The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  During the first two days that Churchill spent at the White House he had no free time, but as soon as he could he contacted Decca. He already knew, of course, that Esmond was missing. On Christmas morning Roosevelt had arranged to take Churchill to the little church in Arlington, Virginia, ‘to sing hymns with Methodies’.19 Two Secret Service men were dispatched to the Durrs’ house at Seminary Hill, with a message asking Decca if she would join him at the church, and spend some time with him at the White House after the service. Decca had gone out to call on some friends, and having listened to the message Virginia drawled, ‘Waaal, it’ll take more than two men to get Decca into church, even for the Prime Minister of England and the President of the United States.’20 When Decca returned and was told about the message she telephoned the White House immediately. Though she had no particular fondness for Churchill she knew that through him she could get the information she wanted about Esmond. She explained who she was and was immediately put through to Eleanor Roosevelt, who made an appointment for her to see Churchill the following morning.

  She took Dinky with her, ten months old, fair and chubby, and dressed in a white woollen suit.21 Churchill was in bed, hard at work on a speech to be delivered to Congress later that day, and which famously began ‘I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.’7 Decca recalled that ‘He looked marvellous . . . like some extravagant peacock in his bright silk dressing gown.’22 He was affectionate in his manner, and warmly sympathetic about Esmond. She listened attentively to what he had to tell her, and it could not have been an easy task for him.

  He told her that, at Nellie Romilly’s request, he had already made enquiries about Esmond and had learned that there was not the slightest chance that Esmond had been taken prisoner. His aircraft had left the base at 4.45 p.m. as part of a nine-plane raid of Hamburg. The crew were reported to be in good spirits. Shortly after 8 p.m. a radio message advised that due to low oil pressure in the port engine the captain had abandoned the mission and was returning home. At 8.30 p.m. another message was received, ‘Give bearings immediately.’ Bearings were taken on the radio signal, and a navigational course was plotted and relayed back. Twelve minutes later the aircraft put out an SOS signal, but no further contact could be established.

  The position had been confirmed at about 110 miles east of the Yorkshire coast, over the North Sea, but searchers could only guess at how much further the aircraft might have flown before ditching. On the following morning a thick fog prevented a search until almost noon, when three air-sea rescue aircraft set off and searched throughout the remaining hours of daylight. It was intensely cold and there was a lumpy sea. A large patch of oil was observed about thirty miles south-west of the assumed position, but there was no sign of a dinghy, and no wreckage was ever found. On the 2 and 3 December thick fog lasted all day and prevented any further search so the rescue operation was abandoned. Churchill was ‘quite sure that Esmond had been drowned’. Even had the crew survived a landing at sea, he told Decca, the temperature of the North Sea in late November was such that no one could survive more than twenty minutes in the water.

  Decca was devastated and Churchill was deeply affected at the distress of the young woman who, he wrote to Nellie, ‘looked very lovely’.23 To mask the awkwardness of the moment, and give them both an opportunity to recover, he cleared his throat and changed the subject. He began to talk about Decca’s family, hoping to comfort her. She hardly took in most of what he was saying, but when he talked about Diana, and explained what he had done to try to make things more comfortable for her, including arranging for some of the convicts to clean the prison, she came to life. A sudden and uncontrollable anger swept over her at the thought of Diana being pampered by servants when Diana’s ‘precious friends’ had just killed Esmond. She exclaimed hotly that Diana and Mosley should be put up against a wall and shot. Churchill had had no idea of her feelings about Diana, and listened quietly while she raged. Then he brought the subject back to Esmond and Giles.

  As small children the brothers had spent many Christmases, and most of their summer holidays, at Chartwell with the Churchills. He felt he knew them well. Decca realized that Churchill’s affection for Esmond was genuine, and his regret at Esmond’s loss was not simply assumed. He told her he was full of admiration for Esmond and that he had died a hero’s death. He advised Decca to remain in the USA for the duration of the war24 but offered to arrange for her to return to her family if she wanted to do so. She said she had not made up her mind what to do. As she was leaving he called in his secretary, and Decca was handed an envelope addressed to Mrs Esmond Romilly. When she looked inside it she found five hundred dollars.

