The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (32 page)

Esmond told Decca that he had fallen in love with her on the day after they arrived in France. Thereafter, since they intended to marry eventually, they saw no reason to pay for two hotel rooms as they journeyed south. Decca’s letters were designed to keep her parents’ minds easy until a letter (forwarded by Esmond to Peter Nevile on the thirteenth), had been delivered to Nellie Romilly in Dieppe on Saturday 20 February. Esmond thought that by then, two weeks after their elopement, they would be married and ‘in the clear’, but they soon found that a marriage was not possible because they were both under age. Esmond was eighteen and Decca was nineteen; as minors they both needed parental permission. Meanwhile, they waited in Bayonne for Decca’s Spanish visa. For Esmond, who was anxious to get to Spain, it was frustrating, but for Decca everything was new and exciting. Only one incident marred her enjoyment and it led to their first quarrel.

They were sitting drinking in a café one evening when a large rough man came in with a dog, muzzled and on a leash. After a while the man began to beat the dog across the face with a switch and as it yelped and whined the other diners laughed and cheered. Decca became frantic and shouted to Esmond, ‘Tell him to stop . . . the cruel brute, can’t you do something?’ Esmond pulled her up out of her seat and said, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’ Outside the café he told her furiously,

What right have you got to impose your beastly upper-class preoccupation with animals on these people? You’re behaving like a typical British tourist. That’s why English people are so hated abroad. Don’t you know how the English people of your class treat people, in India and Africa, and all over the world? And you have the bloody nerve to come here – to their country, mind you, and . . . telling them how to treat their dogs . . . I can tell you when you get to Spain you’ll see plenty of horrible sights, bombed children dying in the streets. French people and Spanish people don’t give a damn about animals and why should they? They happen to think people are more important. If you’re going to make such an unholy fuss about dogs you should have stayed in England, where they feed the dogs steak and let people in slums die of starvation.
⁷

Decca refused to admit that it was necessary to ill-treat animals in order to care for people, and they quarrelled all night. Next day they made up but what Esmond said made her think more deeply about her commitment to his brand of politics. It is interesting that the first disagreement between these two firebrand radicals was over a point unconnected with ideology. However, as she recalled later, she and Esmond felt they could do anything, achieve anything, and that they were not bound by any rules. Years later she attributed this to a special brand of self-confidence due to their upbringing: they enjoyed ‘a feeling of being able to walk through any fire unscathed’.

Nellie received Esmond’s letter on the twentieth, in Dieppe, too late to reply the same day, but the following morning she contacted Dorothy Allhusen, and asked her to contact the Redesdales immediately to tell them the startling news she had just received from Esmond: ‘. . . When I met Decca Mitford at Cousin Dorothy’s the other weekend,’ he had written, ‘we both more or less fell in love with each other . . . then we arranged that she should come to Spain as my secretary. I expect by the time you get this we’ll have been married in Spain, as of course we’ve been unofficially so, since we left, and we’re intending to have three children . . . her family loathe the name of me . . . so pour some white wash on me.’
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Any attempt to get Decca back, he warned, would result in his leaking to the papers the truth about Unity and Hitler: ‘It wouldn’t be a very nice thing to have that advertised.’
*

By this time Peter Nevile had called at Rutland Gate with the unenviable task of telling the Redesdales that their daughter had eloped with a young man whom for years most of the family had thought would have been improved with a horsewhipping. He also told them that the couple were presently living as man and wife in a cheap hotel in Bayonne and that by now they might be married. Having worried for days that Decca might have run off to join a Communist cell, or even that she had been taken by white slavers, Mitford legend says that David sank into a chair muttering, ‘Worse than I thought. Married to Romilly!’

