The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  For Bob, the sense that he had fallen down the White Rabbit’s burrow in Alice’s Wonderland was heightened at Chatsworth. It was not just the sheer size of the house, for, as he said, if he had been invited to the White House he would have known how to behave: at Chatsworth he wasn’t even sure which century he was in. On looking through the visitors’ book he noticed that many of the guests had signed with their surname – ‘Salisbury’, ‘Antrim’, ‘Denham’ and he did the same, then wondered why this caused such an outburst of merriment.* Even away from Chatsworth there were surprises. Both Decca and Bob were amazed at the freedom and openness in which the Communist Party operated in England, ‘so accustomed had we become to the semi-outlaw status of Communists in America,’ Decca wrote. When he tried to get a telephone number from the operator, Bob couldn’t make sense of what he was being told and had to hand the phone to Decca. ‘What is the matter?’ she asked him. ‘She’s saying perfectly plainly that the number is Steeple Bumpstead 267.’ ‘That’s what I thought she said,’ Bob answered miserably, ‘but I thought she was pulling my leg.’ At the mews he ‘discovered swastikas and hammer-and-sickles cut in the windows with diamonds when we used to live here. We did roar,’ Decca told Sydney.

  From England Bob and Decca went to Vienna as a staging post for a proposed visit to Hungary. Bob’s family had Hungarian roots; he had visited the country in 1937 and spoke a little of the language. But they had no luck in getting visas from the consulate in Vienna until Bob mentioned that Nebby Lou was the niece of Paul Robeson. Instantly, visas were produced and everywhere they went in Hungary they were welcomed by fellow Communists in the Peace Committee and treated as VIPs. Robeson was not Nebby Lou’s uncle, simply a close friend of her parents, and she was rather put out at the deception, although as Decca pointed out to her, ‘You’ve called him Uncle all your life.’ The connection opened endless doors, and Nebby was loaded down with gifts – ‘They even gave her an instrument that had once belonged to Bartók,’ Bob recalled.

  The VIP tours impressed Bob and Decca – here was the epitome of the triumphant success of socialism – in much the same way, it must be said, as Sydney and David were convinced about the success of Fascism when shown the prescribed sights of pre-war Germany by Hitler’s adjutants. In both cases the visitors saw only what they were meant to see, showcase exhibits. Bob and Decca were thrilled with the neat collective farms, a workers’ rest home, a new steel factory. Only two minor incidents bothered them, and they could not quite explain them or get them out of their minds. One day they were dining in a restaurant when their waiter asked them, in an urgent whisper, if they would post a letter to America for him. When they asked why he couldn’t post it himself, he became flustered and looked over his shoulder. ‘He was evidently in great distress,’ Decca recalled. ‘However, we regretfully decided we could not perform his mission. What if he were a spy, or an opponent of the Government?’ A similar thing happened when a teacher invited them to her house only to send them an urgent message at the last minute. ‘Nicht kommen, Magda, teacher,’ it read. ‘We had naturally assumed there was vestigial opposition to the Communist Government, yet these two encounters coming . . . within a few days of each other would seem to point to a greater disaffection than we had supposed existed.’22 They asked one of their guides, who told them that since they had accepted the hospitality of the Peace Committee it would be better if they avoided such contacts. Decca wrote an article about the visit for the People’s Weekly when she returned to California. Although the remainder of the article was published intact, the stories of the waiter and the teacher were edited out, ‘for reasons of space’.23 A year later, reading about the remorseless suppression of the Hungarian uprising by Russian tanks, Decca and Bob remembered the waiter and the teacher and fidgeted unhappily.

  The grand finale of their European tour was a trip to Paris to visit Nancy after they had dropped off the two girls at a school for a few weeks. Decca had looked forward to this with tremendous enthusiasm. Nancy was her socialist sister, and they corresponded warmly and regularly. Nancy was not at home when they arrived in Paris, having had reservations at the last minute about Decca’s politics. She had told a number of friends about Decca’s impending visit, describing her to Raymond Mortimer as ‘my Communist sister . . . Eton crop, pince-nez & men’s trousers. She is in London with husband and child. Child has been told that Debo’s money comes from selling slaves. Debo says, “Goodness, if we had any slaves we wouldn’t sell them.” I don’t die for her as much as I pretend to when I write.’24 ‘Decca arrives with her children end of the month. I’m half delighted, half terrified,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Seventeen years . . .’25

  In the end she decided she was more terrified than delighted and flew to England to stay with Debo, thinking that Decca would be put off. In the event Decca had lost Nancy’s phone number and the Treuhafts made their way straight to 7 rue Monsieur, the address to which Decca had been writing for years. She was a little surprised when the maid said that Nancy had gone to visit her sister ‘la duchesse’. Nevertheless, when they explained who they were, the maid let them in, made them welcome and lit the fire. Relaxed after helping themselves to Nancy’s whisky, they telephoned her. It was sixteen years since the sisters had heard each other’s voice, and Nancy made her excuses, chatting easily until she asked, ‘But where are you staying?’ and Decca said, ‘We’re in your flat.’ Whereupon Nancy flew into a rage, accused them of running up a huge phone bill and slammed down the phone. Decca and Bob found this behaviour so ‘utterly mad’ that they laughed until tears ran down their faces. After a while Nancy phoned back, and they had a long conversation. When Decca put the phone down and asked Bob what he made of it he pointed out that Debo was paying for the second call.

