In 1946, Andrew’s father, the 10th Duke of Devonshire, made over the estate to him in an attempt to shelter the family’s assets from the punitive new rate – up to 90 per cent – at which death duties were levied by the post-war Labour government. The assets were transferred into a discretionary trust, called the Chatsworth Settlement, the beneficiaries of which were Andrew and his family. As the inheritance laws stood Andrew’s father had to live for five years after transferring the property to avoid paying duty,18 and since the Duke was a healthy fifty-one-year-old, it seemed a pretty safe bet. Even so, he once told his son that every Sunday when he attended church he mentally ticked off another week of the five years. Meanwhile, there was a great deal for Andrew to learn. He had expected to have to earn his living after the war, and it was Billy who had received all the training appropriate to the duties of the head of the family.
A year later Debo, Andrew and their two children, Emma and Peregrine – called ‘Stoker’ by everyone, even today19 – moved to the pretty village of Edensor (pronounced locally as ‘Enzer’), which is part of the Chatsworth estate. Living at Edensor House, a fifteen-minute walk across the park, meant that they were able to get to know the great house and its land. But while the estate was in good heart, Chatsworth House was in a sorry condition.
The family had hardly lived in it for many years, and no decorating had been done at all since before the First World War. The plumbing was Victorian or worse, there were no modern bathrooms and hardly any hot-water supply. The 9th Duke and Duchess had preferred to live in other family properties. Andrew’s father inherited in 1938, but he and his duchess lived at Chatsworth for only a few months that first winter. They held a lavish party there in August 1939 for Billy’s coming-of-age, but a month later the house was turned over to Penrhos College for the duration of the war. The college’s premises, safe in Anglesey, had been requisitioned by the Ministry of Food and it was inevitable that Chatsworth would also be required for the war effort. The Duke wisely reasoned that three hundred girl boarders and teaching staff would do far less damage than a large number of servicemen so it became a boarding-school. The most valuable furniture and pictures were moved to the library, where Rembrandts, Van Dycks and Reynoldses were stacked against the bookshelves. The silk-covered and panelled walls were boarded over to protect them. When the school decamped in 1946 the great state rooms had taken on an institutionalized appearance after six years as dormitories, classrooms, dining hall, gymnasium and study rooms. The only staff employed to clean had been two housemaids left in situ by the family.
When Debo first saw it after the war she thought it ‘sad, dark, cold and dirty. It wasn’t like a house at all, but more like a barracks . . . careful tenants as Penrhos College and the girls were, the sheer number of them had made the house pretty shabby and worn when they left . . . It was very depressing.’20 Her parents-in-law had lost heart after Billy’s death but they organized the cleaning, the reinstatement of pictures and furnishings, and some redecoration, although the government limited the supply of paint to £150’s worth. At Easter 1949 they reopened the house to the public. There was still a huge amount of work to do but this was planned to take place over years rather than months.
Like the Mosleys, Debo and Andrew travelled a lot in the post-war years, enjoying the South of France and Italy, which had none of the austerity of England. Debo often stayed with Prince Aly Khan at his fabulous villa Château l’Horizon where she met movie stars and other famous people, the food was delectable and every luxury supplied. Yet she enjoyed life at Edensor House too: she was and is a countrywoman, and was much at home there. She had suffered greatly from the loss of two babies, but ‘Em and Sto’ were plump, healthy and intelligent children and a joy to their aunts. To Diana, they helped to compensate for the years she had lost in seeing her own babies grow up. To Pam, called by Emma’s generation Tante Femme, Emma and Stoker, Max and Alexander were the nearest she would come to having children of her own. Nancy, too, loved her nephews and nieces, recounting stories of them with unalloyed pleasure. When she visited them in September 1946, when Stoker was two and a half, she said to him, ‘Can you talk?’ He answered, ‘Not yet.’21
On 26 November 1950, Andrew’s father died suddenly of a heart-attack while chopping wood at Compton Place, his house near Eastbourne. He was fifty-five and had given every impression of being fit and healthy so it was a great shock to everyone. Andrew was in Australia studying farming methods and flew back immediately; Debo met him at London airport. The death of his beloved father was a stunning blow to Andrew in every possible way for he had lost in him a friend and mentor. Furthermore, the Duke had died fourteen weeks short of the vitally important five years. As a result death duties of 80 per cent were now due on all resources. It looked as though the estate would have to be broken up, and many of the treasures and works of art, collected by the family over four centuries, sold off to pay the horrendous bill. Andrew was now the 11th Duke, but it seemed that the title might be all that could be salvaged. From this moment Chatsworth became the centre of his and Debo’s lives. It seemed unlikely that they could save it for their children and their descendants, but they were not prepared to give it up without a fight.
