While Evelyn Waugh was launching Vile Bodies to wide acclaim, Nancy’s manuscript of Highland Fling1 was with the printers. She hoped to make some money from it because David had virtually halved her allowance owing to financial pressures stemming from the depression. Fortunately she managed to talk herself into ‘a job’ with the Lady, writing a weekly column on subjects such as ‘The Chelsea Flower Show’, ‘The Débutante’s Dance’ and ‘The Shooting Party’, at a salary of £250 a year.2 Her contributions are not in the same league as her later bestselling novels but they are pithy and observant. In the following excerpt she advises how to behave during a visit to the photographer.
People about to be photographed are always at great pains to explain that their motives are both noble and unselfish. They never say, ‘I wanted a picture for myself,’ but imply that countless friends and relations are clamouring for one and that it is for their sakes alone that an unpleasant ordeal is being faced . . . Don’t bother to be very natural; it is not an informal snapshot, but a carefully considered portrait . . . and a little affectation often helps to secure a good result. This is why it is important never to take a friend with you. They are so apt to spoil a really good pose by giggling or saying, ‘Darling! What a soulful expression!’3
Meanwhile the rest of the family went to Switzerland. Skating had become a virtual obsession with David, who skated regularly at Oxford, and packed his skates whenever he went up to London. Various members of the family skated almost to professional standard: Tom was able to partner Sonja Henie without disgracing himself, Unity won a bronze medal, and Debo was so good she was invited to join the British junior team, but Sydney – realizing the commitment required for international level competition – vetoed this. The Mitfords usually stayed at Pontresina, close to but less expensive than its fashionable neighbour St Moritz, where they skated on the rink in front of the glitzy Suvretta House Hotel.
Uncle Jack, David’s favourite brother, but better known as the debonair éminence grise of the International Sportsman’s Club, was also a fine skater, but he was more interested in the Cresta bobsleigh run, which attracted a racy international crowd. That year he had brought along an unusual guest. Sheilah Graham was a bright working-class girl of quite extraordinary beauty and at that time was one of ‘Mr Cochran’s Young Ladies’.4 She was married but had been forced to keep the marriage secret (even from Jack) for the sake of her stage career. Years later, when she wrote her bestselling memoir, Beloved Infidel, and recalled that holiday, it was not Jack whom she described but David, whom she likened to a Saxon king: ‘a blond, blue-eyed giant of a man with a striking head, great shoulders, and a hawk-like look to his finely chiselled face’. Sheilah met Tom there and they remained friends for some years; ‘Tom Mitford, a youthful edition of his father and, at twenty-one, one of the handsomest men I had ever seen,’ she recalled. ‘Outrageous fantasies danced through my head. I had always wanted children. And I had not been successful. Perhaps I could found an aristocracy of my own. And I would choose Tom Mitford to be the father, and my sons would look like Saxon Kings . . .’5 As she sat listening to the Mitford family chatting over meals, even the children joining in as the conversation changed effortlessly from English to French, Italian to German, she felt ashamed of her ignorance. Subsequently she began a programme of self-education that changed her life and led to a career as a Hollywood journalist and a love affair with Scott Fitzgerald.
Although Tom was not rich he received a good allowance from David, and made it work for him for he travelled extensively, dined in the best places, was seen in the best company. He was particularly friendly with Winston Churchill, and in one of the longest letters he ever wrote he described a weekend spent at the home of Philip Sassoon. The party, he wrote to Sydney, consisted of Clementine and Winston Churchill, Sir Samuel and Lady Hoare, Tom’s cousin Venetia Stanley and Brian Thynne, ‘and Aircraftsman Shaw [T.E. Lawrence]’.
I am a little disappointed with Shaw. He looks just like any other private in the Air Force, is very short and he’s in his five years of service become quite hardened. He isn’t a bit like the Sargent portrait of him in his book.
Last night I sat next him at dinner and he had Winston on the other side. Winston admires him enormously. He said at one moment ‘If the people make me Prime Minister I will make you Viceroy of India.’ Lawrence politely refused and said he was quite happy in the Air Force. When asked what he would do when, in five years time he has to leave, he said simply ‘Join the dole I suppose.’ It is curious that he should enjoy such a life with no responsibility after being almost King in Arabia. Some say it is inverted vanity; he’d have accepted a Kingship, but as he didn’t get it he preferred to bury himself and hide away.
This morning we flew over to see Colonel Gunnes at Olympia, about 80 miles away. We had a 7 man unit and flew in perfect formation over Brighton and the other resorts – very low to frighten the crowd. Lawrence was thrilled at flying; he said Ministry had stopped him flying a year ago.6 Winston drove his machine a little way. I hadn’t realised he had done a lot of piloting before the war.
We flew in arrow-head formation:
Philip
Winston
Sam Hoare
Me
Lawrence
Venetia
Bryan Thynne
(each with a pilot)
and landed in [a] field . . . It took about an hour getting there and ¾ hour back, as we didn’t return in formation. It was very amusing flying very low over the edge of the sea and jumping the piers at Brighton and Littlehampton, to the astonishment of the people there.7
That spring Decca realized her dearest wish. The family was living at Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe when Sydney appeared to have a change of heart about schools. In an attempt to get Unity interested in something, and stop her sulks, which goaded David into bad tempers, she allowed Unity to attend a day school at Queen’s Gate near their London house. This experiment lasted only a short time before she was expelled and Decca thought that was that. But Sydney persisted and found Unity a place at a boarding-school, provoking the often-heard cry of the Mitford children, this time from Decca who ached to be allowed to go to school, ‘But it’s not fair!’
After Unity had successfully completed two terms, the unbelievable happened: Decca and Debo were suddenly allowed to attend a small local private day school for by the daughters of upper-middle-class families in High Wycombe. It was no treat for Debo: she fainted in a geometry class because it was so difficult, and the blackberry pie and custard made her sick. After ‘three days of hell’ she was allowed to leave.8 But Decca revelled in it. She was brought up short, however, when after some weeks she asked Sydney if she could invite her ‘best friend’ home to tea. ‘Oh, no, darling,’ Sydney replied. It wasn’t possible because Decca would be invited back to the girl’s home and Sydney ‘did not know’ her mother. Decca knew instinctively that there could be no appeal, and though it seems an insignificant incident it helped to form her personal convictions about class and privilege. At the end of the term she was withdrawn from the school and once again thrown upon autodidactic study to expand the PNEU curriculum available at home.
