14
Irreconcilable Differences
(1940–41)

Although in the brief telephone conversation Unity sounded normal it was obvious from what Janos told them that she was far from well. The family learned that Hitler had arranged for Unity to be taken to Berne in a specially fitted out ambulance carriage attached to a train. As well as Janos, she was accompanied by a nursing nun, who had been with her since the shooting, and a doctor who was the ex-husband of a friend Unity had made when she first went out to Munich to learn German. The doctor had now returned to Germany but the nun and Janos would wait until the Mitfords arrived.

Somehow, although it was Christmas, David acquired the necessary travel papers in three days, and on 27 December Sydney and Debo set off for Switzerland. David was to remain in England ‘to organize things from that end’ and to meet them with an ambulance when they returned on the cross-Channel ferry. Debo was nineteen and thinks that Sydney might have had some special permit from the Foreign Office to present at the inevitable checkpoints and borders. It was one of the most harrowing and strangest experiences of her life. It was midwinter, grey, freezing cold, and none of the trains ran to schedule, but at least there was no fighting yet. She and Sydney were both anxious to get to Berne and on 29 December they arrived at the clinic. Nothing had prepared Debo for the shock of what they found.

Unity was still bedridden, propped in a sitting position with pillows since she suffered from severe vertigo and could not remain upright without help. She looked frail and very thin, having lost over thirty pounds, and her dark blue eyes seemed enormous in her yellowy white face with its sunken cheeks. ‘She was completely changed,’ Debo recalled. ‘Her hair was short and all matted. Because of the wound I expect they couldn’t do much about washing or combing it, and her teeth were yellow; they had not been brushed since the shooting. She couldn’t bear for her head to be touched. She had an odd vacant expression . . . the most pathetic sight. I was very shocked and I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for my mother seeing her like that . . . But it wasn’t just her appearance; she was a completely changed person, like somebody who has had a stroke . . . Her memory was very jagged and she could remember some things and not others. She recognized us though.’1

Just to be reunited with Unity was an enormous joy to Sydney, and Unity was thrilled to see them and asked after the others. ‘We were all three so happy,’ Sydney said later.2 As they talked, Unity’s problems became more obvious. She frequently confused words, calling the sugar ‘chocolate’ or the salt ‘tea’ – typical symptoms of brain damage. Janos, who had already stayed longer than planned in Berne, was anxious to get back to his family, so exchanged pleasantries then left. The nun, who had nursed Unity for four months, remained with her patient until they left Berne on New Year’s Eve. She passed on the details of Unity’s clinical treatment, explained that the medical bills had been met by the Führer, and that he had arranged for Unity’s furniture to be packed and placed in storage at his expense. Altogether this was a remarkable sequence of events, and it is curious that none of Hitler’s many biographers has attempted to explain either the relationship or his many small kindnesses to Unity.

The ambulance carriage was now hooked on to a train heading for Calais. Presumably Sydney enlisted the help of British diplomats in Switzerland for it seems unlikely that she could have dealt with the matter on her own. The journey to the French coast was a nightmare, according to Debo, and what should have taken two days took three or four. ‘It seemed to go on for ever,’ she said. ‘Every time the train jolted, stopped and started, it was torture for her. It was a long, dark and cold journey, and Unity was so ill. My mother worried it would be too much for her.’3 Worse was to come. The press were waiting for them at Calais. Unity’s activities had featured in the newspapers for a long time now, and the attention her return stimulated in journalists was a forerunner to the intense press interest associated with modern celebrities. It took them all by surprise. When they reached Calais they found they had missed the sailing and had to stay overnight in the hotel near the terminus. Here, Sydney received a note from a Daily Express reporter offering three thousand pounds for an interview with Unity. As if she was declining an invitation to tea, Sydney replied courteously that Unity was too tired, having been very ill, although she was now much better for she had been well cared-for in Germany. This was seen by the reporter as an invitation to trade. He increased his offer to five thousand. Sydney declined again and asked the hotel staff to keep the press away.

Next morning Unity was carried on to the ferry where they encountered problems with the Customs officer and a doctor. Rudi had packed all she could of Unity’s personal belongings from the Agnesstrasse apartment into fourteen containers.4 The Customs officer insisted on searching each one, and when he came across some tablets that Unity could not identify he seized them. The doctor said they were cocaine and brusquely accused Unity of being a cocaine addict. Sydney insisted he took them away and had them analysed. They turned out to be some old pills that had been prescribed for Rebell, the Great Dane. At last the boat reached Folkestone where David was waiting anxiously with the ambulance. As Unity’s stretcher was carried down the gangway in the failing light, he rushed up and kissed her.

The press corps had been kept out of the port, a restricted area, but after the ambulance passed through the gates the Redesdale party was followed by about twenty cars containing reporters and cameramen. A few miles outside Folkestone the ambulance began to make ominous clanking sounds. A spring had broken and they decided to return to the hotel David had used while he waited for them. They arrived unexpectedly and there was nobody to carry Unity, so David supported her as she walked unsteadily inside while flashbulbs popped and reporters shouted questions. The foyer of the hotel was a blaze of light and crammed with journalists. Sydney tried to calm the frenzy by asking, in wonder, ‘Are you all quite mad? What is it all about?’5 That they were inside the hotel made her suspect that the broken spring had been sabotage. ‘At the time I was not sorry,’ she said later. It had been so difficult driving in the dark of the blackout with pinprick lights, and Unity was worn out. They all were. Before she was carried upstairs the press managed to get a few words from Unity. ‘Are you pleased to be home, Miss Mitford?’ someone called. ‘I’m very glad to be in England, even if I’m not on your side,’ a newspaper report claimed she replied. On the following day David hired another ambulance and the party drove to the cottage at High Wycombe without further interference.

That week cinema-goers were treated to a newsreel film of Unity looking startled and puzzled, as David helped her from the stretcher to her feet outside the hotel. Sydney had washed and combed Unity’s hair while they travelled, which improved her appearance, and that she was able to walk made it appear as though there was not much wrong with her. With little else to write about the incident, journalists made a story of the fact that Unity had been brought home in a first-class carriage with a special guard’s van at a cost of £1,600 to her parents. A good three-bedroom house could be bought for three hundred pounds in 1939. Perhaps it is not surprising that the newsreel was greeted by scathing jeers and catcalls from largely working-class audiences, earning perhaps four or five pounds a week. Opposition – hatred, even – was understandable for ‘the girl who loved Hitler’, but so unusually aggressive was the press coverage of Unity’s arrival that questions were asked in the House of Commons and, later, some newspapers had the grace to admit that their reporters had ‘gone too far’ in their treatment of a young woman who was, clearly, still gravely ill. For some months afterwards the cottage at High Wycombe was given police protection. This led to the assumption that they were being ‘watched’ by the authorities.

