Finally my children hired an aeroplane to take me to London, to see Max’s brilliant friend the neurosurgeon Professor Sidney Watkins, at the London Hospital.
After long tests he operated and removed a brain tumour.
I was taken, half-conscious, to the Intensive Care room, thirsty, and bitterly cold. No water was given, no blanket. As I shivered in the deep misery that follows an operation, I heard Debo’s voice, ‘She is not allowed water. There is to be no question of wine,’ she was saying sharply. The hospital chaplain had been told I was dying and had come to give me the Viaticum, which would take me safely into the next world, but Debo chased him away. Hearing her voice was inexpressible balm. Just to feel she was near was so wonderfully soothing.
After a few days I was moved to a little room full of flowers. The papers had said I’d had a stroke, and given my address. Debo and Pam came often, and all my children and many friends, flowers and fruit and the gift of books, all of them unreadable ‘light fiction’. I was starved for something to read; yet with the London Library and its riches available I could think of nothing to ask for.
Some weeks later I was to go to Chatsworth for convalescence, but as the day approached I was seized with panic thinking of the great doors and windows, and that I should never be able to climb into one of the high beds. I saw myself collapsing at the West door, a heap of useless arms and legs, too weak to move.
It was a nightmarish and daunting vision; I rang for a nurse and asked to see Sister Sherren. When she came to my bedside I said ‘Sister, I can’t go to Chatsworth. Please will you telephone and tell them. It was so kind to suggest it, but I must go to a convalescent home.’ Probably a nurse as clever and experienced as Sister Sherren knows what to do about hysteria. In any case she calmed me, and a day or two later Jerry and Emmy came for me and drove me to Chatsworth.
When I had been carried on a stretcher down the Temple steps it had been September, still high summer, the trees and grass green, the little lake reflecting a blue sky. When I got to Chatsworth it was November, midwinter, but the beauty of every aspect was magic, after the poor hospital where ugliness prevailed. Far from collapsing at the great door, Debo and Andrew got me up the steps and into bed in a flash. My bed was put near the window; I asked for it to be opened wide, the delicious cold air was like champagne to me after the used-up hospital air, the wintry park a dream. Debo constantly came in and out, and Andrew built a wall of books round my bed; I only had to stretch out my hand and choose one, I can never forget their kindness. Someone gave me Dior scent in an upright oblong box, for some reason it looked exactly like one of the tower blocks of flats which disfigure London and Paris. John Betjeman came to sit with me, and I could see the same idea occurred to him, and we couldn’t stop laughing. The air, the food, the view, the visitors and above all Debo herself made me happy and cured me quickly.
I wore a linen foulard on my shaven head; one day it slipped and Debo said, ‘Oh! Honks is a Buddhist monk’, I quickly tied my head up and hid the ravages. I spent hours a day writing letters to thank for flowers and books and visits which had flowed into the hospital, we had kept cards and addresses. After three weeks Jerry drove me home to France. I could walk, and felt quite well, and friends came down. It was like being born again. The operation and its attendant miseries had made a gap in my sorrow; it had become wonderfully less painful. An unexpected bonus was that once the brain tumour had been removed, I never had another migraine. For years it had been the bane of my life.
30.
A FEW WEEKS IN ENGLAND
A few years into my widowhood I realised I was spending more than I could afford, and I let the Temple for some weeks to an American couple and went to England, to Pam’s cottage on the river at Swinbrook. She welcomed me with food galore, in her generous way, and told me what to do about the deep freeze. She said if you took food that had been in the deep freeze, warmed it up, put the remains back in the freezer then next day into the oven again, it was fatal. A mouthful of food after such treatment would kill you. She went back to Woodfield, twenty miles away, and I was left to my own devices. I avoided the deep freeze, and when I had eaten all Pam’s food, a Burford shop sent delicious steak and kidney pudding. There was no shop in Swinbrook, but a van came through the village ringing its bell, and stopped outside the Swan inn opposite the cottage. It sold every thing the heart could desire.
