The Viceroy's Daughters

by Anne de Courcy

  Irene was bombarded by the press, who did not know where the Mosleys had gone. At any other time this would have driven her to distraction, but the breach with Baba overshadowed everything else. She barely noticed when Fruity telephoned, furious at the idea of Tom’s release and no doubt worried in case Baba’s affair with him would be resumed.

  There were constant consultations with the Masseys over sending a letter to Baba. Then a ready-made reason for writing presented itself: concern over Vivien. Would the machine shop in which she worked use her presence as a pretext for another of the strikes which Tom’s release was currently causing? Back came another screed from Baba, so angry and astringent that Irene posted it straight on to the Masseys.

  As the papers filled with the row over Tom, Halifax wrote to Baba on November 25: “I fear [this] may be worrying you a bit. What asses people are, and to what an extent emotion governs human thought. No wonder Herbert Morrison was a bit nervous, if he foresaw this storm. I long to hear from you what happened to him and what you judge of the ‘hullabaloo.’ ”

  The controversy over Tom’s release raged so furiously that a debate on it was scheduled in Parliament. Churchill, writing to Halifax from Cairo on November 26, said he was “burning to take part in the debate on 18B and if I were at home now I would blow the whole blasted thing out of existence. So long as Morrison presents the case as exceptional treatment for Mosley naturally he is on difficult ground and people can cry ‘Favour’! He really would lose very little to sweep the whole thing away, which he could do by the overwhelming arguments I have mentioned to him in the various telegrams which you will have seen by now.”

  (The most telling one enshrined the principle close to Churchill’s heart: the importance of the Habeas Corpus Act. Urging the abolition of Defense Regulation 18B, he wrote: “The national emergency no longer justifies abrogation of individual rights of Habeas Corpus and trial by jury on definite charges.”)

  Much of the country thought otherwise. On November 28 a huge crowd marched to Trafalgar Square carrying placards demanding Mosley’s return to prison. Many of the trade unions were up in arms and the TUC, representing six million workers, deplored the home secretary’s failure to take public opinion into account—polls showed 77 percent against the Mosleys’ release. MPs all over the country received deputations from their constituents urging continued detention.

  The parliamentary debate, on December 1, 1943, was an extraordinarily heated affair. Irene went to listen and was sickened by the venom of many members. So many Labour MPs revolted against Morrison’s ruling that at one point it seemed as if they might force him to leave the government. What distressed Irene most was thinking that Viv and Micky would read these speeches about their father.

  “The Tom M row must surely be dying down,” wrote Halifax to Baba on December 9. “Charles [Peake] told me he thought Herbert M made a very good case but the trouble is that nobody—or very few people—are judging these things rationally. I shall be much interested if and when you see Tom to hear how he feels toward society in general as the result of his treatment of the last few years. I suppose he must be very bitter—at least, I guess I should be. But perhaps he just feels flat, and glad to be out of prison.”

  The rift between Baba and Irene was not really papered over until Vivien lunched with her aunt on December 11. However tactless and overemotional Viv thought Irene had been, her loyalties lay with the woman who had been a devoted mother figure for most of her life. Irene, in her turn, realized that behind the messages Viv transmitted from Baba lay the girl’s genuine, desperate appeal for Irene to be with them as a family during the Christmas holidays. She wrote a letter that she hoped was sufficiently humble to satisfy Baba, posted it and slept until the afternoon of the following day—when the second post brought a stiff response from her sister, almost, though not quite, refusing her olive branches and demanding further apologies. The Masseys advised swallowing her pride and giving Baba what she wanted, if only for the children’s sake, and a second, groveling letter went off. Christmas was saved.

  On Boxing Day Viv and Mick went over to see their father for the first time since his release. He was living at the Shaven Crown, a semi-derelict inn near Shipton-Uncler-Wychwood in Oxfordshire which he and Diana had rented. With them were not only their two small sons, five-year-old Alexander and three-year-old Max, but also Diana’s sons by her first marriage, Jonathan and Desmond Guinness.

