Nicholas justified the book by explaining that his father had asked him to write it shortly before he died, and that Diana had given him the letters without reading them. This surely says a great deal about Diana, for how many second wives would hand over this type of correspondence without at least a glance at it out of curiosity? Max, Mosley’s youngest son and Nicholas’ half-brother, suggested that his father was not compos mentis when he gave permission for the book, but Nicholas pointed out that Diana had been present at the time. Diana attempted to have publication stopped, but once again the action merely resulted in publicity, which helped the book. It was hard for Diana to have this aspect of the personal life of the man she still worshipped spread out for public consumption, and from a source that gave it such authenticity. Predictably, Decca rather enjoyed the embarrassment caused and made quips about it in her voluminous correspondence.
A year later Jonathan and Catherine Guinness wrote The House of Mitford, in which the Mosley case was strongly argued. This time it was Decca who refused to co-operate by withholding permission for any quotes from Hons and Rebels, or indeed any of her books or letters. ‘Leave me out,’ she wrote to her nephew grimly, ‘you’ll have plenty of copy from the rest of the family.’9 Her dislike of Jonathan had been bolstered recently at a meeting with his daughter Catherine who, when interviewing Decca for an article, showed her a letter from Jonathan in which he warned her about Decca:
She’s a very tough cookie [he wrote], a hardened and intelligent Marxist agitator who knows very subtly how to play on her upper-class background so as to enlist residual snobbery (on both sides of the Atlantic) in establishing Marxism. But this leads to problems of identity; to an ambiguity as to what is real and what is an act. All this was very evident in her TV appearance here. Bob Treuhaft came over better, at least he is what he is. He is one piece so to speak, the bright Jewish boy with his ready made ‘red diaper’ principles, seeing (e.g.) Chatsworth from the outside with the healthy irony of a social historian.10
Decca interpreted this letter as implying that she was ‘a liar and not to be trusted’, though Jonathan did not use those words. One friend of many to whom she wrote about the affair, wisely counselled her: ‘He probably doesn’t understand the immensely important help you have given by instinct and design, to a host of people, for most of your life, and you will never understand that the very rich and powerful, in their isolation, also need succour.’
For fear of alienating Debo again, Decca refused to review the book for the Guardian. Instead, she sent sheets of quotable material to her circle of literary friends in England for them to use in their own reviews of the book, which she described privately as ‘a puff job for the Mosley faction’. Several reviewers used extracts from these ‘crib sheets’ of Decca’s, and at least one major review was copied almost word-for-word from Decca’s comments. Decca knew her way about the world of English reviewing which she described as ‘a small pond where people scratch each other’s backs – or bite each other’s backs – and they all know each other. At least in California if your book is reviewed well you know it’s because they like it.’11
She employed the same tactics two years later when Selina Hastings brought out a biography of Nancy. Decca was surprised to hear that Debo, Pam, Diana and some of their childhood friends and cousins liked the new portrait of Nancy. But her contemporary letters show that she had taken against the author even before she read the book, for quite another reason: in writing to Decca, and to a New York newspaper, the author had signed herself ‘Lady Selina Hastings’. This irritated Decca: she regarded it as snobbish and she was determined not to like the book. When the biography was published it contained a derogatory remark about Bob (Treuhaft) and as far as Decca was concerned the gloves were off. She wrote a review, ‘Commentary in Defence of Nancy’,12 which was a brilliant, scathing and, of course, amusing condemnation of the book, but unfair in that she based her criticism upon a few selected passages. She made no reference to the immense amount of fascinating new material about Nancy’s relationship with Palewski, including their private correspondence, which even Decca privately conceded was ‘amazing’. And, even accounting for personal taste, the Hastings biography was far more incisive than the previous one, written by Harold Acton shortly after Nancy’s death, which Decca found unsatisfactory. In case they should miss seeing her review, Decca copied it and sent it to all her Mitford friends and connections, some of whom – to their credit – wrote to disagree with her opinion. ‘Thank you for sending me your championship of Nancy,’ James Lees-Milne wrote, while also advising that she had misquoted him in her review. ‘The Redesdale motto should be “Decca Careth For Us”, instead of God,* for whom I don’t suppose you have much use. And I admire your loyalty but, alas, I’m afraid we don’t yet agree even on [this] book.’13
What makes this review, and those Decca wrote of other books at the time, especially interesting to a biographer is what it reveals about Decca’s tight and confident literary style. For all the success of her first book Hons and Rebels (in the opinion of many, including me, her best book) Decca’s literary voice then had been that of an apprentice compared to what it was to become. By the 1980s her irreverent flourish had developed a polish that placed her in a superior pantheon as a wordsmith. And although her books after The American Way of Death did not have the same massive success, they were generally profitable and, more importantly, because of them, she was in constant demand for nearly two decades as a journalist and speaker. A simple list of her published articles would cover a dozen pages and she never failed to be delighted when offered a huge sum of money for her words.
