‘Well,’ the unflappable maid began, ‘he was quite different from what I thought he would be.’
‘In what way?’ Unity eagerly asked, hoping to provoke some excitement in the otherwise underwhelming response.
‘He’s got such beautiful hair,’ was the maid’s unexpected and disappointing answer.
To Unity’s fury, Diana erupted into peals of laughter. She also confirmed the Führer’s hair was indeed very neatly combed.
The sunny autumn days were gradually lapsing into a bitter, cold winter – another aspect which Diana thought was better dealt with in Germany. She did not find the winter climate unbearable because the German houses, unlike in England, had double glazing and efficient central heating. The icy air preserved an alluring smell, an aroma of brewing combined with the cigars the men smoked as they sat along the street cafés. Before sunrise there was a scuttle of quiet movement in the streets as hundreds of people walked to the station with their skis on their backs. From a distance, Diana could see the small figures speeding down the Alps with the blinding sunlight behind them, beaming off the snow and lighting up the baroque facade below. It was an idyllic setting, but with their plan to meet Hitler already wavering, Diana gave up her flat and returned to England, having spent five weeks in Munich.
Arriving home days before Christmas, and with her children spending the festive season with Bryan, Diana accepted Gerald Berners’ invitation to stay at his country house, Faringdon. The house often played host to bizarre guests; one such oddity arrived in the form of a boa constrictor, brought by Luisa Casati, a famous Italian marchioness. ‘Wouldn’t it like something to eat?’ Berners’ mother, Mrs Tyrwhitt-Wilson, asked as the snake was retrieved from its basket.
‘No, it had a goat this morning!’ the marchioness said in a matter of fact voice as the snake slithered across the floor.
Mrs Tyrwhitt-Wilson eyed the reptile with contempt. ‘It does seem so inhospitable,’ she complained.
Inhospitable was not an adjective to describe Berners. His guests seemed to be a gathering of lost souls and on this occasion the oddity was in the form of Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough. Joking that she and Gladys were bonded together as one social pariah to another, the latter was in a far more precarious situation than Diana. Unlike Bryan, who wished to inflict no harm on Diana, Gladys’s husband was resorting to harsh tactics to destroy her reputation and her domestic circumstances. Although estranged from the duke, she continued to live in his house at Carlton House Terrace and, in an attempt to evict her, he had the electricity turned off.
When her evenings were not consumed by Mosley, Diana visited Gladys, where they sat on the balcony overlooking the Mall, illuminated by the street lights. Leaving the house was an adventure, which Diana realised when she had to feel her way through the dark landing and down the staircase, until she eventually reached the front door, miraculously uninjured.
The sadness radiating off Gladys was painful for Diana to observe. Once a celebrated beauty, feted in the pre-war circles of Paris and Rome, Gladys’s enormous, clear blue eyes were a reminder of her ethereal appeal, obscured by a botched plastic surgery attempt. The facial deformities were the result of an early attempt at face-lifting. Desiring a perfect Grecian nose, the plastic surgeon had advised Gladys to have a piece of paraffin wax inserted where the nose connects to the forehead. The wax gradually slipped from its place, and eventually her nose resembled a deflated balloon.
As much as Gladys’s plight pulled on Diana’s heartstrings, she was relieved when Berners provided lighter moments during her stay. Withdrawing to her bedroom on her first evening at Faringdon, Diana noticed a book placed on her bed. The dust jacket read: ‘This is the hottest thing written in the last twenty years – sex, crime, violence …’ Intrigued, she opened the book only to discover it concealed a copy of the Bible. The laugher ensued over Christmas lunch when Berners presented a gourmet feast to his guests. Cutting into the Christmas pudding, Diana was surprised when buttons and thimbles spilled out. ‘Nobody got a ring or anything nice like sixpence,’ she recounted.
To the horror of Nancy and Jessica, David and Sydney’s attitude towards Hitler and Germany had changed. Sydney was the first convert; she found ‘great beauty and charm’ in Munich’s baroque architecture. And Unity reported to Diana that David, too, had admitted to being wrong in his judgement of Hitler. Debo, who was 14, wrote to Diana: ‘I argue for fascism at school as all the girls are Conservatives.’61 Having turned her political compass to the far left, Jessica could no longer tolerate her family supporting such politics.
