THEIR ARRIVAL AT Rignell had been kept as quiet as possible. The house was not overlooked; it was fairly isolated and surrounded by an unkempt 100-acre park. The most serious threat was from the builders, just arrived after months of persuasion by Pam to do some much-needed work on the roof. One of these men became so suspicious that Pam warned the Mosleys not to open their bedroom curtains. Mosley, after the first few days of weakness, delighted in the chance of some outdoor exercise and waited until after dark to walk in the park. Only Pam’s gardener, the entirely trustworthy Smith, was in on the secret.
It did not take long for the press to track them down. One evening a week after their arrival when, as usual, Smith returned at ten p.m. to attend to the central heating after spending the evening at the pub, he told Pam, ‘The village is full of newspaper reporters, Madam. They are asking everyone if they have seen Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley.’
It was a siege. The first move by the army of reporters, who had rented every available bed in the village, was to invade an empty cottage at the end of the drive and keep the house under constant surveillance with binoculars. Others hid behind trees and shrubs. Pam told everyone to leave the telephone unanswered – it had begun to ring incessantly – and to keep the front door locked. Diana and Mosley were confined to their room, its curtains still drawn. When Pam left the house, she locked the door and pocketed the key.
She was most vulnerable when exercising her dogs. She would let herself out as unobtrusively as she could and make straight for the fields, now covered with a heavy fall of snow. With her own feet protected by gumboots, she would take a mischievous delight in heading for where the snow lay most thickly, followed by reporters in their thin London shoes. ‘You be square with us and we’ll be square with you,’ they would cry. Ignoring them, Pam would stomp off into the deepest ploughed field she could find until, damp and dispirited, her pursuers tailed off. Many of the reporters were recalled to London after a week.
Within days, the Mosleys were told they had to move again. Derek Jackson was privy to the most secret information about the tactics of the Royal Air Force and Mosley’s presence in the same house was considered too risky – presumably he might use his sinister powers to extract vital intelligence from his host and then somehow pass it on to the enemy. It was an overt indication that the authorities believed Mosley capable of actively betraying his country. Pam was informed by the Home Office that either the Mosleys left Rignell or her husband would not be allowed home for his weekends. Finding anywhere to live quickly in wartime, let alone for a sizeable family, was difficult enough; for two exhausted ex-prisoners it was a daunting prospect. But it had to be done.
Sydney came to the rescue, telling Diana of a half-abandoned small hotel called the Shaven Crown in Shipton-under-Wychwood. Diana and Mosley were able to rent it for a few months, moving in mid-December, and were soon joined by Nanny Higgs, Alexander and Max. It was six miles from Swinbrook, and Sydney, who as a keeper of goats had a small extra allowance of petrol, could sometimes drive Unity over to see the Mosleys, returning via Burford, where she sold goat cheeses. Debo, who had a pony and cart, could also drive over (her husband Andrew Cavendish was on active service and she was living with her mother).
The rooms were filthy and Mosley, who again needed nursing, lay in bed most of the time. Diana summoned what was left of her strength to look after him and, with the aid of a sixteen-year-old girl from the village, did her best to clean the place before the arrival of the Guinness boys for the Christmas holidays. Just after Christmas (they had eaten family lunch in the cottage at Swinbrook with Sydney and Unity), all four of the children developed whooping cough. Alexander was the most seriously ill, but both Desmond and Jonathan had it so badly they had to go back to school late.
The move to the Shaven Crown sparked further press stories. One report, saying gleefully that the Mosleys were so disliked that no one would work for them and that Lady Mosley had to look after four children, cook and clean the house herself, produced a flood of applications. From all over England, letters arrived offering to work for them in any capacity. ‘I have never been in service before. I have not the clothes habitual for such situations, nor the coupons for same. My husband died nearly two years ago and I am employed in a local factory. I am willing to fit into the exigency of the times.’ ‘Dear Lady Mosley, Would a good cook, an educated, sensible woman be of any use to you? If so, will you let me have a post card and I can send full particulars. She can come almost at once.’
As the Shaven Crown was only a temporary stopping place, Diana went on house-hunting as best she could. When she heard of a likely house at Crux Easton, near Newbury, she obtained permission to go and look at it, escorted by two policemen. On the way she was allowed to stop for lunch with Lord Berners.
