A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  ‘Worse than that I’m afraid. Jakie has drowned in the mill pond.’ Jakie was Unity’s dog. Apparently he had been found near the bank, it was sad and mysterious. Unity said she must have him buried in the churchyard, but the clergyman refused. ‘Don’t you think it’s awful of Mr. Wells?’ she said. She ordered his tombstone; on it was to be engraved:

  JAKIE

  BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART.

  ‘You see, he was pure in heart. Much purer than Mr. Wells.’

  Desmond went back to Summer Fields and Jonathan to Eton; late, because of their whooping cough. Jonathan had got a scholarship and went into College. He was clever but bad at games, and we thought he would be happier in College than in the house he had been going to. He wrote once, from Summer Fields, ‘I am the lowest jumper in the school’; it reminded me of our own family; none of us was much good at such things. Of course I could visit neither of them, both schools were far out of bounds. During those years when I was living under house arrest Nancy often went down to Eton to take Jonathan out. She reckoned to pay her journey and the luncheon from the profit she made by buying old books in Windsor and selling them at Heywood Hill.

  Eton boys, never smart, became increasingly degraded as the war went on. Clothes were rationed, therefore they bought old and worn overcoats and morning coats from boys who were leaving. Jonathan’s overcoat, which had once been black, had a greenish hue; it was also stained. Nancy said to him: ‘You know, do forgive my saying it, but one would imagine there was soup on the front of your overcoat.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jonathan, unconcerned, ‘there is. You see it’s so cold that we always wear our overcoats at supper.’

  Wartime austerity had not improved the menu in College. A few years later, when Cyril Connolly took André Gide, at his request, to see Eton on their way back from Oxford where Gide had received an honorary degree, they arrived just as the Tugs were about to eat their supper. Gide was quite upset by what he saw. ‘Cela me coupe l’appétit,’ he said to Cyril.

  Not long ago I went to Eton to see my grandson Valentine act the name part in Anouilh’s Pauvre Bitos, translated into English. His mother took me down with my grand-daughter, Catherine, and Harold Acton, who had not been back to the school since he left it more than fifty years ago. I asked him: ‘What is the biggest change here? Is it the boys’ long hair?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Harold, ‘we always had long hair. The Dames were always telling us to go and have our hair cut. No, the great change is in the boys’ accents.’

  Scotland Yard had sent a detective called Mr. Jones to Shipton to keep an eye on us; he told us thrilling crime stories. One starry frosty night I walked through the village to the church where Händel’s Messiah was sung. As I sat wrapped in my Fafner and Fasolt coat in the dimly-lit gothic church listening to the divine music I noticed Mr. Jones in a nearby pew; he was a musical Welshman.

  We could not stay indefinitely at the Shaven Crown so we got in touch with a house agent. There was a house near Newbury on his books and I told the Chief Constable I must see it. He sent me in a motor with two policemen, and on the way over I stopped at Faringdon for luncheon. I was in the seventh heaven, to visit the charming house once more and eat Gerald’s delicious food and listen to his jokes was like being transported back in time to happy days before the war. As he saw me off with my two policemen sitting in front Gerald said: ‘You are the only person who still has a driver and a footman on the box.’

  The house, Crux Easton, was exactly right and I bought it on the spot. We got our Wootton furniture from store and moved in at once. We bought a cow, Max named her Wellson; from then on we lived well and she gave us butter and milk and cream in abundance. In the yard there was a gardener’s cottage with a crowd of children; they became bosom friends with Alexander and Max and in a matter of days had taught them every swear word in the calendar. They quickly discovered the electric effect these words had upon Nanny and they used them freely. Our new detective, Mr. Buswell, a nice and helpful man, told us one day: ‘The boys always say here comes that battleship Buswell when they see me.’ Fortunately he had not understood, owing to the Berkshire accent they already affected, that what they were calling him was bugger-shit.

  Tom was home again from the Middle East and he spent the summer of 1944 at the Staff College. He came to us nearly every weekend; we were intensely happy to see one another. He asked the little boys about the words Nanny forbade them to use. Max, now aged four, told him:

  ‘Nanny doesn’t like sod. Or bugger. Or yourn.’

