The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  Shortly before our first son, Alexander, was born, Kit and I went to Paris and he met the German who had been assigned to work with us, a brilliant member of Goering’s Four Year Plan team. I took the monthly nurse with me to Paris in case the baby decided to be born, but he did not, and we went back to London with the agreement signed and sealed. A week or two later I had the baby and Kit announced our marriage of two years before; there was no more reason for secrecy. Just when broadcasting would have begun, the following summer, Britain declared war on Germany and our house of cards collapsed.

  *

  In the two years leading up to the war, and particularly after the Munich settlement in 1938, considered to have been a diplomatic defeat for the democracies, the possibility of war was present in everyone’s mind. Kit maintained that Chamberlain should have gone to the country and had an election after Munich; he would have won it with ease. The vociferous war faction within the Conservative Party had not much echo, and the Left had made itself ridiculous by calling for war and at the same time opposing rearmament and voting against the service estimates. Kit said: ‘The Labour Party is always for war on three conditions; that the war serves no British interest, that we have no arms to fight with and that none of the Labour leaders is expected to join up.’ Thus, though many people either hoped for war or thought it inevitable, many others did not. Rearmament, which Kit had been demanding for years past, was stepped up.

  My frequent visits to Berlin in 1937 and early 1938 did not go unobserved. I assumed that the famous Secret Service knew why I was there. I only tried to avoid the Press; in any case, the newspapers were interested in Unity, not in me. It was not difficult for the Secret Service to put one and one together: Bill Allen, advertising; Eckersley, radio engineer; myself hanging about doing nothing and then seeing the Minister of Posts. In fact, it appears that the transaction was known but not its terms, or that, compared with Plugge’s concession from France, our concession was more profitable to Germany. It seems to have been imagined that it was a gift to us from the Germans. Had it been so I should not have been obliged to go to Berlin at all, or to argue the Allens’ case with any minister. On the contrary, for Germany the foreign currency it would have earned was the whole point of the business, just as it was for France.

  At the end of July 1939 Unity and I were invited to the Bayreuth Festival, where we saw Hitler frequently. He stayed at the Siegfried Wagner Haus at Wahnfried. On our last day he told us that in his opinion war was inevitable. The British guarantee to Poland had convinced the Poles that in some unexplained way we should come to their assistance if they resisted the absorption of the German city of Danzig into the Reich. This terrible news was not unexpected; in Britain preparations for war were evident in every sphere.

  I knew Unity would not survive. She had always said that if England and Germany went to war she would prefer to die; her loyalties were too fatally divided. I told Hitler I thought my husband would continue to campaign for peace, as he had been doing for the past year. ‘If he does he will probably be assassinated, like Jaurès in 1914 [the murdered French Socialist politician],’ said Hitler.

  A few months before, George Orwell had written to Herbert Read: ‘I don’t know whether Mosley will have the sense and the guts to stick out against war with Germany, he might decide to cash in on the patriotism business.’ As we know, he had the sense and the guts. He did what he did because he foresaw that, win or lose, we should emerge from the war diminished, and because he was convinced that war solves nothing. In other words it was the ‘patriotism business’ that made him take a stand which is always unpopular and often dangerous.

  On the outbreak of war he and I were in London; all the children, including Michael and his aunt Lady Ravensdale, went to Wootton, considered fairly safe from the bombing which many people imagined would follow our declaration of war. My thoughts were with Unity; there was no news.

  On 1 September Kit issued a statement to his followers:

  To our members my message is plain and clear. Our country is involved in war. Therefore I ask you to do nothing to injure our country, or to help any other power. Our members should do what the law requires of them, and if they are members of any of the forces or services of the Crown they should obey their orders and in particular obey the rules of their service… We have said a hundred times that if the life of Britain were threatened we would fight again.

  Practically all our members of military age, including my brother Tom, were already in the services, or in the process of joining.

  If at the beginning of the war the government had said there was to be no more free speech for the duration, Kit would have conducted no campaign for negotiated peace. On the contrary, however, it was continually emphasized that abolition of free speech was one of the evil things we were fighting against, and therefore to have kept silent would have been cowardly in the extreme.

  There was a long tradition in England of political opposition to war, from Chatham in the American War of Independence, Fox in the Napoleonic Wars down to Lloyd George in the Boer War and Ramsay MacDonald in the 1914 War. The latter two were assaulted by the public at their meetings, but Kit never was. There was not much enthusiasm for war over Danzig. He advocated a negotiated peace unless Britain or the Empire were threatened or attacked, combined with rearmament. It was we who had declared war, but the German army had moved east. The Polish campaign was quickly over; Russia occupied the eastern half of the country and for the following seven months we had the phoney war. There was a flurry among Conservatives when Russia attacked Finland and voices were raised in Parliament in favour of aiding the gallant Finns. Harold Macmillan hoped to join in this fight and bought a white fur hat, but the Finns gave in. He was able to wear his hat years later for a Russian Summit and told the Press the origin of his curious headgear. Although I was again pregnant I often went to Kit’s meetings at this time. There was never the slightest disturbance—large crowds listened quietly to what he had to say, and applauded him. There were times during the phoney war when it was possible to believe that neither side would attack and that there could be negotiations with no loss of face. We had news of Unity from a Hungarian friend, Janos von Almasy, who wrote from Budapest. After she shot herself on the morning war was declared she had been rushed to a clinic where her life was saved by devoted nuns. She was unconscious for weeks, and had suffered brain damage. Hitler asked her, when she was able to understand his question, whether she would like to go back to her family in England. She said she would, and he sent her to neutral Switzerland in an ambulance train; she was brought home by my mother and my sister Debo early in January. All this tragic story I have described in my memoirs.

