A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  ‘Dangerous, Dana? Oh, I don’t think so. He’s a dear old fellow,’ said Muv vaguely.

  As to the garden, although it was in a sheltered spot it was not sheltered from really violent storms. She took me that way after my arrival one year and the whole thing was pitch black, salt spray having killed all her vegetables and flowers in a single night. She laughed so much at the look on my face that we had to sit on the garden bench surveying the desolate scene for several minutes while she recovered her composure.

  Children adored the island. My boys when they were small, and then my grandchildren, looked forward to their visits the whole year. The boatman took them trawling at night, they collected shells, Muv read aloud to them, and they loved the adventure of the journey.

  Visiting Farve was much easier. He sent to Newcastle and seemed pleased to see one. After dinner he said: ‘Dina, shall we have un petit brin de feu?’ and he got his keys and opened his safe and took out a firelighter. Nothing else was kept in the safe. It was a relic of the old days when one of us might go to his cupboard for a firelighter to make the damp logs burn in our cold Asthall schoolroom. At Redesdale there were no children to take his firelighters but the idea that they might vanish was ingrained. Farve’s safe would have been a grave disappointment to a clever burglar.

  He, like Muv, listened to the news on the wireless, or at any rate both in their remote dwellings turned it on, very loudly because of their deafness; whether they actually listened I never could quite make out, it may have been a habit acquired during the war and they let the sound wash over them.

  Unlike Muv, he was not in the least interested in any of us or our various activities. He once invited Alexander, aged twelve, to stay; he met him at Newcastle. They had never set eyes on one another before and I asked when he got back: ‘How did you know Farve?’

  ‘I looked at all the old people on the platform, and I saw one noble old gentleman, and I knew it must be him.’ Farve was rather pleased by this polite description.

  In March 1958 M. and I were in London. Muv and Debo decided to go to Redesdale for Farve’s eightieth birthday, he had not been too well that winter. In the night I woke and suddenly knew that I must go with them. Early next morning I went to King’s Cross and ran along the train until I found them in their carriage. We stayed not at the cottage but at the Redesdale Arms, a comfortable nearby inn. I shall never forget the expression on Farve’s face when Muv appeared at his bedside, and his smile of pure delight. All their differences forgotten, they seemed to have gone back twenty years to happy days before the tragedies. She sat with him for hours, Debo and I going in and out. After a couple of days Muv and Debo travelled on to Scotland and I returned to London. They had hardly arrived when they were wired for to go to Farve; a few days later he died.

  When Farve was in his early forties, at Asthall soon after the first war, Tom predicted that he would mellow with age. ‘Oh yes, Farve, you will. Everyone mellows with age,’ he said confidently. He was proved right. The mellowing happened gradually and in many ways I regretted it. There were no more rages, but there were no more wildly funny jokes either. He was quieter, less eccentric, sadder too no doubt. He had already lost his hold on life. All his pleasures, shooting, fishing, playing poker with men friends, were finished and done with. His only son was dead. For most people there are still spectator sports in old age, of which the most passionately interesting is the continuing serial story of politics and world affairs. From this Farve seemed totally detached. Books he had never indulged in; he never cared for gardening. The future must have looked to him empty. When he died I mourned the Farve of long ago; what I could hardly bear to contemplate was that one day Muv too would disappear.

  On the island she was so well and happy and so pleased with her surroundings which combined her two loves, Scotland and the sea, that such thoughts never came into my head. It was in the winter, when she lived at Rutland Gate Mews, that she began to seem old, and once when she had been staying with us at the Temple and I took her to the airport, as I watched from the barrier while she slowly disappeared from view down a long corridor I had a premonition that this would be her last visit to France and I was blinded with tears.

