Decca was making contacts who would become lifelong friends. The most important of these was a tall Southern belle who wore white broad-brimmed hats and huge skirts that rustled when she walked. Virginia Durr spoke in a ‘soft scream’ with a marked Southern accent, which fascinated Decca. At first she did not like Virginia, who seemed loud and bossy. Nevertheless, since it was their policy ‘to swoop down . . . on a circle of people, become part of them for a brief time, glean what there was of interest and be off again’, she accepted an invitation for her and Esmond to visit the Durrs at their sprawling white farmhouse about seven miles from Washington, DC. There they met Virginia’s husband Clifford who worked for the Federal Communications Bureau, which controlled broadcasting, and the couple’s noisy, happy family. By the end of the evening they were fast friends and Decca marvelled at how quickly this had occurred. In England, she reflected, it would have taken years of ‘getting to know someone’ before they reached such a stage of friendly intimacy.
Apart from Esmond’s determination to join up as soon as any fighting began in Europe, there was only one problem in Decca’s life at that time. Besotted as she was with Esmond she could not admit him into one part of her life, and that was her love for Unity. Along with Esmond she bitterly denounced her family in general as ‘Nazis’, including the rabidly anti-Nazi Nancy, the Conservative Pam and even the apolitical Debo. But she could never bring herself to extend it to Unity, though Unity was arguably the chief offender. This, surely, tells us something about Unity who, despite the publication of an excellently researched biography, remains an elusive personality. ‘Although I hated everything she stood for,’ Decca wrote, ‘she was easily my favourite sister, which was something I could never have admitted . . . to Esmond. I knew I could never expect Esmond, who had never met her, to feel anything but disgust for her, so by tacit understanding we avoided discussing her.’4
A month earlier the London Daily Mirror had given Unity an entire page to express her views and ideology under the headline ‘WHAT MISS MITFORD WOULD LIKE TO SEE’. It is a surprisingly reasoned and well-written argument, which states that England and Germany had too much in common to be enemies; and that the two countries ought to be allies with Germany as the greatest Continental power and Britain the great colonial power. But her premise is undermined by her insistence on the importance of racial superiority: too much for most readers to swallow even in the less enlightened 1930s. ‘One of the foundations of Nazi ideology is the racial theory,’ she wrote. ‘They believe that the future of Europe stands or falls with the Nordic race . . .’5
Curiously, despite the part that Unity had played in Putzi Hanfstaegl’s sudden exit from Germany, she remained on good terms with his sister Erna. So much so that in the spring Unity, always short of money, moved out of her flat and in with Erna. ‘It is lovely staying here with Erna,’ she wrote to Diana, ‘but she is very strict and makes me wash the bath out . . . The only boring thing is that she [complains] as much as ever and shrieks at me as if I were responsible for it all [her brother’s defection].’6 If only Unity could talk personally to Hitler, Erna believed, she might get Putzi reinstated. Unity was only too willing and she waited her moment to raise the subject with Hitler. ‘Last week I was lunching with W[olf],’ she wrote to Diana, ‘so I summoned up all my courage and asked if he would see her. He was perfectly sweet and said yes.’7 Erna had not seen Hitler since he had been a fugitive after the failure of the 1923 putsch, when he hid at her home. They met alone and Unity waited outside the room, joining them afterwards for tea. Everything appeared to have gone well, she thought. A few days earlier she had introduced Erna to Randolph Churchill, who was visiting Munich, and Erna told him she intended to visit her brother in London. Randolph said she must visit his father while she was there. Erna told Hitler this and asked him what she might say to Churchill. He replied casually, ‘Use your own judgement.’
