Decca and Esmond spent their first few weeks in the United States in New York, wallowing in unaccustomed luxury at the Shelton Hotel, which Peter Nevile had recommended to them. At $3.50 a day it was rather more than they could afford but Peter had told them that they should put on a ‘good front’ if they wished to impress the natives. He was right. Within no time at all, the letters that they wrote on Shelton writing-paper introducing themselves (‘My good friend Peter Nevile suggested that I should contact you . . .’) brought results and they were able to move out of the hotel and go visiting real Americans. At one grand house Decca met Katherine – Kay – Graham, daughter of Eugene Meyer, who owned the Washington Post. Kay was Decca’s age, and even then an ardent Democrat and ‘New Dealer’. The two women were destined to be good friends, and both Decca and Esmond liked the Meyers because, although they were rich Republicans, they were also anti-Fascist.
To Esmond’s chagrin the lecture circuit was uninterested in them, and his English style of copywriting failed to impress Madison Avenue advertising agencies. They told him his British experience was a positive handicap, so Decca helped the exchequer by inventing a history in the fashion trade and landing a job in a dress shop. It gave her a real thrill to take home a wage. Her former occupation as a market researcher had brought in occasional sums of money through Esmond’s agency, but this was a real job that she’d found for herself, and she was proud of it. Among the upper classes in England the term ‘shop girl’ was used pejoratively, and Decca was probably the first woman in her family ever to work for a living. To Decca these were plus factors. In the meantime the couple were welcomed open-handedly by New York society for the bubbling enthusiasm they carried around with them: they were lively, good talkers, entertaining company and they loved America. Decca found a second-hand clothes shop where she bought a couple of evening dresses at six dollars each, but it cost more to outfit Esmond: his dinner jacket alone cost them $6.50.1
When they moved out of the Shelton they rented a room in the walk-up apartment of two actors in Greenwich Village. It was, said a visitor, as untidy as a schoolboy’s bedroom but always ‘gloriously happy’. Esmond juggled with apples while Decca cooked supper and chided him for scuffing his shoes. He pretended contempt at being told off, but he was noticeably attentive and would dart across the room to light her cigarette.2 Interviewed by the New York Daily Mirror and Life magazine, Esmond said he was going to become an American citizen as soon as possible, but he was anxious to correct any impression that he had left England to avoid fighting and pointed to his experience in Spain: ‘I wasn’t a Communist, I am not now, and I never will be, but in the beginning Madrid was a symbol to me. If England is drawn into a war now I shall go back and fight – because of all the things that are dear to me and Decca will be drawn in . . . but I have no illusions about England fighting for democracy.’ Since Munich, he told them, the last democracy in Europe, Czechoslovakia, had fallen. ‘It is imperial England against imperial Germany now.’3
Decca was making contacts who would become lifelong friends. The most important of these was a tall Southern belle who wore white broad-brimmed hats and huge skirts that rustled when she walked. Virginia Durr spoke in a ‘soft scream’ with a marked Southern accent, which fascinated Decca. At first she did not like Virginia, who seemed loud and bossy. Nevertheless, since it was their policy ‘to swoop down . . . on a circle of people, become part of them for a brief time, glean what there was of interest and be off again’, she accepted an invitation for her and Esmond to visit the Durrs at their sprawling white farmhouse about seven miles from Washington, DC. There they met Virginia’s husband Clifford who worked for the Federal Communications Bureau, which controlled broadcasting, and the couple’s noisy, happy family. By the end of the evening they were fast friends and Decca marvelled at how quickly this had occurred. In England, she reflected, it would have taken years of ‘getting to know someone’ before they reached such a stage of friendly intimacy.