She loved Crux Easton at sight. It was a large, south-facing manor house which had been abandoned by its owners as too big for wartime; for several years its only inhabitants had been a rapidly increasing population of rats. It had the ten or so bedrooms needed for the Mosleys’ extended family – between them, they had seven children – and a sunny terrace with a wonderful view. Most appealing of all in those days, there was a large, well-maintained, productive kitchen garden and eight acres – which meant the Mosleys could keep a cow. Their offer of £3,000 was accepted.
Diana’s first thought was to find servants. Never in her life did she seriously consider doing without them. Like her family and most of her friends she had grown up with servants (Nancy’s efforts at living alone in London had always foundered because, with no one to pick them up, every flat became kneedeep in discarded clothes) and Diana throughout married life had employed them – there had been servants at Savehay up to the day of her arrest. To her, a civilised life, let along a well-run house, was unthinkable without domestic staff. It was not simply that she had been imprisoned so early in the war that, unlike her mother or her sister Pam, she had never found herself running a sizeable house with a singly daily replacing a staff or four or five, nor that prison was an experience so outside ‘normal’ life that it had not affected her attitude. Rather, it was a determination to hold on to what she considered a priority in the kind of life she had decided early on to fashion for herself, a life that whenever possible involved the constant entertaining that both Mosleys loved. Tom Mosley was a man who liked the machinery of his household to run smoothly and if possible invisibly at all times, a view that chimed exactly with Diana’s; neither of them would ever have been able to envisage a wife running in and out of the kitchen or distracted by domestic minutiae. As she regained a little strength, her first thought was to establish a home for herself and Mosley and this meant engaging, at the least, a cook.
One of the letters she had received because of the press stories was therefore particularly welcome. It was from Mrs Nelson, a marvellous cook formerly employed by Lord Berners. When Diana had stayed with him in his flat in Halkin Street in pre-war days, Mrs Nelson used to carry up her breakfast and they would chat. Mrs Nelson, who had had to leave Lord Berners because he found her husband unsatisfactory, now wrote, ‘Dear Madam, I would come to you if you were at the North Pole.’ Diana replied at once offering both Nelsons employment and they arrived in time to help with the move to Crux Easton. Lord Berners was a trifle put out to learn that Diana had acquired the best cook he had ever had, though Diana felt she had been paid back when on her first day Mrs Nelson used the family’s entire butter ration for a fortnight to make a superb apple tart. ‘Oh, Mrs Nelson,’ wailed Diana, ‘how could you?’ ‘People like you can always get more,’ replied the cook. There was nothing for it but dry bread.
Within days of the move, Mosley had bought a cow, which was named Wellson by Max. It was looked after by a man from the village who had been turned down for military service; he also worked with Mosley in the kitchen garden.
At last, their food supply was assured. With plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, milk and homemade butter, and an outdoor life, Mosley soon regained his health. Diana was still weak and unable to eat much, but with Sydney she painted the kitchen and lavatories and much of the rest of the house. The rats were gradually exterminated until they could no longer be heard galloping nightly inside the old walls and ceilings.
The Nelsons did not last the course (after the butter incident they never really settled) and in April Diana wrote to her former Wootton chef, hoping that he might be able to come. He replied that he was in the army:
I was called up early in 1941 so I have been in the Services just over three years so this will explain why I have regretfully to say how sorry I am that I can’t accept your kind and generous invitation to join your domestic staff. Had I been at liberty I would have been pleased and willing to have done so. I have seen James and his wife and little girl twice before he went to North Africa. I believe he is a corporal now. I am in the Royal Artillery. I am the Major-General’s servant or batman now as my category has been lowered and I have to do a lighter job for the present. It would be fun to make eclairs and meringues again . . . I have often thought of you all.
That spring, Sydney, Unity and Debo, leaving behind her two small children, went up to stay with David on Inch Kenneth. David had made over the island to Tom; Sydney, anxious to make a little money for her son, had begun farming there. ‘I imagine one can hardly hope for profit for a year or two as the animals etc have to grow,’ she wrote somewhat despondently to Diana. ‘The wages are devastating and come to £450 a year – partly due to having to have a boatman.’
It was not a happy visit. David appeared to be under the domination of a strong-minded former parlourmaid called Margaret, who had originally worked for the Redesdales at Rutland Gate Mews and on whom he was now virtually dependent. The old, politically based antagonisms between the Redesdales were too strong to allow of any rapprochement and David’s fearsome temper flared up at the slightest provocation.
