The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (65 page)

Decca, predictably, deplored it, and dismissed it in her correspondence as ‘
Woman’s Own
writing’. She always displayed a certain amount of
schadenfreude
when Diana was castigated in the press. In answer to one letter from her, Rudbin replied, ‘Actually I’m rather enjoying it and Diana is forgiven all for me by the glorious quote: “Come, come, said Tom’s father, at your time of life/You’ve no long excuse for playing the rake/It is time that you thought, boy, of taking a wife/Why, so it is father: But whose wife shall I take.”’
³⁸

Some years earlier Mosley had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He staved off the worst symptoms longer than is usual because he was so strong and fit, had an agile brain and quick manner. In 1968 he had been the subject of a prestigious Panorama programme on BBC Television. Over eight million people tuned in to watch his hour-long interview with James Mossman, at that time a record audience. Throughout his seventies he was always happy to be interviewed on television or radio, to argue his corner, to write articles, and shine at dinner parties, but from his eightieth birthday in 1976 there was a clear deterioration. The drugs he needed to take in increasing doses caused him to fall over from time to time.

James Lees-Milne found Mosley physically frail but in good spirits when he visited the couple at the Temple in May 1980. Mosley was now, he wrote in his diary,

a very old man. Shapeless, bent, blotched cheeks, cracked nose, no moustache, and tiny eyes in place of those luminous, dilating orbs. I sat with him after dinner on a sofa and talked for an hour . . . Sir O has mellowed to the extent of never saying anything pejorative about anybody . . . I asked boldly if he thought he had made a mistake in founding the New Party. He admitted it was the worst mistake of his life. [he said] the British do not like New Parties . . . that if he had led the Labour government he would have kept Edward VIII on the throne. He [the King] was eminently suited to be an intermediary between his country and the dictators. Said that critics of himself and Duke of Windsor never made allowances for the fact that they detested war, having experienced the horrors of the trenches. They wanted to avoid it happening again at all costs . . . He stands unsteadily, but assured me his head was all right. Held me by both hands and said I must come again. ‘Why not come tomorrow? Come and stay.’ Charming he was.
³⁹

It was the last time Lees-Milne saw him. Mosley died quietly and suddenly in bed in November 1980.

For Diana it was as though her own life had come to an end. She had been utterly devoted to Mosley during the whole of their forty-four years of marriage and now her family wondered how she would ever cope without him. And though it was a shock, in a sense they were not surprised when Diana suffered what appeared to be a stroke and partial paralysis within a year of Mosley’s death.

Further investigation proved that it had not been a stroke, but a brain tumour, and just as Nancy linked the trauma of the Colonel’s marriage to the development of her cancer, Diana suspected that the development of the tumour in her brain was connected with her devastation at losing Mosley.
⁴⁰
It was thought that she could not survive. She was flown to a hospital in London where the tumour was confirmed and an operation was scheduled to remove it. ‘Oh, hen,’ Debo wrote tearfully to Decca, ‘she is a person one thought nothing could ever happen to. A rock like figure in my life and lots of other people’s.’

Against all the odds – Diana was seventy-one and frail after Mosley’s death – the surgery was a complete success. Her paralysis gradually diminished and she was able to get about. Visitors to nearby wards were startled by the shrieks and roars of laughter that emanated from her room as a constant trickle of old friends dropped in to keep her company. It was a reminder of the words of her former wardress at Holloway to a journalist: ‘We’ve never had such laughs since Lady Mosley left.’ Her doctor thought at one point that she might be hysterical and ought to be watched. But it was just typical Diana; like her sisters, she is simply so inherently funny that it is impossible not to be amused by her.

