Highland Fling was not a bestseller but it went into a second impression within weeks of publication, which Nancy found gratifying. She told her friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who designed the cover, that it was selling at the rate of thirty a day, ‘which I’m told is definitely good for a first novel’.1 It earned her ninety pounds, which was soon swallowed up by a trip to the Côte d’Azur, where she stayed with friends. By the following autumn she was stuck at Swinbrook bewailing the fact that she could not afford to be in London because of the cuts in her ‘already non-existent’ allowance.
If anyone flourished among London’s smart set it was Nancy, but at least she was occupied for her few months of enforced imprisonment in the country as 1932 drew to a close. She hunted twice a week with the Heythrop, and began work on a new book. Decca recalls her sitting by the drawing-room fire giggling helplessly as her pen flew across the lines of a child’s school exercise book while she wrote Christmas Pudding. She maintained the same bright style used in Highland Fling, drawing on friends and relations for characters, and places she knew well as settings. ‘It is all about Hamish at Eton,’ she reported to Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘Betjeman is co-hero.’2 Sometimes she read extracts out loud. ‘You can’t publish that under your own name,’ Sydney said, aghast at Nancy’s thinly veiled caricatures.3
But while the literary side of her life was progressing reasonably well Nancy’s informal engagement to Hamish Erskine had not prospered. Indeed, she appeared to be the only person who ever thought it might. She was obsessed with him and her letters to friends are peppered with comments about him that are invariably witty but often leave the impression of hurt. Both sets of parents were implacably opposed to the match and Hamish dithered about announcing an engagement, though at one point he gave Nancy a ring ‘from Cartier’. He was sent down from Oxford because of his dissolute lifestyle there, shortly afterwards. Without allowing him to go to London where Nancy was staying with friends, his parents shipped him off to America where they had lined up a job for him.
The news of his departure came as a body blow to Nancy and she wrote to him, breaking off their informal engagement. Though she put on a brave face for most of her friends (‘I don’t mind at all,’ she wrote to several), she confided in Mark Ogilvie-Grant that she had made a half-hearted attempt at suicide by switching on the gas fire in her room without lighting it. ‘It is a lovely sensation,’ she wrote, ‘just like taking anaesthetic . . .’ Fortunately she remembered in time that her hostess, who was pregnant, might find her body and miscarry: ‘so I got back to bed and was sick . . . I am really very unhappy because there is no one to tell the funny things that happen to one & that is half the fun in life don’t you agree? . . . How can I possibly write a funny book in the next 6 months, which my publisher says I must do. How can I when I’ve practically got a pain from being miserable and cry in buses quite continually?’4
A new admirer soon appeared on the scene, Guards officer Sir Hugh Smiley, who was far closer to David’s idea of ‘the right sort’. He proposed and Nancy replied that she couldn’t even think about it until her book was finished. When he persisted she accepted, then changed her mind. At home she quarrelled with Sydney and, in a fit of misery, she rounded up Decca and the two went on a long damp country walk during which Nancy confided her woes. ‘I can almost hear the squelch of gumboots,’ Decca recalled forty years later, when she reminded Nancy of the occasion. ‘The rain seemed like one’s inner tears of bitterness because of boredom, and the inner futility of that life. You told me how Muv had given you a terrific dressing down for not being married, having turned down yet another proposal of marriage, & that you would be an old maid if you pursued this hopeless course . . .’5 Nancy replied, ‘I was telling lies if I said Muv wanted to marry me off . . . I think I was probably in a blind temper about something else and talked wildly. One of the reasons for my respect is that she never did urge marriage without inclination and I hardly think she knew who was rich and who was not. I would have liked to marry Robert Byron but he was a total pederast . . .’6
A few weeks later Hamish returned from America, drinking heavily because, he said, his bulwarks (Nancy) had gone. Sir Hugh proposed twice more before Nancy gave him a firm refusal at the Café de Paris where he was wooing her with orchids while Hamish sat giggling at the next table. After that Sir Hugh turned cool and a few months later married another Nancy, Cecil Beaton’s sister. The unsatisfactory relationship with Hamish, but not the engagement, was back on, and life for Nancy went on much as before with parties, nightclubs, lunches at the Ritz and dinners at the Café Royal. She had earned several hundred pounds from her books and articles by then: ‘I’m just so rich I go 1st Class everywhere and take taxis,’ she enthused, boasting that she had even refused an offer of ten pounds a week to write gossip for the Tatler. ‘I’m having a perfectly divine time, it is certainly more fun not being engaged.’7 She did not mention to anyone how ‘deeply distressed’ she had been at a conversation during lunch with Cynthia Gladwyn when she was told what she had apparently never realized: that Hamish was homosexual.8
Hamish knew that marriage to Nancy would never work because of his sexual predilections, and he confided this to several friends, but his emotional attachment to her was important to him so he allowed things to drift. He was not sexually promiscuous, in fact ‘not very sexy’,9 but eventually he realized he must make it clear to her, finally, that while he valued their friendship it could never progress further. He did this by inventing an engagement to another girl, Kathleen ‘Kit’ Dunn, sister of Philip, who was engaged to Hamish’s sister, Mary. Kit was apparently a wild and eccentric character, whom Hamish and Nancy had chuckled over together, but presumably she was prepared to play along with the charade.
