‘There’s always plenty of opportunity!’
‘No, there isn’t. Not always.’
‘Did you have any amours after Sir Oswald?’
‘Ah, well, like Wilde I can resist anything except temptation—but I was never in the slightest degree tempted.’
Meanwhile lunch has begun, served by the maid at a table at the other end of the drawing-room. Diana had said ‘I invited Jean-Noël to join us, I hope you don’t mind, because my hearing is so bad and he can help.’
Which he has been doing, sometimes by shouting what I’ve just asked or by writing it down and passing the note across to Diana. She is decidedly frustrated by having to resort to this—‘Oh, I’m so sorry, it must be so awful for you, you’re so patient’—but it doesn’t happen very often. Jean-Noël is in his thirties with thick black hair which flows upwards. Later on he says ‘Diana is my best friend. I visit her 3 or 4 times a week.’
The first course was tomato and mozarella salad and now we’re tucking into roast chicken with vegetables. Well, I am—the other two eat very modestly. There’s a feature I haven’t seen on a private lunch table for many years: finger bowls, in emerald glass. Beneath the table is a smart rug of black and white diamonds.
‘What is your favourite thing in this room?’
‘My clock and barometer.’ She indicates the French gilt pair hanging on the wall opposite the windows. ‘They belonged to my great-great-grandfather really—but I bought them at one of my father’s many sales. He was always having to sell things and always at the bottom of the market. These came up at Sotheby after the war. They’ve got Paris on the faces so they’ve come home. At the same sale Debo bought his Berlin china which is now at Chatsworth. I’ve just been reading Debo’s wonderful book about Chatsworth. It’s so funny. People think that because she’s a duchess she can’t be a writer but she writes so well, the text is so witty, and the pictures are divine.’
All the Mitford girls wrote well. It is curious that despite little formal education they all had a gift for concise observation. This came not simply from proper childhood instruction but from their high-spiritedness, their not being afraid to say what they meant, and their lack of pretension. Diana’s own autobiography is as pithy as any.
‘When the first version of my autobiography came out in 1977 I went on television—the Russell Harty Show. When I heard my voice I was horrified. It was agony. Jonathan said to Kit “Of course we’ve always known she talked like that but she didn’t realise it herself.” Debo once said to me “Yes, our voices are so awful. But it’s worse for me because they notice it more in the North”.’
The voice is not plummy, is not the Oxford or Bloomsbury drawl, but the perky cut-glass deb voice of the 20s and 30s. It is not remotely awful but very clear, and she has almost flawless grammar besides. No foreigner would have the slightest problem understanding her. It was the lighthearted Mitford banter which Evelyn Waugh made into the upper-class flapper slang of his early novels.
‘They’re making a film of Vile Bodies,’ I say, ‘directed by a comedian called Stephen Fry. Has he been in touch?’
‘No, he hasn’t. I’ve never heard of him.’
‘What they don’t get so right these days are the voices.’
‘Yes—I took Harold Acton down to Eton where one of my grandchildren was acting in something. He hadn’t been for 50 years—he must’ve been about 70 then—and I asked him what’s the big difference, the boys’ long hair? And he said no, no, it’s the accents. For him to say that was very striking because he had this strong sort of Italian accent as you know.’
Cheese—Diana doesn’t take any herself—and green avocado salad are followed by a chocolate flake pudding with lozenges of gold leaf on top. After coffee we decamp to the sofa and I launch out with ‘There’s a new book saying Hitler was homosexual.’
‘I’m sure he was not homosexual—because that sort of thing I do more or less understand.’ (Diana has always had gay friends, from Lytton Strachey onwards.) ‘With someone like General Montgomery—it may well have been unconscious—but all the ADCs and other people around him were very good-looking young men. And I believe it was the same with Kitchener. Well, now, Hitler’s adjutants were sort of …’
‘Ugly.’
‘Gnarled old men, they really were. They were very very sweet but I’m afraid not the least bit good-looking. That just is the answer really, these were the people Hitler loved being with.’