One of her most frequent visitors was Lord Longford, who had become a national figure, known, among other things, for his championship of lost causes in the British prison service. As a director of Sidgwick and Jackson, he was one of Diana’s publishers, and he and the Mosleys had been in the habit of meeting for luncheon whenever they all happened to be in London, their political differences put to one side. But Diana was touched by his visits to her in hospital. ‘Frank’s so faithful, the way he comes all the time,’ she told her son. And she paused for a moment, before adding, ‘Of course he thinks I’m Myra Hindley.’
⁴¹

22
Relatively Calm Waters
(1980–2000)

After Nancy’s death Decca remained implacable towards Diana, her antagonism too ingrained for her to make any concessions. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the tenor of all the sisters’ lives was occasionally interrupted by tensions caused either by Decca provoking her sisters to annoyance by something she said or wrote, or by her reacting to something they had said or written to which she objected. One of these was Diana’s portrait of Mosley, contained in her book,
Loved Ones
, which she wrote while convalescing at Chatsworth from her brain-tumour operation. However, Decca contented herself with private criticism in her letters and did not break into print about it, out of consideration for Debo.

Decca’s career as a journalist was now at its zenith, and she was a regular and respected contributor to organs such as the
Spectator
, the
Observer
and the
New Statesman
in England, and
Esquire
,
Life
and
Vanity Fair
in the USA. In addition she wrote scores of newspaper articles. Her income from her writing was substantial and despite her apparent indifference to it, one of her intellectual friends told me, ‘Decca was financially
very
astute.’
¹
Like Nancy, she had triumphed over what both sisters regarded as a lack of education, and had made her way in a tough profession with better than average success. An objective reader might be justified in thinking that the sisters placed more value on formal school education than it warranted, for the true test of Sydney’s system was surely what her daughters were able to achieve. When the BBC made a documentary about Decca called
The Honourable Rebel
²
and she was a guest on the BBC Radio programme,
Desert Island Discs
³
some of her remarks about their parents, and her stories about the family, were again the cause of a temporary coolness between her and her sisters, even though by this time they had more or less come to expect her to be controversial.

Many readers of this book will be familiar with the BBC production
Love in a Cold Climate
, screened in the spring of 2001. But when, in 1980, Julian Jebb made a television documentary about Nancy, called
Nancy Mitford – a Portrait by Her Sisters
, he inadvertently stirred up what he described as a hornets’ nest. His programme was intended to coincide with an earlier dramatization based on
Love in a Cold Climate
and
The Pursuit of Love
, and given access to Nancy’s (then) unpublished letters he had been fascinated by the two sides of Nancy: her wit, liveliness and genuine warmth which co-existed with snobbery and the malice so often evident in her teases. Jebb interviewed and filmed Debo and Diana together. ‘Lady Mosley and the Duchess loved each other, that was clear at once,’ he noted. ‘It was not immediately apparent how profound, intense and comical is the Duchess’s protective instinct for those she loves, who include every member of the family, living or recently dead.’

As for Diana, ‘It is hard to convey her charm, even more to defend her politics,’ he wrote. ‘The latter are neither flaunted nor evaded but when they come up in conversation they are defended or explained with a temperance of language equalled by a gentleness of tone.’
⁴
He was especially interested that this most beautiful woman was camera-shy. It seems that just as a plain woman may have a love affair with the camera and appear a ravishing beauty on screen, the reverse can happen too. It is certainly true that there are few photographs that show Diana’s real beauty in the way that paintings of her do. ‘As soon as we began to film,’ he said, ‘her face lost all its customary animation and her replies to my questions came as if from a mask with darting eyes.’ He concluded that she felt trapped by the camera.

He filmed Pam at her home in Gloucestershire in front of the blue stove that really
was
the colour of her eyes,
⁵
and on location at Swinbrook, standing by the River Windrush, reading Nancy’s description of ‘Uncle Matthew and the chubb-fuddler’. Then he flew to California to conduct his interview with Decca. It had been set up in advance and he took to her warmth and sense of fun immediately. Things only began to go wrong when she produced a form for him to sign. This made her co-operation conditional on his including in the programme extracts of a letter about Tom, written by Nancy in 1968, at the time of the publication of Mosley’s autobiography. ‘Have you noted all the fuss about Sir Os? . . . I’m very cross with him for saying Tud was a fascist which is untrue though of course Tud was a fearful old twister & probably was a fascist when with Diana. When with me he used to mock to any extent how he hated Sir Os no doubt about that.’
⁶

