THE HOUSE IN which the Mosleys were installed was known as the Parcels House, as it had once been used as the prison’s parcels office. It was separated from the rest of the prison by a high wall, behind which lay a yard – or as the press release put it ‘space for adequate outdoor recreational facilities’ – and a vegetable garden, largely abandoned and covered with grass.
The Parcels House contained two bathrooms, a sitting room, dining room, good-sized kitchen, and sleeping accommodation for about eighteen people, almost entirely in the form of single bedrooms. The floor the Mosleys were given, reached by an echoing stone staircase, consisted of the small dining room, a double bedroom and a small spare bedroom which Mosley sometimes used, a store room, the communal kitchen and a pantry. Like everywhere else in Holloway, the rooms were high ceilinged, dingy and felt cold even in summer.
As far as possible, the three married couples – the Swans, the Mosleys and the de Laessoes – were treated exactly the same as their fellow detainees. In the prison proper, all passages, lavatories and other common rooms were cleaned by prison labour, and the same principle was followed in the Parcels House. ‘I’ll give you sex offenders, they are clean and honest,’ said Miss Davies, one of Diana’s favourite warders.
Within their quarters, the three couples had complete freedom during the day. Only at night were the doors of their ‘block’ locked. They could also do their own cooking and were allowed to import some of their own furniture, on the grounds that there was ‘civilian’ furniture in the boarding houses in which lived their fellow detainees on the Isle of Man.
By the same reasoning, no contact was allowed with the other inmates of Holloway except by letter. If the Swans, the de Laessoes and the Mosleys had been sent to the Isle of Man they would only have been able to contact someone in Holloway by letter; ergo, this should be the rule even if they were in the same complex of buildings. In practice, as the other five had come from Brixton or the Isle of Man, Diana, the only one to have friends in Holloway, was the only person affected by this restriction.
She minded not being able to talk to her friends. If it had not been for the Mosley name, few would have noticed – or cared – if such a minor rule had been infringed. But where Mosley and Diana were concerned, the authorities, while anxious to be fair, had to be extraordinarily careful to avoid allegations of preferential treatment. There had been furious public resentment when it was disclosed that Mosley was to join Diana in Holloway. In Brixton a number of warders got up a petition to keep Mosley, not from spite – he was personally popular with most of them – but because they were convinced that Hitler had given orders to the Luftwaffe not to bomb Brixton prison because Mosley was there. If he went, who knew what would happen to them?
Other Brixton inmates felt straightforward envy. Mosley’s former follower John Beckett, who already believed that Mosley enjoyed special privileges, was incensed at what he regarded as blatant favouritism. As soon as he got the opportunity (on 27 January 1942) he appeared before the Visiting Committee to ask if wives of detainees who were not themselves subject to detention could be allowed to be detained on a voluntary basis at Holloway. ‘Or at least could married detainees who had been at Brixton for a long time be allowed one day a month parole for unrestricted access to their wives?’
Beckett spoke forcefully, and clearly felt that he and his fellow prisoners were being unfairly treated. ‘They are under the impression that they are being penalised because their wives are not interned,’ wrote the Chairman of the Visiting Committee to the Under-Secretary of State, Home Office. Both Beckett’s requests were turned down flat, though the Home Office reasoning (‘it would be unfair on the unmarried detenus’) seemed curious.
In February, longer visits were allowed except on Saturdays. But when Diana asked if they could have their younger children to stay for the occasional weekend, this was refused.
‘The argument that she can only see the children at rare intervals for an hour can be met by allowing longer visits,’ conceded Carew Robinson, adding that even this was rather disapproved of because it might occasion further allegations in the press of ‘special treatment for the Mosleys’. For the same reason, when the Mosleys’ Dolphin Square flats were burgled a few days later, they were refused permission to go there (under escort) to see what had been stolen.
Diana next asked if she could keep six or eight chickens in a corner of the Parcels House yard, to be fed on scraps that would otherwise be thrown away. From her childhood poultry-keeping at Asthall she knew exactly how to look after hens, and their eggs would provide valuable protein at no extra cost. The Governor of Holloway told the Prison Commission that he was in favour of the idea, but the Commission response was a suspicious and humourless negative.
