A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  All this time there was still no fighting. After the partition of Poland there were months of rather ominous silence. The Allies were dug in along the Maginot Line and beyond. During the long cold winter only small inconveniences like the black-out, or bossy men and women asking one another about gas masks, showed that we were at war. The evacuated mothers and babies drifted back to the towns. We had a few of them at Wootton but by Christmas they were already gone.

  The day I left Wootton was one of those frosty sunny mornings when everything sparkles and glitters. Though M. said we would return there after the war I knew in my heart that a happy time in my life had come to an end. The remaining months of my pregnancy we spent in London, and on the 13th of April my fourth son, Max, was born.

  The war was just about to begin in earnest. The Allies, in order to cut supplies of iron ore to Germany, mined neutral waters south of Sweden. The riposte was swift. The Germans occupied Norway and drove out our small expeditionary force. Then quiet descended upon Europe once again.

  The baby and I went to Denham at the end of the month, with a nurse as kind and gentle as my nurse of the year before had been abrasive. If the first weeks of life are important, as the psychologists believe, it is interesting for me to remember the different treatment these two brothers received, the one born in bitter November, the other in an unusually balmy spring, with nurses to match the weather. With a new baby and the country in its early May heavenliness an unreasoned optimism kept welling up. It was still just possible to hope that there would be no fighting war; perhaps Unity would completely recover: any miracle seemed as if it might happen, so perfectly happy were my own private circumstances, so perfectly beautiful the world. These irrational illusions were remote from reality and I suppose I hardly believed in them. It was just that the dreary winter and my dreary pregnancy were over and done with.

  A few days later German armies invaded the Low Countries and France. M., when this seemed imminent, had issued a statement:

  ‘According to the Press, stories concerning the invasion of Britain are being circulated… In such an event every member of British Union would be at the disposal of the nation. Every one of us would resist the foreign invader with all that is in us. However rotten the existing government, and however much we detested its policies, we would throw ourselves into the effort of a united nation until the foreigner was driven from our soil. In such a situation no doubt exists concerning the attitude of British Union.’

  This was printed in Action (9 May 1940). The following day Churchill took over from Chamberlain; the phoney war was at an end.

  17.

  PRISON

  On the 23rd of May 1940 M. and I spent the morning at Denham and motored to London after luncheon. As we turned into the road leading to the entrance of our Dolphin Square block of flats I immediately saw that four or five men were standing about on the pavement near the doorway. They were not talking, as a group of friends might, but were aimlessly staring into space.

  ‘Look. Coppers,’ I said to M.

  We got out of the car and one of them stepped forward and said he had a warrant for M.’s arrest. We went up in the lift with the policemen; on the landing of the seventh floor there were a couple more. All of them were in plain clothes. We went into M.’s flat and he asked to see the warrant. They said he was to go to Brixton prison and that I could visit him the following day. M. and I said goodbye. We went down in the lift and they drove him away. A cold fury possessed me, I can feel it now as I write.

  Several hours before, everyone, men and women, who worked at the B.U. headquarters had been arrested, as I soon discovered. As I drove back to Denham alone there were posters on the streets: ‘M.P. arrested,’ and in the evening paper a description of what had happened that morning. They must have waited for M., guessing that he would come up to London, which he did every day. It was pure chance that I happened to be with him. The M.P. was Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, leader of a group called the Right Club which, as its name implies, was to the right of the Conservative Party.

  A couple of hours later my step-daughter Viv and I were having dinner when from the dining-room window we saw the big wooden gate the other end of the garden pushed open and policemen poured across the lawn. We let them in; they said they had come to search the house.

  ‘In that case you’ll have to stay at least a week,’ I said. There were not only many rooms and attics in the rambling old house but also tithe barns used as store rooms stuffed with miscellaneous objects. I went into the library; two policemen were taking the books out of the shelves. At about five past nine the telephone rang. It was Muv, who had heard on the nine o’clock news of M.’s arrest.

  ‘What is the charge?’ she asked. ‘Oh, no charge,’ I replied.

  ‘Disgraceful,’ said Muv, and I repeated, for the benefit of the policemen, ‘Yes, it is disgraceful.’

  In fact, although Habeas Corpus had been suspended, it had required an Order in Council passed late the previous evening and framed in suitably vague terms to give a semblance of legality to these arbitrary arrests.

  I then telephoned to Mr. Butterwick, Nicky’s housemaster at Eton. He told me not to worry. Nicky was seventeen and had his friends and would not be much affected. Mr. Butterwick added: ‘I should be more worried myself about your boy at his private school.’

  The search was far from thorough; one got the impression that it was only a matter of form and that the men had no idea what they were supposed to be looking for. They searched my room in a desultory way; Max was there, asleep in his cot. He was almost five weeks old. They soon pushed off and left us to our thoughts. Next morning Vivien, Nicky and the nurse left Denham; they were never to return. Nanny and I remained with the two babies. I drove up to London and went to Brixton prison. M. appeared, unshaven; I gave him a parcel of washing things and change of linen. M. told me to try and get hold of a solicitor as soon as possible. Seeing him thus filled me with rage but outwardly I was calm, and I am thankful to say that in the years I am about to describe I, who cry easily, never shed a tear when anyone could see it. My feelings, best described as contemptuous anger, precluded tears.

