The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  15

  GAINS AND LOSSES (1941-3)

  On 9 February Decca gave birth to a six-pound ten-ounce girl in the Columbia Hospital in Washington. She had a bed in a five-bed charity ward,1 and was inundated with flowers, fruit and gifts for the baby. Virginia Durr, an indefatigable networker, had introduced Decca to everyone in Washington worth knowing, including Virginia’s ‘kissin’ cousins’ Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson (‘I looked up Lady Bird in the Peerage,’ Sydney is said to have written to Decca, ‘but could find no trace of her’). At innumerable Washington cocktail parties Decca had been introduced as ‘the wife of Winston Churchill’s nephew’, which, she told Esmond, while it made her cringe, she had to admit was very effective.

  Even so, considering she had been such a short time in the country and had no background there, the flood of visitors she received in hospital seems to testify to Decca’s personal charm and energy. When Eugene Meyer sent a photographer to take a picture of Decca and the baby for the Washington Post, it caused a sensation in the ward and the nurses suddenly became ‘very deferential’. Typically, Decca saw the humour in the situation, writing to tell Esmond how a rather coarse woman in a bed at the end of the ward, whom she heartily disliked, had announced loudly to no one in particular, ‘Why’re they taking her picture? Was her baby born with teeth?’2

  Initially Decca wanted to call the baby Esmé, after Esmond, but then suggested Constancia because she had been reading a book about Constancia de la Mora.3 Esmond agreed but then panicked and wrote saying he thought Carol was better as the baby would undoubtedly be called ‘Connie’. Decca countered that she didn’t see why, since no one ever called her ‘Jessie’. So Constancia it was, though to her family and friends she was always the Donk or Dinkydonk (and is still known universally as Dinky). This stemmed from that July weekend when Esmond left for Canada and Decca attended the Democratic Convention with Virginia Durr. Decca was already suffering badly with morning sickness and Virginia suggested that it was the Democratic Donkey, symbol of the Democratic Party, kicking up its heels. Thereafter Decca always referred to her bump as ‘the Donk’.

  In England the family celebrated another happy event with Debo’s marriage to Lord Andrew Cavendish, on 19 April at the church of St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield. There had been heavy bombing and many of the windows and the curtains of 26 Rutland Gate were damaged, and there was glass everywhere. But the mews cottage remained intact and the Mitfords were virtually the only family in their circle who could still live in their own home. ‘The Airlies, Wernhers, Jack and Iris and the Devonshires are all bombed out, and we have even got gas!’ Sydney reported. The refugees had all left No. 26 so it was decided to hold the wedding reception there. ‘Of course it is empty and looks hideous with so many broken windows, but it seemed the best place. The caterers will bring tables and chairs . . . We have asked such a lot of people, the Devonshires asked nearly 500 . . . everyone seems to like a party in these days when there aren’t many.’4 Sydney got hold of several rolls of heavy wallpaper and made ‘curtains’ with it for the large drawing-room windows.

  My darling Little D,

  Debo’s wedding was on Saturday and all went off well and happily. It was a pouring wet morning, which was rather horrid as of course there was so much coming and going . . . The poor old house (No. 26), quite empty with all the ball room windows blown in (the last came in on Wednesday night), looks slightly dreary, but Aunt Sport [Dorothy - wife of Uncle Tommy] had sent up some lovely spring flowers and great branches and so with these on the mantelpieces the places where the pictures used to hang looked less bad. And about 100 huge blooms of great red camellias had come up from Chatsworth from the tree planted by Paxton 100 years ago. I put them in an enormous washbasin and they were lovely.

  My curtains made of wallpaper in grey and gold really looked just like brocade, and pelmets were tacked on in the same paper. Those huge windows looked so ugly without any curtains. The ballroom I had to leave, just sweeping away the glass. The Mayfair Catering Co. did the party - the last in the old house. I wonder really that they can still do it. They brought tables, chairs, linen and silver and crockery etc, and of course the food, of a plain variety. The wedding cake was one they had made some time ago, of course, no icing as that is not allowed, but they put on a white cardboard casing which looked quite nice and was taken off to cut it.