The object is pretty certainly not to contribute to the national food supply but to produce fresh eggs for Lady Mosley and her husband. If we allow her to keep chickens we cannot logically refuse applications by other married couples [there were only two] in Holloway who may want to keep ducks or turkeys or guineafowl, or even a goat.
The sensitivity of the authorities was, however, well founded. In March a newspaper story that a fashion show had been laid on for Diana, with mannequins parading expensive creations solely for her benefit, produced uproar. Letters flooded in, filled with rage and vindictiveness. Fairey Aviation’s Shop Stewards’ Committee wrote angrily, condemning such ‘luxury’, as did the Letchworth Housewives’ Union, the Women’s Cooperative and countless individual members of the public, and a question was asked in the House.
Wearily the Home Office explained the true facts. Because internees, who could not shop in the normal way, had to order clothing sight-unseen, it often did not fit and had to be returned or exchanged, causing a flow of delivery vans from all over London. To save petrol, and to rationalise the whole process, a concession was given to Jones of Holloway, three hundred yards down the road, to supply clothing, so that only one van arrived at the prison, where the clothes were laid out on a counter in the E wing common room. Here the prisoners could try them on and make their selection. Diana had also been to look at these clothes but, because of the ban on contact with other prisoners, she had perforce been on her own. Her solitary visit had been transformed into ‘an exclusive private showing’.
What made this particular outburst so noteworthy was its virulence. Hitherto, most of the bitterness and odium had been directed at Mosley – who was, after all, the leader and prime mover of British fascism, the man who had openly urged a negotiated peace, the figure viewed as a potential Quisling if Hitler won the war. But from the moment of his arrival at Holloway to join Diana, she was bathed in the same aura of hatred and perceived to be every bit as wicked as her husband – consort rather than loyal wife, demon queen to his king, a Lady Macbeth equally capable of plunging in the dagger, and friend of the arch-fiend Hitler himself.
At school her Guinness children began to suffer persecution. ‘I feel I must write and tell you Jonathan and Desmond went off to school this morning looking very forlorn but brave,’ wrote Nanny Higgs at the beginning of the spring term. It was a contrast to the cheerful letter from the headmaster of Summer Fields at the end of the previous term:
I am afraid I have not been very communicative of late about Jonathan and Desmond but at least the ‘no news’ has been ‘good news’ . . . Jonathan is so much better at getting on with everything . . . Desmond is full of shameless wickedness. I hope that good reports reach you from your family about them. I am myself quite pleased with them and particularly so with Jonathan.
Diana missed her children wretchedly, an ache intensified by a degree of guilt. If she had not been seen to be so friendly with Hitler during her constant visits over the commercial radio enterprise, would she have been imprisoned and so parted from them? ‘If I had known how my visits to Germany would be viewed, I would never have gone. My duty was to my children,’ she admitted later.
In every other way Mosley’s arrival had transformed her imprisonment. In addition to the delight of being reunited with the man whom she loved besottedly, she could enjoy Mosley simply as a wonderful companion. In jail, his qualities showed to their best advantage. He was warm, loving, tender, full of jokes, never losing his natural buoyancy, cheering her, encouraging her, teasing her constantly. He would mimic her Mitford voice, with its long o’s. ‘If I haven’t lorst the piece of paper, I’m orf to make an orffer to an orfficer in Orffer and Orffer,’ he would intone (Offer and Offer were a firm of estate agents).
Their minds fitted perfectly: both grasped the chance to study and learn. Huge parcels of books would arrive, sent by Nancy from Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street – Nancy, whose relationship with Diana was slowly mending, had begun to work there in March 1942. In the evenings they listened to music on Diana’s horn gramophone, or pursued some course of reading – history, economics, poetry, psychology, plays. With Diana’s help, Mosley, who had begun to teach himself German in Brixton, became so proficient that he was able to read her favourite authors in the original. ‘Once it has gripped you it never lets you go,’ she said of Goethe’s Faust. ‘What one loses first in translation is the poetry, which is what matters in Goethe.’
