Wait for Me!

by Deborah Devonshire

  I was the only sister available to go with Muv on the long and possibly hazardous train journey through France to Switzerland. Although there had been little fighting so far, no one knew when a German attack might come. We set off together immediately after Christmas. The journey seemed as dark during the short days as it was during the long winter nights. Arriving in brilliantly lit Berne after blacked-out England and France lifted our spirits, as did the thought of seeing Unity again. It was a false dawn. Our first sight of her was a shock: her face was the same greyish-brown as her hair, which was matted and almost solid with dried blood – she had not been able to bear anyone touching her head since the day the bullet had smashed into her skull, nearly killing her. Even her huge eyes looked different: one glance showed that the light had gone out. She smiled and was pleased to see us but she was another person. Muv and I looked at the sad, thin creature that was left and tried not to let her see how horrified we were.

  Unity had been unconscious for two months after shooting herself but had slowly regained the use of her limbs. The clinic pronounced her fit to travel and on New Year’s Eve, accompanied by a nurse, we started back to Calais in an ambulance carriage attached to the train. Long halts at dark stations were followed by a few miles of jerky progress, accompanied by bangs and squeals of metal on metal. The whole process then began again. The jolts every time we stopped and started were painful and unsettling for the patient. The journey took so long that we missed the boat to Folkestone and had to endure two interminable nights in a hotel in Calais, where we were besieged by a hostile press.

  Finally, on 3 January, Unity’s stretcher was lifted on to the boat and off again at Folkestone, where Farve was waiting for us; then into an ambulance and at last we were on our way to the Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe. But not for long. The engine started making strange noises and we drew to a halt. There was a long wait until another ambulance arrived to take us back to Folkestone. After all these alarms, it was too late to make the long drive to High Wycombe and we spent the night in a Folkestone hotel. Meanwhile the photographers, who had not been able to get close to us on the dock because it was a prohibited area, were snapping away and the reporters got their pictures and story when Unity was transferred from one ambulance to another. Farve was certain the breakdown had been fixed by the press. It was not till the following afternoon that we arrived home, after a journey that had taken four days instead of one.

  Three weeks later, Unity was examined by Sir Hugh Cairns, Nuffield Professor of Surgery at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, who confirmed that the doctors in Germany were right not to have tried to remove the bullet which was lodged in her brain. Muv devoted herself to looking after Unity from the day we brought her home from Switzerland and it gradually became clear to us all that she would never be the same again. Muv wanted to take her to Inch Kenneth but the island was a protected area and as Unity was regarded as a dangerous individual by the authorities, permission was refused. Little did they realize her condition. The press was still plaguing us, so Muv and Farve decided that the Mill Cottage in Swinbrook would be less accessible than High Wycombe, where the yard could not be closed off and the miller’s lorries came and went.

  We were at close quarters at Swinbrook. My bedroom measured seven by eight feet (against the law now but it seemed perfectly all right to me). Unity slept in the next room and there was just a flimsy door between us. Since her suicide attempt she had taken against me, as she had done with others. ‘It’s awful,’ I wrote to Diana in October 1940, ‘she so hates me that life here has become almost impossible. The sitting room is so small and two enormous tables in it belong exclusively to her and if one so much as puts some knitting down on one for a moment chaos reigns because she hies up & shrieks “bloody fool” very loud.’

  She was unable to concentrate and jumped from one subject to another, using the wrong words and getting angry when we could not understand her. She sometimes spoke of the Führer, but as from a great distance; her grasp on reality was that of a child. To add to the misery, she was incontinent. Muv washed her sheets every day in the small kitchen sink and when they were hung out to dry they dominated the little garden. Mrs Stobie (now married to Philip Timms, my father’s old foreman) came in to help. I overheard my mother interviewing an applicant for the job once when Mrs Stobie was ill. ‘I do the rough,’ I heard Muv say. That meant sawing the logs with what became known as a ‘Queen Mary’ (so called because the widowed queen spent the war at Badminton House where she delighted in cutting down the Duke of Beaufort’s trees), chopping the wood for kindling, cleaning the grates in the morning and sweeping out the ashes.

