The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (38 page)

Decca was taking part in a market-research survey in Southampton when the Prime Minister returned from Munich in apparent triumph but, of course, having given in to all of Hitler’s demands over Czechoslovakia. A visitor who called on the Romillys at this point recalls that, although she was young, her ‘intellectual brilliance in matters of political vision made her almost clairvoyant: she predicted the Nazi attack on Poland and on the Soviet Union, and . . . the incredible period of suffering for the British people’.
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Decca firmly believed, and did so for a long time, however, that it was just her ‘class’, people like her parents, uncles, aunts, and the suited members of the Cliveden set ‘with their furled umbrellas, so symbolic of furled minds’, that was the cause of Britain being swept into war, because of their acceptance – or even active support – of Fascism in Europe. Perhaps this view was hardly surprising when half of her family was in Germany that month, enjoying Hitler’s hospitality.

But Decca was astonished when Chamberlain returned, clutching his furled umbrella and waving his bit of paper, to find that the working people she spoke to were overjoyed. ‘But it’s peace,’ they told her, ‘peace in our time. That’s good, isn’t it?’ More than anything she wanted to finish her work and get back to London and Esmond, for surely, she thought, there this capitulation to Fascism would have made people sit up and take notice. But she found Esmond profoundly depressed: the storm of public indignation he had anticipated over Czechoslovakia had simply not materialized.
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In a sense this put an end to what Philip Toynbee referred to as ‘the wild and comical capers . . . cut by Esmond and Decca’. People suddenly woke up to the fact that war was now a strong possibility, despite Mr Chamberlain’s signed contract with Hitler, and the government began to take the measures to prepare for conflict that Winston Churchill had advocated for several years. What Diana calls ‘war fever’ now affected everybody in Britain. Gas masks were issued to every citizen, trenches were dug in London parks, conscription was to be brought in, and armament production speeded up.

Esmond was no coward, as later events proved, but he realized that if he stayed in England he would be among the first to be called up. He had no objection to joining the fight against Fascism, but until war was declared he had no wish to be sucked into the maw of British Army life, which would condemn him to the sort of discipline he considered pointless and against which he had always fought: the Army bull, the shined boots, and ‘salute everything that moves’ attitude of his boarding-school’s OTC. Yet what could he and Decca do? They had no money and were incapable of managing on what was considered a reasonable white-collar income. Following their return to England in August they had spent a good deal of their time dodging a writ-server. No one had told Decca that electricity had to be paid for so she left lights, heaters and stoves burning all day and night at Rotherhithe, and the huge bill was still unpaid.

Since their return from Corsica they had lived in a small bed-sitter in a street off the Edgware Road near Marble Arch. They had decided that it was too traumatic to return to the place where Julia had died, and their new accommodation was more conveniently situated for Esmond’s job on the Strand. But the Electricity Board tracked them down, and an unfortunate young man was sent to serve them with a court order. They either disguised themselves with dark glasses and false moustaches and slid past him in the communal doorway befor e taking to their heels down the street or stayed in bed while he rapped at the door. ‘Sometimes we stayed in bed for as long as two days,’ Decca wrote, ‘[but] though enjoyable to us, these lost days were becoming a source of irritation to Esmond’s boss.’ At this period, Philip Toynbee recalled, there was little evidence of the careless optimism normally displayed by the independent and ‘fanatical Decca’,
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and Esmond, with his peculiar blend of intellectual idealism, mulish pugnacity, boyish charm and ‘irresistible horse laugh’
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was unusually depressed.
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Enthusiasm was at a low ebb in the Romilly household.

Shortly after Decca’s return from Southampton, however, things miraculously changed for them. Three weeks earlier, she had celebrated her twenty-first birthday, in those days the legal coming-of-age. When each of her children was born, Sydney had opened a savings account for them. Every week she paid a small amount into each account, to be given to them when they reached twenty-one. Decca had either forgotten about this nest egg, or perhaps thought that in the circumstances her mother would not give it to her. But when she met Sydney for lunch in London in early October, she found herself the recipient of a hundred pounds. These undreamed-of riches provided Esmond with the answer to all their problems: they would emigrate to America and work there until war was declared. They would make a fortune from lecturing before he joined up.

Immigration visas were in great demand, and difficult to obtain without demonstrable means of support. The three hundred dollars with which the Romillys would have been left after paying their steerage passage would not last long, but Esmond and Decca appeared before the American consul with sincerity and enthusiasm for the American ethos shining out of their handsome young faces. They laid it on pretty thick, stressing how they were impressed by the freedom of the people and ‘the land of opportunity’, and it worked. At about the time that the papers were full of Diana’s marriage to Mosley, the Romillys heard that they had been granted visas and the all-important green-card work permits.