Nancy had spent a good deal of the spring of 1933 staying at Diana’s house in Eaton Square in open defiance of David and Sydney’s decree that ‘the Eatonry’, as the Mitford children referred to the house, was out of bounds. And Nancy was not alone in defying David. On 14 June, the day before the Guinness divorce proceedings were to be heard, there was a gathering of the elder sisters. Pam was there, and Unity, who had just finished a term at art school, called in too to offer sisterly support.10 When the butler announced that Hamish was on the telephone and wished to speak to Nancy, she left the room and went to the phone. She was completely unprepared for what Hamish was about to tell her and she returned, minutes later, white-faced with distress and told them about his engagement.
Hamish called round later that day and there was ‘a dreadful scene’ for which Nancy apologized in a letter:
But darling you come and tell me you are going to share your life with Kit Dunn. You whom I have always thought so sensible & so idealistic about marriage, you who will love your own little babies so very, very much, it is a hard thing for me to bear that you should prefer her to me. You see, I knew you weren’t in love with me, but you are in love so often and for such short spaces of time, I thought in your soul you loved me & that in the end we should have children & look back on life together when we are old . . .11
Three weeks later Nancy announced her engagement to Peter Rodd, a friend of her and Hamish. At Oxford his friends had made up a ditty about him:
Mr Peter Rodd
Is extraordinarily like God
He has the same indefinable air
Of Savoir Faire
According to Diana, Peter proposed only a week after Nancy and Hamish broke up. He had taken Nancy to a party and had had – as usual – a good deal to drink. Nancy was the third girl to whom he had proposed that week. In a letter dated 31 July he hinted to her that he had only intended the proposal as a joke,12 but Nancy was not in a mood for jokes. She had spent almost five years in an unsatisfactory relationship and now, at nearly thirty, she felt perilously close to becoming the old maid of Sydney’s prediction. She felt hurt and humiliated at Hamish’s treachery, she wanted a home, children and some sort of financial stability, and perhaps she wanted to prove to Hamish that she was desirable to others if not to him. She would have done better with the besotted Guards officer, no matter how dull she thought him, for in the event Peter Rodd, or ‘Prod’, as he quickly became known to the Mitfords, proved a poor provider in all departments.
His reputation at the time was poor anyway. At Oxford he regarded college rules as being for everyone but himself, and he was eventually sacked from Balliol for entertaining women in his rooms after hours. While travelling in Brazil he had worked at a succession of jobs, in banking and journalism, found for him by his father, the multi-talented diplomat Baron Rennell. An arrogant and pedantic know-it-all, Prod had either been dismissed or resigned in the nick of time from all of them. He ended up destitute, and under arrest, and had to be bailed out by his unfortunate father. On the credit side he could be amusing, was undeniably clever, and certainly good-looking. According to one biographer, he preferred to admire his talents as works of art, rather than use them, and he spent his life avoiding making achievements that were well within his grasp. Perhaps his character was best captured by Evelyn Waugh who used him as the model for his comic fictional hero Basil Seal.13
Prod was willing to go through with his commitment to Nancy, but for her it was a classic rebound situation: she could not perceive his faults through her rose-tinted delight. David, who lunched his prospective son-in-law at Rutland Gate while the requisite paternal permission was sought, announced that ‘the fella talks like a ferret with his mouth sewn up’ but he agreed to the marriage anyway. By now even he had begun to grasp that, as far as his elder daughters were concerned, his edicts had little effect.
