IN OCTOBER 1926 Asthall was sold. David, who by now could hardly bear the haunting, was delighted, though they had no new home to go to as Swinbrook was not yet ready. Twenty-six Rutland Gate, bought by the Redesdales as a London house from which to bring out Diana and her three younger sisters, was let until Christmas.
To economise while waiting to move to Swinbrook, Sydney and the girls went to Paris (the exchange rate was extremely favourable). They stayed in a family hotel in the avenue Victor Hugo, which was round the corner from the Helleus’ apartment in the rue Emil Menier and near the Cours Fenelon, an excellent small school at which Diana was enrolled a few days after their arrival. Tom, who had just left Eton, was in Vienna, deciding whether to take up music professionally or read for the Bar, and perfecting his German.
Paris was an awakening for Diana. She became aware for the first time of the world to which she then and later aspired: an essentially metropolitan milieu, aesthetic and cultured, where concerts, paintings, books, and people who could discuss them intelligently and amusingly, were a daily staple. She also became conscious of the uninhibited male French reaction to a beautiful woman. Helleu had always admired Sydney and his painter’s eye was fascinated by her blonde brood, in particular Diana, whom he frequently likened to a Greek goddess.
For her part, Diana loved the old Paris houses built around courtyards; she loved the Helleus’ drawing room, with its Louis XVI chairs covered in white and pale grey silk, its carved and gilded eighteenth-century wooden frames hanging empty on the white walls; she loved the aesthetic yet practical approach of Helleu himself – and she loved the dazzled admiration which he did not hesitate to express. ‘Tu es la femme la plus voluptueuse que j’ai jamais connu,’ he would tell her. His everyday name for her was ‘beauté divine’.
She was also absorbed by what she was learning at the Cours Fenelon. She would sit in the classroom facing the rue de la Pompe, its windows hermetically sealed against the intrusion of any possible courant d’air, with a dozen or so of her thirty-two fellow pupils to listen to lectures of the highest quality, many given by professors at the Sorbonne. After school she walked alone, 100 yards round the corner, to tea with Nanny at the hotel. It was the first time she had been allowed to walk alone on a city street.
At Christmas, the Mitfords came home to 26 Rutland Gate, which had been furnished by Sydney with all the best pieces from Asthall – the French furniture, a Peronneau portrait of a young man in a powdered wig, his blue velvet coat enhanced by the blue taffeta drawing-room curtains. The Cours Fenelon Christmas holidays were brief, so after only a fortnight Diana returned to Paris.
She was not, of course, allowed to travel alone. No young, unmarried girl who was not even officially ‘out’ could make a journey without a chaperone. In London, the sisters were only allowed to walk the short distance from Rutland Gate to Harrods in pairs, and not until she was twenty-two and had been married for four years did Diana travel on a train by herself. Fortunately, Winston Churchill, who was going to Rome to visit Mussolini, agreed to drop Diana in Paris on the way. With him was Randolph, delighted to be in Diana’s company again, although he did not cut quite the figure he had hoped: a devastatingly rough Channel crossing laid him flat with seasickness.
At the Gare de Lyon, Diana was handed over to one of the two elderly sisters with whom Sydney had arranged that she should lodge. She had a ground-floor bedroom with tightly clamped shutters and was allowed a skimpy bath in a tin tub twice a week. Her new home, 135 avenue Victor Hugo, on the corner of the rue de la Pompe and the avenue Victor Hugo, was considered close enough to the Cours Fenelon, her violin lessons near the Lycée Janson and the Helleus’ apartment for her to be allowed to walk to all three places unchaperoned. It was her first, intoxicating taste of freedom.
She used part of this new-found independence to take a radical step that would never have been allowed at Swinbrook: she had her hair shingled. David, though forced to accept this, did so with jokes which did not hide his disapproval. ‘I shall be very glad when you finish with Frogland and come home,’ he wrote from Rutland Gate. ‘Remember me to M. Helleu when you see him. It seems there is danger of a “small” dance here at the end of the month. Have you or have you not recovered your hair which was cut off. You must not leave it in Paris. That was one of the stipulations. Much love, Redesdale.’ Three weeks later he was writing gloomily, ‘I wish you were coming to the dance, though it will never be much joy taking you about now you have no hair.’
