The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (46 page)

Incidentally, if, which I certainly think is an inconceivable improbability, I should ever find myself in this sort of situation, I have absolutely determined to escape in some way or another, and I’m sure that if you are sufficiently determined of anything you can achieve it. However I’m equally sure the need will never arise, so please don’t attach any sort of significance to the above, or imagine it indicates a resigned or nervous frame of mind . . .

Very much love, darling angel,

Esmond.
¹³

Esmond wrote again, two weeks after the above letter, full of suggestions and plans for what they would do when she came to England, where they would live, how it would be, the pros and cons of bringing Dinky or leaving her with the Durrs, but Decca had still not received this when she cabled him joyously on Monday 1 December: ‘
LEAVING FRIDAY SO TERRIFICALLY EXCITED DARLING STOP DECIDED BRING DONK DO WIRE THAT YOU AGREE HOW SHALL I CONTACT YOU JOURNEY WILL BE VERY COMFORTABLE LOVE=ROMILLY
’.
¹⁴

She was full of enthusiasm for the forthcoming voyage. The Durrs had gone to New York and she was to leave Washington on Wednesday 3 December to join them there for two nights and then they would see her and Dinky off. With luck she would be with Esmond at Christmas. On Tuesday 2 December, she received a telegram, which she assumed was a reply from Esmond. It read, ‘
2 DECEMBER 1941, MRS E.M. ROMILLY...REGRET TO INFORM...THAT YOUR HUSBAND PILOT OFFICER ESMOND MARK DAVID ROMILLY MISSING ON ACTIVE SERVICE NOVEMBER 30 STOP LETTER FOLLOWS
’.
¹⁵

The shock, of course, was dreadful. The last letter she had received from him, only a few days earlier, had been that message telling her not to give up hope if he was reported missing. It was an uncharacteristic letter, so different from all his others to her, and in her distress it must have seemed to her that when he wrote it he had been reaching out, that in some way he had known what was going to happen and had written to forewarn her. She decided not to go to England and the Durrs came rushing back to Washington to find her with her feelings icily in check, aloof with suppressed fear, but resolute. She was absolutely convinced that Esmond was still alive, she kept telling them, she would have sensed it if he was dead. She thought he had been picked up by a passing trawler, or even a German submarine. It was merely a matter of waiting for news.
¹⁶
The Durrs pulled strings in Washington everywhere they could think of: the British embassy, the US Air Force, but there was no further information.

Decca cabled Sydney and Nellie Romilly, asking them to try to find out anything they could from their end, and a flock of cables and letters winged back from England. Some merely expressed sympathy, others begged her to ‘come home’. After ten days she received a letter from Esmond’s commanding officer, which gave her more details. Esmond had been navigating an aircraft to Hamburg on Sunday the thirtieth and failed to return to base. Nothing was heard from his aircraft following a radio contact, which gave a position of approximately 110 miles east of the Yorkshire coast, ‘well out in the North Sea’. From the start, the CO wrote, he knew there was little chance of Esmond being found, and now, ‘as they have not been seen or picked up although aircraft searched for them the day after, I am afraid there is little or no chance of their survival. The area where they were last heard of is some considerable distance from normal shipping lanes so I think the chance of being picked up by some ship must be ruled out.’ Esmond had done some fine work on operations since joining the squadron, he wrote. ‘He was very happy and I think enjoyed the life. We shall all miss him a great deal.’
¹⁷

Even this did not shake Decca’s conviction that Esmond was alive, was probably a prisoner-of-war, and that he would escape or find a way of getting news to her. She knew this, absolutely, because he had told her in that penultimate letter. She received his final letter in due course, a normal chatty one. She felt she had to hang on to her conviction of his survival: it was all she had.