Meanwhile, Nancy was at work on a sequel to The Pursuit of Love. It did not ‘write itself’ this time and she struggled with it for several years. Love in a Cold Climate was published in July 1949 and was even more successful than its predecessor. Although Sydney was proud of Nancy’s success she was less happy about being cast again as Aunt Sadie. Too many people thought that Aunt Sadie was Lady Redesdale in real life, and Uncle Matthew Lord Redesdale.
Though riding the crest of a wave in her literary career, Nancy’s personal life was less successful. The Colonel was often too busy to see her, occupied with his political career or engaged in one of his other love affairs. To be fair to him, he did little to encourage Nancy’s dependence: he would never sleep at her apartment, though he was happy to lunch or dine there. She became an emotional beggar: ‘Darling Colonel,’ she wrote typically, ‘I know one is not allowed to say it, but I love you’22 or ‘I wish I were sitting on your doorstep like a faithful dog waiting for you to wake up you darling Col . . . Do miss me.’ She wrote scores of letters to him that are almost painful to read, in consideration of who and what she was. Although she pretended to treat his casual neglect as a joke, and made light of it in correspondence to family and friends, she was deeply wounded. But she had no option if she wanted their relationship to continue. She could not give him up and she hated to leave him even to take a holiday.
Once, in the Louvre, she saw him wandering around hand in hand with a former resistance heroine who had been in love with him for some time.23 The Colonel looked so ‘fearfully happy’ that Nancy was knocked sideways, and convinced herself he had proposed marriage. She rushed home and in agonies of jealous misery considered taking an overdose. At last she rang Palewski who was delighted to hear from her:
absolutely angelic. I kept saying but you looked so happy [Nancy wrote to Diana] . . . ‘No, no, I’m not happy,’ he said, ‘I’m very unhappy.’ So dreadful to prefer the loved one to be unhappy – I ought to want him to marry, I know. He did say, ‘but you are married, after all,’ & I know he really longs to be, & I feel like a villainess to make all this fuss . . . the fact is I couldn’t live through it if he married & what is so dreadful is I know I can stop him – or at least I think so – and that condemns him to . . . loneliness and no children. Perhaps I ought to leave Paris for good . . . I must say this has plunged me into a turmoil – oh the horror of love. Later: I’ve just been to see him and told him about the pills, which I see to have been a great mistake, he’s simply delighted at the idea. ‘Oh you must, you must, what a coup for me.’24
But it is clear that Nancy would never have left Paris. Her apartment was the epitome of elegance; living there was one of the great pleasures of her life and with her earnings she was able to indulge her passion for designer clothes.
Her svelte figure suited the New Look admirably and she wallowed in the luxury of Dior and Schiaparelli outfits with tight waists and long, full skirts, so feminine after wartime fashion. Only occasionally was she driven to complain to Palewski about her situation: ‘I said “I’ve given up everything – my family, my friends, my country,” & he simply roared with laughter, & then of course so did I.’25
One of Nancy’s biographers said that the tragedy of Nancy’s life was that she never came first with anyone. From the moment of Pam’s birth she always had to share affection. To the four loves of her life, Hamish, Prod, André Roy and, most importantly, Gaston Palewski, she was not their great love. This was sad for her, as was the lack of children, but it does not mean her whole life was tragic: one only has to read her letters to see that.
When Peter Rodd finally asked for a divorce on the grounds that he was tired of being cuckolded, her first reaction was ‘Good’. Although she did not underestimate the social implications of being a divorcee, she had tolerated his womanizing for years, and now that Prod had access to her bank account in England he plundered it. Perhaps if she was free to marry, the Colonel might oblige, despite his protestations that he must marry a rich, single Frenchwoman for career reasons. But divorce was a protracted process, and there were tax considerations, bearing in mind Nancy’s earnings and her domicile in France. In the event it was another seven years before Nancy was free of Prod.