She visited the Helleus constantly. Hungry after an afternoon’s lectures, she would fall upon Mme Helleu’s tea and rich chocolate cake; equally avidly, she would listen as Helleu expounded on paintings, sculpture and fine art on the visits they made together to the Louvre, Versailles and museums. For by now – though his behaviour was always entirely proper – he was infatuated with the lovely young visitor, whom he drew and painted whenever possible. The shower of compliments, the requests to sit for him, the constant references to her sublime beauty from a man of such charm and forceful personality through whose studio the most handsome women of Parisian society had passed, were a heady diet for a girl accustomed only to Nancy’s snubs, Sydney’s discounting of compliments to her children, and Nanny’s endlessly reiterated ‘Nobody’s going to look at you!’
Letters from admirers confirmed what she was slowly beginning to believe. ‘How I would adore to have a picture of you by M. Helleu,’ wrote Jim Lees-Milne:
You must be like Emma Lady Hamilton sitting to Romsey. I dare say you are very vain, and indeed you have cause to be. Haven’t you even a snapshot of yourself? your Parisian self, of course – that you can send me, as I would love to see for myself whether you have still got that Rafael face . . . I am convinced one can never love a friend too much. Though I will confess it now, I always think of you as something even higher than a friend.
In Paris, Diana had begun to meet a few young men. Some took her out to tea after lectures, others invited her to the cinema. Newly conscious of her power, she flirted, as she wrote to her friend Jim Lees-Milne, ‘outrageously. Round the Bois de Boulogne; in a taxi alone with Charlie after dark – you can guess. Don’t feel angry with me – I know it isn’t lovely to be so sensual but it is exciting and wonderful.’ Such expeditions were strictly forbidden, so she would pretend to her two old ladies that she had an extra-long violin lesson or that Helleu wanted her to give him another sitting. Because of their reverence for art and the famous painter, she was never questioned. Only Diana – and, unfortunately, her diary – knew the truth.
At home Sydney was too preoccupied with the forthcoming dance to worry about a child whose letters home were regular and dutiful. Neither of the Redesdales really liked entertaining and, on the rare occasions they had to, made heavy weather of it. ‘[The dance] is turning into an immense bore, and we have 170 acceptances and quite 100 not answered yet but we are rather in hopes most of these won’t come. I think the house would dance 80 couples or so and of course a good many are older people.’ Nevertheless, she found time to send Diana a registered parcel containing a pair of evening knickers and a dark blue silk dress with white spots that would need taking in.
The outstanding tuition at the Cours Fenelon had its effect. Diana’s report for her spring term there, written on 31 March 1927, described her as ‘excellente élève dont nous garderons le meilleur souvenir’, and her conduct and punctuality were both considered ‘parfait’.
There was one bitter blow that spring. In March 1927 Helleu fell desperately ill. Diana was devastated. ‘Nobody I have loved has ever died except perhaps an adorable animal,’ she wrote to Jim. ‘And now a man whom I have almost worshipped, and who has worshipped me for three months, is going to die. I shall never see him again, never hear his voice saying, “Sweetheart, comme tu es belle,” never ring at his door and hear him come to open it with a happy step. How can I bear it?’ Helleu died at the end of the month. For Sydney, who had known him since she was a young girl, it was sad indeed; for Diana, it was the loss not only of a beloved father-figure but of the first man who had loved her as a woman.
When she returned for the Easter holidays, the family had moved into the new house, South Lawn, or, as it was always known, Swinbrook.
A large, square, yellowish building two miles from the village of Swinbrook, South Lawn is half-hidden by trees near the top of a hill. Its sides and fac,ade are dotted with windows – all the children wanted their own bedrooms. On Sundays the family would walk to the beautiful twelfth-century church in Swinbrook, at which David had worshipped even when living at Asthall. They sat in a pew at the back, their appetites sharpened by the delicious smell of freshly baked bread a few inches from their noses – a seventeenth-century benefactor had instituted the custom of giving the poor of the village six large loaves after matins.
Soon after the move David, who had always wanted to put new pews in Swinbrook church, was able to do so and to have them made, as he was determined, of oak. His cousin, Lord Airlie, owned a horse called Master Robert (which had once drawn a plough in Ireland) which he had entered in the Grand National. David put on £10 at 40–1, Master Robert duly came in and the pews were presented to a grateful church. But when David asked the Bishop’s permission to finish each one with a carved horse’s head in honour of Master Robert, this was refused on the ground that it would commemorate ‘ill-gotten gains’.
David was delighted with the move to Swinbrook, but everyone else hated the new house. Nancy called it Swinebrook; Jessica described it as having aspects of a medieval fortress. Inside, though large, it was uncomfortable, cold and without the beauty that had characterised Asthall. It was predominantly yellow-toned: the doors, woodwork and panelling were all of elm, not all of it properly seasoned – as his children pointed out, the bathroom door was so warped that even when locked you could peer in – and the resulting draughts made the whole house icy.
