A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  As to ‘evil things’ in Germany which we were fighting against, the very same evil things were the rule in Soviet Russia in infinitely greater degree. If one is to fight a war against evil things wherever they are to be found in the world there would never be peace. There were evil things in England too, including the most disgusting slums in all Europe and widespread undernourishment.

  The idea that one can ‘learn from history’ does not obtain with regard to what happened in 1939. Fatally weakened by the war, there can no longer be any question of interfering or intervening in central Europe. When Russian tanks drove into Budapest in 1956, and when Russian tanks occupied Prague in 1968, our rulers lifted their hands in shocked surprise but nothing was done because there was nothing that could be done. Russia could not stand idly by while Czechoslovakia joined the West; Bohemia is still, as it always has been, the key to power in central Europe.

  In July 1939 M. had an immense meeting and demonstration for peace in the Exhibition Hall at Earl’s Court. It was the culmination of several months’ campaign all over the country. Tom, hoping for peace but seeing that war was probable, had joined a territorial regiment, the Queen’s Westminsters. He gave the fascist salute as M. marched up the hall, and this was reported in one of the newspapers with a comment implying that an officer in the army could not at the same time be a follower of Sir Oswald Mosley. Tom’s Colonel strongly upheld him and said he was not going to be deprived of one of his best officers; no more was heard of this nonsense.

  Soon afterwards Unity and I went once again to Bayreuth as Hitler’s guests. As before, we sat with him in the restaurant during the long dinner intervals. On the last day he invited us for luncheon in the Wahnfried annexe where he always lived during the Festspiele. Afterwards he spoke to us alone. He said that as far as he could see, England was determined upon war, and that war was therefore inevitable. I said I thought M. would continue his campaign for peace for as long as such a campaign was legal. Hitler said: ‘If he does, he may be assassinated like Jaurès in 1914.’

  When we left him, Unity said once again that she would not live to see the impending tragedy. That evening we heard Götterdämmerung. Never had the glorious music seemed to me so doom-laden. I had a strong feeling, almost a conviction, that I should never see Hitler again, that a whole world was crumbling, that the future held only tragedy and war. I had no illusions that there might be anything in the nature of the Peace of Amiens, the truce during the Napoleonic wars during which the Whigs went over to Paris to dine with the Emperor. This time all would be bitterness and cruelty. I knew well what Unity, sitting beside me, was thinking. I left her next day, death in my heart.

  After flying to London I got the last train to Derby where M. met me at about 1 a.m. As we drove through the summer night to Wootton I told him Hitler’s words, and what Unity had said. During the short time that remained we moved between Wootton and London. I was pregnant again. In case a miracle happened, I made plans to go to Unity in Munich, but it was not to be. The mad drive to war accelerated, the men on both sides behaving in such a way as to make it inevitable. Towards the end of August it became obviously impossible for me to make any more journeys because war was imminent.

  M.’s sister-in-law Irene Ravensdale came to Wootton with Micky and his nurse. She and the two nannies made enormous black curtains to cover the huge windows. M. and I went back to London; we listened on the wireless to Chamberlain announcing that England and Germany had declared war. It was a hot and cloudless September morning; a minute or two later the sirens blew an air raid warning. Everyone knew what the noise meant, it had frequently been tried out and practised. We went on to our river balcony but nothing appeared in the serene blue sky.

  For a few days I could think only of Unity, but when no news came I began to hope. News of a death travels fast, and there were neutral journalists in Germany, Americans and Italians. It seemed just possible that she had done nothing, since hitherto the only fighting was taking place in Poland; England was not involved.

  Everyone knows that war is foul and terrible and that it brings frightful sufferings and injustices and horrors with it. Yet there is undeniably something about a great war which grips the heart. There is a heightened awareness of the beauty of the peaceful countryside, of love of family and of love for one’s country because of the threat that hangs over them all. The threat that hung over Unity was immediate, but there was nothing to be done. She and I had talked it over and over; I dreaded her iron resolve.

