A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  When M. had wanted to make a French Will, the lawyers said he must produce our 1936 marriage certificate; otherwise his younger sons would have to pay the death duties of illegitimates. Without much hope, I wrote to Berlin, the Home Office people having lost our certificate when they broke open M.’s safe in the war. It seemed unlikely the original existed. Berlin had been bombed to smithereens, it was deep in the Russian zone, and divided between the four occupying powers. After some weeks a letter came. The Standesamt. I must apply to was in the Russian sector. I was given the address.

  This seemed to make it even more unlikely that we could get the document. Communications from the West were not welcome during the Cold War. Nevertheless, months later, a large envelope appeared from the Paris Legation of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. The letter said if I would send 27 francs they would post me a copy of the certificate, which they duly did. German efficiency had prevailed.

  The French notaire was highly surprised. Probably he imagined I had invented the whole story of the Berlin marriage. The English, on the other hand, simply took our word for it.

  The Daily Telegraph was always particularly hostile to us, and when M. died it quite excelled itself. Alexander wrote a letter counter-attacking which it published. In August 1984 it had a headline, WHY WHITEHALL FEARED MOSLEY AND HIS NINE GUNS. The journalist must have been short of a story, and discovered that when in 1940 M was arrested; the police had taken nine guns away from Denham. They had, and they gave me a receipt and returned the guns after the war. The police thought it perfectly normal to find sporting guns in a country house, but the word gun could be used for a rook rifle, or a machine gun. These guns were needless to say not for use in Whitehall but in the hedgerows at Denham where there were a few pheasants.

  I wrote to the Daily Telegraph explaining about sporting guns, but it did not publish my letter. After some weeks I made a complaint to the Press Council. The case was heard the following February. I won, and the Daily Telegraph had to print an apology. The man who had written the article sat with Lord Deedes during the hearing. I doubt if he had ever seen a sporting gun in his life, and perhaps he even believed his own nonsense, but why had the paper printed it?

  M would have laughed. He was amused when Hugh Sherwood (a Liberal) used to touch the floor and say, ‘What’s lower than that? A Tory.’ When the Berrys lost the Daily Telegraph, it was much less hostile under new ownership, often asking me to review books.

  In 1990 I was approached by Professor A.W.B. Simpson, who had decided to write a book about Regulation 18B. He was to call it In The Highest Degree Odious, words used by Winston Churchill when he was Prime Minister in a memorandum to Herbert Morrison the Home Secretary, about imprisonment without trial. I thought how pleased my mother would have been, at this late hour, to know that somebody cared enough about the idea of English justice in the way she herself did, to take this task upon himself. It was in fact too late.

  I helped as much as I could, but the war had been over for nearly fifty years, and many of the victims of this arbitrary and vicious regulation had died. Professor Simpson talked to all the survivors we could find. His book was scholarly, and not much concerned with individual miseries. Perhaps if it had been it would have reached a wider public. However that may be, his researches uncovered many things hitherto unknown to me. John Grigg reviewed In The Highest Degree Odious in the Spectator (I4/8/93). I wrote to the magazine the following week: ‘In John Grigg’s review of Professor Simpson’s book, he hardly mentions that careful research enabled the Professor to discover the role played by MI5 in the application of Regulation 18B 1 A, the order under which hundreds of patriotic men and women were imprisoned without charge or trial in May 1940. Panic there undoubtedly was, but it was not just panic that led to this unprecedented act on the part of the Government. MI5 told the Government that a dangerous fifth column, secretly organized, was ready to help the enemy in the event of a German invasion. Pressed for evidence, MI5 was incapable of producing any, for the simple reason that the whole thing was pure invention. Yet we were not released.’

  What happened to the people in MI5 who had invented this lie? Nothing, no doubt. Yet it had ruined the lives and fortunes of a great many men and women.

  Professor Simpson is witheringly scornful about official secrecy in Britain. He says while most government files are destroyed, access to some that survive is indefinitely refused. I discovered this myself when I asked for the publication of M.’s 1940 interrogation by Birkett. There was talk of 100 years which must go by; but in 1982, with help from some left-wing MPs, my request was granted. It seems likely that although there may be a few damaging secrets to be uncovered, most of the archives have been shredded long since. There is probably as much muddle as there is malignancy in these shadowy areas of English ‘security’.

  32.

  FRIENDS

  Frank Pakenham suggested, while I was recovering from my brain operation, that I should write a book about people I had known. I said I would, provided I could have M. as one of them. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘but you mustn’t write three hundred pages about him and three each for all the others’. I promised to do my best, and the result was Loved Ones. All the characters in the book had died, which precluded many great friends I should have liked to write about.

  The friend who saw me through the tempestuous years of my divorce, re-marriage and imprisonment, was Gerald Berners, who never failed me from 1932 to 1950. I stayed with him over and over again at Faringdon, and for months in Rome. He stayed with me at Wootton, Crux Easton, Crowood, and even at the uncomfortable inn where we lived for a few weeks after our release from prison.

  It is impossible to exaggerate how much I owed him during those eighteen years. He was so clever and well-read. He educated and diverted me. He was subject to depression, like Mrs Hammersley. Both were full of pessimistic jokes.