‘It’s widely accepted now that his relationship with Eva Braun wasn’t sexual either.’
‘One can’t be utterly sure about anyone—except oneself. But I don’t think sex was a big appetite in him.’
‘Which is strange. Because very powerful men are usually very sexual too. Was he like a eunuch?’
‘Like a eunuch? No, but, well, there was no question of anything between him and me but, you know, one can still feel it, one can still sense it if it’s there, the sexual element—and with Hitler one couldn’t.’
Unity Mitford calculated that between 1935 and 1939 she met Hitler 140 times. She introduced him to the rest of the family. Their mother explained to Hitler the value of wholemeal bread. And how many times did Diana meet him?
‘Not as many as Unity. But ever so many times.’
‘I wish he’d been something sexually, he might not’ve murdered so many people. Don’t you think it would have been better for Europe if Hitler had had a sex-life?’
‘Yes, it might’ve been but what about old Musso who had a terrific sex-life?’
‘Exactly. Compared to Hitler he was hopeless at destroying people.’
‘He was made hopeless,’ she replies, ‘because he had a very unsoldierlike population. They didn’t follow him. However he was all for setting everything on fire, wasn’t he.’
‘Is it true that Hitler used to do comic impersonations of Mussolini?’
‘Quite true. Hitler could be very very very funny.’
‘At the end of the war, when the newsreels of the death camps appeared at the cinema, what was your reaction?’
‘Well, of course, horror. Utter horror. Exactly the same probably as your reactions.’
‘Why didn’t you have a revulsion against Hitler because of this?’
‘I had a complete revulsion against the people who did it but I could never efface from my memory the man I had actually experienced before the war. A very complicated feeling. I can’t really relate those two things to each other. I know I’m not supposed to say that but I just have to.’
Diana is one of the people who cuts across our loyalties and preconceptions. Her disregard for public opinion is very attractive but it has prevented her rehabilitation. She alone from that time refuses to let us dismiss Hitler as pure evil. Hitler has his human side, she insists. He was one of us. This makes him even more frightening—which may not be what Diana intended.
Personally I can’t stand brutal dictators in any shape or form. She on the other hand is attracted to the idea of ‘the strong man’. And the classic nightmare—the friendly face which turns into a monster—is something she refuses to have. Perhaps at some level there is a conflation between Hitler and her husband. Oswald Mosley used to strut around in a black costume of his own devising. He was the Errol Flyn of British politics, except of course he wasn’t acting. To reject Hitler would be to reject her husband and that she cannot do. This was probably burned into her during those years in Holloway Gaol. Her sister Nancy and Bryan Guinness’s father, Lord Moyne, were among those who advocated her imprisonment.
‘Going to prison turned out to be quite a surprise,’ she says.
‘In what way?’
‘It went on and on. Three and a half years is a helluva long time.’
‘But it must’ve made you strong.’
‘How?’
‘To know that you could survive it.’
‘Of course there’s prison and prison. I mean I wasn’t tortured.’
‘You mean it was a nice prison.’
‘I
t sounds corny to say it but what’s so awful is the lack of freedom.’ After 18 months her husband was transferred to Holloway to be with her. ‘All we had was an enormous wall, a tree, and sort of asphalt. Then Kit and the old man who was in prison with us made a marvellous garden and we grew fraises des bois which do very well in soot.’
Her sister Jessica and Nancy Cunard were among those who protested against her release.
‘Did the Nazi movement attract you in the 30s?’
‘Not particularly, no. It was Unity who was absolutely overwhelmed with the heavenliness of it.’
‘Did you ever have a black shirt?’
‘Did I ever have a black child?’
‘Shirt!’
‘A black shirt!’ Jean-Noël backs me up.
Gales of laughter. ‘No. I wasn’t really a militant.’
‘Did you not think the Nazis were vulgar?’
‘Well, you see, it was a complete revolution. Do you call that vulgar? It was also a choice at the time between Fascism and Communism. I am very anti-Communist. They made a miserable life for almost everyone.’