  Diana and Tom—who had spent much of his time lying in bed—looked thin, tired and ill and the four boys were incubating whooping cough. It was scarcely surprising that Viv appeared extremely depressed when she and Mick returned at eight o’clock.

  It was a highly social holiday, with a constant flow of visitors for lunch, tea, drinks and dinner as well as General Lee and the American officers. Even so, Irene did not enjoy it: in addition to her other sufferings, she had become plagued with breathlessness, perhaps resulting from the strain of the past months.

  Worse still was the loneliness that seemed to have taken root at the core of her being—even in this crowded house she felt isolated and apart. “I am so breathless I cannot get a word out; no one is good and warm to me. I might be a bit of driftwood. It simply breaks my heart and I prayed and prayed over that note to Baba [on arrival she had left a note on Baba’s bed].”

  Her letter did little good. When Fruity and David left the house early on the morning of December 28 to spend the day with champion jockey Steve Donoghue at Didcot, Baba rounded on her sister, demanding yet more explanations and apologies, insisting that Irene take back things that Irene equally adamantly denied having said.

  Irene wept bitterly; Baba told her furiously that her tears were nothing but cheap drama. Speechless with sobbing, Irene left the room. At dinner she managed to chat and laugh with Fruity over reminiscences of their days at Melton and, later, had a helpful talk with Viv before bedtime. “But I fear somehow Baba is still very frigid.”

  The diary ends sadly on December 31: “I think for a while I must keep away from Baba and Fruity.”

  35

  Peace but Not Accord

  Irene’s public persona was still impressive. Handsome and upright, her somewhat shapeless figure shown to best advantage by the skills of Nancy Astor’s corsetière, Illa Knina of 30 Bruton Street, her sonorous voice at its best in the public speaking at which she was remarkably effective, it was not easy to forget that she was the daughter of one of the century’s towering figures. The subjects of her numerous talks and lectures—to women’s guilds, mothers’ unions, boys’ and girls’ clubs or rallies—invariably had a strong moral theme which added to this impression: “What is Club Service,” “How to become a Club Leader,” “The Adventure of Youth,” “Faith Is No Longer an Adventure,” “God Is an Adventure,” “What the East Has Taught Me in Club Life,” “Service is the Only True Dignity,” and so on.

  In private it was a different matter. Warm-hearted, generous, emotional, she had done her best to be a mother to her dead sister’s children and, though she knew they responded to her love, two of them were now leading independent lives and she had been accused of surrounding the third, thirteen-year-old Micky, with too much petticoat influence. She worked extraordinarily hard, largely at activities to benefit others, she tried hard to be good and do the right thing, yet she felt unrewarded and unfulfilled. Whenever she looked at her younger sister, married, with children, glamorous, alluring, magnetic to men, confident and sure of the path she wished to pursue, she was reminded of what she longed for.

  Baba, in her turn, was too proud to present anything but an immaculate image to the world. On the rare occasions that this gleaming surface cracked, both felt the old closeness. But in general, to Baba, Irene, or Ne-ne (pronounced knee-knee), as she always called her sister, was faintly ridiculous, so that her attitude seemed offensively patronizing to the sensitive Irene. “There was much talk at Denham betwixt Viv, Baba and me in the afternoon,” she wrote on February 24, 1944. “I felt considerably cr
ushed and trampled over by the indifference shown by Baba to anything I had to say on the matter, considering I paid several thousands to keep it going for the children when Tom was nasty from 1937–9.”

  For Irene, jealousy of her younger sister had become a constant underlying emotion. In particular, she envied Baba her close relationship with Lord Halifax. Since the bitter breach with her father all those years ago, there had been no semi-paternal figure to take his place. Halifax would have filled this role to perfection—older, as distinguished morally as he was politically, a man whose faith she knew would have inspired her and, perhaps of more significance than she realized, a former holder of the same great office as her father.

  As the last, weary years of war rolled on, each month brought a victory or gain. In January 1944 the Allies landed at Anzio and the biggest-ever bombing raid on Berlin took place. In March hundreds of Allied troops landed in Burma and within twelve hours had made an airstrip in the jungle for fighters.

