The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (44 page)

Although she was still breastfeeding her baby, Diana opted to leave him with his nurse. She was told ‘to pack enough clothes for a few days’ and in turn she left instructions to her staff to continue packing for their planned departure for Rignell House. She was then driven to Holloway Prison. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the hatred felt for Mosley and the date of her arrest, she was treated badly. Her reception was rough and on her first night she was given a dark, dirty basement cell containing a thin, worn mattress placed upon a bare damp floor. The only window was blocked with sandbags. She could neither eat the food nor drink the tea, and was too cold, even though it was midsummer and she had not undressed, and was in too much pain, since her breasts were full of milk, to sleep. In short, life was made as uncomfortable as possible for her, and far more so than was necessary. A mutual friend had once told her of a conversation with Churchill. The two men had been visiting the slums of Liverpool and Churchill was moved by the misery and degradation. ‘Imagine,’ he said. ‘Imagine how terrible it would be, never to see anything beautiful, never to eat anything savoury, never to say anything clever.’ These words often came back to Diana during her years in Holloway.
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Later she was given a better cell, in that it was dry. It was six feet wide by nine feet long and contained a hard single bed with harsh calico sheets that felt like canvas and stained blankets. There was a hard chair and a small table. Under the chair was an enamel chamber-pot and on a three-cornered shelf was a chipped basin and jug. From the ceiling hung a single dim light. There were other Fascist women there, and innocent women of Italian and German origin who were married to British men but who came within the scope of Rule 18B. The support of these women helped Diana to cope with her imprisonment, though she never lost her anger at those who imposed it, and she never became accustomed to the unnecessary filthy squalor in which the prisoners were obliged to live. One inmate, a German Jew who had been a prisoner at Dachau before 1939, when it was a concentration camp rather than an extermination centre, and had escaped to England, complained that Holloway was dirtier than Dachau. But Diana’s worst deprivation was, naturally, being parted from her babies. In view of the conditions in Holloway, she had been wise to leave the eleven-week-old Max in a healthier environment, but she suffered all the anguish of any mother parted from her baby and her two-year-old toddler. Her only consolation was in knowing that they were safe. Pam took in the Mosley babies and Nanny Higgs at Rignell House where they remained for the next eighteen months. After that Sydney arranged for them to board with the MacKinnon family at Swinbrook House where she could see them every day.

With Diana’s children and the farm animals, the war years for Pam were busy and not unhappy, although Derek was away a great deal of the time. With his scientific ability Derek Jackson would have been of huge value to the war effort as part of Professor Lindemann’s team at Oxford, but he demanded to be allowed to join the RAF during 1940. Lindemann fought to keep him, but a direct intervention by Churchill freed Derek to join the fighting, and he quickly demonstrated his ability in this field as in others. Posted to a night-fighter squadron as radio operator and gunner he brought to this work the same fearless attitude that he always displayed when hunting or racing. Within months he had been awarded the DFC and during the course of the war was responsible for bringing down at least five enemy aircraft, and several others that were ‘unconfirmed’. He also earned the AFC, an OBE and the American Legion of Merit.

For Diana the time dragged interminably, for the BUF women lived in far worse conditions than their male counterparts. Although the men suffered from bed-bugs and were locked up for twenty-one hours a day in Brixton, conditions at Holloway were almost Dickensian. When a bomb fell and hit a main sewer the ground floor of the prison was awash in urine for three days as the lavatories overflowed. There was no water for washing or cleaning and almost immediately the women went down with food poisoning. Convicted prisoners were evacuated to a safer location since it was recognized that Holloway would be badly affected by bombing raids on London. Initially, Diana and her fellow Rule 18B inmates were locked into their cells at night, lights out at five o’clock, and the distant sound of nightly air-raids made the long, freezing winter nights a hell of noise and apprehension. What sustained Diana through the early days was her belief that her incarceration was temporary. Had she known it would last three and a half years, she feels she would have preferred to die. The cells were unlocked as soon as the local air-raid siren sounded so that prisoners would not be trapped in the event of a direct hit, and the women huddled together and chatted to while away the time when noise made sleep impossible. Diana was popular because she could always make them smile, and inevitably she became a sort of leader because she could articulate their problems. Also they sympathized with her over her separation from her babies. Usually during air-raids Diana went to sit with a woman who had a ground-floor cell.

