JESSICA MITFORD’S memorial meeting, held in London’s West End in February 1997, possessed some fugitive elements of a last hurrah for those who had felt that they “knew” the notorious sisters of Swinbrook, and the layers of lore that had sprung up about and around them. In tribute to “Decca” and her life-long struggle against the ghouls of the funeral industry, an affordable to say nothing of cheap, but empty, coffin had been set up on a trestle in the lobby of the Lyric Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. Alas, this conformity with her last instructions—her actual funeral in San Francisco had featured a bargain-basement undertaker—was enough to put off her sister Deborah or “Debo,” better known as the Duchess of Devonshire and the chatelaine of Chatsworth House. Having kindly paid for the expense of hiring the theater, she decided to absent herself from such a macabre and populist spectacle. Diana, Lady Mosley, still loyal to the memory of her Blackshirt husband, was fit enough to make the trip from Paris but did not even consider doing so. (“Do you ever hear from Diana?” I once inquired of Decca. “We sort of bowed to each other from a great distance at dear Nancy’s funeral,” she replied glacially, “but apart from that it’s been absolute non-speakers ever since Munich.”)
The meeting was packed to the rafters and, as one of those invited to give an address, I had the privilege of being introduced to Eddie Romilly, nephew of Decca’s first husband, Esmond. I thought I could find a distinct resemblance to the photographs of the young man whose plane had gone down over the freezing North Sea in November 1941. And then I met an old and beloved acquaintance in the form of Mary Churchill, now the widowed Lady Soames. Winston Churchill’s elder daughter, and biographer of her mother Clementine, she must have been by a considerable distance the most—not to say the only—Tory person present. It would take more than a coffin in the lobby to keep her away, as it turned out. And she told me the following story, which helped explain her devoted attendance.
Like all the Churchill girls (“gels,” as she phrased it) she had been more than a little in love with her cousin Esmond. “We were all frightfully jealous when Decca just ran off with him to Spain, and then to America. And then of course darling Esmond was killed—but posted as ‘missing’ because he’d been lost at sea.” (From the United States, Esmond had volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force as soon as war was declared. He wouldn’t have known it, but William Faulkner had used the same method of oblique enlistment a generation before.) This loss had left Decca marooned as a young widow in Washington, D.C., nursing the baby girl she had been carrying when Romilly’s plane went down. Thus, while the Prime Minister was making ready to cross the Atlantic for a vital summit meeting in Washington with President Roosevelt, he had been confronted with a delegation of his daughters, all insisting that he promise to do something for Decca. He was as good as his word. He invited her to his breakfast room at the White House. There he broke it to her that he had asked for a detailed intelligence report, and could say with regret that there was no further point in regarding Esmond as still “missing.” This she had expected, and took with stoicism, while holding Esmond’s baby. The Prime Minister then handed her a decent sum of money in cash, some of it contributed by his own daughters. He went on to tell her that he had spoken to Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, and received an assurance that a spirited young English girl of Decca’s attainments could be sure of a job somewhere on his diplomatic staff. At this, Churchill found his gift of money flung down onto the bed. “If you imagine for one second,” breathed the outraged widow, “that I would even consider working for that old monster of appeasement, then you are quite, quite wrong. I’d sooner starve.” There was some justice in this, as Churchill well knew. (Halifax had been packed off to the Washington job in the first place partly to get him out of the way, and to weaken the Tory faction that might still favor a separate peace with Hitler.) On his return to England, to make his report to Parliament and the Cabinet on the gravest struggle in which Britain had ever been engaged, the Prime Minister was first required to make a report to his daughters. “And how did it go with dear Decca?” “Pretty bloody, actually.”
Some readers of this book may well feel that the whole thing has been slightly overdone, and that the daughters of privilege and eccentricity were altogether too fond of hogging the stage. Is it really true that, when Esmond and Decca eloped to Spain and took their stand with the Republic, the foreign secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, sent a Royal Navy destroyer to the port of Bilbao to bring them back? And if so, who did they think they were? Actually, the point of the story is that the British establishment did do exactly that, so eager was it to avoid any scandal or inconvenience to the upper classes, but that the young couple refused to set foot on board, and that Esmond wrote to his uncle Winston, pointing out that a victory for Hitler and Mussolini in Spain would hardly be congruent with British interests in the Mediterranean. (It is also a fact that Churchill soon after reversed his initial support for General Franco, though Decca in these pages is sure that the letter can’t have made that much difference.)
And how many families could you conjure to mind, one of whose female scions or scionettes wrote a brilliant early novel satirizing fascism, one of whom had Josef Goebbels as her best man when married, one of whom attempted suicide for love of the Führer, and one of whom seriously plotted to get close to the Führer and shoot him dead? The first of these was Nancy, whose anti-Mosley novel Wigs on the Green was succeeded by later triumphs such as The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, and—some say satirizing the very embassy in Paris occupied by Mary Churchill’s husband—Don’t Tell Alfred. The second was Diana, considered by Evelyn Waugh and many other contemporaries the most beautiful woman of her day, who not only had Goebbels as her best man when marrying the leader of British fascism, but also received a personal gift from Hitler on the happy day. (He gave her a framed and signed photograph of himself.) The third, Unity Valkyrie Mitford, unimprovably named to begin with but cursed by her family nickname of “Boud,” became a poster girl for the Nazi Party not just on account of her vast, blonde appearance but because the Nazis believed, and not without cause, that there were elements in the British aristocracy who could be very useful to them. The fourth of course was Jessica, or “Decca,” who schemed to persuade her sisters that she had undergone a conversion, thereby procure an introduction to Hitler, and then draw her pistol. In later years I sometimes teased her about this missed opportunity, which she admitted she had abandoned for want of courage. “I know.” she would sigh. “It was rather feeble of me.” (The Fleet Street headline if she had succeeded? “Peer’s Red Daughter Murders Leader of New Germany.”) Still, it was some consolation to Decca to know that she had given the Führer at least one bad moment. When Boud told him that her sister had run away to Spain to join the Reds, he put his head in his hands and moaned: “Armes Kind!”