Though Diana did not realise it at the time, the most extraordinary, and unexpected, outcome of these days of close confinement was the effect on their marriage. Deeply in love though they were, being in each other’s sole company all day and every day, added to frustration with their enforced inactivity, could have meant quarrels of an epic proportion. For two people normally so independently active, each with such distinctive and idiosyncratic personalities, both so personally fastidious that they had until then never so much as shared a bathroom, the irritations of close proximity and the general strain of their situation could have torn them apart. Instead, prison welded them together indivisibly.
It was, of course, the first time Diana had been the sole focus of Mosley’s attention, with neither his political work nor other women to distract him. He was lavish with praise for everything she did for him, such as the meals she produced on the ancient gas stove in the shared kitchen. Mrs de Laessoe, terrified of appearing to intrude, would dash in and out ‘like a little rabbit’ said Diana, while Mosley and Major de Laessoe worked together in the garden (the Swans had left at the beginning of May). Mosley, always fascinated by something he could learn from someone else, copied de Laessoe, a natural gardener, thorough, neat and green-fingered. The gardening patch was largely given over to vegetables, from cabbage and kohlrabi to aubergines, but they also managed to raise a highly successful crop of fraises des bois, ‘thanks to the soot’, said Diana.
In Holloway, as in Brixton, Mosley was a centre of attention. The newspapers dubbed Holloway ‘the Mosley harem’ and it was not entirely untrue. He appeared as the solitary male figure, the stag in a herd of hinds – de Laessoe was quiet and elderly, the Governor an anonymous authority figure. As always, Mosley was consciously virile and fit from the exercises he did daily and he served as a focus for the dreams and desires of the enforcedly celibate women in the main prison. One was Nellie Driver, whose cell overlooked the garden of the Parcels House and who regularly watched him. ‘If I stood on my bed I could see Sir Oswald’s well-built frame, naked to the waist and very tanned. Sometimes he was walking round with his wife, or gardening.’ Mosley shamelessly played up to the women, stripping off his shirt the moment the sun came out, doing press-ups in front of the window to an admiring audience, sunbathing in the garden with as little on as possible. ‘So naughty,’ said Diana. ‘He does tease – he lies around sunbathing with all those poor girls all screaming out of their windows.’
At the end of May, the Mosleys were at last allowed to go and check what was missing from their burgled flats – the police believed they had caught the thief. He had taken all the wirelesses, clocks, watches, silver, cutlery and an eiderdown, wrapping everything in Diana’s silver-embroidered white satin bedcover. Eventually, almost all the stolen property was recovered: the burglar, dumping the two items he did not want – the eiderdown and the bedcover – had inefficiently enclosed with them an unpaid electricity bill giving his address.
Diana was still striving to see more of her children and, finally, the bleak face of officialdom softened, in the shape of a representative of the Prison Commission, Miss Barker (later a notably humane Governor of Holloway). When Diana, almost weeping, said to her, ‘Think what a joy it would be to me if I could bath my baby and put him to bed occasionally,’ Miss Barker put her whole weight behind this plea. ‘The Mosleys are behaving very well and causing no trouble to the staff,’ she minuted reassuringly on 9 July 1942, before pleading Diana’s cause. ‘Lady Mosley can only see [her children] at rare intervals when they are brought from the country for a visit lasting an hour. She says it is so dreadful for her babies to grow up not recognising her as their mother but just as someone pleasant they see occasionally.’
Conscious of the perennial anxiety about ‘special treatment’, Miss Barker said that the children would be no charge upon the taxpayer. ‘Lady Mosley would do everything for the children. She would also arrange for all their food to be provided so that they should be no expense.’ (In the event, the Mosleys provided everything from cots and blankets to mugs.)
On talking to Lady Mosley [continued Miss Barker], I really felt she was asking for something that on humane and reasonable grounds she might be granted. But I expressed no opinion to her. It is not likely to cause repercussions with the other 18Bs. No one else has young babies like these [Alexander and Max were three and two respectively]. They are too young to be used as message carriers in and out. I would suggest, if this could be allowed, the visits might take place from Friday afternoon until Tuesday morning. I would suggest that one such visit might be allowed and after this it could be decided whether it could be repeated and what length of period between visits could be decided.