Before they sailed for New York aboard the SS
Aurania
, in mid-February, they spent time calling on friends. During a trip to Oxford they detoured to Swinbrook as Decca wanted to say goodbye to Miranda before she left. She went to the field where she had discovered that Miranda was kept, ‘walked over to the flock of sheep and called out, “Miranda.” She came hobbling out to me – her feet all full of foot rot. I was in floods of tears,’ she wrote to Nancy.

Following that, the couple planned a final salute to Esmond’s
Out of Bounds
period. It was a raid on Eton College, with Philip Toynbee acting as gang member. Decca knew the layout because of her many family connections who were Old Etonians, and she took them to the anteroom of the chapel where they relieved the hat pegs of all the top hats they could carry away. They returned to London flushed with victory and thirty hats, ‘gallant symbols of our hatred of Eton, of our anarchy, our defiance,’ Toynbee wrote.
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Later, Toynbee lost his girlfriend over the incident for when he told her about it she turned huffy and said it was stealing. And it is difficult, with hindsight, to put any other interpretation on it. Had the trio repaired in good humour to a Thames bridge and cast the lot into the river, it might have been viewed as a prank, and a snub to a society they abhorred. But instead Esmond sold the hats to a second-hand clothes dealer and pocketed the cash. Which seems to smack as much of opportunism as any form of idealism.

13
No Laughing Matter
(1939)

Decca and Esmond spent their first few weeks in the United States in New York, wallowing in unaccustomed luxury at the Shelton Hotel, which Peter Nevile had recommended to them. At $3.50 a day it was rather more than they could afford but Peter had told them that they should put on a ‘good front’ if they wished to impress the natives. He was right. Within no time at all, the letters that they wrote on Shelton writing-paper introducing themselves (‘My good friend Peter Nevile suggested that I should contact you . . .’) brought results and they were able to move out of the hotel and go visiting real Americans. At one grand house Decca met Katherine – Kay – Graham, daughter of Eugene Meyer, who owned the
Washington Post.
Kay was Decca’s age, and even then an ardent Democrat and ‘New Dealer’. The two women were destined to be good friends, and both Decca and Esmond liked the Meyers because, although they were rich Republicans, they were also anti-Fascist.

To Esmond’s chagrin the lecture circuit was uninterested in them, and his English style of copywriting failed to impress Madison Avenue advertising agencies. They told him his British experience was a positive handicap, so Decca helped the exchequer by inventing a history in the fashion trade and landing a job in a dress shop. It gave her a real thrill to take home a wage. Her former occupation as a market researcher had brought in occasional sums of money through Esmond’s agency, but this was a real job that she’d found for herself, and she was proud of it. Among the upper classes in England the term ‘shop girl’ was used pejoratively, and Decca was probably the first woman in her family ever to work for a living. To Decca these were plus factors. In the meantime the couple were welcomed open-handedly by New York society for the bubbling enthusiasm they carried around with them: they were lively, good talkers, entertaining company and they
loved
America. Decca found a second-hand clothes shop where she bought a couple of evening dresses at six dollars each, but it cost more to outfit Esmond: his dinner jacket alone cost them $6.50.
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When they moved out of the Shelton they rented a room in the walk-up apartment of two actors in Greenwich Village. It was, said a visitor, as untidy as a schoolboy’s bedroom but always ‘gloriously happy’. Esmond juggled with apples while Decca cooked supper and chided him for scuffing his shoes. He pretended contempt at being told off, but he was noticeably attentive and would dart across the room to light her cigarette.
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Interviewed by the
New York Daily Mirror
and
Life
magazine, Esmond said he was going to become an American citizen as soon as possible, but he was anxious to correct any impression that he had left England to avoid fighting and pointed to his experience in Spain: ‘I wasn’t a Communist, I am not now, and I never will be, but in the beginning Madrid was a symbol to me. If England is drawn into a war now I shall go back and fight – because of all the things that are dear to me and Decca will be drawn in . . . but I have no illusions about England fighting for democracy.’ Since Munich, he told them, the last democracy in Europe, Czechoslovakia, had fallen. ‘It is imperial England against imperial Germany now.’
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Decca was making contacts who would become lifelong friends. The most important of these was a tall Southern belle who wore white broad-brimmed hats and huge skirts that rustled when she walked. Virginia Durr spoke in a ‘soft scream’ with a marked Southern accent, which fascinated Decca. At first she did not like Virginia, who seemed loud and bossy. Nevertheless, since it was their policy ‘to swoop down . . . on a circle of people, become part of them for a brief time, glean what there was of interest and be off again’, she accepted an invitation for her and Esmond to visit the Durrs at their sprawling white farmhouse about seven miles from Washington, DC. There they met Virginia’s husband Clifford who worked for the Federal Communications Bureau, which controlled broadcasting, and the couple’s noisy, happy family. By the end of the evening they were fast friends and Decca marvelled at how quickly this had occurred. In England, she reflected, it would have taken years of ‘getting to know someone’ before they reached such a stage of friendly intimacy.