When she had rested for a few days Unity was admitted to hospital in Oxford but the doctors told the Redesdales that everything that could be done had already been done in Germany.6 Only time could help Unity now, they told Sydney. Unity kept repeating, ‘I thought you all hated me but I don’t remember why.’ She asked Nancy, ‘You’re not one of those who would be cruel to somebody, are you?’7 And ‘Am I mad?’ This was an occasion when Nancy was kind. ‘Of course you are, darling Stonyheart,’ she said gently, ‘but then you always were.’8 Initially Unity appeared to think that her doctors had made a hole in her head, which had caused her illness. Later, though, as her memory returned she asked Diana privately if she thought it ‘very wicked to die by one’s own hand’. Diana believes that ‘to that small extent man must be the master of his own fate. He did not ask to be born; if his life becomes too tragic or unbearable he has the right to die.’9 She told Unity this, but told her also that as she had been saved, she must now concentrate all her energy on recovering her health.

Nancy sometimes stayed with her parents during this period, and to pass the time she worked on Pigeon Pie, a novel based on her experiences in the first-aid post. As usual it was peopled with her friends and connections: You are in it,’ she wrote to Decca, ‘as Mary Pencill.’ After it was published Nanny Blor wrote to Decca to say she’d read it, but hadn’t enjoyed it. Everyone who wrote to Decca said how Unity continually asked after ‘my Boud’ and said how wonderful it would be if she were to walk in the door. Tom and Nancy wrote that they had to leave the room to cry when they first saw her, but that there was a gradual improvement.

The combined effort required to bring Unity home had created a temporary lull in the growing discord between Sydney and David about Germany. With Unity safely home, their differences surfaced again. For a short time in 1938 David had gone along with Unity’s line that the Treaty of Versailles had been unfair to Germany, and that it was only right that the former German colonies should be restored. Like most of the upper classes David had been deeply concerned about the spread of Communism, and feared it. Fascism appeared to be a possible alternative. And Hitler had behaved like a gentleman over Unity’s illness. But by 1939, in common with practically everyone else in Britain, David viewed Hitler as a threat as great as Communism, and someone to be strenuously opposed. Sydney, however, still regarded Hitler as the charming music-lover who had entertained her to tea and, what is more, had looked after Unity so kindly. She recalled the tidiness of German towns, the cleanliness of its hotels, the magnificent autobahns, the feeling that everyone was happy and working together for the greater good of the country, under the beloved Führer. ‘When the Germans have won,’ she said to David, ‘you’ll see, everything will be wonderful and they’ll treat us very differently to those wretched beastly Poles.’10 By mid-February 1940 the couple were ‘absolutely at loggerheads’, as Nancy put it, quarrelling bitterly. Eventually David confided in Nancy that he did not think he could continue to live with Sydney for much longer. And when Nancy wrote to Mrs Hammersley she said that he ‘is more violent now against Germany than anyone else I know, and against any form of peace until they are beaten . . . I really think they hate each other now.’11

Initially the Redesdales intended that after Unity was discharged from hospital, they would take her to sit out the war in the quiet and solitude of Inch Kenneth. But the island was made a ‘protected zone’ like many coastal areas, and when David applied for permits to travel there he was turned down. Unity might be British and she might be an invalid, but she was no more trusted than an enemy alien. Lady Redesdale had made her views on the Germans clear, and she was not allowed to go, either. Lord Redesdale was permitted to go there, of course. He blamed Sydney for this, believing that had she told the truth about the extent of Unity’s brain damage, and not aired her pro-Nazi views so forthrightly, there would not have been a problem. Sydney could hardly admit to herself that Unity might have brain damage, so perhaps it was not surprising that the rest of the population did not know the facts, and it did not help matters when Sydney was quoted as having stated firmly that Unity was ‘recovering well . . . My daughter must not be made into one of history’s tragic women,’ she insisted to a reporter.

The old David, tall, strong, funny, fiery and the inspiration for ‘Uncle Matthew’, had almost disappeared. The events of the last few years, Diana’s divorce and remarriage to Mosley, whom he detested, Decca’s defection, Unity’s suicide attempt, and now the quarrel between himself and Sydney, had broken him. Although he was only sixty-two his health was failing. His eyesight was poor because of cataracts and, white-haired and stooping, he looked a decade older than he was. Where once he had thundered, his tempers were now mere flashes of irritation. When Unity came out of hospital an added and unforeseen problem presented itself: the brain damage had made her clumsy and incontinent – when eating she frequently spilled or dropped her food and David could not stand the sight of her at the table. Eventually it all became too much for him: he went alone to the island, taking the under-parlourmaid, Margaret Wright, as his housekeeper. She was also a trained nurse, which was an advantage with his failing health. David and Sydney wrote to each other almost every day, and often their letters – from David anyway – were tender, always beginning, ‘My darling’. In future the couple were together occasionally for special family occasions, and they sometimes stayed at each other’s houses, but it was the end of their marriage as such and they never again lived as husband and wife. For the remainder of the war David spent six months of each year at Inch Kenneth and the other six, in the winter, at the mews cottage at Rutland Gate.

Sydney decided to return to Swinbrook, reasoning that everyone in that remote area had known Unity from childhood so she was unlikely to be attacked or harmed. She rented the old ‘fishing cottage’ next door to the pub for the summer, and took on a Mrs Timms as a daily. Soon she had acquired some hens and a goat, which gave birth to twins within weeks of purchase. Unity was thrilled, and wrote to Decca about the kids in wavery childish handwriting with grammatical errors. It must have brought a lump to Decca’s throat when she compared it with Unity’s letters before the shooting. Blor came to help with the nursing and after she went home to her family Sydney looked after Unity alone. With dedicated and loving care Unity made limited progress but she remained childlike for the rest of her life. For Sydney it was an unremitting job: Unity’s incontinence meant that her bedlinen had to be washed every day, and as she recovered her mobility she wandered further from home, which, given her trusting simplicity, was often worrying. Old friends and cousins, such as Idden and Rudbin and the Baileys, visited along with Tom and all the sisters except Decca.

