The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (55 page)

Once, in the Louvre, she saw him wandering around hand in hand with a former resistance heroine who had been in love with him for some time.
²³
The Colonel looked so ‘fearfully happy’ that Nancy was knocked sideways, and convinced herself he had proposed marriage. She rushed home and in agonies of jealous misery considered taking an overdose. At last she rang Palewski who was delighted to hear from her:

absolutely angelic. I kept saying but you looked so
happy
[Nancy wrote to Diana] . . . ‘No, no, I’m not happy,’ he said, ‘I’m very unhappy.’ So dreadful to prefer the loved one to be unhappy – I ought to want him to marry, I know. He did say, ‘but
you
are married, after all,’ & I know he really longs to be, & I feel like a villainess to make all this fuss . . . the fact is I couldn’t live through it if he married & what is so dreadful is I know I can stop him – or at least I think so – and that condemns him to . . . loneliness and no children. Perhaps I ought to leave Paris for good . . . I must say this has plunged me into a turmoil – oh the
horror
of love.
Later
: I’ve just been to see him and told him about the pills, which I see to have been a great mistake, he’s simply delighted at the idea. ‘Oh you must, you must, what a coup for me.’
²⁴

But it is clear that Nancy would never have left Paris. Her apartment was the epitome of elegance; living there was one of the great pleasures of her life and with her earnings she was able to indulge her passion for designer clothes. Her svelte figure suited the New Look admirably and she wallowed in the luxury of Dior and Schiaparelli outfits with tight waists and long, full skirts, so feminine after wartime fashion. Only occasionally was she driven to complain to Palewski about her situation: ‘I said “I’ve given up everything – my family, my friends, my country,” & he simply roared with laughter, & then of course so did I.’
²⁵

One of Nancy’s biographers said that the tragedy of Nancy’s life was that she never came first with anyone. From the moment of Pam’s birth she always had to share affection. To the four loves of her life, Hamish, Prod, André Roy and, most importantly, Gaston Palewski, she was not their great love. This was sad for her, as was the lack of children, but it does not mean her whole life was tragic: one only has to read her letters to see that.

When Peter Rodd finally asked for a divorce on the grounds that he was tired of being cuckolded, her first reaction was ‘Good’. Although she did not underestimate the social implications of being a divorcee, she had tolerated his womanizing for years, and now that Prod had access to her bank account in England he plundered it. Perhaps if she was free to marry, the Colonel might oblige, despite his protestations that he must marry a rich, single Frenchwoman for career reasons. But divorce was a protracted process, and there were tax considerations, bearing in mind Nancy’s earnings and her domicile in France. In the event it was another seven years before Nancy was free of Prod.

When Palewski was too busy to see her, Nancy was not lonely – far from it. She had a host of friends and her work; she turned out books regularly. There were two further volumes in the style of
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
, called
The Blessing
(1951) and
Don’t Tell Alfred
(1960), in which Nancy’s best female friend, Diana Cooper, was the basis for Lady Leonie, counter-heroine to the narrator, Fanny, who was modelled on Nancy’s childhood friend Billa Harrod (née Creswell) – who was conveniently married to Cooper’s replacement as ambassador to France. According to one visitor, 7 rue Monsieur was a cultural annexe of the British embassy, a congenial
salon
for the upper classes and literati of England and France. Nancy also became an eminent biographer, which she enjoyed even more than writing novels and which was just as financially rewarding. By the time the Duff Coopers left the Paris embassy Nancy had a huge number of friends in the city. Eventually the Mosleys and Derek Jackson also went to live there, and Pam often called in as she passed through between her homes in Gloucestershire and Switzerland.

