‘There isn’t a pin to put between Nazis & Bolshies’, she wrote to the family friend Violet Hammersley.2 ‘If one is a Jew one prefers one & if an aristocrat the other, that’s all as far as I can see. Fiends!’
Which is proof of what her nephew Alexander says, that it was ‘the personal aspect of politics’ which counted with Nancy. The personal, in the end, was the only thing that made sense. It gave life its meaning and interest and happiness. Nothing else could ever be so important, no philosophy or theory or ideology, however much it dressed itself up and promised heaven on earth. Of course, to those who were plunged in the profundities of political philosophy, Nancy was a hopelessly shallow thinker. She confessed as much with this pointed little aside in Wigs on the Green, when Jasper Aspect says to his lover Poppy that ‘Like most women, you only care about personalities, things don’t interest you’. ‘That’s simply not true’, she replies. ‘I’m fearfully interested in things – I absolutely long for a sable coat.’ Nancy took pleasure in this kind of ‘shallowness’: partly because she knew that it annoyed people, but also because she felt it to be refreshingly rooted in sanity. What she wrote about Nazis and Bolshies may sound simplistic. Yet it was, when one came down to it, pretty much the truth, even if it had been arrived at by nothing more than common sense. Just as Linda’s simple soul was filled with despair when she wandered through the Perpignan camps, so Nancy felt, she knew, that the life she cared about was threatened by an evil, an affront to normal human happiness. She was glad to be married to a man who was on the side of the angels. So much so that her marriage – unlike Linda’s – gave one last leap into a semblance of unexpected life.
She left Peter and the camps in June, and returned to Blomfield Road. Her bulldog, Milly, had just had quads and one of the puppies, Agnes, was given to Robert Byron: ‘She is very anti-appeasement,’ Nancy told him.
Then Nancy spent a rather febrile summer (‘I am leading a very gay life’) in Blomfield Road, waiting for a war that she saw as nasty and necessary. It ‘must be got over with’, she was to write in her next novel, Pigeon Pie, ‘before we can go on with our lives. Like in the night when you want to go to the loo and it is miles away down a freezing cold passage and yet you know you have to go down that passage before you can sleep again. We are starting down it now.’
Her family saw it in their own ways. Jessica viewed it, or so she wrote in Hons and Rebels, as the gateway to ‘the new post-war social order that we were convinced was on the way’. Diana and Unity were opposed to it; Tom eventually chose to fight against Japan rather than his beloved Germany; Sydney took the side of most of her children. She saw war against Hitler as a dreadful thing: ‘When the Germans have won’, she told her husband, ‘you’ll see, everything will be wonderful and they’ll treat us very differently to those wretched beastly Poles.’ David, meanwhile, had gratefully viewed Nazism as a counterbalance to Communism, and had become mildly friendly with Hitler out in Germany (especially when the Führer paid for Unity’s treatment for pneumonia in 1938. David insisted on paying him back; it was an amicable man-to-man meeting). But the moment war was declared, his feelings changed dramatically. He reverted to hatred of the Hun. It seemed to him that he had been duped, or foolish, or horribly weak to have stood at Nuremberg in 1938 and been carried away by it all.
By the time war broke out David was only just over sixty, but he was old before his time. The tall, striding force of nature, whom Nancy called in The Pursuit of Love ‘a sort of criterion of English manhood; there seemed something not quite right about any man who greatly differed from him’, was now bent and frosty-headed, his brilliant blue eyes clouded with cataracts and bewilderment. His dazzling daughters had done for him. Where once he had been able to control them, command their respect, or at least their fascinated attention, now he was a cipher in most of their lives, and he took it hard. Perhaps he felt a kind of guilt, that he had not been able to give them more money, that he had built them a home (Swinbrook) which they all except Deborah fought to escape. He thought little of their men (he called them the man Mosley, the boy Romilly, and the bore Rodd; Derek Jackson he couldn’t make head nor tail of). Probably he could not understand why such lively, funny creatures, such beauties as his girls were, had not made happier, easier lives for themselves – and for him.