It’s a striking merit of this memoir, in view of all of the above, that Boud comes out of it with the most affectionate if pitying description, that Diana is given full marks for charm and grace, that Debo is depicted as a sweet if faintly dim girl who was dead set from the first on marrying a duke, and that only Nancy is shown to be at all spiteful or malicious. (There was another sister, Pamela by name, and also a long-suffering brother named Tom who was later also to die in the war, but one can’t be expected to keep track of everyone and Decca doesn’t really try.) In the figures of Lord and Lady Redesdale, the former tyrannical but credulous and the latter vague but somehow shrewd, we find the classic elements of English upper-crust eccentricity. With an element of tragedy, too, perhaps: it can’t have been easy to have one son killed, one daughter hopelessly maimed by her suicide attempt, and three of the others famous truants with a tendency to spill the family beans. The Brontë vicarage at Haworth seems humdrum by comparison.
One thing Swinbrook House appears to have taught at least one of its daughters was an absolute abhorrence of racial bigotry and chauvinism. As she puts it in rather a feline way, her father was unaware of the notion of “discrimination.” He thought all wogs were basically the same. “When one of our cousins married an Argentinian of pure Spanish descent, he commented, ‘I hear that Robin’s married a black.’ ” Hons and Rebels was published in 1960, by a woman who had already made quite a contribution to the American civil rights movement, and though she makes it plain in these pages that once she and Esmond set foot in America they realized that it was ideal for refugees from the Old World like themselves, she also notices every time anyone makes a hateful remark. She never let up on this to the end of her days. In the 1950s she managed to persuade William Faulkner to sign a petition against the execution of the innocent Willie McGee, a black man falsely accused of rape. (Faulkner said, before she whisked the signed petition away from him, that he thought McGee and his alleged white victim “should both be destroyed”—to which she answered brightly but firmly, “Oh, don’t let’s put that!”) She spent some harrowing hours in a black church with Dr. King, as it was surrounded all night by vigilantes. During her time in the Communist Party, she once told me (and her seeing-through of this Party is slightly prefigured by Hons and Rebels) she learned that suburban white members were avoiding inquiries from the FBI by requesting black members to use the servants’ entrance when coming to “at home” branch meetings. “Well, I let them have it about that. I thought it was an absolute stinker!” Confronted, on the Southern lawn of her old chum Virginia Durr—first introduced in these pages and later celebrated as a doyenne of civil rights—by a man who said of school desegregation that “it don’t make no sense, do it?” she riposted, “Well, to me it do,” and swept away on her heel. Those who tangled with Ms. Mitford always knew they had been in a fight.
Apart from the glimpses it provides of a barely credible English feudal family (who must be credible because they would be quite impossible to invent), this book relates, first, the story of how so many British people were riven between fascism and communism in the 1930s and, second, the tale of a true romance. The two are interwoven so dexterously that one hardly notices the element of social and political history, but the emergence of a Churchillite resistance to fascism—which was the last thing that many on the Marxist left had anticipated—is made more intelligible by Hons and Rebels. And when Decca sets out to delineate the bitter realities of class in those days, she achieves her objective memorably. We come to an understanding of the cynical and broken women she found herself working with, the habitual deference of so many of the lower orders and then—so painfully that one does not notice it at once—the death of her first child in the London slums; a death partly due to her own well-nurtured ignorance in matters of everyday infection.
Perhaps I would better have said “love story” than “true romance.” For all the thrilling escapes and daring transgressions, what moves this narrative most is the absolute love that Decca Mitford had for Esmond. And indeed, her portrait of him is not “romantic” in the sense that some people employ the term: he is represented as often uncouth and selfish and also as gullible when it came to any passing opportunistic scheme but for all that, and contra mundum: “my whole world, my rescuer, the translator of all my dreams into reality, the fascinating companion of my whole adult life—three years, already—and the center of all happiness.”
You may note the three words of mild levity and self-deprecation in the above. Levity, in one form or another, often attaining or exceeding hilarity, was Decca’s forte. Yet you should also note the solemn passage with which Hons and Rebels closes. In a manner that’s only emulated in English writing by Waugh’s Vile Bodies, she takes leave of the decade of fizz and rebellion and irresponsibility and selfishness, and includes herself—and the lost love of her life—in all those foregoing vices. This book had a great success on both sides of the Atlantic because of its “delicious” social comedy and “divine” post-debutante wit but, be in no doubt of it, these pages describe the steady, determined evolution of une femme serieuse.
—CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS