Three weeks after they arrived on the island Unity developed a feverish chill and was put to bed. There was no telephone but there was a crude signalling system. At Gribun the postmaster would hang a large black disc on Sydney’s garage door to signal that mail or parcels were awaiting collection, and Sydney scanned for signals every day with her binoculars. There was a similar device on the island to summon help in an emergency, but although the doctor was called, high winds and a rough sea prevented him from reaching Inch Kenneth for several days and during this time Unity’s condition worsened. She complained of severe headaches and had attacks of vomiting. One morning she suddenly looked up and announced loudly, ‘I am coming.’2 Sydney said that her heart sank. When the doctor came across Unity was treated with Sulphathiazole and improved but her temperature stayed obstinately high. On the third day, the doctor noticed that the scar on Unity’s right temple was bulging and tender; by this time Unity could not tolerate any disturbance, or answer questions.
Suspecting a cranial abscess or meningitis, the doctor called in a consultant, who diagnosed meningitis, and Unity was transferred from the island to the mainland. The journey was traumatic for Sydney and she could never bear to talk about it afterwards. They arrived at the West Highland Cottage Hospital in Oban at midnight on the evening of 27 May and Unity was treated with penicillin. Arrangements were made to move her to the neurosurgery unit at Killearn Hospital on the following morning, but before she could be loaded into the ambulance she had an epileptic fit. She remained unconscious until she died at ten o’clock that night.3 It was concluded that she had died of pneumonococcal meningitis, caused by an infection in the site of the old head wound.
When Sydney left California she had asked Decca if she had any message for Unity, and Decca said, after some hesitation, ‘Just give her my love.’ The sisters were no longer in regular contact but in one of her last letters Unity wrote of how she had asked her father who he would best like to see coming through the door, and he had answered at once, ‘Decca.’ On hearing of Unity’s death Decca wrote, ‘Of course, I mourned for my Boud years ago when I first realized we couldn’t be friends any more.’ (Dinky, however, recalled that her mother had been ‘heartbroken’ when Unity died.4) Sydney replied that Unity had mourned Decca in exactly the same way. ‘She knew you would probably never meet again, but her love for you was quite unchanged. She was always going back in her mind to when you were both young and m’Boud was a constant topic of conversation . . . when I gave her your love when I came back she knew it was with one part of you. I could see by her face. I think you both understood each other.’5 Unity had been Sydney’s life for eight years and her death so soon after Tom’s was a cruel blow. Her only consolation, she wrote to a friend, was something Unity had said to her while she was ill: ‘No one ever had such a happy young life as I did up to the war.’6
David came up to Oban from Northumberland, and he and Sydney accompanied the coffin on the long journey south, by train, to Swinbrook. Unity was buried on 1 June, close to the church, and with the hymns she had planned. Most of the family attended, including the Mosleys. Although there was sadness, most felt, as Decca did, that the old Unity had died on the morning war was declared. She was one of the first casualties of the war, they were wont to say, just as Tom had been one of the last. On the tombstone Sydney had ordered the epitaph, ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth,’ a line from the work of nineteenth-century poet Arthur Hugh Clough, and said to be Winston Churchill’s favourite poem during the war years. At the funeral David and Mosley did not speak to each other, but a few weeks later Diana received a touching letter from her father, apologizing for this, and saying that it had been inadvertent on his part. It was a welcome hint at reconciliation.
The Mosleys had been living for some time in Crux Easton, a small country house near Newbury. Having found it, Diana – hungry for beauty after the bleak years in Holloway and the temporary lodging at the Shaven Crown – wasted no time in turning it into a comfortable home with her usual flair. She got the Wootton furniture out of storage, and employed a cook and a gardener. To supplement the war rations they bought a cow, which gave them butter, milk and cream, and they had fresh vegetables and fruit from the eight-acre garden. ‘I had the joy of the children,’ Diana wrote, ‘and of seeing Mosley get better day by day.’ Although they remained under house arrest until the end of the war in August 1945, with fresh air, good food and a sort of freedom, the immediate horrors of Holloway receded. They used bicycles to get around the countryside, and from the house they had wonderful views over Berkshire and Hampshire. Diana’s two younger sons were seven and five now, and she taught them to read and write and do simple arithmetic.