Her personal research began to take a direction unsuspected by Sydney: social politics. ‘By the time I was thirteen,’ Decca wrote, in an unpublished manuscript, ‘major storms were brewing outside the Swinbrook fortress. Whole population centres were designated “distressed areas” by the Government. I read in the papers of the great hunger marches, the great depression of the early 30s hit the country and police and strikers fought in the streets.’9 Her single term at school was not responsible for, but coincided with, the dawning of self-consciousness that her home-life was exceptional:
The discovery of other people’s reality – more than fifty million in England alone! – is one you can grasp from time to time, only to find it eluding you again, its vastness proving too much for you to handle. You discover suffering – not just your own suffering, which you know is largely of your own making, nor the childhood suffering over Black Beauty, David Copperfield or Blake’s Little Chimney Sweep – but you catch disturbing, vivid glimpses of the real meaning of poverty, hunger, cold cruelty.10
Prior to this Decca and Unity had squabbled a great deal, and the childish battles between Hons and Counter Hons had been semi-serious at times,11 but when Decca reached adolescence the two became Favourite Sisters.12 Although she was thrown more and more into the company of Debo as the elder girls left home, Debo’s clear enjoyment of her life at Swinbrook made her an unsympathetic confidante for Decca and her newly awakened social conscience. Now in the Hons Cupboard when they talked about what they wanted to be when they were grown-ups, Unity would say, ‘I’m going to Germany to meet Hitler,’ and Decca would say, ‘I’m going to run away and be a Communist,’ whereupon, so Decca wrote, Debo would state that she was going to marry a duke and become a duchess.13
Undoubtedly Unity’s anti-parent stance attracted Decca just when she wanted to expand her personal horizons beyond Swinbrook with its apparently petty restrictions to which she would be subject for ‘years and years’, stretching far off into the future, until that happy day when she finally grew up and could run away. She described Unity as ‘a huge bright glittering personality, [she had] a sort of huge boldness and funniness and generosity – a unique character that is hard to explain to anybody who did not know her in those days. She was tremendous fun to be with. She wasn’t at all interested in politics [then] and she would go off into a dream world . . . of Blake, Edgar Allan Poe and Hieronymus Bosch . . . Oddly enough it was I who first became interested in Politics.’14
In fact Decca became so interested in what she read in the newspapers that she even ‘grudgingly’ spared some money from her running-away account to buy leftist books and pamphlets, and pro-pacifist literature. But the defining moment of her burgeoning political interest came when she read a book by Beverly Nichols. Cry Havoc detailed the worst horrors of the First World War and was an eloquent plea for world disarmament. It appealed strongly to sections of a generation growing up in a world where the existing political systems seemed not to be working, and it gave Decca a focus for what were then no more than rags of political ideas. As she read about the growing social and fiscal problems across Europe she began to define her personal ideology, and a new element was added to her running-away plans. She realized that by instinct she was a socialist, and began to understand why she wanted to run away, what she was running away for and from. What she did not yet know was where she was running to. However, ‘I felt as though I had suddenly stumbled on the solution to a vast puzzle which I had clumsily been trying to solve for years,’ she wrote. Her first reaction was to appeal to Nancy and her pro-socialist friends, but she was disappointed in their reaction: they were thinkers not activists. Moreover, they were too busy attending parties every night to take seriously what Decca began to call ‘the class struggle’.
Unity spent just over a year boarding at St Margaret’s, Bushey (SMB, as it is known to its pupils) in Nicholson’s house. The school was chosen presumably because her first cousins Robin and Ann Farrer, and Rosemary and Clementine Mitford were also there, so she was unlikely to be lonely. But she was remorselessly naughty and was expelled just before Christmas 1930, or rather her mother was invited to remove her – a nice point of distinction to which Sydney adhered stoically – because of her unsettling influence on the other girls. In later years Unity liked to claim that the reason for her expulsion was a single act, on Speech Day when she had to read aloud a quotation that included the line, ‘A garden is a lovesome thing God wot . . .’ to which she claimed she added the word ‘rot’. However, her biographer discovered that this joke was used throughout the school before Unity’s expulsion and one of Unity’s friends at St Margaret’s stated, ‘What she got the sack for was a fine disregard of the rules of the school.’15 Later, when Unity became infamous, pupils at St Margaret’s were forbidden to mention her name and she was, as it were, expunged from the school records. Strangely, Unity was upset at her expulsion: even years later she told new friends how sad it had made her.
The Farrer girls who were at school with Unity were daughters of Aunt Joan, the third of David’s four sisters. Joan had married Major Denis Farrer, a distant Redesdale kinsman who had been David’s companion during his long-ago attempt at tea-planting in Ceylon. The Farrers had five children but it was the three girls who played a major part in the lives of the Mitford sisters. The eldest, Barbara, was the same age as Pam, while Ann and Joan (called Robin by her parents) were contemporaries of Unity and Decca. Major Farrer and David often shot together and there were exchange visits between Asthall and the Farrer home, Brayfield, on the Bedfordshire–Buckinghamshire border. Miss Hussey took some of the girls to Brayfield on several occasions, so it is something of a surprise to read in a letter between Decca and Ann that they ‘never really met’ until 1930 when Ann and Robin were invited to Swinbrook for the summer holidays.16 Ann became known as ‘Idden’ and Robin as ‘Rudbin’ (their names in Boudledidge),* but after seeing Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest in Oxford, Idden and Decca took to calling each other ‘Sister’ in correspondence.17 They became instant best friends, and Idden was Decca’s first real confidante outside her immediate family.18
Two or three times they walked together to Chipping Norton – ten miles each way – to a shop where they could buy homemade sausage rolls (strictly forbidden under Sydney’s Mosaic regimen) and fizzy lemonade (also forbidden at Swinbrook). It was to Idden that Decca revealed her concern about the have-nots in society. In return Idden told Decca about their Romilly cousins. The Mitford children had never met Esmond and Giles Romilly. Sydney disapproved of their mother, Nellie, because of her reputation and feckless nature, although Nellie was David’s first cousin, and sister to Clementine Churchill. The two boys were not much welcome at the Farrers’ home at Brayfield either, and they spent most of their summer and Christmas holidays at Chartwell with the Churchills. The Farrers had met them at Chartwell a couple of times and it seemed that no matter how naughty the Mitfords were, and it was inevitable that bright children thrown so much on their own devices would be mischievous, Esmond outdid them by miles. He held the head of Mary Churchill19 under water until she conceded that there was no God, he smoked in his bedroom, and – a cardinal sin – he dared to appear once at dinner without a black tie.20
Although, according to Decca, it was her interest in politics that stimulated Unity’s, the surviving evidence tends to show that Unity, three years older than Decca, had already become interested in pseudo-Fascist literature in 1930 a year or so before Decca’s first political stirrings. Unity’s biographer, David Pryce-Jones, came across a book she had owned. Autographed by her and dated 1930, it was a copy of Jew Süss, the novel by Leon Feuchtwanger about an eighteenth-century Jewish financier-adventurer. Because of its stereotypical Jewish characters, it was used in Germany to fuel and unify disparate elements of anti-Semitism. Pryce-Jones, whose father had been a Swinbrook Sewer at roughly the same time that Unity would have been reading this book, thought it an unusual choice of reading matter for a fifteen-year-old girl21 and it set him on a course of research that led to the only biography written about Unity, whom he described enigmatically as ‘a comet, blazing a trail too erratic to be charted’.22
But no matter which of the two came to politics first, it was typical that although Unity and Decca became emotionally close to each other at this time, they opposed each other ideologically. Decca was toying then with socialism before becoming, as Farve would have put it, ‘a Bolshie’, and Unity had an initial slight interest in Fascism. ‘When Boud became a fascist I declared myself a Communist . . . thus by the time she was eighteen and I was fifteen we had chosen opposite sides in the conflict of the day’ was how Decca put it.23 As they egged each other on and their interest grew, a line was drawn down the centre of the DFD, and it became a miniature battleground of contradictory political fervour with the respective literature of each side crowding every surface, posters of Hitler and Lenin adorning opposite walls, swastikas, hammers and sickles scratched into the glass of the windows.