  The doctor advised Muv to encourage Unity to be independent and after a few months she was able to take the bus to Oxford on her own, sometimes asking her fellow passengers for money on the way. The highlight of her day was lunch at the British Restaurant, a kind of soup kitchen where the doubtful stew and potatoes cost one shilling. She sometimes queued up a second time, which you were not meant to do, but the good-natured customers and staff never reported her.

  She would attach herself to various people for a time and then take up with someone else. Two people stand out for their patience: Mrs Wells, the parson’s wife (‘Blissful Mrs Wells’, Unity called her), and Miss Bannerman who had an antique shop in Burford. These two good, unprejudiced women often kept her company. Unity still needed a cause, something to replace her love of Germany, and she turned to religion. Over the years she joined – or tried to join – the Roman Catholic Church, the Christian Scientists and everything in between. This led to terrible muddles with the local organizers of these different faiths and Muv had to sort them out. Had Eastern religions been as popular as they are today, I am sure Unity would have worked her way through those as well. I was entirely selfish and thought of nothing except being with Andrew and did precious little for either mother or sister.

  Nearly all her contemporaries are dead so there are very few people who remember Unity as she was before she tried to kill herself. (One who does and who has fond memories of her is her old friend Micky Burn, now aged ninety-eight.) Those who are interested in her life can read thousands of words about her, written with the benefit of hindsight. All are hostile because of her friendship with Hitler. She has become a symbol of evil, her name synonymous with anti-Semitism. So why did we all love her? I have searched for the answer, tried to find a word to describe what it was about her, but cannot. Decca could not explain it either: the strongest possible political division separated her from Unity but nothing could extinguish their love for each other. We knew the bad side, we knew she had condoned Nazi cruelty and that she had taken a flat from a Jewish couple who had been evicted; yet in spite of her racist views, vehemently expressed, and her admiration for the most extreme of Hitler’s lieutenants, there was something innocent about Unity, a guileless, childlike simplicity that made her vulnerable and in need of protection. Nancy and Pam in their own ways, Tom, undoubtedly, Diana to a much greater degree, Decca, amazingly, and I, certainly, could not help loving her. Our parents, of course, and cousins felt the same way. It was not that those who loved her forgave her her beliefs, they went on loving her in spite of them. None of this will impress her enemies but it goes some way to account for the feelings of those who knew her. Perhaps it is too easy to say that she was inexplicable, but it is a fact.

  Decca and Esmond returned to England three months before their baby daughter, Julia, was born on 20 December 1937. They lived in a house in Rotherhithe Street in south-east London which I visited two or three times. Esmond made no secret of his dislike of our family and Decca and I usually met on neutral ground. Esmond was not there when I went to see the baby, who was suspended in a cradle out of a window that overlooked the River Thames – a bit of Nanny’s lore to do with fresh air, no doubt. Decca was guardedly welcoming. Unsurprisingly, the old intimacy had gone but we had a good chat.

  Then came their tragedy: Julia caught measles, which turned into pneumoni
a, and she died, aged five months. Decca wrote an agonizing account of her baby’s illness and death in her memoirs, but never spoke of her misery to me or any of the family; she buried her sorrow deep. To my shame, I was entirely taken up at the time with dances and friends – following ‘the devices and desires’ of my own heart. Decca resisted any attempt at sympathy on my part and, understandably, cut herself off from me and the frivolous life I was leading. The day after Julia’s funeral, at which none of the family were welcome, the Romillys went to Corsica where they remained out of communication for three months.

