
and because of his relationship to Winston Churchill the newspapers were on to it. ‘Mr Churchill’s 15 year old Nephew Vanishes’ ran a typical headline; others referred to him more luridly as ‘Churchill’s Red Nephew’. It was said that he was under the influence of a group of London Communists, but his mother told reporters coolly, ‘We are not worried about his safety. We have a good idea where he is . . .’
⁵
There was a great deal of family sympathy for his parents for having to put up with such appalling behaviour, but Sydney blamed Nellie for it.

Listening to the conversation of the grown-ups, Decca thrilled to the exploits of this swashbuckling cousin whom she’d never been allowed to meet, although once she had missed him by only days, when she had gone to stay at Chartwell and found the Churchill nannies agog with stories of his wickedness. In the previous autumn, while she was settling herself in Paris, Esmond had declared himself a pacifist and had wrecked the Armistice service in the school’s chapel by inserting pacifist leaflets in the prayer books. Diana has sometimes been held responsible for indirectly setting Decca on a left-wing path, by steering Unity towards her right-wing allegiance. But it was Nancy who was the biggest influence in Decca’s life. ‘Watching her,’ Decca wrote, ‘all through her engagement to Hamish, and [seeing] how she loathed Swinbrook and longed to be free of Muv etc,
her
fate – to be stuck in that life because she hadn’t any way of escape being without money even after she started writing – was a huge influence on me, then and ever [afterwards].’
⁶
She was determined not to be stuck at home like Nancy, obliged to marry to escape.

There was one last sitting for the annual family photograph taken in front of the house, with everyone in their usual position, Unity with Ratular on her shoulder, Diana, Debo and Nancy clutching dogs, David looking handsomely serious with his thick hair now turning white, Sydney expressionless but revealing that the girls took their beauty from both sides of the family, and Tom in a bright lumber jacket. It was the last time they would all gather like this for a ritual photograph. Then Sydney departed, taking with her Decca, Idden and Unity. Decca and Idden were about to embark on their final term at the Sorbonne, but before leaving them Sydney spoke firmly with Madame Paulain, making it clear that her daughter and niece required their bedlinen to be changed more often than once every three weeks. Then she departed with Unity for Munich, to oversee the settling-in process at Baroness Laroche’s.

The Baroness, whom Diana remembers as a charming woman, took her girls
en pension
. They joined her for lunch and dinner at which the food was always delicious, and all conversation was conducted in German.
⁷
They were given formal German lessons by a governess, Frau Baum, and when Unity made her first appearance in May she had already missed the first few. She wore her black shirt and BUF badge to classes but these emblems had no power to shock as they did in England as Nazi emblems were common everywhere. Her fellow students were a year or two younger than Unity, and were being ‘finished’ prior to coming out. Indeed, one or two were already discreetly dating young ‘storms’, as they called the storm-troopers. Because she was already out Unity did not have to attend the deportment classes, but she did not waste her free time; she worked hard at her German for she had a good incentive to do so. Within weeks of her arrival she had conceived a plan, and begun what was to be her daily programme for the next year or so. She discovered from Frau Baum, a keen Hitler supporter, that Hitler sometimes took lunch in a restaurant called Osteria Bavaria. Unity’s objective was to meet him, but she had discovered that to communicate with him she would need to speak German for he spoke no English. So she concentrated on her studies, and made a few exploratory sorties to the Osteria, and to the Carlton tearooms, which Hitler also patronized.

In June, she finally got to see him. Derek Hill, a young English painter who was visiting Munich, was an old friend of Unity and was in the Carlton tearooms one evening with his mother and aunt when the Führer arrived. There was no pomp when he attended a restaurant, except that he was always accompanied by several henchmen, or members of his inner circle, and the inevitable bodyguard. The party simply came in unannounced and sat down quietly, keeping themselves to themselves. Derek Hill immediately phoned Unity, who jumped into a taxi and sped to the tearoom. ‘I went and sat down with them [the Hill party] and there was the Führer opposite,’ she wrote to Diana. Hill noticed that Unity was trembling so violently with excitement that he had to steady her cup.

Three weeks after Unity’s first sighting of Hitler the Night of the Long Knives took place, when Ernst Roehm and over a hundred officers of the brown-shirted SA (Sturm Abteilungen, storm-troopers) were brutally assassinated on Hitler’s orders. Some were shot on their front doorsteps, others were formally executed or hacked to death in secret, some – thinking the attack was part of an anti-Hitler plot – died screaming, ‘
Heil, Hitler.
’ Like many of those killed, Roehm had been an old comrade of Hitler’s since before the 1923 putsch and had helped him to power. But the SA had been a problem for some time, with Roehm refusing to accept Hitler’s right to give direct orders to SA troops. It seems unlikely that he was guilty of plotting against Hitler, as was claimed at the time, but was disposed of because he posed a threat to the more disciplined black-shirted SS (Schutz Staffeln, Protection Squad) troops, whose leader, Heinrich Himmler, made his rival’s death the price of future co-operation. Hitler called personally on his former friend to arrest him, saying that he alone could arrest a chief of staff. Unity wrote breathlessly to Diana about the massacre, which had shocked Munich burghers to the core.

