by Leslie Brody
When Esmond refused to allow Decca to accept her mother’s money for a new frock in the midst of antagonism, he was wielding Mitford weapons. The Mitfords’ world contained an array of such colorful exceptions. That there would be a dress budget during total war went without saying. You might take your dress money and give it to Spanish orphans, but to refuse such a gift when offered was churlish. Esmond didn’t play with class enemies, and Decca stuck by him.
Mischievously, craftily, wickedly, crazily, Unity kept Decca well apprised of all late-breaking Hitler news. Der Führer, she boasted, had invited her to tea, and they had sat alone together for two and a half hours. Unity gossiped about Decca’s elopement and reported that on hearing the news, Hitler put his head in his hands and sighed, “Armes Kind,” poor child. The thought of her name on Hitler’s lips must have driven Decca wild. The idea was absurd.
The couple returned to Bayonne, where Esmond resourcefully found work as a translator. After a month away from home, Decca wrote to her mother. “You will honestly adore Esmond when you know him & please don’t be put off by all the secrecy, the only reason for it was because I wanted to go to Spain with him & I thought you might try & stop me.”
Muv’s reply was heartbreaking: “My darling, We have been in such agonising suspense about not knowing where you were. Now I have your letter. Esmond will I am sure look after you but please come home. I cannot do more than beg of you to return . . . Please write immediately & often as I cannot bear it.”
In another letter, Muv guiltily wondered what caused Decca to elope: “I cannot help blaming myself terribly for it all . . . I knew you were unhappy, but the cause of it all was beyond me, except that like many girls you had nothing to do. I ought to have been able to help you more.”
In childhood, Decca’s threat to jump off the roof had garnered a mere “Oh, poor duck, I do hope she won’t do anything so terrible.” These letters tell another story. Muv’s composure, that parental vagueness much discussed by her daughters, disguised a penetrating awareness. Muv had borne seven children, six of them daughters, every one of them with great and different combinations of desires, requirements, demands. She couldn’t possibly notice everything; she had to handle what was in front of her first. For much of the time, her daughters seemed to entertain and occupy one another. Muv knew their education was never going to be perfect. Nancy had tried art school, but left after a brief time; Unity was asked to leave her school. Who could have said for sure that Decca would have thrived away from home?
Decca’s next move after writing to Muv was to inform the Chancery judge handling her case that she was expecting a baby. She sent a letter, the contents of which she never forgot:I realize you are my guardian now, but I’d like to point out that I know from reading romances that it will take about a year to extradite me as I haven’t committed any crime. Furthermore, the administrators of Bayonne are all Communists and they’re all on my side. I think it would be nice if you would give me permission to marry, otherwise I might have a large family before I’m twenty-one, and this I think would be inappropriate, don’t you?
In other words, if he forced her to wait, she’d be an unwed mother. After that bombshell, permission to marry was expeditiously granted and Muv came to Bayonne bearing gifts. There was a gramophone from Unity and Debo, a pearl and amethyst necklace from Diana, some books and wedding money. The only other family guest at their marriage was Esmond’s mother, Nellie.
Farve was unable to forgive Decca’s continuing insubordination. Later, he would cut her out of his will; every clause would contain an “except Jessica.” Why? Not for eloping—Diana had also eloped. He could change his mind, but not where Decca was concerned. He perceived her repudiation of class and background as a rejection so final he could never forgive it. Years later, Decca would say, “I knew I was cut out, and I’d have been very surprised if I hadn’t been . . . I think it’s quite natural of them not to like what I did. I never expected them to.”
THE YOUNG COUPLE deposited their wedding money, along with Esmond’s advance for Boadilla, into a cardboard box and tied it up with a red scarf. Decca as secretary-treasurer would dole out the box’s fantastically diminishing contents. While they still had money remaining, Esmond calculated all the odds and angles of boule and blackjack. Then they set off to try their luck at the casino in Dieppe, where he blew the rest of their nest egg in a two-hour gambling spree.