Apart from Esmond’s determination to join up as soon as any fighting began in Europe, there was only one problem in Decca’s life at that time. Besotted as she was with Esmond she could not admit him into one part of her life, and that was her love for Unity. Along with Esmond she bitterly denounced her family in general as ‘Nazis’, including the rabidly anti-Nazi Nancy, the Conservative Pam and even the apolitical Debo. But she could never bring herself to extend it to Unity, though Unity was arguably the chief offender. This, surely, tells us something about Unity who, despite the publication of an excellently researched biography, remains an elusive personality. ‘Although I hated everything she stood for,’ Decca wrote, ‘she was easily my favourite sister, which was something I could never have admitted . . . to Esmond. I knew I could never expect Esmond, who had never met her, to feel anything but disgust for her, so by tacit understanding we avoided discussing her.’4
A month earlier the London Daily Mirror had given Unity an entire page to express her views and ideology under the headline ‘WHAT MISS MITFORD WOULD LIKE TO SEE’. It is a surprisingly reasoned and well-written argument, which states that England and Germany had too much in common to be enemies; and that the two countries ought to be allies with Germany as the greatest Continental power and Britain the great colonial power. But her premise is undermined by her insistence on the importance of racial superiority: too much for most readers to swallow even in the less enlightened 1930s. ‘One of the foundations of Nazi ideology is the racial theory,’ she wrote. ‘They believe that the future of Europe stands or falls with the Nordic race . . .’5
Curiously, despite the part that Unity had played in Putzi Hanfstaegl’s sudden exit from Germany, she remained on good terms with his sister Erna. So much so that in the spring Unity, always short of money, moved out of her flat and in with Erna. ‘It is lovely staying here with Erna,’ she wrote to Diana, ‘but she is very strict and makes me wash the bath out . . . The only boring thing is that she [complains] as much as ever and shrieks at me as if I were responsible for it all [her brother’s defection].’6 If only Unity could talk personally to Hitler, Erna believed, she might get Putzi reinstated. Unity was only too willing and she waited her moment to raise the subject with Hitler. ‘Last week I was lunching with W[olf],’ she wrote to Diana, ‘so I summoned up all my courage and asked if he would see her. He was perfectly sweet and said yes.’7 Erna had not seen Hitler since he had been a fugitive after the failure of the 1923 putsch, when he hid at her home. They met alone and Unity waited outside the room, joining them afterwards for tea. Everything appeared to have gone well, she thought. A few days earlier she had introduced Erna to Randolph Churchill, who was visiting Munich, and Erna told him she intended to visit her brother in London. Randolph said she must visit his father while she was there. Erna told Hitler this and asked him what she might say to Churchill. He replied casually, ‘Use your own judgement.’
Ten days later Erna handed Unity a letter addressed to Hitler and asked her to give it to him. Apparently it was a request that Putzi’s back pay from the Nazi Party be conveyed to her in the form of a cheque signed by Hitler, which she would take with her to England. Hitler read only a few sentences then flushed with anger he tore up the letter. The Hanfstaengls, he told a startled Unity, were money-grabbers, and she had ‘been living on a dung heap’.8 He burned the letter and forbade Unity to see Erna again, not even for one day. This presented her with a problem since she was living with the woman, but it was no problem to Hitler. He said he would find her a flat, and even help her to furnish it. In the meantime Unity moved into an hotel and Janos von Almassy, who was staying in Munich with a friend, went to see Erna and collected Unity’s luggage. On 5 June Unity wrote to Diana that she had found an apartment. ‘Wolf told [Gauleiter] Wagner that they were to look for one for me . . . So today a young man from the Ministerium took me round to look at some . . . At last we found the perfect [apartment] in Schwabing . . . It belongs’, she wrote, ‘to a young Jewish couple who are going abroad.’9 Subsequently she saw the couple again and, apparently amicably, purchased some furniture from them.
It was the acquisition of this flat that essentially placed Unity forever over a line from which there could be no historical rehabilitation. She was not a fool: her own writings in newspapers, particularly her Stürmer article, show that she had an excellent grasp of the situation concerning the Jews. She cannot have avoided seeing the treatment already inflicted on Jews in the streets of Munich – even irregular visitors witnessed scenes where Jews were infamously humiliated. We know she thought that Streicher’s act in making Jews crop grass with their teeth was amusing, and that she approved when a group of Jews were taken to an island in the Danube and left there to starve.10 She told a friend, Mary Ormsby Gore, how an old Jewess, heavily laden, had approached her in the street and asked the way to the railway station. She deliberately sent her in the opposite direction, and thought it an amusing thing to have done. Even if one is prepared to give Unity the benefit of the doubt, and accept that she could not have known what would be the ultimate fate of the majority of Germany’s Jewish population, it is difficult to write of these things without a cold hand upon the heart. It is hardly conceivable that Unity would not have known what lay behind the statement that the young couple with the apartment were ‘going abroad’, and, as Diana said, sadly, ‘It is impossible to defend Unity . . . she condemned herself out of her own mouth.’11 And knowing what she knew, Unity accepted the requisitioned apartment in Schwabing and loved it right from the start. Her enjoyment was not dimmed by the manner in which she had acquired it, only by Hitler having forgotten his promise to help her furnish it. Perhaps, in that summer of 1939, he had too much on his mind to worry about sideboards for Unity.
A week later Unity was in England. She was in good spirits and saw many members of her family. She also saw Hanfstaengl and told him what had happened with Erna, and with Diana and Tom attended Mosley’s huge peace rally at Earl’s Court. Here, Tom – by now an officer in the Territorials – greeted his brother-in-law with the Fascist salute as he walked past them. The newspapers took it amiss that a serving officer in His Majesty’s Forces should behave like this. Tom’s commanding officer was interviewed by reporters, who were clearly hoping to stir up trouble, but the colonel merely told them he wasn’t going to be deprived of one of his best officers over the matter of a salute.12 Afterwards Unity went back to Germany, her car laden with small items of furniture, lamps and curtain material. Larger items that she had appropriated with Sydney’s permission from Rutland Gate were shipped out to Germany with the assistance of a friend in the diplomatic corps.