Decca had been very anxious. Like the Redesdales in England, she had been badgered by American reporters offering a thousand dollars and more for ‘the inside story’ on Unity. Poor as the Romillys were, and in some ways unscrupulous, and much as they loathed Fascism, Decca’s love for Unity prevented her speaking to the press. One magazine she turned down ran a story anyway: ‘I see they have an article about the “fabulous mansion at High Wycombe”,’ Decca wrote to Sydney, ‘and pointing out that Farve is one of Princess Marina’s closest friends and talking of Winston Churchill as Bobo’s uncle. One journalist wrote that I had said, “Unity was always a wild youngster,”12 (I hadn’t even seen him) and next day it was in headlines in every US paper.’13

From Sydney she learned that six months after the shooting the doctors expected Unity to go on making limited progress for up to eighteen months but that she would never recover completely. She was stuck at a mental age of eleven or twelve. Sydney tried to remain optimistic, treating the injury like concussion, and reminding everyone how long Tom had taken to recover from concussion caused by a car crash some years earlier. However, she admitted that Unity’s personality was changed: ‘That old insouciance has rather gone,’ she wrote, ‘and she is so much more affectionate and sweet to everyone and there is something really so pathetic about her, poor darling.’14 At Unity’s request, Sydney arranged for her to see a Christian Science practitioner. From this point on Unity displayed the obsessional fixation on religion that can often be a characteristic of mental illness. The Daily Express, however, chose to link Unity’s interest in Christian Science with the Nazi movement, pointing out that ‘several of the leading Nazis’ were strong Christian Scientists. But Unity was interested in many religions and swung from one to another, depending on whom she had last spoken with.

The papers continued to run stories on Unity almost weekly and David was often bothered for ‘a statement’ and referred to in reports as a supporter of Hitler. Finally he could bear it no longer and on 9 March he wrote to The Times:

My only crime, if it be a crime, so far as I know, is that I am one of many thousands in this country who thought that our best interests would be served by a friendly understanding with Germany . . . though now proved to be wrong, I was, at any rate, in good company . . . I resent . . . the undoubted undercurrent of suspicion and resentment caused by publicity to which there is no right of reply . . . I am constantly described as a Fascist. I am not, never have been, and am not likely to become a Fascist.15

To spare Unity potential hurt the newspapers were hidden away from her, even though, Sydney wrote to Decca, she could only read a few lines if she found them, for she had the limited attention span of a child, her concentration was gone and she suffered blackouts.

The old life in England seemed far away to Decca and Esmond. He wrote a series of brilliantly simple, though obviously subjective, essays on the political situation and the Cliveden set, for journals such as the Commentator, but though he frequently criticized England and its administration, he never wavered from his intention to join up when it became necessary. His brother Giles was already serving in the British Army and had been sent with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France, but while everybody waited for the Phoney War to end, he and Decca were determined to enjoy what they knew was a limited period of freedom.

Driving to New Orleans they made a mistake in navigation and ended up in Miami. There, by virtue of invented backgrounds, Decca found a job on a faux-jewellery counter in a drug store at fourteen dollars a week, and Esmond, ‘known for his inability to carry a teaspoon from one room to the next’, was employed by a restaurant based on his ‘long experience’ as a waiter at the Savoy Grill. He lasted one evening, during which he soaked his customers with wine, dripped tomato sauce on their clothes and ended up crashing spectacularly into a heavily laden fellow waiter leaving the kitchen with a tray of food. He was asked to leave but such was his personal charm that he talked the owners into letting him open a cocktail bar at a wage of five dollars a week plus meals and tips.16

The bar was an immediate success but the Miami police called round and closed the restaurant down because, they said, the bar was being operated illegally. To reopen the owners needed a liquor licence, which would cost a thousand dollars for the season. The Italian family who owned the Roma restaurant were crushed by what seemed the end of their livelihood, but Esmond struck a deal with them: he would raise the money, he said, in exchange for a full partnership in the restaurant. They agreed, probably thinking he was mad. If he could raise that sort of money why would he work for five dollars a week? Even Decca doubted Esmond in this case, especially when he told her his plan. He would use their small savings to fly back to Washington, DC, and see Eugene Meyer and talk him into lending them the money. In Decca’s experience rich people got that way by not lending money without equity so she wrote immediately to Tom asking him to transmit to her the three hundred pounds in her account at Drummonds, proceeds of the sale of some shares David had given her. This, she thought, would pay off Mr Meyer if he agreed to the loan, but Tom could not comply with the request due to currency regulations.

Esmond’s interview with Eugene Meyer was brief. He described the venture and launched into an explanation of the exchange rate between English pounds and American dollars, which Mr Meyer cut across with the remark, ‘Yes, Esmond, I happen to know about the exchange rate.’ Then he leaned back in his chair and said, ‘A thousand dollars. Yes, I think I can lend you a thousand dollars.’ Esmond was so bemused at not having to trot out his brilliant arguments that all he could think of to say was, ‘Oh! Well, I hope it won’t leave you short.’ Collapse of stout party: Mr Meyer thought the remark hilarious and wrote out a cheque on the spot.17

Decca resigned from her drugstore job to help Esmond run the bar. They became part of the Italian family and if Decca thought, What would Muv think? when she had to eject a drunken woman from the restaurant powder room, it was all part of the fun of building their business. It seemed never to have crossed their minds that ownership of a business might carry a whiff of capitalism, and they cheerfully quizzed customers about their politics while always strongly espousing the left. It was an enormously happy time for them: young, bright and successful they managed to put the war out of their minds. ‘We spend the mornings on the beach,’ she wrote to Sydney, ‘and the rest of the time eating up the delicious Italian food.’ To her great surprise she met Harry Oakes in Miami, the man who had made his millions at Swastika. She had heard of his good fortune all her life, whenever David talked about the gold mine. To meet him was, she thought, an extraordinary coincidence.

The Phoney War ended suddenly, in May 1940, as Hitler’s troops swept victoriously through the Low Countries and crossed into France. On 10 May Chamberlain announced his resignation and Churchill was asked to form an all-party coalition government. The BEF was forced to retreat until there was only the English Channel at their backs, and were rescued by the miracle of a massive fleet of small boats ferrying back and forth from Dunkirk.

Decca believed that Esmond changed a lot during the eighteen months they spent in the USA, that he had outgrown his automatic adolescent rebellion against any form of authority. He was steadier and more serious. There was only one aim in his life now, and that was the permanent defeat of Fascism. News from home was bad. Esmond’s father died suddenly on 6 May. His brother Giles was missing in the fighting, believed to have been taken prisoner at Dunkirk. Nellie wrote to tell him that Aunt Clemmie had come for the funeral, and that Uncle Winston rang her to say that Holland and Belgium had been invaded. ‘Esmond,’ she wrote, ‘if it is your own sincere conviction not to come home there is nothing more to say – but if Decca is holding you back from your country in her hour of anguish remember Uncle Winston’s words, “If Britain lives a thousand years . . . this will be her finest hour.”’18 Suddenly Europe loomed over them again.