Later that night, as they sat in another French café nursing brandies and contemplating their next move, Roger Roughton, an English friend of Esmond’s, entered. A Communist and a poet, Roughton had just acquired a huge, furnished home in London; the property had been left to him as a farewell from a departing lover. He told them they could rent the upstairs flat if they liked for two pounds a month. So to Rotherhithe they would go, after spending part of the summer in Dieppe with the Romilly family. Decca’s mother-in-law, Nellie, was solicitous, but Decca didn’t trust her and never forgave her for sending Esmond to a juvenile detention center. “The ordinary Mrs. Romilly,” she called Nellie behind her back, the nickname a mean, teasing reference to Decca’s own higher rank in aristo protocol as an “Honorable.” Esmond said he loathed his mother, and it was clear he had little respect for his father. While in Dieppe, the honeymooners went to the beach every day and gambled in the casino every night, where sometimes they’d see Nellie across the blackjack table.
By summer’s end, Decca and Esmond were installed in Roughton’s four-story building by the London docks. (Their rent included the hire of a housemaid, whom they paid one pound, one shilling, and three pence, monthly.) The newlyweds took over one floor with a kitchen, and the rest of the house became a sort of crash pad for friends, artists, and fellow travelers. Brother Tom visited regularly, the only member of her family whom Esmond would tolerate. They hosted bottle parties, to which guests would bring their own alcohol and which often transformed into a floating gambling den. “Esmond was always trying to pile up enough capital to start a night club, or buy a milk bar, or get a car,” said Decca. They hit the greyhound races every Friday, whereupon Esmond “would display the almost touching faith of the inveterate gambler in the dog of his choice.” Esmond invited all sorts to the gaming, including Bryan Guinness, Decca’s former brother-in-law and once Diana’s husband. Guinness remembered how one embarrassing night, he bet recklessly, trying to lose his money to Esmond’s “house,” but his luck was too good. He kept winning and had to stay late just to lose enough to break even. The loud and boisterous crowd gathered round, unsteady on their feet, running low on cigarettes, but unable to leave. Languid ladies drowsed on their fur coats; Champagne Reds and Parlor Pinks and poets shouted for Guinness to lose his hand, betting he wouldn’t. He apologized again when he didn’t, and Decca laughed. Even Esmond lost his poker face.
Esmond found work in an advertising firm as a copywriter. Decca soon lost interest in domestic engineering, for which she had little talent. She preferred the world outside the house and took a job as an occasional market researcher. The work entailed collecting public opinion on new products and was based on theories being floated by an American named Gallup. With a small group of women, she traveled to various parts of England and went door to door. For the most part, she liked the sorority, but some of the bitter girls-room intimacies stunned her. Her fellow workers were all older and more experienced. They called her “the Baby,” and few of them were aware that Decca would have her own child within the year. Their jokes and cynicism about sex as a weapon—and the men they fooled or fooled around with—seemed like a foreign language about which she knew just enough to feel defensive and indignant. Decca was still in a honeymoon state of mind.
This was the time when Philip Toynbee first entered Decca’s life. He had known Esmond in his earlier Out of Bounds days, and as a boy had also run away from school. Toynbee straddled two worlds: He was a young Communist still engaged in the upper-class society that Decca and Esmond had rejected. As a friend, he functioned as a sort o
f spy reporting on dinner-table gossip in the homes of the gentry they all knew and at the comrades’ meetings. All three had many a rambling conversation about the Communist Party (CP) in England. Decca and Esmond recognized the CP’s value in the fight against fascism and in its “singleness of purpose,” but they didn’t join. “In Esmond’s view, the British party was at the time overloaded with bourgeois intellectuals, too much off in a corner, isolated from the main labor movement to be worth the effort involved in being a member.” They would hear of this or that friend being disciplined for some comment or act of individualism, and they’d feel less and less partial to submitting to CP discipline. Toynbee thought the Romillys simply anti-authoritarian, unless they were the authority. “Philip was forever trying to recruit us in the party,” Decca wrote. “The accounts he gave of internal bickering and rigid sectarianism, which he couldn’t resist telling in the most amusing fashion in the midst of his recruiting pitches were hardly persuasive.” In contrast to Esmond, Decca was always more inclined to bend if and when she wished; she didn’t rule out membership, but bided her time.