Loyalties were further divided when Jessica allayed herself with the Communist Party. Uncompromising in her political beliefs – a trait she shared with Diana and Unity – she had begun to view her parents, especially her mother, as ‘an enemy of the working classes’. And the more she learned of Mosley, the more she loathed him. This sense of loathing transferred on to Diana, her once favourite sister. As far as Jessica was concerned, Diana was to blame for their parents growing admiration of Hitler and, in particular, Unity’s fanaticism with him. A few years later, when she eloped with Esmond Romilly,* her second cousin and fellow communist sympathiser, she severed all ties with Diana.
Nancy retaliated by planning a book which parodied fascism. ‘The Leaderteases’, as Nancy referred to them, were no longer amusing to Diana. Inventing the whimsy title Wigs on the Green, as she had done with all of her novels, Nancy looked to her nearest and dearest for inspiration. Fearing Diana’s wrath, and not overlooking her sister rescuing her from many a financial disaster – ‘Thank you by the way for the lifesaving gift of £5’ – Nancy knew better than to satirise her. She used Unity as her protagonist in the form of Eugenia, an ungainly girl in tatty clothing who worshipped the fascist leader, Captain Jack of the Union Jack Movement. Diana was appalled, but Nancy possessed enough gumption to argue: ‘fascism is now such a notable feature of modern life all over the world that it must be possible to consider it in any context …’
There was a fragment of truth behind Nancy’s self-justification for writing Wigs on the Green, as fascism was indeed springing up in many contexts. W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s anti-fascist play, The Dog Beneath the Skin, was published in 1935 and first performed by the Group Theatre in 1936. Gerald Berners and Diana dined with Auden, then a relatively unknown writer, and to be polite they attended a performance of the play. Diana remembered two things: the play ‘was not very good’ and the playwright ‘was pale yellow, hair and suit, he had bitten nails and a dirty suit’.
Although Diana tolerated Auden and Isherwood’s play, Nancy’s betrayal also coincided with Diana’s old friend Edward James (whom she had been in love with during her days as a debutante), who was going through a very public divorce from Tilly Losch. Diana was quick to leap to his defence, even though society abandoned him for daring to challenge Tilly’s suit on the grounds of adultery when she countersued Edward, claiming the marriage was a sham due to his homosexuality. ‘After the divorce I discovered who my real friends in England were,’ and when Edward tallied up those who supported him, he counted two women – one of whom was Diana.
Diana was sincere when she told Edward: ‘Pa was very grateful to you for marrying Tilly, we were so afraid that Tom would.’ However, not everyone in the Mitford family had feared a marriage between Tilly and Tom. Nancy became one of Tilly’s many supporters; a sore point for Diana, whose feelings of love mellowed into a lifelong fondness for Edward. The divorce was granted in 1934 and Edward – now available – proposed to Diana, but she declined with the words: ‘No fear.’ Diana needed a stronger man, hence her continued devotion to Mosley. The publication of Wigs on the Green and Nancy’s support of Tilly further embittered Diana, and the once close sisterly relationship cooled.
If the New Year of 1935 brought any eventualities in Diana and Mosley’s life, nothing could compare to the news that Unity was about to reveal. On a Saturday afternoon in February, Unity stepped off the damp stre
et into the Osteria Bavaria and, following her normal routine, she ordered some lunch and waited for the usual sighting of Hitler.
Hitler and his entourage entered the restaurant and they walked past Unity’s table at the front – she always sat at that table because Hitler would have to walk past her to enter and to leave. Having stared at him the entire time, as she always did, Unity took the last sip of her coffee and cast the empty cup to one side. The waitresses at this point had become acquainted enough with this strange English girl to know to automatically refill her cup. There was something unique about this particular day. Before Unity gestured for the waitress, she looked up and to her surprise one of Hitler’s cronies stood before her and announced in German: ‘The Führer would like to speak to you.’