19
Return to the
Old Country
(1955–8)

Looking back, the early fifties had been an extraordinary time for Decca. In 1950 she and Bob had intended to visit England but were denied passports owing to their membership of the Communist Party. There was some compensation: Debo visited them in Oakland, ‘for a Honnish reunion’, during which they entertained Bob with Honnish songs and stories, and Debo generally wowed the comrades who, to Decca’s amazement, couldn’t wait to meet a real live duchess, just as they had crowded in to meet Sydney. During the next half-decade the Treuhafts made several unsuccessful attempts to get passports. Decca ‘longed’ to go to England to see her mother and one or two others such as Nancy, Idden and Nanny Blor, and finally asked Sydney to appeal to Winston Churchill. ‘Do see what you can do . . . it may be the only chance,’ she wrote. ‘But if you correspond with him, please send me a copy.’
¹

Sydney refused. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing doing as regards asking favours, it would not be possible for me anyhow, and surely not for you either, as you are heart and soul against him.’
²

Regrets were soon buried under a welter of work. For Decca, with the house and family to care for, there were hardly enough hours in the day as the CRC gathered strength. At first she was confined to the office, involved in mass mailings and the organization of protest meetings, but she became more personally involved with the case of a young black man, Willie McGee, who had been sentenced to death in Mississippi for raping a white woman. There was evidence that the plaintiff had been his willing mistress for several years and had accused him of rape only when he attempted to end their relationship. This, however, was not admissible in court and in McGee’s home town no one dared speak out on his behalf for fear of retribution from the powerful Ku Klux Klan. No one, that is, except McGee’s wife Rosalee, an uneducated twenty-eight-year-old, who left the town for the first time in her life and embarked on a nationwide speaking tour funded by the CRC. Her aim was to recruit sufficient national sympathy to persuade the Governor of Mississippi to commute the death sentence.

Decca met Rosalee in Oakland and was appalled when she heard how the family lived. Rosalee had already lost three close male relatives to white lynch mobs or a vicious justice. Decca talked three women comrades into joining her, and drove to Jackson, Mississippi, to take up the cause in person. She and her three-woman ‘delegation’ were unable to prevent McGee’s execution, but Decca’s self-confident aplomb – she thought nothing of telephoning the Governor at his home to discuss the McGee case – and the fact that she had ventured into the town during the row gave others the courage to speak out where before they had remained silent. When she organized a protest, other white women came from the northern states to join it. Hundreds of black people streamed in, too, in defiance of the Ku Klux Klan, to stand in silent protest. Decca’s spark helped to light the fire that the fight for civil rights became during the next decade. During her time in Mississippi the McGee case was national news, and although most national newspapers presented the protests as a desperate ploy of Communists to further the cause of international Communism and foment racial strife, the case was groundbreaking in the history of civil rights in the USA.

In 1951 Decca was subpoenaed by the California State Committee on Un-American Activities. She had to present herself at a court hearing, bringing with her the membership records of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress. This caused consternation among her friends and comrades, for the records contained the names and addresses of anyone who had supported the organization, including most of the Communists in the Bay area. Bob could not help her: he was already in hiding to avoid being subpoenaed himself, and as their phones were tapped and she knew the FBI was watching her, she dared not contact him. Recently, numbers of people had been sent to prison and she was nervous. She contacted the CRC lawyer who insisted she must take the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer, to avoid incriminating herself. ‘What if one elected to testify about oneself, but refused to answer questions about others?’ she asked. ‘No good,’ he replied. ‘If you answer one single question, the committee will say you waived the privilege and insist you answer as to related facts, meaning the names of your colleagues and other details.’
³
So Decca learned her single statement: ‘I refuse to answer on the ground that my answer might tend to incriminate me.’ She took Dinky with her to the court, having obtained permission from the headmistress to absent her from school that day in case her classmates teased her.