  A few days later Nancy returned to Paris #‘in the sunniest of moods’, and quietly pressed fifty pounds on Decca, which she said was to pay for books and furniture that she had taken from their flat after Decca and Esmond left for the USA. Decca remembered those books: tattered old left-wing volumes not worth five shillings. The fifty pounds, then, was an outright gift, given in such a way as not to cause embarrassment or give the impression that Nancy was dispensing charity. ‘Nancy’s extraordinary contradictory attitude to money,’ Decca wrote, ‘her excessive small meannesses alternating with bursts of lavish generosity, never ceased to baffle me.’26 After Decca left, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh that, after all, she had enjoyed the visit. ‘Decca is . . . unchanged and so sweet. Also her Romilly daughter . . . is a beauty. I very much hope she’ll send her here in a year or two to learn French & then I must find her a French husband (recipe for happiness).’27

  Decca and Dinky stayed on for a few weeks after Bob and Nebby Lou returned to the USA, to see Mrs Hammersley, who was living on the Isle of Wight, and Pam, who was about to return from Switzerland. Bob wrote to warn Decca that despite a fight on his part, he had been forced to surrender his passport in New York, and she could expect the same thing. Decca’s letter to Bob reveals that her relationship with her family remained fragile: ‘Woman was here to lunch (second sight . . . calling her Woman, since she’s become a you-know-what-bian)28 . . . After lunch we tried to teach her Scrabble but she never scored more than 4 on any one play and even Muv got a bit restive with her when she said, “What does I-C-Y spell?” after I’d put it down for a score of 35.’29 She reported a terrific argument which had occurred when she happened to see on Sydney’s engagement pad that she had invited the Mosleys to lunch in the following week. Decca had said that she and Dinky would not eat with ‘murderers’ and Sydney had been furious that Decca would refer to her ‘own sister’ as a murderer. All things considered it was time for Decca to return to California.

  The passports were confiscated in New York as Bob had warned, but there was a warmer welcome when they arrived in California. Virtually all their friends turned up to meet the train, complete with a mock brass band of children’s drums, trumpets and homemade banners, ‘The sort of thing
they put on here for returning prisoners of war or football teams,’ Decca wrote to Sydney. All their friends and even Dinky were fascinated by Decca’s voice. For years, although noticeably English, she had allowed her accent to become more relaxed, like that of an upper-class American dowager. ‘After our trip,’ Dinky recalled, ‘her accent became very British. Benj and I could hardly believe our ears.’30 The return to crisp Mitfordian English remained, despite teasing by the family.

  There was an anticlimax to the excitement of homecoming: Decca learned that during her long absence the FBI had staged a huge anti-Communist sweep of the area, visiting the employers of party members and anyone associated with the CRC, asking pointed questions about the person concerned. In many cases the employer did not know that the employee was a Communist or a Communist sympathizer. There were no charges, FBI officers said, but they would appreciate hearing that the person had changed his or her job. These surprisingly Gestapo-like tactics worked. Even those employers who considered that a person’s political affiliation was a private matter were intimidated. Small businessmen could not afford bad publicity, or to court the disfavour of either those in government departments or their customers who regarded Communism as a threat to the country. As a result many family breadwinners lost jobs and were forced to go underground or resign from the party.31

  A few months later, in March 1956, the transcript of Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party was published, detailing Stalin’s horrendous crimes. Ten million people had been killed in the thirties because they opposed him, from peasant proprietors who objected to their land being ‘collectivized’ to members of the right-wing intelligentsia, old Bolsheviks and members of the old officer corps. Anyone who stood in his way had been mercilessly eliminated in the way that the Nazis had eliminated the Jews and other non-Aryans. The transcript ‘sent shock waves’ through the American Communist Party and there were resignations en masse, but Decca wrote,

  I did not share this anguish to any marked degree. I had never been as thoroughly convinced as most comrades had of Soviet infallibility. Terrible as the revelations were it seemed to me that the very fact that Khrushchev had seen fit to lay them out before the world signified that the Soviet leadership was set on a course of fundamental change . . . At least that was my view at the time, although, as it turned out, I was grievously mistaken.32

  She regarded her membership of the party as a way of combating Fascism in the West, not as an implied alliance to Russia.

