by Leslie Brody
Among the Communist writers contingent, Decca met Claud Cockburn, who had also reported from the Spanish Civil War. It’s not hard to imagine a rollicking night on the town with Decca and Bob and some local comrades and Claude and other war-weary journalist friends, drinking in the Happy Valley Bar of the Palace Hotel. Decca, an authority, thought the Happy Valley Bar made the best martinis in San Francisco “and possibly the world.” Pele was amazed at how emphatically English Decca became again around other Brits. She had a grand old time translating Cockburn’s often incomprehensible accent for the locals. The United Nations story could put even the most cynical newshound in a good mood. And to Cockburn, what a sidebar! One of those notorious Mitford sisters, now the dedicated financial director of the San Francisco Communist chapter, had deputized him to act on a family matter. She wished with Cockburn’s assistance to donate her inheritance of one-sixth of a Scottish island to the British Communist Party.
Decca had found her métier for the moment as a fund-raiser—raising money in dribs and drabs—but here was an opportunity for a spectacular publicity coup. It was a bit far for the San Francisco party to take full advantage, but London members could, why not? How many times did a portion of a Scottish island fall into your lap? They might use it as a holiday resort or a dacha for fatigued members, or to grow vegetables and raise goats, as Muv did. After a certain number of beverages, Decca agreed to give Cockburn power of attorney to speak to the British party leaders and set the transfer in motion. In an article years later, Cockburn summarized the idea: “What could possibly be more delightful to this lifelong enemy of the grown-ups than the mental picture—however unrealistic—of a horde of unbridled Reds cavorting Marxistically on the beaches, rattling the windows of ‘the Big House’ with nightly renderings of Hurrah for the Bolshie Boys and the Internationale.”
It was a spectacular tease, but there was something else going on. Decca was still reeling from all sorts of conflicting emotions. It was her style to suppress any public display of grief (a “concrete upper lip,” Virginia Durr called it). She had absorbed the loss of Esmond, her sister Unity’s suicide attempt and resulting brain damage, and her brother Tom’s death so late in the war, when it had seemed so sure he would make it through. She had been stalwart through all these traumas and preserved a sort of civility in all her exchanges with her mother, rarely mentioning the political furies that divided them.
To Decca, the island signified her family’s culpability in the war. She wanted to punish them to some extent or at least force them to acknowledge “what a criminal thing it was to have supported Hitler and an appeasement policy for England.” This wasn’t a particularly feasible plan, and eventually her indignation against everyone (except the Mosleys) subsided. They were all too far away.
Several months would pass, and though their encounter lay heavy on Decca’s mind, she heard nothing from Cockburn. Back in England, Cockburn met with British party leaders, who were baffled by Decca’s donation. He also tracked down Lord Redesdale in Westminster, who persuaded him that Inch Kenneth, so very far away, was the “very small” home of an old lady and a sick girl. By that point, his assignment wasn’t much fun anymore, and Cockburn backed away from the project.
Next, Decca tried to sell her part of the island. She told her sisters that she’d be willing to sell them her share or to divide the proceeds with them. Nancy alone recognized the power of such a tease but wondered, “At what price?” The others sisters were angry at Decca’s game. Rather than break with Decca, Muv agreed to become her partner and, on her behalf, had the island appraised.
Decca’s inheritance and subsequent effort to sell Inch Kenneth were also a matter of great interest to the FBI, whose increasing scrutiny of Decca resulted in a file of her political activities and consequently a sort of log book. The agent in charge had many informers who reported on her membership in the Twin Peaks branch of the Communist Party and her outstanding success in selling subscriptions to the People’s Daily World and in other fund-raising. She was followed to a picnic, a New Year’s Eve ball, conferences, lectures, and classes, but nothing seemed to spark the engagement of her followers like the story of Inch Kenneth. One agent wrote: “XXX advised XXX that the subject stated that she had inherited one-sixth of an island off the coast of Scotland and reported that she in a joking manner stated that she might give it to the Soviet government for a naval base.”