‘I think they’re both horrible. What about the Nazis’ persecution of degenerate art in the 1930s?’
‘The artists persecuted them really. Personally I never wanted a German Expressionist picture in my house. I think we live in an age when there’s really no art and the best we can do is preserve something from the past.’
‘The Nazis also thought Picasso was terrible.’
‘That was their opinion. Picasso has so many admirers in the world that he can do without the Nazis. He was a multi-millionaire. He painted all through the war here in Paris under the Occupation. Nobody interfered with him. I don’t see that he’s got much to complain of.’
The question of vulgarity lingered, for in a subsequent letter she elaborated the point: ‘I thought about the vulgarity of National Socialists. They were never vulgar in the way, for example, a Tory Conference with ladies in hats singing Wider Still and Wider, is. I think the answer may be MUSIC. My brother, a very musical man, used to say it’s so unfair, they’ve got all the best tunes. Which of course for marches and anthems etc they had. When Hitler made an important speech at the closing session of the Parteitag, a marvellous orchestra would play a Bruckner symphony before he spoke, with the world Press anxious to hear what he was going to say. The choice of music was so un-vulgar.’
Though never publicly dissociating herself from Hitler, she did once say to Nicholas Mosley that Hitler ruined her life.
‘I said it only because I got fed up with being asked why I didn’t hate Hitler enough. He ruined my life in that Hitler really began the war—though he was pushed into it. To me the biggest atrocity of all was the war. I’m as near a pacifist as makes no difference. So it would be truer to say that the war ruined my life. But again not really. I’ve had a very good life as well. Lots of lovely times since then.’
Her father lost a lung in the Boer War. His brother was killed in the First World War. Her brother Tom, also a Nazi sympathiser, was killed in the Second World War. This the era they call ‘the good old days’!
‘What makes you feel guilty generally speaking?’
‘I don’t feel terribly guilty actually. I don’t suffer from remorse. What I suffer from is when things go wrong for the people I love. That I can hardly bear.’
After the war the Mosleys farmed for five and a half years in the English countryside.
‘We got on very well with the local people.’
‘But you were a very notorious couple.’
‘Yes. I remember going into a bank in Newbury to cash a cheque and there was a queue. My husband was waiting for me and when it got to the last man in front I turned round and said “Not long now, my lovebird”. Everyone looked round to see who the lovebird was and saw the one-time leader of the British Fascists. Their faces were so funny.’
The Mosleys were refused passports and so had to borrow a boat to escape to their next destination which was Ireland. Then to France, to a house on the edge of Paris called le Temple de la Gloire. The British Embassy ostracised them.
‘There was a complete ban on us from the beginning. One ambassador in the early 70s did invite us. He just didn’t realise. So I said to Kit I think we should say no, they’ve been so rude to us for so long, but Kit said it’s so like you that, but you mustn’t—if somebody holds out their hand you must take it. So we accepted and about three days later the poor wretch had to withdraw the invitation. He’d discovered we were on the Foreign Office black list.’
‘And now?’
‘They still don’t. I should feel I’d done something awful if I suddenly got an invitation!’
‘You’ve said that Paris is the perfect city for old people.’
‘When I was here and quite young I was always amazed by how much they loved old people. They would say of some old hag, you know, oh la beautée! It’s very comforting that they just don’t notice the awful change that takes place.’
‘Unlike London—which is so ageist. I find as I’m getting older I’m getting more anxious about crime. Do you find that?’
‘Do you know, I am very unimaginative, because I don’t find that. I never foresee disasters.’
‘Have you ever been burgled here?’
‘No, but we’re in a nest of police. You must’ve noticed. That’s because of the government ministries and the Chamber of Deputies which are here.’
‘Mugged?’
‘No, but then I don’t go out at night, and I don’t think there’s nearly as much mugging in Paris as in London.’
‘Are you good at being by yourself?’
‘Very good. I love it. That was always the case.’
‘Because you’ve always had a huge family. You want to get away from them.’