  Céline, in his Voyage au bout de la nuit, describes how a man is caught by the thrill of a military band marching past the café where he is sitting with his drink. He rushes to join the colours and spends the rest of the war regretting his precipitate gesture. On various levels all manner of men are caught by the attraction of war and a great many of them actually enjoy it. It is not hard to imagine that a clerk with a really dull job, a nagging wife and a fortnight’s holiday a year might prefer the comradeship of an officers’ mess, leaving behind the petty worries of his humdrum life and buoyed up by the exhilarating feeling that he is helping his country in its hour of need. Yet in 1939 there was certainly no war fever and not much enthusiasm for the war.

  All that autumn M. made speeches demanding ‘peace with the British Empire intact’. He was astonished by the reception he got from the crowds who went to hear him. They listened in silence to what he had to say, and then they applauded. There is a film of one of these meetings, typical of many at that time. The street is packed with people, and at the end of his speech M. asks them to lift up their arms ‘for peace’. A forest of arms goes up. All this was very different from what we had expected, and very different for example from the experience of Ramsay MacDonald when he spoke for peace during the First World War. MacDonald’s meetings had been violently attacked, as had Lloyd George’s during the Boer War. During our campaign the communists, for obvious reasons, kept quiet, but the interesting thing to note is that the type of patriot who had attacked Ramsay MacDonald, and before him Lloyd George, was not much in favour of the Second World War. Many such men probably saw that England had nothing to gain and everything to lose by fighting Germany on behalf of Poland, or for any other reason except in order to defend our country or our Empire, and hence their enthusiasm for the war was non-existent and they were prepared to listen to M.

  One Sunday afternoon M. hired the Stoll Theatre in Kingsway, for a meeting. Alone on the stage as always, he held an audience of three thousand. It was far and away the most moving speech I ever heard him make. The applause went on for several minutes. As I went out through the foyer someone touched me on the arm; it was an American called Odom who lived in England; he had a lovely Nash house full of treasures overlooking Regent’s Park where we had visited him once or twice. He now pressed £5 upon me ‘for the cause’. He was the very last person I should have expected to see at one of M.’s meetings, but this was typical of the attitude of quantities of men and women who came to us at this time.

  Meanwhile Poland had been divided, as so often before in its history, between Germany and Russia. Hitler made a speech offering peace in the West, but anything so rational was out of the question for the politicians who had taken us into the war, and they would certainly have looked foolish if after so much beating of the breast they had taken us out again before firing a shot. The fatal drift to disaster went on, though at a snail’s pace. Keeping people’s spirits up the newspapers pretended to believe that we were winning the war by doing nothing at all. According to them Germany would soon abandon the unequal struggle because it had no rubber or oil, and in any case the German generals were just about to murder Hitler in order to make peace. I cannot remember whether the cardboard tanks were mentioned again; the Polish campaign may have finished them off, but as there was no oil the German armour was immobilized.

  On the 2nd of October my parents got a letter from Janos’s brother, Teddy von Almasy, saying that Unity was ill in hospital. Farve sent him a telegram to Budape
st and he replied: ‘Continual improvement. No fever.’ Another cable came on the 17th: ‘Further progress. Your letters forwarded.’ (They had written through Janos in Hungary.) No mention was made of what her illness was; I guessed the truth. The relief and joy of knowing that she was alive were great, but the second cable with its reference to ‘improvement’ after six weeks in hospital was not reassuring, to me at least, and it was dreadful not to be able to rush to her side. Weeks of silence followed. Muv was awakened once in the middle of the night by a Sunday Pictorial reporter telling her that Unity had died in hospital. She did not tell me at the time; she said afterwards that she never believed it for a moment: ‘It was just the Sunday Pictorial,’ scornfully. Early in November a letter came from the American Embassy through the Foreign Office to say she was progressing well, but still no details.

  General Fuller often came to see us at Grosvenor Road that autumn. He was stopped near our house by an A.R.P. warden who asked: ‘Where is your gas mask?’