Prod spent a week at Swinbrook, talking until the family reeled with boredom. No matter what subject was brought up, it seemed he was the world expert. ‘I know, I know,’ he would interrupt. ‘I know, I was an engineer and I . . .’ or ‘I know, I know, I am a farmer . . .’ The sisters swore he once said, ‘I know, I know, I am the Pope . . .’ One of his lectures, delivered to the haplessly captive Decca and Debo, was a detailed account of the tollgate system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their dazed reaction can be imagined, and from then they referred to him as ‘the old Toll-Gater’,14 which Nancy inevitably converted into a bon mot: ‘For whom the Gate Tolls . . .’
Almost overnight the tone of Nancy’s letters changed from misery to sheer delight as she began the customary visits to introduce herself to members of her fiancé’s family. ‘Well, the happiness. Oh goodness gracious I am happy. You must get married darling,’ she advised Mark Ogilvie-Grant, writing from Highcliffe Castle, Hampshire, which was the home of one of Peter’s aunts.15 ‘Everybody should this minute if they want a receipt for absolute bliss . . . And remember true love can’t be bought. If I really thought it could I’d willingly send you £3 tomorrow.’16 Prod, too, wrote letters expressing his happiness, to Nancy herself, and to Hamish, apologizing for taking Nancy away from him. It was a polite fiction between friends. ‘I know it is hell for you and I wish it wasn’t [but] I am so much in love with her that I can understand how you feel.’17
Pre-wedding activity now absorbed the Mitford household for the marriage, originally planned for October but eventually held on 4 December at St John’s Church in Smith Square, with Diana’s two small sons as pages.
While Nancy had been switching fiancés, and the scandal of the Guinness divorce was on everyone’s lips, tragedy had befallen the house of Mosley. In April 1933 Mosley and Cimmie had gone to Rome where he played a major role in a huge rally during which the Italian Fascist Party presented him with a black banner containing the Union Flag and Fascist symbols as the BUF standard. The couple returned at the end of April and Mosley immediately resumed his visits to Diana. Absolute discretion was essential. Bryan had ‘behaved like a gentleman’ and offered fake evidence of infidelity so that Diana would not have to appear in court, but with the proceedings in the offing it was imperative that the department of the King’s Proctor was given no evidence to indicate ‘collusion’. ‘The King’s Proctor haunted us all,’ Diana wrote. If there was any suspicion that the divorce was ‘arranged’ the courts were obliged to deny the petition; and even in the year after a divorce was granted, evidence of an affair by the petitioner could make the divorce invalid. Under cover of darkness Mosley could walk the short distance between his Ebury Street flat and Diana’s house in Eaton Square in about five minutes. When he tapped on her windows with the walking-stick he had carried since the flying accident in 1918, she would be waiting to let him in.
During the first weekend in May Mosley went to his country property, Savehay Farm in Denham, Buckinghamshire, where he had arranged to spend the weekend with Cimmie. On the Saturday night they had a terrific row about Diana, and Mosley slammed out of the house. Cimmie spent the night crying, which was not unusual for her at that time. The following morning, she wrote to Mosley, apologizing for behaving unreasonably to him, and explaining that she had been feeling particularly unwell ‘with sickness, and crashing back and tummy pain’.18 Later that day, within a few days of the Mosleys’ thirteenth wedding anniversary, Cimmie was rushed into hospital with a perforated appendix. She was operated on and Mosley dashed to her side. This did not, however, prevent him going straight from the clinic to the Eatonry that night. Appendicitis was not in itself considered dangerous, but in the days before antibiotics there was always a risk of infection, and within three days it was clear that Cimmie was critically ill with peritonitis. The doctors felt that if she fought hard she might win through, but on 15 May she died at the age of thirty-three, without, her surgeon announced, ‘both mentally or physically ever lifting a finger to live’.19
It was a devastating blow to all concerned, and Mosley, who had unquestionably loved his wife, according to his lights, spent ‘hours and hours’ sitting by her flower-bedecked coffin. When it was removed to the chapel at Cliveden, home of Nancy Astor, who had befriended the young Cimmie (whose own mother had died when she was eight),20 Mosley spent hours pacing endlessly about at their home in Denham, in the garden Cimmie had created. Cimmie’s two sisters were so concerned about his demeanour that they had his revolver removed from his bedroom and hidden from him. They knew that when Mosley had walked out after the row on that last Saturday night before Cimmie was taken ill he had gone straight to Diana Guinness. ‘God, what a terrible doom for Tom [Mosley]!’ Cimmie’s elder sister, Irene Ravensdale, wrote in her diary. ‘And to think that Cim has gone and that Guinness is free and alive . . . where is any balance of justice!’21 Upon one matter, Mosley was absolutely insistent: his three children must have no further changes in their lives. They must continue to live at Savehay, the old house at Denham that Cimmie had decorated to her taste, surrounded by the same nursery staff, himself, their grandmother and aunts. It was the best he could do to give them a sense of security.22
For Diana, of course, it seemed like absolute disaster. She had not disliked Cimmie, and had certainly not wished her ill. She knew that Mosley had had affairs with at least a dozen women before her, and she had supposed that Cimmie accepted his behaviour. Now, with the papers full of eulogies for Cimmie, opinion hardened against Diana. Plenty of people gossiped that Cimmie had died of a broken heart, rather than infection. From being the darling of Society a year earlier Diana became a social pariah, as her parents had foretold.