  Later a rumour went round London about this gift. It was not secret and a number of people seemed to know about it, possibly through Nellie. It was said that Decca had thrown it in his face. This is not true. She recognized that the gift was kindly meant, to help her in a difficult time, and - as she said in her papers - ‘$500 was a great deal of money.’ But she did come, after a while, to regard it slightly as ‘blood money’ so she gave some to the Durrs’ elder daughter to buy a pony, and donated the rest to a Communist Party fund. When Churchill saw Tom Mitford in Libya some months afterwards, he told him of the meeting. She was not just angry about Diana, he said, for on hearing that she had just completed a stenography course and was looking for a job, Churchill offered to get her one on the staff of the British ambassador, Lord Halifax. She snapped, ‘I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole.’ Churchill told Tom that he felt very snubbed, and sighed that Decca was as fanatical a Communist as ever.25

  Now, Decca began to accept that Esmond was dead. Cliff and Virginia Durr often heard her weeping at night. Sometimes Virginia would go to her room and Decca would sob on her shoulder. That the invincible Esmond had perished in the icy waters of the North Sea was a terrible thing for her to bear.26 The image of him drowning in that cold water haunted her. Decca could be ‘cool and aristocratic’ when she chose, but Virginia Durr wrote that as one of the few people who had ever seen her with her defences down she knew that Decca was a very emotional and vulnerable woman. After the desolation and weeping came the natural anger of grief, which was focused on the Mosleys, especially Diana, for despite Unity’s history she was never accorded a share of the blame for Esmond’s death. Decca felt sorrow for Unity, never anger. But she never ceased to blame Diana for Esmond’s death, and she was a good hater.

  Virginia Durr was deeply concerned about her, and wrote secretly to Sydney, saying Decca would ‘be furious and send out her porcupine quills at me’ if she found out about the letter. From Decca’s descriptions of her family in England, Virginia wrote, she had formed

  a high opinion of your loyalty to your children and your strength of purpose . . . The situation here is very simple. I think Decca wants to come home to England but she feels she has no place to come. She receives from the Canadian Government about $65 a month as a dependant’s allowance, and W. Churchill as you know gave her $500. The allowance from the Canadian Government will stop after 6 months if Esmond is not found and she will receive a very small pension . . . it may be that it is too dangerous for her to make the trip to England but at least she should not have the feeling that there is no place she can go in England . . . she is very welcome here, but . . . she is so essentially English, and so bound to England by her affection that she could never be anything else. She has been hurt so much both by circumstances and her own fierce pride that I cannot bear for her to have the further hurt of feeling unwanted.27

  Immediately Sydney wrote, begging Decca to return home. Decca’s cousins, Rosemary (daughter of the late Clement Mitford) and her husband Richard Bailey (son of Sydney’s sister Aunt Weenie), were in Washington at the time, and it was suggested that she return home with them.28 Sydney heard from Decca before her letter could have reached Washington. Worn out by sleepless nights and crushed by al
ternate hope and despair, Decca wrote on 22 February, almost three months after Esmond was reported missing, that she was still convinced he was alive, a prisoner of war, and that she thought she might not hear anything from him until the end of hostilities.29 She had decided, she continued, to remain in the USA, was continuing with her stenography lessons and had a part-time typing job with the RAF delegation. Decca’s mettle now made itself apparent. The easy option for her would have been to return to England with her baby. There she would have been welcomed, fussed over and cared for. She would hardly have had to think. Instead she was determined to carry on the fight that she and Esmond had begun, against Fascism in all its forms. And she felt she could do that more effectively in the USA, starting with nothing.