‘It is impossible not to feel sympathy with this plea,’ Carew Robinson urged. Permission was finally given for an ‘experimental visit’ – but not without the usual agonising from the authorities. ‘Up to what age should children be allowed to visit?’ wondered the Home Office. ‘Will this arrangement have to be discontinued in the case of the elder Mosley child, now said to be nearly four, if the War goes on for two or three more years?’ But the visits began, with the first from 25 to 28 September and another a month later. This time, the usual disparaging stories were pre-empted by a press release. As the Prison Commission minuted to the Home Office: ‘There does not seem much point in trying to conceal details which the Press can no doubt unearth if they give their minds to it; and there may be some advantage in giving correct details in order to damp down tendentious inventiveness.’
Relations with Nancy improved further when, in September 1942, she began the love affair that would henceforth dominate her life. The man with whom she fell in love was Gaston Palewski, General de Gaulle’s Chef de Cabinet. He was not immediately prepossessing. The Colonel, or ‘Col’ as Nancy called him in her letters, was short, swarthy and stocky, with skin pitted by acne scars. But he was cultivated, had great taste, loved art, was amusing, witty and full of joie de vivre. Above all, he genuinely adored women and knew just how to please them. When he laid himself out to attract, most women found him irresistible.
When Nancy met him, he had just returned from commanding the Free French forces in Ethiopia and was enjoying the pleasures of a capital city, aided by the fact that he spoke excellent English. Though he never pretended to be in love with Nancy, he found her attractive, stylish and supremely entertaining – like Fabrice in the novel she later wrote,fn1 he would encourage her to chat for hours on the telephone and never tired of hearing about the eccentricities of her family. She, for her part, introduced to true physical passion by this experienced seducer, fell deeply and irrevocably in love with him – and gradually, by a process of transference, with France and the entire French nation.
Her happiness spilled over and she was delighted to do all she could to help Diana. In the holidays, Jonathan and Desmond (now fourteen and twelve) would stay with her on the nights before and after the monthly day-long visit they were allowed to make to Holloway. Diana did her best to make these days a treat, saving her rations to concoct puddings designed for a schoolboy’s sweet tooth. ‘The gateau riche was lovely!’ wrote Desmond after one of these visits.
Jonathan and Desmond got on extremely well with their stepfather. He was charming, amusing and affectionate with them. ‘Ah, the Monthly Meal!’ he would tease Diana. ‘The only time I get a decent meal is when the Guinness boys come.’ Jonathan would ask him question after question about his politics, to which Mosley would reply as to another adult, so that the boy soon understood exactly why his stepfather and mother were hated by the political establishment. Mosley would talk to him of the classics, of the German love of the ancient world, of the German writers he was reading (later, Jonathan learned German at Eton, becoming extremely fluent).
Prison conditions nevertheless took their toll on Diana that autumn. Until the Mosleys had been able to grow their own vegetables and do their own cooking, she had hardly been able to bring herself to eat prison food. For nearly two years, everyone who saw her had commented on her thinness and pallor. When, in October 1942, she caught the gastro-intestinal flu sweeping round the prison, she quickly became extremely ill. Her condition was aggravated by the coldness of the Parcels House.
Mosley, desperately worried, raged at the Governor, Dr Matheson – a man with whom he otherwise got on well – saying that when Diana got pneumonia he would hold him responsible. After a fortnight Diana was so ill that her own doctor, Dr Bevan of Gloucester Place, was sent for. When he saw her at the beginning of November he was shocked both by her appearance and the coldness of her room.
I find Lady Mosley very low in general condition, very pale with subnormal temperature of 97.4 and with rather poor pulse [his report began]. The conditions in which she is necessarily living are unsuitable for an illness of this kind. The temperature of the room this morning when I saw her was only 45°, and since she has to get up and go to an adjoining room every time the bowels act, she runs a risk of chill, and there seems a possibility that her condition of colitis may become chronic. Her diet moreover is unsuitable. She should be on a milk diet but she has not been having more than half a pint a day. From a medical point of view, I feel that Lady Mosley should be removed to a nursing home, where in a warm room with a suitable diet, she should be well in about a week.
