by Lisa Hilton
Well, we got our ship off … There was a fearful hurricane and she couldn’t get into Port Vendre, so all the arrangements had to be altered … at an hour’s notice, special trains etc etc the result was Peter was up for two whole nights… I was up all yesterday night as the embarkation went on until 6am and the people on the quay had to be fed and the babies given their bottles. There were 200 babies under 2 and 12 women are to have babies on board … The women were on the quayside first and then the men arrived … you never saw such scenes of hugging. The boat sailed at 12 yesterday, the pathetic little band played first God Save the King for us, then the Marseillaise, and then the Spanish national anthem. Then the poor things gave three vivas for Espana which they will never see again. I don’t think there was a single person not crying – I have never cried so much in my life.
Nancy had come to know many of the refugees personally, as some had helped with the office work. Jessica had idolized the working class so long that when she actually met a member of it who didn’t work for her family (during a job as a saleswoman) she was horrified to find them dirty, coarse and unpleasant. Like George Orwell, she felt terribly let down when she saw the noble proletariat close up. Nancy had no such naïve expectations and therefore no such prejudices. She took the refugees as they were, embraced their concerns and understood them – for example, criticizing the Red Cross for issuing shorts, which the Spaniards found undignified and humiliating to wear. Unlike Diana or Unity, Nancy had first-hand experience of the human wretchedness Fascism produced, and Perpignan annealed her hatred for it. To her mother she wrote: ‘If you could have a look, as I have, at some of the less agreeable results of Fascism in a country I think you would be less anxious for the swastika to become the flag on which the sun never sets. And whatever may be the good produced by that regime, that the first result is always a horde of unhappy refugees cannot be denied.’ To Nancy, no ideology was worth the cost she had witnessed. When she returned to England in June 1939, she was more than ever convinced that Fascism had to be fought.
The Perpignan experience had also brought about a rare moment of closeness and collaboration in the Rodd marriage. Until Lord Redesdale’s dramatic recantation (‘like Latimer in the Daily Mirror’) Peter and Nancy presented a united front against both the milder pro-appeasement beliefs of the Rodd family and the ever-more obsessive devotion of the elder Mitfords. In the six years between their first visit to Nuremberg and the outbreak of war, Diana and Unity had spent much time with Hitler. Diana’s personal friendship with the Führer was coloured by her practical aims of obtaining help for her husband’s cause; Unity was evangelical. Her life was lived with no other object than seeing Hitler, her time organized around the possibilities of meeting him. Far from heeding Peter’s warning as to the disastrous consequences of her idolatry, the Redesdales had accommodated it, first in visiting Munich and being introduced to Hitler, subsequently in espousing Fascism in both the House of Lords and the British press and attending the 1938 Nuremberg rally. Pamela and Deborah were largely unimpressed by their presentations to the leader of the Reich. Pamela described him as looking like any ordinary farmer while Deborah giggled at her mother’s earnest attempts to engage him in a discussion of laws regulating the quality of bread flour.
In terms of the family allegiances, though, Pamela was ranged on the Fascister side through her marriage in 1936 to Derek Jackson, a rich and distinguished physicist and a supporter of Fascism. Jackson attracted less opprobrium than other sympathizers, both within and without the family, partly because of his extreme brilliance and partly because when the time came he served with great valour in the RAF. Tom’s position was complex. While contemporaries disagree as to whether or not he approved of the Nazis, he was unequivocally pro-German. As a near-professional-level musician he admired German composers above all others and he was an extremely serious student of German philosophy and literature. He had a spiritual affinity with Germany as Nancy had with France. When the time came he elected to be drafted to the East, rather than Europe, because, in the words of his friend James Lees-Milne, he was better able to face killing the Japanese, whom he did not like, than the Germans, whom he did. Of the latterday Mitford conversions to National Socialism, Lady Redesdale’s was the most enduring. It infuriated Nancy that her mother openly declared she hoped Britain would lose the war, and that she seemed to regard Adolf as her ‘favourite son-in-law’. According to her personal logic, it was British opposition to Fascism that destroyed not only her marriage, but the life of her daughter Unity.
