The correspondence between her and Decca kept them in touch with the pattern of each other’s family life, the marriages of children, births of grandchildren, the deaths of old friends and the previous generation, the daily domestic trivia that was so different for each woman. ‘Derek Jackson came and stayed [for the wedding of Debo’s daughter, Sophia]. It is so queer that he still thinks of us all as his family after 5 [sic] wives since Pam,’ Debo wrote. ‘She said, “Hallo, horse,” when he came in, as though nothing had happened.’ Sometimes, letters would contain phrases in Boudledidge (confusing to a researcher) such as, ‘Jaub, Dzdiddle no zdmudkung [yes, still no smoking] – I long for a puff,’ and a scribbled message on the outside of an envelope, ‘Jegg engludzed [cheque enclosed]’.
By now Decca had a well-established and large circle of friends in England, completely unconnected with the Mitford family, but still she felt the pull of blood ties and she and Debo usually met whenever she was in England. Because they wanted desperately to save their friendship the two sisters found a formula by which they were able to put aside their accepted differences, and this worked well except every now and then when Debo would mutter, ‘All those lies, hen.’32 But there was always restraint in Decca’s relationships with the greater family, and even with Pam for a while. There was no relationship at all with Diana: the brief truce during Nancy’s illness was never reinstated. Curiously, although Decca liked Diana’s son Desmond enormously, she could not bear his elder brother Jonathan. She had not seen him since he was four years old when he offended her by giving the Nazi salute, and when he became chairman of the ultra-conservative Monday Club (1970–72), he was forever branded by her ‘a dangerous neo-Nazi’.
Shortly after the row about the Unity biography, Diana published her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts – ‘the truth,’ she teased, ‘but not necessarily the whole truth’. It was extensively reviewed, and generally accepted as having been well written, but it was slated all the same. Many reviewers used the same phrase: Lady Mosley, they said, was ‘unrepentant’. In the main this referred to the fact that Diana wrote her memories of Hitler, the man she had liked and admired, as though none of the things he did later (and none of the things which he was doing at the time, and which came to light afterwards) had occurred. That subsequent historical perspective did not change her original memories rankled. She did not condone the horrors perpetrated by his regime, but merely stated what her own reactions had been at the time. In turn, she had been offended by the factual inaccuracies published about Hitler by journalists and successive biographers; the fact was, she wrote, that she had observed a charming, cultured man, who did not rant and foam at the mouth (as was frequently claimed), with well-manicured hands (not roughened and nail-bitten), a fastidious man who ate sparingly (rather than the cartoon character who stuffed himself with cream cakes). Her lack of criticism brought fury raging down on her head, and her account of her time in the filthy conditions of Holloway invited the comments that many millions of women were incarcerated in far worse conditions during the war, thanks to Hitler and his supporters. A recent biography of Diana suggests that although the book answered some questions and repaid some recent slights it was substantially a vehicle for continuing the campaign that Diana had waged for the past fifty years: that of supporting and defending Mosley.33 As every author knows, controversy never hurts a book and A Life of Contrasts sold well. ‘Diana’s style is better than Nancy’s,’ James Lees-Milne wrote in his diary. ‘It lacks N’s debutante touch, and is confident and adult.’34
Despite the hostility of her reviewers, Diana decided to write another book and her subject was hardly less controversial. Quite close to the Mosleys’ Temple de la Gloire was the Moulin de la Tuilerie. Nancy had once considered buying the property when it was an unrestored old mill, but at the time she could not bear the thought of moving so far from the Colonel. Subsequently it was purchased by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and converted into a sumptuous home. Neighbourly invitations were exchanged and when the Windsors first went to visit the Mosleys at the tiny temple, the Duchess said, ‘Yes, it’s very pretty here, but where do you live?’35
