The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  With Diana’s children and the farm animals, the war years for Pam were busy and not unhappy, although Derek was away a great deal of the time. With his scientific ability Derek Jackson would have been of huge value to the war effort as part of Professor Lindemann’s team at Oxford, but he demanded to be allowed to join the RAF during 1940. Lindemann fought to keep him, but a direct intervention by Churchill freed Derek to join the fighting, and he quickly demonstrated his ability in this field as in others. Posted to a night-fighter squadron as radio operator and gunner he brought to this work the same fearless attitude that he always displayed when hunting or racing. Within months he had been awarded the DFC and during the course of the war was responsible for bringing down at least five enemy aircraft, and several others that were ‘unconfirmed’. He also earned the AFC, an OBE and the American Legion of Merit.

  For Diana the time dragged interminably, for the BUF women lived in far worse conditions than their male counterparts. Although the men suffered from bed-bugs and were locked up for twenty-one hours a day in Brixton, conditions at Holloway were almost Dickensian. When a bomb fell and hit a main sewer the ground floor of the prison was awash in urine for three days as the lavatories overflowed. There was no water for washing or cleaning and almost immediately the women went down with food poisoning. Convicted prisoners were evacuated to a safer location since it was recognized that Holloway would be badly affected by bombing raids on London. Initially, Diana and her fellow Rule 18B inmates were locked into their cells at night, lights out at five o’clock, and the distant sound of nightly air-raids made the long, freezing winter nights a hell of noise and apprehension. What sustained Diana through the early days was her belief that her incarceration was temporary. Had she known it would last three and a half years, she feels she would have preferred to die. The cells were unlocked as soon as the local air-raid siren sounded so that prisoners would not be trapped in the event of a direct hit, and the women huddled together and chatted to while away the time when noise made sleep impossible. Diana was popular because she could always make them smile, and inevitably she became a sort of leader because she could articulate their problems. Also they sympathized with her over her separation from her babies. Usually during air-raids Diana went to sit with a woman who had a ground-floor cell.

  One consolation during these long months of misery was provided by a German woman, who had been given permission to bring with her a wind-up gramophone and dozens of records: Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Handel, Debussy and Wagner. She held concerts in a room across the yard. ‘Despite the tiresome pauses while the gramophone was wound up,’ Diana recalled, ‘these concerts were heavenly. There is nothing like music for transporting one a thousand miles from hateful surroundings into realms of bliss.’47 But throughout her imprisonment the highlight of her week was a letter from Mosley, who she learned had grown a beard, ‘Guess what colour it is - red!! At least quite a lot of it - silver threads among the gold.’ Mosley used his time in prison as an opportunity to study literature and languages. In his autobiography he would write, ‘Plato’s requirement of withdrawal from life for a considerable period of study and reflection before entering the final phase of action was fulfilled in my case, though not by my own volition.’ His letters kept Diana informed of his daily life, his studies, his love for her. He called her ‘my precious darling’, and ‘my darlingest one’. On the few occasions when the letters were held up for a day or two, Diana plunged into near despair.

  As months went by she was allowed occasional visits from members of the family. Even Nancy visited after a year or so, never letting Diana know that she had ‘shopped’ her, but as usual it was Sydney who was to the fore in offering support. During the entire period of Diana’s imprisonment, no matter how difficult it was to travel, Sydney was a regular visitor to Holloway for the weekly quarter of an hour with Diana when she would impart news of the children and the family. Sydney spent four to six hours travelling and was generally obliged to wait for up to an hour in the damp, grimy prison waiting room before Diana was fetched. Sydney also visited Pam and the Mosley babies whenever possible. Later, she took all Diana’s children to the prison, but she was expecting sympathy from the wrong quarter when she wrote to Decca about the conditions: ‘They have no water and no gas, so can’t cook, they get 1 pint of water a day each for washing cooking and drinking, and there is none at all for the lavatories. Diana says the smell is terrible.’48