The relationship between the Fuhrer and the young English aristocrat had made Unity the most notorious of the Mitford sisters by the end of the Thirties. She was mentioned a good deal in the press, for example on 18 March 1939, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, in a piece run by the Daily Mirror entitled ‘What Miss Mitford Would Like to See’. Lady Redesdale published her own opinions on National Socialism in a Daily Sketch article on 10 June, her connection with Unity making for engaging copy. Whatever the reality of Unity’s political influence (which appears, on balance, to have been negligible), it is understandable that the interest and controversy she provoked, which she monitored in fat scrapbooks of press cuttings, not only fuelled her passion for all things Nazi but contributed to a belief that she was possessed of a unique destiny. Rudi von St Paul, a friend of Unity’s, claimed to her biographer David Pryce-Jones that ‘she put her life and ambition into avoiding a war between England and Germany … She could not admit to herself and the public that she had failed to prevent the war. She had been on a pedestal and was therefore mistaken into thinking she had influence.’2
In 1938, Lord Redesdale had purchased the isolated Hebridean island of Inch Kenneth from a chap at his club. The Redesdales, Nancy and Deborah were summering there when war was declared on 3 September. Nancy immediately set off for London, followed the next day by Deborah, who made the journey to Blomfield Road accompanied by one of her mother’s goats. None of the family could have been aware that Unity was by this time lying in a Munich hospital with a bullet lodged in her brain. During her last visits to England, she had told Diana, Tom, Deborah and Jessica that she intended to commit suicide if war was declared and after leaving a suicide note and a sealed letter for Hitler had driven to the Englischer Garten and shot herself in the temple.
On 15 September, Nancy wrote to Violet Hammersley that Unity ‘on fairly good authority is in a concentration camp for Czech women which much as I deplore it has a sort of poetic justice’. Peter, she claimed, would use his diplomatic connections to have her released when she had come to her senses. The first real news came on 2 October, but it was not until December that Lady Redesdale and Deborah were able to set off for Switzerland, where Hitler had arranged for Unity to be transferred, to bring her home. They arrived back in England in early January to a hostile furore in the press. Unity was to live for another eight years, an overblown, incontinent wreck, unmanageable, pathetically furious and piteously needy. Lady Redesdale sacrificed herself to her care and her condition dealt the final blow to the Redesdale marriage. After Unity’s return the Mitford parents chose to live apart. Nancy later described her ‘beautiful, charming, odd’ sister as a ‘victim of the times’. ‘Am I mad?’ Unity had asked her plaintively. ‘Of course you are, darling Stonyheart, ’ Nancy replied, ‘but then, you always were.’ Unity was the first family casualty of the war, her lumbering ghost the nexus for all the guilt and grief that no amount of Mitford jokes could ever quite appease.
8
WAR
Nancy began her war work the day she returned to London. Peter was already commissioned in the Welsh Guards and while waiting to be called up joined a first-aid post in Chelsea. Nancy was to drive an ARP van every night. Driving in the blackout was not a success – she crashed almost immediately – so she found more suitable work at a first-aid post in Praed Street, near Blomfield Road. Sitting around rolling bandages in anticipation of casualties, indelible pencil poised to write on their f
oreheads, she began her fourth novel, Pigeon Pie.
The satirical effect of inverted context had already been exploited by Nancy in Wigs on the Green, where Fascism is parodied by its transposition to rural England. The technique owes something to Pope’s Rape of the Lock, where a petty society squabble is elevated to mock-Homeric epic; in Pigeon Pie Nancy did something similar, reducing the paranoia of the ‘Phoney War’ to a spy story set in a Mayfair drawing room. Considering the novel later with Evelyn Waugh, Nancy thought it ‘extremely evocative’ of those first tense months of the conflict, when no side seemed anxious to begin.
England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. England beckoned to Poland, Germany answered with Russia. Then Italy’s Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee … England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain’s Nanny said she had internal troubles and must sit this one out. England looked towards the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except little Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. America of course, was too much of a baby for such a grown-up game, but she was just longing to see it played. And still it would not begin.