  We had spent Christmas for the last time at Wootton but we had to give it up; it was too unpractical, too big, too remote. Kit and I stayed in London until my baby, Max, was born in April and then the whole family went to Denham. From London and Denham I could see Unity constantly; she was very gradually recovering.

  In May 1940 the German armies moved west. On 9 May Kit published a statement in his weekly paper, Action:

  According to the Press, stories concerning the invasion of Britain are being circulated… in such an event every member of British Union would be at the disposal of the nation. Every one of us would resist the foreign invader with all that is in us. However rotten the existing government, and however much we detested its policies, we would throw ourselves into the effort of a united nation until the foreigner was driven from our soil. In such a situation no doubt exists concerning the attitude of British Union.

  The phoney war was now at an end. Kit was arrested on the 23 May, a fortnight after his belligerent statement was published. At the time of the fall of France and the escape of our armies from Dunkirk, he was in gaol. It was then that many politicians began to talk of negotiated peace.

  I have described our prison experiences in my memoirs, A Life of Contrasts, and shall not repeat here. In June 1940, a month after his arrest, Kit was
told that his sister-in-law, Lady Ravensdale, intended to apply to the court for the guardianship of his three elder children. He insisted upon going to oppose this move in person. He had a ‘special relationship’ with both Cimmie’s sisters, but despite—or perhaps because of—this he would not have considered either a suitable guardian, and he knew how strongly Cimmie would have objected to the idea. He felt quite certain he would shortly be released from prison, having already been heard at great length by the 18B Advisory Committee. Had he known that he was to be locked up for three and a half more years he might hardly have opposed Irene Ravensdale’s guardianship so violently, as she was obviously de facto the children’s guardian. He did his best to veto a plan to send Michael, aged eight, to Canada, and in this the judge agreed with him. But with regard to Irene he was over-ruled. His letter to me describing all this and asking me to write to Nicholas inviting him to stay when he should be back in a house of his own, and also to thank Nicholas’s housemaster Mr Butter-wick for their pleasant relationship and tell him henceforward to send all communications to Lady Ravensdale, was sent to Denham, and for warded to Holloway Prison, as I had meantime been arrested myself. I was therefore unable to deliver his messages.

  In the long run this guardianship question made little difference; as usual heredity took over from environment to a great extent. But Kit was extraordinarily incensed by it. He had tried so hard to be a good father, a role which did not come easily to him, and he had succeeded. Irene’s action seemed to him as unnecessary as it was insulting. Although they were both minors in law, Vivien and Nicholas were grown up; nineteen and seventeen. I was surprised that they did not object, or at least go and see their father to discover what he felt about Irene’s move. When I asked them years later, it transpired they had no idea he minded; their aunt with an odd lack of candour had never told them that Kit had insisted upon going from prison to the court in order to oppose it in person.

  However, his annoyance was soon forgotten in his frantic worry about me. He was powerless to help, and his feelings can easily be imagined. He knew from his own experience the degradation and filth of prison. I was nursing my baby, eleven weeks old, and he imagined me getting every sort of infection and fever. His letters enjoined me to get hold of Mr Gilliatt, the gynaecologist, without delay—an impossibility. I could not take the baby; France had fallen and bombs were expected to fall on London any day. Denham had been requisitioned by the army and the babies and I had been going to my sister in Oxfordshire on the Monday, but on Saturday I was taken off to prison. After a few days of miserable pain, I recovered.

  Henceforward Kit’s attitude to his elder children changed. He was fond of them, they were always welcome, but he felt no more responsibility for them; they had been taken from him against his forcibly expressed will. Nicholas stayed on at school as long as possible until he was called up. By then Kit and I were imprisoned together in Holloway. It was inexpressibly bitter for him to think that his son might be killed in the war, and die before he had begun to live, as had so many of his own contemporaries in the First World War. We got permission for Nicholas to come for longer visits to the prison. Kit felt deepest compassion for him, and tried in conversation and in letters to show affection, and to interest him in books and ideas which filled his own mind at that time. My sons Jonathan and Desmond were allowed similarly long visits, and so were the two babies, during this fourth year of our incarceration.