The Redesdales spent the summer of 1939 on a remote island in the Inner Hebrides. David had bought this island, Inch Kenneth, complete with an austere three-storey house, cottage, and a ruined chapel in 1938 after a friend at his club had brought the property to his attention. He, Sydney and Unity had gone to view it and loved it on sight. Because of its windswept isolation and the fact that there was no shooting it was not worth a great deal, and David paid for it with what remained from the sale of Swinbrook. Thereafter, everybody who visited fell in love with Inch Kenneth’s stark beauty and pristine beaches, though it was difficult to get to, and hardly a sound prospect as a potential retirement home. From London it involved travelling to Oban by an overnight sleeper train, followed by a ferry trip of several hours to the island of Mull, a fifteen-mile drive across Mull to the hamlet of Gribun, then a short boat trip to the island. On calm days this last stage of the journey was a pleasant half-hour excursion, but in inclement weather with a lumpy sea it could be long and uncomfortable. The Redesdales employed a couple, who lived in the cottage; the wife helped Sydney with the house, and the husband was responsible for maintaining and operating the small motor-boat called the Puffin, and a rowing-boat. These vessels ferried the family and visitors to and from the island and collected supplies sent over from the mainland. At Gribun, the nearest civilization, the Redesdales kept an ancient Morris in a shed, for the journey across Mull to the Oban ferry. Immediately Sydney set to work to ensure that the kitchen garden was planted with as much produce as it could support, and the ‘farm’ supported a few dozen chickens for eggs and a couple of cows for milk. Once on the island the only contact with the outside world was the news over the wireless. As the long hot summer of that last year of peace continued, the news worsened and the Redesdales grew more and more concerned about what would happen to Unity if and when war was declared.
At the end of July Unity and Diana had attended the Bayreuth Festival at Hitler’s personal invitation. On arrival Unity was greeted with two large bouquets, one from Herr Wagner of Munich, the other from the Mayor of Munich. Neither, apparently, was immune to the gossip in Munich, which ran along the lines of: ‘did Unity Mitford and Hitler sleep together or not?’ On 2 August, the final day of the Wagner Festival and a day before they were due to leave Bayreuth, the sisters lunched with Hitler. Diana remembers that he told them he believed England was determined on war, and that if this was so, it was now inevitable. Diana said that Mosley would continue to campaign for peace, with the British Empire remaining intact, as long as it was legal for him to do so, and Hitler warned her that he risked assassination, ‘Like Jaurès in 1914,’ he said.13
Remarkably, we have Hitler’s version of a similar conversation. ‘Churchill and his friends decided on war against us some years before 1939,’ he said, in a recorded conversation. ‘I had this information from Lady Mitford [Unity]; she and her sisters were very much in the know, thanks to their relationship with influential people. One day she suddenly exclaimed that in the whole of London there were only three anti-aircraft guns! Her sister [Diana] who was present stared at her stonily, and then said slowly, “I do not know whether Mosley is the right man, or even if he is in a position, to prevent a war between Britain and Germany.”’14
His report of Diana’s reaction to Unity’s casual remark is interesting for it suggests that she was either shocked or displeased by its naïvety. But whether Unity’s statement was accurate or not is unimportant, for Hitler had a huge embassy in London, and the information about armaments provided by his intelligence service would have been far more informed than anything Unity could tell him. Diana thinks that the three anti-aircraft guns remark was the sort of joke then prevalent in UK newspapers and points out that Unity spent little time in England in 1939 so would not have known anything of any value. ‘I often disapproved strongly of things Unity said . . . but she was incapable of disloyalty to England.’15
When the sisters were alone together after luncheon, Unity told Diana for the second time that if war was declared between England and Germany she would not live to see the tragedy unfold: ‘She simply felt too torn between England and Germany to wish to see them tear themselves apart.’ Diana was not the only person to whom Unity made this statement or others like it: she had also told Tom, Debo and Decca that she intended to ‘commidit’ (‘commit suicide’ in Boudledidge) rather than choose between England and Germany in a war. Diana never saw Hitler again, though Unity had lunch with him on the first two days following her return to Munich.
Despite what Hitler had said to them, Unity did not seem to accept that war was so imminent for when Diana left on 3 August, she still hoped that her sister might be able to return on the eighteen with Jonathan and Desmond for the Parteitag. But Diana was pregnant again and, anyway, events unwound far more rapidly than anyone had anticipated. Within a month of her return to England it was already too late to travel to Germany. Instead Diana was at Wootton making the preparations for war that were suddenly obligatory for all householders. Blackout curtains had to be made for the numerous massive windows.