  Debo’s dress was all white tulle . . .very pretty and she had a bouquet of white orchids. Nancy and Peter were there, and the Woman (but not Derek) and Tom, who showed people to their seats . . . The party lasted quite a bit and Debo went to the Mews to change her dress . . . they had quite a lot to do after they left Rutland Gate as they had to get Debo’s identity card and ration card altered to her new name, and then go on and register for National Service as she was born in 1920 . . . They have taken a tiny mews cottage near Regents Park and hope to go straight there after their honeymoon [in Eastbourne] in about a week . . .

  All greatest love, darling,

  Muv.5

  Photographs of David arriving at the church with Debo show an old man. Dressed in his Army greatcoat over his old uniform, he looks grim and wretched. One wedding guest described him as ‘a broken man’.6 Among the wedding telegrams were messages from Diana and Mosley, Joe, Jack and Kick Kennedy, and Decca, who hinted that Debo had nearly got her duke. ‘A very counterhon remark,’ Debo commented.7 Considering the reduced size of newspapers the wedding and going-away of ‘Lord and Lady Cavendish’ were covered in surprising detail.

  The life of the story was extended when journalists noticed that Unity appeared ‘quite normal’. Why, since she was able to attend her sister’s wedding, they asked, was she not in prison like Lady Mosley? But no one seeing those photographs and comparing them with Unity before the shooting could regard her as ‘normal’ - even her eyes were not properly co-ordinated. The matter was brought up in Parliament when a Labour MP asked the same question. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison answered coolly that he was aware of Unity’s medical condition and the circumstances in which she was living. At present, he said, there were no grounds that made it necessary, in the interests of national security, to take her into custody.

  In the eighteen months since the shooting Unity had made a recovery of sorts. By 1941 she was able to take the bus into Oxford and she even advised Decca that she had applied for a provisional driving licence to take driving lessons. In Oxford she had lunch at the British restaurant, where meals were fixed at a shilling, and Unity used to rejoin the queue to get another shilling’s worth, which was greatly disapproved of as she was recognized.8

  By the time Decca received all this news she was staying in Hamilton near Toronto, having taken Baby Dinky up by train. She rented a small flat near the military camp for a few weeks. ‘Esmond comes home to dinner every night,’ she wrote to Sydney, ‘but next week I am going back to Va’s because he goes west for final training.’ It was marvellous for them both to be together with the baby. In late June Esmond flew down to see them for a few days before shipping out for England. They spent a week at Martha’s Vineyard with friends. When someone asked him if he was nervous about flying on raids over Germany he replied, matter-of-factly, that he had no misgivings. ‘I have no doubt at all,’ he said, ‘that I will survive this war whether shot down or not.’9 On 27 June Esmond left to take a ship to England.

  Letters from the Mitford family were mostly about food shortages in England and the huge prices charged for what food was available. Sydney was grateful that she hardly ate any meat and that she no longer had a large family to cater for. However, she could still get good flour for bread, she made cheese from goat’s milk, which she sold in Burford ‘off the ration’, and they had unlimited eggs, which was lucky as ‘they are only allowed 1 egg a week in towns’. She had embarked on a project to provide ‘school dinners’ for the children at Swinbrook and Asthall as both schools were crammed with evacuees and she felt that they should get at least one nourishing hot meal a day.
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br />   Pam, with plenty of fresh produce from Rignell House farm, was more concerned about the shortage of labour for the farm and the house, and clothing coupons: ‘We only get 66 a year and a new Mackintosh is 14,’ she wrote. She told Decca about the Mosley babies, who had been living with her for a year now, and that cattle feed had become so expensive that she could no longer afford to keep the herd of beautiful Aberdeen Angus she had built up. ‘The bull, “Black Hussar”, has already gone to the butcher. Poor Black Hussar!’ Derek was now flying operations at night over Germany as gunner and navigator and had been awarded a DFC for bringing down a bomber among other things. He had just been home for six days’ rest, badly needed after eight weeks of ‘ops’.

  Debo, now Lady Andrew Cavendish, was pregnant. She could hardly keep it secret like Decca, she wrote, because she kept being sick. But there was compensation for, she joked, as it was ‘work of national importance’ she did not have to work for the war effort. She could not imagine Andrew as a father. It was hard when he went away, for she could hardly go to Swinbrook as Bobo still hated her.

