Clementine had been a bridesmaid at Sydney’s wedding forty years earlier, and both Redesdales had once been proud of their connection with Winston. Since 1939, however, Sydney considered that Churchill bore a major responsibility for causing the war (‘a warmonger’ was her description of him), and was certainly responsible for Diana’s incarceration. For Diana’s sake, however, she swallowed her reluctance to ask a favour of him, and went to see Cousin Clementine. It was a difficult interview. Clementine began by saying, ‘Winston has always been so fond of Diana,’ and telling her that the Mosleys were better off in prison as they would probably be lynched if released. Sydney said frostily that they were prepared to take the risk. ‘I can picture her cold and proud demeanour,’ Diana wrote in her autobiography.
Whether Sydney’s appeal influenced the matter is not known, but shortly afterwards a medical report submitted by a Home Office doctor, sent to examine the invalid, worried the government enough to consider releasing Mosley forthwith. They weighed the fact that his death in captivity might confer on him a form of martyrdom and provide a new rallying point for English Fascists. The Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, argued strongly against releasing the Mosleys but Churchill was in favour and he carried the cabinet on 18 November. The war rumbled on but England no longer stood alone: the alliance with Russia and the USA had made a tremendous difference, and Churchill’s popularity as war leader was riding high. He must have anticipated a level of protest from Labour MPs, trade unions and Communists, but no one was quite prepared for the storm that broke. On 19 November he wrote to his wife, ‘Today Mr Morrison is going to tell the House about the Mosleys. I hope it goes all right.’29
The Mosleys learned about the decision from their wardress, who heard it announced on the radio on 20 November, burst into tears and ran to tell them they were free. It was a restricted form of freedom: they were advised that they would be permitted to live only in locations approved by the Home Office, and under house arrest, ‘for the duration’. They were not allowed to live in London, to own a car, or to travel beyond a seven-mile radius of their accommodation. Nor were they allowed to meet or associate with anyone in the Fascist movement, or to make any political speeches or announcements or put out press releases. The initial problem was where they were to go. Savehay Farm was still requisitioned by the War Office and the only other property they owned was the London flat, which they were forbidden to use. Diana got a message to Pam and Derek, who immediately offered to take them in at Rignell House.
During the three days it took to make the necessary arrangements a countrywide outcry grew. Newspapermen waited outside the prison gates on hastily erected press stands, newspapers filled their front pages with reports on the matter and protest demonstrations were organized. It must have been an agonizing three-day wait for Diana, with the fear that their release might yet fall through because of the protests. But finally they were smuggled out in pitch darkness some hours before dawn through a little-used side gate in the prison, which the reporters had overlooked. There, two police cars were waiting with engines running.
We were driven fast through the dark, sleeping city [Diana wrote]. The police kept looking behind them but we had given the journalists the slip. As day broke and revealed the frosty country landscape M[osley] and I thought that nothing so beautiful was ever seen by human eye. At Rignell a wonderful welcome awaited us. Derek had got leave; Muv used her month’s allowance of petrol and came over with Debo. We had delicious food, beautiful wine, talk, and laughter, perfect happiness. Then, for the first time in three and a half years we slept in soft, fine linen, in soft warm beds.30
Neither Sydney nor Diana ever really gave Churchill credit for what he did on Diana’s behalf. His papers now reveal that he had always been opposed to the Mosleys’ imprisonment without trial, that he had a ‘deep loathing’ of Rule 18B, and that he had stuck his neck out on Diana’s behalf to get better treatment for them and, ultimately, to allow them to leave the prison. He was in Cairo when they were released and it was left to Herbert Morrison to bear the brunt of the protests. Clementine reported to her husband what was happening in his absence. On 23 November twenty thousand union members and factory workers from all over the country (many undertook long, difficult train journeys) handed in a petition to Downing Street and stood in protest in Whitehall. The newspapers had a field day. Three days later another mass protest was held in Parliament Square and MPs were lobbied as they went in to hear Morrison defend the decision. There was a debate in which a backbencher asked why Lady Mosley had been released since it was her husband who was ill. ‘Yesterday, Mr Morrison lunched with me,’ Clementine Churchill wrote to Winston. ‘He seemed battered by what he is going through in the Mosley affair. I felt very sorry for him . . . the crowds at various points of London have been quite large but good-tempered. I ran into hundreds [in] Parliament Square . . . rather like a football crowd.’31