She saw Mosley only for very short periods. Several times a week he would drive to London in the early evening from Denham and be back there by 1 a.m. ‘Who could it be but Diana Guinness?’ Irene Ravensdale wrote in her diary. ‘Baba and I were sick with terror.’23 The sisters could see that Mosley was genuinely ill with grief, that he was doing his best to be a good father to the children and was always sweet with them. But, equally, they thought it hurtful to Cimmie’s memory that Mosley should wish to go on seeing Diana at such a time. How could they know, since he did not tell them, that his relationship with her (they referred to Diana as ‘the horror’ between themselves) was any different from those he had shared with other women in the past? They bearded him about it and he told them frankly that he felt he had an obligation to Diana and he could not ‘shirk’ it. They saw danger signals, too, in that Unity had recently joined the BUF and was keen to become a serious activist. They suspected that in some way Unity was spying on Mosley on Diana’s behalf. With the summer just beginning it was decided between them all that Irene would take the two elder children on holiday, the baby, only a year old, would go with Nanny to the Isle of Wight, and Baba, having cleared it with her husband ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, would accompany Mosley on a motoring trip in France.
One evening Mosley visited Diana at her request. Afterwards, according to Irene Ravensdale’s diaries, he told his sisters-in-law that he had asked Diana, referring to the divorce proceedings, ‘Have you jumped your little hurdle yet?’ She had been wounded that he should take so lightly the enormous sacrifice she had made, crying, ‘It’s my whole life!’24 There was a terrible row, he reported, and he left after telling her that he was going on holiday to France with Baba. Diana refutes this. ‘He did not say, “Have you jumped your hurdle?” Nor did I say, “It’s my whole life.” We always understood each other perfectly.’25 It appears, then, that either Mosley or Irene Ravensdale invented the incident. Nevertheless, Diana cannot have been happy to hear that Mosley was going on an extended holiday with Baba and it is probable that hot words were exchanged.
All this had occurred between Cimmie’s death and the gathering of the elder Mitford sisters at Diana’s house a month later, on 14 June, on the eve of the divorce hearing, when Hamish told Nancy of his fake engagement. If ever Diana had been in need of sisterly support it was then. She was just twenty-two with two small children. At a time when she might have reasonably expected strong support from the man for whom she had broken up her marriage, he was involved with his own crisis and was available only occasionally. Worse, she had just learned that he was going on holiday with another woman. Although she is too loyal to Mosley to have ever said so, she must have felt utterly alone and defenceless. One or two friends, having overcome their initial disapproval, had begun to invite her to dinner parties, and mutual friends told Cimmie’s sisters that Diana was looking grim, with her face ‘dead-white’.26
Perhaps Diana already suspected that Mosley’s interest in Baba was more than platonic or strictly familial for, astonishingly, Mosley began a long-standing affair with her that summer. It was an open secret within the family: Irene Ravensdale, who had enjoyed a brief, unimportant romp with Mosley before his marriage to her sister, wrote, ‘I pray this obsession with her will utterly oust Diana Guinness.’27 With hindsight Diana says she did not mind about Mosley’s affair with Baba, because ‘I was somehow always confident that he would come back to me’, though she admits to periods of jealousy.28 At the time, however, she was more deeply in love with Mosley than ever, and though she and Mosley quickly patched up their quarrel, it must have been a difficult period for her. One surprising thing happened: through Unity Diana was advised that she might visit Swinbrook for the weekend of 6 June. She and Unity spent most of the time sitting in the garden for David refused to speak to her, but it was ‘the thin end of the wedge’ in his parlance.