When Farve had written at the time of Nicky’s birth, he may have thought the time right to end hostilities, but Decca was just winding up. After the Inch Kenneth business, she never expected to see her father again. She told Dobby she hated him for the way he had acted at the start of the war. Decca always claimed that she understood her father’s actions, but his rejection hurt her, even when she was older.
Years later, Decca attended an authors’ luncheon. Like others of its kind, there was a rubber chicken dinner, some gossip, and some fundraising. It wasn’t until the guests had enjoyed a few drinks, when a fellow author asked Decca to contribute an article to an anthology on the subject of fathers. Decca stormed out. Her hosts might not have known why, but she felt she’d been set up and she was furious.
CHAPTER 14
THE TREUHAFTS WERE moving to Oakland. Nancy was appalled—New York and Washington, like Rangoon and Bombay, were on a map from which one might return with amusing stories, but Oakland? Decca might as well wear a calico bonnet. Meanwhile, Decca and Bob could hardly believe their luck. The Oakland general strike, which had shut down the city in 1946, had left it with an attractive reputation for socialist dreamers. The Treuhafts found a sweet little house on a tree-lined street on a steep hill near a rose garden. In Oakland, the weather was perfect all year. Bob, a junior partner at Gladstein, Grossman, Sawyer and Edises (or, as Decca called them, “Gallstones, Gruesome, Sewer & Odious”), pulled in sixty dollars a week, and Decca bought her first new refrigerator. Bert and Pele Edises also moved to the East Bay, but up into the Berkeley Hills, where Pele felt utterly marooned, so far from jazz clubs and artists’ studios. In her new surroundings, she thought her children too vulnerable and exposed, “looked on as dangerous reds.”
Back in Washington, President Harry S. Truman was cleaning house. He’d already dropped the bomb, and now his to-do list read something like this: Assert the victor’s role; protect the sphere of influence; keep Soviets from world domination; pick up dry cleaning. He asked Congress to support a global war against Communism and issued a new Loyalty Order, which barred “subversives” from government employment. This version of the order, designed for the cold war, empowered the attorney general to publish a list of proscribed organizations. The definition of the word loyalty was assumed to be self-evident. Subversives were an undermining constituency, and membership in any of the attorney general’s listed organizations was immediate cause for investigation. Passports, federal loans for housing, and applications to live in federal housing were all subject to a wiggly standard of loyalty.
In October, Bob and Decca’s second son, Benjamin, was born. With each of her children’s birth Decca’s experience had been that much more complicated. For Benjy’s birth in 1947, the doctor had induced with “5 big doses of castor oil, 5 Triple-H enemas (so called by the nurses—it stands for High, Hot & a Hell of a lot), and 45 shots of something or other. Also innumerable pills.” High-priced hospitals, highly regarded physicians, and technological advances did not seem to make anything go easier. These observations and her lifelong respect for the midwife’s skill would become the source material for The American Way of Birth, which she would publish forty-five years later.
In the fast-moving postwar economy, midwifery was considered old-fashioned and unnecessary. All across the workforce, women workers were returning home. Madison Avenue ad campaigns featured sparkling new appliances in immaculate kitchens. Model mothers wore high heels and aprons around nipped-in waists. Such was not the style chez Treuhaft, where “the tidal wave of washing and cleaning . . . daily threatened to engul
f.” Decca had three young children and plenty of volunteer party work to do. Dinky, Nicky, and Benjy came along to meetings and on the weekends would accompany their parents to picnics, benefits, and concerts. She liked their company, but longed for outside work: “For a few depressing months I stayed at home trying to cope.” She was like the farm girl who had once seen the bright lights of Paris. In her case, glamour was a full-bodied submersion in subversion. She knew how much she had to offer. She hated being bored at home, surrounded by that particular nightmare called housework.