  In 1960 we took a flat in London where we spent three winters. This enabled me to see her almost every day; she often came to us and I went to her for tea and scrabble. Her Parkinson’s disease got gradually worse. Her poor hand tapping on the table and her dachshund’s tail thumping on the floor were a sort of percussion chorus which made her laugh. Often we met at Harrods bank; on one of the comfortable Harrods sofas Debo and I sat either side of Muv shouting scandals to amuse her, she was so deaf that the whole bank partook of our secrets.

  Max was now at Christ Church and when he was just twenty he married Jean Taylor; she was only nineteen. Like Jonathan, Max was a married undergraduate.

  In 1962 the communists made a great effort once again to prevent M. from speaking; they organized violence and there was fighting at M.’s meetings, often shown on television, though needless to say nothing else was reported, not a word of his speeches for example. For many years his meetings, indoor and outdoor, had been perfectly orderly; now, obviously, word had gone forth that they were to be attacked. The government immediately capitulated; on orders from the Home Office the moment there was any attempt to disrupt a meeting the police closed it. Under the Public Order Act M. had not the right to keep order at outdoor meetings, and since the police gave way at once to the disorderly, outdoor meetings came to an end. This happened when public meetings were in any case being replaced by television, but M. was banned from television. Over and over again he consented to give interviews before the cameras, invited to do so by Malcolm Muggeridge, Daniel Farson and others, but when the time came for the films to be screened they were always banned. From 1968 on, a fairer administration gave M. a number of opportunities to state his opinions on television.

  A neighbour of ours at our London flat was Lady Hoskins, the widow of a General, who lived on the ground floor. She became fond of Max, and once as he was leaving the house on his way to his father’s meeting, during this period of violence, she waylaid him in the hall.

  ‘Max!’ she said, ‘Please take this!’ and she held out her late husband’s sword which usually decorated the wall of her drawing-room.

  ‘Oh no, Lady Hoskins, thank you very much, but you see I should be arrested at once if I was carrying that sword,’ said Max.

  Telling me about it afterwards he added: ‘The old dear didn’t realize it was an offensive weapon.’

  At one outdoor meeting M. was set upon by communists as he was walking to the platform. It was at Ridley Road in East London, where he and other speakers had held innumerable meetings both before and since the war and where he was on the best of terms with the local population. The police were holding back his supporters some way off which gave the reds a chance to hurl M. to the ground. There were shouts of ‘Put the boot in’, but M. held one of his assailants in such a way that though they were rolling on the ground he was able to use him as a shield to ward off the blows and kicks of the rest of the cowardly gang. Max flung himself upon his father’s attackers; moments later the police arrived and arrested him along with the gang; they were all put in a black maria. M. resumed his walk to the improvised platform, but the police closed the meeting thus once again giving in to violence and preventing free speech.

  Max was bailed out, and next morning I went to the police court to hear him defend himself. A senior police officer cross-examined him; he suggested that Max had gone to the meeting hoping for a fight. Max replied that he had gone hoping to hear his father speak. ‘But you expected a fight, didn’t you?’ asked the policeman. ‘No, and nor presumably did you, or you would surely have disposed your men more effectively,’ was Max’s reply. He went on to ask whether it was suggested that he should have stood idly by while his father was being kicked by a gang of roughs. ‘It was not only my right, but my duty to go to his aid,’ he said (Dail
y Telegraph 2/8/62). He was acquitted. Apparently this, for M., very dangerous situation had arisen because television crews were waiting and the police thought that if pictures were taken of M. arriving surrounded by cheering supporters it would look too favourable; they therefore arranged that he should walk to the platform alone, between police buses. Max had driven there with him. The communists were given their golden opportunity, and but for M.’s. presence of mind he would have been badly hurt, or worse. They were not local people but had been sent from afar.

  At about this time a short letter appeared in The Times signed by Victor Gollancz and Frank Pakenham. They said that much as they deplored all that M. stood for they also deplored the violence being used against him.