  At the end of 1941, while trying to support Decca from afar, Sydney had plenty of problems at home. Debo’s baby, a son, was stillborn. Unity was sent off to stay with friends so that Debo, who was very depressed, could come to the cottage for a while. It was tragic for Sydney that her daughters all seemed at odds with each other. She could never understand it. Nancy, too, had a crisis. Her lively relationship with ‘the charmer’ André Roy had resulted in an ectopic pregnancy in which her Fallopian tubes were found to be damaged beyond saving and so were removed. She was told that she could never have children. Perhaps it was not surprising that in the circumstances Peter’s parents were not sympathetic, but Nancy clearly expected them to be. Her mother-in-law was told by the surgeons that Nancy would be ‘in danger’ for three days. ‘Not one of them even rang up to enquire let alone send a bloom,’ Nancy wrote to Diana. ‘I long to know if they looked under R in the death column . . . Muv was wonderful. She swam in a haze between me and Debo. When my symptoms were explained to her she said, “Ovaries - I thought one had 700 like caviar.” Then I said how I couldn’t bear the idea of a great scar on my tum to which she replied, “But darling who’s ever going to see it?” Poor Debo must be wretched, the worst thing in the world I should think - except losing a manuscript of a book which I always think must be the worst.’30

  Friendly relations had been re-established between Nancy and Diana, and occasionally, when Diana got permission for her elder children to spend a day with her in Holloway, Nancy had twelve-year-old Jonathan and ten-year-old Desmond to stay with her overnight at Blomfield Road to make things easy for them. ‘They are bliss,’ she told Diana, ‘so awfully nice & thoughtful and tidy. The nicest guests I ever had. Jonathan is so funny...’31

  In March 1942 Nancy got a job at three pounds a week managing Heywood Hill’s bookshop at 17 Curzon Street.32 George Heywood Hill had been called up, so Nancy ran the shop helped by his wife, Anne. She enjoyed her job, had always loved being surrounded by books, and here her wide knowledge of literature was put to a practical use. She had no objection to the administration side of a bookshop, packing and unpacking, sorting and placing the books in their correct categories, and her friends popped into the shop for a chat whenever they passed. It became a meeting place, with knots of Nancy’s friends standing around ‘roaring’ so that at times other customers might have been forgiven for feeling they were intruding on a private cocktail party. Nancy always had a new story to make droppers-in laugh, such as the one she told of the wife of the American millionaire who met a parson’s daughter wearing a necklace of lapis lazuli. ‘Oh,’ said the American, ‘I have a staircase made of those.’33 She usually walked the two and a half miles to work every morning, and sometimes back again in the evening, so she became fit. The only thing she disliked was the drudgery of working hours. Once she decided to catch a bus and was accosted by an American serviceman who grabbed her round the waist. Nancy rounded on him. ‘Leave me alone, I’m forty!’ And he did.

  James Lees-Milne was surprised to find that the rebellious Nancy had become rather conventional. ‘It is clearly our duty,’ she lectured him, ‘to remain in England after the war, whatever the temptation to get out. The upper classes have derived more fun from living in this country since the last war than any other stratum of society in any other country in the world. No more foreign parts for us.’34 And she hissed the final sibilant, almost turning it into a joke. But she was deadly serious about ‘doing her bit’ for the war and she demonstrated it by walking to work, saving electricity by not turning on the water heater, sticking to a four-inch depth of water in her baths, and refusing to attend a ball thrown by Debo ‘because the news was so bad’. Her first love, Hamish, had been taken prisoner, as had Tim Bailey - the only survivor of the four Bailey cousins.35 Tom was in Libya and Prod was in Ethiopia. While they were dancing in London, she said, the men might be fighting for their lives.

  This was a somewhat inconsistent view, for Nancy hardly lived like a nun and had an active social life, which included throwing parties regularly. To fill lonely evenings she had begun work on what she called ‘my autobiography’ but, she told friends, she would not be able to publish it until her parents were dead because it would hurt them.36 Like Decca, Nancy was bitter that her parents had denied their ‘clutch of intelligent daughters’ an education, and it showed when her book was eventually published, making the Mitford family a household name. She had changed her mind about waiting until her parents were dead and they were hurt, but disguised it because they were so pleased by Nancy’s success. ‘There is a vein of callousness in her which almost amounts to cruelty,’ James Lees-Milne once observed. ‘All the Mitfords seem to have it, even Tom.’37 Nevertheless, her wit endeared her to a wide circle of friends.

