The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  On 28 December 1942, Bob Treuhaft wrote to his mother Aranka of the ball to which he had escorted Decca. It had taken place at

  a tremendous colonial mansion with white columns, footmen etc . . . all the women were seven foot tall and looked down their noses. I was probably the only non-congressman, non-commissioner or non-delegate, and certainly the only non-Aryan.’

  My sudden appearance on the Washington social scene - the ball was only the climax of two weeks of similar activities - is connected with my wild, uncontrollable and completely futile infatuation for the most terrific female the world has ever seen.

  You’ve probably heard of Unity Mitford . . . and her sister. One of them is reputed to be Hitler’s girl friend . . . and the other is married to Oswald Mosley, leader of the English fascists. Well, this is their sister, the only non-fascist member of the family and consequently disowned by them years ago as a radical.

  She married Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew, and went to Spain to fight with the loyalists in the Spanish war . . . he joined the RAF and has been lost 2 years [sic], and she has a beautiful 2-year-old baby. I discovered her working here at the OPA . . . and we’ve become good friends. She’s constantly sought after by the local aristocracy and diplomatic set, and she’s constantly throwing them out of her house because she hates stuffed shirts . . . Besides being beautiful she is exceptionally talented and shines with a kind of fierce honesty and courage. All this will undoubtedly make you very, very sad, because it is another lost cause. But you shouldn’t feel that, because I’ve never enjoyed anything so much in my life and . . . the situation is under control.10

  Since Aranka knew that Bob was on the verge of an engagement to a young woman called Mimi, this letter called forth an anxious query as to what he thought he was playing at. ‘Mimi went to Detroit and wants to come back in two months and marry me,’ he replied soothingly, ‘don’t worry. Nothing rash will happen before I see you again.’11 When Decca learned, at a New Year’s Eve party, of Bob’s understanding with Mimi, she was deeply shocked, not by the relationship but by her own reaction. ‘For the first time in my life,’ she wrote, ‘I was assailed by the bitter, corrosive emotion of jealousy. I could not quite understand this myself, but it brought home to me what I had begun to suspect: that my feelings about Bob were in a hopeless muddle.’12 She felt such pleasure in Bob’s company and looked forward to seeing him more than anything else in her life except Dinky. Yet she was still grieving for Esmond, still had that tiny doubt in the back of her mind about his death, and she believed that she would never, could never, love another man. She told herself that she had ‘no call over Bob’s affections’ or even the right to mind who he went out with. At this point, unable to handle the matter, Decca ran away for the second time. She learned of a vacancy in the OPA in San Francisco, which paid $1,800 a year, and she put in her application for a transfer.

  In February she and Dinky set off for California. Bob offered to see her off but was taken aback when he came to help with her luggage, which consisted of a large suitcase, Dinky’s tricycle, and a dozen bulging carrier-bags tied up with string. He commented that he hadn’t expected matched luggage but he thought she might have tried at least for matched carrier-bags. He was unable to stand the thought of parting from Decca and stayed on the train with her for a few stops, before catching a bus back to Washington. They promised to write to each other. For the rest of the three-day train journey Decca had plenty of time to reflect that in running away from her feelings for Bob she had put three thousand miles between her and her American friends, and she was going to a place where she didn’t know a soul. She tried to override the unusual diffidence that she experienced after Bob got off the train, telling herself that she had now left everything behind her, including the still bitter memory of Esmond’s death. She was heading for a new life. It was exciting. Wasn’t it?

  During the first few days she found temporary lodgings (forty dollars a month, room and board) and someone to care for Dinky while she settled into her new job. It was important that there was not too much interruption in her income and, she told herself, there would be time later to look for a better home. For Decca the regional office was more interesting than Washington’s for it was a hotbed of warfare between radicals and conservatives and there were fierce clashes over political issues. The radicals fought for the rights of government employees to join unions, and for rent and price controls. The conservatives were suspected of planting stool pigeons in the unions, and liaising with the Apartment House Owners Association and business interests generally to sabotage the work of the OPA. This sort of activity was right up Decca’s street, yet she was listless and could hardly take an interest.