Selina Hastings came to stay. We had been friends ever since she interviewed me, and asked if it was true that we were not invited to the English Embassy in Paris. I said it was quite true, and that it was rather a blessing, because as Enoch Powell had once said, the Foreign Office was a nest of spies and traitors, with whom one would not care to associate. I added ‘Of course, I’m sure Gladwyn isn’t the Fourth Man, but he is part of the Foreign Office.’ Gladwyn Jebb was Ambassador in the early fifties.
Selina put my little tease in her article, and a friend who saw Cynthia Jebb found her cross. She said I had gone too far. ‘But she only said Gladwyn was not the Fourth Man’, but Cynthia was unappeased.
Ever since Burgess and Maclean disappeared, in 1951, and turned up in Moscow, to be followed by a third spy, Philby, there had been talk of a Fourth Man. Yet no inquiry was ever held as why the two notoriously drunken and badly behaved communists had been elevated to important positions at our Embassy in Washington. The affair damaged Anglo-American relations during the Cold War. Far from being a question of a fourth man, it was more than likely there were dozens of these men. Goronwy Rees, who was in a position to know, says in his book, A Chapter of Accidents, the English Security Service itself was riddled with spies. Selina won my heart with her accurate reporting.
One day I was reading in bed with the electric blanket turned on, looking through the sleet at the river from time to time, when I realised the telephone next door was ringing furiously. It was a journalist from The Times. He said the Duchess of Windsor had died and would I dictate an ‘appreciation’. This I did, and it was printed next day. The news was really a wonderful relief to me. I had always been haunted by the thought of the Duchess, ‘alive’, that is with a beating heart, yet unconscious, year after year. I went to the sad house from time to time to see Georges and Ofélia. Georges the butler had promised to let me know if one of the nurses was unkind. It can happen.
The telephone never stopped ringing, journalists, and then an invitation to the funeral. I suppose all this was the result of my little book of a few years before. I wanted very much to go to the funeral, but how to get from Swinbrook to Windsor? The front door opened and Catherine appeared. I told her my dilemma, and she said ‘Granny, I’ll take you to the funeral.’ She said it would be no trouble at all. So I accepted, and when we got to the castle they gave us a ticket for Catherine as well as me.
In St George’s chapel we were shown up a steep stair to the little gallery that runs under the roof of the chancel, above the standards of the Knights of the Garter. We climbed over the knees of Hubert de Givenchy, the Duchess of Marlborough, the Duke of Marlborough and Laura Duchess of Marlborough. I came next, but I made Catherine take my place. I knew Laura would whisper all through the service. She was not on whispering terms with her stepson, so we should benefit, and I was too deaf for whispers. Hubert de Givenchy recognised my black coat, already years old. Twenty years on, it is still my best; he was a wonderful, classic, dressmaker.
Laura whispered, Catherine told me later. She had visited Diana Cooper the night before and told her she’d got a Daimler to come down to Windsor to the Duchess’s funeral. Diana Cooper, who was in bed, had said ‘Oh, do take me!’ But Laura had been inexorable: ‘Sorry chum; no way, I’m not going to carry you up the steps.’
While Laura and Catherine were whispering, I looked about me. We had an unrivalled bird’s eye view.
It was a scene of great splendour and beauty. Half the pews in the Quire were filled with men and boys who sang in the choir, and half with the Military Knights of Windsor in their scarlet uniforms. The l
ittle coffin lay in front of the altar, and the seats on the floor were occupied, on the left side by the Duchess’s household, who had been flown over from France by order of the Queen. Then the Royal Family appeared and sat on the right of the altar: the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother, the Prince and Princess of Wales all in black, and the choir had black cassocks and white surplices. There was only black, white and scarlet. The Standards belonging to the Knights of the Garter had heraldic devices in little squares and oblongs, lions, crosses, and all the rest of the medieval array; one Standard only was an exception; its device a huge chrysanthemum, the sort that Proust describes as having decorated Odette’s cosy little salon in the belle époque, it obviously belonged to the Emperor of Japan.