‘No, I love my family and my friends. But I’m good at being alone because I don’t notice that I am if I’ve got my books. My great phobia is that I might not be able to read. I’m too deaf to watch television. We’ve got one in the flat but I never look at it.’
‘Are you a member of the London Library?’
‘I was for years because at the Temple there was no library, there was room for very few books in that house, but I got tired of undoing and doing up those parcels, so when I came here I gave it up.’
‘Well, I don’t have room for books in my place either but I still have them. I’m now being overwhelmed by books.’
‘Weed.’
‘What?’
‘Weed. Do you weed?’
‘Do I weed …’
‘One has to.’
The Mosleys became friendly with those other local exiles from England, the Windsors. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor had moved to Paris earlier, when the Duff Coopers were still at the embassy. Unlike the Mosleys, the Windsors weren’t on the black list.
‘Diana Cooper was one of the people who said you must curtsey to the Duchess of Windsor—which is recognising her position. Diana did it on the grounds that I always did it myself which was if you’re going to meet them you must be polite to him. He minded very much when people didn’t curtsey to his wife. And because Diana led the way, everyone else at the embassy did it afterwards. You see, it would then have been too pointed to stop.’
‘You said that the Duke of Windsor hardly spoke French but did speak German. So what was spoken at their dinner parties?’
‘French people talked French to each other but general conversation was in English. The Duke loved talking Spanish if the chance arose. His English had slight Cockney and American inflexions.’
‘Did the Duchess give you any mementos?’
‘Ha, she gave me the oddest memento you could ever imagine. She said oh I must give you something and she gave me A King’s Story translated into French in a very cheap edition!’
And what about Ribbentrop? At this Diana clasps her hands to her breast and looks up at the ceiling.
‘I feel completely sure the story about the Duchess of Win
dsor and Ribbentrop and their affair and her treachery is an invention from beginning to end. As Malcolm Muggeridge said in his memoirs, to base history on what secret service people say in their reports is as mad as to base it on tabloid journalism and for the same reason: unless they come up with a scandal from time to time, they lose their jobs.’
She gives a sad downward glance to one side which is the only sign that she might be getting tired.
‘Are you OK to continue? Just say stop if you wish to.’
‘I don’t mind going on—if there’s any interest.’ And to Jean-Noël ‘I mustn’t keep you with my nonsense. If you have to get back …’ But he would happily stay for ever.
‘Um—what do you think of the biography of you by Jan Dalley?’
‘To tell you the truth I never read it. I looked at it. The whole thing bores me terribly. I liked her. But I’m sure I’d never want to read a book by her. Did you read it?’
‘No. I don’t like reading a lot about people before I meet them. I’d rather discover them for myself.’ Me to Jean-Noël: ‘Have you read this book?’
‘I refused!’
Diana to Jean-Noël: ‘You’re too good!’
Me to Diana: ‘Yes, tell me about him.’
‘Jean-No’s just so wonderful. I met him because he was commissioned to write a book about Hubert de Givenchy and I was one of the people who knew Hubert when he was very very young, just learning his metier immediately after the war. Jean-No came down to see what I could remember—and we made friends.’
Diana looks at him and bursts out laughing, for no particular reason, for the sheer love of his company. She doesn’t look a bit tired, though she’s been several hours on the go with me and has only recently returned from visits to Chatsworth and London where she was photographed by Mario Testino in an assemblage of her large, well-connected family: 5 generations.
‘I’ve just become a great great grandmother. Oh, it’s always the Guinnesses—millions of children! My second son Desmond’s son had a daughter when he was very young and she has just had a baby.’
The Mosley name was poison after the war and the Hitler shadow which is cast over Germany for all time still includes them, but not to such an extent that—unlike the family of Oscar Wilde for example—they have felt obliged to change their name. When I mentioned this subsequently on a fax to Paris (deafness precludes the telephone) she replied ‘I laughed at the idea of changing our name. I was so proud of my husband, especially the fact that Mosley opposed the war which so reduced our country that it cannot be compared with the England of my youth.’
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 57