  Esmond cabled from England in early August that he had arrived safely, a relief to Decca in view of the danger of U-boat attack in the Atlantic. He could be contacted, he said, at the Savoy, not that he was staying there but it was a good address to use and he could call in every few days for his mail or ask them to forward it when he had to go out of London. He knew he did not need to worry about Decca and the baby for Virginia Durr wrote to him to say how much they loved having her, and how well she was doing. ‘She misses you dreadfully of course . . . but she is “all the rage” . . . we might let her out by the day or week since she is so superior to most. “Strictly high class English refugee with good connections. Best Mayfair Accent”. All our acquaintances are green with envy . . . Seriously Decca is splendid, in fact we think you outmarried yourself...’10

  By the same post came a letter from Decca, telling him matter-of-factly that she had ‘a good chance of getting a place on a lend-lease bomber and coming to England’. It would have to be fairly soon, she told him, as she was pregnant again. By the time she received his reply, Decca had miscarried and the plan to fly to England was temporarily shelved. Instead, when she recovered she enrolled for the stenography course she had planned several months earlier, because, she added, she wanted to get out of ‘that salesgirl - refined-type-English-upper-class-lending-tone - rut’. The business school was ‘huge and busy . . . people making out schedules, high schooly and college girls all over the place rushing when the class bell rings’.11 She teased that her shorthand textbooks looked exactly like his handwriting. ‘I don’t mind a bit about [losing the baby] any more,’ she wrote, ‘and I hope you don’t. The Donk is so frightfully nice and companionable, she is really all I need.’12 There was a lot about Dinky that reminded her of Pam’s ‘womanly’ qualities.

  Esmond’s letters to Decca and to Philip Toynbee demonstrate that the sheer fatigue of nightly operations over Europe was wearing him down. His brother Giles had been captured at the start of the war, had tried to escape and was recaptured. When his relationship to Churchill was discovered he was transferred to Colditz, as a special-category prisoner. In one month six members of Esmond’s squadron were killed. Twice he found himself spending the entire day flying over the North Sea searching for survivors of aircraft reported to have ‘ditched’. He allowed himself to sink into a depression, which he only overcame after a visit to Philip Toynbee.

  When Decca wrote that, although there was no hope now of her hitching a lift on a plane to England, she had put her name down for a place on a boat, he was pleased. Earlier in the year he had been mildly discouraging about her plan to join him but now ‘I wish tremendously that I’d taken a different line right away,’ he wrote. ‘But I didn’t know how things were going to work out. Now it isn’t only that I can see you will be really happy over here, despite all the factors I’ve mentioned . . . it is also that I am being utterly selfish, and want to be with you again more than anything in the world.’

  He went on to explain that four of his ‘closest friends’ had been killed and that ‘I have been through rather a bad spell - but am now right through it. Two were people I did not have a lot in common with - it was a friendship based simply on a sharing of the same experiences combined with adaptability and agreeableness of manner . . . as a result we had developed quite an affection . . . on a fairly humorous basis of joint boastings and “line shootings” about our trips.’ He described how they used to meet in his room, discussing books and politics and life in general and the changes they hoped would be made after the war. Their loss, he felt, was ‘a cruel blow from something against which it is impossible to strike back, it is so huge and powerful and at the same time so vague and shadowy’. He continued:

  This whole business has made me realise one thing very deeply - i.e. that this sort of thing is infinitely worse for the wives etc, of the people concerned than it is for themselves. The thought that when people are missing, it is of course a very long time before any definite news can be reached of them, i.e. as to whether they have landed anywhere and been captured. In a very large number of cases this turns out to be the case. You may say, of course, that I don’t seem to have taken this attitude in the case of my friends - but that just proves what I am trying to say, i.e. one always imagines the worst somehow, which is utterly irrational.

  Incidentally, if, which I certainly think is an inconceivable improbability, I should ever find myself in this sort of situation, I have absolutely determined to escape in some way or another, and I’m sure that if you are sufficiently determined of anything you can achieve it. However I’m equally sure the need will never arise, so please don’t attach any sort of significance to the above, or imagine it indicates a resigned or nervous frame of mind . . .