The choir sang ‘Lead us heavenly Father lead us o’er the world’s tempestuous sea, guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us…’ Yes, I thought. Feed us. Nobody ever fed us more deliciously than the poor little person they are going to bury. The archbishop said a prayer and it was over. Following the coffin the Royal Family walked slowly down the aisle; all rather grey, except the Princess of Wales, whose beauty shone out like a buttercup which had improbably planted itself in a wintry field.
As soon as the royal party had started on its way to Frogmore we climbed down from our eyrie and went to the cloisters to look at the flowers.
There were masses of the usual wreaths, and many unusual arrangements sent from the Bahamas, where the Duke had been Governor during the war, with charming, loving messages attached. As the Duchess was very old, nearly all her great friends were dead. Her French friends had flown from Paris. I was very pleased to be there and to see for myself what a perfect ceremony it was, and how even the Duke of Windsor, who loved her so much, would not have been able to imagine anything more dignified.
Catherine and I then motored to Stanway, where I stayed the night, and we regaled her husband, Jamie Neidpath, with our adventures, and his cousin Laura’s unkind behaviour to his great aunt. Next day Catherine took me back to Swinbrook, and in Burford I bought the newspapers. Accustomed as I am to the lies and nonsense which fill the English yellow press, even I was astonished by what I read. The accounts of the Duchess of Windsor’s funeral seemed to be designed to diminish her and at the same time annoy the Queen.
What a strange life the Duchess of Windsor had, the last years not a life at all. Her mind clouded, she was kept ‘alive’ by her doctors and nurses. Did she have dreams and nightmares during those years? There was no loving child to hold her hand or smooth her forehead. Was she lonely, sad or completely unconscious? Who knows
Until this frightfully long illness she had seemed fairly happy, though she must have missed the Duke and his sheltering love. She was looked after by her doctor and solicitor. Nobody else was allowed. Did she mind not being a royal highness? My guess is that she thought the whole thing incomprehensible nonsense, but minded a little because the Duke took it to heart on her behalf. Legally she was a royal highness, according to rules carefully laid down by Queen Victoria, and she was always treated as such in her own houses and everywhere else in France. This question of her title kept the Windsors out of England, presumably the object of the exercise. It was probably just as well, for all concerned. I felt profoundly thankful that she was now beyond care, sorrow, spite. I had liked her courage, her high spirits, her perfectionist efficiency.
31.
FLASHBACK
It is not surprising that my parents reacted angrily to my rather wild decision to leave Bryan and attach myself to M. I was twenty-two, happily married with two baby boys and a husband the whole family had become fond of.
We were very rich. This had been a great surprise to me, Bryan never seemed like other rich men. When we were first engaged, and his mother invited me to stay, far from living in a stately home we were lodged in huts in a cornfield, with no garden or park. I think the first time it dawned on me that we might be rich was when I said one day I wished I had a diamond tiara. ‘Oh’ said Bryan, ‘there is one for you.’
Aged eighteen I had no idea who was rich and who was not, though I knew we as a family were poor. Muv disliked riches, but she was glad to see me comfortably settled for life. Then suddenly I behaved in an outrageous way, falling in love with a married man and upsetting everybody. I explained to my furious parents that as M. had never been faithful to her, his wife would think nothing of it; to her I was just another girl he fancied. I could not see that anything would change for her, even if the affair was permanent. He had his family, I had my little boys, we should meet when possible; I should be free to travel, see my friends. He had his all-absorbing work.
And what about Bryan? He wanted me to stay, but we were deeply unsuited to one another. I felt quite sure he would find the sort of wife he needed.
Farve and Lord Moyne, Bryan’s father, went to see M. and angrily tried to persuade him to give me up and put a stop to the whole nonsense. Of course he refused, just as I did. How can we have been so sure? Looking back, all my sympathy is with my parents, and the friends and relations who argued the impossibility of the situation. How it was that we were both so sure, I have no idea. I was only twenty-two, but I had seen a lot of the world. He was thirty-six and a well-known politician.