In the following week Unity was admitted to the BUF as a member, and she was thrilled to receive, on that eventful day of 14 June from the hands of ‘the Leader’ himself, a BUF coat badge, which Mosley removed from his own lapel. Her membership was known to her siblings and to others outside the family, but was kept secret from David and Sydney.
What of Decca and Debo during this turbulent period? They were living quietly at Swinbrook doing much the same things that the four elder sisters had done, with perhaps a little more freedom, although never enough for Decca. Still, the rebellious unhappiness that she details in her memoir is nowhere in evidence in her contemporary correspondence. Nor did her friends regard her as unhappy. One, who met her for the first time in 1932, was fourteen, about a year older than Decca, when he was taken to Swinbrook by his mother so that she could discuss Women’s Institute matters with Sydney.
I sat quietly and covertly looked about me while the ladies talked [he recalled]. Then the door opened and with what seemed a single swift movement Jessica was in the room, closing the door behind her, standing straight, feet together, smiling. She was wearing a print frock and a black patent leather belt tight to the waist. Her brown hair was short and thick. Her eyes full of amusement, and also friendliness, as they took me in. She shook hands, and sat down, feet together, back straight, the very picture of une jeune fille parfaitement bien élevée, but with such an expression of intelligence and humour as I had rarely seen in a girl her age . . . Decca at that time would have been thought of as a child by most elders . . . nevertheless there was nothing childish about her, in any sense implying weakness or silliness or inability to hold her own in her own world. That first summer afternoon I swiftly came to know that my first impression of originality had been quite correct; here was a spirit both lively and adventurous, a keen mind fed by a highly varied diet of reading, a sparkling sense of humour and all allied to a delicious appearance . . .29
If Decca had been as deeply unhappy as she claims, it was never obvious to her new friend. It seems more likely that the discontent with her life at home was something that flowered in the years that followed and was so traumatic that it coloured all her early memories.
As Mosley was touring in France with Baba, Diana decided to go to Europe that summer on holiday too. Unity asked if she could go with her, rather hoping, she confessed later, that Diana would choose to go to Italy or France. But Diana chose Bavaria, partly because Tom was there and spoke so glowingly about it, and partly because she wanted to find out more about the regime, especially about the new German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, in whose activities the newspapers took such an interest.
In the immediate aftermath of Hitler coming to power there were outbreaks of violence against anyone who had opposed his election, or who ‘did not fit’ an accepted profile. Those rounded up were imprisoned in hastily erected concentration camps such as Dachau outside Munich. Then the camps resembled conventional prisons rather than the places of systematic murder they became less than a decade later. The improvements in the German economy were the envy of other European governments and most people accepted the unpleasantness – extreme as it was – as an almost inevitable cost of a new, radical regime.
Although Germany had not been her first choice, Unity was immediately mad keen on Diana’s proposal. She was just nineteen and with her increasing interest in the BUF she wanted to see for herself how the system worked. Unity was not yet wholly committed to Fascism – indeed, John Betjeman, who knew her reasonably well, thought she was more interested in film stars and the cinema. But that trip to Germany, Diana wrote in her autobiography, unquestionably ‘changed Unity’s life’.30 The streak of obsessive behaviour in Unity’s character, which might have made her ultra-religious had she leaned towards the Church, fastened instead on Nazism.
Earlier in the year, before Cimmie’s death and her divorce, Diana had met a German called Putzi Hanfstaengl at the house of one of Bryan’s relations. Hanfstaengl was the Harvard-educated son of a rich Munich family of art dealers, and an old friend of Hitler. When the National Socialist putsch of 1923 failed, Hitler was wounded and several of his comrades-in-arms were killed. Hanfstaengl took Hitler into his home and hid him for a while, and after Hitler’s arrest he continued to support him throughout the two years of imprisonment that followed, during which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. In the period of political wilderness after Hitler’s release, Hanfstaengl remained loyal to his friend, and when things improved he obtained hard currency from the United States (his family had a gallery in New York) to help fund Hitler’s return to politics. His donation of a thousand US dollars during the financial chaos of Germany’s years of hyperinflation was a lifesaver to Hitler, so it is not surprising that when the Nazis came to power Hanfstaengl was rewarded with a senior appointment as Hitler’s public relations adviser, and he made it clear that he worshipped the Führer.
