The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  It was far more difficult for Diana to live with the deception as she was, and is, congenitally unable to lie.62 Furthermore she had time in which to think about it all, while Mosley was always frenetically busy, his mind and his life filled with matters other than their affair. The Greater Britain, which defined his policies, and acted as a manifesto for his party, sold rapidly and went into three editions. He was a member of the British fencing team that year, which involved not only the dedicated training demanded of any international athlete, but bouts of epée around the country. He represented Great Britain several times up to 1937, even though surgery after his flying accident had left him with one leg several inches shorter than the other, and he had to wear special shoes to counteract this disability.63 But, more importantly, Mosley had worked that year to form the BUF, which demanded the majority of his time and attention for many months. There was always an aura of excited energy about Mosley that transmitted itself to those with whom he came into contact, and it is difficult to avoid the analogy that Diana was like a moth drawn to a flame. ‘The fact that Mosley was so busy in a variety of ways,’ Diana wrote, ‘was one of his great attractions for me. I wanted more freedom than Bryan was prepared to give me.’64

  The opening rally of the BUF was held on 15 October in Trafalgar Square, and as usual the devoted Cimmie was there to support and help Mosley win the popular vote, even though she was personally undecided about Fascism. A week or so later there was a well-attended meeting in a hall in Farringdon Street. In Italy and Germany Fascist meetings were quiet, respectful and nationalistic. In England every shade of political opinion wanted its say and Mosley’s meetings were characterized by noisy barrages. In fielding questions from a small group of hecklers in the gallery Mosley referred to them facetiously as ‘three warriors of [the] class war, all from Jerusalem’. This was the first time he had made any public reference to Jews and though it would not then have been considered universally the racist remark it would be today it was a major error and enabled his opponents to charge him with anti-Semitism. Another mistake, with hindsight, was his decision to uniform active members of the BUF in black shirts designed on the same clean, classic lines as Mosley’s fencing jacket; within weeks of their introduction the shirts had become a symbol, were slashed with razors and torn off the backs of wearers. Somehow Mosley did not recognize that his methods, and his rousing speeches, attracted to his standard every working-class tough spoiling for a fight, the 1930s equivalent of skinheads and soccer hooligans.

  After the Farringdon Street function Mosley went to Rome to see Mussolini, ostensibly to attend the tenth anniversary celebration of the dictator’s accession as leader of the Italian Fascist Party, but more importantly to try to persuade him to back the BUF with financial support. But before he left he visited Diana at Biddesden to discuss their relationship. She had already decided that she had to leave Bryan, even though Mosley made it clear that he could not leave Cimmie for her. She knew that divorce would mean social ostracism, and that was bad enough, but she was proposing not simply to divorce a thoroughly nice and popular man but to live openly as the paramour of a man in public life who had a wife and three young children. Curious as it may seem now, Mosley’s political stance was not a significant factor in the equation for at that time Fascism was ‘still on the edge of being respectable’.65 She also understood that because of his hectic political schedule, and the time he needed and wanted to devote to his family, Mosley could spend only limited amounts of time with her. She would have to be satisfied with the dregs. Furthermore, all the principals of this drama were young and ostensibly healthy: Diana was looking at, and fully prepared for, a lifetime commitment in which she gave everything for little in return. But the strength of her love for Mosley, and her confidence in his love for her, gave her the courage to decide that, no matter what difficulties would result, it was what she wanted. Mosley accepted her decision.