‘Farve looks very ill,’ wrote Debo on 9 May 1944:
He’s terribly thin and everything worries him, even the smallest little thing about the boats. He never sits with us in the drawing room but helps Margaret in the kitchen. I haven’t had a chance to chat to him at all yet . . . he is dreadfully difficult and cross and unapproachable . . . It was evidently due to her that the babies were put off coming, because I think he would have liked to have them. Of course it’s perfect nonsense as she only has to cook and do nothing else as Syd does the housework. It seems to me that Farve is a sort of scullery maid. Then of course there is the news, which Farve has at 7, 8, 10, 1, 3, 6 and 9 and midnight, and Muv won’t listen to it. So Farve and Margaret listen together and she makes maddening comments. Oh Honks, you don’t know what it’s like . . . Muv is furious about the babies not coming but can’t say anything as Farve flies into a temper so easily.
The situation was not made any easier by the fact that Sydney herself could not have looked after her husband. She was sixty-two and she was entirely occupied in caring for Unity. Margaret was strong, hard-working and made David comfortable, and he was terrified of upsetting her.
With the opening of the Second Front in June 1944, the danger of a German invasion of Great Britain was clearly long past, but the restrictions placed on the Mosleys remained. Within the limits of house arrest, however, Diana had achieved a reasonable facsimile of the life she had led earlier. The Wootton furniture had been brought out of store and she had managed to find people to work in the house. Like everyone else, she would rush to the butcher if there was a rumour he had some bread-filled wartime sausages and every week David sent her a small food parcel from Inch Kenneth. But they were never short of garden produce or, thanks to Wellson, milk and butter. As she had done with her older sons, Diana began to teach Alexander and Max to read, write and do simple sums. Her sisters came to stay; her brother Tom, home from Italy and at the Staff College, managed to come almost every weekend. Viv visited, for the first time finding her father approachable and ‘positively genial – not a word one would have used about him before’. Micky, now a schoolboy, came in the holidays.
Other social life was confined to the visits of certain pre-war friends. Randolph Churchill was not among them. ‘Why will they see Berners and not me?’ he complained bitterly to Nancy. But Mosley, who had blamed Churchill for the continuance of the war, regarded the entire Churchill family as arch-enemies and would have nothing to do with his former friend. Osbert Sitwell’s sentiments, however, were warmly appreciated when he wrote:
Later in the year, when the world is thawing, I would love to come and see you and Diana, after this long and insufferable gap. I could easily come down for luncheon one day (hope to be in London in May). Yes, the inadequacy of time is appalling and to have been unjustly deprived, as you have been, of a period of time, is beyond bearing. The only comfort for you must be that it is impossible to blame you for anything that happened in those years.
It was not a view generally shared: few of the Mosleys’ neighbours wished to know them.
Sydney and Unity stayed on Inch Kenneth until mid-November (Debo had left a fortnight earlier). Sydney had persuaded her shaky, irascible husband, whose sight was rapidly deteriorating, to come down to London with her, but she did not know what he planned to do thereafter. It was while he was staying at the Mews that Jonathan and Desmond, arriving at the end of term, saw one of their grandfather’s famous rages. Used to ‘Granny Muv’s’ gentle sweetness, they were taken by surprise when, after bathing, one of them forgot to pull out the bathplug. David exploded, shouting at them furiously, ‘That’s the sort of thing people have to resign from their clubs for!’ In the same month, Diana learned that her former father-in-law Lord Moyne had been assassinated in Cairo.
For the Mitford family, the following spring was to bring the most tragic news yet. Tom Mitford had been worried for some time that he might be sent with his regiment to invade Germany itself. He could not bear the thought. Rather than fight on the very soil of the country he still loved deeply, he obtained a posting from the Staff College to the Far East. He refused a staff job in Burma and was made second in command of a battalion. ‘Every letter says how glad he is to be there,’ wrote Sydney to Diana. ‘He likes the Indian soldiers so much, they are fine fellows. I saw in the Sunday papers his division was on the Irrawaddy.’ At the beginning of March the Redesdales were told that he had been wounded. They heard nothing more until, in early April 1945, came the news that he had died of his wounds.
The family gathered at the Mews – Mosley had rung the Home Office for permission for Diana to travel – to comfort each other as far as possible.
‘So ghastly about Tom, we had all hoped he was getting better as it was some time before we heard he had died and still hardly believe it,’ wrote Pam to her friend Billa Harrod on 18 April. ‘Bobo said it will be so lovely for him to meet Dr Johnson. So like her!’ A few days later Diana received a letter from Randolph Churchill, last seen many years earlier; ‘how heartbroken I was to hear of Tom’s death and how deeply I feel for you all in his tragic loss. I had seen very little of him during the war but he was my dearest friend. I saw him last just a year ago, in North Italy.’