It was at this point, in the mid-1980s, that I came into contact with her. She was warm, kind, bubbling. In interviews for this book I learned from numbers of people of her generosity to friends in trouble. Indeed, some months after our first contact, when she heard that my partner had died suddenly she was both hugely sympathetic and practical. She was, in fact, pretty well irresistible. This was the side of Decca that her friends saw, but woe betide an enemy. As an opponent Decca transformed herself into a determined avenger, able to use the power of words and her celebrity status as weapons. Her letters to friends are as full of spicy gossip as were Nancy’s.
In January 1984 Decca flew to Nicaragua with a group of writers concerned with press censorship there and in neighbouring El Salvador. Within a short time of her arrival she suffered a deep-vein thrombosis while getting into an elevator: ‘It was a very odd experience,’ she said later, ‘first a hand went, then a foot . . .’14 Fortunately, it was only a minor stroke and within a few months she had recovered and was back to normal, apart from a moderate limp. But it frightened her. For years she had been drinking and smoking heavily – when short of words she found drinking helped, and she had been addicted to cigarettes from her youth. Now, three years short of seventy, these indulgences began to take an inevitable toll. Warned to give up smoking at least, she promised to try, and took to chewing a brand of gum marketed in the USA as an aid to quitting, ‘because I have been such a bore to Bob and everyone,’ she wrote to Debo. ‘He was a total saint this time but how can he be expected to be ditto if it recurs due to my own fault?’
Apart from a few months for recuperation from the stroke, her work was unaffected. Later in 1984 she wrote Faces of Philip, an affectionate memoir of Philip Toynbee, Esmond’s oldest friend, and she followed this with a biography of her mother’s heroine, Grace Darling. Both books required her to spend long periods in England researching, and Grace Had an English Heart was eventually published in 1987. Neither of these latter books sold in quantity and Decca became bored with Grace Darling long before she completed the work. ‘Grey Starling is about to take wing,’ she wrote to her correspondents, ‘oh the amazing relief. Decompression.’ She was far more interested in the fulfilment of a long-held ambition: a trip to Russia.
Bob and Benjamin, along with Dinky, her husband and two children, and her immense circle of friends in the Bay
area, many of whom dated back to the days when she had first arrived in California in the early 1940s, were paramount in her life, but she relished any new controversy that reared its head in the news as natural fodder for her articles. In the spring of 1989 the Islamic fatwa was declared on Salman Rushdie for his book Satanic Verses. On the day this was announced Decca appeared wearing an outsize cardboard lapel badge upon which she had printed ‘I AM Salman Rushdie’. Later the badge went into production and was worn all over the USA by those opposed to literary censorship, and subsequently Rushdie himself was absorbed into Decca’s vast international circle of literary and media friends. ‘About the Salman Rushdie badges,’ Decca wrote gaily to Debo, ‘I’d send you one, but I fear you don’t look much like him.’