  Finding a solicitor to act for us was easier said than done. The firm which had dealt with B.U. affairs refused at once. M.’s family lawyer, a man called Sweet, turned out to be most unlike his name. He was almost rude. There had been no thought of asking him to do anything himself, I saw him about household bills, but I had imagined he would have advised me what to do next. There was an indescribable atmosphere of panic, barely suppressed, and wherever I went I was met with glances not so much hostile as terrified. My own lawyer, a kind but elderly man, explained that he could not leave his office and go and wait about at Brixton prison; all his clerks had been called up and there was nobody to answer the telephone but him. He gave me precious advice: to go to Oswald Hickson, an old radical who, he said, would care not in the very least what ‘people might think’. Indifference to public opinion is an essentially aristocratic virtue; it is rarer than one might imagine, as I discovered in those difficult days. I was very worried. If lawyers who knew M. and who therefore must have realized that his imprisonment was a great wrong, were unwilling to act for him, how should I ever find a stranger who would do so? Mr. Hickson questioned me closely. He agreed to go to Brixton next day; he behaved perfectly. He acted for us for years, until his place was taken by our wise friend and counsellor Mr. Lane.

  I was allowed to visit M. once a week. He always had a list of things he wanted: books, and his oldest and most degraded country clothes. He insisted that he was perfectly all right, and although I knew this was to comfort me I never guessed that he and his companions were lodged in verminous cells. Lice and bugs infested the wood frames of the beds.

  Three times after M. was arrested I had visitors at Denham. Muv and Unity came over from Swinbrook. Unity was recovering. She could now walk, rather slowly. She was touching, pathetic, and not in the least like her old self. Another day Gerald s
truggled over by bus. He was living in Oxford at the time, and he said that various dons of his acquaintance had earnestly tried to dissuade him; they told him that to spend a day with me was to put himself in jeopardy. That was the popular view. I was untouchable. I could see that Gerald felt extremely bold to have disregarded the dons’ advice, and I was grateful for his courage and his friendship.

  Gerald told me that day of his two fears. The lesser of these was that he would be cut off from all his friends. He imagined no telephone, no post, no petrol. In the event this never happened, post and telephone were not even rationed. His other dread was that he would be hurt but not killed; he was thinking of air raids. He did not fear death, but he greatly dreaded the idea that he might agonize untended, and he wished for a pill which would kill instantly. There had been so much talk in the newspapers about total war that in his imagination Gerald lived through a total breakdown, which in fact never happened in England, though elsewhere it did. As at that time nobody could know what war would bring and the news from across the Channel got worse every day, it was impossible to dismiss his gloomy thoughts as unrealistic. All the same we had a lovely day; I walked with him to his bus and he promised to come again. My other visitors were Pam and Derek. Derek is one of those people referred to above with a complete disdain for public opinion, or what is called public opinion: the views put forward by politicians, Press and BBC.

  When I went to London for prison visits I also saw one or two faithful friends. On my thirtieth birthday I lunched with the Fullers. The General said he imagined ‘at this moment the French are asking for an armistice’. It seemed unbelievable. The most powerful army in Europe, beaten in a matter of weeks. We discussed his own position as an outspoken critic of the government.

  ‘They’ll never arrest Boney,’ said Mrs. Fuller. ‘He knows too much.’ And sure enough they never did.

  Once Lady Downe came to see me at Dolphin Square, and on yet another day I ran into William Acton in Piccadilly. ‘I’m going to Brixton prison,’ I told him, and he came with me part of the way in a bus, so that we could have a few minutes together.

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘I’m learning Urdu,’ was the reply. I was never to see him again; he joined the army, and died towards the end of the war. No words can tell how much I loved and admired the handful of friends who cheered me during the first five weeks of M.’s imprisonment. I grieved and worried about him night and day, and wondered about my future, and my babies, and Jonathan and Desmond, defenceless in a hostile world. Making every allowance for the panic of the government at a time when disaster was overtaking the Allied armies, it still seemed unbelievable that Englishmen could be held in prison indefinitely, without charge (because no charge could be made) and without trial. They were of course held silent. Our paper Action had been banned, and in any case all the men who ran it were in prison. Prisoners were not allowed to write to The Times. On the old principle of ‘there’s seldom smoke without fire’ the general public got the impression that the prisoners must have ‘done’ something. In England (the theory goes) people are not put in prison for no reason, and if the reason could not be told in open court, that in itself must be a very bad sign. The number of those who knew enough about politics to guess the squalid reasons behind the arrest of M. and his companions was severely limited.