  Then there were Bob’s letters. They were not love letters: they were the letters of a dear friend who told her indirectly that he missed her and Dinky. ‘It’s no good Dec, having all those miles of Field between us.’13 As the weeks wore on she found she missed him a good deal, and that the distance she had put between them had not put him out of mind as she had intended. She wrote to him once a week, telling him all the small details of her new life, and of incidents that she thought might amuse him such as when her landlady confided in her that her former husband had been a beast. ‘He ruined my bladder,’ Mrs Betts14 told Decca mysteriously as they washed up the dishes after supper. Bob’s response to this information delighted Decca. It was another poem set to the tune of a popular song: ‘. . . In a fit of depravity/He filled the wrong cavity/ . . . What’s the madder, You ruined my bladder/You took advantage of me.’ And Decca realized that ‘more and more I found my only source of real pleasure and sustenance was Bob’s letters’.15

  The room that Decca and Dinky inhabited in Mrs Betts’s boarding-house was at 1350 Haight Street near Ashbury. Two and a half decades later, in the Summer of Love of 1967, the Haight-Ashbury area would become the world centre of hippie culture. Now it is a trendy suburb where tourists shop and take coffee in sunny pavement cafés. In 1943, however, it was an area of run-down working-class homes, shops and cheap boarding-houses. Most important to Decca was that the motherly Mrs Betts agreed to look after two-year-old Dinky, along with her own two small boys, while Decca worked. A secondary factor was that it was convenient for her job, and was within her limited budget: she had still to save enough to buy furniture when she found an apartment. She trudged around the city following up rental advertisements but too many people were chasing too few apartments. When, after a few weeks, the occupant of the unfurnished apartment below Decca’s room moved out, she persuaded Mrs Betts to let it to her. It was the epitome of inconvenience: two small rooms, a minuscule kitchen and a boarded-up shop-front facing on to Haight Street. It could be reached only by going through the boarding-house and descending an outside wooden fire escape, or through a pitch-black alley and climbing up the fire escape. She bought second-hand furnishings and tried to make it a home.

  Although by 16 March Decca had still not made up her mind whether to stay in San Francisco or to go to Mexico to fulfil an ambition of Esmond’s, she adopted a defiant tone in her letters to Sydney. ‘We love San Francisco . . . we have got an apartment in this building,’ she wrote. ‘It is $25 a month and Mrs Betts is going to look after the Donk and feed her for an extra $40. This is a terrific bargain as nurses here in SF are about $10016 . . . You asked whether the Donk has Mitford eyes; no, she hasn’t. In fact she doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to any Mitford either in looks or character, but is exactly like Esmond.’17 This was patently untrue: Dinky would have fitted into any of those annual Mitford photographs at Asthall and Swinbrook, without raising any suspicion of being an interloper.18 But Decca was truthful about her work and enthusiastic about the new friends she had made in the union. ‘My job is heaven; tho unfortunately the reactionaries here are trying to prevent a lot of the things we want to do & it may even result in us all losing our jobs. If so, I can get another job; but I do love the OPA The FBI (like Scotland Yard) are investigating a lot of pe
ople in our division at the moment, including me. This is part of a red-baiting program. The Durrs were investigated, too.’19 Her future, she thought, did not lie in England but in the USA ‘I feel that in my job here, I’m working for the cause I always believed in - the destruction of fascism.’

  In May 1943 she was sent to Seattle for two weeks to train some new OPA recruits, and as a result of one operation in which she successfully obtained a prosecution of a lumber company there, she was offered a permanent job in Seattle at $2,600 a year. It was a big temptation, she wrote to Sydney, especially as the government would pay all her removal expenses, and rents there were much cheaper than in San Francisco. She had not turned down the offer, but she wanted to wait until after the visit of a friend who was coming out from Washington in early June. ‘By the way,’ she finished, ‘please don’t put “The Hon” on the envelopes as when I get them at the office they leave them around on my desk and of course no-one knows anything about my family. If they did, it would soon get around to some beastly journalists and all that publicity would start again.’20