Their education caused their parents considerable concern for no school could be found to take them. The name Mosley was like poison. It was John Betjeman who eventually found a prep school for them. ‘You really are an angel,’ Diana wrote to him, ‘to have found a school which might accept Alexander and Max as pupils – or should I say a genius . . . Thank you so, so much for all the trouble you have taken. I was beginning to despair, as I had so many furious refusals. Isn’t it odd in a way? If I had a school I should welcome reds, in the hope of converting them.’7 Although the Mosleys could not travel until the end of the war they received visitors, and Tom had spent several periods with them while he was at Sandhurst before being shipped to Burma. ‘I was so thankful,’ Diana wrote, ‘that we had him with us for his leaves that year . . . Muv came and Bobo who loved little Max.’ The tradition of entertaining continued after the war: ‘Randolph [Churchill] wanted to come and was indignant when we refused . . . Of course Gerald Berners came and stayed.’8
Unlike most people, Mosley foresaw that rationing of food and other necessities would continue long after the war ended. He decided that the only thing to do to mitigate this would be to farm. Although they loved Crux Easton, its eight acres were patently insufficient, so they bought the eleven-hundred-acre Crowood House estate, near Ramsbury in Wiltshire. It was beyond the seven-mile perimeter and they were forced to purchase the property without having seen it, but fortunately, when Rule 18B was lifted and they moved there they found the eighteenth-century manor house, built of grey stone, ‘quite perfect’. The uprising against the Mosleys, prophesied by Clementine Churchill, never occurred. They were ostracized by some elements of local society but they also met with ‘wonderful kindness’ from others, ‘mixed with curiosity no doubt,’ Diana says.
This did not unduly worry Diana, for several old friends lived close enough for regular visiting. The Betjemans lived at Wantage, and Daisy Fellowes was in Donnington. Diana’s old friend Lord Berners, who had visited her in Holloway, lived near by in his amazing house, Faringdon. Nancy described it in The Pursuit of Love as Merlinford, home of Lord Merlin. Betjeman also described life at Faringdon: ‘on a sunny summer evening. The bells of Faringdon church tower are playing “Now the day is over” across the grass terraces. Pigeons dyed blue are still strutting about in front of the limestone façade . . . All day long from early in the morning, Lord Berners will have been at work either composing on the piano in the dining room – a piano with a huge gilt fish perched upon it – or he will have been writing in the drawing room where [are] . . . the early Corots, the Matisse seascape, the Constable paintings, the Dufy of the races. A third thing . . . would have been painting the lake from his terrace or . . . the willowy flat valley of the Upper Thames with the Cotswold Hills rising blue in the distance.’9 This was the Mosleys’ calling circle, and with this, and occasional visits by Diana’s family and Cimmie’s grown-up children, Vivien and Nicholas, Diana was content. The prep school Betjeman found was not a success: Alexander hated it and lasted less than a term. Thereafter, an old recluse who lived near by taught the boys, and later Diana employed a tutor to teach them at home.
As soon as he recovered his health and vigour, Mosley began to write. While they were living at Crowood he produced two books, My Answer and The Alternative. No publisher would to
uch them but this did not deter the Mosleys: they set up their own publishing house called Euphorion Books. There was some difficulty in obtaining paper, and printer after printer turned them down as soon as the name Mosley was mentioned, but these difficulties were overcome. The woman who had persuaded the Nazi hierarchy to give her a radio airwave was not to be put off easily by a few rural printers.
