Irene spent much of her time at the Kennington day nursery and concerning herself with the future of children generally. When she first saw the evacuees sent to Wootton she was horrified by their stunted growth, general ill health and dirty, ragged clothes. “What is really shameful is that our system has allowed such creatures to grow up,” she wrote to The Times. “There is a serious deficiency somewhere in training and outlook. Our educational methods seem to have failed miserably, and such children, through evacuation, have been brought mercifully to the light of day.” She went on to beg for legislation to stop the parents from taking them back to the damp, verminous and despairing conditions from which they came, feeling that life in the freedom and tranquillity of the country would give them a far better chance.
An imaginative gesture was to offer sanctuary to the ten men of a Regent’s Park barrage-balloon unit. She had seen them out of her bedroom window in Cornwall Terrace and wondered where they went when off duty. On hearing that no one else invited them in at night, she put her former music room at their disposal, with its circle of easy chairs, tables, radio and well-dimmed lights, telling them to ask their wives and girlfriends along if they wished. She also gave them the use of a bathroom so that they could have a hot bath after work. Around half a dozen turned up most nights between 6 and 10 p.m. Typically, Irene was not satisfied with this single act of kindness but urged her friends to do the same for their local defense units.
In those first months of the war the hectic social pace of the upper classes scarcely faltered. Many still had servants, though half the number they had had earlier in the year as the young and fit were called up or left to do more fitting war work. London restaurants like Quaglino’s and Claridge’s were packed every evening as those home on leave or with new jobs in the Admiralty or War Office or who were staying in town overnight—trains were packed with troops moving about the country—went out to dinner as usual. Irene, working at the day nursery, going to concerts when she could, would give lunch to her friends the Eshers or the Masseys at Claridge’s, go to Sibyl Colefax’s parties, or be entertained by Miles Graham or Nevile Henderson.
Miles Graham, now a general, drove her down to one of the Cliveden weekends that still continued and at the end of November she took Vivien to Eton in driving rain to watch the famous Wall Game in a sea of mud. “It really is miraculous that in War this fantastic drollery goes on,” she wrote. “Elliot [the headmaster] and all the masters and boys out in top hats and tailcoats and rolled umbrellas, including the Provost. Photographers nipping about everywhere and waterlogged boys struggling in the mire.”
She was temporarily on excellent terms with Baba. They discussed another of Irene’s admirers, Leslie Hore-Belisha (“Baba told me that he asked someone lately whether if he married a baroness he would become a baron!”). When Belisha told Irene about an evening spent with the king and queen and that he had suggested Fruity as aide-de-camp to the duke of Windsor, she wondered if he was telling the truth or was simply trying to please her.
That autumn Baba bought Little Compton, in Oxfordshire, an exquisite Tudor manor house on the eastern flank of the Cotswolds which had once belonged to Archbishop Juxon, the cleric who had accompanied Charles I to the scaffold to pray with him in his final moments. She furnished its paneled ground-floor rooms with the rosewood-and-gilt side cabinets and walnut wing chair that had come from Kedleston, oak tables, piles of books, pretty table lamps and rugs over the polished wood floor. Upstairs, in her white-painted bedroom with its high, barrel-vaulted ceiling, was the painted and lacquered furniture which later became the hallmark of her taste.
Soon after Baba moved in she received a letter from Wallis, its tone of mild complaint ranging over everything from the uniform she had to wear for her work with the Red Cross to her servants.
You are lucky to have your friends around you and be in your own country. I have a great longing for America—war makes one like a homesick child perhaps. I have signed up with the Section Secretaire Automobile of the French Red Cross and been given an ambulance. I tried in every way to do things for the English but I was far from welcome. The uniform is like all feminine ones—hideous but pratique. The Duke is well but as disheartened and discouraged about everything as I am.
I hope the house is getting on—I can imagine the endless difficulties. I am still struggling with the butler question—we have an ape at present. Fruity will be home for Christmas. We haven’t decided what we will do as I don’t know if the Duke will get enough leave to make opening La Cröe worth while. Why not come over some time—it would be fun to see you once again.