Decca developed a much more equal say in their marriage. Though she still acquiesced for convenience to the superopinionated Esmond, nothing felt too oppressive. She didn’t enjoy hearing how her workmates misled the men in their lives, but she was learning how to organize things in her life according to the way she preferred them. Esmond wouldn’t hear of her seeing her family, but she would meet up with Unity without his knowledge. And sometimes, Unity would drive Muv to Rotherhithe when Esmond was out.
In Rotherhithe, they stayed up late with their friends arguing about socialism and Communism, Stalin and Trotsky, anarchy and poetry and feminism, Spain and Hitler and how to play the angles at the greyhound track. They’d all drink and smoke, and every electric light in the house would blaze away while they slept where they’d fallen—on the bed, in the chairs, or wrapped in blankets on the floor—and wake, some to go to work, others to argue more. Who’s for a ciggie? No milk for the tea? Decca thought that Esmond was a brilliant political philosopher with his “instinctive understanding of subtleties,” as gifted as his uncle Winston Churchill. One particularly awed visitor recalls that the young Decca also displayed a “political vision” that made her seem “almost clairvoyant.”
Later in life, Decca proudly called herself a subversive. Toynbee recalls the couple during their Rotherhithe period “in an open and declared war against the rich and the established.” Through their connections, they would sometimes find themselves invited for dinner or overnight stays at the homes of wealthy acquaintances, and what could be lifted was fair game. On one occasion, Decca returned home with her handbag packed with expensive cigarettes fished from gorgeous glass dispensers. At another house, Decca’s every request was granted unquestioningly: more pillows, cigars, chocolates, breakfast in bed. Late in her pregnancy by then, she enjoyed the cosseting. Esmond had to stop Decca (the outlaw, the bandit queen, the saboteur) from cutting down the curtains around their guestroom bed. Such curtains, she thought, would look better in Rotherhithe.
On another visit, this time to Eton, whose geography she knew from her visits to brother Tom when he was in school there, Decca attended the chapel service while Toynbee and Esmond stole thirty top hats from its cloakroom. This more conventional prank might have been viewed as naughty, at worst irritating, if they had just thrown them away out of a balloon, perhaps, or from the top of the Eiffel Tower. But Esmond pawned the hats. They needed the money. “Being good was never conspicuously on our agenda,” Decca said.
To what part of their past did they owe respect? To the elders who had sent a battleship to capture them? To the meaningless customs and boring rituals, the surfaces and appearances that had led a guest at a dinner Toynbee had attended to say unreservedly, “we need someone like Hitler over here”? They didn’t have much money, and they were used to nice things. They knew that in such houses, there would typically be a surplus of cigarettes, breakfasts, and hats.
It wasn’t just the upper classes who judged them undisciplined and immature. Their Communist pals would cluck their tongues, too. As adventurers, rogue and scamp, they wanted to be regarded and commented upon. Sister Nancy called Esmond a publicity hound. Decca would try to explain their freebooting behavior by referring to the “rich vein of lunacy” that ran in her family and the “brutality” in Esmond’s past. These experiences “hardly calculated to endow us with an instinct for the highest in humanity and culture.”
Theirs was an implausible pace to keep up. They had the hectic energy of youth and the stamina of their convictions. They would meet the coming war with that tough-mindedness they had cultivated on their travels together. Raising a child, free from the bonds of privilege, was going to take another kind of courage.