Jebb was taken aback: ‘The letter was bound to offend Diana and might annoy the other sisters,’ he wrote in an article for the
Sunday Times
in the spring of 1980. ‘First I thought it was wrong of Decca not to have told me this condition before I had travelled all the way to California . . . second I thought it ironic that the great upholder of liberal principles should impose what amounted to censorship, for it is just as restricting to be forced to include something as it is to be forced to delete it.’
⁷
In the end, though, Decca prevailed and he had no option but to include the letter. Working with Decca, he was struck by her articulate professionalism, but also by her ‘intense sadness’ at her long separation from Nancy. Diana was not upset, but she insisted on stating during her interview that Tom had been a paid-up member of the BUF, a fact now historically confirmed and curious in view of his pro-Jewish sympathies.

The letter certainly caused more bother between the sisters in private than its inclusion in the programme merited, and following this incident Decca made a trip to England without contacting Debo or Pam. The public, however, was now so inured to the political rivalries of the sisters that the item about Tom failed to have any shock impact. Decca had felt she must make the point about her brother for he had been the only member of the family whom Esmond could bear. When the dust settled she wrote to Debo explaining that she simply didn’t believe Tom had been a Fascist. ‘Neither, apparently, did Nancy, so I wanted to be sure to get that in.’ But it is clear from Tom’s own correspondence with his oldest friend, James Lees-Milne (which, of course, Decca would never have seen), that he was sympathetic to Fascism if not Nazism. The real surprise of the programme was seventy-three-year-old Pam, for in it the ‘quiet sister’ emerged as a star performer. Giggling, pretty, funny and sometimes serious, she positively stole the show from her more famous sisters.

At this point the Mitford industry, as the sisters referred to books and articles about their family, was at its peak, and books, plays and articles proliferated. There was a light-hearted musical called
The Mitford Girls
based on their lives. When Diana, Debo and Pam attended a performance the manager of the theatre gave them badges to wear, which read, ‘I really am a Mitford girl.’
⁸
One of the most important of the books was arguably Nicholas Mosley’s
Rules of the Game
, published in 1982, about his father. Nicholas was Mosley’s son by Cimmie, and the book was candid about Mosley’s prolific sex life and his mother’s distress at his father’s infidelity. Among other revelations he included private letters between his parents, written when Mosley and Diana were lovers in the period leading up to Cimmie’s death. Diana and her Mosley children were outraged, as were Nicholas’s own brother and sister. Diana was motivated by a fierce protectiveness of the love of her life for whom she was still grieving. Nicholas’ siblings and his half-brothers perhaps felt they had already suffered enough publicity because of their father. They all felt it was ‘too soon’ to make this sensitive material public.

Nicholas justified the book by explaining that his father had asked him to write it shortly before he died, and that Diana had given him the letters without reading them. This surely says a great deal about Diana, for how many second wives would hand over this type of correspondence without at least a glance at it out of curiosity? Max, Mosley’s youngest son and Nicholas’ half-brother, suggested that his father was not
compos mentis
when he gave permission for the book, but Nicholas pointed out that Diana had been present at the time. Diana attempted to have publication stopped, but once again the action merely resulted in publicity, which helped the book. It was hard for Diana to have this aspect of the personal life of the man she still worshipped spread out for public consumption, and from a source that gave it such authenticity. Predictably, Decca rather enjoyed the embarrassment caused and made quips about it in her voluminous correspondence.