In Paris, Fruity was finding life with the Windsors more and more difficult. He no longer felt that, as formerly, the duke’s affection for him was rocklike. This, he could not help thinking, was due to the duchess’s influence. When he and the duke set off for a tour of Strasbourg and then the front, he told Baba that the atmosphere at first was chilly.
“But by slow degrees as we progress further and further from Paris and the environs of Suchet we begin to thaw, gradually, slowly, as another mile is put between us and Suchet!! HRH is extraordinary. By the afternoon we became NORMAL and again he became a really delightful companion, one with whom one would go away anywhere (slight lapses when a bill has to be paid!).”
They inspected gun batteries, saw a battalion of tanks that had seen action in September, lunched with the general in command and then reached Strasbourg. “We entered a City of the Dead,” wrote Fruity on October 30, 1939. “Picture it in your mind, a wonderful city of over 200,000 inhabitants now completely empty, with at most 1,500 people in it. It was weird. One felt one was entering a city that had been struck by plague. One found shops with all their stock in the windows ready for sale, hotels with the lounges all prepared. One expected to see rats running from the houses across the street. Grass is sprouting between the tramlines, the roads are uncleaned, stray dogs run about. Given another couple of months Strasbourg will be but a name. All the inhabitants left in 36 hours.”
They drove on to the Rhine, then into the Vosges Mountains, where snow prevented a view of the Siegfried Line, and then to one of the largest fortresses of the Maginot Line. “A veritable underground city, it is terrible, something uncanny—H. G. Wells,” wrote Fruity to Baba. “Think of 1,500 men locked in an iron box under the earth.” Before he signed off, he told her once again that HRH had been “wonderful all these days—missing nothing and seeing everything.”
Once back in Boulevard Suchet, the easy, affectionate camaraderie that had inspired such deep devotion in Fruity disappeared and the frosty chill reappeared. “It always will be the same I believe as long as she is alive, and she makes him the same way,” wrote Fruity to Baba in the same letter. He told her that the duchess’s war work had been shelved: “The hospital business is off as there is no need for hospitals at present (the other reason is she doesn’t really want to do it—it would cost money!)”
There were further reasons for discontent. As someone whose only income was his major’s pension, pay was a matter of importance to Fruity, and so far he had received none. To expedite matters, he wrote privately to Hore-Belisha, whom he had met and dined with several times in Cannes. He also felt that having dropped everything immediately to accompany the duke when needed, on the understanding that he was acting as equerry, and having worked hard and to the best of his ability, he was gradually being pushed to one side.
His disenchantment with his employer increased when, dining alone with the duke one evening, he showed him a letter he had received from the Military Mission saying that the War Office had no authority to pay him at all. “I showed HRH the letter and he said—nothing. He then looked at me and said: ‘Didn’t they tell you at the W.O. you wouldn’t get any pay?’ I said: ‘Good God, no.’ He looked just fishy. Christ, I am fed up. What beats me is that HRH is quite prepared to do nothing for me at all. He is the frozen limit. I really think I can’t stay on with him without any authority or pay. In lots of wa
ys I won’t be sorry.”
Fruity had one more underlying worry. Ever since Baba’s blatant infidelity with her brother-in-law that had caused him such misery, he had focused on Tom Mosley as the cause of their growing estrangement. While her subsequent affairs were conducted with reasonable discretion, Tom Mosley flaunted his conquests, Baba included. In France, away from her, knowing that she was out most evenings, the idea of this tortured him.
“I’ve wanted to say something VERY important to you,” he wrote on November 3. “I do not want to have a row on paper, and any unpleasantness, but I will just say that I sincerely hope and trust that you are not seeing anything [underlined eight times] of Tom Mosley, and that you will not do so.”