CHAPTER 4
“I AM GOING TO have a baby in January,” Decca told Nancy in a letter dated July 1937. “Do you remember poor Lottie’s agonies, & I expect it’s much worse for humans.” (Lottie was one of the family’s dogs.) “Some of us do our duty to the community unlike others I could name.” For the first time in her life, Decca had something her childless elder sister wanted. “Shall I call it Nancy . . . ? Goodness, I have been sick but I’m not any more now.”
Decca wondered if her child would be a boy, and she hoped he would be pretty. Before the baby’s birth, she had a dream in which she was trapped in Swinbrook and awoke grateful to find herself back at Rotherhithe, where Esmond and she had made a quiet nest in the chaos. Their baby daughter was born December 20, 1937, and they named her Julia, after sixteenth-century poet Robert Herrick’s divine portrait of Julia, “the queen of flowers,” in The Parliament of Roses to Julia. As a subversive, exalting sensuality in a puritan society, Herrick suited the young couple’s taste. Another of Herrick’s poems, The Bracelet to Julia, spoke to the young mother Decca about new varieties of love:I am bound, and fast bound so
That from thee I cannot go
If I co’d, I wo’d not so
Nanny Blor offered her services (for which the Mitford parents offered to pay), but Esmond vetoed the idea, thinking Blor would bring too much in the way of Mitford family associations. They planned to raise their child without nannies or governesses or any other such minions of British upperclass family life. Esmond himself had hoped to help out more, but he was the only one working at the time. In any case, as he was “known for his inability to carry a teaspoon from one room to the next,” the principal care and welfare of their baby fell to Decca. Julia quickly became, Decca wrote, “the center of my existence.”
Decca and Esmond were beginning to feel at home among the brothers and sisters of the Bermondsey Labour Party. Bermondsey was a notable redoubt of radicalism, and its membership “considerably more militant” than that of the official Labour Party. Decca complimented her new neighbors for their “seriousness of purpose.” The Bermondsey mob was also fun to be around. She and Esmond attended lectures and joined in conversations, arguments, and radical sing-alongs, which Decca loved. She loved to harmonize, and she particularly loved to belt out a novelty song. (Noel Coward’s were her favorites.) Despite Britain’s nonintervention policy, which Bermondsey members resented and condemned, they held fund-raisers for Spanish orphans and Jewish refugees from Germany. Decca found the tale of the Bermondsey schoolchildren who had “lined up to boo Princess Mary, symbol of hated charity,” an especially appealing advertisement for her neighborhood. She liked their style.
So did Esmond. Boadilla had been published in autumn 1937 to good reviews but so-so sales. Still, at nineteen, he had two books under his belt and was confident of his ability to write well and complete his projects quickly. He had plans for a novel, but for the time being settled into work as a copywriter at the advertising agency of Graham and Gillies. Back in Spain, when Esmond had first received his fifty-pound advance for Boadilla, he and Decca had thought they might emigrate to Mexico, a world away from the dismal weather, the loss of Spain, and German aggressi
on. But family life was at least for the moment more like a sanctuary than an exile. For a change, they weren’t running away or under fire, and they didn’t have to justify themselves to anyone. Esmond’s job had its amusements; he was good at jingles and jargon. The New Year looked promising. He was earning enough to support the three of them. Perhaps there was some adjustment necessary now that they were outside the limelight. Naturally, the neighbors gossiped about the celebrity couple. There were nice cars parked outside from time to time, and well-dressed toffs going into and out of their house. But it was a good life in its almost ordinariness and one he would hardly have predicted for himself.
Decca, too, was learning the ropes and adapting. It is easy to imagine her out and about, buying the Craven A cigarettes they chain-smoked, a paper from the newsboy on the corner, a chop from a jokey butcher who called her pet or love. Sometimes, the wives of the “tired, white-faced dockers” would stop on the street and coo at Decca and her sweet baby. She and Esmond had been in the habit of being together all the time. It might have been hard at first to be alone—in her house full of siblings, she had never been alone for extended periods. But Decca adapted and caught up on her novel reading while the baby slept.