When Palewski was too busy to see her, Nancy was not lonely – far from it. She had a host of friends and her work; she turned out books regularly. There were two further volumes in the style of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, called The Blessing (1951) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960), in which Nancy’s best female friend, Diana Cooper, was the basis for Lady Leonie, counter-heroine to the narrator, Fanny, who was modelled on Nancy’s childhood friend Billa Harrod (née Creswell) – who was conveniently married to Cooper’s replacement as ambassador to France. According to one visitor, 7 rue Monsieur was a cultural annexe of the British embassy, a congenial salon for the upper classes and literati of England and France. Nancy also became an eminent biographer, which she enjoyed even more than writing novels and which was just as financially rewarding. By the time the Duff Coopers left the Paris embassy Nancy had a huge number of friends in the city. Eventually the Mosleys and Derek Jackson also went to live there, and Pam often called in as she passed through between her homes in Gloucestershire and Switzerland.
19
Return to the
Old Country
(1955–8)
Looking back, the early fifties had been an extraordinary time for Decca. In 1950 she and Bob had intended to visit England but were denied passports owing to their membership of the Communist Party. There was some compensation: Debo visited them in Oakland, ‘for a Honnish reunion’, during which they entertained Bob with Honnish songs and stories, and Debo generally wowed the comrades who, to Decca’s amazement, couldn’t wait to meet a real live duchess, just as they had crowded in to meet Sydney. During the next half-decade the Treuhafts made several unsuccessful attempts to get passports. Decca ‘longed’ to go to England to see her mother and one or two others such as Nancy, Idden and Nanny Blor, and finally asked Sydney to appeal to Winston Churchill. ‘Do see what you can do . . . it may be the only chance,’ she wrote. ‘But if you correspond with him, please send me a copy.’1
Sydney refused. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing doing as regards asking favours, it would not be possible for me anyhow, and surely not for you either, as you are heart and soul against him.’2
Regrets were soon buried under a welter of work. For Decca, with the house and family to care for, there were hardly enough hours in the day as the CRC gathered strength. At first she was confined to the office, involved in mass mailings and the organization of protest meetings, but she became more personally involved with the case of a young black man, Willie McGee, who had been sentenced to death in Mississippi for raping a white woman. There was evidence that the plaintiff had been his willing mistress for several years and had accused him of rape only when he attempted to end their relationship. This, however, was not admissible in court and in McGee’s home town no one dared speak out on his behalf for fear of retribution from the powerful Ku Klux Klan. No one, that is, except McGee’s wife Rosalee, an uneducated twenty-eight-year-old, who left the town for the first time in her life and embarked on a nationwide speaking tour funded by the CRC. Her aim was to recruit sufficient national sympathy to persuade the Governor of Mississippi to commute the death sentence.
Decca met Rosalee in Oakland and was appalled when she heard how the family lived. Rosalee had already lost three close male relatives to white lynch mobs or a vicious justice. Decca talked three women comrades into joining her, and drove to Jackson, Mississippi, to take up the cause in person. She and her three-woman ‘delegation’ were unable to prevent McGee’s execution, but Decca’s self-confident aplomb – she thought nothing of telephoning the Governor at his home to discuss the McGee case – and the fact that she had ventured into the town during the row gave others the courage to speak out where before they had remained silent. When she organized a protest, other white women came from the northern states to join it. Hundreds of black people streamed in, too, in defiance of the Ku Klux Klan, to stand in silent protest. Decca’s spark helped to light the fire that the fight for civil rights became during the next decade. During her time in Mississippi the McGee case was national news, and although most national newspapers presented the protests as a desperate ploy of Communists to further the cause of international Communism and foment racial strife, the case was groundbreaking in the history of civil rights in the USA.