The scenes in the court are familiar to us now from old newsreels of grim-faced bullying inquisitors such as Joseph McCarthy demanding loudly of Hollywood notables, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’ Decca was not called to the stand until after the lunchtime recess. All morning she had watched others undergo the trauma of examination, saw how some had fought back, causing uproar, how others had wilted under pressure, and how some had stuck to the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer anything, just as she had been told to do. She took the stand clutching her membership-records file and after she had taken the oath the questions she had rehearsed were asked: ‘Are you now or have you ever been . . .? Have you ever heard of or read the
People’s World
? Have you been a director of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress since May 1950? Do you maintain a bank account for the Civil Rights Congress? Is your husband, Robert Treuhaft, legal counsel for the Civil Rights Congress?’ To each question she responded with the memorized incantation.
⁴

But she began to grow irritated. She wanted to retaliate to the bullying, to play to her friends in the gallery and make them laugh, but she clenched her teeth and replied as rehearsed. Suddenly a curious question was asked: ‘Are you a member of the Berkeley Tenants Club?’ She was puzzled for a moment, never having heard of it and thinking it must have some connection with bad landlords. Then she began her answer: ‘I refuse to answer that question on the grounds . . .’ To her confusion the courtroom erupted in a roar of laughter. The question had been ‘Do you belong to the Berkeley
Tennis
Club?’ and was an attempt at heavy sarcasm by the prosecutor, goaded by Decca’s plummy voice and the fact that the club was a bastion of conservatism. In the uproar the chairman rapped his gavel for order and dismissed Decca as being ‘totally uncooperative’. As she stepped down from the stand her lawyer grabbed her arm and hissed at her to get out fast and go into hiding. ‘Don’t go home . . . or to any house that might be under surveillance.’ The court had been so confused by the noise and laughter that the chairman had forgotten to ask for the CRC records.

Decca cast an agonized glance at Dinky in the gallery, and bolted for her car having insisted that the lawyer saw Dinky home. She hardly had a chance to get clear of the building before the mistake was realized and she was recalled. By then she was in her car driving blindly away from the courthouse, hoping she was not followed. She hid with friends for a few days as Bob was doing, until they knew that the hearings were over, then Decca telephoned Dinky, who was looking after Nicholas and Benjamin. ‘Thank goodness,’ the redoubtable Dinky said, when Decca announced that she was coming right home. ‘I’ve been doing all the cooking and we’re sick of scrambled eggs.’
⁵

The next few years were spent subpoena-dodging, going into hiding whenever a friend was served with one. As their phone was tapped and they were under surveillance by the FBI,
⁶
Bob and Decca were careful never to mention the name of a friend or comrade unless they were in an open space and knew they could not be overheard. Bob appeared once before the commission and scourged them with clever oratory that made the evening papers. On another occasion he was so angry with the Attorney General over some unfairness that he kicked down the door of the District Attorney’s office. One of his partners overheard a policeman at the courthouse say to another, ‘Do you think Treuhaft really wants to overthrow the government?’ ‘Well, no,’ was the reply. ‘But I think he wants to get someone else to do it.’
⁷
The newspaper reports of these incidents, sent home to Sydney by Decca, were stuck into a great album, alongside the Redesdales’ invitation to Westminster Abbey for the Coronation of George VI, and Sydney’s authorization to visit Diana in Holloway.

Decca went on with her work, and wrote regularly to Sydney: news of the progress of ‘Dinky, Nicky and Benj’ was interspersed with details of her trips around the country on CRC business. She sounded fulfilled and happy, if occasionally downcast by what she regarded as pettiness and the inevitable ‘persecution’ by investigators for the Un-American Activities Committee. The Treuhafts had moved to 61st Street in Oakland, a larger house, which they liked very much. ‘We’ll probably stay here for ever,’ Decca wrote happily to Sydney. There was still no news of their passports, and it seemed that the children would be fully grown by the time Sydney saw them again. Then suddenly, with no warning, this busy, happy life was shattered.