  I wrote to Frank asking what it was that M. stood for that he deplored. Was it united Europe? was it his economic policy? Frank wrote back saying he had imagined when he saw my letter that I was going to thank him for writing to The Times, and then all he got was a rocket. In fact, I loved him for having written, but the ritual disapproval of ‘everything’ M. advocates has always seemed to me one of the great nonsenses and hypocrisies of the post-war years.

  In 1959 there had been a general election. M. was asked to stand in North Kensington. It was a constituency in which several streets had recently been taken over by West Indians. At that time any number could enter the country, and as the West Indies were suffering from slump thousands crossed the Atlantic and settled in England. M. thought the whole idea wrong from start to finish. He advocated helping the West Indies in a number of ways and sending the West Indians home to decent conditions. In 1959 it would have been possible to reverse the decision taken by the government to import unskilled labour. Britain should have insisted upon ‘Dominion status’ for itself. If great empty countries like Canada and Australia restricted immigration, how much more so should crowded Britain? Since we had been reduced by the war to a relatively weak position in the world we depended for survival upon skill, brains and inventiveness; among the fifty-five million inhabitants there were plenty of unskilled workers without importing more. Furthermore it was only necessary to glance at the United States to see what an intractable problem race relations could become.

  M. fought the election on his whole programme of united Europe and economic reform, as well as the question of immigration. Only a small part of the constituency was affected by the arrival of the West Indians; unfortunately the remainder took the then popular liberal line. If M. had been elected England might not be in the unfortunate position it is as I write these words: the sick man of Europe. At every stage of our decline he has put forward a constructive policy; had he been in Parliament his voice could not have been ignored.

  Canvassing for him in North Kensington I had a good look at the appalling housing in parts of the constituency. The blacks had made this slum far worse simply by overcrowding. A man called Rachman organized a profitable racket and squeezed more and more people into the disgusting houses. Highly disagreeable as the situation was for any white person unable to move to some other district—and there were many such, and their life had become a sort of hell of noise and filth and misery—I also felt sorry for the blacks. They hated the climate, and they cannot have relished the interest they aroused in clergymen and assorted do-gooders, the kind of people anyone normal, whatever his colour, would be careful to avoid. If they could find no work they went to collect the dole and the sight of them in the queue, drawing out pounds shillings and pence, as money was called in those days, further irritated their white neighbours, who could easily think of ways they would prefer that their rates and taxes should be spent and did not hesitate to tell them so.

  All in all, it would be difficult to parallel in its wide assortment of evils and annoyances great and small the insouciant gesture of the Tories when they opened wide the doors to black immigration.

  As the numbers multiplied the people immediately affected became angry, but they had nobody in the House of Commons to speak on their behalf. Far from it; they were scolded by politicians and clergy for not welcoming the change in their neighbourhoods; many a letter was penned in the quiet of a cathedral close telling them how fortunate they were to have so many black people living among them, bringing steel bands to liven up the streets and so forth. As they remained unconvinced the politicians were gradually obliged to change their tune, but as usual it was far too late and the damage was done. A flourishing race-relations industry prospered, while lazy employers admitted that it was ‘marginally cheaper’ to employ black labour than it would have been to install new machinery in their factories, thus ensuring that much of British industry remained old fashioned and soon became obsolete. The slums, through overcrowding, are worse than ever before; dirty, untidy, noisy as well as insanitary and inconvenient. The bad housing in our big cities has to be seen to be believed; it is a quite unnecessary blot upon Britain which neither the Conservative party nor the Labour party has ever tackled in a serious way. Hardly a week goes by but some incident, a statistic concerning juvenile crime among blacks, or the preponderance of unemployed blacks, is published giving rise to calls from the busy race-relations industry for ever more legislation.