  Nancy was unrepentant that her intervention had helped put Diana - to whom she referred in contemporary correspondence as ‘Mrs Quisling’ - in prison. Though she loved Diana she had seen hardly anything of her since the publication of Wigs on the Green four years earlier, and she clearly felt that her sister deserved punishment for supporting and encouraging a regime that had turned Europe upside down and endangered millions of promising young lives. Soon London was under blitz bombing and this alone seemed sufficient justification. Diana and her fellow prisoners were in the thick of it, too, of course, and Holloway suffered a direct hit on B wing, belying the rumour that the prison was protected because the Germans knew Diana was in there. But Nancy’s house in Blomfield Road was especially vulnerable: it was in the sightline of German bombers aiming for Paddington Station. Her reports of the bombing, once it began in the late summer of 1940, make baleful reading even though she sprinkled her letters liberally with merriment. Prod had survived Dunkirk and his regiment had performed well, but he was mostly away, leaving her alone through the air-raids. She wrote to Violet Hammersley after one raid:

  Ten hours is too long of concentrated noise and terror in a house alone. The screaming bombs . . . simply make your flesh creep, but the whole thing is so fearful that they are actually only a slight added horror. The great fires everywhere, the awful din which never stops & wave after wave of aeroplanes, ambulances tearing up the street and the horrible unnatural blaze of searchlights all has to be experienced to be understood . . . in every street you can see a sinister little piece roped off with red lights round it, or roofs blown off, or every window out of a house . . . People are beyond praise, everyone is red-eyed and exhausted but you never hear a word of complaint or down heartedness . . . Winston was admirable wasn’t he, so inspiring...49

  A few weeks later she had become so accustomed to the bombing that she could write, ‘People here pay no attention whatever now to the bombs and if somebody does take cover you can be sure they are just up from the country.’ She had changed her job at the first-aid post and now looked after evacuees and those bombed out of their homes. David came down to London for the winter and as the mews was having some essential repairs carried out - when builders could be found - Nancy opened up 26 Rutland Gate and moved in with him, taking some of her own furniture from Blomfield Road. Like many people with spare rooms, they took in homeless people for a short period, while accommodation was found for them. From October 1940 they had a Jewish refugee family billeted on them. Nancy liked them. ‘On the day after they arrived,’ she wrote, ‘Farve . . . got up at 5.30 to light the boiler for them and charming Mr Sockolovsky who helped him, said to me, “I did not think the Lord would have risen so early.” Wasn’t it biblical?’50

  Shortly afterwards, all the empty rooms in the house were requisitioned for other Jewish families evacuated from the East End.51 When Sydney arrived in London after a bomb dropped in Swinbrook and damaged the roof of the cottage, she could see no humour in the situation and was ‘beastly’ to David and Nancy. Although it had already been decided that the house must be sold as soon as possible because they could no longer afford to keep it on, Nancy wrote, ‘she says if she had all the money in the world, she would not ever live in the house after the Jews have had it’.52

  What had actually caused Sydney’s outburst of anger was that her once immaculate house was so unkempt. In mitigation Nancy had only one maid to help her while Sydney had run the establishment as a family home with half a dozen loyal staff. Nancy admitted that the house was rather dirty, ‘but it�
�s only floor dirt which can be scrubbed off’. Even had she been able to afford staff it was impossible to find anyone: all the young women who had once gone into domestic service were now in the services or munitions factories. Nevertheless, the incident caused a chill between mother and daughter for some time. And after a winter living with David, and trying to cater to his requirement of a main meal containing meat every evening, and putting up with his irascibility, Nancy was pretty fed up with her father, too.