  ‘I’ve left it at home with my bow and arrows,’ said the General. He knew Germany well; his books on tank warfare, like Liddell Hart’s, had been translated and they were widely read by the German High Command. He was sarcastic about the real or assumed optimism of Fleet Street, and he said our own generals were preparing to fight the 1914 war over again.

  General Fuller was easily moved to sarcasm. He had joined the B.U. after the row about the Olympia meeting, a typical gesture combining courage and the fun of giving a backhander to the hysterical and silly Left in English politics. He had the charm of brilliant intelligence as well as imagination. Hitler, who saw him several times and admired his beautifully precise and logical mind as much as I did, said to me about him once that he felt sure he would be an ‘unbequemer’ (an awkward colleague) in any organization, an observation which seemed to me to sum him up exactly, though to M. he was a loyal and valued collaborator.

  We decided that we must leave Wootton. It was too big and too far from any railway station. The house at Denham was near London, in metroland, and the whole family would live there. As this arrangement was by way of being semi-permanent I put my own furniture in one of the rooms and had curtains made out of the grey silk of the vast Wootton curtains, all of which as it turned out was a complete waste. Grosvenor Road was also unpractical for a wartime house; it was big, and difficult to heat. We moved across the street to Dolphin Square.

  We spent a last Christmas holiday at Wootton; it was a hard winter and the boys skated on the lakes. On Christmas Eve my parents had a telephone call from Berne; first Janos spoke, and then Unity herself. As soon as was possible Muv and Debo set out for Switzerland to bring her home. I longed to go with them, but as M.’s wife I should have been a hindrance, apart from the fact that I was pregnant. The sorrow of packing up Wootton was completely overshadowed by anxiety about Unity.

  We gradually pieced together the history of the last four months. She had shot herself on the 3rd of September at the moment when England declared war on Germany, in the Englischer Garten at Munich, a park near the River Isar. A day or two before she had been to see Gauleiter Wagner about a licence for her little pistol. She seemed distraught, and he felt so worried about her that he told two men to keep a discreet eye upon her. The result was that no sooner was a shot heard than Wagner’s men, who were at a little distance, ran to Unity and picked her up. They thought she was dead, but they took her to a clinic where she lay unconscious. Hitler was told, and during the campaign in Poland he telephoned the clinic several times for news. When, after weeks, she regained consciousness he went to see her, it must have been on the 8th of November when he was in Munich for the usual meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller commemorating the 1923 putsch. He asked Unity what she wished to do: stay in Germany or go back to England? She chose England. When she was considered well enough to travel Hitler sent her in an ambulance train to Switzerland, accompanied by a doctor and a nurse. The faithful Janos travelled with Unity in the ambulance train, so that she should not be alone in a strange land, and they arrived on Christmas Eve and telephoned my parents.

  Farve went to see Oliver Stanley, the Minister for War. He told him that, gravely ill as she was, he hoped there was to be no question of arresting her for ‘intelligence with the enemy’ or on some similar charge. Oliver Stanley gave him his word that she could come home without any danger of that sort. Muv and Debo set forth. All this happened during the ‘phoney war’; a few months later it would not have been possible.

  Perhaps Muv realized how desperately sad the end of their journey was going to be, but Debo did not. When they arrived at Berne, after sitting up all night in an unheated train, Janos was on the platform with a man from the Swiss Foreign Office. They went straight to the clinic. Muv could hardly bring herself to open the door of Unity’s room, dreading the unknown. She wrote: ‘There she was, half sitting up, her hair all spread out, her face all eyes. Very thin she was, but looking beautiful. What a wonderful meeting it was. We were all three so happy.’

  Janos left them and went back to Munich on his way to Bernstein. He was a wonderful friend. But for him and his brother months would have gone by after Unity shot herself, with no news. His kindness in going with her to Switzerland, and staying until Muv and Debo arrived, showed he truly loved her. It must have been the gloomiest week of his life, for one could not look at her without pain, remembering what she had been only four months before.