The Windsors and Mosleys liked each other and got on well. Perhaps part of the reason lay in the fact that both couples suffered from a perpetual bad press, and that the lives of each, despite the happiness of a sound marriage, were tinged by the underlying waste of unfulfilled promise. The uncharitable, among whom was Decca, saw it as a natural friendship ‘given their mutual support of Hitler’, though the Duke of Windsor’s so-called ‘support’ of Hitler’s regime is even now far from being proven. But it would be surprising if there was no understanding between two women who had each devoted her life to supporting a man deprived of what he regarded as his destiny. Diana regarded the Duke’s treatment by the Royal Family as unfair. It was monstrous, she thought, ‘to stop him doing anything and then to put it about that he was frivolous and lazy’.36
After the Duke’s death, when the Duchess had slipped into a long-term comatose state, Diana’s old friend Lord Longford (formerly Frank Pakenham), who was a director of Sidgwick and Jackson, visited the Mosleys at the Temple. He persuaded Diana to write a biography of Wallis, to correct the many ‘lies’ that proliferated about her friend.37 The result is an interesting review of an enigmatic personality, and could hardly be otherwise for Diana had known the Duchess well at a personal level for some years. But it was roughly treated by many reviewers, and condemned as ‘a hagiography’, presumably because Diana did not subscribe to bringing down her subject, which more and more seems regarded as an essential part of a biographical study. Present-day Royal researchers, however, see Diana’s treatment as an important book in the Windsor canon and it sold a respectable 23,000 copies in hardback.
Decca, predictably, deplored it, and dismissed it in her correspondence as ‘Woman’s Own writing’. She always displayed a certain amount of schadenfreude when Diana was castigated in the press. In answer to one letter from her, Rudbin replied, ‘Actually I’m rather enjoying it and Diana is forgiven all for me by the glorious quote: “Come, come, said Tom’s father, at your time of life/You’ve no long excuse for playing the rake/It is time that you thought, boy, of taking a wife/Why, so it is father: But whose wife shall I take.”’38
Some years earlier Mosley had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He staved off the worst symptoms longer than is usual because he was so strong and fit, had an agile brain and quick manner. In 1968 he had been the subject of a prestigious Panorama programme on BBC Television. Over eight million people tuned in to watch his hour-long interview with James Mossman, at that time a record audience. Throughout his seventies he was always happy to be interviewed on television or radio, to argue his corner, to write articles, and shine at dinner parties, but from his eightieth birthday in 1976 there was a clear deterioration. The drugs he needed to take in increasing doses caused him to fall over from time to time.
James Lees-Milne found Mosley physically frail but in good spirits when he visited the couple at the Temple in May 1980. Mosley was now, he wrote in his diary,
a very old man. Shapeless, bent, blotched cheeks, cracked nose, no moustache, and tiny eyes in place of those luminous, dilating orbs. I sat with him after dinner on a sofa and talked for an hour . . . Sir O has mellowed to the extent of never saying anything pejorative about anybody . . . I asked boldly if he thought he had made a mistake in founding the New Party. He admitted it was the worst mistake of his life. [he said] the British do not like New Parties . . . that if he had led the Labour government he would have kept Edward VIII on the throne. He [the King] was eminently suited to be an intermediary between his country and the dictators. Said that critics of himself and Duke of Windsor never made allowances for the fact that they detested war, having experienced the horrors of the trenches. They wanted to avoid it happening again at all costs . . . He stands unsteadily, but assured me his head was all right. Held me by both hands and said I must come again. ‘Why not come
tomorrow? Come and stay.’ Charming he was.39
It was the last time Lees-Milne saw him. Mosley died quietly and suddenly in bed in November 1980.
For Diana it was as though her own life had come to an end. She had been utterly devoted to Mosley during the whole of their forty-four years of marriage and now her family wondered how she would ever cope without him. And though it was a shock, in a sense they were not surprised when Diana suffered what appeared to be a stroke and partial paralysis within a year of Mosley’s death.