  In the summer of 1942 Nancy was still involved with André Roy and when Unity turned up ‘looking a mess’ for a party at Blomfield Road, it was the ‘adored Capitaine Roy’ who took her upstairs to apply make-up and fix her hair so that she looked pretty. But fate was waiting in the wings for Nancy. Her relationship with Roy was a light-hearted, affectionate friendship, which provided emotional and social relief from her half-life as Prod’s wife. The Rodds’ marriage had been over before the war but Nancy’s pride had not allowed her to admit it; her friends said her remarkable stoicism over the bombs was the result of her ‘steeling herself to an indifference to Peter’s misbehaviour’.38 In September 1942 Nancy met Gaston Palewski and, for her, life began.

  Palewski, or ‘the Colonel’ as Nancy always called him, was the right-hand man of Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, in London. The relationship between these two men was strong for it had been Palewski, then a rising young diplomat and politician, who had first brought de Gaulle to the notice of Paul Reynaud, Minister of Finance in the Daladier government of 1934. Thereafter, both men had absolute trust in, and respect for, the other’s abilities. At the outbreak of war Palewski volunteered for the French air force and was mentioned in dispatches for his valour in the battle for Sedan.

  When France fell, he contacted de Gaulle offering his services to the Free French in London. Palewski spoke English fluently, having done a year’s postgraduate study at Oxford, and he had well-honed diplomatic skills. He spent six months in London from August 1940, acting as interpreter and go-between, but by the spring of 1941 he had become irritated and disillusioned by the constant quarrels and jealousies among the Free French as de Gaulle tried to organize an efficient resistance movement. Feeling he could be of more value in an active role, he asked for a posting to Africa and subsequently commanded the Free French forces of East Africa in Ethiopia until de Gaulle summoned him back to London in 1942 to be his chef de cabinet.

  Where de Gaulle was austere and absolutely single-minded in his quest, Palewski embraced every pleasure life had to offer. And though the fight against France’s enemies was, for the time being, the most important thing in his life, he was easily able to incorporate this aim into his considerable joie de vivre. He was forty-one, charming, intelligent and a brilliant conversationalist; he loved the arts, good food and wine, beautiful women and clever talk. He was a welcome addition to London’s café society, and before long was seen everywhere at smart parties, such as those of Emerald Cunar
d and Sybil Colefax, both of whom he had known for some years.

  While Palewski was in Ethiopia he had met Peter Rodd in Addis Ababa and when the subject came up at a dinner party, Palewski was told that Nancy Rodd would welcome first-hand news of her husband. As a result he arranged to meet her at the Allies Club in Park Lane, a short walk from the bookshop, and they talked of Ethiopia, Peter and France. Although she had lost the bloom of youth Nancy had presence, while her chic appearance, despite wartime clothes rationing, and brisk wit interested the Colonel immediately. In his diaries James Lees-Milne provides some vivid vignettes of Nancy at this time. On one occasion he noted her running down South Audley Street to get warm. ‘She made a strange spectacle, very thin and upright, her arms folded over her chest, and her long legs jerking to left and right of her like a marionette’s. I really believe she finds it easier to run than to walk.’39 On another he describes her wearing a ‘little Queen Alexandra hat, with feathers on the brim, pulled down over her eyes, and looking very pretty and debonair’.40

  Gaston Palewski was neither handsome nor patrician in appearance; he had none of the aesthete’s effeminacy that had been characteristic of the men to whom Nancy had hitherto been attracted. On the contrary, he was shortish and stocky, with features that owed more to the Polish roots of his grandparents than his innate Frenchness. He had dark hair and a moustache, and his olive skin was pitted with acne scars, yet he was unmistakably distinguished; he dressed well (Savile Row), exuded self-confidence, magnetism and infectious joviality, and Nancy found herself ‘powerfully attracted. He charmed and flattered her; he gossiped, joked and made her feel that she was the centre of his undivided attention.’41 Within weeks they were lovers, and for Palewski love-making was an art form.