Some years earlier, in 1982, Debo had also broken into print with The House; it was part autobiography and part a contemporary history of Chatsworth. She had written it as a product for the Chatsworth shops but it sold well generally, both in the UK and the USA, and she suddenly found herself touring on the lecture circuit in its wake. ‘Nancy once told me,’ Decca wrote, ‘that if you ever became a writer you’d put us both in the shade.’ In response to frequent requests from visitors Debo also wrote The Estate in 1990 (and in 2001 was working on a revision of The House prior to its planned republication).
When Andrew and Debo celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 1991, the Duke spoke of their years together: ‘My wife and I realize how lucky we have been,’ he said. On thinking how best to celebrate the occasion he had had the idea of a ‘golden wedding party’ to which he and Debo would invite not friends and dignitaries but other Derbyshire couples who had married in 1941. He thought that, with luck, a dozen or so marriages might have survived fifty years and made the announcement. To the Devonshires’ surprise and amusement, nearly a thousand couples applied, not all from Derbyshire, and this resulted in a massive party, held in a marquee almost a quarter of a mile long, at Chatsworth. There are undoubtedly some who would dismiss this generous gesture as paternalism, but there is equally no doubt that the happy occasion gave pleasure to a large number of people, and the attitude of the Duke and Duchess towards each other at that event showed the depth of their affection for each other.
In the latter years of the 1980s, Diana and Pam, who was now increasingly lame in the right leg that had been weak since her childhood attack of polio – ‘I’m a bit short in the offside leg,’ she would say in answer to enquiries – spent a number of holidays together, in Switzerland and Italy in the summer, and several winters in South Africa. They had grown very close in the last decade and enjoyed each other’s company. ‘I do hate winters now I’m old,’ Diana wrote to James Lees-Milne. ‘I feel happy in the sun among flowers.’15
She had endeavoured, in the absence of Mosley, to fill her life with serenity and beauty, but in November 1989 she provoked national controversy merely by appearing as a guest on Desert Island Discs. The BBC had tried to air the programme on three occasions: the first date they chose, 8 October, was changed because someone rang in to say that it was the eve of Yom Kippur, which was surely inappropriate scheduling. It was then announced that the programme would air on 1 October but the schedulers were advised that this was Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year). A third date announced, 19 November, was found to be the date of the annual memorial parade of Jewish veterans, so the programme was rescheduled for a fourth time to 26 November. To Decca, it did not matter when the programme aired: the mere fact of giving Diana an opportunity to speak in public proved that the BBC was ‘deeply imbued with the deep-dyed anti-Semitism that pervades all England’.16
As always, Diana answered the presenter’s questions frankly, calmly and without hedging or exaggeration. Hitler was, she said, ‘extraordinarily fascinating and clever. Naturally. You don’t get to be where he was just by being the kind of person people like to think he was . . . Of course, at that moment he was the person who was making the news and therefore he was extremely interesting to talk to.’ He had mesmeric blue eyes, she recalled. She had never believed there would be war between England and Germany, ‘I thought reason would prevail,’ she said. ‘Had I the slightest idea I would be imprisoned I would have given up going to Germany. My duty was to be with my children.’ She minded very much that she had missed those vital years of her children’s lives: they had all changed completely by the time she was released.