  In 1983, Gerald Berners’ centenary was celebrated with an exhibition of his painting at the South Bank and a concert of his music at Wigmore Hall. A journalist, asking me about him, said ‘How did he get on with Sir Oswald?’ ‘They were very fond of each other’, I replied.

  There was a silence and then the journalist said ‘I can’t even imagine Lord Berners and Sir Oswald Mosley together’.

  While Selina was staying with me at Swinbrook cottage she invited A.N. Wilson to come over from Oxford. I had wanted very much to meet this brilliant writer. We had a fascinating conversation, which has gone on ever since, mostly by letter as we live in different countries. Some years later he became literary editor of the Evening Standard, and I was his reliable hack reviewer, of which every literary editor needs a few, for the four or five years it lasted. Although we seldom meet, I look upon him as one of my great friends.

  All my life I have had special friends and confidants. Age makes no difference to friendship. Gerald Berners was twenty-seven years older than me; Jean-Noel Liaut is sixty years younger. Both have been indispensable to me, and so were Jean de Baglion, and in my own family Tom, Unity and Debo. Just before he died, Debo brought Jim Lees-Milne for a last visit to the Temple in 1997. We had one happy evening, but next day he felt so ill she journeyed straight back with him and took him to hospital. He was my oldest friend, whom I had known since I was ten.

  A short time before leaving the Temple I made my last great friend. Like all the others, Jean-Noel Liaut is a writer, a great reader, very clever, endlessly sympathetic; the best possible company. His affectionate companionship and laughter is just like that of the other bosom friends I have tried to describe, and we have the luck to live in the same city.

  A year after Gerald died we went to live in France, and my new great friend was Jean de Baglion. He too showed me what to read and made me laugh. None of these friendships was exclusive; all my bosom friends had other friends and husbands and wives and lovers. In friendship there must be neither possessiveness nor jealousy. Either would wreck it.

  Jean stayed with us at the Temple and in Ireland; we staye
d with him in Poitou. He announced: ‘I am arranging a little dungeon in the country’ and when everyone laughed, ‘what have I said? Isn’t dungeon the English for donjon?’ We explained its meaning had changed over the centuries, and often stayed with Jean in his delightful dungeon.

  Once, staying there with Pam, and Kitty Mersey, as we drove about the country looking at churches and villages, we saw a beautiful little château with a moat. We asked Jean about it, he said he sometimes went to play bridge with the owner, but that as he crossed the threshold he always thought with horror ‘Si mon grandpère me voyait!’ Asked why this grandfather would so have disapproved, he explained that his neighbour’s ancestor had bought the property during the French Revolution, as ‘bien national.’ Castles and estates belonging to emigrés were sold as biens nationaux, and the buyers were shunned, as were their descendants for centuries to come. Such are the deep cleavages in French society, many of which continue to this day.

  Jean was my kind comforter when M. died, as I have already told. Another whose sympathy brought me back to life was Tony Lambton. Although I stayed with him in Italy, and he came to the Temple, most of our friendship was conducted on the telephone. He used to ring up early in the morning and pour out his witty and malicious jokes. My deafness put an end to this matchless amusement.

  Jean spent his last years at his dungeon, cultivating his garden and thinking about religion. Since leaving his Jesuit schools, he had been agnostic; he never went to church unless to please his mother when he stayed with her.

  On one occasion it was Easter, and Jean knew his mother would be horrified if he did not take communion, so he went to Confession. When the priest asked him what sins he had committed, he said he had broken the sixth Commandment. Were you alone? He was asked. No, he replied. Where did it happen? Oh in various houses, there were several of us. “Mais, mon fils, c’est très grave”, said the priest. Jean was rather surprised, and then suddenly remembered, and said: ‘Je me suis trompé de commandement.’ It was the seventh I meant to say. The priest immediately gave him absolution. The poor old priest, who knew all Jean’s family, had thought for a moment that Jean, away in Paris, had joined a gang of thieves.

  At the end of his life, under the influence of a young curé, known as the curé en soutane, because he preferred to wear the old cassock of the days before Vatican II,. Jean wished to rejoin the Catholic church. He asked the curé en soutane what he must do. First of all, he must believe the Creed. When it came to the resurrection of the body, he was told he must believe that on the Day of Judgement he would get back his body for all eternity. ‘Ah non’ he said ‘là je ne marche pas.’ He had not much liked his body in life and he certainly did not want it for eternity. How the matter was resolved I am not sure, but the curé en soutane told this story in his farewell address at Jean’s funeral. The whole congregation, who had known Jean all his life, laughed.

  M. had been very fortunate in his biographer. Robert Skidelsky was a friend of Max’s at Oxford; he went to hear M. speak at the Union and was captivated by his cleverness and humour. Robert was President of the Humanist Society, and invited him down to speak. He thought he would like to write M.’s life, and Max supported him. M. was very uncooperative; Robert was given no private papers, but there was so much in the public sphere that he decided to go ahead. I wanted only a hagiography, and when Robert kindly sent chapters of his book he got furious letters from me about his unfair approach to my idol. Quite undaunted, he went ahead and produced an excellent book, with many gaps about M.’s private life, caused by the limitations imposed upon him. It is never possible to write a rounded biography of somebody who is still alive.