Further investigation proved that it had not been a stroke, but a brain tumour, and just as Nancy linked the trauma of the Colonel’s marriage to the development of her cancer, Diana suspected that the development of the tumour in her brain was connected with her devastation at losing Mosley.40 It was thought that she could not survive. She was flown to a hospital in London where the tumour was confirmed and an operation was scheduled to remove it. ‘Oh, hen,’ Debo wrote tearfully to Decca, ‘she is a person one thought nothing could ever happen to. A rock like figure in my life and lots of other people’s.’
Against all the odds – Diana was seventy-one and frail after Mosley’s death – the surgery was a complete success. Her paralysis gradually diminished and she was able to get about. Visitors to nearby wards were startled by the shrieks and roars of laughter that emanated from her room as a constant trickle of old friends dropped in to keep her company. It was a reminder of the words of her former wardress at Holloway to a journalist: ‘We’ve never had such laughs since Lady Mosley left.’ Her doctor thought at one point that she might be hysterical and ought to be watched. But it was just typical Diana; like her sisters, she is simply so inherently funny that it is impossible not to be amused by her.
One of her most frequent visitors was Lord Longford, who had become a national figure, known, among other things, for his championship of lost causes in the British prison service. As a director of Sidgwick and Jackson, he was one of Diana’s publishers, and he and the Mosleys had been in the habit of meeting for luncheon whenever they all happened to be in London, their political differences put to one side. But Diana was touched by his visits to her in hospital. ‘Frank’s so faithful, the way he comes all the time,’ she told her son. And she paused for a moment, before adding, ‘Of course he thinks I’m Myra Hindley.’41
22
Relatively Calm Waters
(1980–2000)
After Nancy’s death Decca remained implacable towards Diana, her antagonism too ingrained for her to make any concessions. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the tenor of all the sisters’ lives was occasionally interrupted by tensions caused either by Decca provoking her sisters to annoyance by something she said or wrote, or by her reacting to something they had said or written to which she objected. One of these was Diana’s portrait of Mosley, contained in her book, Loved Ones, which she wrote while convalescing at Chatsworth from her brain-tumour operation. However, Decca contented herself with private criticism in her letters and did not break into print about it, out of consideration for Debo.
Decca’s career as a journalist was now at its zenith, and she was a regular and respected contributor to organs such as the Spectator, the Observer and the New Statesman in England, and Esquire, Life and Vanity Fair in the USA. In addition she wrote scores of newspaper articles. Her income from her writing was substantial and despite her apparent indifference to it, one of her intellectual friends told me, ‘Decca was financially very astute.’1 Like Nancy, she had triumphed over what both sisters regarded as a lack of education, and had made her way in a tough profession with better than average success. An objective reader might be justified in thinking that the sisters placed more value on formal school education than it warranted, for the true test of Sydney’s system was surely what her daughters were able to achieve. When the BBC made a documentary about Decca called The Honourable Rebel2 and she was a guest on the BBC Radio programme, Desert Island Discs3 some of her remarks about their parents, and her stories about the family, were again the cause of a temporary coolness between her and her sisters, even though by this time they had more or less come to expect her to be controversial.
Many readers of this book will be familiar with the BBC production Love in a Cold Climate, screened in the spring of 2001. But when, in 1980, Julian Jebb made a television documentary about Nancy, called Nancy Mitford – a Portrait by Her Sisters, he inadvertently stirred up what he described as a hornets’ nest. His programme was intended to coincide with an earlier dramatization based on Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, and given access to Nancy’s (then) unpublished letters he had been fascinated by the two sides of Nancy: her wit, liveliness and genuine warmth which co-existed with snobbery and the malice so often evident in her teases. Jebb interviewed and filmed Debo and Diana together. ‘Lady Mosley and the Duchess loved each other, that was clear at once,’ he noted. ‘It was not immediately apparent how profound, intense and comical is the Duchess’s protective instinct for those she loves, who include every member of the family, living or recently dead.’