Irene Ravensdale, together with Mosley’s children from his first marriage, joined the Mosleys there, so it could not have been a comfortable period for anyone concerned, given Lady Ravensdale’s much-aired antipathy towards Diana. Nor did it help relations, Irene Ravensdale wrote in her autobiography, that Diana prominently displayed in her drawing room the large autographed photograph of Hitler that had been his wedding gift to her. In fact, Diana had purposely removed this photograph before Irene’s visit because she was aware it might cause offence. ‘I wrapped it in brown paper and put it in a cupboard,’ she recalled. In June, shortly after Mosley was arrested, she deposited the brown paper parcel at Drummonds bank and has never seen it since.16
Meanwhile, Unity amused herself by decorating her apartment. Janos von Almassy came to stay with her for a few weeks in early August, during which he bought her a dining table and chairs. When he left, the Wrede twins, half-Spanish princesses who had served as nurses in the Spanish civil war, stayed with her for a few days. It was only towards the end of the month that she began to feel isolated. Hitler was in Berlin, occupied with affairs of state, and the British consul summoned Unity and ordered her to return to England. She refused, and was told that she would forfeit British protection if she did not leave with the few remaining British subjects. She retorted that she had far better protection than that: Hitler’s. But she was miserable: most foreign journalists had now been withdrawn, and all her friends had pulled out, too. Even her German friends had retreated to their homes. Food was already rationed and becoming scarce, although Hitler sometimes remembered her and sent supplies to her flat. The few friends she did manage to see were frightened by the idea of war, and were also made uneasy by Unity’s assertions that if war was declared she would have no alternative but to shoot herself.
On 22 August she wrote to Diana that she was thrilled to hear about the Nazi–Soviet pact for surely, she wrote, this would make Germany so strong that England would never dare oppose Hitler. A few days later she was writing that she was not so sure the pact had helped: war seemed even more certain. The worst thing was that she had not seen Hitler for nearly three weeks. ‘I wish he would come,’ she said plaintively. By now it was obvious to her that Diana could not fly out to Germany and all the borders were closed. ‘On thinking things over,’ Unity wrote, ‘I might disappear into the mountains in the Tyrol perhaps, if war is declared. Of course the other way seems the easiest way out, but it seems silly not to wait and see how things turn out, it might be all over within a week.’17 On 30 August she received two last letters from Diana and her parents. It seemed a miracle that they had got through for the city was now on full alert for war with mandatory blackout after dusk, and the postal services were spasmodic. David had sent her 1,500 German marks that he had left over from his last trip ‘for emergency’. She replied thanking him and telling Sydney about her idea of going to the Tyrol, and to Diana asking that ‘if anything was to happen to me and the English Press try to make some untrue story out of it against W[olf], you will see to it that the truth is known won’t you . . .’18 Her biggest fear, though, was that ‘I shan’t see the Führer again.’ These were the last letters that got through.
While Unity idled away the last few weeks of August, working on the decoration of her apartment and sunbathing on its balcony, hoping against all hope for a reconciliation between Germany and England, Pam and Derek Jackson were in New York. He was engaged on a high-level mission for the Air Ministry, but they made time to call on Decca and Esmond at their flat in Greenwich Village. They just knocked on the door, without prior announcement. ‘I was amazed at Woman turning up here,’ Decca wrote to Sydney.19 As usual it was the meal that Pam most recalled about their visit. Forty years later she remembered that they ate roast chicken, which Pam cooked and carved. It was a ‘boiling hot day’, she reminded Decca, and even the effort of carving the chicken had brought her out ‘in a muck sweat’. The other thing she remembered was that Decca showed her where they hid their money, between the leaves of books. Pam worried for weeks that they would forget where it all was, or leave some behind when they left. It was pleasant for the sisters to meet, and Decca enjoyed telling them about her work and how they were managing. Derek and Esmond did not hit it off, though, and this made the occasion ‘uncomfortable and stiff’.
Decca had just left her job at the dress shop, having been offered a better one at Bloomingdales. In the meantime she was working on a trade stand at the New York World Fair. The Jacksons went to the fair several times to see her there without Esmond. When it was time to leave the United States, they invited the Romillys to dinner at their hotel and Esmond was fascinated to learn that they proposed to fly back to England. The Americans had been operating a transatlantic service since June, which carried up to seventeen civilian passengers. On 4 August a British service was inaugurated and Derek arranged for them to be on the second trip. So unusual was the mode of transport that just before they took off the Jacksons were interviewed by journalists, who asked why they had chosen to fly to England. ‘Well, you see,’ Derek explained, ‘tomorrow is our little dog’s birthday so we are in rather a hurry to get home . . .’ He had in reality been allocated seats because he was carrying top-secret papers. ‘The embassy had asked him to give them to them for transmission in the diplomatic bag,’ Diana recalled. ‘Derek refused. He said later, “If I’d accepted, the Russians would have had them next day.”’20
Almost the last thing Pam did before leaving New York was to arrange a singing telegram for Decca’s twenty-second birthday in September. Then they set off for England. Three years earlier, a transatlantic flight of any kind was still deemed worthy of a tickertape parade but aviation in the thirties represented the exposed cutting edge of technology. Aircraft evolved in that decade from flimsy club biplanes through classic racers and record-breaking fuel carriers, to the sophisticated fighting machines of the Second World War. The Jacksons went home in a Caribou flying boat. ‘Our flying journey’, Pam wrote to Decca, ‘was wonderful, but rather frightening when we took off. The plane seemed far too small to battle all across the Atlantic. We came down at Botwood in Newfoundland, and were able to go for a walk while the plane was being filled with petrol. The next stop was at Foynes in Ireland. The whole journey only took 28 hours!’21 Pam was probably among the first hundred women to fly the Atlantic, and although she is always regarded as ‘the unknown sister, who never did anything’, this flight in 1939 represented a quiet act of courage. No fuss, no nerves: it was typical of the daughter who most resembled Sydney.