In 1951 Decca was subpoenaed by the California State Committee on Un-American Activities. She had to present herself at a court hearing, bringing with her the membership records of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress. This caused consternation among her friends and comrades, for the records contained the names and addresses of anyone who had supported the organization, including most of the Communists in the Bay area. Bob could not help her: he was already in hiding to avoid being subpoenaed himself, and as their phones were tapped and she knew the FBI was watching her, she dared not contact him. Recently, numbers of people had been sent to prison and she was nervous. She contacted the CRC lawyer who insisted she must take the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer, to avoid incriminating herself. ‘What if one elected to testify about oneself, but refused to answer questions about others?’ she asked. ‘No good,’ he replied. ‘If you answer one single question, the committee will say you waived the privilege and insist you answer as to related facts, meaning the names of your colleagues and other details.’3 So Decca learned her single statement: ‘I refuse to answer on the ground that my answer might tend to incriminate me.’ She took Dinky with her to the court, having obtained permission from the headmistress to absent her from school that day in case her classmates teased her.
The scenes in the court are familiar to us now from old newsreels of grim-faced bullying inquisitors such as Joseph McCarthy demanding loudly of Hollywood notables, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’ Decca was not called to the stand until after the lunchtime recess. All morning she had watched others undergo the trauma of examination, saw how some had fought back, causing uproar, how others had wilted under pressure, and how some had stuck to the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer anything, just as she had been told to do. She took the stand clutching her membership-records file and after she had taken the oath the questions she had rehearsed were asked: ‘Are you now or have you ever been . . .? Have you ever heard of or read the People’s World? Have you been a director of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress since May 1950? Do you maintain a bank account for the Civil Rights Congress? Is your husband, Robert Treuhaft, legal counsel for the Civil Rights Congress?’ To each question she responded with the memorized incantation.4
But she began to grow irritated. She
wanted to retaliate to the bullying, to play to her friends in the gallery and make them laugh, but she clenched her teeth and replied as rehearsed. Suddenly a curious question was asked: ‘Are you a member of the Berkeley Tenants Club?’ She was puzzled for a moment, never having heard of it and thinking it must have some connection with bad landlords. Then she began her answer: ‘I refuse to answer that question on the grounds . . .’ To her confusion the courtroom erupted in a roar of laughter. The question had been ‘Do you belong to the Berkeley Tennis Club?’ and was an attempt at heavy sarcasm by the prosecutor, goaded by Decca’s plummy voice and the fact that the club was a bastion of conservatism. In the uproar the chairman rapped his gavel for order and dismissed Decca as being ‘totally uncooperative’. As she stepped down from the stand her lawyer grabbed her arm and hissed at her to get out fast and go into hiding. ‘Don’t go home . . . or to any house that might be under surveillance.’ The court had been so confused by the noise and laughter that the chairman had forgotten to ask for the CRC records.
Decca cast an agonized glance at Dinky in the gallery, and bolted for her car having insisted that the lawyer saw Dinky home. She hardly had a chance to get clear of the building before the mistake was realized and she was recalled. By then she was in her car driving blindly away from the courthouse, hoping she was not followed. She hid with friends for a few days as Bob was doing, until they knew that the hearings were over, then Decca telephoned Dinky, who was looking after Nicholas and Benjamin. ‘Thank goodness,’ the redoubtable Dinky said, when Decca announced that she was coming right home. ‘I’ve been doing all the cooking and we’re sick of scrambled eggs.’5
The next few years were spent subpoena-dodging, going into hiding whenever a friend was served with one. As their phone was tapped and they were under surveillance by the FBI,6 Bob and Decca were careful never to mention the name of a friend or comrade unless they were in an open space and knew they could not be overheard. Bob appeared once before the commission and scourged them with clever oratory that made the evening papers. On another occasion he was so angry with the Attorney General over some unfairness that he kicked down the door of the District Attorney’s office. One of his partners overheard a policeman at the courthouse say to another, ‘Do you think Treuhaft really wants to overthrow the government?’ ‘Well, no,’ was the reply. ‘But I think he wants to get someone else to do it.’7 The newspaper reports of these incidents, sent home to Sydney by Decca, were stuck into a great album, alongside the Redesdales’ invitation to Westminster Abbey for the Coronation of George VI, and Sydney’s authorization to visit Diana in Holloway.
The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family Page 44