  A few weeks after M.’s arrest the War Office commandeered Savehay Farm. This was a tremendous blow; I had no idea where I could live with my children within reach of Brixton prison. The man from the War Office said that in any case Denham would soon be ‘unhealthy’ for us. Asked what he meant by this he indicated that it would be a target which was likely to be bombed to smithereens. (It survived the war, undamaged.) The gardeners’ cottages also had to be evacuated on orders from the War Office, which found accommodation for them not too far away. I consulted Muv about what I should do, and Pam nobly said we could all go to Rignell for the time being. Nanny and I packed the trunks. We planned to leave on Monday the 1st of July.

  The beautiful hot summer weather went on and on; the garden at Denham was full of flowers. On Saturday afternoon I fed the baby and put him in his pram. I took my book into the garden. A maid appeared.

  ‘There are some people at the door who want to speak to you,’ she said.

  ‘What sort of people?’ ‘Three men and a woman.’

  I knew at once they must be police. Journalists sometimes hunt in couples, and one or two had come since M.’s arrest asking rude and irrelevant questions, but three men and a woman sounded more like police. I went to the door, and a warrant for my arrest was produced. The woman came with me while I put a few things in a small box; ‘enough for a weekend,’ she said. I was thinking about the baby and the bombing of London which, since France had fallen, was expected hourly. He was eleven weeks old that day. I asked where I was to be imprisoned; I had heard of a women’s prison at Aylesbury; but it was to be Holloway, therefore I decided, much as I longed to take him, that I must leave him with Nanny, who would take both babies to Rignell where they would be as safe as it was possible to be. Since, however, the policewoman had said ‘a week-end’, I thought I should do my best to be able to continue nursing the baby when it was over, and then wean him in the usual way. It was supposed to be bad for a baby to have a complete change of diet. I hugged the babies, and Nanny who was in tears, and was driven away.

  The police motored me to London along empty roads; we were there in no time. Hoping to be able to nurse the baby again I asked my escort to stop at Bell and Croydon in Wigmore Street, the policewoman came with me and I bought a contraption called a breast pump. I should have been wiser to have got the salts and bandages which women use who do not intend to nurse their babies; I should have had far less pain. At Holloway prison the great gate opened and the car deposited me the other side of a yard.

  Then came the strange procedure called in prison language ‘reception’. I was locked into a wooden box like a broom cupboard. It had a seat fixed opposite the door; if you sat on it your knees touched the door. There was no window but light came in from the wire netting roof of the box. Here I remained for four hours. This was in the nature of a practical joke on the part of the prison authorities, for there was no reason why I should not have been taken straight to my cell after the usual formalities. There was nobody else arrested under Regulation 18B that day.

  I collected my thoughts. My ideas about prison came from American films, and I envisaged cells of which one side would be made of iron bars, all giving on to a landing, like a zoo. The walls of my cupboard, painted a dirty cream colour, had been scribbled on by former denizens; there were a few swear words and cryptic sentences. ‘Fraser is a cow,’ was one. I tried to read the book I had brought with me, a pocket edition of Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex. It was not an ideal choice but I had snatched it up as I left my room.

  After a couple of hours the door was unlocked for a moment and I was given a chipped enamel plate with a vast sandwich upon it, also an immense mug of thick china made in the shape of a bobbin with a waist but no handle, containing a hot brown liquid which I guessed was supposed to be tea though it looked more like soup. I was thirsty but dared not drink. I missed the baby in an almost unbearable way. I left the sandwich untouched. After a while I heard other prisoners arrive and being locked into the adjacent boxes, and for the first time I heard the odd noise made by women prisoners, particularly prostitutes. They shout to one another in a sort of wail that is more like song than speech. It was to become a familiar sound over the years; also the accompanying shouts of the wardresses: ‘Be quiet, you women.’

  After about four and a half hours in my box I was taken out to see the doctor, an unprepossessing female with dyed hair and long finger nails, varnished dark red. I told her that I had been nursing my baby but that I could look after myself, and when a bath was mentioned I said I had had one that morning which seemed to satisfy her. Then a wardress took me to F Wing. She made me go first, an act o
f apparent courtesy which, like so much in prison, is not quite what it seems.

  Wardresses must always have their prisoners in front of them; if they were following there’s no knowing what they might take it into their heads to do: run away, for example

  As she unlocked the door and we stood in the entrance to F Wing a babel of voices suddenly fell silent and a sort of gasp went up. Dozens of women, many of them in dressing gowns, were standing about in groups, most had mugs in their hands. I did not know it, but it was ten minutes before they were due to be locked in their cells for the night and for this reason they were all on the landings. They crowded round me with kind expressions of sympathy; they knew I had left a little baby and were furious on my behalf. I knew very few of them, though they were members of B.U. Since Cimmie’s death M. had been haunted by the idea that she had worn herself out by political activities beyond her strength. My work for him had been entirely connected with business and not at all with propaganda; I was quite incapable of making a speech. Thus I hardly knew any of them even by sight; one and all were to be kindness itself; there was nothing they would not do for me, they idolized M. and it was for his sake.