  Even the unfolding of the Hungarian situation did not persuade her to resign from the party, though there was always at the back of her mind a niggling question mark over the waiter and the teacher in Hungary. It was two years before the Treuhafts decided to leave (‘Bob was never as committed as Decca,’ one friend remembered), but eventually they did so, having concluded that the American Communist Party was no longer a force for democracy, peace and socialism in the USA, and that instead of fighting Fascism it had become a self-serving organization dominated by Russia and out of touch with working people. Meanwhile the CRC was disbanded, perceived as an arm of the Communist Party rather than an organization campaigning for civil rights, and Decca found herself out of a job. It seemed that everything for which she had worked since she and Esmond arrived in the USA eighteen years earlier was coming apart. Nevertheless, in later years she stated on a television programme that the years of work for the Communist Party and CRC were ‘among the most rewarding of my life’.33 And once, when asked in an interview about her politics, Decca answered wryly, ‘sort of old left. Or maybe just left-over.’

  For a while she worked in the classified section of the San Francisco Chronicle, selling advertising space. As a new employee her name was listed in the union’s newspaper, and she was tickled when a fellow employee came round with a few extra copies for her, saying, ‘I know what a thrill it is to see your name in a newspaper for the first time.’ The job didn’t last. The FBI found out where she was working, contacted the Chronicle and Decca found herself a housewife once again. Dinky and Benjamin were at summer camps and from being frantically busy she now had time to kill. To relieve boredom she began to sort through old papers, including bundles of Esmond’s letters, and correspondence with Sydney going back to 1938. Over the next weeks she showed interesting or amusing extracts to one of her best girlfriends, Pele de Lappe, and to other old comrades, who like the Treuhafts had become ‘Ex’s’ (ex-members of the Communist Party). It was at these friends’ suggestion that Decca began to write a memoir of her childhood, including all the hilarious Mitfordian anecdotes she had related over the years, and the story of her relationship with Esmond.

  She had already achieved a miniature literary success with a home-printed booklet called Life-itself-manship, a sideways look at membership of the Communist Party. She made up five hundred copies and it sold like hot cakes to the comrades. Demand was so great, Decca wrote to Sydney, that it looked as if she was going to have to mimeograph and staple another batch – ‘Nancy is so lucky not to have to bother.’ The memoir, untitled at that point, was a full-length book, and a different matter altogether. It took her two years to write, aided and abetted by a group of friends she called her ‘Writing Committee’.34 Working as a veritable team of editors, the committee read it, offered helpful suggestions and reminded her of stories she had half forgotten. Bob, of course, was editor in chief (‘Chairman,’ Decca said) though he recalled, ‘I hardly saw the manuscript until it was finished.’ The committee acted as editors and prompters only, the text was pure Decca and it was her apprenticeship as a writer. She sent the completed manuscript to six publishers but it was rejected. Disappointed, she put it away.

  As compensation, in 1957 Decca learned that she had inherited a large sum (‘it’s between £8,000 and £10,000’)35 from the estate of Esmond’s mother, but there were problems: it was eighteen months before probate was granted, and the English banks were unable to transfer the money to America because of the still-trenchant currency restrictions. Meanwhile Decca could not go to England because she had no passport so she appealed to the Bank of England on grounds of domestic need. ‘Please don’t bother to intercede for me,’ she wrote to Sydney hastily, ‘because I know you’ll tell them I’m giving it to the Communist Party and I won’t be able to get it . . .’ Two years later, when a Supreme Court ruling restored their passports, Bob and Decca immediately set off to England, with Benjamin. Decca also took the manuscript, thinking it might get a better reception in England. If not, she thought, she would forget about writing as a potential career.

  Nancy’s career had been well established internationally since publication of her two Radlett novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Consequently, Pigeon Pie, which had attracted only limited sales when first published in 1940, became an ‘overnight’ success when republished in 1951: ‘Pigeon Pie has had better notices in America than any of my books, isn’t it unaccountable,’ she wrote to Sydney. ‘When I think how poor I was when it came out, almost starving (literally . . .) I feel quite cross though it’s nice at all times to have a little extra money.’36

  Three years later she published her first biography, Madame de Pompadour, and the reviews again were good. ‘Miss Mitford . . . admires money and birth and romantic love,’ her friend Cyril Connolly wrote, ‘. . . good food, fine clothes, “telling jokes”, courage and loyalty, and has no time for intellectual problems or the lingering horrors of life.’37 The eminent historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote that everyone who had enjoyed The Pursuit of Love would be delighted that its characters had reappeared, ‘this time in fancy dress. They now claim to be leading figures in French history. In reality they still belong to that wonderful never-never land of Miss Mitford’s invention, which can be called Versailles, as easily as it used to be called Alconleigh. Certainly no historian could write a novel half as good as Miss Mitford’s work of history.’38 Another friend, Raymond Mortimer, described the book as ‘extremely unorthodox . . . it rea
ds as if an enchantingly clever woman were telling the story over the telephone’. Nancy did not know whether to feel complimented or not. ‘I was rather taken aback,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘I had seen the book as Miss Mitford’s sober and scholarly work . . . he obviously enjoyed it though he says the whole enterprise is questionable.’39 The book was apparently banned in Ireland as being a potential threat to happy marriage. Nancy said she was prepared to edit it but on asking for a list of the offending material was advised that there was nothing in the text that had irritated the censors. ‘Then why is it banned?’ ‘Well, it’s the title,’ she was told.