Other members of the Mitford family besides Decca, Unity and Diana were now taking up partisan positions. David had swung round in a U-turn and for him the Germans had once more become ‘the beastly Hun’. Sydney was having none of this: she had met Hitler and liked the man; she had seen for herself the ‘marvellous’ things that his administration had done for a country brought to its knees by the previous war, and she continued to support him. Hitler’s arguments about encirclement by unsympathetic neighbours made perfect sense to her and, in her opinion, if a war was impending it was Churchill and the British government who were the cause for they had it in their power to stop it. For Debo, the only child left at home, this was a traumatic time. She was the only witness of the effect on her parents of Decca’s elopement, the worry over Unity, and the continuous disagreement between them about Hitler and the looming conflict. With the exception of Pam, whom they hardly saw, her family seemed to have become somehow totally enmeshed in politics.
Even Nancy became actively involved. In the late spring of 1939 she travelled to Perpignan where Prod was working as a volunteer with international charity organizations in the Roussillon region near the Spanish border. The area was inundated with half a million supporters of the previous Spanish government who had fled across the border to escape retribution under Franco’s regime. The French could not cope and herded the men into wire-enclosed camps. The women and children quartered wherever they could. It was left to international organizations such as the Red Cross to feed, clothe and care for them.
The plight of the refugees was a shock to Nancy: there were few frivolities here and she was genuinely affected by the plight of the dispossessed families.
If you could have a look, as I have, at some of the less agreeable results of fascism in a country [she wrote to Sydney], I think you would be less anxious for the swastika to become a flag on which the sun never sets. And whatever may be the good produced by that regime, that the first result is always a horde of unhappy refugees cannot be denied. Personally I would join hands with the devil himself to stop any further extension of the disease. As for encirclement, if a person goes mad he is encircled, not out of any hatred for the person but for the safety of his neighbours & the same applies to countries . . . if the Russian alliance does not go through we shall be at war in a fortnight, & as I have a husband of fighting age I am not particularly anxious for that eventuality.22
Nancy joined the volunteers, working ten hours a day and more to help the refugees find food, clothes, accommodation, medication and, ultimately, transportation to Mexico, Morocco or other parts of France. The biggest logistical problems concerned the loading of refugees on to the ships, and sometimes she and Peter could not find time to go to bed or even talk to each other for days at a time. When the departure of one ship was delayed by a hurricane Nancy worked among the women refugees stranded on the quayside, helping where she could. There were two hundred children under two who had to be fed, many with bottled milk, and changed every four hours. Some women were in the last stages of pregnancy. But amid the chaos and despair Nancy could spot a joke: ‘Peter said yesterday one woman was really too greedy, she already had 4 children and she wants 3 more,’ she told her mother. ‘I thought of you.’23 At last the ship was able to dock and the men were allowed to rejoin their families. ‘None of them had seen each other since their retreat . . . you never saw such scenes of hugging. The boat sailed at 12 yesterday, the pathetic little band on board played first God Save the King for us, and then the Marseillaise & then the Spanish National anthem. Then the poor things gave three vivas for an Espana which they will never see again. I don’t think there was a single person not crying. I have never cried so much in all my life.’24 By the time Nancy returned to England she was a fully committed ‘rabid anti-Nazi’,25 but though a socialist by inclination she never tipped over the edge into radicalism. ‘There isn’t a pin to put between Nazis & Bolshies,’ she wrote that autumn to Mrs Hammersley. ‘If one is a Jew one prefers one & if an aristocrat the other, that’s all as far as I can see. Fiends!’26
On Saturday 2 September Unity telephoned Rudi von Simolin (later Baroness von St Paul), a friend of Janos von Almassy and Erna Hanfstaengl. Rudi was visiting her father at Seeseiten, about an hour’s drive from Munich, when Unity rang, and there followed a long conversation. Unity said that she had heard from the British consul that there would now be war within days. All her efforts of the past two years, to persuade Hitler that there could not be war between their two countries, had been in vain, she said, and she intended to shoot herself when war was declared. ‘I was terrified for her,’ Rudi told Unity’s biographer.27 She urged Unity to do nothing until Monday when she would return to Munich and they could work out what should be done for the best. The war might not last long, she said, and there was no need for her to shoot herself. She reminded Unity of their plan for an autumn riding holiday. All the same, when she put down the phone Rudi had the feeling she had not got through to Unity and tried to ring back, but the receiver was off the hook.