Yet if Decca was truly unhappy, as she claims to have been, it was not obvious to her family. Her letters sparkle, almost as much as Nancy’s, with fun and enjoyment of her life, especially her friendship with Idden, and her beloved pets, the spaniel, Spanner, and Miranda, who loved chocolate. Her relationship with her father is nowhere better illustrated than by letters she wrote to him in 1932 from holiday on the Isle of Wight containing a series of spoof newspaper articles about him, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings. David took these letters in great good humour, but apart from the closeness of Decca’s relationship with her father these ‘articles’ also showed a basic understanding of the journalism for which in later life she would become renowned:
Peer Had up for Murder – and Rightly
Lord ‘Sheepbrain’ Redesdale, well known to all committee frequenters such as the skating committee . . . was had up yesterday for assaulting and injuring Mr Adolphus Jones who afterwards died of shock.
He is to be hung tomorrow as soon as possible [inset: ‘his daughter’s remarkable spaniel who has got mange’]. The Hon. Nancy Mitford, another daughter, whose engagement to P. Rodd was announced in these columns, is being married in the prison chapel so that her father can give her away before the hanging . . .24
One illustration shows David, dressed in a suit decorated with arrows with a rope around his neck, escorting Nancy, dressed in flowing bridal clothes, to the altar. Her next letter contained a homemade four-page newspaper:
Man with Glaring Eyes Caught
Lord Redesdale is to be tried in the House of Lords for the unnecessary murder of Miss Belle Bathe, a bathing Belle of Totland Bay.
Lord Redesdale was interviewed today by our special correspondent. ‘I was imagining myself in a skating rink’ he [said] . . . when this damn girl came up and tried to hire out a towel. So I unfortunately trampled her underfoot with my skates.’ Lady Redesdale, when interviewed, merely replied, ‘Ohrrr, poor [darling]’, so we expect she will be tried for being an accessory after the fact.
Miss Jessica Mitford was also interviewed by our correspondent. ‘I always expected something of the sort’, she said. ‘You see he really is a subhuman and a pathetic old throw-back, so what was one to expect?’ We also learn that Lord Redesdale is a great admirer of Hitler, ‘The fellow has fair hair. Really almost yellow’ he told our correspondent, ‘so of course I admire him.’ Lord Redesdale has narrowly escaped arrest for cruelty to children; loud shrieks have often been heard to come from his house . . .
[Headline]: Lord Redesdale hanged – last words: ‘Take care of my skates . . .’25
The letters to David, which accompany these extracts, are alive with love and laughter, and appear to show a child confident in her father’s affection. They are not in any sense demonstrative of an unhappy child. However, Decca did record that Sydney withheld her pocket money on one occasion when she referred to her father as ‘a feudal remnant’. ‘Little D, you are not to call Farve a remnant!’ Sydney ordered. In fact, it was only one of countless names that all the children bestowed upon their parents and which were generally taken with good humour. Sydney became ‘the poor old female’, shortened to TPOF, and ‘the fem’ in conversation, while David was ‘the poor old male’, TPOM, and often ‘the poor old sub-human’. Letters are scattered with references to the parents as ‘the birds’ and ‘the nesting ones’. No one escaped a nickname in the Mitford household.26
Unity came out in the spring of 1932 and, economically, Sydney brought out Rudbin at the same time, irritated because David’s sister Joan seemed unprepared to ‘do anything’ to launch her daughters into Society. A fellow débutante recalled that as she and Unity were both nearly six feet tall they were made to bring up the rear of the procession.27 Dressed in white and with the regulation ostrich feathers in their hair, they felt ridiculous and rebellious, which created an instant bond of friendship. Invited to stay at Swinbrook, Unity’s new friend was surprised and impressed by the sophisticated and free manner in which the Mitfords talked about their parents. Unity, she said, was quite unlike anyone else, but it was her behaviour rather than her character that was different. Her clothes were outlandish and she brightened up the requisite débutante wardrobe approved by Sydney by adding dramatic flourishes such as velvet capes and flashy jewellery hired from a theatrical costumier.
Where Nancy enjoyed teasing, Unity liked to shock, though in her teenage years her manner of shocking people was often startling or funny rather than truly shocking. As a débutante she drew attention to herself by taking her pet white rat Ratular to dances and even to a Palace garden party. She would sit stroking it, almost daring young men to speak to her. Sometimes Ratular was left at home in favour of her grass snake, Enid, who performed as an unusual neck ornament. When either of these pets escaped – which was whenever Unity felt that things needed to be livened up – there was a huge amount of shrieking and commotion. Unity was not unattractive; someone said that looking at her was like looking at Diana in a slightly distorted mirror, and she had her own little court of admirers, but no one ‘stuck’. She was too unusual: all photographs of her show her with a sullen expression, but friends say she smiled and laughed a great deal. ‘She was fun,’ one said. ‘She used to giggle and giggle, but in photographs she looks severe because Diana had said that smiling wrinkled the skin, so she put on her photography face.’28
When she was presented in May she discovered some Buckingham Palace writing-paper in a waiting room and immediately pocketed it to use as ‘jokey’ writing-paper for thank-you notes. Sydney was aghast, but Unity needed to stand out, to draw attention to herself, to be accounted as someone in her own right, not simply one of the middle Mitford girls. She felt awkward about her appearance, and had endured a full complement of sisterly taunts about her size, but her character and behaviour made her what Decca called a sui generis personality. Her originality made a deep impression on many who were introduced to her then for the first time. Diana’s neighbour, Dora Carrington, for example, met her in the summer before she came out while the Mitfords were visiting Biddesden, home of Diana and Bryan. ‘Dear Lytton,’ Carrington wrote afterwards, ‘I went with Julian to lunch with Diana today. There found three sisters and Mama Redesdale. The little sisters were astonishingly beautiful and another of sixteen (Unity) very marvellous or Grecian. I thought the mother was remarkable, very sensible and no upper class graces . . . the little sister [Debo] was a great botanist and won me by her high spirits and charm . . .’29
Despite the seemingly ceaseless round of parties, and the trips to Venice, Greece and Turkey that Diana and Bryan made, Bryan must have found time to work for in 1930 he was admitted to the bar. To his disappointment he was offered few briefs and only discovered the reason for this by accident: the clerk considered that others in the chambers were in greater need of the three-guinea fee than Bryan. After that he more or less gave up. In 1931 the couple moved from Buckingham Street to 96 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, overlooking the river. Formerly it had been the house of the artist James McNeill Whistler, and was two doors away from the old London home of Diana’s grandparents, where David had been born. Some time earlier Bryan had purchased Biddesden, a Queen Anne house in the baroque style, set in rolling chalk downland near Andover in north Hampshire. It was a comfortable old property of mellowed red bricks with stone coining, originally built for General Webb, one of Marlborough’s generals. A portrait of the first owner on his battle-charger hung, two storeys high, in the entrance hall. It went with the house and Diana was warned that if it was moved the general’s ghost would make a nuisance of itself by riding ceaselessly up and down the stairs in protest. Her childhood memories of the Asthall ghost made her especially sensitive to this legend and she made no attempt to alter the decoration of the hall, though she stamped her own youthful taste on the remainder of the house.