  While he was away Diana told a devastated Bryan that she was leaving him, though there seems to have been some sort of agreement that she would postpone it until after Christmas – probably for the sake of the children. Perhaps Bryan hoped that given time he could persuade her to change her mind. But there were frequent quarrels between them over Mosley. Diana was aware that she was behaving badly, but there was no turning back. Eventually she confided in Tom and Nancy, who were shocked at her decision, and deeply concerned for her; ‘Mitty [Tom] and I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon discussing your affairs,’ Nancy wrote on 27 November, ‘and we are having another session in a minute. He is horrified, & says your social position will be nil if you do this. Darling I do hope you are making the right decision. You are SO young to begin getting in wrong with the world . . .’66 Two days later she wrote again:

  I feel convinced that you won’t be allowed to take this step, I mean that Muv & Farve & Tom, Randolph, Doris [Castlerosse], Aunt Iris, John [Sutro], Lord Moyne & in fact everybody that you know will band together and somehow stop it . . . Oh dear I believe you have a much worse time in store for you than you imagine. I’m sorry to be so gloomy darling . . . Mitty says £2,000 a year will seem tiny to you & he will urge Farve, as your Trustee, to stand out for more . . . if you want me at Cheyne Walk I’ll come of course. Only I think I can do more good down here.67

  A few days before Christmas David and Lord Moyne (Bryan’s father) went together to see Mosley.68 It was a difficult interview for all concerned, but Mosley refused to be lectured or intimidated into giving Diana up, just as she had when her parents and, indeed, all her relatives attempted to pressure her. She listened to all the arguments, persuasions, impatient anger and pleading – she was only twenty-two, she hardly knew her own mind, she was throwing her life away, she was ruining the children’s lives, no one, including the family, would ever speak to her again, she would be an outcast and, even worse, her actions would rebound on the reputations of her sisters – but she had taken it all into account before making her decision. The only disapproval she really minded, she said, was Tom’s, for he sided with his old friend. ‘He was fond of Bryan,’ Diana wrote. ‘He also thought that for a temporary infatuation I was ruining my life and that I should bitterly regret it.’69

  At this point, having extracted from Diana her word that she would not invite Mosley to their house, Bryan agreed to go away to Switzerland for three weeks, to give her some time for reflection. He had spent several holidays there with David and enjoyed winter sports, which Diana did not. Their agreement did not, however, prevent Diana attending a New Year’s Eve party at the house in Somerset that Mosley and Cimmie had rented for the holidays. Also present was Cimmie’s younger sister Alexandra (‘Baba’ to her family and soon to be known in the press as ‘Baba Blackshirt’), together with her husband Major ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, equerry to and close friend of the Prince of Wales.

  When Bryan returned home to Cheyne Walk in mid-January Diana moved out, leasing a small house at 2 Eaton Square for herself, her two sons and their nanny. The Guinnesses’ marriage was over. In the same month Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.

  7

  Slings and Arrows

  (1932–4)

  Highland Fling was not a bestseller but it went into a second impression within weeks of publication, which Nancy found gratifying. She told her friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who designed the cover, that it was selling at the rate of thirty a day, ‘which I’m told is definitely good for a first novel’.1 It earned her ninety pounds, which was soon swallowed up by a trip to the Côte d’Azur, where she stayed with friends. By the following autumn she was stuck at Swinbrook bewailing the fact that she could not afford to be in London because of the cuts in her ‘already non-existent’ allowance.

  If anyone flourished among London’s smart set it was Nancy, but at least she was occupied for her few months of enforced imprisonment in the country as 1932 drew to a close. She hunted twice a week with the Heythrop, and began work on a new book. Decca recalls her sitting by the drawing-room fire giggling hel
plessly as her pen flew across the lines of a child’s school exercise book while she wrote Christmas Pudding. She maintained the same bright style used in Highland Fling, drawing on friends and relations for characters, and places she knew well as settings. ‘It is all about Hamish at Eton,’ she reported to Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘Betjeman is co-hero.’2 Sometimes she read extracts out loud. ‘You can’t publish that under your own name,’ Sydney said, aghast at Nancy’s thinly veiled caricatures.3

  But while the literary side of her life was progressing reasonably well Nancy’s informal engagement to Hamish Erskine had not prospered. Indeed, she appeared to be the only person who ever thought it might. She was obsessed with him and her letters to friends are peppered with comments about him that are invariably witty but often leave the impression of hurt. Both sets of parents were implacably opposed to the match and Hamish dithered about announcing an engagement, though at one point he gave Nancy a ring ‘from Cartier’. He was sent down from Oxford because of his dissolute lifestyle there, shortly afterwards. Without allowing him to go to London where Nancy was staying with friends, his parents shipped him off to America where they had lined up a job for him.