Mosley was confined to bed but he and Diana were not allowed to remain long at Rignell House. Journalists soon discovered their whereabouts and pictures of Diana looking fit and glamorous - from a photo taken years earlier at Ascot with Randolph Churchill, though he had been cropped out - appeared alongside stories that the couple were living in a luxurious country mansion protected by baying hounds, though the only dogs were Pam and Derek’s dachshunds, Wüde and Hamelin. Suddenly it was realized by someone at the War Office that Diana’s sister Pamela Jackson was the wife of the eminent scientist Derek Jackson, who had been involved in top-secret scientific projects at Oxford.32 Herbert Morrison telephoned Derek personally to explain why the Mosleys could not be permitted to remain at Rignell. Derek, the war hero who was afraid of nobody, was unimpressed: he replied that he needed no lessons in patriotism from a man who had spent the First World War dodging around in apple orchards.33
In any event the Mosleys decided that it was best for them to move, but houses were impossible to find. All country towns and villages were bulging with people who had fled the cities, or had been evacuated due to bombing. Sydney heard that the partly disused inn at Shipton-under-Wychwood was available to rent, and as it was only three miles from Swinbrook, it meant they could visit each other. It was called, somewhat bizarrely, the Shaven Crown, and the hotel had been closed since the beginning of the war though the bar still functioned as a village pub. The rooms were as cold, dirty and uncared-for as any building neglected for so long would be, but they moved in with Nanny and the two little boys - Alexander, now five, and Max, three. Diana set about turning it into a temporary home, and when Jonathan and Desmond came home from boarding-school for the Christmas holidays Diana had the joy of having all her children around her at last. It was their first Christmas together since 1939. They spent the day at Mill Cottage with Sydney and Unity, all crammed into the tiny dining room.
The Shaven Crown was intended only as a short-term solution to their housing problem and at once Diana set about looking for a suitable house. In January she found Crux Easton, ‘the most delightful house one could imagine’. Meanwhile, Mosley was still very ill and the burden of caring for him, doing the housework and cooking for the family was hers. Feeding them all was the most immediate difficulty for rationing was at its height and she had no store of the basic provisions that most prudent housewives had built up. Sydney often gave her a few eggs, which were like gold dust, but, Jonathan recalled, everyone was obsessed with food. When Unity’s dachshund was drowned in the Windrush Diana returned home and announced solemnly, ‘There’s terrible news I’m afraid.’ Thirteen-year-old Desmond immediately assumed the worst: ‘What,’ he asked anxiously. ‘No sausages at Hammett’s?’34
Wisely, Sydney, did not mention the Mosleys in her next letter to Decca, for fear she would stop writing.
We had a very cheerful Christmas, couldn’t get a turkey or a goose but had a large, enormous chicken, almost as good. Very horrid not being with Farve and I greatly hope that next Christmas we may be together. I have not heard lately from Tom; he may be in Italy n
ow . . . Debo spent Christmas with the Devonshires, her house is very cold and she was quite glad to go somewhere warm for a bit. She and Emma are perhaps coming here when I expect to go to Inch Kenneth for a month or more.
She said that what she had most enjoyed was organizing a Christmas party for fifty village children, evacuees and thirty old people. ‘We had the Christmas tree and . . . I have still got all the old decorations & the old Father Christmas clothes, of course one can’t buy anything of that sort, and I’m nearly at the end of the candles.’ She had swapped two dozen eggs for a Christmas cake from a caterer: ‘It is worth anything to have a few hens . . . if you depended on a shop you get one egg, per head, per month - perhaps.’