That summer Diana was twenty-one and pregnant again, with her second son, Desmond, who was born in September 1931, so she did not travel abroad. When Bryan went away with friends, Sydney and the three youngest girls stayed at Biddesden to keep her company. Even so, and with a veritable army of servants, Diana lay awake at night, frightened of the darkness and listening for footsteps on the paving outside the house – presumably those of General Webb keeping a watch on his portrait. She confided her fears to their neighbour and close friend Lytton Strachey, whose reaction apparently cured her of her apprehensions once and for all. ‘[He] raised both hands in a characteristic gesture of despairing amazement. “I had hoped,” he said, “that the age of reason had dawned.”’30 Nevertheless, the portrait of General Webb remained in situ.
With a real talent for entertaining and love of good conversation, Bryan and Diana encouraged an eclectic circle of friends from the worlds of politics, literature, art and science to stay at Biddesden for extended periods. John Betjeman was there almost every other weekend, with Augustus John, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. Prof [Lindemann] was another frequent guest, as were the Sitwells, the Acton brothers, Harold and William, and the Huxleys. ‘Randolph Churchill almost lived with us,’ a member of the staff recalled.31
Biddesden had a 350-acre dairy farm and a herd of fifty cows. Bryan was only too happy to agree to Pam’s suggestion that she manage it and run the milk round for him. There was a farm manager’s cottage built of brick and flint on the property and Pam moved in, but she was often invited to Biddesden for dinner. The farm workers called her ‘Miss Pam’ and had a healthy respect for her as she worked alongside them, invariably dressed in riding breeches and boots, even when, in the early days, she made a few mistakes. For example, she bid at market for what looked to her like a very fine cow, only to discover when it arrived at the farm that ‘the brute was bagless’. She always had an acute sense of humour about her own limitations and was quite unaware of her beauty, which endeared her to everyone who met her.32 Since her broken engagement two years earlier she had formed no emotional attachments, but John Betjeman, who had been a friend of Bryan since 1927 at Oxford when they were successive editors of the magazine Cherwell, became a founder member of what he called ‘the Biddesden Gang’ and fell instantly in love with her. Betjeman, or ‘Betj’, as Pam called him, was on the rebound from a frustrated love affair but his affection for her ran deep. In a letter to Bryan he admitted that all his thoughts were of Pam. ‘I hope I am not a bore. Possibly.’33 Although quieter than her sisters Pam had the same physical beauty of open, regular features and attractive cheekbones, fair hair, with startling blue eyes, the same colour as David’s.
John Betjeman and she ‘walked out’ for a while. ‘He was mad on kite-flying at the time,’ Pam would tell Betjeman’s biographer. ‘He used to bring his kite down for the weekend.’ Sometimes they drove around Hampshire and Wiltshire together, exploring old churches and villages, picnicking on the downs, visiting his (hated) old school, Marlborough. On Sundays they always cycled down to the old church at nearby Appleshaw for matins, with the glorious ancient liturgy and hymns that David had insisted on at Swinbrook. Once Pam persuaded Betjeman to ride, putting him on a reliable old pony and sending him off into the woods behind the house where he would be ‘safe’. Unfortunately, the local hunt was drawing there: at the sound of the horn the reliable old pony reared with joy, and happily decanted its passenger before galloping off to join in the fun.
Betjeman was too shy to advance his suit aggressively but he persisted quietly for over a year. ‘My thoughts are still with Miss Pam,’ he wrote to Diana in February 1932 from a hotel in Devon. ‘I have been seeing whether a little absence makes the heart grow fonder and, my God, it does. Does Miss Pam’s heart still warm towards that ghastly Czechoslovakian [sic] Count? . . . I do want . . . to hear whether this severe test has improved my chances and done down my rival. I have written a confession of my tactics to Miss Pam today. Was that wise?’34 Diana encouraged him, and Betjeman continued as a frequent weekend visitor. He recalled that after dinner Bryan did conjuring tricks and guests used to gather round the piano for parlour songs, and ‘rounds’, but the absolute favourites were the old evangelical hymns. Diana’s parlourmaid, May Amende, disapproved thinking that they were mocking them, but they were not, Betjeman insisted, ‘We sang them in the car, too.’35 Unity’s favourite was also Sydney’s, the old Moody and Sankey hymn about the lost sheep, which was almost prophetic.
There were nine and ninety that safely lay
In the shelter of the fold
But one was out, on the hills away,
Far off from the hills of gold . . .