They sold the bar, making a small profit after settling the loan, and set off for Washington, DC, where Esmond intended to join the Canadian Royal Air Force and volunteer to serve in Europe, even though, as he told Decca, ‘I’ll probably find myself being commanded by one of your ghastly relations.’19 He suggested that she should enrol in a stenographer’s class while he was away. They both knew it was going to be tough and lonely for her with him gone. Learning shorthand and typing would be occupation for her and enable her to earn a living, as typists were always in demand. As for accommodation, Esmond had this worked out, too. They called on the Durrs and, while Decca was engaged in heated conversation with Cliff, he slipped into the kitchen to ask Virginia if Decca could stay with them after he left. ‘I’m sure she will be so lonely. If you could just keep her for the weekend I can’t tell you how much I would appreciate it.’20 She told him she was going away that weekend to a Democratic convention but agreed that Decca should go with her, to take her mind off Esmond’s departure for an RCAF training depot at Halifax, Nova Scotia. ‘Within days,’ Virginia wrote, ‘we had become devoted to Decca.’ They referred to her jokingly as ‘our refugee’ and she fitted very well into the untidy mêlée of the extended family, pets and stray visitors that peopled the farmhouse. Decca wrote to Esmond, ‘Virginia has very kindly – entirely due to you, you clever old thing – asked me to stay as long as I want, but of course if there’s any chance of seeing you I could scram North in a second.’21 In the event Decca ended up living with the Durrs for two and a half years, and Virginia always said that Esmond had had the whole thing worked out from the start.

On the journey to Washington the Romillys had stopped off at New Orleans for a two-week holiday. They had wanted to visit the city since they had taken the wrong turning that led them to Miami. Arriving after dark they found a small hotel in the French quarter, which offered rates that were half what was asked by other hotels. A few days later they discovered the reason for the low price: it was a brothel. This discovery amused rather than worried them for they were on a second honeymoon and it was a romantic interlude, emotions heightened by their imminent parting. ‘Actually while the rate-per-room was listed as per night, one was expected to get out after a couple of hours,’ Decca explained, ‘to make room for the next people. However we stuck it out for the 2 weeks, much to the annoyance of the nice Madame . . .’22 The only thing that spoiled the interlude for Decca was the ‘vile’ attitude of the white population to the blacks: ‘I found them extremely depressing,’ she wrote.23

Although Esmond was not aware of it, Decca had plans of her own. She knew that Esmond would consider it foolhardy to encumber herself with a child at such a time, but she was determined to conceive before he left her. Within a month of Esmond’s departure for Canada, Decca knew she had been successful. Her baby was due early the following year. During the summer the Romillys wrote to and telephoned each other several times a week. Their letters, preserved today in the library of Ohio State University,24 not only reveal the deep love they felt for each other (‘Darlingest Angel . . . I have missed you so much . . . it’s been like a prolonged dull kind of stomach ache,’ Esmond wrote), but also that Decca could be as funny and sparkling as Nancy. Telling Esmond how she and the Durrs had played ‘the Marking Game’, where players allot marks out of ten to the subject under discussion, she wrote: ‘Va [Virginia] fell on it as a tiger on a piece of juicy meat. I can see we’ll be playing it constantly . . . In spite of the fact that Virginia, Ann and Mrs F were marking Cliff 10 for nearly everything, and Ann was trying to sabotage you and me with low marks, you came out top for Brains, Force and Sex Appeal. We tied with a low of 18 out of a possible 40 for Sweetness.’25 She referred to Esmond’s camp as ‘Camp Boredom’ and her letters were sprinkled with Mitford-speak.

Here, too, are Esmond’s acute perceptions of how the war was going, and his own shift in mood. He had entered the Canadian Air Force in the ranks. Before long he had applied for a commission as a pilot officer. ‘There are a great many advantages in every way in being an Officer in England now,’ he explained. He could justify his change of attitude because commissions were awarded based on performance in the courses, not on one’s background, and an added incentive was increased pay. Decca, however, was not to regard this as ‘the Price of Principles’, it was simply that he was ‘absolutely using every particle of the good in the situation and none of the bad’.26

As summer turned into autumn he was moved to Saskatchewan for advanced training before being sent to Europe. His mother, Nellie Romilly, wrote that she was thrilled to hear he was to be in London and Decca forwarded it, remarking gloomily that it seemed Nellie could hardly wait to apply for a posthumous VC for Esmond. Meanwhile, she had found a job in an exclusive dress shop, Weinberger’s, which paid well (if one discounted the ‘damages’ she was always having to pay for because she was clumsy), and through her work (‘Weinbergering’, she called it) she met members of ‘the rich set’ in Washington. By now Esmond knew about the baby, but her employer did not and Decca was slightly concerned when Mrs Weinberger drew attention to the fact that ‘Mrs Romilly’s waistline appears to be rather thick’.27 Decca took to wearing a corset, until she fainted one day and Virginia made her leave it off. Esmond, too, could be very funny: on 11 September he wired Decca with a standard message that he had chosen from a book of templates: ‘On this occasion of your birthday may we offer our congratulations and express our pleasure at having been allowed to serve you in the past together with the hope that we may continue to do so in the future. Romilly.’28

The couple saw each other occasionally. Once, Decca bussed up to Montreal to meet him and he parked their old car in the street outside the boarding-house where she was staying. Next morning they found that the trash collectors, who thought it had been abandoned, had cleared it away. She found him deeply concerned that his application for a commission might be turned down because during his medical it had been discovered that he had suffered a mastoid in his childhood. Here, for once, Nellie proved helpful to him. She personally contacted Beaverbrook and Churchill to see if anything could be done. At first it seemed hopeless: ‘Experience has shown that those who have suffered from mastoid cannot stand heights,’ Beaverbrook wrote. ‘I am told the regulations are severely adhered to . . . it seems he must seek a ground job.’29 But with these big guns firing on his behalf Esmond was cleared to fly, having proved in a practical manner that he could stand flying at great heights, but only as a navigator, not a pilot. Almost as an afterthought Nellie mentioned to Esmond that his cousin Diana Churchill had told her that Lord Lothian had seen Decca in Washington and reported that she was pregnant – Esmond had forgotten to tell his mother this news.