The prison doctor took a more robust attitude, saying that if Diana got another such attack, she should take a dose of castor oil, which would cure her in twenty-four hours.
The icy temperature of Diana’s bedroom was yet another attempt by the authorities to counter stories of the ‘luxury’ in which the Mosleys lived. On 17 October the Sunday Dispatch had run a story that wardresses in Holloway were shivering while the 18Bs – notably, of course, Mosley and Diana – had plenty of coal and coke. The Governor of Holloway therefore decided that although the central heating should be turned on in the main prison on 1 November, that in the Parcels House should not be switched on until mid-January 1943. Even then, it did not make very much difference, as there were only four radiators in the entire block – one each in the de Laessoes’ two single bedrooms, one in the Mosleys’ double bedroom and a fourth, rather uselessly, in the store room. Otherwise, the only heating until mid-January was an open fire in the sitting room, which was on the de Laessoes’ floor, and a small gas fire in the dining room, in the Mosleys’ quarters.
‘Here I never have a fire till teatime,’ wrote Sydney consolingly on 5 November, ‘but then I am out most of the time. The goats take a lot of looking after. I am so pleased, I have been given ten extra clothes coupons for my out of doors work. They really are needed as an overall takes seven, not to speak of rubber boots and gloves.’
The Mosleys had by now been in prison just over two and a half years. Diana’s emaciated, run-down condition, the phlebitis on Mosley’s leg, which now began to recur, the fear that yet another summer might pass behind bars, made Mosley determined to try once more for their release.
Accordingly, on 19 January 1943, when Sydney made one of her many visits to him, Mosley begged her to approach Clementine Churchill. He had written to the Prime Minister the previous autumn, through his solicitor, reminding Churchill of his promise to release the 18Bs when the war situation improved. The Battle of Alamein, for Britain at least the turning-point of the war, had been won two months earlier; would Sydney now see Clementine and ask her to press the Prime Minister for a reply? The warder listening to their conversation reported Mosley’s words:
The Prime Minister had promised to release the 18Bs when the war situation became better. Now, according to the Press, we were ‘galloping to victory’. He told Lady Redesdale he did not retract one word of what he had spoken. He had tried to stop this war, but they had got it. Now, they could get out of it as best they could. If they had listened to him it need never have happened. He would forget politics for the duration, and if they found he did not keep his word, they could give him two years. Lady Redesdale promised to do what she could.
Although Mosley had more or less abandoned the children of his first marriage in the summer of 1940, he had not quite lost touch with his eldest son, Nicholas. On 21 February 1943, Nicholas, now commissioned into the Rifle Brigade, came at his father’s invitation to see him in jail for the first time. Nicholas, with his intelligence and interest in politics, had always been his father’s favourite: Mosley did not have much time for girls and Micky, a baby when his mother died, had been brought up entirely by his Aunt Irene and his nanny.
Nicholas, who was allowed to spend anything up to a day with his father and stepmother, smuggled in luxuries including champagne, brandy and pâté under his army greatcoat. The wardress led him to a door in the high inner wall and there his father was waiting, beside his kitchen garden. After a delicious lunch cooked by Diana, Mosley and Nicholas went into the garden and talked.
The after-effects of Diana’s illness lasted a long time. She felt listless and lacked energy. Though between visits she longed to see the children, when they did arrive she could hardly cope with them. ‘Lady Mosley does not appear to be very interested in the children, whom she finds rather exhausting; Sir Oswald Mosley is the more interested,’ ran the report of a visit on 8 March 1943.
The year wore on. In mid-April Unity was confirmed by the Bishop of Dorchester. ‘She is greatly delighted,’ wrote Sydney. But of Diana’s father there was bad news. He had developed cataracts and though at first Sydney, with her belief in the Good Body’s ability to heal itself, thought that time might effect a cure, she had to admit a month later that this was not happening.