Debo, she reported, was expecting a second baby in May, Andrew was in Italy, Pam was alone, but Derek got leave occasionally and managed to get home to see her. It was now impossible to get any domestic help, she said,
but no one minds a bit . . . I am sure most . . . would never go back even if they could to a house full of servants. Things like carrying coals and keeping fires going and ordinary housework are so easy and quickly done. Of course we are completely spoiled having the good Mrs Stobie, but when she goes away for a bit I see to what there is to do. My outside work takes about three hours a day and because of this I am allowed an extra 10 clothing coupons for gumboots etc. I am so pleased.35
Sydney’s chatty letter was not answered and when, after three months, she queried whether Decca had received it, Decca wrote on paper bearing the letterhead Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee:
The main reason why I haven’t written . . . is that you never answered my question about the Mosleys. I see in the papers that they are now living at Shipton, so I suppose you do see them. I was so disgusted when they were released, and so much in sympathy with the demonstrators against their release that it actually made me feel like a traitor to write to anyone who had anything to do with them. However I see that it is difficult for you, and not your fault ...36
That year Decca’s romance with Bob was not the only one to affect the family. Before she moved from Washington she met Kick Kennedy at just about the time that Billy Hartington became engaged to a niece of Lord Mountbatten.37 Kick was still madly in love with him, and was convinced that he had proposed to someone else only because she had left England.38 She felt sure that if she returned he would change his mind. Her parents objected when she resigned from her job on the Herald Tribune, and joined a Red Cross programme with the aim of returning to England to help the war effort. But Kick was more self-confident than she had been in 1939 and ignored their protests. In June she sailed for England aboard HMS Queen Mary, which had been converted to a troopship. She had been correct about Hartington’s feelings: shortly after she arrived in London they became secretly engaged. The old stalemate, however, still existed: to her brother Jack she wrote, ‘Of course I know he would never give in about the religion, and he knows I never would. It’s all rather difficult as he is very, very fond of me, and as long as I’m about he’ll never marry . . . 39
As the winter lengthened into spring and everyone waited for the invasion of France, which was now only a matter of time, the Devonshires, realizing how much the couple cared for each other, withdrew their opposition. Rose Kennedy, however, was implacable: no daughter of hers would marry out of the Church. Cardinal Spellman and Archbishop Godfrey (the English papal legate), and through him the Pope, were all involved in the heated exchanges that flew between London and Hyannis Port, in letters, phone calls and cables, in the vain hope of finding a resolution to the problem.
Eventually Kick realized that she could never hope to win over her mother, and her father had abdicated any say in the matter by embarking upon an affair with a married woman. Although she was warned that she would be excommunicated from the Church, and that her only hope of salvation was for Hartington to die first, Kick reached a private agreement about the religious education of any future children, and the couple decided to marry in a civil ceremony.
17
THE FRENCH LADY WRITER (1944-7)
On 27 April 1944 Debo gave birth to a son, Peregrine Andrew Morny1 Cavendish. Three weeks later Decca gave birth to a son, Nicholas Tito Treuhaft, and Idden, now Mrs David Horne - Sydney wrote to Decca - was also about to produce.