I am terribly sorry for the Führer – you know Roehm was his oldest friend and comrade, the only one that called him ‘du’ in public . . . it must have been so dreadful for Hitler when he arrested Roehm himself and tore off his decorations. Then he went to arrest Heines
⁸
and found him in bed with a boy. Did that get into the English papers? Poor Hitler.
⁹

The words said to have been used by Hitler when he arrested his old friend became a catchphrase among the girls at Baroness Laroche’s, ‘
Schuft, du bist verhaftet
[Wretch, you are under lock and key],’ but Unity was unable to see the funny side of this, and was upset that her beloved Führer had been in danger.
¹⁰

It was a subtly changed Unity who returned to Swinbrook for the summer. Photographs show that she had a poise and a singular beauty, where since the age of thirteen she had merely looked fair and awkward. She and Decca squabbled as usual about politics, but they were loving squabbles, and they sat down cheerfully afterwards to discuss what they would do should either of them be placed in a position where they had to give orders for the execution of the other. Only one thing marred Unity’s summer: she received a postcard from Tom, who, having grown up with six sisters, had learned a thing or two about teasing. He was in Bayreuth, he wrote, and he had been invited to supper with Hitler and Goering. She believed him and was miserably jealous for days, until she heard that it was untrue. But she was so enthusiastic about her life in Munich that Sydney decided to take Decca and Idden there for a short holiday in September after the beginning of Unity’s autumn term.

Unity went back early, in August, so that she could attend the 1934 Parteitag and Diana joined her there a few weeks later. Putzi Hanfstaengl refused to help them, saying that their excessive make-up embarrassed him and, besides, there was not a ticket to be had for the rally. If they went to Nuremberg, he warned, they would find every bed reserved and would end up spending their nights sitting in the railway station. The sisters decided to go anyway and found it, just as he had predicted, crammed. They sat in a café and Unity was thrilled simply to be there. ‘
Do
be glad we came,’ she kept repeating happily to Diana. But luck was with them: an old man with whom they shared a table in a beer garden was wearing an unusual emblem. Unity engaged him in conversation, curious about his badge, and it turned out that he was one of the first members of the Nazi Party and his card bore the number 100. It entitled him to various privileges and, impressed with the enthusiasm of the English girls, he arranged accommodation and passes to the stadium for them.

Diana’s motive for visiting Germany at this point was not simply to attend the Parteitag. She had already begun to do what Professor Lindemann had suggested and was learning to speak German. It was not possible for her to be away from Mosley or her two boys
¹¹
for extended periods, to learn as Unity was learning, so she took some Berlitz courses in London and was now looking to improve on this base. She enrolled in a short course at the university run for foreigners, due to begin in November, and returned home in the meantime. In November she moved into a flat that Unity had found just off the Ludwigstrasse. It was full of Biedermayer furniture, centrally heated and the rent included a good cook. Unity was no longer staying with the Baroness and had taken a room at a hostel, a
Studentheim
, for women university students, which she always referred to as ‘the heim’. She left it and moved in with Diana.
¹²

With the help of Putzi Hanfstaengl Diana obtained a press card, which enabled the sisters to get into meetings at which Hitler was to speak. Whenever her classes allowed she joined Unity at the Osteria. Otherwise Unity went there alone. Initially she persuaded friends to accompany her, but after a while she was content to eat a light lunch on her own and read a book to pass the long hours of waiting. She was rewarded and saw Hitler on a number of occasions, which was always a terrific thrill for her. When she was not waiting for Hitler she and Diana were fond of visiting the Pinakothek (Munich’s Museum of Art, now the Alte Pinakothek, one of the leading art galleries in the world), the palaces, museums and parks such as the Englischer Garten, and they wandered around the old and new parts of the city, the ‘new’ parts designed by King Ludwig I over a century earlier in the neo-classic style. Ludwig bankrupted himself and the city to bring about his ideals, and eventually lost his throne because of his affair with the dancer Lola Montez. Diana had enjoyed the city in the summer, but found it just as attractive in the winter: its proximity to the mountains made it possible for many of its citizens to be on the ski slopes in under an hour, and at weekends there was almost a holiday atmosphere. ‘The icy air out of doors had a special smell so that had one been set down there blindfold one would have known at once it was Munich. Possibly the smell was of brewing, combined with the little cigars the men smoked.’
¹³