All three children did extra jobs to earn pocket money so that they could buy things they wanted and pay for Christmas and birthday presents. They did chores like ironing Bob’s shirts, or taking out the trash. Ten-year-old Nicholas had a paper round, delivering the
Oakland Tribune
, after school. On the afternoon of Thursday, 15 February 1955, while riding his bicycle home, he was hit by a bus and killed. Dinky had been on her way to look for him as he was late for supper, and heard the sound of the crash. She ran to the corner of the road to see what had happened and was with her dying brother within seconds. He was probably dead before the ambulance arrived. By then a small shocked and hushed crowd had gathered at the scene. One neighbour voiced her opinion that if Mrs Treuhaft spent more time at home this wouldn’t have happened. Dinky flew at the woman in a blind fury and had to be pulled off.
⁸

Friends rallied round the family but the hurt was too deep for comfort. In the evening, when Decca and Bob returned from the hospital, Dinky remembers wandering around the house with Decca alone in one room and Bob in another, all unable to share their grief. They buried Nicholas in Guerneville, the town where Bob and Decca had been married, and from then on Decca, in the only way she knew how to cope, bottled up her feelings. By tacit agreement Bob, Dinky and Benjamin followed her lead and Nicholas was airbrushed out of their lives, but never their thoughts. Dinky always kept a photo of him on her dressing-table, but shut it away in a drawer when Decca came in. Benjamin lost the person who had been perhaps closest to him. Those who knew them at that time recall the two little boys endlessly play-wrestling on the floor of the living room, sparking each other off with funny remarks. After his brother’s death Benjamin had problems at school, getting low grades and into scrapes. On one occasion, decades later, when Decca was lunching with Kay Graham, her old friend from Washington, Nicholas was mentioned. A few days later Decca wrote, ‘Sorry I damn near blubbed . . . I should have supposed I had totally recovered, not to mention that we were brought up
never
to cry in front of other people . . . so forgive the unaccustomed lapse.’
⁹

Sydney, desperately upset about ‘my little Okay’, as she called him, and knowing what it meant to lose a son, wrote inadequately to Decca, ‘Your letter came. You are very brave, but I always knew you were that . . .’
¹⁰
Debo was the only other member of Decca’s family who had met Nicholas, but she was on holiday in Brazil when he died and Sydney decided not to tell her until she returned. For Decca Nicholas’s death, she once said, was the last of the four big losses in her life: Julia, Esmond and Unity were the others.

The aftermath of Nicholas’ death was a grim time for the Treuhafts. Bob felt helpless to comfort Decca and, in any case, she was unable to accept any form of sympathy. Because she had been in charge on the day of the accident, Dinky inevitably felt responsible for what had happened: she had been almost a surrogate mother as well as elder sister to Nicholas, and suffered greatly because she could not talk to either parent. Also there was a shift in her relationship with Benjamin, for Nicholas had been the connecting link between them. Dinky felt that the death of her brother distanced them all in a way and life was never quite the same again.
¹¹
At the age of sixteen she developed a gastric ulcer, more usually associated with middle-age executive stress than the carefree life of an American teenager.

Twelve weeks later, to their immense surprise, the passports for which the Treuhafts had applied with dreary regularity over the previous five years arrived in the post. Decca lost no time in arranging a trip to England for her, Bob and Dinky. She felt Benjamin was too young to appreciate the trip, so he was to stay with his grandmother Aranka, in New York. She was horrified to discover the cost of the journey but there was still some money in her old running-away account at Drummonds bank that they could draw upon while they were in London. They had tried unsuccessfully to have this transferred to them shortly after Sydney’s visit, and at Decca’s request Sydney had arranged a meeting with the manager, to see if there was some way round the currency restrictions, as they were desperately short of money. ‘Now let me see, your ladyship,’ said the accommodating manager, ‘we are unable to send the money to the United States, unless there is some strong mitigating reason such as that the money is needed for school fees, or to pay hospital bills and so forth. What is the money required for?’ He could hardly have given a stronger hint. ‘Oh I think she wants to give it to the Communist Party,’ Sydney answered truthfully.
¹²
Whereupon the manager assumed a stern expression and refused the application. It had annoyed Decca at the time – as well as spawning a dozen after-dinner stories – but now the money would prove useful.