  Very much love, darling angel,

  Esmond.13

  Esmond wrote again, two weeks after the above letter, full of suggestions and plans for what they would do when she came to England, where they would live, how it would be, the pros and cons of bringing Dinky or leaving her with the Durrs, but Decca had still not received this when she cabled him joyously on Monday 1 December: ‘LEAVING FRIDAY SO TERRIFICALLY EXCITED DARLING STOP DECIDED BRING DONK DO WIRE THAT YOU AGREE HOW SHALL I CONTACT YOU JOURNEY WILL BE VERY COMFORTABLE LOVE= ROMILLY’.14

  She was full of enthusiasm for the forthcoming voyage. The Durrs had gone to New York and she was to leave Washington on Wednesday 3 December to join them there for two nights and then they would see her and Dinky off. With luck she would be with Esmond at Christmas. On Tuesday 2 December, she received a telegram, which she assumed was a reply from Esmond. It read, ‘2 DECEMBER 1941, MRS E. M. ROMILLY . . . REGRET TO INFORM . . . THAT YOUR HUSBAND PILOT OFFICER ESMOND MARK DAVID ROMILLY MISSING ON ACTIVE SERVICE NOVEMBER 30 STOP LETTER FOLLOWS’.15

  The shock, of course, was dreadful. The last letter she had received from him, only a few days earlier, had been that message telling her not to give up hope if he was reported missing. It was an uncharacteristic letter, so different from all his others to her, and in her distress it must have seemed to her that when he wrote it he had been reaching out, that in some way he had known what was going to happen and had written to forewarn her. She decided not to go to England and the Durrs came rushing back to Washington to find her with her feelings icily in check, aloof with suppressed fear, but resolute. She was absolutely convinced that Esmond was still alive, she kept telling them, she would have sensed it if he was dead. She thought he had been picked up by a passing trawler, or even a German submarine. It was merely a matter of waiting for news.16 The Durrs pulled strings in Washington everywhere they could think of: the British embassy, the US Air Force, but there was no further information.

  Decca cabled Sydney and Nellie Romilly, asking them to try to find out anything they could from their end, and a flock of cables and letters winged back from England. Some merely expressed sympathy, others begged her to ‘com
e home’. After ten days she received a letter from Esmond’s commanding officer, which gave her more details. Esmond had been navigating an aircraft to Hamburg on Sunday the thirtieth and failed to return to base. Nothing was heard from his aircraft following a radio contact, which gave a position of approximately 110 miles east of the Yorkshire coast, ‘well out in the North Sea’. From the start, the CO wrote, he knew there was little chance of Esmond being found, and now, ‘as they have not been seen or picked up although aircraft searched for them the day after, I am afraid there is little or no chance of their survival. The area where they were last heard of is some considerable distance from normal shipping lanes so I think the chance of being picked up by some ship must be ruled out.’ Esmond had done some fine work on operations since joining the squadron, he wrote. ‘He was very happy and I think enjoyed the life. We shall all miss him a great deal.’17

  Even this did not shake Decca’s conviction that Esmond was alive, was probably a prisoner-of-war, and that he would escape or find a way of getting news to her. She knew this, absolutely, because he had told her in that penultimate letter. She received his final letter in due course, a normal chatty one. She felt she had to hang on to her conviction of his survival: it was all she had.

  On 7 December the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and launched assaults on the Philippines, Malaya and Hong Kong. On the following day Britain and the USA declared war on Japan. Three days later Germany and Italy declared war on the USA. Isolationists there who had campaigned for ‘schools not tanks’ might not have been happy, but Churchill recorded in his diary that on that night ‘I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.’18 On 12 December he left London for the USA for the first of his wartime meetings with President Roosevelt in Washington. He need not have hurried. HMS Duke of York took ten days over the voyage due to relentless storms, and instead of steaming up the Potomac, as intended, Churchill was so impatient to see Roosevelt that he jumped ship at Chesapeake with his valet, doctor and Lord Beaverbrook, and flew on to Washington, telling the remaining entourage to follow by train when they could.