On the following morning Unity received a message that there was a telegram for her at the British consulate. She walked round to collect it and was informed that Britain had declared war on Germany that morning. Immediately she went home and wrote to her parents: ‘This is to say goodbye . . . I send my best love to you all and particularly to my Boud [Decca] when you write. Perhaps when this war is over, everyone will be friends again and there will be the friendship between Germany and England which we have so hoped for . . .’28 She hoped that they would see Hitler often when the war was over and that Tom would be safe. It was light, matter-of-fact, final. The consul would deliver the letter for her, which was guaranteed to chill the heart of a parent.
Her next act was to go to Gauleiter Wagner’s office and ask if she was to be interned as an enemy alien. He assured her that she was not, and even offered to obtain some petrol for her car. Despite his reassurance she seemed distracted and she requested him to ensure, should anything happen to her, that she was buried in Munich with her signed photograph of Hitler and her Nazi Party badge. He was concerned enough about her demeanour to order that she should be discreetly followed, and she was next observed calling on the wife of her singing teacher. She had paid some outstanding bills from the money David had sent her, but a thousand marks remained and she gave this to the woman, saying she had no need of it. She also gave her an envelope containing keys and asked if they could be delivered to Rudi the following day. Then she walked back to her flat.
A little later she returned to Wagner’s office in her car and handed him a large, heavy envelope. Her former agitation had disappeared but nevertheless she bade him goodbye in something of a hurry. Wagner was half persuaded that there was no need to worry and it was not until he had dealt with the matter in hand that he opened the envelope Unity had left with his name on it. In it he found a suicide note saying that she was unable to bear the thought of a war between England and her beloved Germany, a sealed letter for Hitler, and her two most precious belongings: the signed framed photograph of Hitler which she took with her even when she travelled back and forth to England, and her special Party badge. He made enquiries, but no one had seen her drive off or knew which direction she had taken. All he could do was alert the police.
Unity drove to the Englischer Garten, the beautiful three-mile-long park beside the swiftly flowing River Isar, just east of the Schwabing district. It was familiar territory, one of Unity’s favourite places in Munich and quite close to her flat on Agnesstrasse. She had often walked her dogs along the winding paths under willow trees between the flower-beds, and exercised them on the open grassy spaces, before finding new homes for them a few months earlier. She even knew of a secluded little glade where, on occasions, she had sunbathed naked, giggling helplessly at the thought of what Sydney would say if she knew. She was not laughing on 3 September and she did not seek seclusion. Just inside the park, a few yards from the Königinstrasse, and close to the Haus de Kunst, an art gallery built under Hitler’s direction, she took her pearl-handled pistol from her handbag and shot herself in the temple.
For her it was a warrior’s exit, an honourable departure from a situation she regarded as intolerable. Metaphorically, she fell on her sword. ‘She put her life and ambition into avoiding a war,’ Rudi told Unity’s biographer. ‘She had been on a pedestal and therefore was mistaken into thinking that she had influence. She was too loyal to her beliefs.’29
A Frau Koch and her two sons were out walking in the Englischer Garten a little after noon on that fateful Sunday. Unity had just passed them when the shot rang out. The elder of the two brothers turned at the sound and caught Unity almost as she slid to the ground. With his mother’s help he carried her from the pavement and laid her on the grass. Blood was streaming down her face.30 Just across the road there was a military establishment and Frau Koch ran over to appeal for help. Within a short time a Luftwaffe car drove out, picked up Unity and drove off with her. Later, the Kochs were questioned by the police and told not to talk about the incident with anyone. They only learned Unity’s identity a few days later.31
On the following day Rudi returned to Munich. She called first on Unity’s music teacher whose wife handed her the envelope Unity had left. She said she had heard that a young woman had shot herself in the Englischer Garten. The envelope was found to contain the keys to the Agnesstrasse apartment so the two women hurried off there together. They found the apartment sealed off by the authorities, so Rudi called on Gauleiter Wagner. He told her what had happened, that Unity was alive, but in a coma and not expected to regain consciousness. Rudi went immediately to the hospital and was told that the bullet had entered Unity’s right temple, and was embedded at the back of the skull from where it could not be removed. Later a doctor said that had he tried to follow the track the bullet had taken with a scalpel even with his years of experience he could not have done so without killing the patient. It was something of a miracle that Unity had survived.