  On May 25 Halifax wrote excitedly to Baba from the Waldorf Astoria:

  Here is a bit of personal news I would like you to have but which you must keep strictly to yourself. I was astonished two days ago to get a telegram from Winston expressing a desire to submit my name to the King for an Earldom!! Don’t laugh too much. Confidence, good work, gesture to Americans etc. My first reaction was definitely adverse. Incongruous in wartime and likely to be equally incongruous when we are all living in a bankrupt new world afterward. And moreover one felt that one was contributing comparatively little in effort and sacrifice by the side of thousands of others. So it seemed to me slightly discordant and ridiculous.

  Dorothy however took the view that, while one was still doing the job, it was rather a compliment to me and the U.S., which it would not have been if it had been offered when one was pushed out or retired, and that the world at large would take it as a recognition of the importance of the job, etc.

  So after much debate, and not without some doubt, I have telegraphed to W assenting. I shall be anxious to know whether you will think I have been a fool or not, when you have finished smiling! I’m sorry to let go Viscount, which I think is a nicer title, and which my father and grandfather had made respectable, but I think the main point is that the name itself remains.

  On June 4 Rome was liberated by the Allies and on June 6 the invasion of Europe began with D-Day. A week later the Germans hit back with the first of a new type of weapon, the V-1 flying bomb. It was jet-propelled, pilotless, flew at low altitudes and exploded when it ran out of fuel. Nevertheless, on June 22 Halifax was able to write: “Malcolm Macdonald tells me that many of the intelligent, in the know people in London are confident that Germany must crack before October.”

  His return to London in July meant another ecstatic reunion. “I hated going away this morning,” he wrote to Baba on July 22, a telling sentence since he wrote from his beloved Garrowby. “It is perfect being with someone like you who shares everything and with whom one has no reserves or lack of understanding. A very perfect companion, you are. So good altogether that it is spoiling and life seems to lack much of its spice and savour when you aren’t there.”

  On August 25 Allied troops, led by the French, marched into Paris. By now the Germans were calling up old men and children; boys of fifteen were captured in the front line. The British government had begun to plan for postwar education and a free medical service for everyone. “Oh! How I rejoice at seeing the Germans getting their own stuff back,” wrote Halifax as the Allied advances continued. “As the NY Times says: ‘One has the sensation of seeing a motion picture in reverse.’ ”

  Once again the Germans retaliated with a more deadly version of the V-1: a long-range, powerful rocket that traveled faster than the speed of sound and exploded on impact. In September the first of these V-2s landed on London (most of the smaller, earlier V-1s had fallen on southeast England). But nothing could halt the inexorable Allied advance.

  With the end of the war now seemingly only months away—something made even more likely when the first German city, Aachen, fell to the Allies on October 20, 1944—the Halifaxes’ plan for a holiday in England was postponed: it would not do for the ambassador to be away from his post when victory was declared.

  Instead, Halifax began to urge Baba to visit Washington, perhaps for Christmas or certainly soon afterward. “I don’t think I shall come home—unless sacked—before May,” he explained, adding in the same letter: “Have you been reading about the mass massacres in concentration camps at Lublin?* Have you ever read anything more utterly bestial in your life?

  “More and more I find myself wishing that lots of Germans may be killed before this job is over, from top to bottom, for I believe justice would best be served by their feeling something of what either directly or by acquiescence they have done to other people.”

  By the beginning of 1945 Irene’s health was poorer than ever. The diary is full of complaints about her “nerves,” poor sleeping and breathlessness, and the writing, always difficult to read, is much wilder. Her feeling of psychological distress must also have been exacerbated by the tensions between Baba and Fruity. Even thirteen-year-old Micky was unhappily aware of these. “He told me Fruity and Baba went at each other day and night.”

  Whereas, previously, Irene had usually managed to cover up her drinking and she had never been seen the worse for wear on any of her public engagements, now it was impossible to ignore. Her story that she had been hit on the head and fallen into a basement area was disbelieved by most of her family. “She simply got drunk and fell over,” said Fruity when he heard it.