At the party where Diana first met him, Hanfstaengl was annoyed. All one read about Germany in the English newspapers, he complained, was of the regime’s attitude towards the Jews. ‘People here have no idea of what the Jewish problem has been since the war,’ he told his listeners hotly. ‘Why not think of the ninety-nine per cent of the population, of the six million unemployed? Hitler will build a great and prosperous Germany for the Germans. If the Jews don’t like it they can get out.’31 Recalling this meeting, Diana was certain that if she called on Hanfstaengl in Munich, he would introduce them to Hitler, but at first the trip consisted of sightseeing with some of Tom’s friends. Eventually, however, Diana made contact with Hanfstaengl.
He was hospitable, providing the two young women unexpectedly with tickets to privileged seats for the first Parteitag in Nuremberg, and finding them scarcely obtainable accommodation near by. The rally, which began on 31 August and lasted four days, had a major effect on both young women. The carnival atmosphere was vibrant with enthusiasm as crowds milled about and revelled to the sounds of oompah-bands playing old favourites along with regular insertions of the popular ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ that had become the Nazi anthem. Some four hundred thousand people attended the event. ‘The old town was a fantastic sight,’ Diana wrote. ‘Hundreds of thousands of men in party uniforms thronged the streets and there were flags in all the windows . . . the gigantic parades went without a hitch. A feeling of excited triumph was in the air, and when Hitler appeared an almost electric shock passed through the multitude.’ It was, she decided, ‘a demonstration of hope in a nation that had known collective despair’.32
It was difficult for those present not to be emotionally affected and, indeed, Diana and Unity were not the only visitors impressed by the showmanship of Hitler’s party. Many young Englishmen who visited Germany in the first part of that decade were moved to support Hitler’s regime, even though later some came to despise it. In a recent television documentary examining the attraction of Hitler to the youth of Europe at that time, Nigel Nicholson was just one who stated that he was thoroughly hooked: ‘The catchy “Horst Wessel” song, the marching, the torches, the singing and tramping of boots – I was, at that moment, a Hitler youth,’ he said. Michael Burn was another: ‘I wrote home, “I cannot think coherently – it is so wonderful what Hitler has brought this country back to . . .”’ He recalls that he was ‘stunned and excited by the cohesion of Germany after the political disunion in Britain. Then there was the theatre of Nuremberg: ‘great lights in the sky, moving music, the rhetoric, the presentation, timing, performance, soundtrack, exultation and climax. It was almost aimed at the sexual parts of one’s consciousness.’33 Over the years that followed most of these young people recognized the true nature of the Nazi movement and defected from it, becoming leaders in the wartime fight against Hitler, but for the moment all they felt was excitement and admiration. For Diana and Unity the only regret of the holiday was that they did not meet Hitler in person. Although with their blonde, tall, slim appearance they were the physical personification of Arian womanhood, Hanfstaengl told them that he did not dare to introduce them as they wore so much lipstick, which Hitler abhorred. They were used to this; Farve felt much the same way.34
When they returned to England Diana had to face her father’s anger: she was still in semi-disgrace over her divorce, and when Unity gaily told them about the Parteitag David erupted. ‘I suppose you know without being told,’ he wrote to Diana, ‘how absolutely horrified Muv and I were to think of you and Bobo accepting any form of hospitality from people we regard as a murderous gang of pests. That you should associate yourself with such people is a source of utter misery to both of us – but of course, beyond telling you this . . . we can do nothing. What we can do, and what we intend to do, is to try to keep Bobo out of it all.’35
Mosley was still touring France and the children were staying at Biddesden with Bryan, so Diana left almost immediately for Rome where she spent six weeks at the luxurious house overlooking the Forum, owned by her great friend Lord Berners. Gerald Berners, a homosexual, was a quintessential eccentric; had he possessed no talent at all, he was rich enough to indulge himself as a dabbler in the aesthetic disciplines he so enjoyed, but he was also clever and exceptionally well read, an able musician, composer, artist and writer. He had been posted to Rome as a junior diplomat but while Diana was there he seemed to spend more time working on the score for a Diaghilev ballet. Nancy would later use him as the model for her colourful character Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love, a compliment that Berners rather enjoyed. At his country home, Faringdon, he kept a flock of doves, which he dyed in pastel shades so that when they rose into the sky it looked as though someone had flung a handful of confetti over the rooftop, a pretty nonsense amusingly described by Nancy. Berners was one of the few friends who accepted Diana’s decision to divorce Bryan without critical comment, and Diana valued him because he was clever, witty and made her laugh – a quality that was especially welcome at that time – but also because he was her mentor: she once said that her relationship with Berners had been the equivalent of reading arts at university.