Eventually they produced a list, which included reprints of classic works as well as Mosley’s books. One new book even became a bestseller: Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Stuka Pilot, with an introduction by English flying ace Douglas Bader. The profits from this one book underwrote the costs of Euphorion. My Answer set out to explain and defend Mosley’s policies. ‘As well as a future to be gained, there was a past to be justified . . .’ his biographer wrote, ‘a past which Mosley recognized now constituted a new and major barrier between him and the British people.’10 The Alternative, however, was clearly intended to launch his post-war political career. He worked up to this slowly, careful not to give the government any excuse to rush in any new legislation to prevent him speaking in public. Of one thing Mosley was always convinced: the war meant the end of the British Empire; therefore, the future for Britain now lay in Europe. A United Europe, he said, must become a power to match that of the USA and the USSR. This was his vision, and the nature of his work after the war. He was a politician by instinct: all that had happened during the war had not changed this. His reading during the years in prison had been focused on a European union, and he had also learned German, fluently enough to be able, several years later, to deliver a speech in that language without once referring to his notes.
From November 1947 he began to address meetings of a new movement, which he called the Union Movement, based mostly in the East End of London. He was always willing to speak whenever he could get a hall, but most remained closed to him. Now his battle cry was that if a union of European countries was linked to the rich resources of a developing Africa, the two continents could form ‘a force which equalled any power in the world’.11 In the following year he returned to active politics, campaigning for ‘Europe a Nation’. Had he remained in conventional politics during the 1930s who is to say what might have been his destiny?
But in the pre-war years the general populace had come to revile his ideas. Though extant papers tend to confirm his claims that he was never personally anti-Semitic and that the Jews formed no part of his doctrine, he was – and probably always will be – branded with the label anti-Semite to the mass of British voters. Once the full horror of Nazi rule became common knowledge there was never any chance of Mosley’s restitution as a serious political leader. Astonishingly, neither he nor Diana seemed to recognize the finality of this, or if they did, they chose to ignore it in the hope of winning through in the long term. He battled on for a while, speaking where he could (a core of faithful old BUF members always turned up to hear him), fighting against print unions who refused to produce posters for his meetings and newsletters. Plans to launch a newspaper had to be cancelled when he was refused a newsprint quota but he was constitutionally unable to admit defeat. Years later, in 1956, he addressed a series of public meetings – his first in five years: 600 turned up in Kensington, 1,500 in Manchester. ‘After all these years’, a Daily Telegraph reporter wrote, ‘I thought some of the fizz might have gone out of him. Not a bit of it. Alone, he held a packed proletarian audience – only a few velvet collars – for 75 minutes, pulverising each party in turn.’12
No matter what Mosley faced, Diana remained steadfastly loyal. She and the children spent the summer of 1947 at Inch Kenneth, and loved it, but like many of her friends following the war years what she really longed for was to travel in Europe again. She hankered after sunshine and the carefree ambience of the Mediterranean, but this was impossible because the government refused to grant the Mosleys passports. ‘Not allowing free travel is one of the typical features of socialism everywhere,’ she wrote with chagrin,13 but Decca and Bob had precisely the same problem in the USA: their membership of the Communist Party made them ineligible for passports.
As usual Mosley found an answer. He discovered that under Magna Carta any British subject has the right to leave his country and return to it at will. No passport was required in law, though in practice the shipping lines and airlines prevented travel by refusing to sell tickets to anyone without one. His answer to the Foreign Office was to purchase a boat, a sixty-ton ketch called the Alianora, complete with skipper and crew. It was not a smart, gleaming yacht but a strong, sea-kindly, ocean-going working vessel. The Mosleys made no secret of their plans, and mentioned them to many people; on the day before their departure in the early summer of 1949, their passports suddenly arrived in the post. Diana believes that the Foreign Office did not wish to look foolish, but she is, understandably perhaps, jaundiced.
Unlike her mother, Diana was no sailor and she was seasick, but as they sailed south to Bordeaux, Corunna and Lisbon she was thrilled to be free at last of petty restrictions. Max and Alex went with them and they all celebrated Diana’s thirty-ninth birthday in Lisbon. From there they sailed to Tangier and Formentor. Then the two boys returned to the UK, as they were to spend half of the summer with Sydney at Inch Kenneth while the Mosleys went on to cruise the ports of the Mediterranean and meet up with many old acquaintances from pre-war days. They visited Nancy who was staying with friends near Marseille, and at the end of the summer Debo came to join them in Antibes. On the last night of their holiday the trio dined in one of the old grand restaurants frequented by Mosley a decade earlier. He wrote,
Debo . . . was now a married woman of some years standing, but she looked so young in her diaphanous summer clothing that no one would have believed it. Waiters observed me dining magnificently in the presence of Diana, then at the height of her extraordinary beauty, and of this lovely child, enchanting and seemingly enchanted for to their astonishment she finally pulled a wad of notes from her pocket and paid the immense bill. An old waiter whispered in my ear, ‘C’est Monsieur qui a la chance.’