  ‘Yawn?’ said Tom. ‘Why, what’s wrong with yawn?’

  ‘She doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like it when we say One o’ yourn.’

  Randolph telephoned to ask if he could come down but we said no. He complained loudly to Nancy: ‘Why can’t I see them if Berners can?’ M. said that as long as he was forbidden to see his political friends, some of whom were still in gaol, he refused to see political opponents.

  Although Randolph fought many elections he never got into Parliament except during the war when he was given a seat under the party truce. The reason always advanced for his failure to be elected was that he was rude to one and all. In the many years I knew him, Randolph was never rude to me, or to M. whose qualities he admired. He was often tiresomely argumentative, but always affectionate and even flattering.

  Crux Easton was a delightful old house, it faced south with an immense view over Berkshire and Hampshire. The garden was stocked with fruit and we gave the gardener seeds for every vegetable under the sun; food had almost disappeared from the shops by the summer of 1944. This gardener could not be called up for war work because he had flat feet, he shuffled slowly along and managed fairly well. One morning M. was chatting to me in my bedroom and said: ‘I must go now and chase up Cleverley.’ Alexander, who was having his reading lesson, became very agitated and his eyes were huge and anxious.

  ‘Please don’t let Dad chase Mr. Cleverley,’ he said. ‘You see, poor Mr. Cleverley can’t run.’ I explained that M. only meant that he wanted to find Cleverley and tell him something about the pea-beans.

  I taught both boys to read, write and do simple sums. They were very quick and learnt in no time. Apart from swear words they knew no slang. Alexander told me of his great friend in the cottage: ‘Bernard has got a kid coming to stay. I asked him where he was going to put it, and he’s going to be allowed to have it in his room!’

  ‘Are you sure it’s not another little boy?’ ‘Oh, quite sure. He said a kid.’

  Gerald came over to stay with us at Crux Easton. I managed to buy a lobster in Newbury. With Wellson’s cream and some brandy it was going to be a treat. Gerald was with me in the kitchen, chatting while I prepared. I went up to change, and told him to watch the clock and at ten past eight to take the lobster out of the oven. At ten past eight I heard agonized screams coming from the direction of the kitchen and flew downstairs. Poor Gerald had used one of those cloths made of knitted string, he was terribly burnt but had bravely not dropped the dish. It spoilt the evening, huge blisters appeared on his hands.

  ‘Martyrs went to the stake for their faith,’ said Gerald, ‘and I went to the stake for Diana’s lobster.’

  During the war our first gaoler, Sir John Anderson, had married Ava Wigram, who had a comfortable little house in Lord North Street and an excellent cook. According to Gerald a friend called to congratulate: ‘Oh, Ava, what thrilling news! Was it the coup de foudre?’ Ava replied crossly: ‘Nothing whatever to do with food.’ Gerald loved this story which he had doubtless invented, and he gave his sneeze-like laugh.

  Among our guests were Debo’s babies aged two and one. I loved them and their presence partly compensated me for my loss, all the years when Alexander and Max had been babies. When Diddy, their nurse, said ‘Emma has got a crush on her Aunt Honks’ I was as pleased and proud as possible.

  All my sisters came to stay at Crux Easton, and Muv and Viv and Micky. Nicky was with his regiment in Italy; he won the M
.C. which delighted us.

  The quaint notion expressed by Cousin Clementine to Muv, that if we were set free we should have a bad time from our fellow-citizens, was proved to be the purest fantasy. The reason is not far to seek. For seven years before the war M. had made speeches up and down the country; in all, he had been heard by several million people. It was impossible for them to believe that M., with his impassioned advocacy of ‘greater Britain’ and ‘Britain awake!’ and parity of armaments, could suddenly have turned into a traitor who desired the defeat of his country, or that if it was defeated he would be prepared to collaborate with its conqueror. It was just too unlikely, and they did not believe it, despite the fact that we had been held silent in gaol for many years.

  The Churchills lived in a world of their own. They believed that Churchill would win the election to be held the moment the war ended, thus paralleling Lloyd George’s massive win at the end of the first war. In 1944 Stalin was still Uncle Joe (a nickname which, when he heard of it, enraged him), the great statesman of whom Churchill said, toasting him at one of their banquets: ‘It is no exaggeration or compliment of a florid kind when I say that we regard Marshall Stalin’s life as most precious to the hopes and hearts of us all,’ and again, ‘We feel we have a friend whom we can trust.’