And there was far worse to come. If the build-up to war had begun to take the Mitford family apart, war itself would finish the job. Afterwards life would go on, new happiness would be found and rapprochements made; but some of the damage would be irreparable. For example nothing would bring Unity back to the girl she had once been, the eccentric over-sized Boud with the rat on her shoulder and the strange zest for life, not after she had put a gun to her head on the day that war broke out, and fallen in a great ruined heap in the Englischer Garten in Munich.
She had been unable to bear the thought that Germany and England should be enemies; and she had believed that she was playing some role in preventing this. The shattering of that belief shattered Unity, as she had known it would. For several days before the outbreak of war she was alone in her Munich flat, listening obsessively to the wireless, waiting in dread for news. On 1 September, she lunched for the last time at the Osteria Bavaria, where she had first met Hitler. On the morning of 3 September she picked up a telegram from the British Consulate confirming that war had indeed been declared. Then she telephoned a friend named Rudi von St Paul who said, subsequently: ‘I was frightened because three or four months beforehand... she had said then that unless she could stop the war, she would have to shoot herself. She had shown me the pistol... I was terrified for her.’ The following morning Baroness von St Paul received a letter from Unity, along with her keys and a will, explaining that she had killed herself.
But Unity was not dead. She had bungled it, as was so often the case in her odd and uncoordinated life, and the bullet that should have killed her had lodged itself in her head, in so precarious a place that it was impossible to move. ‘The dead-end which she had reached’, wrote David Pryce-Jones in his biography, ‘was cruelly embodied, as well as over-symbolised, by the bullet in her brain.’
He also wrote, quite truly, that although Unity’s support of the Nazi regime would have made it difficult for her to return home when war broke out, her position was not impossible. She might have been imprisoned under the Emergency Defence Regulations, but nothing worse. ‘She had done no more than make a fool of herself.’
So Unity had not shot herself out of cowardice, or fear of being unable to live with the consequences of her support for Germany. In a perverse way, her motives were nobler than that. ‘She was sincere when she put the pistol to her temple.’ This pitiful, uncontrollable girl had found her fulfilment in Munich, and in the belief ‘that she had weighed in the balance of politics, that she had had a role, a mission’. When this was taken away from her, all she wanted was to die. And the bullet did, effectively, bring her life to an end; as, in a way, it also ended the lives of her parents.
In The Pursuit of Love, Nancy wrote that ‘the parents of our contemporaries would console themselves, if things did not go quite as they hoped for their children, by saying: “Never mind, just think of the poor Alconleighs!”’ But that was to minimise the pain. Nothing in The Pursuit of Love compares with what happened to Unity: the blinding, horrific sense of impotence that caused her to do what she did, and the damage that her action caused to her parents. Nancy had been staying with the Redesdales on the day that war broke out, when the hitherto vague fear for Unity took an instant and terrible grip. Incongruously, they were all stuck on an island in the Inner Hebrides named Inch Kenneth, bought – along with a stark and rather terrible-looking house – by Lord Redesdale in 1938, when Swinbrook was finally sold: it was one of those sudden, somehow attractive impulses that had driven his life. The island was beautiful, but intractably remote. Reaching it from London was, according to Nancy, ‘the worst journey in the world’.3 It required an overnight train, a long ferry ride to Mull
, a drive, then a boat trip. Many years later Lady Redesdale took on the job of collecting and delivering the islanders’ letters; no one else was willing to do it. Inch Kenneth was not Nancy’s kind of place – she hated cold in her bones – but she was there in September, lending support to the mother from whom she had begun to feel so agreeably detached.
As war was declared, the atmosphere on the island became less forgiving than ever. Retreating to this hermitage had no doubt seemed, in the summer, a comforting idea; but on 3 September 1939 the enforced remoteness led to desperate frustration. For although there was no actual intelligence of what had happened to Unity, her family was waiting to hear something bad. Tom and Diana knew that she had threatened suicide should war break out, and everyone knew that she had become obsessive about relations between England and Germany. What had started, back in the early 1930s, as a huge tease (swastikas on the wall to annoy Decca), then had become a joyful reason for living (the bliss of being in Munich, being made to feel important), had come to this end: a twenty-five-year-old girl lying neither alive nor dead, only the bullet in her brain for company, small shadows cast on her bed from the flowers sent by Goebbels, von Ribbentrop and Hitler.