  Like all other families, the Mitfords each had their own worries, which the war somehow made harder to shoulder. Nancy, tired from working and trying to run the house, and fully aware of Prod’s serial adultery, was depressed that her marriage was a failure, David, increasingly ill and lonely, was missing Sydney but was unable to live with her ridiculous support of the enemy. Sydney was worried about all her children and grandchildren: Tom in the Army, Diana in prison, the babies staying with Pam, Decca in the USA, Debo who was now unhappy even at her beloved Swinbrook, and, of course, the full-time care of the incontinent and mentally impaired Unity. It is not surprising that tempers flared occasionally. But despite her disagreement with Sydney even Nancy saw how unfair it was that the burden of caring for Unity should fall entirely on her mother. ‘Muv has been too wonderful with her and has absolutely given up her whole life,’ she reported to Decca, while their father was being simply beastly about Bobo. ‘He hardly ever goes near her, and has never been there to relieve Muv and give her a chance to have a little holiday.’53

  As the bombing worsened, Tom wrote advising Sydney to prepare for invasion. Nancy’s version of Sydney’s reaction to the Jews occupying her house must be compared with Sydney’s own letters at the same time. On the subject of evacuees she wrote to Decca, ‘we have about 70 at Rutland Gate . . . about 50 of them Jews, but it’s not very comfortable [for them] as there is no furniture but straw palliasses on the floor. The families have a room each to themselves which they go into during the day time but they all troop down to the basement at night . . . it is really sad to see the plight of the homeless...’54 Nancy was so fanciful in her letters, and sometimes in her speech, that it is difficult for the researcher to know what is fact and what is invention but in this case Sydney’s own mild reaction appears more likely to be the accurate version of the incident. As Sydney was wont to say, ‘There is a small knife concealed in each of Nancy’s letters.’55 As soon as the mews was habitable Nancy returned there and together with Mabel, the parlourmaid, two or three friends and a cook from the Women’s Volunteer Service, she looked after the constantly shifting residents of 26 Rutland Gate.

  It was a chance request from a friend in the War Office, at this point, that changed the course of Nancy’s life, although this is only evident with hindsight. She was asked to ‘worm’ her way by any means possible into the Free French Officers Club and find out what they were up to. ‘They are all here under assumed names,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘and all splashing mysteriously large sums of money about and our people can’t find out anything about them and are getting very worried.’56 With her social contacts it was only a matter of time before Nancy was able to comply with the request and as a result she met André Roy,57 a thirty-six-year-old ‘glamorous Free-Frog’, with whom she fell in love and had a light-hearted affair lasting into the following year. Nancy had never complained about Prod’s infidelities though she was deeply hurt and often lonely. During her relationship with André Roy, she came into her own again, sparkling, shimmering and wittily ornamenting London Society.

  Sydney, Debo and Unity returned to life at the cottage at Swinbrook, and although they were away from the terror of London bombing raids, life was anything but idyllic. As Unity recovered her strength she became as irrational and as temperamental as David had once been, but without his fun and charm. Debo was the one most affected by this, just as she had been the most affected by the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. On one occasion when David visited them for a weekend Debo wrote to Decca graphically describing the tensions in the house. ‘Muv and Bobo are getting awfully on my nerves. I must go away soon, I think. There was a dreadful row at breakfast this morning and I shouted at Muv in front of Mrs Timms. Farve shook me like he did you after you’d been to Mrs Rattenberg’s [sic] trial.’58 Despite this, she admitted, ‘I hadn’t seen him for ages . . . he was heaven. He was bloody at the scene where he shook me, but otherwise very nice.’59 Unity had commandeered two large tables in the small sitting room for her collage work, Debo wrote,

  and if I so much as put my knitting on one of them she hies up and shrieks BLOODY FOOL in my ear which becomes rather irksome . . . She absolutely HATES me . . . She is completely different to what she was and I think the worst thing . . . is that she’s completely lost her sense of humour and never laughs . . . Muv is fairly all right but awfully bitter and therefore it is sometimes very difficult. I must say she’s wonderful with Bobo and never loses her temper or gets impatient even when she’s being maddening . . . if you ever come across the Kennedys (the Ambassador here) do take note of Kick, she is a dear girl and I’m sure you’d like her.60

  Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy had fallen in love with Andrew Cavendish’s elder brother, Billy, Lord Hartington, who was heir to the Duke of Devonshire, the massive Chatsworth estate, land and properties in Yorkshire, Sussex and Ireland, and an income of a quarter of a million pounds a year. Kick was eighteen and Billy was twenty when they first met but while Billy’s antecedents were so impressive that he had been suggested as a possible future husband for Princess Elizabeth, the Kennedys, despite Joseph Kennedy Senior’s ambassadorship, were still regarded by many Americans as upstart Boston Irish who had made good only within living memory. But it was neither the age of the couple nor even their cultural differences that cast doom upon the relationship. The Cavendish family were staunch Protestants and ferociously anti-Catholic. ‘I am a black Protestant,’ the Duke of Devonshire was wont to say, ‘and I am proud of it . . . Papists owe a divided allegiance, they put God before their country.’61 The Kennedys were bitterly entrenched Catholics. The couple knew from the start that there was no future to their courtship because of irreconcilable religious differences, and Billy described it as ‘a Romeo and Juliet thing’.62 Kick was heartbroken when her father insisted she return to the USA in 1939 and by the time Debo wrote her letter to Decca, Kick was already working for the Herald Tribune in Washington.

  By now Debo and Andrew Cavendish had announced their engagement, and to make things easier at the cottage Debo often went to visit friends or family, and spent some time with Andrew’s parents at Chatsworth. Andrew was at Sandhurst before he joined the Coldstream Guards, but the couple were able to meet occasionally.63 Their wedding was scheduled for the following spring when they would both be twenty-one. In the meantime Debo worked in the garden, for which she developed an interest that surprised her, and rode a four-year-old piebald horse that she had bred from her old hunter. She trained it to pull a pony cart, which she painted blue and red - ‘It is very useful now there is so little petrol,’ Sydney wrote to Decca.64 Everyone was pleased about the engagement: Nancy wrote, ‘He is a dear little fellow & I am sure she will be happy. Also it will be easier for Muv as she [Debo] and Bobo get on so badly.’65 In December Debo moved out of Swinbrook when she was loaned a cottage at Cliveden, where she had agreed to work in the canteen of the Canadian Military Hospital.

  In this darkest time of the war, when Britain was fighting for its life, little thought was given to the appalling conditions suffered by those imprisoned under Rule 18B. Indeed, large segments of the population would have been heartily in favour of making things as uncomfortable as possible for internees. Diana’s scorn of the dirt, poor food, filthy lavatories and inadequate washing facilities helped her to rise above the horror of it all. She ignored the noise of the nightly bombs that fell terrifyingly close, shaking the walls of the prison and setting her fellow inmates screaming or whimpering, because she hardly cared whether she lived or died. But
when Jonathan was taken to hospital for an appendectomy and she was refused permission to visit him, she found her situation almost unbearable. All day and all night, she paced the floor of her cell, worrying about her child lying seriously ill, and probably asking for her. In that first winter in prison she began to suspect that her imprisonment might be intended to last for the duration of the war. This was the nadir of Diana’s life.

  As 1940 drew to an end, things were tough for the rest of the Mitford family too, but not as gloomy as they might have been. None of them had been bombed out or injured, and they had Debo’s wedding to look forward to. Debo and Andrew were to live in a small house in Stanmore, Middlesex, close to where Andrew was to be stationed. Pam and Derek had a house near by. ‘I expect we will be terrifically poor,’ Debo wrote to Diana, ‘but think how nice it will be to have as many dear dogs and things as one likes without anyone saying they must get off the furniture. I do so wish you weren’t in prison, it will be vile not having you to go shopping with, only we’re so poor I shan’t have much of a trousseau.’66