A sense of humour is an ethereal quality that is difficult to describe but Diana explained Berners’ wit beautifully. She wrote of how, when they drove back to England together in October, they stopped over in Paris where they met Violet Trefusis, notorious as the lover of Vita Sackville-West. Her mother was Mrs Keppel, the favourite of King Edward VII. Violet and Berners decided to pretend they were engaged and in November this was announced in London gossip columns to the astonishment, presumably, of everyone who knew either of them. Violet phoned him to say she had had dozens of congratulations. Berners was delighted; he had received none, he said. When Mrs Keppel insisted that a denial must be made as the joke had gone far enough, he suggested announcing in The Times: ‘Lord Berners has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man.’36
Unity passed the time at Swinbrook working at her collages and painting, and, unknown to her parents, made regular trips into Oxford where she dropped in at the BUF offices and helped to sell copies of the Blackshirt. By comparison Nancy’s innocent tea parties with undergraduate friends in Oxford cafés, which had provoked David’s fury a decade earlier, seem tame. Sydney saw to it that Unity did the Season again, so that her social life continued as it had during her débutante year. But whenever she was in London during the run-up to Nancy’s wedding, or during secret visits to the Eatonry after Diana’s return, Unity attended BUF rallies or Mosley’s meetings, proudly sporting a black shirt and her unusual badge, which identified her as someone special in the party ranks. At Swinbrook visitors during that period report that hardly had they set foot in the entrance hall before they were besieged by Unity and Decca demanding, ‘Are you a Fascist or a Communist?’ When one young man answered, ‘Neither, I’m a democrat,’ they retorted in unison, ‘How wet!’ and lost interest in him.37
Unity was not alone in attending Mosley’s meetings: the elder sisters all turned up occasionally, out of loyalty to Diana if nothing else, but they were all interested to a greater or lesser degree in politics. In November Nancy wrote to Diana about a meeting in Oxfordshire, within striking distance of Swinbrook, so of course she and Unity found a way of attending. ‘T.P.O.L.’s [the Poor Old Leader’s] meeting was fascinating, but awful for him, as the hall was full of Oxfordshire Conservatives who sat in hostile and phlegmatic silence – you can imagine what they were like. I think he is a wonderful speaker & of course he is better still with a more interesting audience . . .’38 Even Pam attended one or two meetings, but there is no record of her opinions.
Although Diana would never construe it in such a light, her long uncomplaining absence during that summer and autumn brought Mosley to heel. When he became ill that winter with phlebitis, from which he had suffered previously, he was advised to spend some time in a warmer climate. After Nancy’s wedding, following which the newly-weds went to Rome for their honeymoon, Mosley asked Diana to accompany him to Provence where they lived near Grasse in a rented house for a month or so at the beginning of 1934. Despite his illness, they were happy. It was the first time they had been free to be together without attracting disapproving looks or worrying about the King’s Proctor, or lectures from friends and family. Although Diana was now in touch with her parents again, they regarded Mosley as ‘that man’ and it was tacitly understood that he was not to be introduced into the conversation. David even went so far as to write Mosley’s name on a slip of paper and lock it away in a drawer: he believed strongly that this practice would bring an enemy to grief.