The theme of Decca’s domestic dyslexia was often a source of comedy—her smart and deliberate choice. There was very little reward that she could perceive for superior housewifery. The consequence of excellence in the field was further encouragement, and the concept of virtue as its own reward was distinctly unsatisfying. In the end, cleaning would be like typing. If she had learned to type well in the days when typewriters were clunky with inky ribbons and springy keys, perhaps she would have become a desirable secretary instead of a subeligible one. But then she might have been stuck in the typing pool, working for others, and it might have been just that much harder to imagine becoming the journalist she wanted to be. She had studied and practiced typing, but it wasn’t until she was writing her own books that she really mastered the skill. There was also a political component to housework, which Decca might never have fully appreciated if she hadn’t spent these several months at home. She hung this quotation from Lenin above her kitchen sink: “Housework is highly unproductive, most barbarous and most arduous, and it is performed by women. This labor is extremely petty and contains nothing that would in the slightest degree facilitate the development of women.”
As party members, Decca and her friends felt particularly encouraged to take leadership roles in organizing, fund-raising, and education. She met a roadblock early on when it came to restarting her journalism career. She approached the People’s Daily World in the hope of training to become a serious reporter. A male editor who saw her as undereducated, lighthearted, and one of the more vociferous defenders of the “Vicky Says” column steered her toward writing for the Women’s Pages. Over time, Decca had come to believe (as the Women’s Commission had pointed out) that the Women’s Pages were “patronizingly stupid,” so she resented his implication. She had spent years defying expectations and didn’t like to be underestimated. She would periodically freelance for the paper, but she never joined its staff.
IN APRIL 1948, Decca’s mother surprised the Treuhafts with a telegram announcing her sudden decision to visit. For years, Decca had been inviting her mother to California, but their reunion had started to seem unlikely—first there had been the war, then Unity’s needing constant care; there was little money, and California was so far away. They had continued to correspond faithfully, both their personas on paper reliably airy, comic, forgiving, and controlled. But letters, no matter how intimate or revealing, are just the silhouette of a body. After nine years, how would her mother find her? Decca felt “at once immensely excited . . . and deeply apprehensive.” Here she was with three American children, a stay-at-home housewife with Communist books and laundry ankle deep. About all she could do was clean the house with the help of Bob and seven-year-old Dinky (who, family legend held, was something of a domestic prodigy). One day, her daughter returned home from school to find Decca sweeping the stairs from the bottom up.
“You’re supposed to start at the top and go down,” Dinky advised.
A PHOTO TAKEN at the airport shows Muv looking thin and fatigued. She was sixty-eight years old. Commercial nonstop flights from London to San Francisco had begun just the year before. The journey took twenty-three hours, still a piece of cake after what she’d come through in the past few years. In the picture, Decca looks healthy and pretty and, just months after Benjy’s birth, slightly plumper than usual. Decca didn’t pay much attention to fashion anymore, but she had obviously dressed with care. It is one thing to imagine one’s mother after many years apart, but quite another thing to actually see her. Consternation and apprehension melted into a joyful reunion made sweeter as Muv and her granddaughter became instant friends. In the car ride to Oakland, Dinky asked her just when she planned to scold Decca for having run away. The very idea, Decca said, “set us all to shrieking with laughter.”
From the freeways to the bridges through the gorgeous golden city to the Oakland suburbs, Muv was fascinated, curious, and uncritical. She was playful with the children and unjudging of the household chaos. She told Decca she thought the house “wonderful & very pretty” and Oakland’s Victorian homes amid Western gardens something “like a musical comedy stage set.” Decca was far more comfortable with Muv’s disengaged cool than she had ever been. It seemed her mother was “absolutely bent on friendship.”
There was some comforting family gossip. Decca found out what she could about Mrs. Romilly and about Giles, who had survived the war as a prisoner in Germany. He had suffered from deprivation and many losses, but seemed to be improving and had recently married. Nancy was a great source of entertainment; there was so much to say. She’d moved to Paris, and she was still in love with a French diplomat, whom she’d met in 1943. His name was Gaston Palewski. He had been the chef de cabinet of de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile during the war and commanded the Free French forces in East Africa. Nancy called him “the Colonel.” There was a character in her novel, The Pursuit of Love, very like him. The family thought Nancy’s novel was delicious, and they were pleased by its great success. Farve was delighted by the fictionalized version of himself. Everyone agreed there had to be a sequel. The fictional Farve was easier to discuss than the man in reality, though his health was a neutral subject. It was good to know that his eyes had improved. It had seemed for a while as if he’d go blind due to cataracts.