Meanwhile Max Mosley, Diana’s fourth child, was born on 13 April. The Mosleys had given up Wootton a few months earlier and moved into Savehay Farm at Denham, Buckinghamshire, the house Cimmie had loved and left to Mosley. Cimmie had been dead six years, and Mosley’s Curzon sisters-in-law had drawn further away from him, though remaining in contact because of Cimmie’s children. Mosley needed a base nearer London and, anyway, it had become financially impossible to continue to run both establishments; indeed, there was even talk of letting Savehay. When the German radio project folded due to the outbreak of war Mosley was virtually ruined. Diana estimates that he put £100,000 of his own money (well over £2 million today) into the BUF. He was now reliant on family trusts, under the supervision of his sisters-in-law, to pay the school fees for Cimmie’s two sons, and even to bring out his elder daughter Vivien.30 This caused significant bad feeling, because the sisters were determined not to allow Mosley to use any money from the trust fund to finance the ailing and unpopular BUF and were suspicious of him.

As Diana had said to Hitler, Mosley continued to campaign for peace between the two countries until the declaration of war, after which he argued for a negotiated peace. It was not until 9 May 1940, a few weeks after Max’s birth, when Hitler squashed any remaining doubt of his intention to dominate Europe, that Mosley made a statement to the effect that the BUF was at the disposal of the British armed forces. He then advised members that he expected them ‘to resist the foreign invasion with all that is in us’. He also attempted to join his old regiment. None of this did anything to change the public perception of Mosley. He was by now the most hated, and even feared, figure in public life in England. Although he never actively supported Hitler – it was Mussolini whom he, along with Winston Churchill in the early 1930s, had always regarded as ‘the most interesting man in Europe’ – neither had he condemned him. He was regarded by the majority in Britain, including most politicians, as a dangerous Hitlerite who, should Germany be successful in invading Britain, which looked ominously possible in May 1940, would end up as a Germano-British puppet dictator reporting to his Nazi masters.31

Although Mosley’s two sole contacts with Hitler had been through Diana, her frequent visits to Germany to further the radio project, her meetings with Hitler and Hitler’s presence at the Mosleys’ marriage ceremony harmed Mosley because these events appeared to the British public to demonstrate a close relationship between him and Hitler. We now know that such a relationship never existed, and Mosley always insisted that the puppet-dictator scenario was never a possibility. He wished to be Britain’s leader all right, but not under Hitler. He saw Fascism strictly in terms of its application in Britain as a political expediency, not subject to Germany or Italy. Without straying into the details of a repulsive ideology, or the fact that Mosley preached the overthrow of one of the oldest successful forms of democratic government in the world, according to his own lights Mosley was a patriot who sought peace with all Britain’s sovereign possessions intact. His biggest fear was that war with Germany would cost Britain the Empire and, of course, history proved him right. Years later Diana told her stepson Nicholas Mosley that her relationship with Hitler had ruined her life. ‘And’, she added, ‘I think it ruined your father’s.’32

We do not know precisely what Hitler had in mind for Britain if his invasion plans had been successful, but we know what he thought of Mosley: in May 1940, at about the time when the BEF was trapped on the beaches of Normandy, Hitler spoke of him to an adjutant. ‘After our meal,’ Gerhard Engel wrote in his diary, ‘a long conversation and dialogue from Hitler about Mosley, [he said that] Mosley might have been able to prevent this war. He would never have become a populist leader, but he could have been the intellectual leader of true German–British communication. He [Hitler] is convinced that Mosley’s role hasn’t run its course yet.’33 Although Diana is adamant that this was never what Mosley intended, and that ‘Mosley would never have accepted such a role’,34 had the Germans successfully invaded Britain it is possible that Mosley would have been a prime candidate for the position of Fascist overlord.35 Diana disagrees. At forty-three he was too young, she said. A more likely candidate, she feels, would have been Lloyd George, a much older man who had been a great figure in the First World War, ‘like Pétain in France. Also Lloyd George greatly admired Hitler and they got on extremely well together, which Hitler and Mosley never did.’36 Lloyd George’s admiration of Hitler is historical fact. As late as 1936 he regarded Hitler as ‘the greatest leader in the world’, and even told him so during a visit to Germany.37

On 23 May the Mosleys drove to their London apartment. Mosley had given up the house in Grosvenor Road and bought a flat in a modern building a short distance away, in Dolphin Square. As they drew up they saw a group of men waiting near the entrance. They were plain-clothes policemen and produced a warrant for Mosley’s arrest. Although Mosley must have recognized that he was deeply unpopular he had never done anything illegal and both he and Diana thought that the matter would be quickly resolved, that a trial would exonerate him. But there was no charge, and there was never a trial.

In the previous summer, when war was known to be imminent, an Emergency Powers Act had been rushed through Parliament. An amendment to Rule 18B of this act, made in the following months, enabled the Home Secretary to arrest and detain without trial anyone of ‘hostile origin or association’ if this was believed necessary for the defence of the realm. In May 1940, when Hitler’s troops advanced clear across Europe and there was justifiable fear of an invasion, ‘a wave of fifth-column hysteria swept the country’.38 Churchill’s new National Government decided to arrest and detain enemy aliens, Fascists and Communists, on the grounds that they were a potential security risk, and also for their own safety. During the First World War German nationals had been badly treated by angry British citizens. Accordingly, Rule 18B was amended, and under Rule 18B(1a) the government was now empowered to imprison indefinitely, without trial, any member of an organization which, in the Home Secretary’s view, was subject to foreign control, or whose leaders were known to have had association with leaders of enemy governments, or who sympathized with the system of government of enemy powers. This may be regarded as poetic justice by some, for although Mosley argued hotly that his arrest and incarceration were against rights laid down in Magna Carta, there is good reason to believe that had his party ever come to power those rights would have been sacrificed by him for expediency. He had, after all, proposed similar legislation in 1931 to combat mass unemployment.39

The following day Diana visited Mosley in Brixton Prison, and found, with some difficulty, a solicitor willing to represent him. Many of the BUF officials had been arrested with Mosley, and Diana agreed to perform a few tasks for the party, such as paying outstanding wages. When she returned to Denham and her children, the police were hard on her heels, with a warrant to search the house. From documents at the Public Record Office we now know that Diana was not arrested at the same time as Mosley because the security services wished to keep her under surveillance. Her phone was tapped, her mail intercepted, her movements and contacts recorded during the entire time that she was at liberty. Within a short time she was informed that Savehay was to be requisitioned for the war effort, and she began to pack.

Sydney and Unity, who were frequent visitors to Savehay Farm, came on the bus from High Wycombe, and Lord Berners, another frequent visitor, also called to cheer her up. Pam came to the rescue, offering to take in Diana, the babies and Nanny Higgs at Rignell House until things had sorted themselves out. Meanwhile Diana visited Mosley once a week and took in books and old country clothes at his request. Not wanting to worry her, he told her that everything was fine, and it was a long time before she discovered that the cells allotted to BUF prisoners were infested with bed-bugs and lice. On 29 June, Diana was also taken into custody and government records show that it was always intended that she should be. Any doubts that might have existed were swept away when several members of her own family freely advised officials that Diana was at least as dangerous as Mosley, if not more, for it was she who was the friend of Hitler, not he.