  Tom acted as a bridge between Decca and our parents and was the only member of the family to make friends with Esmond. A great arguer, he was fascinated by the theory of politics rather than their practical application and was able, unlike my sisters, to discuss politics dispassionately. He was present at Mosley’s infamous Olympia meeting in 1934, where he was photographed giving the Fascist salute, but he also spent hours talking to Esmond. He was as interested to meet Hitler with Diana and Unity as he was to debate communism with Decca and Esmond’s friends. As a result, he was claimed by both sides as ‘one of us’ and remained on good terms with everyone throughout all the political upheavals.

  In early 1939 the Romillys left for America to start a new life. Esmond joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in July 1940 and this brought about the greatest sorrow of Decca’s life. On 30 November 1941 Esmond’s disabled plane came down in the North Sea and he was posted missing. The word ‘missing’ is particularly cruel, leaving as it does a ray of hope that the person will turn up safe and well, even in the most doomed circumstances. As days go by, it becomes increasingly unlikely and yet, and yet . . .

  It was in Decca’s nature to be optimistic and she clutched at every straw, hoping against hope that Esmond was a prisoner of war. In December, Winston Churchill (whose wife, Clementine, was Farve’s first cousin) went to America to confer with President Roosevelt and asked Decca, who was living in Washington, to meet him at the White House. Churchill told her that he had looked carefully into the matter of the plane’s disappearance and that there was no chance of Esmond being alive. Even then Decca could not believe it. As she left the White House, Winston gave her an envelope containing $500. She was enraged at this display of charity – as if she could not look after herself. She was certainly not going to accept money from Churchill and she gave it away to friends.

  After Esmond’s death, Muv wrote to Decca telling her how delighted we would all be to have her back and pleaded with her to come home. Decca’s Air Force pension was derisory, but a prouder woman you could not find; she decided to stay in America, take a secretarial job and manage somehow. Esmond’s death must have nearly destroyed her. I do not doubt that their marriage would have lasted: they were so exactly right for each other. Her saviour was Constancia, ‘Dinky’, her ten-month-old daughter – all that she had left of Esmond and the dizzy few years they had spent together.

  Diana and Sir Oswald married in 1936, after the sudden death of his first wife, Cimmie, following an appendicitis operation that went wrong. In May 1940 Sir O was arrested under Defence Regulation 18B, a wartime ruling that empowered the government to detain anyone considered a threat to the country, and he was sent to Brixton Prison. He was not charged with any offence and so was not tried in a court of law. A month later Diana was also arrested under 18B and taken to Holloway, the women’s prison. Max, her fourth son (and second by Mosley), was eleven weeks old and she was still breastfeeding him. She was given the chance to take the baby with her, but the bombing of London was expected at any moment and she decided to leave him with his brother, eighteen-month-old Alexander, in the capable hands of Nanny Higgs.

  What happened to Diana and my brother-in-law is well documented. What is less well known is that the day after Diana was arrested Gladwyn Jebb, private secretary to Sir Alexander Cadogan at the Foreign Office and an acquaintance of Nancy, summoned Nancy to his office. He wanted to know whether she thought Diana’s friendship with Hitler and other high-ranking members of the Nazi party made her a threat to the country, and asked her if she knew the purpose of Diana’s visits to Germany. Nancy told Gladwyn that she thought Diana ‘an extremely dangerous person’. What she based this statement on I do not know – Diana never spoke politics to Nancy – and why she agreed to be questioned about a subject of which she admitted she knew nothing I shall never understand. Diana had always been generous to Nancy and they loved each other’s company, which makes Nancy’s denunciation all the more inexplicable. But I do know that her underlying jealousy of Diana, which went back to childhood, was still very present. It had been exacerbated by Diana producing four healthy boys and Nancy being unable to have children following an ectopic pregnancy. Diana did not learn of Nancy’s action until 1985, twelve years after Nancy’s death. It must have been a fearful shock, however well she thought she knew Nancy, such duplicity being entirely foreign to her own nature.