For anyone unfamiliar with the story, it would seem a remarkable fluke that Unity was chosen at random to meet the Führer, who went to the Osteria Bavaria to dine as a private citizen. However, this had been a carefully crafted plan, in the works for over a year. On 9 February, Unity saw the results of her dedication. ‘I can’t tell you all the things we talked about …’ Unity swooned in a letter to Diana. The topics included Noel Coward’s Cavalcade, which Hitler thought was the greatest film he had ever seen, and he warned that the international Jews must never again be allowed to make two Nordic races fight against one another. Unity wrote to Diana, urging her to come to Munich at once so that she, too, could meet ‘the greatest man of all time’.
There was no question of what Diana should do and Mosley encouraged her to go to Munich at once. With the credibility of the BUF floundering and his public support at an all time low, he knew there was only one direction in which the party could go: it needed foreign support, and this, he hoped, would come from Germany.
Since the Olympia rally, Irene had become opposed to Mosley and the BUF. However, as much as her artistic nature clashed with her brother-in-law’s ideology, she pointed the majority of the blame in Diana’s direction. She wrote in her diary: ‘Baba saddened me deeply by tales of Mrs Guinness’s increased wriggling her way into Tom and the children and that she goes everywhere with him in a black shirt and has entree to Hitler and Goebbels for him.’ The black shirt was an exaggeration and her perception was off, for it was Unity who was working to gain Mosley ‘entree with Hitler’ and, having met him a further two times since writing to Diana, she was introduced to his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. However, unlike Hitler who was enchanted by Unity’s gaiety, Goebbels was suspicious of her motives from the beginning.
Finally, the lifestyle of freedom that Diana had imagined when she left Bryan was coming true. Leaving her children behind, Diana set off for Munich via Paris in an elegant Voisin car – a present from Mosley – which ran into trouble as the heavy snow fell in the Black Forest. The chauffeur from the Voisin factory’s grumbling was more than Diana could bear and, spying a peasant with a team of horses, she called for help and was pulled to safety. It would be the only hindrance during her trip.
There was nothing exceptional about Hitler when Diana finally met him on 11 March 1935. She observed that he ‘appealed in equal measure to women and to exactly the sort of men he needed’. She claimed that she never heard Hitler rant, or indeed go off on a political tangent. He had simple tastes, apparent over luncheon at the Osteria Bavaria when he ordered ‘eggs and mayonnaise, and vegetables and pasta, and compote of fruit or a raw grated apple, and Fachingerwasser’. Hitler was extremely polite to women and impressed Diana with his European manners: he kissed her hand, bowed his head and did not sit down until she was seated. This, she felt necessary to mention in her autobiography, given the ‘acres of print about Hitler in which his rudeness and bad manners to everyone are emphasised’.
Hitler fascinated Diana with his greyish blue eyes, so dark that they often appeared brown and opaque, and like those who possess sinister intentions, he charmed her. The charm was in abundance; he admired Unity and Diana, the latter in her chic Parisian clothes. Unlike many in his company, the sisters were not intimidated by him and they conversed freely, often punctuating their sentences with Mitford jokes and witty nuances.
To dispel the myth surrounding Unity’s head-over-heels infatuation with Hitler, Diana wrote: ‘Unity was never awed in her entire life. She said what came into her head.’ It was this candour which made the Führer laugh and in return ‘he inspired affection’.
Two days later, Diana and Unity left for Paris, taking it in turns to drive the Voisin. Bryan was staying at the Rue de Poitiers flat with Nanny Higgs and the children. It was Jonathan’s 5th birthday and, still friendly with Bryan, Diana joined them. Paris never appealed to Unity and after exhausting the museums she departed for Munich.
Unity was not shy in boasting about her connections to ‘Cousin Winston’ and the English aristocracy and, knowing Hitler’s admiration for prominent people, she also told him of Mosley. Although Hitler publicly disapproved of co-habitation and adultery, he was fascinated to learn more. So, when Mosley received his invitation to visit Hitler in April, Diana must have, in some way, felt useful to him.
NOTES
* Esmond Romilly’s mother, Nelly Hozier, was the daughter of Lady Blanche Hozier. Nelly, too, was rumored to have been the daughter of Bertie Redesdale, thus if such rumours were true, Nelly was, in fact, David’s half sister.