According to newspaper reports, many listeners were upset by what appeared to be Diana’s defence of Hitler, but Jewish leaders were infuriated by her championship of Mosley. Denying that he was anti-Semitic, she said, ‘He really wasn’t, you know. He didn’t know a Jew from a Gentile . . . But he was attacked so much by Jews both in the newspapers and physically on marches . . . that he picked up the challenge. Then a great number of his followers who really were anti-Semitic joined him because they thought they would fight their old enemy.’ Yes, she admitted, he had referred to Jews as ‘an alien force which rises to rob us of our heritage’ in a speech in 1936. ‘One of those things which horrified him,’ she said, ‘was that we had this enormous Empire and he did think that the Jews, and the City in general, had invested far too much in countries that had nothing to do with our Empire . . . They were attacked by Communists very often on peaceful marches through east London and in all the big cities, and when there is a fight people are injured of course.’17
It was undoubtedly insensitive of the BBC to schedule the programme originally so that it coincided with Jewish anniversaries, but equally one senses that the inadvertent clashes of dates merely added another card to the hand of those who opposed the Mosleys, and that Diana would have been attacked, automatically, no matter when the programme went out. A Jewish representative stated, ‘The activities of Oswald Mosley in the 1930s were racial, discriminatory and blatantly anti-Semitic. He capitalized on the economic difficulties of the 1930s attempting to throw responsibility on world Jewry . . . There can be no whitewashing Oswald Mosley today . . . BBC listeners should not be exposed to apologia for Hitler and Oswald Mosley.’18 A BBC statement said that they had received some complaints from Jewish listeners but equally they had received a positive response from people who had enjoyed the programme. Diana had been close to centre stage in world history for a while; therefore, what she had to say was of immense interest.19
On 12 April 1994 a devastated Debo telephoned Decca to advise that Pam had died from a blood clot after surgery for a broken leg. Although eighty-six, Pam had continued to lead a full life right to the end, having only to curtail somewhat her beloved trips abroad in recent years. As with her sisters, age had made little difference to the way she lived, thought or wrote, and only physical impossibility prevented her leading the life she had lived since she was a young woman. At her eightieth birthday party she had wowed her guests by appearing in a gold lamé coat, and sat radiant with pleasure, her eyes still that amazing shade of blue, which showed no signs of fading to octogenarian paleness.
The accident occurred during ‘a jolly weekend in London’. She had spent the day shopping, and after dinner with friends was invited next door for drinks. Despite her usual care (she had written to Decca a short time earlier advising her to be careful about breaking legs or hips), she fell down some steep steps and suffered a clean fracture below the knee in her weak leg. She was taken to hospital where the bone was successfully pinned, and on coming round from the anaesthetic her first words were ‘Who won the Grand National?’ Within twenty-four hours she was sitting up in bed entertaining visitors, such as Debo’s granddaughter, Isabel, with her new baby, and several other callers, and being her usual ‘terribly funny’ self. Debo was in Ireland and spoke to Pam on the phone. She had just arrived in London when she received a message to go directly to the hospital. Pam died ten minutes before Debo could get there.
‘But imagine how she, of all people, would loathe a life confined to a wheelchair with somebody to look after her,’ Decca wrote. ‘And – God forbid, to do the cooking! (how I’d hate to
be that somebody, come to think of it).’ The last time Decca had seen Pam was in the previous autumn when Decca was a guest speaker at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. She and Bob had taken several people to Pam’s cottage (‘neat as a pin’), which was near by, and Pam had cooked ‘the most delicious 3-course lunch . . . completely single-handed’.20 The scrapbook row, which Decca had not forgotten but had decided to overlook, was long behind them.
Hosts of friends attended the funeral at Swinbrook to sing the hymn sung at all Mitford funerals, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. Today, a small oak planted by Pam on the village green is as much a memorial to ‘the quiet Mitford sister’ as is her headstone in that peaceful place, which held so many childhood memories. Although she had no children of her own Pam’s many nieces and nephews were left feeling bereft: ‘Tante Femme’s’ maternal and caring qualities were unique in the family, and of all Sydney’s daughters she was the most like her mother. A friend who attended the funeral wrote and told Decca that Debo had forbidden the vicar to preach a sermon – ‘So like Farve with his stopwatch set for ten minutes,’ Decca commented.
In November that year Decca was staying at Dinky’s apartment in New York. She tripped on the hem of her long skirt as she and Bob were leaving to go out to dinner and suffered multiple fractures in her ankle. After a cast was fitted she and Bob were able to fly back to California where she was cared for by Benjamin’s Korean wife Jung Min. Decca wrote to Debo that she was well aware that the accident had been caused by clumsiness because she had had too much to drink. She had broken her wrist a year earlier in the same way. She knew she had become far too dependent on alcohol to get her through difficult times, to enjoy good times, and increasingly simply to get her started in the morning. She considered all this and made a decision to give it up, cold turkey.
The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family Page 53