A year later Jonathan and Catherine Guinness wrote
The House of Mitford
, in which the Mosley case was strongly argued. This time it was Decca who refused to co-operate by withholding permission for any quotes from
Hons and Rebels
, or indeed any of her books or letters. ‘Leave me out,’ she wrote to her nephew grimly, ‘you’ll have plenty of copy from the rest of the family.’
⁹
Her dislike of Jonathan had been bolstered recently at a meeting with his daughter Catherine who, when interviewing Decca for an article, showed her a letter from Jonathan in which he warned her about Decca:

She’s a very tough cookie [he wrote], a hardened and intelligent Marxist agitator who knows very subtly how to play on her upper-class background so as to enlist residual snobbery (on both sides of the Atlantic) in establishing Marxism. But this leads to problems of identity; to an ambiguity as to what is real and what is an act. All this was very evident in her TV appearance here. Bob Treuhaft came over better, at least he is what he is. He is one piece so to speak, the bright Jewish boy with his ready made ‘red diaper’ principles, seeing (e.g.) Chatsworth from the outside with the healthy irony of a social historian.
¹⁰

Decca interpreted this letter as implying that she was ‘a liar and not to be trusted’, though Jonathan did not use those words. One friend of many to whom she wrote about the affair, wisely counselled her: ‘He probably doesn’t understand the immensely important help you have given by instinct and design, to a host of people, for most of your life, and you will never understand that the very rich and powerful, in their isolation, also need succour.’

For fear of alienating Debo again, Decca refused to review the book for the
Guardian
. Instead, she sent sheets of quotable material to her circle of literary friends in England for them to use in their own reviews of the book, which she described privately as ‘a puff job for the Mosley faction’. Several reviewers used extracts from these ‘crib sheets’ of Decca’s, and at least one major review was copied almost word-for-word from Decca’s comments. Decca knew her way about the world of English reviewing which she described as ‘a small pond where people scratch each other’s backs – or bite each other’s backs – and they all know each other. At least in California if your book is reviewed well you know it’s because they like it.’
¹¹

She employed the same tactics two years later when Selina Hastings brought out a biography of Nancy. Decca was surprised to hear that Debo, Pam, Diana and some of their childhood friends and cousins liked the new portrait of Nancy. But her contemporary letters show that she had taken against the author even before she read the book, for quite another reason: in writing to Decca, and to a New York newspaper, the author had signed herself ‘Lady Selina Hastings’. This irritated Decca: she regarded it as snobbish and she was determined not to like the book. When the biography was published it contained a derogatory remark about Bob (Treuhaft) and as far as Decca was concerned the gloves were off. She wrote a review, ‘Commentary in Defence of Nancy’,
¹²
which was a brilliant, scathing and, of course, amusing condemnation of the book, but unfair in that she based her criticism upon a few selected passages. She made no reference to the immense amount of fascinating new material about Nancy’s relationship with Palewski, including their private correspondence, which even Decca privately conceded was ‘amazing’. And, even accounting for personal taste, the Hastings biography was far more incisive than the previous one, written by Harold Acton shortly after Nancy’s death, which Decca found unsatisfactory. In case they should miss seeing her review, Decca copied it and sent it to all her Mitford friends and connections, some of whom – to their credit – wrote to disagree with her opinion. ‘Thank you for sending me your championship of Nancy,’ James Lees-Milne wrote, while also advising that she had misquoted him in her review. ‘The Redesdale motto should be “Decca Careth For Us”, instead of God,
*
for whom I don’t suppose you have much use. And I admire your loyalty but, alas, I’m afraid we don’t yet agree even on [this] book.’
¹³

What makes this review, and those Decca wrote of other books at the time, especially interesting to a biographer is what it reveals about Decca’s tight and confident literary style. For all the success of her first book
Hons and Rebels
(in the opinion of many, including me, her best book) Decca’s literary voice then had been that of an apprentice compared to what it was to become. By the 1980s her irreverent flourish had developed a polish that placed her in a superior pantheon as a wordsmith. And although her books after
The American Way of Death
did not have the same massive success, they were generally profitable and, more importantly, because of them, she was in constant demand for nearly two decades as a journalist and speaker. A simple list of her published articles would cover a dozen pages and she never failed to be delighted when offered a huge sum of money for her words.