On 7 December the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and launched assaults on the Philippines, Malaya and Hong Kong. On the following day Britain and the USA declared war on Japan. Three days later Germany and Italy declared war on the USA. Isolationists there who had campaigned for ‘schools not tanks’ might not have been happy, but Churchill recorded in his diary that on that night ‘I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.’
¹⁸
On 12 December he left London for the USA for the first of his wartime meetings with President Roosevelt in Washington. He need not have hurried. HMS
Duke of York
took ten days over the voyage due to relentless storms, and instead of steaming up the Potomac, as intended, Churchill was so impatient to see Roosevelt that he jumped ship at Chesapeake with his valet, doctor and Lord Beaverbrook, and flew on to Washington, telling the remaining entourage to follow by train when they could.

During the first two days that Churchill spent at the White House he had no free time, but as soon as he could he contacted Decca. He already knew, of course, that Esmond was missing. On Christmas morning Roosevelt had arranged to take Churchill to a local church ‘to sing hymns with the Methodies’.
¹⁹
Two Secret Service men were dispatched to the Durrs’ house at Seminary Hill, with a message asking Decca if she would join him at the church, and spend some time with him at the White House after the service. Decca had gone out to call on some friends, and having listened to the message Virginia drawled, ‘Waaal, it’ll take more than two men to get Decca into church, even for the Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States.’
²⁰
When Decca returned and was told about the message she telephoned the White House immediately. Though she had no particular fondness for Churchill she knew that through him she could get the information she wanted about Esmond. She explained who she was and was immediately put through to Eleanor Roosevelt, who made an appointment for her to see Churchill the following morning.

She took Dinky with her, ten months old, fair and chubby, and dressed in a white woollen suit.
²¹
Churchill was in bed, hard at work on a speech to be delivered to Congress later that day, and which famously began ‘I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.’
*
Decca recalled that ‘He looked marvellous . . . like some extravagant peacock in his bright silk dressing gown.’
²²
He was affectionate in his manner, and warmly sympathetic about Esmond. She listened attentively to what he had to tell her, and it could not have been an easy task for him.

He told her that, at Nellie Romilly’s request, he had already made enquiries about Esmond and had learned that there was not the slightest chance that Esmond had been taken prisoner. His aircraft had left the base at 4.45 p.m. as part of a nine-plane raid of Hamburg. The crew were reported to be in good spirits. Shortly after 8 p.m. a radio message advised that due to low oil pressure in the port engine the captain had abandoned the mission and was returning home. At 8.30 p.m. another message was received, ‘Give bearings immediately.’ Bearings were taken on the radio signal, and a navigational course was plotted and relayed back. Twelve minutes later the aircraft put out an SOS signal, but no further contact could be established.

The position had been confirmed at about 110 miles east of the Yorkshire coast, over the North Sea, but searchers could only guess at how much further the aircraft might have flown before ditching. On the following morning a thick fog prevented a search until almost noon, when three air-sea rescue aircraft set off and searched throughout the remaining hours of daylight. It was intensely cold and there was a lumpy sea. A large patch of oil was observed about thirty miles south-west of the assumed position, but there was no sign of a dinghy, and no wreckage was ever found. On the 2 and 3 December thick fog lasted all day and prevented any further search so the rescue operation was abandoned. Churchill was ‘quite sure that Esmond had been drowned’. Even had the crew survived a landing at sea, he told Decca, the temperature of the North Sea in late November was such that no one could survive more than twenty minutes in the water.

Decca was devastated and Churchill was deeply affected at the distress of the young woman who, he wrote to Nellie, ‘looked very lovely’.
²³
To mask the awkwardness of the moment, and give them both an opportunity to recover, he cleared his throat and changed the subject. He began to talk about Decca’s family, hoping to comfort her. She hardly took in most of what he was saying, but when he talked about Diana, and explained what he had done to try to make things more comfortable for her, including arranging for some of the convicts to clean the prison, she came to life. A sudden and uncontrollable anger swept over her at the thought of Diana being pampered by servants when Diana’s ‘precious friends’ had just killed Esmond. She exclaimed hotly that Diana and Mosley should be put up against a wall and shot. Churchill had had no idea of her feelings about Diana, and listened quietly while she raged. Then he brought the subject back to Esmond and Giles.