One consolation during these long months of misery was provided by a German woman, who had been given permission to bring with her a wind-up gramophone and dozens of records: Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Handel, Debussy and Wagner. She held concerts in a room across the yard. ‘Despite the tiresome pauses while the gramophone was wound up,’ Diana recalled, ‘these concerts were heavenly. There is nothing like music for transporting one a thousand miles from hateful surroundings into realms of bliss.’
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But throughout her imprisonment the highlight of her week was a letter from Mosley, who she learned had grown a beard, ‘Guess what colour it is – red!! At least quite a lot of it – silver threads among the gold.’ Mosley used his time in prison as an opportunity to study literature and languages. In his autobiography he would write, ‘Plato’s requirement of withdrawal from life for a considerable period of study and reflection before entering the final phase of action was fulfilled in my case, though not by my own volition.’ His letters kept Diana informed of his daily life, his studies, his love for her. He called her ‘my precious darling’, and ‘my darlingest one’. On the few occasions when the letters were held up for a day or two, Diana plunged into near despair.

As months went by she was allowed occasional visits from members of the family. Even Nancy visited after a year or so, never letting Diana know that she had ‘shopped’ her, but as usual it was Sydney who was to the fore in offering support. During the entire period of Diana’s imprisonment, no matter how difficult it was to travel, Sydney was a regular visitor to Holloway for the weekly quarter of an hour with Diana when she would impart news of the children and the family. Sydney spent four to six hours travelling and was generally obliged to wait for up to an hour in the damp, grimy prison waiting room before Diana was fetched. Sydney also visited Pam and the Mosley babies whenever possible. Later, she took all Diana’s children to the prison, but she was expecting sympathy from the wrong quarter when she wrote to Decca about the conditions: ‘They have no water and no gas, so can’t cook, they get 1 pint of water a day each for washing cooking and drinking, and there is none at all for the lavatories. Diana says the smell is terrible.’
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Nancy was unrepentant that her intervention had helped put Diana – to whom she referred in contemporary correspondence as ‘Mrs Quisling’ – in prison. Though she loved Diana she had seen hardly anything of her since the publication of
Wigs on the Green
four years earlier, and she clearly felt that her sister deserved punishment for supporting and encouraging a regime that had turned Europe upside down and endangered millions of promising young lives. Soon London was under blitz bombing and this alone seemed sufficient justification. Diana and her fellow prisoners were in the thick of it, too, of course, and Holloway suffered a direct hit on B wing, belying the rumour that the prison was protected because the Germans knew Diana was in there. But Nancy’s house in Blomfield Road was especially vulnerable: it was in the sightline of German bombers aiming for Paddington Station. Her reports of the bombing, once it began in the late summer of 1940, make baleful reading even though she sprinkled her letters liberally with merriment. Prod had survived Dunkirk and his regiment had performed well, but he was mostly away, leaving her alone through the air-raids. She wrote to Violet Hammersley after one raid:

Ten hours is too long of concentrated noise and terror in a house alone. The screaming bombs . . . simply make your flesh creep, but the whole thing is so fearful that they are actually only a slight added horror. The great fires everywhere, the awful din which never stops & wave after wave of aeroplanes, ambulances tearing up the street and the horrible unnatural blaze of searchlights all has to be experienced to be understood . . . in every street you can see a sinister little piece roped off with red lights round it, or roofs blown off, or every window out of a house . . . People are beyond praise, everyone is red-eyed and exhausted but you never hear a word of complaint or down heartedness . . . Winston was
admirable
wasn’t he, so inspiring . . .
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A few weeks later she had become so accustomed to the bombing that she could write, ‘People here pay no attention whatever now to the bombs and if somebody does take cover you can be sure they are just up from the country.’ She had changed her job at the first-aid post and now looked after evacuees and those bombed out of their homes. David came down to London for the winter and as the mews was having some essential repairs carried out – when builders could be found – Nancy opened up 26 Rutland Gate and moved in with him, taking some of her own furniture from Blomfield Road. Like many people with spare rooms, they took in homeless people for a short period, while accommodation was found for them. From October 1940 they had a Jewish refugee family billeted on them. Nancy liked them. ‘On the day after they arrived,’ she wrote, ‘Farve . . . got up at 5.30 to light the boiler for them and charming Mr Sockolovsky who helped him, said to me, “I did not think the Lord would have risen so early.” Wasn’t it biblical?’
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Shortly afterwards, all the empty rooms in the house were requisitioned for other Jewish families evacuated from the East End.
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When Sydney arrived in London after a bomb dropped in Swinbrook and damaged the roof of the cottage, she could see no humour in the situation and was ‘beastly’ to David and Nancy. Although it had already been decided that the house must be sold as soon as possible because they could no longer afford to keep it on, Nancy wrote, ‘she says if she had all the money in the world, she would not ever live in the house after the Jews have had it’.
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What had actually caused Sydney’s outburst of anger was that her once immaculate house was so unkempt. In mitigation Nancy had only one maid to help her while Sydney had run the establishment as a family home with half a dozen loyal staff. Nancy admitted that the house
was
rather dirty, ‘but it’s only floor dirt which can be scrubbed off’. Even had she been able to afford staff it was impossible to find anyone: all the young women who had once gone into domestic service were now in the services or munitions factories. Nevertheless, the incident caused a chill between mother and daughter for some time. And after a winter living with David, and trying to cater to his requirement of a main meal containing meat every evening, and putting up with his irascibility, Nancy was pretty fed up with her father, too.

Like all other families, the Mitfords each had their own worries, which the war somehow made harder to shoulder. Nancy, tired from working and trying to run the house, and fully aware of Prod’s serial adultery, was depressed that her marriage was a failure, David, increasingly ill and lonely, was missing Sydney but was unable to live with her ridiculous support of the enemy. Sydney was worried about all her children and grandchildren: Tom in the Army, Diana in prison, the babies staying with Pam, Decca in the USA, Debo who was now unhappy even at her beloved Swinbrook, and, of course, the full-time care of the incontinent and mentally impaired Unity. It is not surprising that tempers flared occasionally. But despite her disagreement with Sydney even Nancy saw how unfair it was that the burden of caring for Unity should fall entirely on her mother. ‘Muv has been too wonderful with her and has absolutely given up her whole life,’ she reported to Decca, while their father was being simply beastly about Bobo. ‘He hardly ever goes near her, and has never been there to relieve Muv and give her a chance to have a little holiday.’
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As the bombing worsened, Tom wrote advising Sydney to prepare for invasion. Nancy’s version of Sydney’s reaction to the Jews occupying her house must be compared with Sydney’s own letters at the same time. On the subject of evacuees she wrote to Decca, ‘we have about 70 at Rutland Gate . . . about 50 of them Jews, but it’s not very comfortable [for them] as there is no furniture but straw palliasses on the floor. The families have a room each to themselves which they go into during the day time but they all troop down to the basement at night . . . it is really sad to see the plight of the homeless . . .’
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Nancy was so fanciful in her letters, and sometimes in her speech, that it is difficult for the researcher to know what is fact and what is invention but in this case Sydney’s own mild reaction appears more likely to be the accurate version of the incident. As Sydney was wont to say, ‘There is a small knife concealed in each of Nancy’s letters.’
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As soon as the mews was habitable Nancy returned there and together with Mabel, the parlourmaid, two or three friends and a cook from the Women’s Volunteer Service, she looked after the constantly shifting residents of 26 Rutland Gate.