Rudi spent the next weeks visiting the hospital daily, having been given a petrol allowance for the purpose by Gauleiter Wagner. She also wrote or cabled Janos von Almassy daily to keep him advised of the situation. Hitler visited Unity on 10 September before she regained consciousness. A day or so later she came round, although she was deeply confused and paid no attention to her visitors, her carers, or the banks of flowers that had been sent in by Goebbels, Ribbentrop, several gauleiters and Hitler. Hitler sent roses. On 13 September, ten days after the shooting, Unity managed to say one or two words to Hitler on the telephone. He did not visit her again until 8 November; by then she could understand better, and even hold a short conversation. He asked her what she wanted to do. She said she would like to go back to England for a few weeks, then return to Munich.32
According to Julius Schaub, Hitler’s adjutant, Hitler was ‘deeply shaken’ by Unity’s appearance and manner, as was everybody who saw her over the next few months. She seemed to have no memory of the suicide attempt (although she made a further attempt to kill herself by swallowing her swastika badge which had to be removed from her stomach with a probe), only a limited ability to speak, and she was partially paralysed. Her face was badly swollen due to the wound in her temple and there was little resemblance to the beautiful, alert and lively girl she had been. Instead, she had the empty fixed stare of someone who had suffered a stroke.33 Hitler asked Frau Schaub if she would watch over Unity by visiting each day, and went off to discuss her case with her doctors. Subsequently he set in motion an arrangement to get her to Switzerland as soon as it was feasible for her to travel. Once again he made himself personally responsible for her hospital bills. Her suicide attempt was declared a state secret, and after the first report of the anonymous woman, it was never mentioned by the German media. It is difficult to know whether Hitler did this out of consideration and affection for Unity, or whether he felt uncomfortable that yet another young woman with whom he was connected had attempted suicide. Two other women who were sexually linked, by rumour or fact, with Hitler, committed or attempted suicide with varying degrees of success: Geli, his half-niece, and Eva Braun, who made two attempts.34
The Mitford family knew nothing of this, although Gauleiter Wagner told Rudi they had been notified, and that all frontier checkpoints had been advised that Lord and Lady Redesdale and Mrs Diana Mosley would be permitted to cross.35 In the early days of the war, however, there no way in which they could have been contacted, and the German press silence meant that the news was confined to those most closely involved with the incident. Tom and Diana were in no doubt that Unity would have shot herself, as she had so often said she would. Her hint about the Tyrol gave a spark of hope, but in their hearts they feared the worst.
Sydney, David, Debo and Nancy were at Inch Kenneth when war was declared. Nancy immediately left for London and Sydney drove her to the Oban ferry. During the journey Nancy made a rude remark about Hitler, and Sydney told her to shut up or get out and walk. Realizing that her mother was worried and wretched about Unity, Nancy chose to shut up. There was no talking to Sydney about Hitler: her high regard for him had been borne of a genuine fear of Communism and nurtured over tea-cups in Munich when Unity had translated polite conversations between the two. During September they had no news of Unity, only rumours. On 15 September Nancy wrote to Mrs Hammersley: ‘Bobo, we hear on fairly good authority, is in a concentration camp for Czech women which much as I deplore it has a sort of poetic justice.’36 She also referred to an interview in the Daily Mirror in which David had ‘publicly recanted like Latimer’ and said he had been wrong about Hitler.
It was not until 2 October that the Redesdales heard from Teddy von Almassy, brother of Janos. He was in Budapest, which was neutral so had postal communications with England and Germany, and he wrote to say that Unity had been ill but was in hospital and was now recovering. Sydney and Debo left David at Inch Kenneth and travelled down to live at the mews cottage in London. It was a curiously changed London with sandbags everywhere, windows criss-crossed with brown paper, barrage balloons, hardly any traffic and almost everyone, it seemed, in uniform. But even there, pulling strings, Sydney could not get any reliable news of Unity, so she busied herself by closing Rutland Gate ‘for the duration’ and putting the furniture into storage. Most of this was lost in a warehouse fire within a few weeks but as Sydney wrote to Decca, ‘Things don’t seem to matter much when one thinks of the terrible world conflagration.’37 They had another brief communication, this time by cable from Teddy von Almassy, advising that Unity was making good progress, but no further explanation of what was wrong with her. ‘It is a terrible and continual worry,’ Sydney wrote to Decca. ‘One cannot bear to think what agonies of mind she must have been through as she never believed a war could happen between the two countries.’
There was considerable animosity between Nancy and Sydney now. Following the declaration of war Nancy was furious at Sydney’s open support of Hitler. ‘She is impossible,’ Nancy wrote to Mrs Hammersley. ‘Hopes we shall lose the war and makes no bones about it. Debo is having a wild time with young cannon fodder at the Ritz etc. Apparently Muv said to her “Never discuss politics, not even for 5 minutes, with Nancy.” Rather as some devout RC might shield her little one from a fearful atheist!’38
Nancy, working in an underground casualty depot in Praed Street, was already bored with the degree of sacrifice and discipline demanded for no apparent reason throughout the months of the Phoney War. She was telling everybody she had been given an indelible blue pencil with which to write names and other details on the foreheads of the dead and injured, and asking what she was supposed to do ‘if a coloured person was brought in’. Derek Jackson was away on a mission for the RAF, Tom, Prod and the Bailey and Farrer brothers were all in the Army, Debo was planning to work in a canteen. Ten days after they first met Randolph Churchill married Pamela Digby, to whom he had become engaged within twenty-four hours of setting eyes on her. ‘She’s rather a friend of Debo’s – pretty with red hair and lovely colouring,’ Sydney wrote to Decca.