As small children the brothers had spent many Christmases, and most of their summer holidays, at Chartwell with the Churchills. He felt he knew them well. Decca realized that Churchill’s affection for Esmond was genuine, and his regret at Esmond’s loss was not simply assumed. He told her he was full of admiration for Esmond and that he had died a hero’s death. He advised Decca to remain in the USA for the duration of the war
²⁴
but offered to arrange for her to return to her family if she wanted to do so. She said she had not made up her mind what to do. As she was leaving he called in his secretary, and Decca was handed an envelope addressed to Mrs Esmond Romilly. When she looked inside it she found five hundred dollars.

Later a rumour went round London about this gift. It was not secret and a number of people seemed to know about it, possibly through Nellie. It was said that Decca had thrown it in his face. This is not true. She recognized that the gift was kindly meant, to help her in a difficult time, and – as she said in her papers – ‘$500 was a great deal of money.’ But she did come, after a while, to regard it slightly as ‘blood money’ so she gave some to the Durrs’ elder daughter to buy a pony, and donated the rest to a Communist Party fund. When Churchill saw Tom Mitford in Libya some months afterwards, he told him of the meeting. She was not just angry about Diana, he said, for on hearing that she had just completed a stenography course and was looking for a job, Churchill offered to get her one on the staff of the British ambassador, Lord Halifax. She snapped, ‘I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole.’ Churchill told Tom that he felt very snubbed, and sighed that Decca was as fanatical a Communist as ever.
²⁵

Now, Decca began to accept that Esmond was dead. Cliff and Virginia Durr often heard her weeping at night. Sometimes Virginia would go to her room and Decca would sob on her shoulder. That the invincible Esmond had perished in the icy waters of the North Sea was a terrible thing for her to bear.
²⁶
The image of him drowning in that cold water haunted her. Decca could be ‘cool and aristocratic’ when she chose, but Virginia Durr wrote that as one of the few people who had ever seen her with her defences down she knew that Decca was a very emotional and vulnerable woman. After the desolation and weeping came the natural anger of grief, which was focused on the Mosleys, especially Diana, for despite Unity’s history she was never accorded a share of the blame for Esmond’s death. Decca felt sorrow for Unity, never anger. But she never ceased to blame Diana for Esmond’s death, and she was a good hater.

Virginia Durr was deeply concerned about her, and wrote secretly to Sydney, saying Decca would ‘be furious and send out her porcupine quills at me’ if she found out about the letter. From Decca’s descriptions of her family in England, Virginia wrote, she had formed

a high opinion of your loyalty to your children and your strength of purpose . . . The situation here is very simple. I think Decca wants to come home to England but she feels she has no place to come. She receives from the Canadian Government about $65 a month as a dependant’s allowance, and W. Churchill as you know gave her $500. The allowance from the Canadian Government will stop after 6 months if Esmond is not found and she will receive a very small pension . . . it may be that it is too dangerous for her to make the trip to England but at least she should not have the feeling that there is no place she can go in England . . . she is very welcome here, but . . . she is so essentially English, and so bound to England by her affection that she could never be anything else. She has been hurt so much both by circumstances and her own fierce pride that I cannot bear for her to have the further hurt of feeling unwanted.
²⁷

Immediately Sydney wrote, begging Decca to return home. Decca’s cousins, Rosemary (daughter of the late Clement Mitford) and her husband Richard Bailey (son of Sydney’s sister Aunt Weenie), were in Washington at the time, and it was suggested that she return home with them.
²⁸
Sydney heard from Decca before her letter could have reached Washington. Worn out by sleepless nights and crushed by alternate hope and despair, Decca wrote on 22 February, almost three months after Esmond was reported missing, that she was still convinced he was alive, a prisoner of war, and that she thought she might not hear anything from him until the end of hostilities.
²⁹
She had decided, she continued, to remain in the USA, was continuing with her stenography lessons and had a part-time typing job with the RAF delegation. Decca’s mettle now made itself apparent. The easy option for her would have been to return to England with her baby. There she would have been welcomed, fussed over and cared for. She would hardly have had to think. Instead she was determined to carry on the fight that she and Esmond had begun, against Fascism in all its forms. And she felt she could do that more effectively in the USA, starting with nothing.