Sydney wrote immediately to Decca at the address in Bayonne: ‘My darling, we have been in such agonising suspense . . . please come home. I cannot do more than
beg
of you to return. We shall be here as we are not, of course, going on the cruise.’
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On the same day Sydney received a seven-page letter from Nellie Romilly, which must have made her want to scream. Nellie began by saying that she and her husband, Bertram, were proud to have Decca as a daughter-in-law, even though they were concerned that Esmond had taken such a step when he was in no position to keep a wife. She was surprised, Nellie continued, as before he left she had asked Esmond if he had any romantic entanglements and he had replied that he was in no position to fall in love as he could not support a wife. ‘I know only too well that he cannot appeal to any mother as a husband for her child . . . his attitude has always been one of defiance to law and order,’ she wrote. She only hoped, she said, that ‘the children’ were in northern Spain where there was no fighting.
¹⁰
When Nanny Blor was told about this all she said was, ‘Good gracious, she didn’t take any clothes to fight in.
¹¹

The couple
were
in Spain by this time. Decca had finally been granted a Spanish visa and after a rough three-day voyage in a small cargo boat across the Bay of Biscay, she and Esmond arrived at Bilbao. Whenever she stopped to think about what had happened it seemed like a dream to her: here she was, in Spain, with Esmond, the embodiment of years of fantasizing. As members of the accredited press corps they were given free board and lodging in the Hotel Torrontegui in the centre of the town which, although it was some distance from the fighting, showed all the signs of a war zone. Food was scarce; meat, eggs, butter and milk were unobtainable. Every meal, breakfast, lunch, supper, was the same, and they existed on beans and coarse grey bread, with an occasional treat of fish, all washed down with the thick chocolate drink of the region. Utility services were spasmodic and garbage was piled up in the nearly deserted streets.

After a few days they were taken by jeep to the front where a representative of the Press Bureau explained the various battle positions to the assembled reporters. Decca, looking out of place among the contingent of hardened war correspondents, was asked if she would like to shoot a rifle. At that moment she must have wished that she had gone out shooting occasionally with her father for the recoil knocked her off her feet and the bullet embedded itself in a tree. This was Decca’s sole experience of front-line fighting in Spain, and it seemed ‘unreal’. After that, she and Esmond settled quickly into a routine in Bilbao, checking each day with the Press Bureau for war news and spending a few hours each afternoon preparing and typing dispatches for the
News Chronicle
such as ‘One Night on the Spanish Front: by Esmond Romilly’.
¹²
But she was fidgety and anxious about what was happening at home, half worried that her parents would find a way of bringing her back. She wrote to her mother with pretended insouciance: she and Esmond were quite safe, she said, and they were not to worry about her. She told of how they had been taken to see a prisoner-of-war camp where she thought the prisoners were rather too well looked-after – ‘when you think how the fascists treat
their
prisoners . . .’
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Often, at night she could hear the heavy guns as war raged an hour’s drive away.

At Rutland Gate the Mitford children had soon clustered round the distraught and bewildered Redesdales. Unity had ‘scrammed back’ from Munich as soon as she heard the news of the elopement, and by the time she arrived they had heard via the consul in Bayonne that Esmond and Decca were now in Spain. Prod was well to the fore when legal options were being discussed, with plenty of ‘I-know-I-
am
-a-lawyer’ suggestions and it was agreed that he and Nancy should go out to Spain and bring Decca home. ‘Prod was boring about the whole thing,’ Unity wrote later. ‘Right from the beginning he wanted to arrange everything and he was dying to be the heroic brother-in-law who rushed out . . . (expenses paid by Farve) to bring you back. Also it was his silly and expensive idea to make you a ward in chancery. I don’t suppose, either, that you loved his piece in the
Daily Mail
, in which he said that you only became a communist to get even with me.’
¹⁴
Meanwhile she told of the sad spectre of their parents sleepless for nights on end, with David clumsily making pots of tea for Sydney.