30
“My Idea of a Perfect Evening”
Baba was becoming close to a man as different from Tom Mosley as it would be possible to imagine. Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, former viceroy of India and now foreign secretary, was a politician out of a sense of duty rather than the burning ambition and lust for personal power that inspired Mosley. His twin passions were High Anglicanism and foxhunting. Immensely tall and distinguished looking, he had been born without a left hand; instead, he had a false fist with a thumb over which he wore a leather glove in black or brown (according to whether he was in London or the country). It was impossible to imagine him doing anything dishonorable; he was so admired by the king that His Majesty had given him the unique privilege of walking through the gardens of Buckingham Palace to the Foreign Office.
Baba had kept in touch with Halifax ever since she had first met him with Nevile Henderson in Berlin. She had entertained the Halifaxes in London and been to stay with them at Garrowby, their estate in Yorkshire, and all three had soon become close friends. But although Baba was extremely fond of Dorothy Halifax, her real closeness was with Dorothy’s husband. As the foreign secretary was known for his austere reserve, such an intimacy was all the more surprising—and noticeable to observers. It was a friendship that developed while she was still conducting her affair with Dino Grandi: to be the favorite female companion of both the British foreign secretary and the representative of Mussolini’s fascist regime was an irony unremarked on at the time.
Apart from an occasional lunch, the first significant milestone in the friendship between the foreign secretary and the young woman who was to mean so much to him occurred on October 4, 1939, when Halifax wrote Baba a short note: “I was on the point of writing to you to say that Dorothy had had to go up to Yorkshire till Saturday and to beg you to come and cheer my solitude when your telegram came. So I jumped at Friday evening, which I hope may be all right for you, if you don’t mind plain fare and if you really don’t mind being tête-à-tête! It will be very good to see you. Will 6:30 do? And I will try not to have too much work to do after dinner!” It was of that evening that Baba wrote in her diary: “Dined with Edward tête-à-tête—my idea of a perfect evening.”
As foreign secretary, Halifax spent much, if not most, of his time in London, while Dorothy was often at Garrowby. He and Baba would dine together, or go for walks in the park. With her interest in politics, her flattering attention and her lucid comments, she was a stimulating as well as attractive companion; for her part, mixed with her liking and admiration for his nobility of character was the enjoyment of feeling herself at the very center of things.
As they became more intimate, she poured out all her misery over her marriage and her worries about Fruity and the future. For Halifax, the presence of this beautiful, unhappily married young woman who obviously adored him was irresistible. It was not long before London society, buzzing with wartime scandal, wondered if she was sleeping with him. If it had been any other man, the answer would have been yes, but the exact nature of the relationship was a mystery even to those closest to both of them, from Irene on the one side to Halifax’s close friend Victor Cazalet and private secretary Charles Peake on the other.
Yet although Halifax was undoubtedly romantically obsessed with Baba, a physical liaison is unlikely. He was deeply devoted to his wife, he was a man of honor and his religious principles were such that if he had contravened them in this way he would have been tortured by guilt and remorse—and there is no trace of either in the many letters he wrote her. Holding hands during one of their interminable walks through the woods at Garrowby or Little Compton would not have troubled even the foreign secretary’s rigorous conscience.
Halifax’s feelings for Baba can perhaps best be compared with those of Asquith for Venetia Stanley: the adoration, the age gap, the flood of letters that poured out political secrets and gossip with complete trust in the discretion of their recipient. Dorothy, wise and understanding, ensured that the marriage could accommodate this other love—in one of Halifax’s letters to Baba there is a reference to a long discussion which he had had with Dorothy about his relationship with Baba—“disinfecting” it by maintaining her own close friendship with the younger woman.
From Baba’s point of view Halifax represented stability, an older man on whom she could rely utterly; his approach to life provided a compass that helped to guide her through the moral maze in which she so often found herself; his faith helped and underwrote her own—they would pray together—and he exuded that heady, intoxicating scent of power and inside knowledge which she found so deeply satisfying.
