The Mitford Girls Read online

  A new admirer soon appeared on the scene, Guards officer Sir Hugh Smiley, who was far closer to David’s idea of ‘the right sort’. He proposed and Nancy replied that she couldn’t even think about it until her book was finished. When he persisted she accepted, then changed her mind. At home she quarrelled with Sydney and, in a fit of misery, she rounded up Decca and the two went on a long damp country walk during which Nancy confided her woes. ‘I can almost hear the squelch of gumboots,’ Decca recalled forty years later, when she reminded Nancy of the occasion. ‘The rain seemed like one’s inner tears of bitterness because of boredom, and the inner futility of that life. You told me how Muv had given you a terrific dressing down for not being married, having turned down yet another proposal of marriage, & that you would be an old maid if you pursued this hopeless course ...’5 Nancy replied, ‘I was telling lies if I said Muv wanted to marry me off . . . I think I was probably in a blind temper about something else and talked wildly. One of the reasons for my respect is that she never did urge marriage without inclination and I hardly think she knew who was rich and who was not. I would have liked to marry Robert Byron but he was a total pederast ...’6

  A few weeks later Hamish returned from America, drinking heavily because, he said, his bulwarks (Nancy) had gone. Sir Hugh proposed twice more before Nancy gave him a firm refusal at the Café de Paris where he was wooing her with orchids while Hamish sat giggling at the next table. After that Sir Hugh turned cool and a few months later married another Nancy, Cecil Beaton’s sister. The unsatisfactory relationship with Hamish, but not the engagement, was back on, and life for Nancy went on much as before with parties, nightclubs, lunches at the Ritz and dinners at the Café Royal. She had earned several hundred pounds from her books and articles by then: ‘I’m just so rich I go 1st Class everywhere and take taxis,’ she enthused, boasting that she had even refused an offer of ten pounds a week to write gossip for the Tatler. ‘I’m having a perfectly divine time, it is certainly more fun not being engaged.’7 She did not mention to anyone how ‘deeply distressed’ she had been at a conversation during lunch with Cynthia Gladwyn when she was told what she had apparently never realized: that Hamish was homosexual.8

  Hamish knew that marriage to Nancy would never work because of his sexual predilections, and he confided this to several friends, but his emotional attachment to her was important to him so he allowed things to drift. He was not sexually promiscuous, in fact ‘not very sexy’,9 but eventually he realized he must make it clear to her, finally, that while he valued their friendship it could never progress further. He did this by inventing an engagement to another girl, Kathleen ‘Kit’ Dunn, sister of Philip, who was engaged to Hamish’s sister, Mary. Kit was apparently a wild and eccentric character, whom Hamish and Nancy had chuckled over together, but presumably she was prepared to play along with the charade.

  Nancy had spent a good deal of the spring of 1933 staying at Diana’s house in Eaton Square in open defiance of David and Sydney’s decree that ‘the Eatonry’, as the Mitford children referred to the house, was out of bounds. And Nancy was not alone in defying David. On 14 June, the day before the Guinness divorce proceedings were to be heard, there was a gathering of the elder sisters. Pam was there, and Unity, who had just finished a term at art school, called in too to offer sisterly support.10 When the butler announced that Hamish was on the telephone and wished to speak to Nancy, she left the room and went to the phone. She was completely unprepared for what Hamish was about to tell her and she returned, minutes later, white-faced with distress and told them about his engagement.

  Hamish called round later that day and there was ‘a dreadful scene’ for which Nancy apologized in a letter:

  But darling you come and tell me you are going to share your life with Kit Dunn. You whom I have always thought so sensible & so idealistic about marriage, you who will love your own little babies so very, very much, it is a hard thing for me to bear that you should prefer her to me. You see, I knew you weren’t in love with me, but you are in love so often and for such short spaces of time, I thought in your soul you loved me & that in the end we should have children & look back on life together when we are old...11

  Three weeks later Nancy announced her engagement to Peter Rodd, a friend of her and Hamish. At Oxford his friends had made up a ditty about him:

  Mr Peter Rodd

  Is extraordinarily like God

  He has the same indefinable air

  Of Savoir Faire

  According to Diana, Peter proposed only a week after Nancy and Hamish broke up. He had taken Nancy to a party and had had - as usual - a good deal to drink. Nancy was the third girl to whom he had proposed that week. In a letter dated 31 July he hinted to her that he had only intended the proposal as a joke,12 but Nancy was not in a mood for jokes. She had spent almost five years in an unsatisfactory relationship and now, at nearly thirty, she felt perilously close to becoming the old maid of Sydney’s prediction. She felt hurt and humiliated at Hamish’s treachery, she wanted a home, children and some sort of financial stability, and perhaps she wanted to prove to Hamish that she was desirable to others if not to him. She would have done better with the besotted Guards officer, no matter how dull she thought him, for in the event Peter Rodd, or ‘Prod’, as he quickly became known to the Mitfords, proved a poor provider in all departments.

  His reputation at the time was poor anyway. At Oxford he regarded college rules as being for everyone but himself, and he was eventually sacked from Balliol for entertaining women in his rooms after hours. While travelling in Brazil he had worked at a succession of jobs, in banking and journalism, found for him by his father, the multi-talented diplomat Baron Rennell. An arrogant and pedantic know-it-all, Prod had either been dismissed or resigned in the nick of time from all of them. He ended up destitute, and under arrest, and had to be bailed out by his unfortunate father. On the credit side he could be amusing, was undeniably clever, and certainly good-looking. According to one biographer, he preferred to admire his talents as works of art, rather than use them, and he spent his life avoiding making achievements that were well within his grasp. Perhaps his character was best captured by Evelyn Waugh who used him as the model for his comic fictional hero Basil Seal.13

  Prod was willing to go through with his commitment to Nancy, but for her it was a classic rebound situation: she could not perceive his faults through her rose-tinted delight. David, who lunched his prospective son-in-law at Rutland Gate while the requisite paternal permission was sought, announced that ‘the fella talks like a ferret with his mouth sewn up’ but he agreed to the marriage anyway. By now even he had begun to grasp that, as far as his elder daughters were concerned, his edicts had little effect.

  Prod spent a week at Swinbrook, talking until the family reeled with boredom. No matter what subject was brought up, it seemed he was the world expert. ‘I know, I know,’ he would interrupt. ‘I know, I was an engineer and I . . .’ or ‘I know, I know, I am a farmer . . .’ The sisters swore he once said, ‘I know, I know, I am the Pope . . .’ One of his lectures, delivered to the haplessly captive Decca and Debo, was a detailed account of the tollgate system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their dazed reaction can be imagined, and from then they referred to him as ‘the old Toll-Gater’,14 which Nancy inevitably converted into a bon mot: ‘For whom the Gate Tolls . . .’

  Almost overnight the tone of Nancy’s letters changed from misery to sheer delight as she began the customary visits to introduce herself to members of her fiancé’s family. ‘Well, the happiness. Oh goodness gracious I am happy. You must get married darling,’ she advised Mark Ogilvie-Grant, writing from Highcliffe Castle, Hampshire, which was the home of one of Peter’s aunts.15 ‘Everybody should this minute if they want a receipt for absolute bliss . . . And remember true love can’t be bought. If I really thought it could I’d willingly send you £3 tomorrow.’16 Prod, too, wrote letters expressing his happiness, to Nancy herself, and to Hamish, apologizing for taking Nan
cy away from him. It was a polite fiction between friends. ‘I know it is hell for you and I wish it wasn’t [but] I am so much in love with her that I can understand how you feel.’17

  Pre-wedding activity now absorbed the Mitford household for the marriage, originally planned for October but eventually held on 4 December at St John’s Church in Smith Square, with Diana’s two small sons as pages.