I fear Farve seems very far from well. He is ever so much blinder and can’t really see anything except the line of sky and mountain. He must have got much worse rather suddenly, as he was writing quite long and good letters to me up to ten days ago. Now he can’t write at all. He is very much out of spirits, naturally, and everything worries him. I should like to bring him down straightaway to see the oculist but he refuses utterly to come until he has a new boatman and Heaven knows how long that will take . . . he looks dreadfully tired and when indoors sleeps nearly all the time.
Unity, too, was an increasing problem. She was incontinent, required constant nursing, had forgotten how to write and suffered from loss of balance. She had aged immensely in physical appearance – Diana’s friend Cela (now married to David McKenna), seeing her in Oxford, mistook her momentarily for a woman of fifty-five. Already obsessed with religion, Unity had now become obsessed with the ideas of marriage and motherhood. ‘Lady Mosley was most anxious to hear what they [her children] did but Miss Mitford didn’t wish to talk about it. Somebody had told her that she was very beautiful but she did not make the best of herself and she was anxious to have Lady Mosley’s opinion,’ ran the report of one of her visits that spring. It is easy to picture poor Unity, a lopsided giantess, clumsy, pathetically well-meaning, romping and laughing excitedly as she chattered about her adoration for the führer, her favourite hymns and her wish for at least ten children. Even Sydney’s angelic patience was tried. ‘Bobo is so extremely difficult I don’t know what to do with her,’ she said sadly on one visit. ‘And you, Diana darling, who could do something with her, locked in here . . .’
As the summer passed there was other family news. In May Cela went to Jonathan’s confirmation, reporting how well he comported himself and how proud she was of her godson. Nanny Blor, Diana’s old nanny, wrote faithfully from Swinbrook for Diana’s birthday. Jessica remarried; in an ecstatic letter to her mother she described her new husband Bob Treuhaft, a left-wing lawyer, as ‘small and dark’. Diana and Bryan corresponded about Jonathan, who had won a scholarship to Eton – Diana sent him £5 in congratulation. Should he, his parents wondered, go into College or become an Oppidan scholar’.fn2 The matter was settled when Jonathan told his father that, as six of his best friends were going into College, he too would like to.
At Eton, the chivvying and persecution to which Jonathan had been subjected at Summer Fields through being the son of the notorious Lady Mosley largely disappeared. This was partly because of Eton’s more tolerant, adult atmosphere and partly because Jonathan himself, larger and tougher, was prepared to stand his ground.
Although their mother was in prison, Jonathan and Desmond still continued the pre-war pattern of shared holidays, half at Biddesden with their father’s growing second family and half with Pam or Sydney. Diana did her best to make them realise how much she thought of them, with constant letters and thoughtful and imaginative presents: a hammock, a mileometer, a handsome fountain pen, marvellous crackers for birthdays, and food (‘the nicest shop cake I have ever had’ wrote Desmond appreciatively from school). Sometimes friends took the boys out – Evelyn Waugh took his godson Jonathan to the circus. ‘I was overjoyed to see your writing after so long and you can’t imagine how wonderful I thought it of both of you to invite the boys out twice,’ wrote Diana to Roy Harrod. ‘We are reading the neo-Hellenists . . . Heaven is also a preoccupation but in spite of all I should like to live to be 80 or so.’
Diana had imposed the semblance of civilisation on the rooms she shared with Mosley. She played ‘The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla’ on her gramophone, she wrote to Nancy for yet more books ‘a complete Moliere, also I crave La Mort de Pompée, by Corneille’. But the pleasures of books, music, jokes, the careful cooking, the conversation and self-education, the spirited rejoinders to the Governor, the smiling faces they presented to their children, had worn thin. The report of a visit by Sydney on 24 September shows something of their wretchedness: ‘[Sir Oswald] complained of the deadly monotony, and the confinement and sense of frustration. Lady Redesdale told him to get out in the garden more but he said he was sick and tired of the garden.’ Both Mosley and Diana were sliding into despair. There had been no response from the Prime Minister, no hint of coming freedom although the tide of war had turned. Like a black tunnel, confinement stretched ahead, its end nowhere in sight.
fn1 The Pursuit of Love
fn2 Sometimes boys who had been elected to scholarships preferred not to go into College, and went instead into houses. They were known as Oppidan Scholars rather than King’s Scholars.