Both Sydney and Pam kept Decca updated with the latest news. Aunt Iris had become an all-night telephone operator and Uncle Jack had joined the auxiliary fire brigade. ‘Coal was rationed and though food was not rationed yet, it soon would be,’ Pam wrote. Everyone was busy making blackout curtains, the barrage balloons over London were very pretty and some London refugees had been billeted on them at Rignell House. ‘Fortunately they spent only a few nights before deciding it was too far from the pub and returned to the East End.’ Sydney wrote that London was ‘much less gloomy than it was in the first weeks and there is a lot of entertaining in restaurants, all of which, and all the nightclubs, are full’.39
The Romillys were still enjoying America; making the most of what time they had left before the fighting began. Shortly after Pam and Derek’s visit they had moved to Washington, DC, where Esmond got a job selling silk stockings, door to door. It was a high-pressure sales job and Esmond learned the patter fast: ‘Mrs Robinson, have you ever felt a bit of real fresh silk?’ he would begin, producing a skein that looked like tangled horsehair. He wound it around the potential customer’s wrist and tugged hard. ‘That would certainly have a hard time breaking, wouldn’t it?’ Then he would invite the hapless victim to take a pin and make a hole in a piece of printed silk, ‘woven exclusively for the discriminating woman, almost impossible, isn’t it?’ But he withdrew the pin quickly for it had been known to happen. ‘Your big toe would have a hard time trying to go sightseeing through that, wouldn’t it?’ By a process of flattery and smooth-talking he invariably came away with an order, leaving a flustered housewife wondering how she had parted with eighteen dollars for enough stockings to last twelve months. In fact, he was so good at it that he exceeded his sales quota and proudly carried home to Decca the prizes that he was awarded as gifts for his ‘little woman’: a Snugfit Supersoft Shortie Housecoat and a Brushrite brush and comb set. He never achieved the fifty dollars a week that had been glowingly advertised when he applied for the job, but he earned enough to pay their expenses.40
At weekends they relied on invitations to grand houses, where they were wined and dined, and in return entertained their fellow guests with stories of Decca’s upbringing and their elopement. On one occasion when she phoned to accept an invitation to a mansion in Virginia, Decca was asked, ‘You ride, of course?’ ‘Oh yes,’ Decca said blithely, unwilling to forfeit a weekend of lavish hospitality, and giving only momentary thought to those frequent falls in the paddock at Swinbrook. ‘Do bring your riding things,’ said her hostess. Decca’s riding things consisted of a pair of old trousers and a rough shirt. The other guests were clad immaculately in gleaming boots, well-cut breeches and hacking jackets. Nor was Decca able to handle the thoroughbred she had been allotted. It was a disaster.
In early November the Redesdales heard through the American embassy that Unity was ‘in a surgical hospital in Munich’ and making a good recovery from an attempted suicide. At least now they knew the worst and when, a few weeks later, a reporter rang in the middle of the night to ask if it was true that Unity had died in hospital, Sydney was confident enough to hang up on him. Suddenly the newspapers were full of a story that ‘The Girl Who Loved Hitler’ had shot herself following a massive row with Hitler and had died in a Munich hospital. In other versions she had been shot on the orders of Himmler, and buried in an unmarked grave. Blor, who was in London for Christmas shopping (‘It didn’t take long,’ she said, ‘the shops were empty’),41 saw a news-vendor the next day holding a poster with headlines announcing Unity’s death. ‘She went up to the man and said, ‘THAT’S NOT TRUE!’ Sydney wrote. ‘He was astonished . . . Debo is terrifically gay and goes out to lunch and dinner every day. I suppose there is a great dearth of girls in London and the young men come up quite a lot . . . The cottage at Swinbrook is presently housing Diana’s nurse and baby and is to be let for a month at Christmas to friends of Debo; Andrew Cavendish and another boy. I do hope they won’t break it up completely.’42
Debo and Andrew Cavendish had been secretly pledged to each other for some months having been in love since shortly after they met in the previous year. Debo thought it was pointless asking for permission to marry; they would only be told they were too young. Sensibly, they decided to wait for a more propitious moment.
Hearing the latest reports, Decca wrote anxiously asking for news. The Romillys were now in Florida, and she had been mobbed by reporters offering her money in exchange for a story but she didn’t know what to make of the assertion that Unity was dead. Sydney cabled her enough information to set her mind at rest.
David came down from Inch Kenneth to spend Christmas at the mews cottage and it was while he was there, on Christmas Eve, that he and Sydney received further news about Unity. It was the best Christmas present they could have received, for it was Janos calling and, after explaining that he was with Unity in Switzerland, he handed the phone to her. ‘When are you coming to get me?’ Unity asked plaintively.