Sydney had been able to spend two weeks with Debo after the birth, but Decca’s announcement by cable of her new baby came as a complete surprise for she had not told them she was pregnant. She rectified her former reticence with enthusiastic descriptions of the birth, and the baby who was ‘wonderful. He weighed over 9lbs . . . having him was no trouble at all . . . the actual birth took only 7 minutes, so Bob was able to stay with me till almost the end . . . We call the new baby “the Mong” because of his Mongolian eyes (Bob is part Mongolian).’ Decca had left the OPA in December, she said, and within a few weeks would begin a new job as financial director of the California Labour School, ‘which trains Union people in organising economics etc. My job is to raise funds to keep the school going, write publicity etc. I think it will be very interesting . . .’ Dinky was growing up fast, she reported, and at three years old she could already dress herself and make her own bed. Furthermore, ‘standing perilously on a high stool by the stove . . . she always cooks the bacon for breakfast . . . and is learning to cook scrambled eggs’.2 She liked to wash the dishes and was very motherly with the new baby, and these ‘Womanly’ - as in Pamela - qualities in her small daughter were a source of amused surprise to Decca. But there were signs of Decca, too: ‘She gets furious if you try to help her do anything and she has a habit now of threatening to run away if we scold her . . . the other day she got her little suitcase and packed her doll and nightgown and started for the door. We think she has running-away blood in her, and is bound to really do it one day.’3 The family at home ‘roared’ at this.
The news of Nicholas’ birth also prompted the offering of an olive branch from David, who wrote to Decca for the first time since she had run off with Esmond. In his neat, clear handwriting, he wrote, ‘Just to send you my love and every good wish for him and his future. Some day, when things are in a more settled state, I greatly hope to see you all, and judging from all news and the look of things it seems to me there is some prospect that I may last that long - I should much like to. Much love, Farve.’4 There was a slight improvement in his failing health, undoubtedly due to the fact that Sydney had received permission to visit Inch Kenneth, and the couple spent two and a half weeks together there. Writing from the island, Sydney told Decca,
Farve looks terribly thin and frail and very easily gets tired. He sleeps a lot in the day. All the same he sees to the farm and animals and boats etc. We are in the middle of a tiresome cut-off period, the sea is too rough to get across and we have had no letters or papers for 4 days. We can always manage for food as there’s enough on the island, and of course the ‘news’ comes on the wireless. Tom is, I suppose, in this fighting in Italy. I heard from him . . . 1 May, [he was] living in a peasant’s hut in company with two Italian families and their cows! I left Debo . . . with all the excitement of Billy’s wedding . . . they really have been so faithful over 5 years and would have married years ago but for the difference in religion. To me it seems like Old Forgotten Far-off Things & Tales of Long Ago and a reversion to the days of Queen Elizabeth . . . Everyone likes her enormously, Debo and Andrew especially . . . you know her don’t you?5
The wedding of Debo’s brother-in-law Billy Hartington and Kick Kennedy finally took place at the Chelsea register office on 6 May 1944. Joseph Kennedy cabled his best wishes and made a generous settlement so that Kick would never be financially dependent upon the Cavendish family, but Rose Kennedy remained opposed to the union. As a result only one member of the Kennedy family attended the wedding, Kick’s eldest brother, Joe. He was serving in the United States Air Force, based at Dunkerswell in East Anglia, and attended the ceremony in defiance of his mother’s wishes.
The newly-weds honeymoon
ed at Compton Place, Eastbourne, the same family property used by Debo and Andrew for their honeymoon four years earlier. Then Billy returned to his regiment to take part in the preparations for the D-Day offensive. On 13 August the Kennedy family were devastated by the distressing news that Joe Jr had been killed on the previous day, when his bomber exploded during a top-secret mission. Kick wangled a place on a military flight to the USA to attend her brother’s memorial service. She stayed in Boston with her mother, having sent word to Billy to say that if there was any chance he might get leave she would return immediately. On 13 September a person-to-person call came through from London for the Marchioness of Hartington to tell her that Billy had been killed. While leading his men in a rush on German lines in Belgium he had been hit in the chest by a sniper’s bullet and died instantly.6 Frantically, Kick cabled Billy’s parents for information, but her cable crossed with one from them, telling her about Billy’s death, and asking her to come back to England. To a close friend in Washington7 she confided the gnawing pain of losing part of herself: ‘The amazing thing about Billy was that he loved me so much. I felt needed. I really thought I could make him happy.’ That she had not conceived a child during their short time together was an added misery.8
The Mitford Girls Page 39