  At the Yalta conference Poland, as usual, was on the agenda, and Churchill announced: ‘Honour was the sole reason why we had drawn the sword to help Poland against Hitler’s brutal onslaught, and we could never accept any settlement which did not leave her free, independent and sovereign.’ It goes without saying that neither Stalin nor Roosevelt paid the smallest attention to Mr. Churchill’s hopes, or his heart, or his honour. It slowly dawned upon him—a painful, tardy awakening—that Stalin’s aims were incompatible with our own, which had to include freedom for Poland, the ostensible reason why we had gone to war in the first place. At this time communism was fashionable; once at Crux Easton somebody came with a collecting box and was met by Muv who was staying with us. ‘Mrs. Churchill’s fund for what?’ I heard her ask; she was already getting deaf.

  ‘For China.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Muv. ‘China’s too big.’

  In November 1944 Walter Moyne, who was Minister of State in Cairo, was murdered by Jewish terrorists. The assassins were executed. Thirty years later their remains were taken to Israel and given a state funeral attended by the Israeli cabinet and a deputation from the United Nations, which demonstrates once again that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, though this hardly explains why the United Nations joined in the Israeli beano.

  Lord Moyne was a very charming and an exceptionally brave man. Either he hardly knew what fear meant, or, more likely, for he was clever and sensitive, he willed himself to ignore it. Anthony Eden, in his book about the first war, Another World, describes walking down a road with him; about 200 yards ahead the Germans were shelling heavily. ‘We continued to walk, Walter to expound and I to listen… Walter made no sign, but I could bear it no longer and stopped in my tracks with the comment: “I don’t know, Walter, whether you intend walking into that barrage, but I am against it,”’ and Walter fell in with a suggestion that they should go round another way. Raymond Greene once told me that out hunting Walter’s courage amounted to rashness. I was very sorry that my elder sons, just getting to the age when they could have appreciated him, were never to know their clever grandfather.

  The war was now going entirely in the Allies’ favour, and the English and Americans had landed in Normandy. It was the beginning of the end. Tom decided that the imminent invasion of Germany was something he would prefer not to take part in; we often spoke of it. He volunteered for the Far East and after Christmas he was sent to Burma. Rather unexpectedly, he loved soldiering, and he said he would stay in the army after the war.

  In March 1945 a telegram came to say Tom was wounded. I knew instantly that he had died, and so it proved. Near in age, we had always been more like twins than brother and sister. A day never passes when I do not think of him and mourn my loss. He was clever, wise and beautiful; he loved women, and music, and his family.

  M. telephoned the Home Office to get permission for me to go to London, for we were still living under house arrest. I should have gone whether it was given or not. Muv, Farve and Nancy were at the Mews; we consoled each other as best we could, but Muv was never comforted. For our generation the losses were heavy; four of our first cousins, Debo’s brother-in-law, Decca’s husband, had all been killed; and now Tom.

  The end of the war came with the Americans encouraging the Russians to march ever further west until they occupied half Europe. The Americans dropped their two atom bombs on Japan. Churchill, according to the newspapers’ myth had ‘won’ the war, but he was defeated in the General Election; this was a surprise to no one who took an interest in politics, though it undoubtedly amazed him and his cronies who had come to believe that he was the most popular man in England, the indispensable man.

  Everything turned out according to M.’s predictions. He had always said that if outside powers were drawn into Europe’s quarrels they would end the war paramount in our continent. England counted for nothing at Yalta or at Potsdam. Russia, with the complaisance of ignorant America, drew new frontiers. The cruelties and persecutions of which every European must feel deeply ashamed did not end with the war.

  With the enthusiastic connivance of America the British Empire began to be liquidated as M. had also predicted. Not only was half Europe occupied by Russia and subjected to compulsory communism but England was gradually shrunk from a great power to its present little measure. True, it has been badly governed for half a century; but the biggest single factor in its decline was the last war.