  In this curiously haphazard way it came about that M.’s life was written by the brilliant Robert Skidelsky who, with his three-volume life of Keynes, has become the foremost political biographer of the century. Despite my reservations and strictures, he has remained one of the dearest friends and most stimulating companions of the last forty years.

  33.

  EXTREME OLD AGE

  The collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War in 1989 seemed like the beginning of a golden age of peace in the world, but this was illusion. The new enemy is terrorism. America, the only great power, has declared war on terrorism all over the world because of the suicide bombings in New York and Washington on September 11 2001. For England, this may mean that American money will no longer flow to the terrorists who have killed so many and destroyed so much in Northern Ireland, Manchester, London and Brighton. But it must be remembered what a thin line can be drawn between the terrorist and the freedom fighter.

  In 1964, I happened to be in Pretoria, and the local papers were full of a trial of terrorists about to take place. I asked the concierge of our hotel where the High Court was. ‘Just round the corner,’ was the reply. I hurried to the Court and sat among empty seats on the right of the aisle. I was quickly moved by an official to a similarly empty block of seats in the left side; I had inadvertently gone to a seat reserved for blacks, it was the high noon of apartheid.

  The prisoners were brought into the dock, all but one were black. The judge took his seat and the indictment was read out. These men had a fruit farm at Rivonia, after a tip-off, police raided it and found all the fruit boxes full of dynamite. One railway station had already been blown up, and they had plans to ‘blow up South Africa’.

  The men in the dock hardly bothered to defend themselves. Their leader, Nelson Mandela, told the Court they had no civil rights, and no means of acquiring any except by violence leading to revolution. The charge was High Treason, a capital offence, but the men were sentenced to many years in prison.

  When the court adjourned, I chatted to a white lady who had come to listen to the proceedings. She was the mother of the white man in the dock (he was acquitted). She said he had been in prison on remand with the black prisoners and got to know them very well. He said Nelson Mandela was a very remarkable man. The rest is history. It seemed strange at the time, and it still does, that the public boycotted the trial. There were rows of empty seats in the Court.

  When he was released from prison, Mandela was able to effect change without dynamite. He was a blessing to South Africa, and fully deserved his Nobel Peace Prize.

  In 1998 I left the Temple and came to live in Paris, a perfect city for the very old (and in fact for all ages). Paris is beautiful, bright and clean, and the French have never had a youth cult, they rather like old people. The greatest change has been that it is no longer the centre of fashion. All the dress makers flew away a few years ago, leaving chaos. Everyone dresses according to his or her taste, whether elegant or shabby. Most of my friends are dead, but with those who remain, and my sons, and above all Debo with her generous and loving nature, I am fortunate beyond words.

  I read ‘for as long as my eyes can see’ as it says in the nursery rhyme.

  On my ninetieth birthday in 2000 my descendants came from far and wide for a last farewell. ‘Laughter, and the love of friends’ said Belloc when asked what made life worth living.

  Yes, and a thousand other things.

  NOTES

  1. Still in print today.

  2. If you can read, you should be able to understand.

  3. The exchange rate of the franc was very cheap in 1926

  4. ‘…for interiors of cathedrals, I know of none to equal in beauty those of the great painter Helleu.’ Marcel Proust, La Bible d’Amiens.

  5. Carrington, Letters, ed. David Garnett.

  6. Victor Cazalet.

  7. Great Contemporaries published 1935, re-issued 1942.

  8. Lloyd George, A Diary, by Frances Stevenson.

  9. Life with Lloyd George.

  10. Lloyd George.

  11. Daily Express 17/9/36.

  12. Reader’s Digest 1956.

  13. In Scum of the Earth.

  14. Sunday Pictorial.

  15. Russell Grenfell, Main Fleet to Singapore.

  16. Churchill was War Minister a
nd Air Minister combined from 1918 to 1921, the crucial period for the reconstruction of the forces. The Air Staff had evolved a plan under which the post-war RAF was to consist of 154 squadrons of which 40 were for home defence. Under Mr. Churchill’s aegis this was whittled down to a mere 24 squadrons, with only two for home defence, and the plan for state-aided airways covering the Empire was also discarded. When he moved to a fresh office in 1921 The Times had this comment on the fruits of his regime at the Air Ministry: ‘He leaves the body of British flying well-nigh at that last gasp when a military funeral would be all that would be left for it’, Liddell Hart, Encounter, April 1966. M.’s maiden speech in the House of Commons attacked Churchill for this.

  17. ‘We will always stand by you’.

  18. Head forester of the realm.

  19. ‘You have no right to that! It’s cheating!’

  20. ‘Aren’t you ashamed, to stand in front of the Führer’s house with a painted face!’

  21. The maids are out of date. In 2002, a Hitler expert writes a book about him as homosexual.

  22. House of Commons 28/10/1948.

  23. God gives you everything you need.

  24. Roy Harrod, The Prof. Strangely enough, Prof. was quite wrong. German archives show that production went up in the factories after bombing.