They left the boat in France for the winter and Debo drove them back, ‘along that road,’ Mosley wrote, ‘more golden in our eyes than the one to Samarkand, back to England and politics’.14
They stopped off at Nancy’s Paris apartment and memories of her sunny courtyard with its pots of geraniums provided a sharp contrast to the grey austerity that gripped England that winter. The Mosleys spent one further summer aboard the Alianora visiting Venice and all their favourite places, and then she was sold, having well served her purpose. Mosley had begun to feel that in order to become a true European it was necessary to leave England. In 1951 Crowood was sold and the Mosleys moved to Ireland, where they bought the former palace of Irish bishops, Clonfert Palace in County Galway.
Pam and Derek Jackson were already living in Ireland. They had left Rignell in 1947, driven out of England, like so many rich people, by 98 per cent super-tax. Initially they rented Lismore Castle, the Devonshires’ Irish seat, but eventually, through Ikey Bell, one of the most famous names in foxhunting history, they found a house of their own, Tullamaine Castle, near Fethard in County Tipperary. Their life revolved around horses: Derek indulged his passion for foxhunting and steeple-chasing. Pam rode every day, though the weakness in her leg, resulting from the polio, prevented her hunting, and ran the farm. At first the life suited them admirably but after the delights of tax freedom faded, and unlimited horsy society paled, Derek became fidgety. His first love had always been science and he missed being able to pop into the laboratory at Oxford to use the facilities there or argue a technical point with Professor Lindemann, now Lord Cherwell. He was invited to Ohio State University as a visiting professor,15 and began to spend several days a week in Dublin, where he had access to several laboratories at Dublin University and Dunsink Observatory. Pam did not object to his absences, but while he was working in Dublin he met and fell in love with Janetta Kee, a young divorcée. Pam gave Derek the divorce he requested, and
remained at Tullamaine for a short time. Then she sold it and went to live near Zurich amid picture-book scenery. She used her house there as a base for the frequent travelling she enjoyed. Later she bought a cottage in Gloucestershire.
Derek married Janetta and they had a daughter, Rose, of whom he was immensely proud, but a child did not cement the marriage. After a few years the couple divorced and Derek married three times more. This flamboyant character, who was a major personality in the lives of the Mitfords, used his money to enjoy the lifestyle of a bygone age. He would stop trains by pulling the communication cord to complain about dirt in his carriage, would contemptuously toss a ten-pound note at Jockey Club stewards in payment of a fine for some riding misdemeanour, finished twice in the Grand National riding his own horses, and was a much-decorated war hero. His intellect was only just short of genius yet he would happily revise complicated travel plans to avoid ‘hurting the feelings’ of his beloved dachshunds. Pam’s marriage to him lasted fourteen years, and was the only one of his six marriages – apart from the last, which ended with his death – to endure for more than a couple. Pam and Derek always remained great friends and saw each other frequently after he went to live in France, where he became a researcher at the Bellevue Laboratory near Paris.
Both Prod and Andrew Cavendish, who had become Marquess of Hartington at the death of his elder brother, had tried to get into Parliament after the war. Prod did not get further than the initial interview, which Nancy had forecast because, she said, married to a Mitford he hadn’t a hope of being selected as a candidate. Nevertheless, she said, she ‘egged him on’ because candidates were given ninety extra petrol coupons. Andrew, however, following family tradition,16 twice contested the constituency of Chesterfield in 1945 and 1950, both times unsuccessfully. A friend who canvassed for him was told by a voter, ‘they like ’im, but they say booger ’is party’.17
The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family Page 43