This approach, it has been suggested, is ‘horribly compromised by its flippancy’. Nancy ‘simply does not know how to respond to an event of this magnitude’; hence Pigeon Pie is ‘less an exercise in detachment than straightforward evasion, an attitude to life forged in that artificial late-Twenties crucible in whom the events of a decade later can only raise a kind of forced inanity’.1 That the Twenties produced a generation incapable of coping with war seems a fairly specious point, given that they fought it, but the critic is completely missing Nancy’s technique. Comparing the first months of the war to a children’s round game captures exactly the horrible diplomatic team-picking of those first months. It was not Nancy but the governments of Europe who were unable to contemplate the magnitude of what they had done. The consistent theme of the novel is the error of appeasers, those English people (like Nancy’s acquaintance Henry ‘Chips’ Channon and indeed her own parents) who were flattered by ‘being made a fuss of’ and trips in Mercedes–Benzes into believing the Nazis fundamentally benign. Nancy does not gloat, rather it is the childish, the blind, the venal, the conceited, who have brought Europe to this pass and it will be up to the adults, like her pretty, dizzy but ultimately sound heroine Sophia Garfield and her soldier lover Rudolph, to get it out.
Pigeon Pie is also the first of Nancy’s novels to touch on America. The anti-Americanism which was to become almost a fixation with her has its roots in what she perceived as the attitude of the US government in these first months of the war. Americans are portrayed as dull, money-grubbing hypocrites, their proud boast of democracy belied by their obsession with class and their apparent hope that Germany would win the war. In general, British people were unaware of Roosevelt’s ardent behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings to overcome the restriction of the neutrality acts passed in the USA in the mid-Thirties, acts which he did not begin to publicly circumvent until September 1940. Senator Joseph Kennedy, the US ambassador to Britain who remained en poste until late 1940, made no secret of his pro-appeasement views or of his belief that democracy was ‘finished’ in Europe. Kennedy’s opinions were well known to Nancy, as Deborah Mitford was at the time close to Andrew Cavendish, whom she married in 1941. Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen would become Deborah’s sister-in-law in 1944, on her marriage to Andrew’s elder brother, the Marquess of Hartington. Nancy’s views of America were thus both informed and representative of what many people thought in that first period of the war.
The political framework of the novel is slight yet solid, deftly raised beneath the comedy of Sophia’s attempts to deal with her unruly lover and her hopes of being a ‘glamorous female spy’. Unwittingly, she outwits the sinister Boston Brotherhood, an American religious cult populated by German spies, who have kidnapped Ivor King, ‘the King of Song’, an affectionately bewigged portrait of Mark Ogilvie-Grant derived from an earlier story, The Two Old Ladies of Eaton Square. Rudolph and Luke, Sophia’s husband, are, as noted, a compound of Peter Rodd and his brother Francis. Rudolph comes out well – brave, clever and equal to his duty – but there is none of the fascination Nancy betrays in Wigs with his earlier incarnation as the brilliant, guileful Jasper Aspect. Sophie keeps Rudolph very effectively in his place, and is resigned to the view that while he is an ideal lover, he would be a disastrous husband. ‘Women are divided into two categories, those who can deal with the men they are in love with and those who can’t.’ Sophia, like Amabelle Fortescue, is very much the former type. Dealing with men was becoming Nancy’s perennial question, one that was to dominate her next four novels, as well as her biography of Mme de Pompadour, and the elements are all there in Pigeon Pie: when and how to make a scene, how to cope with infidelity and jealousy, how to reconcile romantic idealism and the pragmatism required for an enduring marriage.
By the time the book was published, however, these eternal questions seemed trivial. The Phoney War was at an end, the Blitzkrieg had begun and France had fallen. ‘Poor sweet charming Sophia. She is, alas! an unimportant casualty, ’ concluded the Spectator. (When the book sold 10,000 copies on its reissue fifteen years later, Nancy reflected ruefully on how much that success would have meant to her during those ‘penniless’ years.) But she was about to make a more significant contribution to the war effort than a cheerful comic novel. On 20 June 1940, she visited Gladwyn Jebb at the Home Office, at his request, and denounced her sister Diana. ‘I regard her as an extremely dangerous person, ’ she told the under-secretary for economic warfare. It was not, as she wrote to Violet Hammersley, very sisterly behaviour, but she believed it was her duty.