Only months after I had my way, moved out of our big house in Cheyne Walk to a little house in Eaton Square, made all arrangements with Bryan about sharing the children, and thinking the turmoil had subsided, a tragedy happened. Cimmie, M.’s wife, had an appendicitis operation, got peritonitis, and died. Needless to say, I was totally shattered and so was he. He had loved her dearly. I kept my side of the bargain and always encouraged him to see his family; Baba Metcalfe, Cimmie’s sister, was a sort of surrogate Cimmie in my eyes. During the next two years, M.’s family unconsciously helped me. Every time he went to his house at Denham to be with the children, the aunts and the granny nagged him unceasingly, in an effort to stop him seeing me. Naturally they were unsuccessful, men hate being nagged. He used to come back to Eaton Square in a very affectionate frame of mind; this is human nature.
In fact what they dreaded was that we should marry. Yet marriage was the very last thing I wanted. My friends had got used to my way of life, and even my parents partly relented. After only two years, it was Farve who put me in the aeroplane for Naples after my accident, though he knew why I was going.
It is very strange, looking back, to remember how much my mother loved and admired M. a few years after having so disliked the idea of him, and how much he admired and loved her for the last twenty years of her life. The great difference between seventy years ago and now is that in those days, although hundreds of people might know about ‘a scandal’, there would be no mention of it in the newspapers
As soon as our divorce was absolute, Bryan was in and out of Eaton Square, and I often went down to Biddesden, where Pam had a cottage and managed the farm for him. I was often away, in Italy with Gerald, or in Germany with Unity. In 1936 I married M. and Bryan married his ideal wife.
How could one help to forward M.’s brilliant ideas, and make a reality of them? Conditions in England in the early thirties were very terrible for millions of people. The unemployed and their families existed on an insufficient dole. They were hungry. I never forgot this, and wondered if there was anything I could do. An opportunity presented itself. The BUF was short of money; it needed a newspaper above all.
Bill Allen, a Tory MP who had joined the New Party, had a big advertising business in Northern Ireland. He had been trying for some time, without success, to get a concession from the Irish Republic for a commercial wireless station to be beamed at England. Another Tory MP, Captain Plugge, had got just such a concession from the French government. He had set up Radio Normandie, which was a great success with English listeners. They didn’t mind the advertisements, since they got the music they liked. Plugge and the French state shared the profits. It was said to be a licence to print money.
If the French had agreed to do it, why not the
Germans? A station near the North Sea coast could broadcast to London and the whole of southern England.
In 1936 I set about trying to persuade the Germans. I did not pester Hitler himself, but various Ministers whom I knew. I pointed out that Germany would benefit, as France was doing, by giving us a medium wave length, of which it had so many. The idea was turned down, first the Wehrmacht objected, then Dr Goebbels. I persevered, and finally it was Ohnesorge, the Minister of Posts, who realized it was a clever idea. Bill Allen had everything ready, including the co-operation of a very skilful wireless engineer, Peter Eckersley, who designed the station with every modern improvement of those days.
I went to Berlin with Allen and Eckersley and a lawyer a good many times to iron out differences which arose. We had all signed a secrecy agreement; we did not want the Press to know of the project. The English government knew that it was a purely commercial arrangement. In the agreement it was stipulated there should be no propaganda of any kind, just popular music for the housewives.
When it was all signed and sealed M. and I announced our hitherto secret marriage of two years before. I could hardly have journeyed so often to Berlin as M.’s wife without the curiosity of the Press being aroused. As in the Plugge agreement with France, Germany was to get about half the profits; Bill Allen’s firm, Peter Eckersley and ourselves shared the rest. Money troubles for the BUF would have vanished. When the station was ready to broadcast, war broke out and with it our hopes died. There was a fairly accurate account of all this in History Today a few years ago, entitled ‘Mosley as Entrepreneur’.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 34