  It is probably quite difficult for someone who has not experienced it to imagine how demoralizing it is to be imprisoned without trial. It is like being kidnapped—you cannot see the end. If you are charged, and there is a trial, either you are found not guilty and released at once, or you are sentenced, and can count the days of vileness. No charge, no trial. No trial, no sentence. After Kit’s appearance and interrogation by Birkett’s Advisory Committee he felt completely certain he would be released; his letters to me show this. Instead, I was arrested myself. Nevertheless hope never quite faded. It revived when occasionally the question of Regulation 18B was raised in the House of Commons, or when Churchill had the decency to say there had never been a fifth column in England. Also, people were released from time to time, for no apparent reason, just as they had been arrested for no apparent reason in the first place. This constant uncertainty, added to rumours flying round the prison about being transferred to a concentration camp, or another prison, made nearly everyone live from day to day, doing nothing because nothing seemed worth doing or beginning.

  Kit could not bear to waste even a day of his life in such a way. He gave himself a programme of reading, and he learnt the only thing available to be learnt at Brixton: languages. He greatly improved his French, and he studied German—there were numerous Germans in the prison. It was a triumph of the will that by the time he joined me in Holloway eighteen months later he knew enough German to be able to read and enjoy Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Hölderlin and other poets. Just as in English, after a few readings he knew his favourite passages by heart, and could quote extensively from Faust, Wallenstein, Also Sprach Zarathustra, and other works of genius. He had learnt in what for him were inauspicious circumstances; he who loved solitude was constantly in a noisy crowd, and there was a ping pong table outside his cell. He welcomed the hours locked in his cell, there was silence and he was alone.

  In Brixton he was visited by a few old political friends: James Maxton, the Independent Labour Party leader, went down, and so did Bob Boothby, and Walter Monckton who was in the government. Harold Nicolson also went to the prison; he was working in the propaganda department of the Ministry of Information. The evening before his visit Kit had happened to hear him broadcast a talk, which was so silly and so dishonest that he refused to receive him. Nicolson shared a flat with Guy Burgess, the Communist spy who probably influenced him.

  Kit’s first mention of phlebitis came in spring 1941. By then we were allowed to see each other once a fortnight.

  Only four days more till I see my Darlingest one. Everything is so dull in the interval. How I long, more and more if possible, to be with you, now that the lovely Spring and Summer is on the way. I think of you so much… It would be so wonderful to be with you… All our time together I have always had so much too much to do. But all the same we had so much Heaven. My phlebitis so far does not appear to have spread. I expect it is bound to appear in other places as it always does once it starts. But that is nothing to worry about as I can always get the specialist to bind it up before it goes much higher up the leg… In general I am feeling better than I was and longing for it to be less cold so as to get a little sun—the reviver. It has a magical quality. Oh to go together on a sunlit road towards its ever gathering power until we were well and had forgotten. Anyhow to be with you anywhere in the Summer would be a Paradise.

  ‘Until we were well.’ I was fairly well, but he already was not. Naturally ‘the sunlit road’ could only be a dream for the future after the war, but a year later we were together, though still in prison. On a hot day we were sitting in our yard with our backs to the grimy wall when the Catholic priest, Canon Browne, came to see us. He went on to visit the 18B women in their part of the prison, and one of them told me later that he had said: ‘It’s like the Garden of Eden over there.’ The asphalt path, the stony, sooty patch of soil, the walls and the bars, made a strange Garden of Eden. Nevertheless there was a certain truth in the old priest’s vision. The kingdom of heaven is within. Just as Kit’s letters had been my solace, so his presence was my joy.

  This welcome improvement in our situation had come about because in the late autumn of 1941 my brother Tom, dining at Downing Street, had been questioned by Churchill and told him that, for us, the worst of the deprivations of our imprisonment was the fact that we were separated. The Prime Minister, who disliked the suspension of habeas corpus, acted quickly and we were locked up together.

  We had been married five years when the little cage at Holloway became our dwelling. We were there for two more years; nothi
ng changed except the seasons; for ten months out of twelve the old prison was cold. We who had led such varied, active lives, who, even when Kit was at his busiest, had always escaped for a few days now and again to Paris, or Arles, who had been fortunate enough to live surrounded by beauty, and friends, were now deprived of everything except one another and our books. We were transported from our grim surroundings by plays and poetry. Far from wasting these seemingly endless years I believe Kit’s whole view of life was dramatically influenced by, in particular, Goethe’s philosophy and his Hellenism, as well as his pantheism.

  He knew no Greek, but in various translations he read Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Greek drama, Greek philosophy, every book he could get in English or German on Hellenism, were his staple diet in prison. He read Corneille and Racine. All these were for pleasure; for work he read Freud, Jung and Adler.

  I suppose it was a test of marriage, but such an unusual one that it is hard to guess how other marriages would have fared in like circumstances. Kit was a superb companion, amused, amusing, appreciative of the smallest pleasures, laughing at the absurdities which abound in all institutions, brilliant, loving, even-tempered and unselfish. The contrast with our normal lives was complete, and it was due to him that we never subsequently looked back upon our three and a half years in the miserable prison as wasted years. At Wootton we had been largely insulated from the world in a sort of paradise, but only for short periods. Now we were insulated in a sort of purgatory, but the essential ingredient was the same in both: we had each other.