There were still terrible shortages at home—rationing, nationalization—so it was better not to dwell on that subject. No politics was the only rule for this visit. Fresh fruit was hard to find out of season, so the lemon trees in all the gardens were dazzling to Muv. She could now make terrific bread, which she demonstrated. Noting that Decca had no adequate breadboard, Muv promised to send her one. Nancy had started sending rice from France, and—teasing as always—she only sent it to people who had good chefs so it wouldn’t be wasted. Pam was getting a divorce—imagine! She’d been so good to Diana’s boys, taking them in for the duration of the Mosleys’ incarceration. There was a definite chill when Diana’s name was mentioned, and Decca made it clear she couldn’t forgive her sister. (“Wicked Aunt Diana who would melt us all down for soap if she could catch us,” is how she described her to Dinky.) Debo had a new title, the Marchioness of Hartington, and when her husband, Andrew, became Duke of Devonshire, she would be a duchess. With all of that, Debo faced her own heartbreak. Three miscarriages, one around the time of Decca’s and the others more recently. Unity was sometimes impatient and rude to Debo, often unable to express herself adequately, but Unity always spoke of her favorite sister, Decca, with affection.
After Unity’s suicide attempt, the doctors had thought it too dangerous to remove the bullet from her head. Brain damage had made her “strange and childish.” Muv cared for her devotedly, but Farve still found her presence hard to tolerate. Other visitors had noted Unity’s weight gain and that she often seemed depressed. Unity hadn’t been allowed into town during the war, because American forces had been stationed there, but now on good days, she rode her bicycle all over, singing at the top of her voice. A few things gave her real pleasure. She liked to eat and resisted the healthy diet her mother enforced. Church soothed her to some extent. She loved the hymns and liked to visit the parson. She had also found a part-time job, pouring tea at the hospital near High Wycombe, where she and Muv lived when they weren’t at Inch Kenneth.
Muv had seen Unity grow more confused in social encounters. She knew her daughter was unbearably lonely. On one visit to see Nancy, Unity had confided in Derek Hill, a painte
r and friend of her elder sister, that she had joined the Congregationalist Church because after the service, you shook hands and that was “wonderful,” since so few people would touch her anymore. They had a few friends who reliably cared for Unity while Muv visited America.
Decca and Muv’s reunion featured a new directness and honesty. It had rarely been the form among adult Mitfords to share introspection. Decca was happy by then living with Bob and her children in California, but that other life—the one with Esmond—was not so deeply buried. Decca may have tiptoed around some subjects, but she was more than ready to talk about her first husband. It must have been a relief just to say his name aloud. They discussed Esmond’s death early on in the war and Tom’s death at its very end. So many of the young men who used to come to their house had been lost or injured, but a few had established themselves.
Muv and Decca discussed Evelyn Waugh’s career. He had been in their house often when Nancy and Diana were home. Hadn’t Evelyn used Decca’s own definition of sheepish in Vile Bodies, to mean not shy but as beautiful as Decca’s pet lamb Miranda? He had dedicated his new novel, The Loved One, to Nancy (just as years before, he had dedicated Vile Bodies to Diana). Mother and daughter noted that in the first few pages of The Loved One, there is a reference to a chap who before the war had defied convention by staying in America and opening “a restaurant with an Italian partner.” That same character returned to fight in the war and died as the Nazis invade Norway. Esmond had died over the North Sea, and Giles had been captured in Norway, and Waugh knew them both. Waugh’s genius was for the rolling, light, barely there soufflé spiced with malice. It’s just possible that Decca read in the character, who set the standard for eccentric independence, a sort of tribute to her husband. Sydney thought it possible. Writers do so often make fiction out of true stories—they mix and match. Nancy’s work was proof of that.