Betjeman proposed twice. Pam turned him down flat the first time but on the second occasion he asked her to take some time to think it over. A month later, however, he was writing to an old friend, ‘I suppose you have heard about the death of poor old Lytton Strachey [of cancer] and how about a fortnight later [sic] Carrington borrowed Bryan Guinness’s gun and shot herself down at Biddesden. You may have heard too that I fell slightly in love with Pamela, the rural Mitford. I don’t know whether I still am . . .’36 Later still, with no favourable reply from Pam, he added a light-hearted PS in a letter to Nancy: ‘If Pamela Mitford refuses me finally, you might marry me – I’m rich, handsome and aristocratic.’37 Finally he wrote to Diana that Pam’s fondness for the Austrian count, Tom’s friend Janos von Almassy, ‘that “Austrian Betjeman” about whom I am continually hearing, and about whose success I have had little reason to doubt’ had killed his love for her and that he was now interested in ‘another jolly girl’.38 Years later Pam told Betjeman’s daughter, ‘Betj made me laugh. I was very, very fond of him, but I wasn’t in love with him . . . He said he’d like to marry me but I rather declined.’39 The future poet laureate, first person to use the term the Mitford Girls – in print, at least – consoled his disappointment by writing a ditty ‘in honour of The Mitford Girls, but especially in honour of Miss Pamela’:
The Mitford girls! The Mitford Girls
I love them for their sins
The young ones all like ‘Cavalcade’,
The old like ‘Maskelyns’40
SOPHISTICATION, Blessed dame
Sure they have heard her call
Yes, even Gentle Pamela
Most rural of them all41
Betjeman and the girl who subsequently became his wife, Penelope Chetwode, were frequent visitors to Biddesden over the years that followed despite the effect of the house on him. Like Diana, he was affected by the supernatural ambience and on one occasion had a disturbing dream in which he was handed a card inscribed with a date. He declined to reveal the details but said he was convinced it was the date of his death.
To celebrate Diana’s twenty-second birthday in June 1932 the Guinnesses held a party at Cheyne Walk. She was then at the height of her beauty, had been painted by half a dozen leading portrait artists and her face – which had become virtually an icon for the era with its classical planes – carefully composed, so as not to encourage wrinkles, appeared in newspaper Society columns regularly. She was the woman who apparently had everything: youth, riches, a happy marriage, a charming husband who worshipped her, and two healthy children. For her party she dressed in pale grey chiffon and tulle, and wore ‘all the diamonds I could lay hands on’.42 Their guests included Winston Churchill, Augustus John, first-time visitor Oswald Mosley, and ‘everyone we knew, young and old, poor and rich, clever and silly’. It was a still, warm summer night and dancing went on until the glassy surface of the river was gilded with the pink and orange of sunrise.
There was a singular significance to this one party out of all the others for Diana, which is no doubt why she recalls it so graphically. A short time earlier, during the spring of 1932, she had met the dashing and dangerous Sir Oswald Mosley and had fallen madly in love with him. It was the real thing, a love that would triumphantly defy the world no matter what the cost, and endure for the rest of her life, but she could not have known that then, only wonder, perhaps, at the intensity of her feelings.
They met first at a dinner party, and little could the hostess have realized the part she was playing in history by seating them next to each other. Diana was not especially impressed with him that evening, but she found what he had to say interesting. Although he had not been previously introduced to her, they moved in the same circles and he had certainly noticed her on several occasions. The first time had been at a ball given by Sir Philip Sassoon at his magnificent Park Lane home. ‘She looked wonderful among the rose entwined pillars,’ Mosley wrote of Diana in his autobiography, ‘. . . as the music of the best orchestras wafted together with the best scents through air heavy laden with Sassoon’s most hospitable artifices. Her starry blue eyes, golden hair and ineffable expression of a Gothic Madonna seemed remote from the occasion but strangely enough not entirely inappropriate . . .’43 He spotted her again during a visit to Venice but they did not meet then either. At the back of Diana’s mind was the knowledge that Mosley had a reputation as ‘a lady-killer’, which did not dispose her to favour him.44
It was only a matter of time, however, for soon the popular princess of London Society was completely under the spell of the man who was rapidly earning for himself a reputation as the enfant terrible of British politics. They met everywhere, trying to discover which function the other was attending – such as the coming-of-age party thrown by the Churchills for Randolph – seeking each other out at every opportunity, trying to suppress their feelings but unable to draw back from the delicious thrill of being in each other’s company. As the attachment deepened they were both aware of the need for discretion, and of the furore there would be if word of their attraction got out. Also, Diana genuinely cared for Bryan and was mindful of how she could wound him. But when she compared what she felt for Mosley with her affection for Bryan it was as the sun to a candle. At her birthday party Mosley declared for the first time to Diana that he was passionately in love with her. On the following morning Diana’s parlourmaid, May Amende, answered the phone. With his customary impatience, Mosley paused long enough only to identify the voice as female before he asked, ‘Darling, when can I see you again?’45
Prior to meeting Mosley, Diana had been miserable following the deaths of Strachey and Carrington; Carrington’s upset her particularly, because she had innocently loaned her the shotgun. Diana has a good mind, and during this period she began to use it. On the face of it she had everything, just as the papers simpered, but she concluded that, with the exception of the birth of her babies, her existence since her marriage to Bryan had been trivial and that there must be more to life. She began to recognize dimly that much of what her parents had said was right, and that she had really married ‘in order to escape the boredom, and sort of fatal atmosphere that families make when too cooped up together’.46 She also began to notice the world outside her cosseted existence.
The teenage Decca was not alone in the Mitford family in recognizing that there were unacceptable aspects to Society, ‘although,’ Diana wrote, ‘it was not necessary to have a particularly awakened social conscience to see that “Something must be done.” The distressed areas, as they were called, contained millions of unemployed kept barely alive by a miserable dole. Undernourished, overcrowded, their circumstances were a disgrace which it was impossible to ignore or forget. The Labour Party had failed to deal with the problem, the Conservatives could be relied upon to do the strict minimum, yet radical reform was imperative.’ More than most Diana realized that, for the rich, life had gone on as before the depression had struck, and would continue to do so. ‘Nothing will stop young people enjoying themselves,’ she continued.47 Unlike Decca, Diana did not accept that axiomatically the rich had to be brought down in order to raise the poor: she felt instinctively that there must be a way of resolving the conundrum. She was seeking some sort of answer that she had not yet identified. When she met Mosley, and listened to his stirring ideas, the missing piece seemed to fall into place.
To anyone who lived through the Second World War the name Oswald Mosley has a sinister ring. During those years he became – after members of the German Nazi regime – public enemy number one. But a decade before the war Mosley was admired, fêted and listened to with respect. Arguably one of the most brilliant young politicians of his time, in the late twenties and early thirties he was widely regarded in political circles as a prime minister-in-waiting. It was simply a matter of time, and of him finding his place. By the time Diana met him, Mosley had already begun to take the bold steps that would sever him for ever from conventional politics.