At the same time, she was seeing both Michael Lubbock, her affair of the previous year, and Sir Walter Monckton. Monckton was well known to have a weakness for women; he was also an extremely clever and attractive man. Baba had liked him from the moment she met him at the time of the Windsors’ wedding, and their joint involvement in the couple’s affairs had frequently brought them together. As most of those close to Baba knew that she and Fruity now led virtually separate lives, she was usually asked out on her own. With a string of admirers, she was seldom at a loose end.
Irene was as busy as ever. Her health, never very good, was not improved by her drinking bouts, characterized as “neurasthenia,” “cramps in my tummy” or even “lumbago,” which became more frequent when she was worried. But they never stopped her from seeing friends, conducting committee meetings—or worrying about Denham. The question of its future continued to dominate her: Nick, who had won an examination prize at Eton for the fourth time running, told her that he had never been told he was going up to Wootton after Christmas; Nanny refused to discuss the future, and Baba smiled pleasantly and told her not to worry. Irene resorted to bed and a course of colonic irrigation.
Nevertheless, the first Christmas of the war began well. Irene, always generous, had given a champagne party and a Christmas dinner, cooked in her kitchen, to the barrage-balloon unit and their wives and girlfriends; her staff and the nurses got turkeys and a bottle of whatever drink they liked, the VADs received ten shillings apiece so that they could take their boyfriends to the theater. At Denham, she did her best to keep up the spirit of past Christmases with a tree, presents and the tradition of Father Christmas down the chimney performed by Nick. On Boxing Day evening they listened to Lord Haw Haw on the radio attacking the British government from Germany. Irene told the Mosley children, accurately if tactlessly, that this was William Joyce, who until recently had been one of their father’s chief fascist executives—a piece of news to which they reacted defensively.
Fruity, in Paris, told Baba on January 30, 1940, that the duke was going to GHQ for a few days and was very pleased about the proposed trip, which he described to Fruity as “the thin end of the wedge.” “I am glad for him,” wrote Fruity. “I too think something better will come up fairly soon for HRH and then, I guess, I disappear.”
In the meantime, it was Fruity’s turn to accompany his employer. “I’m off on a very interesting and exciting tour of a section of the French line,” he wrote in a letter of February 19. “I’m very pleased at being taken. They are in wonderful form. I am getting to really like her. I find I can do a great deal with her, much more than with him, and so I get things done.” Confi
dently he added: “She likes me now.”
Baba was not so sure. Fruity was hoping for some home leave and she wrote an alarmed postcard to Walter Monckton. “I have a sinking feeling it may forbode [sic] bad news as something tells me that our dear friends may be planning the dirtiest ever!” Monckton replied reassuringly, though wrongly: “I do not think you will find the news from the Suchet front as bad as you expect.”
At Denham, the alterations to “halve” the house and thus cut down on the rates were in full swing. Nanny and Micky, there on their own apart from a daily governess, found themselves without heat or hot water during one of the coldest months of the year while boiler and pipes were removed, shut down or replaced. For Nanny, the discomfort was aggravated by uncertainty about the future. She had given her life first to the Curzon daughters, then to Cim’s children; in Irene’s absence, she was wholly responsible for Micky. Yet she only discovered matters that affected her deeply at second hand. With the arrival of Diana’s nanny and two-year-old son, Alexander, and, soon, Diana’s second child (Max, born in April) she foresaw herself being pushed into a subordinate position. She felt that Tom was too cowardly actually to sack her but hoped that constant pressure, overwork and humiliation would eventually force her to leave. All this she poured out to Irene in a painful interview at the end of February.
Putting these worries to one side, Irene went to stay with her sister, seeing Little Compton for the first time and finding it spectacularly beautiful. “Baba seems to get a very satisfying life,” she wrote in her diary on February 24. “I wonder where I make the error—perhaps through too much work and thought, giving no time to men and social leisure. She has her regular dinners every week with her two beaux, Sir Walter Monckton and Lord Halifax. I have nothing of that and oh! If I had the ear of Lord H on church questions. She is interested in none of these things.”
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 37