Ten days later Erna handed Unity a letter addressed to Hitler and asked her to give it to him. Apparently it was a request that Putzi’s back pay from the Nazi Party be conveyed to her in the form of a cheque signed by Hitler, which she would take with her to England. Hitler read only a few sentences then flushed with anger he tore up the letter. The Hanfstaengls, he told a startled Unity, were money-grabbers, and she had ‘been living on a dung heap’.8 He burned the letter and forbade Unity to see Erna again, not even for one day. This presented her with a problem since she was living with the woman, but it was no problem to Hitler. He said he would find her a flat, and even help her to furnish it. In the meantime Unity moved into an hotel and Janos von Almassy, who was staying in Munich with a friend, went to see Erna and collected Unity’s luggage. On 5 June Unity wrote to Diana that she had found an apartment. ‘Wolf told [Gauleiter] Wagner that they were to look for one for me . . . So today a young man from the Ministerium took me round to look at some . . . At last we found the perfect [apartment] in Schwabing . . . It belongs’, she wrote, ‘to a young Jewish couple who are going abroad.’9 Subsequently she saw the couple again and, apparently amicably, purchased some furniture from them.
It was the acquisition of this flat that essentially placed Unity forever over a line from which there could be no historical rehabilitation. She was not a fool: her own writings in newspapers, particularly her Stürmer article, show that she had an excellent grasp of the situation concerning the Jews. She cannot have avoided seeing the treatment already inflicted on Jews in the streets of Munich – even irregular visitors witnessed scenes where Jews were infamously humiliated. We know she thought that Streicher’s act in making Jews crop grass with their teeth was amusing, and that she approved when a group of Jews were taken to an island in the Danube and left there to starve.10 She told a friend, Mary Ormsby Gore, how an old Jewess, heavily laden, had approached her in the street and asked the way to the railway station. She deliberately sent her in the opposite direction, and thought it an amusing thing to have done. Even if one is prepared to give Unity the benefit of the doubt, and accept that she could not have known what would be the ultimate fate of the majority of Germany’s Jewish population, it is difficult to write of these things without a cold hand upon the heart. It is hardly conceivable that Unity would not have known what lay behind the statement that the young couple with the apartment were ‘going abroad’, and, as Diana said, sadly, ‘It is impossible to defend Unity . . . she condemned herself out of her own mouth.’11 And knowing what she knew, Unity accepted the requisitioned apartment in Schwabing and loved it right from the start. Her enjoyment was not dimmed by the manner in which she had acquired it, only by Hitler having forgotten his promise to help her furnish it. Perhaps, in that summer of 1939, he had too much on his mind to worry about sideboards for Unity.
A week later Unity was in England. She was in good spirits and saw many members of her family. She also saw Hanfstaengl and told him what had happened with Erna, and with Diana and Tom attended Mosley’s huge peace rally at Earl’s Court. Here, Tom – by now an officer in the Territorials – greeted his brother-in-law with the Fascist salute as he walked past them. The newspapers took it amiss that a serving officer in His Majesty’s Forces should behave like this. Tom’s commanding officer was interviewed by reporters, who were clearly hoping to stir up trouble, but the colonel merely told them he wasn’t going to be deprived of one of his best officers over the matter of a salute.12 Afterwards Unity went back to Germany, her car laden with small items of furniture, lamps and curtain material. Larger items that she had appropriated with Sydney’s permission from Rutland Gate were shipped out to Germany with the assistance of a friend in the diplomatic corps.
The Redesdales spent the summer of 1939 on a remote island in the Inner Hebrides. David had bought this island, Inch Kenneth, complete with an austere three-storey house, cottage, and a ruined chapel in 1938 after a friend at his club had brought the property to his attention. He, Sydney and Unity had gone to view it and loved it on sight. Because of its windswept isolation and the fact that there
was no shooting it was not worth a great deal, and David paid for it with what remained from the sale of Swinbrook. Thereafter, everybody who visited fell in love with Inch Kenneth’s stark beauty and pristine beaches, though it was difficult to get to, and hardly a sound prospect as a potential retirement home. From London it involved travelling to Oban by an overnight sleeper train, followed by a ferry trip of several hours to the island of Mull, a fifteen-mile drive across Mull to the hamlet of Gribun, then a short boat trip to the island. On calm days this last stage of the journey was a pleasant half-hour excursion, but in inclement weather with a lumpy sea it could be long and uncomfortable. The Redesdales employed a couple, who lived in the cottage; the wife helped Sydney with the house, and the husband was responsible for maintaining and operating the small motor-boat called the Puffin, and a rowing-boat. These vessels ferried the family and visitors to and from the island and collected supplies sent over from the mainland. At Gribun, the nearest civilization, the Redesdales kept an ancient Morris in a shed, for the journey across Mull to the Oban ferry. Immediately Sydney set to work to ensure that the kitchen garden was planted with as much produce as it could support, and the ‘farm’ supported a few dozen chickens for eggs and a couple of cows for milk. Once on the island the only contact with the outside world was the news over the wireless. As the long hot summer of that last year of peace continued, the news worsened and the Redesdales grew more and more concerned about what would happen to Unity if and when war was declared.