Apart from Esmond’s determination to join up as soon as any fighting began in Europe, there was only one problem in Decca’s life at that time. Besotted as she was with Esmond she could not admit him into one part of her life, and that was her love for Unity. Along with Esmond she bitterly denounced her family in general as ‘Nazis’, including the rabidly anti-Nazi Nancy, the Conservative Pam and even the apolitical Debo. But she could never bring herself to extend it to Unity, though Unity was arguably the chief offender. This, surely, tells us something about Unity who, despite the publication of an excellently researched biography, remains an elusive personality. ‘Although I hated everything she stood for,’ Decca wrote, ‘she was easily my favourite sister, which was something I could never have admitted . . . to Esmond. I knew I could never expect Esmond, who had never met her, to feel anything but disgust for her, so by tacit understanding we avoided discussing her.’
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A month earlier the London
Daily Mirror
had given Unity an entire page to express her views and ideology under the headline ‘
WHAT MISS MITFORD WOULD LIKE TO SEE
’. It is a surprisingly reasoned and well-written argument, which states that England and Germany had too much in common to be enemies; and that the two countries ought to be allies with Germany as the greatest Continental power and Britain the great colonial power. But her premise is undermined by her insistence on the importance of racial superiority: too much for most readers to swallow even in the less enlightened 1930s. ‘One of the foundations of Nazi ideology is the racial theory,’ she wrote. ‘They believe that the future of Europe stands or falls with the Nordic race . . .’
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Curiously, despite the part that Unity had played in Putzi Hanfstaegl’s sudden exit from Germany, she remained on good terms with his sister Erna. So much so that in the spring Unity, always short of money, moved out of her flat and in with Erna. ‘It is lovely staying here with Erna,’ she wrote to Diana, ‘but she is very strict and makes me wash the bath out . . . The only boring thing is that she [complains] as much as ever and shrieks at me as if I were responsible for it all [her brother’s defection].’
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If only Unity could talk personally to Hitler, Erna believed, she might get Putzi reinstated. Unity was only too willing and she waited her moment to raise the subject with Hitler. ‘Last week I was lunching with W[olf],’ she wrote to Diana, ‘so I summoned up all my courage and asked if he would see her. He was perfectly sweet and said yes.’
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Erna had not seen Hitler since he had been a fugitive after the failure of the 1923 putsch, when he hid at her home. They met alone and Unity waited outside the room, joining them afterwards for tea. Everything appeared to have gone well, she thought. A few days earlier she had introduced Erna to Randolph Churchill, who was visiting Munich, and Erna told him she intended to visit her brother in London. Randolph said she must visit his father while she was there. Erna told Hitler this and asked him what she might say to Churchill. He replied casually, ‘Use your own judgement.’

Ten days later Erna handed Unity a letter addressed to Hitler and asked her to give it to him. Apparently it was a request that Putzi’s back pay from the Nazi Party be conveyed to her in the form of a cheque signed by Hitler, which she would take with her to England. Hitler read only a few sentences then flushed with anger he tore up the letter. The Hanfstaengls, he told a startled Unity, were money-grabbers, and she had ‘been living on a dung heap’.
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He burned the letter and forbade Unity to see Erna again, not even for one day. This presented her with a problem since she was living with the woman, but it was no problem to Hitler. He said he would find her a flat, and even help her to furnish it. In the meantime Unity moved into an hotel and Janos von Almassy, who was staying in Munich with a friend, went to see Erna and collected Unity’s luggage. On 5 June Unity wrote to Diana that she had found an apartment. ‘Wolf told [Gauleiter] Wagner that they were to look for one for me . . . So today a young man from the Ministerium took me round to look at some . . . At last we found the
perfect
[apartment] in Schwabing . . . It belongs’, she wrote, ‘to a young Jewish couple who are going abroad.’
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Subsequently she saw the couple again and, apparently amicably, purchased some furniture from them.