After Chamberlain’s speech, Nancy prepared to make the marathon journey back to London. She quarrelled with her mother during the drive to the station, which was perhaps to be expected. ‘I said something only fairly rude about Hitler & she said get out of this car & walk to the station then so after I had to be honey about Adolph.’ Of course Nancy should not have tried to upset Sydney in these circumstances, although Sydney was being quite nasty as well (according to Nancy, at least). ‘I said Peter had joined up so she said I expect he’ll be shot soon which I thought fairly tactless of her. Altogether she is acting very queer.’ Lady Redesdale was out of her mind, as anyone would have been with a child in what had overnight in fact become enemy territory. No doubt the thought of Hitler was torment to her, as to her husband. Had Unity not supported him, she would not be in this situation, but if everyone else were not so against him, the situation need surely not have happened. Meanwhile what to do? How to find out about her daughter? And what about Diana, who had so publicly ranged herself on the Fascist side? What about Tom, who at the age of thirty would be required for his country? The agony of any parent on 3 September was, for the Redesdales, hideously intensified, and for Nancy to blame her mother was wrong, but irresistible. True to form, she continued not to resist: ‘Well the family’, she wrote to Violet Hammersley. ‘Muv has gone finally off her head... Poor thing I suppose she is quite wretched so one must make allowances...’
By 4 September Nancy was already plunged into war work. Wearing her flamboyant hat of righteousness, she wrote to her mother: ‘I am driving an ARP [Air Raid Protection] car every night from 8-8. So far have had only one go at it & feel more or less OK (it is mostly waiting about of course).’ In fact she had crashed her car within hours: ‘wasn’t it awful... driving in the dark is too devilish. All the other people of course are charming, they think I’m rather a joke, so obviously incompetent.’ Peter, she continued, ‘is working day & night at a 1st aid post in Chelsea’. Causes were now coming his way thick and fast. He may have felt that the war represented a chance for a new life, just as his marriage had done six years earlier.
Of Unity there was still no real news, only rumour. ‘Bobo we hear on fairly good authority is in a concentration camp for Czech women which much as I deplore it has a sort of poetic justice’, Nancy wrote to Mrs Hammersley on 15 September. Germany was treating Unity’s suicide attempt as a literal state secret; nobody knew anything. The family could only try to go about its business, Sydney returning to London and pressing for news, Tom ‘stationed near us [the Rodds]... tired but cheerful’, Diana pregnant and contemplating her husband’s ruin, whilst in a Munich clinic Unity lay like a swollen ghost and tried to kill herself again. She swallowed her swastika badge, which was later removed from her stomach with a probe.
In early October some news reached the family: one of Unity’s friends wrote, very cagily, to say that she was ill and in hospital. A month later there was, at last, a rather uninformative official communication, stating that Unity had tried to kill herself but was getting on well. Then of course the story got out. Facts were sketchy, turned easily into melodrama. A reporter actually telephoned Sydney to ask if Unity was dead. This rumour reached Jessica, who was in America at the time and terrified by it; a variation even had Unity executed on Himmler’s orders. But a letter of Nancy’s, dated 25 October, mentions a report in the Daily Express that got the story essentially right, saying that Unity was – as Nancy put it – ‘ill with attempted suicide’. By which time she had, according to her concerned hospital visitor Herr Hitler, expressed the desire to go home.
Hitler eventually paid for Unity’s stay in the Munich clinic, and arranged for her to be taken to neutral Switzerland. At the very end of 1939, her mother and sister Deborah went to Berne and brought her back to England. On her return, the press was waiting for her. Flashbulbs exploded in her collapsed and vacant face; she was offered, through her mother, £5,000 for an interview with the Daily Express, although she could barely remember the words ‘salt’ and ‘sugar’. In the first week of 1940, cinemas showed a newsreel of her arrival at Folkestone, being helped by her father to stagger off a stretcher; the audiences hollered abuse at the screens. Meanwhile she had been taken to a nursing home in Oxford, near to the cottage at High Wycombe owned by her mother, which was given police protection for several months.