  The friend she was waiting to see was Bob Treuhaft. He took a ‘streamliner’ train out to California and spent five days with Decca. During this time they spent a few days vacationing at Stinson Beach with Dinky, declared their love for each other, and Bob decided to move out to California as soon as he could arrange to do so. Fortunately there were vacancies for lawyers in the San Francisco branch of the OPA and within two weeks he had packed up his apartment, arranged to ship his furniture (‘at government expense’), and pulled strings to get an airline seat. Tickets were limited and priority was given to official travellers. ‘It was hard work but I finally persuaded the airlines how vital it was for me to get to see my old Dec in the shortest possible time,’ he wrote to Aranka on 19 June from ‘over Chicago’. ‘I’m looking forward tremendously to life in a real earthy community, after the ivory tower campus atmosphere of Washington . . . Decca’s in the swing already in local politics, clubs and unions and even in my short stay there I began to feel a part of it.’

  Eight days later he wrote again:

  If I didn’t say much over the phone it was only because the wonder and the beauty of it all just left me speechless . . . I came out here knowing that Decca loved me, but with little hope of persuading her to marry me. The second day here I asked her the question and she said yes before I had a chance to finish, because she had been thinking about this for months, and had already made her decision. When Decca makes up her mind she never changes it . . . We parked the Dinkydonk with some friends and went out to a beautiful resort [Guerneville, California] among the Redwoods on Russian River and got married by a lady justice of the peace the next day [21 June]. I never dreamed that so much glorious living could be packed into one week. Aranka she is just magnificent in every way - and completely devoted. She is the only girl that I’ve ever known that I know I can be completely happy with, whatever may happen.21

  Decca’s best friends, Marge (Frantz) and ‘Dobbie’ (Doris Brin), were not entirely sure about the marriage. ‘When he first arrived he was obviously nuts about her, but we thought he wasn’t good enough for her,’ one said.22

  Decca also wrote home with news that dumbfounded her family.

  Darling Muv, you will be v. surprised to hear I am married to Bob Treuhaft. I know I haven’t told you about him before, so I’ll do so now. I have known him since last December . . . and since coming out here in February I was terrifically lonely without him. We are tremendously happy and all the bitter, horrible past months seem to have vanished . . . we are going to live out here and we will come on a trip to Europe after the war . . . The Donk adores Bob. I do hope you realise how wonderful everything is. I would have written you sooner about it except that it was so terrifically sudden . . .23

  It was very fortunate, she wrote, that the whole thing had been done secretly and there had been no publicity in the papers.

  They would have made an awful stink, especially as Bob is Jewish and they would have brought out all the old stuff about our family . . . I really didn’t mean to tease when I wrote about being turned out by the family. That’s all a long time ago anyway. What I really meant was . . . that all our ideas and beliefs are so tremendously different and opposed that it would be impossible to go back to an ordinary family life. But I don’t think anymore, as I once did, that this means one can’t be on writers or even speakers if close enough.24

  However, this policy was not to be universally applied. Later that year when writing to advise that Bob had been promoted and had a job at the magnificent salary of $4,600, and that she had applied for US citizenship, she added angrily that she was furious to hear about the release of the Mosleys and felt it was a betrayal of those engaged in fighting Fascism. Indeed, if she were to hear that Diana and Mosley were staying with Muv she had decided not to continue writing.25

  Having read that there had been a mass demonstration of protest from forty thousand people, who marched on the House of Commons demanding ‘Put Mosley Back’, Decca went further. She wrote to Churchill (‘Dear Cousin Winston’) protesting that the release of her sister appeared to indicate that the government was out of touch with the will of the people of Britain to defeat Fascism in all its guises and an absolute betrayal of all those who had given their lives in the war to date.26 She demanded that the Mosleys be kept in jail, and she felt so strongly that she broke her own rules. She made the letter public by giving it with an exclusive press release to the San Francisco Chronicle, thus ending her period as a closet Mitford.