It was the acquisition of this flat that essentially placed Unity forever over a line from which there could be no historical rehabilitation. She was not a fool: her own writings in newspapers, particularly her
Stürmer
article, show that she had an excellent grasp of the situation concerning the Jews. She cannot have avoided seeing the treatment already inflicted on Jews in the streets of Munich – even irregular visitors witnessed scenes where Jews were infamously humiliated. We know she thought that Streicher’s act in making Jews crop grass with their teeth was amusing, and that she approved when a group of Jews were taken to an island in the Danube and left there to starve.
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She told a friend, Mary Ormsby Gore, how an old Jewess, heavily laden, had approached her in the street and asked the way to the railway station. She deliberately sent her in the opposite direction, and thought it an amusing thing to have done. Even if one is prepared to give Unity the benefit of the doubt, and accept that she could not have known what would be the ultimate fate of the majority of Germany’s Jewish population, it is difficult to write of these things without a cold hand upon the heart. It is hardly conceivable that Unity would not have known what lay behind the statement that the young couple with the apartment were ‘going abroad’, and, as Diana said, sadly, ‘It is impossible to defend Unity . . . she condemned herself out of her own mouth.’
¹¹
And knowing what she knew, Unity accepted the requisitioned apartment in Schwabing and loved it right from the start. Her enjoyment was not dimmed by the manner in which she had acquired it, only by Hitler having forgotten his promise to help her furnish it. Perhaps, in that summer of 1939, he had too much on his mind to worry about sideboards for Unity.

A week later Unity was in England. She was in good spirits and saw many members of her family. She also saw Hanfstaengl and told him what had happened with Erna, and with Diana and Tom attended Mosley’s huge peace rally at Earl’s Court. Here, Tom – by now an officer in the Territorials – greeted his brother-in-law with the Fascist salute as he walked past them. The newspapers took it amiss that a serving officer in His Majesty’s Forces should behave like this. Tom’s commanding officer was interviewed by reporters, who were clearly hoping to stir up trouble, but the colonel merely told them he wasn’t going to be deprived of one of his best officers over the matter of a salute.
¹²
Afterwards Unity went back to Germany, her car laden with small items of furniture, lamps and curtain material. Larger items that she had appropriated with Sydney’s permission from Rutland Gate were shipped out to Germany with the assistance of a friend in the diplomatic corps.

The Redesdales spent the summer of 1939 on a remote island in the Inner Hebrides. David had bought this island, Inch Kenneth, complete with an austere three-storey house, cottage, and a ruined chapel in 1938 after a friend at his club had brought the property to his attention. He, Sydney and Unity had gone to view it and loved it on sight. Because of its windswept isolation and the fact that there was no shooting it was not worth a great deal, and David paid for it with what remained from the sale of Swinbrook. Thereafter, everybody who visited fell in love with Inch Kenneth’s stark beauty and pristine beaches, though it was difficult to get to, and hardly a sound prospect as a potential retirement home. From London it involved travelling to Oban by an overnight sleeper train, followed by a ferry trip of several hours to the island of Mull, a fifteen-mile drive across Mull to the hamlet of Gribun, then a short boat trip to the island. On calm days this last stage of the journey was a pleasant half-hour excursion, but in inclement weather with a lumpy sea it could be long and uncomfortable. The Redesdales employed a couple, who lived in the cottage; the wife helped Sydney with the house, and the husband was responsible for maintaining and operating the small motor-boat called the Puffin, and a rowing-boat. These vessels ferried the family and visitors to and from the island and collected supplies sent over from the mainland. At Gribun, the nearest civilization, the Redesdales kept an ancient Morris in a shed, for the journey across Mull to the Oban ferry. Immediately Sydney set to work to ensure that the kitchen garden was planted with as much produce as it could support, and the ‘farm’ supported a few dozen chickens for eggs and a couple of cows for milk. Once on the island the only contact with the outside world was the news over the wireless. As the long hot summer of that last year of peace continued, the news worsened and the Redesdales grew more and more concerned about what would happen to Unity if and when war was declared.

At the end of July Unity and Diana had attended the Bayreuth Festival at Hitler’s personal invitation. On arrival Unity was greeted with two large bouquets, one from Herr Wagner of Munich, the other from the Mayor of Munich. Neither, apparently, was immune to the gossip in Munich, which ran along the lines of: ‘did Unity Mitford and Hitler sleep together or not?’ On 2 August, the final day of the Wagner Festival and a day before they were due to leave Bayreuth, the sisters lunched with Hitler. Diana remembers that he told them he believed England was determined on war, and that if this was so, it was now inevitable. Diana said that Mosley would continue to campaign for peace, with the British Empire remaining intact, as long as it was legal for him to do so, and Hitler warned her that he risked assassination, ‘Like Jaurès in 1914,’ he said.
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