  As always, she was penitent, remorseful, ashamed and biddable, agreeing to go into a nursing home for another cure during the month of January 1945. She hated every minute of it—the lack of privacy, the constant presence of watchful nurses, the whole paraphernalia of pills and injections designed to ease the process of withdrawal. “It made me desperate like a caged lion and I only wanted to escape and do bad things,” she wrote in her diary. She went home, tried a different treatment and then, as a last resort, went down to Little Compton, where Baba was briskly kind and understanding.

  In the outside world, the war in Europe was moving into its final phase. On February 14 Dresden was reduced to a smoking ruin and victory after victory brought the Allies nearer to Berlin. In the Bahamas, the Windsors were looking forward to the end of their “exile.” The duke had announced his resignation from the post of governor from April 1945, a few weeks before the end of the traditional five-year term. Their thoughts naturally turned to France, their only real home since their marriage.

  When Baba heard that they were leaving the Bahamas she wrote at once to the duchess—the first time since her previous acrimonious letter—a stiff little note asking about some pottery she had bought just before the war. Wallis’s reply showed that she was anxious to get on good terms again.

  Dear Baba [she wrote on February 25, 1945],

  Gray has told me about your Juan-les-Pins pottery. Here is the situation. La Cröe has been occupied by the Italians and the Germans, has been shelled from the sea by us and last but not least ruined by the Germans. The Americans are now dealing with the latter and we ought to be able to have our representatives inside of the gate shortly. I hope your things are not among the missing. We have lost quite a bit of our possessions. I do not think the pottery ever got to the Paris house somehow but must admit to being a bit vague on this score. Gray is writing to our old and frozen butler at Suchet to enquire and look among the mess there. If it is in Paris it is safe—but La Cröe I can’t say.

  I was sorry not to hear from you after my last letter and hope there was nothing in it that could have caused a misunderstanding. If so it was certainly unintentional on my part—as I have always appreciated and valued our friendship.

  Yours ever,

  Wallis

  On April 28, 1945, Mussolini was shot as he tried to flee across the Italian frontier to Innsbruck. Baba’s old friend and forme
r lover Count Dino Grandi had played a large part in Il Duce’s overthrow eighteen months earlier, framing the resolution that divested him of much of his power in the Grand Council in July 1943. The next day Mussolini was arrested and imprisoned and a prime minister installed, though it was not until he tried to escape to the German lines after the liberation of Rome that he was caught and killed.

  Within the next forty-eight hours, Hitler had committed suicide in his underground bunker and at 2:41 a.m. on May 7, the Germans signed the instrument of unconditional surrender. Finally, after more than five long years, the war in Europe was over.

  Like everyone else, the Curzon sisters celebrated. Baba collected a group of friends outside White’s Club and with thousands of others they walked the streets escorted by Fruity—now a special constable—who found his progress impeded by constant questions from passersby about bus and tube routes. The late evening found them, exhausted, sitting on the traffic island opposite the Ritz, shoes kicked off to ease their aching feet, watching the jubilant play of the searchlights after listening to the king’s broadcast at 9 p.m. from loudspeakers at the front of Buckingham Palace.

  Halifax’s feeling that the duke of Windsor was after his job was justified. The duke was anxious to arrange his postwar future, which stretched blankly before him, and if he could not have his first choice, the embassy in Washington, he hankered after a position as ambassador-at-large. Meanwhile, to fill the immediate aftermath of their departure from the Bahamas the Windsors decided to take a holiday in the U.S. They left for Miami on May 3, 1945, letting it be known that they would then return to France.

  The problem was that a man who had renounced the throne could not very well represent the reigning monarch, while the return of the Windsors to England raised the specter of a second “court.” When the new Labour government was elected on July 26, 1945, it, too, agreed that a roving ambassadorship would lead to inevitable trouble. As Halifax wrote: “It would almost certainly cause embarrassment to the Ambassador and the Consul, each of whom would be likely in different degrees to find it difficult to keep the Duke on the approved line or correct him if he got off it.”