Of all the sisters, Diana, always the closest to Tom, felt his loss the most. ‘We had always been more like twins than brother and sister,’ she wrote later. ‘A day never passes when I do not think of him and mourn my loss. He was clever, wise and beautiful; he loved women, and music and his family.’
Grief aggravated Diana’s difficulty in recovering her health. She was still painfully thin, with a poor appetite that showed no signs of improving. Psychologically she was deeply scarred: for years her sleep was disturbed by ‘prison’ nightmares – fears about returning to jail, terrors at being torn away from her sons again. Prison affected her far more deeply, and for far longer, than Mosley. Although he had been released on medical grounds, so weak he could scarcely get out of bed, he had begun to get better quickly. After six months, he had recovered much of his old vigour – so much so that he was looking for occupation. With anything that could be remotely construed as political proscribed, he turned instead to the subject that preoccupied everyone throughout the war: food. The war was clearly in its final stages but shortages, he believed, would go on for a considerable time. Therefore the most useful thing he could do would be to farm.
He was not allowed to travel more than seven miles from Crux Easton, but when he heard of a house and farm with 1,000 acres he bought it sight unseen. It was at Crowood, near Ramsbury, in Wiltshire.
The end of the war in Europe, celebrated by VE Day on 8 May 1945, meant the immediate cessation of house arrest for the Mosleys, along with liberty once more to own a car. As there was a petrol ration for every car, Mosley immediately bought four little Austin Sevens that were extremely economical on fuel. The first sortie made in one of these was to see Crowood for the first time. Although the house had the eighteenth-century fac,ade that Diana so admired, with a later addition at the back, she did not really like it, though she did her best with the large drawing room – pale blue wallpaper, a large Aubusson and her French furniture. She ran the house with a married couple, the cook and housekeeper, a housemaid and, outside, a single gardener.
Mosley, anxious to buy more land, needed to raise cash. One way was close to hand. When they were married, he had given Diana the Mosley family jewels. Now he asked for their return. Without demur she fetched them from the bank and they were sold at auction. They were exceptionally beautiful, set with first-quality Brazilian diamonds, the most important pieces being a riviére of huge stones and an exquisite late-eighteenth-century tiara of blackberry-like diamond leaves and flowers, their centres made from large, lustrous single stones. Fortunately, the long earrings that matched the tiara did not reach their reserve, so Mosley gave them back to Diana. She had four of the stones made by Cartier into a pair of fashionable clip earrings of one big stone and one small one each, which she wore constantly. The remaining diamonds were made into brooches.
That summer was spent by the combined families at Crowood. It was a curious ménage. Irene, who had come with Viv, Micky, Nanny Hyslop and Andrée, still refused to speak to Mosley. His mother had been invited to keep the peace. Baba refused to come even for a meal because Diana was present. Jonathan and Desmond, trailed by Alexander and Max, worked on the farm. When Nicholas, who had won the Military Cross, returned in August, he went straight to Crowood. Later in the year, Mosley engaged a black gamekeeper, whom he discovered living in the village. But few except his old friends would accept his invitations to shooting parties.
With a farm, entertaining became much easier, and gradually Diana renewed contact with her old friends. John and Penelope Betjeman were within reach, as were Gerald Berners and Robert Heber-Percy. One of the friends Diana saw most of was Daisy Fellowes, without whom no party in Venice, Paris or the south of France would have been complete in pre-war days. She and her husband lived ten miles away, at Donnington Park, a huge Gothic house near Newbury. Daisy Fellowes, beautiful, enormously rich, and famed for her chic, was also noted for her teasing. She loved Diana, but this did not stop her using the Mosleys as the best tease of all. ‘The Mosleys are coming to dinner, do come and meet them,’ she would say to her stuffier neighbours, watching for their horrified reaction.
For, in general, the Mosleys were ostracised. More and more horrific truths about the death camps were emerging, and few people would willingly meet the notorious couple who had so publicly allied themselves with the creed behind such unspeakable atrocities. When Ralph Partridge, one of the Ham Spray ménage who had been Diana’s friends and neighbours fifteen years earlier, bumped into her on Hungerford Station he told his wife of their meeting with the words, ‘I shook the hand of Fascism!’