The eldest of three sons, Mosley came from a similar background to Diana’s. He graduated from Sandhurst on the outbreak of the First World War at the age of seventeen. He served gallantly in the trenches and in the air, but was badly injured in a landing accident and was invalided out of the forces, with a pronounced limp, before he was twenty. With a military career denied to him he turned to politics and was elected Conservative MP for Harrow in the so-called ‘khaki election’ of 1918, becoming the youngest member of the Commons. Thus began his meteoric rise. Confident, rich, darkly good-looking, he was over six feet tall and athletic: he rode well, played tennis and fenced at international level. Above all, he was charismatic; he excelled in debate and was a polished performer on the hustings. In those pre-television days political meetings were attended in numbers only dreamed of by present-day politicians and he thought nothing of addressing a crowd of thousands. With his impassioned speeches, delivered in a powerful, if unusually pitched, voice he found it easy to carry his audience with him when he called for political reform to ‘get the unemployed back to work’. His speeches were as full of stirring phrases as were Churchill’s: ‘. . . the tents of ease are struck, and the soul of man is once more on the move’ and ‘Supposing people had stood on the shore when Drake and Ralegh . . . set out to sea and said, “Don’t go. The sea is very rough and there will be trouble at the other end . . .”’48 During the 1931 election the Manchester Guardian wrote:
When Sir Oswald Mosley sat down after his Free Trade Hall speech in Manchester and the audience, stirred as an audience rarely is, rose and swept a storm of applause towards the platform – who could doubt that here was one of those root-and-branch men who have been thrown up from time to time in the religious, political and business story of England.49
Two years after being elected, impatient for office and disillusioned by, among other things, Conservative inactivity to help former servicemen, Mosley crossed the floor of the Commons and joined the Labour Party. Nine years later, still only in his early thirties, he was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Ramsay MacDonald’s government, and was one of a quartet of ministers given responsibility for dealing with unemployment, which had then reached the unheard-of level of two and a half million. The memorandum he produced on the subject was described several decades later by a political pundit as ‘brilliant . . . a whole generation ahead of Labour thinking’,50 but his recommendations were rejected, and in May 1930 he resigned in protest, ‘slamming the door with a bang to resound through the political world’. It was, wrote one respected political commentator, ‘an amazing act of arrogance’.51 Frank Pakenham met Mosley at a dinner party at the Astors’ house, Cliveden, soon afterwards. ‘It was a Conservative household but they entertained politicians of all persuasions there,’ he said. ‘I sat next to Tom [Mosley] and he looked at me with that odd look with which he seemed to transfix women . . . he had very dark, mesmeric eyes. Anyway, he said to me, “After Peel comes Disraeli. After Baldwin and MacDonald comes . . .?” And he left the question hanging in the air. “Who comes next?” I asked him. “Comes someone very different,” he growled.’52
At this point Mosley had reached the pinnacle of his career in conventional British politics. ‘He had become a major political personality in his own right,’ his biography stated, ‘with a wide, and almost unique, range of support and goodwill across the political spectrum.’ Churchill himself proposed Mosley for membership to the Other Club, which Churchill had founded with F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, in 1911, as a dining club for men prominent in political life. Shortly after Mosley’s resignation from the Labour Party, the government fell, caught by the effects of the world depression. Mosley could easily have gone back to the Conservative Party and they would have welcomed him, but he could see no radical thinking there, and a radical solution was – he insisted – the only way to deal with the worsening economic situation.53
Instead, he charted a courageous course. Prompted by George Bernard Shaw, and with the financial backing of Sir William Morris (later Lord Nuffield), who donated fifty thousand pounds, he formed his own party, which he called, rather unimaginatively, the New Party, and campaigned in the 1931 election. The result was a Tory landslide. Not one New Party candidate was elected and Mosley lost his own parliamentary seat. The handful of notables who had supported him, such as Oliver Baldwin, Harold Nicholson, John Strachey and Alan Young, quickly faded away, but Mosley was far from defeated. Over the next twelve months the New Party evolved into the British Union of Fascists (BUF), which was officially launched on 1 October 1932. It proposed a totalitarian concept of government, uniforms for its active members, and support of European Fascist parties, although Mosley was nothing if not strongly nationalistic.
There is an informed and objective portrait of Mosley during this period. At the request of a favourite aunt, James Lees-Milne spent a fortnight during the election canvassing and performing menial tasks for Oswald Mosley’s party. What he saw of Mosley, from his subordinate position, made Lees-Milne uneasy: ‘He was in those days a man of overweening egotism. He did not know the meaning of humility. He brooked no argument, would accept no advice. He was overbearing and over-confident. He had in him the stuff of which zealots are made. His eyes flashed fire, dilated and contracted like a mesmerist’s. His voice rose and fell in hypnotic cadences. He was madly in love with his own words,’ Lees-Milne concluded, after noting ‘. . . the posturing, the grimacing, the switching on and off of those gleaming teeth and the overall swashbuckling’. This was written many years later when Mosley was in a political wilderness, and Lees-Milne added, ‘I believe Mosley is no longer like this. He has acquired tolerance and wisdom which, had he only cultivated them forty years ago, might have made him into a great moral leader.’54 A number of people made similar observations to me while I was researching this book.
Mosley continued to campaign with his ideas at public meetings and paid ministerial-style visits to Mussolini. Unlike the two main parties, the BUF had no major newspaper as a platform, although initially Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail gave Mosley some limited support. His meetings were often rowdy, indeed he encouraged hecklers for he was so confident and clever that he found it easy to turn interruptions to his advantage. The Daily Worker printed constant encouragement to its readers to break up Mosley’s meetings, and as matters began to get out of hand, he appointed ‘bouncers’ from within his ranks of supporters. They rapidly evolved into silent and sinister-looking bullyboys, presenting BUF meetings in a light guaranteed to be unappealing to the average British voter. It is surprising that Mosley, with his political acumen, did not grasp that this was a major error of judgement.
From the start, once he struck out on his own, Mosley promoted Fascism as the answer to the global collapse of the economic order. Capitalism, he argued, had shown that it could not resolve the current problems of poverty and mass unemployment, while Bolshevism was to be avoided at all costs. Some of the horrors of the Bolshevik administration were known, though not by any means the true extent, and there was an undercurrent of fear among the upper classes and British middle-class Conservatives that the proletariat masses might seize power and ‘ruin’ the country. If one was to be radical in that period there were only two directions in which to travel, far right or far left: Fascism or Communism. It is important to recall that at that time Fascism, as a political model, was unmarred by the horrors we now associate with Nazism. Indeed, there was practical contemporary evidence in Europe that right-wing radicalism worked well, and did not necessarily lead to abuse of power.
Mussolini, whom Mosley admired, claimed that Fascism was the only alternative to Communism and, unlike the Bolsheviks, he did not seek to change the monarchy or the Church or confiscate private property. He seemed to offer action without revolution, and Mosley needed to point no further than Italy’s economic resurgence during the late twenties under Mussolini. In addition there were the exciting ideas of Adolf Hitler, the leading National Socialist in Germany, tipped as the next chancellor. What he had done in Germany was apparently a miracle: he had taken a nation with five million unemployed and put men to work building roads and factories. To the British voter Mosley might have had extreme ideas, but he was then untouched by the bogeyman image that history has since applied.