As for Diana, ‘It is hard to convey her charm, even more to defend her politics,’ he wrote. ‘The latter are neither flaunted nor evaded but when they come up in conversation they are defended or explained with a temperance of language equalled by a gentleness of tone.’4 He was especially interested that this most beautiful woman was camera-shy. It seems that just as a plain woman may have a love affair with the camera and appear a ravishing beauty on screen, the reverse can happen too. It is certainly true that there are few photographs that show Diana’s real beauty in the way that paintings of her do. ‘As soon as we began to film,’ he said, ‘her face lost all its customary animation and her replies to my questions came as if from a mask with darting eyes.’ He concluded that she felt trapped by the camera.
He filmed Pam at her home in Gloucestershire in front of the blue stove that really was the colour of her eyes,5 and on location at Swinbrook, standing by the River Windrush, reading Nancy’s description of ‘Uncle Matthew and the chubb-fuddler’. Then he flew to California to conduct his interview with Decca. It had been set up in advance and he took to her warmth and sense of fun immediately. Things only began to go wrong when she produced a form for him to sign. This made her co-operation conditional on his including in the programme extracts of a letter about Tom, written by Nancy in 1968, at the time of the publication of Mosley’s autobiography. ‘Have you noted all the fuss about Sir Os? . . . I’m very cross with him for saying Tud was a fascist which is untrue though of course Tud was a fearful old twister & probably was a fascist when with Diana. When with me he used to mock to any extent how he hated Sir Os no doubt about that.’6
Jebb was taken aback: ‘The letter was bound to offend Diana and might annoy the other sisters,’ he wrote in an article for the Sunday Times in the spring of 1980. ‘First I thought it was wrong of Decca not to have told me this condition before I had travelled all the way to California . . . second I thought it ironic that the great upholder of liberal principles should impose what amounted to censorship, for it is just as restricting to be forced to include something as it is to be forced to delete it.’7 In the end, though, Decca prevailed and he had no option but to include the letter. Working with Decca, he was struck by her articulate professionalism, but also by her ‘intense sadness’ at her long separation from Nancy. Diana was not upset, but she insisted on stating during her interview that Tom had been a paid-up member of the BUF, a fact now historically confirmed and curious in view of his pro-Jewish sympathies.
The letter certainly caused more bother between the sisters in private than its inclusion in the programme merited, and following this incident Decca made a trip to England without contacting Debo or Pam. The public, however, was now so inured to the political rivalries of the sisters that the item about Tom failed to have any shock impact. Decca had felt she must make the point about her brother for he had been the only member of the family whom Esmond could bear. When the
dust settled she wrote to Debo explaining that she simply didn’t believe Tom had been a Fascist. ‘Neither, apparently, did Nancy, so I wanted to be sure to get that in.’ But it is clear from Tom’s own correspondence with his oldest friend, James Lees-Milne (which, of course, Decca would never have seen), that he was sympathetic to Fascism if not Nazism. The real surprise of the programme was seventy-three-year-old Pam, for in it the ‘quiet sister’ emerged as a star performer. Giggling, pretty, funny and sometimes serious, she positively stole the show from her more famous sisters.
At this point the Mitford industry, as the sisters referred to books and articles about their family, was at its peak, and books, plays and articles proliferated. There was a light-hearted musical called The Mitford Girls based on their lives. When Diana, Debo and Pam attended a performance the manager of the theatre gave them badges to wear, which read, ‘I really am a Mitford girl.’8 One of the most important of the books was arguably Nicholas Mosley’s Rules of the Game, published in 1982, about his father. Nicholas was Mosley’s son by Cimmie, and the book was candid about Mosley’s prolific sex life and his mother’s distress at his father’s infidelity. Among other revelations he included private letters between his parents, written when Mosley and Diana were lovers in the period leading up to Cimmie’s death. Diana and her Mosley children were outraged, as were Nicholas’s own brother and sister. Diana was motivated by a fierce protectiveness of the love of her life for whom she was still grieving. Nicholas’ siblings and his half-brothers perhaps felt they had already suffered enough publicity because of their father. They all felt it was ‘too soon’ to make this sensitive material public.
The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family Page 52