  Diana described her experiences in Holloway in her memoirs, A Life of Contrasts, and there is little I can add. I visited her several times and saw enough to realize what an ordeal her imprisonment was. She was allowed one visitor for half an hour every fortnight. The precious thirty minutes was usually used by my mother, with or without Diana’s children. There was always a wardress present at these meetings, one of whom became Diana’s friend. The prison was overcrowded and there were many women to each lavatory. One of these had a red ‘V’ painted on the door and was usually empty, so Diana decided to use it. ‘I shouldn’t if I were you,’ her friend the wardress warned her, ‘it’s for people with venereal disease.’ Muv was so shocked by the filth of the visitors’ lavatory that, in an uncharacteristic gesture, she wrote on the wall: ‘This lavatory is a disgrace to HM Prisons’. Sir O also wrote an account of his imprisonment, but one detail he failed to mention is that the Lascar seamen held in the cells on the floor above him used to urinate out of the window and the wind blew the results down into his cell below.

  Tom, who was with the 11th Battalion King’s Royal Rifle Corps (surprising his old friends by the eagerness with which he embraced army life), visited Diana whenever he was on leave. One day in autumn 1941 he went to see both Sir O in Brixton and Diana in Holloway. He told Diana that he was dining that night with Churchill and asked if there was anything she would like him to say to the Prime Minister. ‘Only the same as always,’ she answered, ‘that if we have to stay in prison couldn’t we at least be together?’ After dining at 10 Downing Street, Tom wrote to Churchill on Diana’s behalf, repeating her request. In December 1941, after eighteen long months apart, Diana and Sir O were reunited in Holloway, as were other husbands and wives held under Regulation 18B. Diana said that, unlikely as it may seem, one of the happiest days of her life was in prison: the day she and her husband were together again. The press made a great deal of this and it was picked up by the bus conductor on the north London route, who used to announce at the top of his voice, ‘Holloway Jail. Lady Mosley’s suite. All change here.’ My mother gave him a stern look as she got off the bus to go through the huge prison gates.

  Two years later, Sir O fell ill with phlebitis. The authorities were frightened that he might die in prison and in November 1943, after much discussion, the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, unwillingly agreed that the Mosleys should be released under house arrest. When this was announced, Nancy again performed her ‘patriotic duty’ and went to MI5 to volunteer that in her opinion Diana sincerely desired ‘the downfall of England and democracy generally’ and should not be released. This time Nancy’s fantasy had gone too far; she had no evidence whatsoever for her claim and luckily the government took no notice. Diana was never to know of this second betrayal since the relevant government papers were not made public until four months after her death. To me, Nancy’s behaviour is so incredible that I would not have believed it had I not read it in black and white in an official document.

  Derek Jackson worked at Professor Lindemann’s Oxford laboratory
until the Fall of France. He then joined the RAF as a wireless operator/air gunner, making over sixty sorties with 604 Squadron. At thirty-four, he was older than most of his comrades and Lindemann did not want to let him go, but by force of character Derek succeeded in joining up. Pam followed him around the country and was there to look after him in rented houses whenever possible. From 1943 until the end of the war he played a vital role in helping to develop ways of interfering with enemy radar.

  Derek behaved in the air force much as he had done on the racecourse, astonishing his pilot on one occasion by giving instructions in German. When the Mosleys were released from Holloway and had nowhere to live Derek invited them to Rignell, but after a few days the Home Office woke up to the fact that Derek was doing top secret scientific work and the Mosleys were told they had to leave. Derek was incensed and when aroused could be a formidable opponent. He grabbed the telephone and rang the Home Office, demanding to speak to Morrison who, as Derek knew, had been a conscientious objector in the First World War. To everyone’s surprise Derek was put through and – as he enjoyed recalling later – he went into the attack: ‘When you have got the DFC, the AFC and the OBE for valour, you can tell me what to do.’ In spite of Derek’s protestations, the Mosleys had to leave Rignell and went to a nearby inn, The Shaven Crown, where they spent Christmas 1943.