In Mosley’s book The Greater Britain, upon which he was working when he and Diana met and which he published a few months later through the BUF press, he unashamedly advocated totalitarian government: freedom for the individual but within complete state control; a democratically elected government headed by an authoritarian leader, who, he insisted, could not be described as a dictator as long as an elected parliament retained the power to dismiss the government. Unlike Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which Jews are specifically mentioned as the enemy of the people, Mosley’s book made no reference to Jews but – paradoxically one might think upon the most cursory examination of his own lifestyle – he regarded decadence as the real adversary. His vision included a nation of citizens living ‘like athletes’, working wholeheartedly towards the common goal of a nation made great again, ‘shrinking from no effort and from no sacrifice to secure that mighty end’. The political commentator Beatrice Webb’s reaction was that he was merely imitating Hitler, whose policies were degraded because they followed primitive values ‘of blood lust, racial superstition, [and] blind obedience. As for Mosley,’ she wrote, ‘ he has not even Hitler’s respectable personal character nor Mussolini’s distinction . . . he [is] dissolute and unprincipled, without common sense in every sense of the word.’55
At this point Mosley had been married for twelve years to Cynthia ‘Cimmie’ Curzon, second daughter of Lord Curzon, a former viceroy of India and, during the war years and until his death in 1924, one of the outstanding figures in British political history. Mosley first saw Cimmie on Armistice Night in 1918 when, swathed in the Union Flag, the sweet-faced twenty-year-old had climbed on to one of the lions in Trafalgar Square to lead a rousing chorus of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. A year later they were formally introduced. Curzon was then Foreign Secretary, and though the wildly ambitious Mosley clearly fell in love with the personable and intelligent young woman, her father’s position, and her own personal wealth (through trusts settled on her by her millionaire American grandfather),56 undoubtedly affected his decision to marry her.
After a fashion the marriage worked well. Soon after their marriage, Cimmie, no slight politician herself, was elected Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent. When she was not pursuing her own career she was Mosley’s staunch supporter and campaigned strongly for him. They were an unlikely pair to represent socialism: members of the élite upper class, with a serious side to their lives but living an unashamedly luxurious and highly privileged lifestyle. Mosley made no secret of his ‘almost-unlimited appetite for fun’, and the single significant problem in the marriage was his sexual incontinence. Even prior to marrying Cimmie, he had a reputation as a womanizer, and his marriage vows did not change what was a virtual obsession. Cimmie soon learned about his serial affairs, and her misery was increased by his expectation that she accept them. As time went on she tried hard to ‘look the other way’, sometimes even bringing herself to tease him about it in her letters to him. The unwritten rules of upper-class society accepted that liaisons outside marriage were inevitable and, though regrettable, were allowable provided they were conducted with discretion. Divorce, of course, was unthinkable and amounted to social suicide.
Mosley was happy to abide by the rules and was usually reasonably discreet. His infidelities were trivial, he insisted to Cimmie, and would never affect the deep and meaningful love he felt for her. Their son Nicholas wrote that when his father met Diana he continued to love Cimmie deeply, though probably he had ceased to find her sexually attractive.57 Mosley’s London flat in Ebury Street, ostensibly necessary for his work, was by unspoken agreement off-limits to his wife. There seems to be a general belief that it consisted of a single palatial room with a large bed on a raised dais, and that it was clearly unsuitable as a place to entertain political contacts. However, Diana remembers that ‘The bed was upstairs and invisible from the big room, which had a sofa and chairs, and was very suitable for serious politicians to visit.’58
In that spring of 1932, when Mosley and Diana were falling in love, Cimmie had recently given birth, by Caesarean section, to her third child. She had not been in full health for over a year, suffering from a mild kidney infection after a fall but complaining over a prolonged period of backache, headaches, weight gain and a general malaise. Today such symptoms in an intelligent and apparently healthy young woman who appeared to have the world at her feet would immediately invite suspicion of an unacceptable level of stress.
In July 1932, a month after the birthday party at Cheyne Walk, Mosley attended a ball at Biddesden held by Diana to celebrate the end of Unity and Rudbin’s first season. There Unity met Mosley for the first time, and she, too, fell under his mesmeric influence, though for her it was an ideological surrender. He became her ideal of a political leader – indeed she referred to him thereafter as ‘The Leader’ – and her allegiance to Fascism became as deep, fulfilling and enduring as was Diana’s emotional attachment to Mosley.
Diana and Bryan had arranged to spend the hot summer months touring southern Europe, culminating in Venice. The Mosleys made similar plans, travelling separately so that Cimmie could make the journey in comfort by train. Diana and Mosley arranged to meet, apparently accidentally, at Arles or Avignon but the plan went awry when Diana became ill at Avignon with diphtheria. She and Mosley were writing to each other virtually daily, and fearful that his letters, addressed to await her arrival at various points on her itinerary, might be innocently intercepted and opened by Bryan during her enforced isolation, Diana had to take her friend Barbara Hutchinson, at whose house she and Mosley had first met, into her confidence to avert discovery.59
Within weeks Mosley and Cimmie, Bryan and Diana were all together holidaying on Venice’s Lido as part of a British contingent that included Tom Mitford, Randolph Churchill, Bob Boothby, Emerald Cunard and – the love of her life – Sir Thomas Beecham, Edward James and his wife Ottilie (the Viennese dancer Tilly Losch, with whom Tom was still half in love despite her marriage), and Doris Castlerosse, who was not only one of Diana’s closest friends at the time but also a girlfriend of Tom before her marriage to Viscount Castlerosse. In telling Barbara Hutchinson about Mosley, Diana had opened Pandora’s box, and the mere fact of being away from England in a holiday environment perhaps led to a lack of normal reserves. The lovers lost all sense of discretion and were always at each other’s side laughing into each other’s eyes. It was patently obvious to everyone, especially Cimmie and Bryan, that Mosley and Diana were seriously involved with each other. They disappeared for hours at a time, and everyone knew that they were together somewhere; Mosley openly borrowed a room from Bob Boothby on one occasion. The discomfited Bryan and Cimmie could only hope that at the end of the holiday the affair would have run its course. Cimmie cried a good deal of the time.
But back in England matters merely candesced. At a fête champêtre at Biddesden in September, Diana and Mosley danced together the entire evening. They made a striking couple, he with his black eyes, black hair and black moustache, dressed in stark black, she with her blond hair and fair skin in white. They had eyes only for each other and hardly even spoke to anyone else, although at one point she had a short conversation with Henry Lamb, the artist, who was working on a portrait of her and was consequently spending a lot of time at Biddesden. She noticed him frowning in Mosley’s direction, and said to him, ‘You’re thinking what a frightful bounder he is . . .’60 Cimmie wrote letters full of hurt to Mosley in London, agonizing openly at the knowledge that he entertained Diana at his Ebury Street flat: ‘Bloody damnable, cursed Ebury – how often does she come there?’ she asked bitterly. She knew that he lied to her when he stayed away from home, she wrote, and that when he was being sweetest to her he was really ‘trying to get away with something’.61 Mosley was experienced at dalliance and could handle this. He wrote loving replies, ridiculing her fears, full of ‘lovey-dovey, baby-talk’, using their pet names for each other, dismissing Diana and other liaisons as part of his ‘frolicsome little ways’ and declaring continued undying devotion to Cimmie, insisting that she was ‘the one’ for him. Cimmie wanted, needed, to believe him and so the game went on.