  Debo’s description is not the same as Muv’s; it is an illustration of how differently two people can report the same scene. She says: ‘I remember the grey cold in the town, and being taken to the clinic, and the fearful shock of seeing her propped up in bed, two enormous dark blue eyes in her face which had shrunk and become almost unrecognizable because it was totally different from her, short matted hair and yellow teeth neither of which had been touched since the 3rd of September when the bullet had gone through her brain. She couldn’t bear her head to be touched and it was only very gradually that this became a little better. Her hair never got right again and had a sort of brittle, hard look. Her sunken cheeks made the teeth seem bigger and more horrible and yellow and her skin was dry and yellow too. She had an odd vacant smile and was terribly thin and seemed so small. She was pleased to see us, but the shock of finding a completely different person was great—it was like getting to know a sort of child one had known ages ago.

  ‘I think we stayed two or three days till an ambulance carriage was attached to a train. The journey to the French coast was a nightmare because every time the train lurched it was agony for her, and it seemed almost to do it on purpose and heaved and jigged about even more than usual. I suppose it was specially long. It was certainly specially dark and cold and seemed endless. She was taken on a stretcher to the boat and off again at Folkestone where Farve met us with an ambulance. We went to an hotel, the Press were everywhere. Then back to the ambulance for the journey to High Wycombe. Having pretty well avoided talking to the Press we wondered if they had somehow arranged that the ambulance should break down after a few miles, as that is what happened, and all the journalists who were following crowded round to get pictures as she was transferred after a long wait to another ambulance. When we arrived at Wycombe we had police protection. I think that went on for some months.

  ‘I suppose Muv and Farve realized then that she would never get better and become her old self. Her whole nature changed and she even looked completely different and yet there was a shadow of her old self, a most strange mixture of what she had been and a new person. She was never beautiful again. When she started to walk she was clumsy.’

  So Muv and Debo brought Unity across France by train as far as Calais, they had missed the boat and had to wait two days for another. At Folkestone they had to go to an hotel because Unity was exhausted. In both ports they were besieged by journalists, falling over each other to cash in on tragedy as is their custom. They bid each other up, offering Muv ever larger sums to be allowed to interview Unity just for one minute.
Naturally she refused. Tripping over pressmen the whole way, they finally got the exhausted and half-paralysed Unity to Old Mill Cottage at High Wycombe. There was nowhere else to go. Swinbrook had been sold and Farve had bought an island in the Inner Hebrides, Inch Kenneth. There was quite a big house on the island, but the journey there would have been utterly impossible, apart from the fact that it was in a Defence Area. The High Wycombe cottage was vulnerable to a Press siege; soon Muv and Unity moved to the Mill Cottage at Swinbrook where they stayed until the end of the war. Farve went to Inch Kenneth; there was no room for him in the tiny cottage.

  Lord Nuffield, an old friend of my father’s, suggested that Unity should go to the Nuffield Hospital in Oxford where the great brain surgeon, Professor Sir Hugh Cairns, worked. After keeping her under observation for some weeks, Cairns said he agreed with the German doctors, who had advised against an operation to remove the bullet. He told Muv that if, with all his skill, he had put an instrument through a head in the same way as the violent bullet had gone, the patient would have died.

  Unity looked deathly ill. She was emaciated and half-paralysed, she had to be fed as she could not lift a spoon. It was heart-rending to see the terrible change in her. She had been cared for in Germany by devoted nuns; they had brought her painfully back to life when all she desired was death. They had also, as good Christians, tried to persuade her that she had committed a grave sin by taking her own life. She questioned me over and over again: did I think it very wicked to die by one’s own hand? She probably knew my answer. To that small extent man must be the master of his fate. He did not ask to be born; if his life becomes too tragic or unbearable he has the right to die. I told her this was my opinion, but that as she had been saved all her energy must now be summoned up and concentrated on recovering her health.