In the meantime, Decca finally achieved a taste of the freedom for which she so longed. In the autumn of 1933 Sydney arranged for her and Cousin Idden to spend the customary year abroad – a year in Paris to be ‘finished’ and improve their French before their coming-out year. Sydney took them to France to settle them in but while she was with them the girls’ hearts were in their mouths as they attracted admiring glances from young men, even the odd pinch (and once in the cinema, a groper, but Decca made sure Sydney did not find out for fear she would refuse to leave them). Sydney, more used to English restraint in ogling, was irritated at the attention the girls attracted and with Diana’s experience still fresh in her mind made cross little threats every now and again: ‘If this continues I shall have to take you both home.’ At last, to Decca’s heartfelt relief, she left them and went on a short cruise, before returning home to see Nancy married to Peter Rodd.39
A few weeks later there was some rioting on the streets but it died down quickly, too quickly for Decca who found it rather diverting. Nor was she especially sorry that she missed Nancy’s wedding for there had been a coolness between her and Nancy since the latter had joined with Mrs Hammersley in teasing her about being ‘a ballroom Communist, a cut below a parlour pink’.40 The truth stung, for the closest Decca had been able to get to Communism before her departure for Paris had been on those occasions when she had slipped away from Nanny during a walk in the park. Then she was able to join the groups gathered round the Communist orators at Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner, which inevitably included a stirring rendering of the anthem ‘The Internationale’ and an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with the clenched-fist salute.
In Paris, free of parental control for the first time in her life, Decca had no intention of behaving herself in the way her mother expected – nor, probably, would many teenagers in those circumstances. On the other hand, she was careful in her letters home to be circumspect and she did not repeat Diana’s mistake in keeping an incriminating diary. She told Sydney as little as possible about the riots, but quoted a good deal from the Communist newspaper L’humanité.41 In the evenings, telling Madame, their guardian – who seems not to have cared much what they did – that they were going to the opera, they visited picture-houses, nightclubs and even the Folies Bergères with various boys, and accepted numerous invitations to dinner. Decca ‘fell in love’ with a married man called Émile, who was too passionate for her comfort, but the relationship soon ended with no harm done. Idden fell in love with a poet called Maurice and smuggled him into their room, causing Decca to worry that they might throw her out.42 In the event he was too shy even to kiss Idden so that relationship did not last either. For one date with a much older man Decca wore a tight satin suit, the chief attraction of which was that she knew Sydney would not have approved of it. After dinner, instead of going on to a nightclub as Decca expected, her companion steered her to a bordello. She pretended nervously that this was all quite normal for her, but when he showed her a salon ‘pour les sadistes’ she felt anxious and Nanny’s warnings came back to her. She could almost hear Sydney say, in a dampening manner, ‘Not at all a nice place, Jessica, I shouldn’t think,’ and after a brief struggle with her companion, she made a hasty exit. It was all very daring and even though they were still attending school (the Sorbonne) – which in itself was wonderful – Decca felt very much a woman of the world and even her handwriting, which had formerly been the neat, stylized script of the schoolroom, changed into the hasty scrawl that characterized her letters for the rest of her life.
The two girls went home for Christmas, and during the holidays Unity began a determined campaign to persuade her parents to let her spend her ‘year abroad’ in Germany. All the other sisters had gone to France to polish up their French, which Unity had refused to consider. Her trip with Diana in the previous year, though, had made her want to learn German, she said, as Tom had, and she wanted to go to finishing-school in Munich. Since Sydney had spent some years trying to get Unity interested in anything, one can only sympathize with what she probably regarded as a new and positive attitude in this lovable but difficult daughter. She did some investigation and learned of a Baroness Laroche who had a house at 121 Königinstrasse, which operated as a sort of informal finishing-school where English girls could study German under a governess. Mary St Clair Erskine, sister of Hamish, and other English girls of ‘the right sort’ from families known to Sydney, had stayed with the Baroness. Sydney therefore approved her daughter’s request.
Looking back, it seems that 1933 was a pivotal year for the Mitford family. By the start of 1934 Sydney probably believed that the worst of their problems were now behind them. Although she and David still disapproved of Diana’s affair with Mosley, the initial scandal, which had caused them extreme distress and embarrassment, seemed to have died down. Nancy was married and wrote home of her ecstatic happiness; Decca was successfully established at school in Paris and would come out at the end of the year. Tom, who never gave any trouble, had recently qualified in law; Pam was still working at Biddesden for Bryan. Only Debo, a reasonably contented child apart from an occasional adolescent outburst, was still in the schoolroom at Swinbrook. Miss Hussey had given a term’s notice and Sydney reasoned that it might be easier to send Debo to school for a year rather than recruit a new governess. Even Unity had found an interest.
No one could have foreseen the tragedy that resulted from the Redesdales’ decision to allow Unity to go to Germany.