Nancy, who knew nothing of the reason for Diana’s frequent visits to Germany – to obtain an airwave – was one of those who informed on her sister. On 20 June, nine days before Diana was arrested, Nancy admitted this to Mrs Hammersley: ‘I have just been round to see Gladwyn40 at his request to tell him what I know . . . of Diana’s visits to Germany,’ she wrote. ‘I advised him to examine her passport to see how often she went. I also said I regard her as an extremely dangerous person. Not very sisterly behaviour but in such times I think it one’s duty.’41 Lord Moyne, Bryan Guinness’s father, wrote to Lord Swinton to inform him ‘of the extremely dangerous character of my former daughter-in-law’.42 He submitted as supportive evidence a two-page memorandum based on the testimony of his grandsons’ (Jonathan and Desmond) governess, who recounted statements and opinions that she claimed to have heard or overheard Diana making. Irene Ravensdale wrote to the Home Secretary saying virtually the same thing: that Diana was as dangerous as Mosley.

As a result of surveillance of and information-gathering on Diana, the head of MI5, Brigadier Harker, recommended that ‘this extremely dangerous and sinister young woman should be detained at the earliest possible moment’.43 He understood that she had been the principal channel of information between Mosley and Hitler, had been deeply involved in the radio project from which ‘all the profits were to go to Mosley [sic]’, and not least because she clearly approved of Unity Mitford’s disloyal behaviour and friendship with Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Streicher.44 Clearly, the government knew everything about the radio project, and of Mosley’s involvement, probably through Bill Allen. Diana states that Mosley was aware of Bill Allen’s involvement with the Secret Service. ‘He always told us that he was an agent. Mosley never minded. He said he had nothing to hide. The secrecy about the radio station was only to prevent the press from knowing.’45 Nevertheless, every movement of Mosley and Diana, for many years previous to the war and since, had been reported and, notably, Bill Allen was not among the eight hundred members of the BUF who were imprisoned under Rule 18B.

Although she was still breastfeeding her baby, Diana opted to leave him with his nurse. She was told ‘to pack enough clothes for a few days’ and in turn she left instructions to her staff to continue packing for their planned departure for Rignell House. She was then driven to Holloway Prison. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the hatred felt for Mosley and the date of her arrest, she was treated badly. Her reception was rough and on her first night she was given a dark, dirty basement cell containing a thin, worn mattress placed upon a bare damp floor. The only window was blocked with sandbags. She could neither eat the food nor drink the tea, and was too cold, even though it was midsummer and she had not undressed, and was in too much pain, since her breasts were full of milk, to sleep. In short, life was made as uncomfortable as possible for her, and far more so than was necessary. A mutual friend had once told her of a conversation with Churchill. The two men had been visiting the slums of Liverpool and Churchill was moved by the misery and degradation. ‘Imagine,’ he said. ‘Imagine how terrible it would be, never to see anything beautiful, never to eat anything savoury, never to say anything clever.’ These words often came back to Diana during her years in Holloway.46

Later she was given a better cell, in that it was dry. It was six feet wide by nine feet long and contained a hard single bed with harsh calico sheets that felt like canvas and stained blankets. There was a hard chair and a small table. Under the chair was an enamel chamber-pot and on a three-cornered shelf was a chipped basin and jug. From the ceiling hung a single dim light. There were other Fascist women there, and innocent women of Italian and German origin who were married to British men but who came within the scope of Rule 18B. The support of these women helped Diana to cope with her imprisonment, though she never lost her anger at those who imposed it, and she never became accustomed to the unnecessary filthy squalor in which the prisoners were obliged to live. One inmate, a German Jew who had been a prisoner at Dachau before 1939, when it was a concentration camp rather than an extermination centre, and had escaped to England, complained that Holloway was dirtier than Dachau. But Diana’s worst deprivation was, naturally, being parted from her babies. In view of the conditions in Holloway, she had been wise to leave the eleven-week-old Max in a healthier environment, but she suffered all the anguish of any mother parted from her baby and her two-year-old toddler. Her only consolation was in knowing that they were safe. Pam took in the Mosley babies and Nanny Higgs at Rignell House where they remained for the next eighteen months. After that Sydney arranged for them to board with the MacKinnon family at Swinbrook House where she could see them every day.

With Diana’s children and the farm animals, the war years for Pam were busy and not unhappy, although Derek was away a great deal of the time. With his scientific ability Derek Jackson would have been of huge value to the war effort as part of Professor Lindemann’s team at Oxford, but he demanded to be allowed to join the RAF during 1940. Lindemann fought to keep him, but a direct intervention by Churchill freed Derek to join the fighting, and he quickly demonstrated his ability in this field as in others. Posted to a night-fighter squadron as radio operator and gunner he brought to this work the same fearless attitude that he always displayed when hunting or racing. Within months he had been awarded the DFC and during the course of the war was responsible for bringing down at least five enemy aircraft, and several others that were ‘unconfirmed’. He also earned the AFC, an OBE and the American Legion of Merit.

For Diana the time dragged interminably, for the BUF women lived in far worse conditions than their male counterparts. Although the men suffered from bed-bugs and were locked up for twenty-one hours a day in Brixton, conditions at Holloway were almost Dickensian. When a bomb fell and hit a main sewer the ground floor of the prison was awash in urine for three days as the lavatories overflowed. There was no water for washing or cleaning and almost immediately the women went down with food poisoning. Convicted prisoners were evacuated to a safer location since it was recognized that Holloway would be badly affected by bombing raids on London. Initially, Diana and her fellow Rule 18B inmates were locked into their cells at night, lights out at five o’clock, and the distant sound of nightly air-raids made the long, freezing winter nights a hell of noise and apprehension. What sustained Diana through the early days was her belief that her incarceration was temporary. Had she known it would last three and a half years, she feels she would have preferred to die. The cells were unlocked as soon as the local air-raid siren sounded so that prisoners would not be trapped in the event of a direct hit, and the women huddled together and chatted to while away the time when noise made sleep impossible. Diana was popular because she could always make them smile, and inevitably she became a sort of leader because she could articulate their problems. Also they sympathized with her over her separation from her babies. Usually during air-raids Diana went to sit with a woman who had a ground-floor cell.