  The news of his departure came as a body blow to Nancy and she wrote to him, breaking off their informal engagement. Though she put on a brave face for most of her friends (‘I don’t mind at all,’ she wrote to several), she confided in Mark Ogilvie-Grant that she had made a half-hearted attempt at suicide by switching on the gas fire in her room without lighting it. ‘It is a lovely sensation,’ she wrote, ‘just like taking anaesthetic . . .’ Fortunately she remembered in time that her hostess, who was pregnant, might find her body and miscarry: ‘so I got back to bed and was sick . . . I am really very unhappy because there is no one to tell the funny things that happen to one & that is half the fun in life don’t you agree? . . . How can I possibly write a funny book in the next 6 months, which my publisher says I must do. How can I when I’ve practically got a pain from being miserable and cry in buses quite continually?’4

  A new admirer soon appeared on the scene, Guards officer Sir Hugh Smiley, who was far closer to David’s idea of ‘the right sort’. He proposed and Nancy replied that she couldn’t even think about it until her book was finished. When he persisted she accepted, then changed her mind. At home she quarrelled with Sydney and, in a fit of misery, she rounded up Decca and the two went on a long damp country walk during which Nancy confided her woes. ‘I can almost hear the squelch of gumboots,’ Decca recalled forty years later, when she reminded Nancy of the occasion. ‘The rain seemed like one’s inner tears of bitterness because of boredom, and the inner futility of that life. You told me how Muv had given you a terrific dressing down for not being married, having turned down yet another proposal of marriage, & that you would be an old maid if you pursued this hopeless course . . .’5 Nancy replied, ‘I was telling lies if I said Muv wanted to marry me off . . . I think I was probably in a blind temper about something else and talked wildly. One of the reasons for my respect is that she never did urge marriage without inclination and I hardly think she knew who was rich and who was not. I would have liked to marry Robert Byron but he was a total pederast . . .’6

  A few weeks later Hamish returned from America, drinking heavily because, he said, his bulwarks (Nancy) had gone. Sir Hugh proposed twice more before Nancy gave him a firm refusal at the Café de Paris where he was wooing her with orchids while Hamish sat giggling at the next table. After that Sir Hugh turned cool and a few months later married another Nancy, Cecil Beaton’s sister. The unsatisfactory relationship with Hamish, but not the engagement, was back on, and life for Nancy went on much as before with parties, nightclubs, lunches at the Ritz and dinners at the Café Royal. She had earned several hundred pounds from her books and articles by then: ‘I’m just so rich I go 1st Class everywhere and take taxis,’ she enthused, boasting that she had even refused an offer of ten pounds a week to write gossip for the Tatler. ‘I’m having a perfectly divine time, it is certainly more fun not being engaged.’7 She did not mention to anyone how ‘deeply distressed’ she had been at a conversation during lunch with Cynthia Gladwyn when she was told what she had apparently never realized: that Hamish was homosexual.8

  Hamish knew that marriage to Nancy would never work because of his sexual predilections, and he confided this to several friends, but his emotional attachment to her was important to him so he allowed things to drift. He was not sexually promiscuous, in fact ‘not very sexy’,9 but eventually he realized he must make it clear to her, finally, that while he valued their friendship it could never progress further. He did this by inventing an engagement to another girl, Kathleen ‘Kit’ Dunn, sister of Philip, who was engaged to Hamish’s sister, Mary. Kit was apparently a wild and eccentric character, whom Hamish and Nancy had chuckled over together, but presumably she was prepared to play along with the charade.