It was far more difficult for Diana to live with the deception as she was, and is, congenitally unable to lie.62 Furthermore she had time in which to think about it all, while Mosley was always frenetically busy, his mind and his life filled with matters other than their affair. The Greater Britain, which defined his policies, and acted as a manifesto for his party, sold rapidly and went into three editions. He was a member of the British fencing team that year, which involved not only the dedicated training demanded of any international athlete, but bouts of epée around the country. He represented Great Britain several times up to 1937, even though surgery after his flying accident had left him with one leg several inches shorter than the other, and he had to wear special shoes to counteract this disability.63 But, more importantly, Mosley had worked that year to form the BUF, which demanded the majority of his time and attention for many months. There was always an aura of excited energy about Mosley that transmitted itself to those with whom he came into contact, and it is difficult to avoid the analogy that Diana was like a moth drawn to a flame. ‘The fact that Mosley was so busy in a variety of ways,’ Diana wrote, ‘was one of his great attractions for me. I wanted more freedom than Bryan was prepared to give me.’64
The opening rally of the BUF was held on 15 October in Trafalgar Square, and as usual the devoted Cimmie was there to support and help Mosley win the popular vote, even though she was personally undecided about Fascism. A week or so later there was a well-attended meeting in a hall in Farringdon Street. In Italy and Germany Fascist meetings were quiet, respectful and nationalistic. In England every shade of political opinion wanted its say and Mosley’s meetings were characterized by noisy barrages. In fielding questions from a small group of hecklers in the gallery Mosley referred to them facetiously as ‘three warriors of [the] class war, all from Jerusalem’. This was the first time he had made any public reference to Jews and though it would not then have been considered universally the racist remark it would be today it was a major error and enabled his opponents to charge him with anti-Semitism. Another mistake, with hindsight, was his decision to uniform active members of the BUF in black shirts designed on the same clean, classic lines as Mosley’s fencing jacket; within weeks of their introduction the shirts had become a symbol, were slashed with razors and torn off the backs of wearers. Somehow Mosley did not recognize that his methods, and his rousing speeches, attracted to his standard every working-class tough spoiling for a fight, the 1930s equivalent of skinheads and soccer hooligans.
After the Farringdon Street function Mosley went to Rome to see Mussolini, ostensibly to attend the tenth anniversary celebration of the dictator’s accession as leader of the Italian Fascist Party, but more importantly to try to persuade him to back the BUF with financial support. But before he left he visited Diana at Biddesden to discuss their relationship. She had already decided that she had to leave Bryan, even though Mosley made it clear that he could not leave Cimmie for her. She knew that divorce would mean social ostracism, and that was bad enough, but she was proposing not simply to divorce a thoroughly nice and popular man but to live openly as the paramour of a man in public life who had a wife and three young children. Curious as it may seem now, Mosley’s political stance was not a significant factor in the equation for at that time Fascism was ‘still on the edge of being respectable’.65 She also understood that because of his hectic political schedule, and the time he needed and wanted to devote to his family, Mosley could spend only limited amounts of time with her. She would have to be satisfied with the dregs. Furthermore, all the principals of this drama were young and ostensibly healthy: Diana was looking at, and fully prepared for, a lifetime commitment in which she gave everything for little in return. But the strength of her love for Mosley, and her confidence in his love for her, gave her the courage to decide that, no matter what difficulties would result, it was what she wanted. Mosley accepted her decision.
While he was away Diana told a devastated Bryan that she was leaving him, though there seems to have been some sort of agreement that she would postpone it until after Christmas – probably for the sake of the children. Perhaps Bryan hoped that given time he could persuade her to change her mind. But there were frequent quarrels between them over Mosley. Diana was aware that she was behaving badly, but there was no turning back. Eventually she confided in Tom and Nancy, who were shocked at her decision, and deeply concerned for her; ‘Mitty [Tom] and I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon discussing your affairs,’ Nancy wrote on 27 November, ‘and we are having another session in a minute. He is horrified, & says your social position will be nil if you do this. Darling I do hope you are making the right decision. You are SO young to begin getting in wrong with the world . . .’66 Two days later she wrote again:
I feel convinced that you won’t be allowed to take this step, I mean that Muv & Farve & Tom, Randolph, Doris [Castlerosse], Aunt Iris, John [Sutro], Lord Moyne & in fact everybody that you know will band together and somehow stop it . . . Oh dear I believe you have a much worse time in store for you than you imagine. I’m sorry to be so gloomy darling . . . Mitty says £2,000 a year will seem tiny to you & he will urge Farve, as your Trustee, to stand out for more . . . if you want me at Cheyne Walk I’ll come of course. Only I think I can do more good down here.67
A few days before Christmas David and Lord Moyne (Bryan’s father) went together to see Mosley.68 It was a difficult interview for all concerned, but Mosley refused to be lectured or intimidated into giving Diana up, just as she had when her parents and, indeed, all her relatives attempted to pressure her. She listened to all the arguments, persuasions, impatient anger and pleading – she was only twenty-two, she hardly knew her own mind, she was throwing her life away, she was ruining the children’s lives, no one, including the family, would ever speak to her again, she would be an outcast and, even worse, her actions would rebound on the reputations of her sisters – but she had taken it all into account before making her decision. The only disapproval she really minded, she said, was Tom’s, for he sided with his old friend. ‘He was fond of Bryan,’ Diana wrote. ‘He also thought that for a temporary infatuation I was ruining my life and that I should bitterly regret it.’69
At this point, having extracted from Diana her word that she would not invite Mosley to their house, Bryan agreed to go away to Switzerland for three weeks, to give her some time for reflection. He had spent several holidays there with David and enjoyed winter sports, which Diana did not. Their agreement did not, however, prevent Diana attending a New Year’s Eve party at the house in Somerset that Mosley and Cimmie had rented for the holidays. Also present was Cimmie’s younger sister Alexandra (‘Baba’ to her family and soon to be known in the press as ‘Baba Blackshirt’), together with her husband Major ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, equerry to and close friend of the Prince of Wales.
When Bryan returned home to Cheyne Walk in mid-January Diana moved out, leasing a small house at 2 Eaton Square for herself, her two sons and their nanny. The Guinnesses’ marriage was over. In the same month Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.