One consolation during these long months of misery was provided by a German woman, who had been given permission to bring with her a wind-up gramophone and dozens of records: Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Handel, Debussy and Wagner. She held concerts in a room across the yard. ‘Despite the tiresome pauses while the gramophone was wound up,’ Diana recalled, ‘these concerts were heavenly. There is nothing like music for transporting one a thousand miles from hateful surroundings into realms of bliss.’47 But throughout her imprisonment the highlight of her week was a letter from Mosley, who she learned had grown a beard, ‘Guess what colour it is – red!! At least quite a lot of it – silver threads among the gold.’ Mosley used his time in prison as an opportunity to study literature and languages. In his autobiography he would write, ‘Plato’s requirement of withdrawal from life for a considerable period of study and reflection before entering the final phase of action was fulfilled in my case, though not by my own volition.’ His letters kept Diana informed of his daily life, his studies, his love for her. He called her ‘my precious darling’, and ‘my darlingest one’. On the few occasions when the letters were held up for a day or two, Diana plunged into near despair.

As months went by she was allowed occasional visits from members of the family. Even Nancy visited after a year or so, never letting Diana know that she had ‘shopped’ her, but as usual it was Sydney who was to the fore in offering support. During the entire period of Diana’s imprisonment, no matter how difficult it was to travel, Sydney was a regular visitor to Holloway for the weekly quarter of an hour with Diana when she would impart news of the children and the family. Sydney spent four to six hours travelling and was generally obliged to wait for up to an hour in the damp, grimy prison waiting room before Diana was fetched. Sydney also visited Pam and the Mosley babies whenever possible. Later, she took all Diana’s children to the prison, but she was expecting sympathy from the wrong quarter when she wrote to Decca about the conditions: ‘They have no water and no gas, so can’t cook, they get 1 pint of water a day each for washing cooking and drinking, and there is none at all for the lavatories. Diana says the smell is terrible.’48

Nancy was unrepentant that her intervention had helped put Diana – to whom she referred in contemporary correspondence as ‘Mrs Quisling’ – in prison. Though she loved Diana she had seen hardly anything of her since the publication of Wigs on the Green four years earlier, and she clearly felt that her sister deserved punishment for supporting and encouraging a regime that had turned Europe upside down and endangered millions of promising young lives. Soon London was under blitz bombing and this alone seemed sufficient justification. Diana and her fellow prisoners were in the thick of it, too, of course, and Holloway suffered a direct hit on B wing, belying the rumour that the prison was protected because the Germans knew Diana was in there. But Nancy’s house in Blomfield Road was especially vulnerable: it was in the sightline of German bombers aiming for Paddington Station. Her reports of the bombing, once it began in the late summer of 1940, make baleful reading even though she sprinkled her letters liberally with merriment. Prod had survived Dunkirk and his regiment had performed well, but he was mostly away, leaving her alone through the air-raids. She wrote to Violet Hammersley after one raid:

Ten hours is too long of concentrated noise and terror in a house alone. The screaming bombs . . . simply make your flesh creep, but the whole thing is so fearful that they are actually only a slight added horror. The great fires everywhere, the awful din which never stops & wave after wave of aeroplanes, ambulances tearing up the street and the horrible unnatural blaze of searchlights all has to be experienced to be understood . . . in every street you can see a sinister little piece roped off with red lights round it, or roofs blown off, or every window out of a house . . . People are beyond praise, everyone is red-eyed and exhausted but you never hear a word of complaint or down heartedness . . . Winston was admirable wasn’t he, so inspiring . . .49

A few weeks later she had become so accustomed to the bombing that she could write, ‘People here pay no attention whatever now to the bombs and if somebody does take cover you can be sure they are just up from the country.’ She had changed her job at the first-aid post and now looked after evacuees and those bombed out of their homes. David came down to London for the winter and as the mews was having some essential repairs carried out – when builders could be found – Nancy opened up 26 Rutland Gate and moved in with him, taking some of her own furniture from Blomfield Road. Like many people with spare rooms, they took in homeless people for a short period, while accommodation was found for them. From October 1940 they had a Jewish refugee family billeted on them. Nancy liked them. ‘On the day after they arrived,’ she wrote, ‘Farve . . . got up at 5.30 to light the boiler for them and charming Mr Sockolovsky who helped him, said to me, “I did not think the Lord would have risen so early.” Wasn’t it biblical?’50

Shortly afterwards, all the empty rooms in the house were requisitioned for other Jewish families evacuated from the East End.51 When Sydney arrived in London after a bomb dropped in Swinbrook and damaged the roof of the cottage, she could see no humour in the situation and was ‘beastly’ to David and Nancy. Although it had already been decided that the house must be sold as soon as possible because they could no longer afford to keep it on, Nancy wrote, ‘she says if she had all the money in the world, she would not ever live in the house after the Jews have had it’.52

What had actually caused Sydney’s outburst of anger was that her once immaculate house was so unkempt. In mitigation Nancy had only one maid to help her while Sydney had run the establishment as a family home with half a dozen loyal staff. Nancy admitted that the house was rather dirty, ‘but it’s only floor dirt which can be scrubbed off’. Even had she been able to afford staff it was impossible to find anyone: all the young women who had once gone into domestic service were now in the services or munitions factories. Nevertheless, the incident caused a chill between mother and daughter for some time. And after a winter living with David, and trying to cater to his requirement of a main meal containing meat every evening, and putting up with his irascibility, Nancy was pretty fed up with her father, too.

Like all other families, the Mitfords each had their own worries, which the war somehow made harder to shoulder. Nancy, tired from working and trying to run the house, and fully aware of Prod’s serial adultery, was depressed that her marriage was a failure, David, increasingly ill and lonely, was missing Sydney but was unable to live with her ridiculous support of the enemy. Sydney was worried about all her children and grandchildren: Tom in the Army, Diana in prison, the babies staying with Pam, Decca in the USA, Debo who was now unhappy even at her beloved Swinbrook, and, of course, the full-time care of the incontinent and mentally impaired Unity. It is not surprising that tempers flared occasionally. But despite her disagreement with Sydney even Nancy saw how unfair it was that the burden of caring for Unity should fall entirely on her mother. ‘Muv has been too wonderful with her and has absolutely given up her whole life,’ she reported to Decca, while their father was being simply beastly about Bobo. ‘He hardly ever goes near her, and has never been there to relieve Muv and give her a chance to have a little holiday.’53

As the bombing worsened, Tom wrote advising Sydney to prepare for invasion. Nancy’s version of Sydney’s reaction to the Jews occupying her house must be compared with Sydney’s own letters at the same time. On the subject of evacuees she wrote to Decca, ‘we have about 70 at Rutland Gate . . . about 50 of them Jews, but it’s not very comfortable [for them] as there is no furniture but straw palliasses on the floor. The families have a room each to themselves which they go into during the day time but they all troop down to the basement at night . . . it is really sad to see the plight of the homeless . . .’54 Nancy was so fanciful in her letters, and sometimes in her speech, that it is difficult for the researcher to know what is fact and what is invention but in this case Sydney’s own mild reaction appears more likely to be the accurate version of the incident. As Sydney was wont to say, ‘There is a small knife concealed in each of Nancy’s letters.’55 As soon as the mews was habitable Nancy returned there and together with Mabel, the parlourmaid, two or three friends and a cook from the Women’s Volunteer Service, she looked after the constantly shifting residents of 26 Rutland Gate.