  While Nancy had been switching fiancés, and the scandal of the Guinness divorce was on everyone’s lips, tragedy had befallen the house of Mosley. In April 1933 Mosley and Cimmie had gone to Rome where he played a major role in a huge rally during which the Italian Fascist Party presented him with a black banner containing the Union Flag and Fascist symbols as the BUF standard. The couple returned at the end of April and Mosley immediately resumed his visits to Diana. Absolute discretion was essential. Bryan had ‘behaved like a gentleman’ and offered fake evidence of infidelity so that Diana would not have to appear in court, but with the proceedings in the offing it was imperative that the department of the King’s Proctor was given no evidence to indicate ‘collusion’. ‘The King’s Proctor haunted us all,’ Diana wrote. If there was any suspicion that the divorce was ‘arranged’ the courts were obliged to deny the petition; and even in the year after a divorce was granted, evidence of an affair by the petitioner could make the divorce invalid. Under cover of darkness Mosley could walk the short distance between his Ebury Street flat and Diana’s house in Eaton Square in about five minutes. When he tapped on her windows with the walking-stick he had carried since the flying accident in 1918, she would be waiting to let him in.

  During the first weekend in May Mosley went to his country property, Savehay Farm in Denham, Buckinghamshire, where he had arranged to spend the weekend with Cimmie. On the Saturday night they had a terrific row about Diana, and Mosley slammed out of the house. Cimmie spent the night crying, which was not unusual for her at that time. The following morning, she wrote to Mosley, apologizing for behaving unreasonably to him, and explaining that she had been feeling particularly unwell ‘with sickness, and crashing back and tummy pain’.18 Later that day, within a few days of the Mosleys’ thirteenth wedding anniversary, Cimmie was rushed into hospital with a perforated appendix. She was operated on and Mosley dashed to her side. This did not, however, prevent him going straight from the clinic to the Eatonry that night. Appendicitis was not in itself considered dangerous, but in the days before antibiotics there was always a risk of infection, and within three days it was clear that Cimmie was critically ill with peritonitis. The doctors felt that if she fought hard she might win through, but on 15 May she died at the age of thirty-three, without, her surgeon announced, ‘both mentally or physically ever lifting a finger to live’.19

  It was a devastating blow to all concerned, and Mosley, who had unquestionably loved his wife, according to his lights, spent ‘hours and hours’ sitting by her flower-bedecked coffin. When it was removed to the chapel at Cliveden, home of Nancy Astor, who had befriended the young Cimmie (whose own mother had died when she was eight),20 Mosley spent hours pacing endlessly about at their home in Denham, in the garden Cimmie had created. Cimmie’s two sisters were so concerned about his demeanour that they had his revolver removed from his bedroom and hidden from him. They knew that when Mosley had walked out after the row on that last Saturday night before Cimmie was taken ill he had gone straight to Diana Guinness. ‘God, what a terrible doom for Tom [Mosley]!’ Cimmie’s elder sister, Irene Ravensdale, wrote in her diary. ‘And to think that Cim has gone and that Guinness is free and alive . . . where is any balance of justice!’21 Upon one matter, Mosley was absolutely insistent: his three children must have no further changes in their lives. They must continue to live at Savehay, the old house at Denham that Cimmie had decorated to her taste, surrounded by the same nursery staff, himself, their grandmother and aunts. It was the best he could do to give them a sense of security.22

  For Diana, of course, it seemed like absolute disaster. She had not disliked Cimmie, and had certainly not wished her ill. She knew that Mosley had had affairs with at least a dozen women before her, and she had supposed that Cimmie accepted his behaviour. Now, with the papers full of eulogies for Cimmie, opinion hardened against Diana. Plenty of people gossiped that Cimmie had died of a broken heart, rather than infection. From being the darling of Society a year earlier Diana became a social pariah, as her parents had foretold.