Despite the immense trouble David had taken over its design and building, the house had one major planning fault, which became apparent almost immediately. The children had very little privacy.
There was nowhere like the library in the Asthall barn, with its comfortable sofas, walls lined with books and grand piano, where Tom could play to his heart’s content and Diana could read, both in the sure knowledge that they would not be disturbed. At Swinbrook, the piano was in the drawing room. Tom, who hated people coming in and out while he was playing, would at once stop. Reading was equally circumscribed: the library was David’s study and he would not countenance any of his children sitting there with him. The bedrooms, small, uncomfortable and icy cold, were the last places to which to retire for hours with a book. The only alternative was the large drawing room, with four or five other sisters there, chatting, shrieking or quarrelling.
David, sensitive and intuitive under his fierce exterior, was miserable at his family’s reaction to his longed-for new house. He hated their outspoken dislike of it and he, too, was affected by the pressure of too many personalities – most, in embryo, as strong as his own – crowded into the drawing room. Apart from Tom’s sporadic presence, David was a lone man in a sea of women; neither of the Redesdales had ever considered having menservants, believing them to be dirty, troublesome and given to drink. At one point David could scarcely bear to be in the same room as Unity and Jessica, already veering towards different ends of the political spectrum and constantly arguing at the tops of their voices. Nancy, green eyes glittering, would begin to tease their father, reducing everyone to shrieks, until she went too far and he roared at her.
It was at Swinbrook that his habit of taking a sudden, inexplicable dislike to one of his daughters began. Perhaps because there were so many of them he would, often for no apparent reason, appear to loathe one for days or weeks until, equally mysteriously, she was restored to favour. Only Debo, the youngest, busily trotting about her own concerns and hunting whenever she could, was exempt, even when she developed one of her inexplicable rages, slowly sliding off her chair to roar and scream under the table. As reasoning or remonstrating with her only caused her to redouble the yells, Sydney sensibly issued an edict that everyone was to ignore her. When the rage had run its course Debo would emerge and climb on to her chair again as if nothing had happened.
The move to Swinbrook marked the end of Diana’s childhood. If it had come a year earlier, she would have been heartbroken at leaving Asthall; as it was, she was absorbed in the exciting possibilities that lay ahead. She loved the Cours Fenelon and her life in Paris, she now knew many of Tom’s friends and some of Nancy’s. Even hunting had lost its charm: Diana’s horse was a ‘roarer’, and at sixteen she found the noise it made embarrassing in front of the smart, well-mounted members of the Heythrop hunt. But nothing had prepared her for the reality of Swinbrook.
She found the lack of privacy oppressive; in particular she resented furiously the interruption in the reading which now filled most of her days and had become the major plank in the long process of self-education. Though she never had any desire to go to school, she was determined to learn and Tom and his friends helped, encouraged and suggested. Eventually, she took refuge in the large linen cupboard, sitting on the warm sheets with book and torch. As the younger children grew, they joined her, and called it the Hons Cupboard (the H aspirated as in hen).
Shortly after Diana came home for the Easter holidays there was a family row so cataclysmic that it became the stuff of legend. One day, after writing her diary at her mother’s desk, Diana went out for a walk with Pam. Suddenly, with a shock of horror, she realised that she had left the diary open. It contained not only details of her sittings for Helleu but of her doings with the young men such as Charlie who had taken her out. She and Pam ran back, arriving panting, but it was too late. The storm broke, with accusation of immorality and untrustworthiness. Calling Diana ‘wanton’, Sydney told her: ‘Nobody would ask you to their houses if they knew HALF of what you had done!’ before burning the fated diary. There was no question of returning to the Cours Fenelon, meals were taken in silence, her parents glowering at her furiously, and she was despatched with Nanny and the little ones to a cottage in Devon belonging to a great-aunt. With no money, no books and only her little sisters for company after the delights of Paris, there followed three months of desperate boredom.
One result was to make her determined not to suffer such incarceration again; her letters are spattered with references to ‘reformation’. Another was that, after Devon, even Swinbrook seemed reasonably agreeable, especially now that Nancy treated her more as an equal. They both chafed against parental restraints, they shared the same sense of humour and love of books, and now that Nancy’s acid wit was not so often directed against her, Diana found her sister excellent company – besides, she was fascinated by the friends Nancy was beginning to bring home. All were clever, most were aesthetes and many homosexual – a combination both sisters were to find irresistible all their lives.