  Early in 1945 M. had a letter from Osbert Sitwell, who wrote:

  To have been deprived, as you have been, of a period of time, is beyond bearing. The only comfort for you must be, that it is impossible to blame you for anything that happened in those years.

  Surveying the disasters, great and small, I knew that Osbert was right. It was a comfort, albeit a cold one. For me the chief tragedy of the war was the loss of Tom and Unity, hers on the first day, his almost the last. They were closer to me in age and in every other way than anyone else in our family at that time. Most of my friends in Germany were dead, including Magda Goebbels and all her children except Harald. That the politicians who had lost the war should take their own lives seemed to me inevitable; as Voltaire says:

  Quand on a tout perdu, que l’on a plus d’éspoir

  La vie est une opprobre et la mort un devoir.

  It was only later when I saw how the living were treated by the Allies that I came to realize that Magda had also been right in her resolve to die with her children.

  The Nuremberg trials I shall not comment upon. Everything I think about them was perfectly expressed by M. in The Alternative. The great and unforgivable crime of the German leaders was the killing of helpless prisoners. It may be thought that Britain’s leaders committed a comparable crime by driving a million Cossacks, men, women and children to be murdered by the Russians, having first induced the men to lay down their arms by lying to them. This crime only recently came to light when Solzhenitsyn wrote of it in Gulag. It goes without saying that apart from the politicians who gave the orders, and the unfortunates who obeyed them, nobody in Germany or in Britain knew anything about what was happening.

  At the time of the trials I was surprised that the Allies should not have thrown in a few war-crimes of their own, in order to make the whole thing seem more like even-handed justice and less an isolated act of vengeance. The Russians would not have participated, but one would have thought Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy could hardly stretch as far as it did. Bernard Shaw, writing about the trials of Nurse Cavell and Sir Roger Casement in the first war, said that for them to seem fair it would have been necessary to have neutral judges. However true, this is not practical politics.

  Cruelty and violence and tragedy, all
are inseparable from war. Men who wage war give cruel orders which are executed with violence and provoke tragedy. This applies to them all, Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt and even Churchill in so far as he had the power. It was the same further down the scale. Prof. Lindemann with his memorandum advocating the bombing of working-class districts as more disruptive to the German war effort than the bombing of ‘military objectives’ achieved a ghastly result in which countless thousands of men, women and children were burned to death in Dresden, Hamburg and elsewhere. No wonder Prof.’s memorandum ‘gained him a reputation of ruthlessness’.24

  19.

  CROWOOD

  M. who saw that food shortages would continue for a long time, decided the most useful thing he could do for the present would be to farm. As Crux Easton had only eight acres he bought Crowood. With its usual senseless spite the Home Office refused us permission to go over and see it, we therefore bought it unseen. There were several hundred acres in hand.

  With the end of the war Regulation 18B was lifted at once, we got hold of our car and drove to see Crowood. We had to move there. It was not practical to farm it from Crux Easton so we packed up and left, with Wellson, and our books, and the people we had gathered round us. I was sorry to go, but everyone except me preferred Crowood. We were to live there for five and a half years, and it was there M. wrote his books My Answer and The Alternative.

  Harassment of various kinds by no means ended with the war. Things were always more difficult for us than for other people; it was harder to get paper, or a printer. We set up a publishing house, Euphorion Books, and published a few classics that were unobtainable at that time; in this way M.’s books could appear in a ‘list’ along with Virgil’s Georgics, a couple of short Balzac novels and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. M. wrote a preface to Faust, and for Goethe’s bicentenary we published it with an old, not too inadequate translation. I fully realized that Faust is untranslatable, and that anyone who is interested in Goethe’s ideas must take the trouble to learn German. His novels are another matter. Werther is quite easy to translate, and as everyone knows Napoleon took it with him on his campaigns. But Die Wahlverwandtschaften, a perfect book, one of the novels I have lived in, is unavailable in English. I boldly decided to have a shot at it myself; we put it in the Euphorion autumn list. The total orders amounted to three copies; I therefore abandoned the idea. I already had cold feet and a strong feeling of inadequacy faced with this masterpiece. Goethe is simply a name to nearly all English people, and even those who know German prefer Thomas Mann, a sort of Galsworthy (one can readily imagine a Buddenbrooks Saga on television), while Goethe is neglected.