  She saw Mosley only for very short periods. Several times a week he would drive to London in the early evening from Denham and be back there by 1 a.m. ‘Who could it be but Diana Guinness?’ Irene Ravensdale wrote in her diary. ‘Baba and I were sick with terror.’23 The sisters could see that Mosley was genuinely ill with grief, that he was doing his best to be a good father to the children and was always sweet with them. But, equally, they thought it hurtful to Cimmie’s memory that Mosley should wish to go on seeing Diana at such a time. How could they know, since he did not tell them, that his relationship with her (they referred to Diana as ‘the horror’ between themselves) was any different from those he had shared with other women in the past? They bearded him about it and he told them frankly that he felt he had an obligation to Diana and he could not ‘shirk’ it. They saw danger signals, too, in that Unity had recently joined the BUF and was keen to become a serious activist. They suspected that in some way Unity was spying on Mosley on Diana’s behalf. With the summer just beginning it was decided between them all that Irene would take the two elder children on holiday, the baby, only a year old, would go with Nanny to the Isle of Wight, and Baba, having cleared it with her husband ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, would accompany Mosley on a motoring trip in France.

  One evening Mosley visited Diana at her request. Afterwards, according to Irene Ravensdale’s diaries, he told his sisters-in-law that he had asked Diana, referring to the divorce proceedings, ‘Have you jumped your little hurdle yet?’ She had been wounded that he should take so lightly the enormous sacrifice she had made, crying, ‘It’s my whole life!’24 There was a terrible row, he reported, and he left after telling her that he was going on holiday to France with Baba. Diana refutes this. ‘He did not say, “Have you jumped your hurdle?” Nor did I say, “It’s my whole life.” We always understood each other perfectly.’25 It appears, then, that either Mosley or Irene Ravensdale invented the incident. Nevertheless, Diana cannot have been happy to hear that Mosley was going on an extended holiday with Baba and it is probable that hot words were exchanged.

  All this had occurred between Cimmie’s death and the gathering of the elder Mitford sisters at Diana’s house a month later, on 14 June, on the eve of the divorce hearing, when Hamish told Nancy of his fake engagement. If ever Diana had been in need of sisterly support it was then. She was just twenty-two with two small children. At a time when she might have reasonably expected strong support from the man for whom she had broken up her marriage, he was involved with his own crisis and was available only occasionally. Worse, she had just learned that he was going on holiday with another woman. Although she is too loyal to Mosley to have ever said so, she must have felt utterly alone and defenceless. One or two friends, having overcome their initial disapproval, had begun to invite her to dinner parties, and mutual friends told Cimmie’s sisters that Diana was looking grim, with her face ‘dead-white’. 26

  Perhaps Diana already suspected that Mosley’s interest in Baba was more than platonic or strictly familial for, astonishingly, Mosley began a long-standing affair with her that summer. It was an open secret within the family: Irene Ravensdale, who had enjoyed a brief, unimportant romp with Mosley before his marriage to her sister, wrote, ‘I pray this obsession with her will utterly oust Diana Guinness.’27 With hindsight Diana says she did not mind about Mosley’s affair with Baba, because ‘I was somehow always confident that he would come back to me’, though she admits to periods of jealousy. 28 At the time, however, she was more deeply in love with Mosley than ever, and though she and Mosley quickly patched up their
quarrel, it must have been a difficult period for her. One surprising thing happened: through Unity Diana was advised that she might visit Swinbrook for the weekend of 6 June. She and Unity spent most of the time sitting in the garden for David refused to speak to her, but it was ‘the thin end of the wedge’ in his parlance.

  In the following week Unity was admitted to the BUF as a member, and she was thrilled to receive, on that eventful day of 14 June from the hands of ‘the Leader’ himself, a BUF coat badge, which Mosley removed from his own lapel. Her membership was known to her siblings and to others outside the family, but was kept secret from David and Sydney.

  What of Decca and Debo during this turbulent period? They were living quietly at Swinbrook doing much the same things that the four elder sisters had done, with perhaps a little more freedom, although never enough for Decca. Still, the rebellious unhappiness that she details in her memoir is nowhere in evidence in her contemporary correspondence. Nor did her friends regard her as unhappy. One, who met her for the first time in 1932, was fourteen, about a year older than Decca, when he was taken to Swinbrook by his mother so that she could discuss Women’s Institute matters with Sydney.