  In the sixties when Labour was back in office, R. H. S. Crossman, a minister in the Labour government, wrote in his diary: ‘if the Conservatives were to launch a strong anti-coloured-immigration line, they might really start winning votes.’ He wrote further that George Wigg told him: ‘it has been quite clear that immigration can be the greatest vote-loser for the Labour party’ if it was seen that Labour was ‘permitting a flood of immigrants to come and blight the central areas in all our cities’. This was unfair, because it was not Labour but the Conservatives who had opened the floodgates, but they had realized before the Labour leaders how unpopular this policy was, and therefore they were looked upon by the electorate as the party more likely to halt coloured immigration. Since, however, the central areas of many cities were already what Lord Wigg called ‘blighted’, a competition in vote-catching was fairly meaningless so far as this particular problem went. It is just one more example of short-sighted stupidity in the rulers our unfortunate country has burdened itself with. It sometimes seems as if they must sit down together and deliberately try to devise a policy which is certain to make things harder for everybody. One would be inclined to believe this were it not that we know by experience that nothing is thought out; the politicians are blown hither and thither by pure chance.

  M. had always insisted that the immigrants must be decently treated once they are in the country; nevertheless he was violently attacked by politicians and press, as was said of him in another context, ‘simply and solely because he was right.’ What he was saying in the fifties, when it was easy to do something about it, nearly everyone is saying in the seventies. As usual he was right, but he was right too soon. If this problem is ever to be solved it will have to be in a European context, because if their countries of origin are to be induced to receive the immigrants back the inducement will have to be the only one that counts: economic and financial.

  In the autumn of 1968 M.’s autobiography, My Life, was published. The BBC gave him the whole of its Panorama programme, and it was seen by a record audience. The interviewer was James Mossman, and he was asked at the beginning by Robin Day whether he had found M. rather different from what he expected. ‘Startlingly different,’ said Mossman.

  Reviews of My Life were notable for the fact that all the clever or remarkable men paid tribute to M.’s brilliance and character; only a few scribblers and hacks did their best to denigrate. Notable opponents, with peculiarly English generosity, praised the book. A. J. P. Taylor wrote that M. is ‘A superb political thinker, the best of our age.’ Malcolm Muggeridge said he was: ‘The only living Englishman who could perfectly well have been either Conservative or Labour prime minister,’ and Sir Colin Coote: ‘He displays yet another talent, for it is the best-written volume of memoirs emanating from my generation.’ Frank Pakenham (Lord Lon
gford) wrote: ‘In the field of ideas he was a creative force,’ and Colin Welch: ‘We are confronted by a man of powerful will and bold intelligence, self-disciplined, by no means lacking in shrewdness or even humour, a spell-binding speaker, a truly formidable figure,’ while Christopher Sykes spoke of ‘memorable and important pieces of writing.’

  I was pleased with the reception of My Life, for I had been urging M. for years to write down his memories.

  25.

  THE WINDSORS

  A few miles along the valley from Orsay in what was then the village of Gif the painter Drian had an old mill which he wanted to sell. Nancy longed to buy it. She loved the idea of a garden with a stream running through it. At the same time she thought she might be lonely and cut off from her friends, all of whom strongly advised her to stay where she was at rue Monsieur.

  The Moulin de la Tuilerie was finally bought by the Windsors, who made a lovely flower garden in the English style and a luxurious Hollywood-like dwelling, every barn and outhouse as well as the mill itself filled with bedrooms and bathrooms and dining-rooms of various sizes to fit parties large and small. They were kind neighbours to us and we had happy times at the mill for many years until they decided to sell it. When they first came over to the Temple the Duchess of Windsor said: ‘Yes, it’s very pretty here, but where do you live?’

  I loved the Duke and have seldom met his like for charm. He was always ready to laugh and be amused and then his rather sad and anxious expression changed and his face lit up in a most engaging way. He had the almost miraculous memory that royal personages so cleverly cultivate and which everyone finds flattering. A favourite topic he could seldom indulge in, because so many of their guests were American or French or Spanish or German, was English families. He remembered people’s sisters and cousins and aunts. He would say: ‘Now let me see. Lady so and so was Lord so and so’s great aunt. Recto?’ He pronounced lady almost, though not quite, lidy.