And she truly did. Unlike her three stridently political sisters, Nancy has never been permitted partisan passion of her own. With her, it was always about the jokes. Nancy was always better prepared to lose a friend than a good laugh and the sharpness of her teasing brought her enemies as well as admirers. Nevertheless she did have political convictions. She was extremely well read in history, she had been at the very centre of political debate in Europe through her family for years and her hatred of Hitler and belief in Britain’s duty to fight the war was shared by millions of British people. Perhaps she was not politically sophisticated, but none of her sisters was renowned for the profundity of her views. Yet somehow, with Nancy, it has been made personal. One biographer suggests that her denunciation of Diana came down to nothing more than jealousy of her beautiful, brilliant sister, who had been loved by one adoring husband and left him for another equally enraptured, who had the children and the money so painfully absent from her own life. Another suggests that it was due to Nancy’s ‘increasing bitterness’ at the rift over Wigs on the Green, ‘proved’ by the ‘waspishness’ of her letters at the time (was Nancy ever anything other than waspish?).2
If there was anything personal about Nancy’s hatred of Fascism, it stemmed from what it had done to her own family: Unity was a wreck and her parents were tearing one another apart. She had experienced a form of political awakening in Perpignan, her husband and many of her beloved friends were fighting. Moreover, Hitler’s creed was the antithesis of everything she believed about civilization, promising nothing but ignorance and cruelty. A convinced anti-appeaser, she was disgusted by the surprise expressed by those who had been pro-Munich at Hitler’s consistent failures to keep his word ‘as though he had ever behaved any other way’. Nancy’s declaration was made four days after the capitulation of the Pétain government to the Nazis. With France in Hitler’s power, invasion became a strong possibility. She had every reason to sincerely believe that her much-loved sister, her closest friend, was a genuine threat to her country.
This opinion was based on both Diana’s avowed close friendship with Hitler and the visits she had been making to Germany since 1933. These had begun when she accompanied Unity to the first Nuremberg rally. On her return in 1934, she took a flat for three months in Munich. In January 1935 she we
nt again, with Lord Redesdale, was introduced to Hitler in February and presented him to Mosley in April. In 1936, she attended another Nuremberg rally and in October she and Mosley were married in Munich. In total she made five trips to Germany between April 1936 and February 1937. She was at the Parteitag that autumn and continued to visit Hitler in Berlin through 1938. Three more journeys to Munich took place in 1939, the last for the Bayreuth Festival in August, less than a month before Britain declared war. Nancy could hardly be blamed for finding this extremely sinister, and the fact that the authorities were clearly anxious (why else should she have been summoned? It was not her own initiative) endorsed her own suspicions. The paranoia she had mocked in Pigeon Pie seemed more plausible after the fall of France and with posters proclaiming ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives!’ displayed everywhere. Unsurprisingly, according to Dianas biographer, ‘In this climate, British Fascism was inevitably seen as a vehicle for future Nazi influence in Britain.’3
What Nancy could not have known was that the purpose of Diana’s visits had been the establishment of a commercial radio station which could raise money for the BUF (or, as it had become in 1936, the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists). After the riots of Mosley’s notorious march in Cable Street in London’s East End, the government had passed the Public Order Act, giving police the power to break up demonstrations and forbidding the wearing of uniforms. The act removed the basis of much of the party’s popular appeal, while Cable Street discouraged Mussolini, who had been donating to it for several years. After Il Duce’s financial support was withdrawn in 1935, Mosley was looking for alternative funding. Recognizing that his name might put off both potential advertisers and listeners, he took on two partners, Bill Alan and Peter Eckersley. Eckersley and his wife Dorothy were committed Nazis (they had been taken by Unity to gaze on Hitler in Munich in 1937) and Dorothy Eckersley would eventually be imprisoned for broadcasting propaganda from Germany between 1937 and 1941.