At the end of July Unity and Diana had attended the Bayreuth Festival at Hitler’s personal invitation. On arrival Unity was greeted with two large bouquets, one from Herr Wagner of Munich, the other from the Mayor of Munich. Neither, apparently, was immune to the gossip in Munich, which ran along the lines of: ‘did Unity Mitford and Hitler sleep together or not?’ On 2 August, the final day of the Wagner Festival and a day before they were due to leave Bayreuth, the sisters lunched with Hitler. Diana remembers that he told them he believed England was determined on war, and that if this was so, it was now inevitable. Diana said that Mosley would continue to campaign for peace, with the British Empire remaining intact, as long as it was legal for him to do so, and Hitler warned her that he risked assassination, ‘Like Jaurès in 1914,’ he said.13
Remarkably, we have Hitler’s version of a similar conversation. ‘Churchill and his friends decided on war against us some years before 1939,’ he said, in a recorded conversation. ‘I had this information from Lady Mitford [Unity]; she and her sisters were very much in the know, thanks to their relationship with influential people. One day she suddenly exclaimed that in the whole of London there were only three anti-aircraft guns! Her sister [Diana] who was present stared at her stonily, and then said slowly, “I do not know whether Mosley is the right man, or even if he is in a position, to prevent a war between Britain and Germany.”’14
His report of Diana’s reaction to Unity’s casual remark is interesting for it suggests that she was either shocked or displeased by its naïvety. But whether Unity’s statement was accurate or not is unimportant, for Hitler had a huge embassy in London, and the information about armaments provided by his intelligence service would have been far more informed than anything Unity could tell him. Diana thinks that the three anti-aircraft guns remark was the sort of joke then prevalent in UK newspapers and points out that Unity spent little time in England in 1939 so would not have known anything of any value. ‘I often disapproved strongly of things Unity said . . . but she was incapable of disloyalty to England.’15
When the sisters were alone together after luncheon, Unity told Diana for the second time that if war was declared between England and Germany she would not live to see the tragedy unfold: ‘She simply felt too torn between England and Germany to wish to see them tear themselves apart.’ Diana was not the only person to whom Unity made this statement or others like it: she had also told Tom, Debo and Decca that she intended to ‘commidit’ (‘commit suicide’ in Boudledidge) rather than choose between England and Germany in a war. Diana never saw Hitler again, though Unity had lunch with him on the first two days following her return to Munich.
Despite what Hitler had said to them, Unity did not seem to accept that war was so imminent for when Diana left on 3 August, she still hoped that her sister might be able to return on the eighteen with Jonathan and Desmond for the Parteitag. But Diana was pregnant again and, anyway, events unwound far more rapidly than anyone had anticipated. Within a month of her return to England it was already too late to travel to Germany. Instead Diana was at Wootton making the preparations for war that were suddenly obligatory for all householders. Blackout curtains had to be made for the numerous massive windows.