Through Churchill, the Foreign Office had become involved ever since the Redesdales realized that Decca was missing. Now, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden agreed to allow the Rodds to travel aboard a naval destroyer just leaving for the port of Bermeo (thirty miles from Bilbao) to take off British subjects and refugees trapped by the fighting. Eden also sent a personal cable to the consul in Bilbao:
‘FIND JESSICA MITFORD AND PERSUADE HER TO RETURN’
. Meanwhile the family solicitors, Hasties, were instructed to cable Esmond: ‘
MISS JESSICA MITFORD IS A WARD OF COURT STOP IF YOU MARRY HER WITHOUT LEAVE OF JUDGE YOU WILL BE LIABLE TO IMPRISONMENT STOP HASTIES
’.
¹⁵

The same day the British newspapers got on to the story when the
Daily Express
headlined its front page: ‘Peer’s Daughter Elopes to Spain’.
¹⁶
This was the sort of romantic episode that reporters could make something of: the pretty teenage daughter of a peer of the realm, eloping with a younger cousin who also happened to be the notorious and rebellious ‘red’ nephew of Winston Churchill. What was more, the girl came from a family with two already newsworthy daughters: Diana, who supported (they dared not go further) Sir Oswald Mosley, and Unity, who had already made her position on Hitler and the Nazis well known. The story, with considerable embellishment, made headlines in all the British papers, and many European ones, for weeks: ‘Another Mitford Anarchist’, ‘Consul Chases Peer’s Daughter’, ‘Mixed Up Mitford Girls Still Confusing Europe’. Unfortunately, despite their scoop, the
Daily Express
got the sisters mixed up and stated that it was the Hon. Deborah Freeman Mitford who had eloped. Debo subsequently sued for libel because of the damage to her reputation, and settled out of court for a thousand pounds, which she spent on a fur coat. Esmond, who felt that he and Decca had undergone all the hardships and were desperately short of money, never got over the injustice of Debo’s windfall.

Now that her whereabouts were known, Decca was besieged with mail from home. Nanny was frantic about her wardrobe and whether she had enough underclothes – ‘We shall have no peace while you remain in Spain. Darling, how could you do it?’ she wrote. ‘
Do please come
.’ On the eve of what should have been the departure of their world cruise Sydney wrote,

Darling beloved Little D;

I am writing this for Peter to take to you . . . I think I am living in the most frightful nightmare and half expect to wake up and find it never happened and Little D is here . . . Nannie’s heart is broken . . . Bobo and Debo miss you all the time and the house is so sad . . . I beg you to listen to Nancy and Peter and do as they say . . . It is something to know where you are, I nearly went mad when it seemed you had quite disappeared . . . I can’t help blaming myself terribly for it all . . . I knew you were unhappy, but the cause of it all was beyond me, except that like many girls you had nothing to do. I ought to have been able to help you more . . . Farve is better now but it was frightful to see him so down, I have never seen him like that . . . Tom & Diana & Bobo have been wonderful and helped so much . . .
¹⁷

Tom, Diana and Unity had all sided with Decca, provoking uproar at Rutland Gate. Two weeks later Unity wrote from Munich that when she arrived home she found Aunt Weenie announcing that it would be better if Decca were dead, ‘but I know she thinks that about me and Diana, too’. Unlike her gentler older sister Sydney, Weenie was all for sending Tom to give Esmond a good thrashing, and accused Diana of causing all the problems of Decca and Unity by ‘setting a bad example’. But futile threats to horsewhip Esmond were all that David could manage. Coming on top of Diana’s divorce and marriage to ‘that man’, and Unity’s obsession with Hitler, Decca’s defection had a devastating effect on him and what was to be a rapid physical decline appears to date from this point. The ‘poor old Fem and Male’ were utterly miserable, Unity continued. At first they had suggested that Unity went out to get Decca, but then they decided that,

as Esmond is by way of hating the idea of me . . . it might do more harm than good. So I came here instead, in the new car Farve gave me . . . four-seater and black. I stayed two days . . . at Nuremburg on the way [and] met the Führer by great good luck last Tuesday . . . he asked me to go to tea with him and I followed his car to his flat and sat with him for 21¼2 hours alone, chatting. He wanted to hear all about you and what happened since I saw him last. He had forbidden it to appear in the German newspapers which was nice of him wasn’t it – at least perhaps you won’t think so as Nancy says Esmond adores publicity.
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