60 Published in the notes of A Life of Contrasts, Diana Mosley.
61 A letter from Deborah to Diana, 4 October 1943, The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters, Charlotte Mosley (ed.).
30
A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS
Harold Nicolson, Mosley’s old friend who had supported the New Party but severed political ties when the BUF was formed, once remarked of Cimmie: ‘She was not made for politics. She was made for society and the home.’ It is not apparent if this statement was known by Diana, but it certainly paralleled with Mosley’s reluctance for her to become involved with the BUF. Cimmie might not have been made for politics, but Diana was. The ease in which she communicated with Hitler – she was now fluent in German – would later act as a vital tool for Mosley and his BUF. For now, Diana remained in Paris with Bryan and the children while Mosley travelled to meet Hitler.
Before Mosley’s departure, he made a startling anti-Semitic speech* in Leicester: ‘For the first time I openly and publicly challenge the Jewish interests in this country commanding the press … commanding the cinema, dominating the City of London, killing London with their sweatshops …’ This speech reached Julius Streicher, whose own hatred of the Jews was the most prominent among the Nazi Party. He wrote to Mosley to congratulate him on his rousing speech. Mosley’s reply to Streicher was published in his newspaper, Der Stürmer: ‘I value your advice greatly in the midst of our hard struggle. The power of Jewish corruption must be destroyed in all countries before peace and justice can be successfully achieved in Europe. Our struggle to this end is hard, but our victory is certain.’
The meeting with Hitler was a small, intimate affair. The Führer invited the Kaiser’s daughter, the Duchess of Brunswick, Frau Winifred Wagner and Unity. This was a milestone for Unity in particular, though her presence must have inspired an uncomfortable feeling in Mosley, who was no stranger to her extreme fanaticism and outbursts. Mosley found Hitler to be a ‘calm, cool customer, certainly ruthless, but in no way neurotic … with a gentle, almost feminine charm’. It was a careful, methodical response from Mosley; he hardly knew Hitler and the meeting was not enough to gauge whether there would be any sort of political friendship between the two. Prior to extending an invitation to Mosley, Hitler had sent his aide, Colonel Ross, to England for three weeks to observe the BUF. Ross reported there ‘was a fine spirit and the movement had a splendid leader, but no organisation’.
The calmness did not extend to Unity, who was said to possess ‘a masculine streak’ when it came to politics.62 She was tipped into a frenzy of excitement at being in the company of both Hitler and Mosley and, caught up in the moment, she immedi
ately wrote a letter to Julius Streicher, asking for it to be published in his newspaper. ‘The English have no notion of the Jewish danger. Our most dangerous Jews work only behind the scenes … I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater.’63 It was a dangerous and immature gesture, but Nancy brushed it off with the usual flippancy she resorted to when dealing with Unity: ‘Good gracious that interview you sent us, fantasia, fantasia,’ she teased. Trying to justify Unity’s comments, Diana defended her sister’s outlook by attaching it to loyalty, and this affinity with Hitler, she explained, provoked her to believe ‘the enemy of my friend is my enemy’.
Unsurprisingly, the written attack was not well received outside of those with anti-Semitic feelings and it established Unity as a notorious anti-Semite. Mosley, too, had garnered such a reputation by his own hand with his speeches. Diana had refrained from making such public comments against the Jews – she had many Jewish friends – but she had become guilty by association.
On a humid evening in July, Mosley telephoned Diana, inviting her to spend the night at Savehay to sleep in the cool, country air. Having suffered sleepless nights from the intolerable London heat, she accepted his invitation. Before she could motor down to Denham, she attended a dinner party at the Dunns, where she sat next to the press baron, Lord Beaverbrook, and consumed liberal amounts of champagne.64 Rather tipsy and drained from the hot weather, she returned to the Eatonry to change into her coolest outfit: a white satin jacket and a long, white skirt. It was after midnight when she finally set off in the Voison with her timid spaniel in the back seat. She approached the junction where the five roads meet between Belgrave Square and Cadogan Place, unaware that a Rolls-Royce was speeding in her direction. It crashed into the side of the tiny Voison and its impact caused Diana’s head to hit off the windscreen, smashing the glass, which sliced through her face.
Mrs Guinness Page 20