They included the Acton brothers, John Sutro, Robert Byron and John Betjeman. Her brother Tom did not entirely approve. ‘I gave the Prof. your various messages,’ he wrote after he had been to stay at Chartwell during Diana’s exile in Devon. ‘He would like you to keep your respectable Oxford friends, and forsake entirely all aesthetes at Oxford and elsewhere.’
Randolph – being Randolph – was blunter. ‘I am afraid the Prof. does not share your views on the desirability of homosexualism. In fact, he said that it was “the very negation of all race survival”. If this is true, as I feel sure it is, I do not see how you can continue to have such a very lenient view on the subject.’ But perhaps the very fact that homosexuals were ‘safe’ was what drew Diana; her father’s frequently expressed prejudice against ‘pansies’ was as nothing compared to what his reaction would have been at finding his young daughter indulging in a clandestine love affair. All the Mitfords had been brought up with the twin concepts of rigid chastity and the idea of one deep love that led, inevitably, to marriage. (When love did not, as in Nancy’s case, lead to marriage, it led to a lifelong fidelity.)
Much of the holidays that summer was spent at Chartwell, partly thanks to the ardent pleading of Randolph, who begged to see her whenever possible. ‘My darling Diana,’ runs a typical letter:
I am so longing to see you before I go back to Eton. I came out of quarantine on Wednesday but do not return until Monday. All my family, including Papa, Mummy and Diana, are deserting me on Saturday and are going to Trent for the weekend. I wonder whether you would be allowed to come here on Saturday for the weekend? I know that the family is broke, as a result of the dear ones’ libel action, and that you are not allowed to travel, but I will come and pick you up, and deposit you again on the Monday. Your Mother may of course think it inconceivable but against this you can urge 1) that you came this time last year under similar conditions, b) that we are cousins, c) that Cousin Moppet is an ideal chaperone, d) that darling Randolph is going back to Eton on Monday and will otherwise be all alone. Of course you may have other plans for the weekend or alternatively be bored to extinction but if you think it at all likely that you will be allowed to come will you ring me up as soon as possible and I will get my mother to write or telephone to your mother? I do so hope you will be allowed to come as Iamso so lonely and have so much I want to tell you and consult you about. Therefore, if you have any affection for poor ‘Randyov’ do your best to come and earn his undying gratitude.
All my love, darling Diana,
Your loving
‘Randyov’
Remember, telephone Westerham 93 as soon as possible.
She came – but she did not respond in the way Randolph wished.
Indulged by his father and treated with coldness and reserve by his mother – Diana believed Clementine was jealous of Winston’s adoration of him – Randolph craved affection, particularly from women. But as Diana was to write to a friend many years later:
Winston’s spoiling . . . made him unbearably cocky. Poor Randolph never grew up. He always behaved badly – you could rely on that. One dreaded him. But there was something touching and affectionate about him and I was very fond of him. He was so full of life, so full of chat, he was very very fond of me and adored my brother. Really, I looked on him almost as another brother.
So she remained sweet, affectionate and sympathetic, but any advances were met with a gentle, amused rebuff or, as Randolph put it, ‘your extraordinarily cruel and callous behaviour’. He was, he wailed, shortly going back to school and would not see her for another four months:
you might accordingly have humoured me, if you have any affection for me at all. I have been so melancholy about it that I have not been able to bring myself to write to you. Please do write and tell me why you were so unkind. Was it because you wished to destroy my love for you? If so you were unsuccessful, for I love you as much as I ever have.
Other letters held out the bait of the Prof, whom they both adored, being present; most ended reproachfully, ‘Goodbye, darling Diana, Your loving but unloved Randy’. So accepted was his devotion that when Diana Churchill wrote to her from Venice, where she was staying with her parents and the Prof, she concluded:
The Prof. is returning to England next week and says that the only thing that reconciles him to this sad but inevitable departure is the fact that he hopes to see the gloomy skies of England lit up by your radiant smile. He would have written to you himself only that he fears this might rupture his friendship with Randy.
Back at Swinbrook in the autumn, the stupor of boredom after the cleverness, fun and male admiration at Chartwell became almost too much to bear. Hours were spent with Nancy, talking and dreaming of love. When she was allowed to attend her first ball, the Radcliffe Infirmary Ball in Oxford in the autumn of 1927, accompanied by Diana Churchill, it was the subject of feverish speculation. Would Prince Charming appear that night? Would Sydney or Cousin Clementine now allow them to go to other dances?
The answer was no in both cases. It was back to the chickens, the village, the rows, the shrieks, the boring walks, the impossibility of being alone – all the familiar components of a life that had begun to seem claustrophobic, while somewhere out there lay the brilliant, artistic, sparkling world she longed for.