‘It wasn’t an embarrassment,’ Nancy said of Unity’s actions, years later, in the television interview that she gave in 1966. ‘It was a terrible sadness. It was dreadful.’ But what strikes one, in Nancy’s letters from this strange time, is how extraordinarily detached she was; or appeared to be.
On 10 October, for example, when very little was known about Unity’s condition and the family must have been worrying itself to death, Nancy was writing to Mrs Hammersley a long, detailed narrative about her cousin Edward Stanley, who had become innocently involved in a scandal at White’s Club over an unpaid backgammon debt. This was followed by an equally long account of Randolph Churchill’s marriage to Pamela Digby4 (‘a pretty, luscious little piece... it seems she was the 8th girl Randolph had proposed to since the war began’). The letter ends with a throwaway sentence about Tom Mitford, then staying in Nancy’s house, whose ‘leisure hours are beguiled by a belle from Watford’.
A couple of weeks later, Nancy wrote to Jessica in Washington DC. This letter is equally airy and teasing. It is full of digs about Americans, which she always loved to make (‘they are so terrified of war & air raids’), and full of spite towards Lady Redesdale (‘I gather the Fem is engaged upon an acrimonious correspondent with her MP about how wicked it is to attack dear little Hittle. Last war she would have found herself in jail’). In the midst of all this is a single sentence about Unity: ‘Poor Bowd do write to her it must be lonely.’
Perhaps Nancy could not lament Unity’s fate too much with Jessica, who was hardly going to sympathise with her sister’s inability to live without the love of Nazi Germany (although in fact Decca’s affection for Unity remained strong as ever: principle once again foundering in the face of the personal). But with Violet Hammersley, a bystander, Nancy might have shown more concern? Not so. Writing to these two enabled her not to show concern, to be honest instead, to make jokes, talk about other things, insist upon her own, new, sane agenda.
Yet it comes across coolly – almost shockingly so – when she writes ‘I’m simply as happy as a bird’, and one thinks of Sydney sitting beside the Rutland Gate telephone, David stumbling half-blind around bleak Inch Kenneth, both anguishing over the girl in her shadowy clinic bed – where were Nancy’s feelings for all of this? She cared, of course she did. But there was a cool side to her (for which she would, no doubt, have blamed her mother). And the cool Nancy believed, or had decided to believe, that her family had brought these troubles
upon themselves, what with their idiotic days out to Nuremberg, their adolescent infatuations with a moustachioed madman and his smiling henchmen. They had distanced themselves from her; now she would do the same. Now, in some fundamental way, she cut free from her family, from the clinging muddy vines of its problems. Perhaps that was why she was as happy as a bird?
It is almost certainly the reason why, for the first time since her engagement, she was writing about her husband with respect and something like affection. Peter had become a bit of a hero to Nancy: a man who did refugee work for the dispossessed rather than made that work necessary, who volunteered within a day of war being declared and urged war work upon his wife (‘Sophia agreed with him really’, Nancy wrote in Pigeon Pie. ‘The huns must be fought’).
Along with several of his friends, Prod had a commission in the Welsh Guards: ‘Peter is all dressed up in his uniform looking very pretty – he goes to Essex for training on Sat: next’, Nancy told Mrs Hammersley. A couple of weeks later, she wrote to her about Unity. ‘I remember so well, some 5 years ago Peter wrote an immense letter to Farve begging him to remove her from a situation which must lead to tragedy. The family were very pooh pooh-ey & thought it all a great impertinence. Fools.’ One wonders if Nancy herself had been quite so impressed by Peter’s prescience back in 1934, when she was busy turning Unity into the mad but harmless Eugenia Malmains. But by 1939 her husband was flavour of the month. To Jessica she mentioned a quarrel between Peter and Giles Romilly, Esmond’s brother: ‘Rodd lost his temper & was most awfully rude (quite like Farve, & I have never seen it happen before, I was quite shaken up).’ She deplored the falling-out with Giles but there was a hint of ‘Why, Mr Rodd! You’re so... manly!’ about Nancy’s description.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 18