Irene Ravensdale, together with Mosley’s children from his first marriage, joined the Mosleys there, so it could not have been a comfortable period for anyone concerned, given Lady Ravensdale’s much-aired antipathy towards Diana. Nor did it help relations, Irene Ravensdale wrote in her autobiography, that Diana prominently displayed in her drawing room the large autographed photograph of Hitler that had been his wedding gift to her. In fact, Diana had purposely removed this photograph before Irene’s visit because she was aware it might cause offence. ‘I wrapped it in brown paper and put it in a cupboard,’ she recalled. In June, shortly after Mosley was arrested, she deposited the brown paper parcel at Drummonds bank and has never seen it since.16
Meanwhile, Unity amused herself by decorating her apartment. Janos von Almassy came to stay with her for a few weeks in early August, during which he bought her a dining table and chairs. When he left, the Wrede twins, half-Spanish princesses who had served as nurses in the Spanish civil war, stayed with her for a few days. It was only towards the end of the month that she began to feel isolated. Hitler was in Berlin, occupied with affairs of state, and the British consul summoned Unity and ordered her to return to England. She refused, and was told that she would forfeit British protection if she did not leave with the few remaining British subjects. She retorted that she had far better protection than that: Hitler’s. But she was miserable: most foreign journalists had now been withdrawn, and all her friends had pulled out, too. Even her German friends had retreated to their homes. Food was already rationed and becoming scarce, although Hitler sometimes remembered her and sent supplies to her flat. The few friends she did manage to see were frightened by the idea of war, and were also made uneasy by Unity’s assertions that if war was declared she would have no alternative but to shoot herself.
On 22 August she wrote to Diana that she was thrilled to hear about the Nazi–Soviet pact for surely, she wrote, this would make Germany so strong that England would never dare oppose Hitler. A few days later she was writing that she was not so sure the pact had helped: war seemed even more certain. The worst thing was that she had not seen Hitler for nearly three weeks. ‘I wish he would come,’ she said plaintively. By now it was obvious to her that Diana could not fly out to Germany and all the borders were closed. ‘On thinking things over,’ Unity wrote, ‘I might disappear into the mountains in the Tyrol perhaps, if war is declared. Of course the other way seems the easiest way out, but it seems silly not to wait and see how things turn out, it might be all over within a week.’17 On 30 August she received two last letters from Diana and her parents. It seemed a miracle that they had got through for the city was now on full alert for war with mandatory blackout after dusk, and the postal services were spasmodic. David had sent her 1,500 German marks that he had left over from his last trip ‘for emergency’. She replied thanking him and telling Sydney about her idea of going to the Tyrol, and to Diana asking that ‘if anything was to happen to me and the English Press try to make some untrue story out of it against W[olf], you will see to it that the truth is known won’t you . . .’18 Her biggest fear, though, was that ‘I shan’t see the Führer again.’ These were the last letters that got through.
While Unity idled away the last few weeks of August, working on the decoration of her apartment and
sunbathing on its balcony, hoping against all hope for a reconciliation between Germany and England, Pam and Derek Jackson were in New York. He was engaged on a high-level mission for the Air Ministry, but they made time to call on Decca and Esmond at their flat in Greenwich Village. They just knocked on the door, without prior announcement. ‘I was amazed at Woman turning up here,’ Decca wrote to Sydney.19 As usual it was the meal that Pam most recalled about their visit. Forty years later she remembered that they ate roast chicken, which Pam cooked and carved. It was a ‘boiling hot day’, she reminded Decca, and even the effort of carving the chicken had brought her out ‘in a muck sweat’. The other thing she remembered was that Decca showed her where they hid their money, between the leaves of books. Pam worried for weeks that they would forget where it all was, or leave some behind when they left. It was pleasant for the sisters to meet, and Decca enjoyed telling them about her work and how they were managing. Derek and Esmond did not hit it off, though, and this made the occasion ‘uncomfortable and stiff’.
Decca had just left her job at the dress shop, having been offered a better one at Bloomingdales. In the meantime she was working on a trade stand at the New York World Fair. The Jacksons went to the fair several times to see her there without Esmond. When it was time to leave the United States, they invited the Romillys to dinner at their hotel and Esmond was fascinated to learn that they proposed to fly back to England. The Americans had been operating a transatlantic service since June, which carried up to seventeen civilian passengers. On 4 August a British service was inaugurated and Derek arranged for them to be on the second trip. So unusual was the mode of transport that just before they took off the Jacksons were interviewed by journalists, who asked why they had chosen to fly to England. ‘Well, you see,’ Derek explained, ‘tomorrow is our little dog’s birthday so we are in rather a hurry to get home . . .’ He had in reality been allocated seats because he was carrying top-secret papers. ‘The embassy had asked him to give them to them for transmission in the diplomatic bag,’ Diana recalled. ‘Derek refused. He said later, “If I’d accepted, the Russians would have had them next day.”’20
The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family Page 30