  Nancy had spent a good deal of the spring of 1933 staying at Diana’s house in Eaton Square in open defiance of David and Sydney’s decree that ‘the Eatonry’, as the Mitford children referred to the house, was out of bounds. And Nancy was not alone in defying David. On 14 June, the day before the Guinness divorce proceedings were to be heard, there was a gathering of the elder sisters. Pam was there, and Unity, who had just finished a term at art school, called in too to offer sisterly support.10 When the butler announced that Hamish was on the telephone and wished to speak to Nancy, she left the room and went to the phone. She was completely unprepared for what Hamish was about to tell her and she returned, minutes later, white-faced with distress and told them about his engagement.

  Hamish called round later that day and there was ‘a dreadful scene’ for which Nancy apologized in a letter:

  But darling you come and tell me you are going to share your life with Kit Dunn. You whom I have always thought so sensible & so idealistic about marriage, you who will love your own little babies so very, very much, it is a hard thing for me to bear that you should prefer her to me. You see, I knew you weren’t in love with me, but you are in love so often and for such short spaces of time, I thought in your soul you loved me & that in the end we should have children & look back on life together when we are old . . .11

  Three weeks later Nancy announced her engagement to Peter Rodd, a friend of her and Hamish. At Oxford his friends had made up a ditty about him:

  Mr Peter Rodd

  Is extraordinarily like God

  He has the same indefinable air

  Of Savoir Faire

  According to Diana, Peter proposed only a week after Nancy and Hamish broke up. He had taken Nancy to a party and had had – as usual – a good deal to drink. Nancy was the third girl to whom he had proposed that week. In a letter dated 31 July he hinted to her that he had only intended the proposal as a joke,12 but Nancy was not in a mood for jokes. She had spent almost five years in an unsatisfactory relationship and now, at nearly thirty, she felt perilously close to becoming the old maid of Sydney’s prediction. She felt hurt and humiliated at Hamish’s treachery, she wanted a home, children and some sort of financial stability, and perhaps she wanted to prove to Hamish that she was desirable to others if not to him. She would have done better with the besotted Guards officer, no matter how dull she thought him, for in the event Peter Rodd, or ‘Prod’, as he quickly became known to the Mitfords, proved a poor provider in all departments.

  His reputation at the time was poor anyway. At Oxford he regarded college rules as being for everyone but himself, and he was eventually sacked from Balliol for entertaining women in his rooms after hours. While travelling in Brazil he had worked at a succession of jobs, in banking and journalism, found for him by his father, the multi-talented diplomat Baron Rennell. An arrogant and pedantic know-it-all, Prod had either been dismissed or resigned in the nick of time from all of them. He ended up destitute, and under arrest, and had to be bailed out by his unfortunate father. On the credit side he could be amusing, was undeniably clever, and certainly good-lo
oking. According to one biographer, he preferred to admire his talents as works of art, rather than use them, and he spent his life avoiding making achievements that were well within his grasp. Perhaps his character was best captured by Evelyn Waugh who used him as the model for his comic fictional hero Basil Seal.13

  Prod was willing to go through with his commitment to Nancy, but for her it was a classic rebound situation: she could not perceive his faults through her rose-tinted delight. David, who lunched his prospective son-in-law at Rutland Gate while the requisite paternal permission was sought, announced that ‘the fella talks like a ferret with his mouth sewn up’ but he agreed to the marriage anyway. By now even he had begun to grasp that, as far as his elder daughters were concerned, his edicts had little effect.

  Prod spent a week at Swinbrook, talking until the family reeled with boredom. No matter what subject was brought up, it seemed he was the world expert. ‘I know, I know,’ he would interrupt. ‘I know, I was an engineer and I . . .’ or ‘I know, I know, I am a farmer . . .’ The sisters swore he once said, ‘I know, I know, I am the Pope . . .’ One of his lectures, delivered to the haplessly captive Decca and Debo, was a detailed account of the tollgate system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their dazed reaction can be imagined, and from then they referred to him as ‘the old Toll-Gater’,14 which Nancy inevitably converted into a bon mot: ‘For whom the Gate Tolls . . .’