  The papers had been on to her anyway. The Examiner had run the story headlined, ‘Sister of Nordic Goddess in OPA Job Here’ after a journalist talked his way into Decca’s office and - when he took her picture through a glass partition - was attacked by a furious Decca who knocked the camera out of his hands, kicked it and grabbed him by the throat. The other papers ran stories inventing facts where they could find none, and her own polite ‘No comment’ to journalists waiting outside her office building was construed in the press as ‘a reluctance to discuss her presence in San Francisco’. This, she said, reminded her of a similar incident when she and Esmond were runaways in Bayonne and Esmond had threatened to punch a reporter if he continued to pester them. The reporter filed his story next day, quoting Esmond as saying, ‘I am with the girl I love.’

  For some days Decca and Bob hid in their apartment with the blinds pulled. The difficulty of access to it suddenly became an asset, as reporters had to knock on the door of the boarding-house whereupon Mrs Betts sent them packing. Fifteen years later Decca wrote that she regretted the tone of her letter to Churchill, because with hindsight she found it ‘painfully stuffy and self-righteous - and also, as Nancy pointed out in her understated fashion, it was “not very sisterly”’ but, she said, when she wrote it she was feeling ‘a deep bitterness over Esmond’s death and a goodly dash of familial spitefulness’.27 Her letter led to her being invited to join the Communist Party through her friend Dobbie Brin (later Walker), whom Decca had met during her first weeks in San Francisco.

  There was a slight hiccup in Decca’s application to join the party because the membership application form contained the ominous question: ‘Occupation of father?’ and she did not feel that ‘Aristocrat’ or ‘Peer of the Realm’ was acceptable. Fortunately she remembered her father’s gold mine, and was able to answer ‘miner’.28 Her background and connections were known about, of course. And though there were a few dissenters she was elected to membership on the understanding that she would do all she could to ‘overcome the handicaps of birth and upbringing’. To Decca, being elected did not mean simply being content to be a card-carrying member and attend meetings. It meant being an activist, and her enthusiastic participation in party activities was soon rewarded. ‘Within a few months of joining the Party, Bob and I rose in the ranks.’ Bob was elected to serve on the campaign committee for the party’s municipal election platform. Decca became ‘Drive Director’, res
ponsible for collecting a sort of monthly ‘tithe’ of a day’s pay from party members. She excelled at this, and her enormous charm made her popular with almost everyone. Shortly afterwards she was nominated for the full-time job of county financial director.

  The amount of publicity that the Mosleys’ release provoked in San Francisco and throughout the USA was nothing to what was happening in England. Until the autumn, 1943 had been a reasonably quiet year for Sydney. In the spring David had undergone surgery to remove the cataracts which had made him quite blind. To everyone’s relief this was successful, and though he now had to wear thick glasses he could see again. There was also great joy when Debo gave birth safely, in April, to a baby girl, Emma. Tom had been in Libya but was now in Italy; he wrote as regularly as the war allowed, short letters just to let Sydney know he was safe. Pam was happy with her country life. Unity was now able to travel alone and could spend short periods with friends and relations. Doctors said she had recovered as far as she was likely to, and although friends who had known her before she shot herself found her an uncomfortable caricature of her former self, she seemed contented enough. Then, in October, Mosley became ill and they were all pitchforked into front-page drama again.

  Because of prison conditions, lack of exercise and inadequate diet, both Mosley and Diana had suffered from periods of illness during the two years they were in Holloway. Diana collapsed at one point with dysentery, which fellow prisoner Major de Laessoe treated, with some pills he found in his old first-aid kit that dated from a residence in Angola. She was unconscious for twelve hours and when the pills were analysed they were found to be opium, of which she had been given a massive dose. Mosley’s was an old weakness: phlebitis caused by poor circulation in his right leg, which had been damaged in the First World War flying accident. He was unwell and in a lot of pain in June 1943, when the eminent doctor Lord Dawson examined him and concluded that the phlebitis would not clear up in prison. He advised the government that Mosley should be released. Prison doctors disagreed. In November 1943, the illness flared up again. This time Mosley’s condition deteriorated rapidly, and so much so that the prison doctors were now inclined to agree with Lord Dawson’s earlier opinion, although releasing him hardly seemed an option. Diana was worried that he might not survive the winter and decided that she must let Churchill know how seriously ill Mosley was, and appeal for better treatment. Tom was serving abroad so, much as she hated to do it, she asked Sydney to go and see Clementine Churchill for her.