It was a chance request from a friend in the War Office, at this point, that changed the course of Nancy’s life, although this is only evident with hindsight. She was asked to ‘worm’ her way by any means possible into the Free French Officers Club and find out what they were up to. ‘They are all here under assumed names,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘and all splashing mysteriously large sums of money about and our people can’t find out anything about them and are getting very worried.’56 With her social contacts it was only a matter of time before Nancy was able to comply with the request and as a result she met André Roy,57 a thirty-six-year-old ‘glamorous Free-Frog’, with whom she fell in love and had a light-hearted affair lasting into the following year. Nancy had never complained about Prod’s infidelities though she was deeply hurt and often lonely. During her relationship with André Roy, she came into her own again, sparkling, shimmering and wittily ornamenting London Society.

Sydney, Debo and Unity returned to life at the cottage at Swinbrook, and although they were away from the terror of London bombing raids, life was anything but idyllic. As Unity recovered her strength she became as irrational and as temperamental as David had once been, but without his fun and charm. Debo was the one most affected by this, just as she had been the most affected by the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. On one occasion when David visited them for a weekend Debo wrote to Decca graphically describing the tensions in the house. ‘Muv and Bobo are getting awfully on my nerves. I must go away soon, I think. There was a dreadful row at breakfast this morning and I shouted at Muv in front of Mrs Timms. Farve shook me like he did you after you’d been to Mrs Rattenberg’s [sic] trial.’58 Despite this, she admitted, ‘I hadn’t seen him for ages . . . he was heaven. He was bloody at the scene where he shook me, but otherwise very nice.’59 Unity had commandeered two large tables in the small sitting room for her collage work, Debo wrote,

and if I so much as put my knitting on one of them she hies up and shrieks BLOODY FOOL in my ear which becomes rather irksome . . . She absolutely hates me . . . She is completely different to what she was and I think the worst thing . . . is that she’s completely lost her sense of humour and never laughs . . . Muv is fairly all right but awfully bitter and therefore it is sometimes very difficult. I must say she’s wonderful with Bobo and never loses her temper or gets impatient even when she’s being maddening . . . if you ever come across the Kennedys (the Ambassador here) do take note of Kick, she is a dear girl and I’m sure you’d like her.60

Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy had fallen in love with Andrew Cavendish’s elder brother, Billy, Lord Hartington, who was heir to the Duke of Devonshire, the massive Chatsworth estate, land and properties in Yorkshire, Sussex and Ireland, and an income of a quarter of a million pounds a year. Kick was eighteen and Billy was twenty when they first met but while Billy’s antecedents were so impressive that he had been suggested as a possible future husband for Princess Elizabeth, the Kennedys, despite Joseph Kennedy Senior’s ambassadorship, were still regarded by many Americans as upstart Boston Irish who had made good only within living memory. But it was neither the age of the couple nor even their cultural differences that cast doom upon the relationship. The Cavendish family were staunch Protestants and ferociously anti-Catholic. ‘I am a black Protestant,’ the Duke of Devonshire was wont to say, ‘and I am proud of it . . . Papists owe a divided allegiance, they put God before their country.’61 The Kennedys were bitterly entrenched Catholics. The couple knew from the start that there was no future to their courtship because of irreconcilable religious differences, and Billy described it as ‘a Romeo and Juliet affair thing’.62 Kick was heartbroken when her father insisted she return to the USA in 1939 and by the time Debo wrote her letter to Decca, Kick was already working for the Herald Tribune in Washington, the rival paper to the Meyers’ Post.

By now Debo and Andrew Cavendish had announced their engagement, and to make things easier at the cottage Debo often went to visit friends or family, and spent some time with Andrew’s parents at Chatsworth. Andrew was at Sandhurst before he joined the Coldstream Guards, but the couple were able to meet occasionally.63 Their wedding was scheduled for the following spring when they would both be twenty-one. In the meantime Debo worked in the garden, for which she developed an interest that surprised her, and rode a four-year-old piebald horse that she had bred from her old hunter. She trained it to pull a pony cart, which she painted blue and red – ‘It is very useful now there is so little petrol,’ Sydney wrote to Decca.64 Everyone was pleased about the engagement: Nancy wrote, ‘He is a dear little fellow & I am sure she will be happy. Also it will be easier for Muv as she [Debo] and Bobo get on so badly.’65 In December Debo moved out of Swinbrook when she was loaned a cottage at Cliveden, where she had agreed to work in the canteen of the Canadian Military Hospital.

In this darkest time of the war, when Britain was fighting for its life, little thought was given to the appalling conditions suffered by those imprisoned under Rule 18B. Indeed, large segments of the population would have been heartily in favour of making things as uncomfortable as possible for internees. Diana’s scorn of the dirt, poor food, filthy lavatories and inadequate washing facilities helped her to rise above the horror of it all. She ignored the noise of the nightly bombs that fell terrifyingly close, shaking the walls of the prison and setting her fellow inmates screaming or whimpering, because she hardly cared whether she lived or died. But when Jonathan was taken to hospital for an appendectomy and she was refused permission to visit him, she found her situation almost unbearable. All day and all night, she paced the floor of her cell, worrying about her child lying seriously ill, and probably asking for her. In that first winter in prison she began to suspect that her imprisonment might be intended to last for the duration of the war. This was the nadir of Diana’s life.

As 1940 drew to an end, things were tough for the rest of the Mitford family too, but not as gloomy as they might have been. None of them had been bombed out or injured, and they had Debo’s wedding to look forward to. Debo and Andrew were to live in a small house in Stanmore, Middlesex, close to where Andrew was to be stationed. Pam and Derek had a house near by. ‘I expect we will be terrifically poor,’ Debo wrote to Diana, ‘but think how nice it will be to have as many dear dogs and things as one likes without anyone saying they must get off the furniture. I do so wish you weren’t in prison, it will be vile not having you to go shopping with, only we’re so poor I shan’t have much of a trousseau.’66