The Mitford Girls Read online

  On days when she felt more cheerful, although she still experienced pangs of guilt because such activities were contrary to the class struggle, Decca looked forward to being a débutante. She imagined it would be a sort of extension of her experiences in Paris, and at the end she would be regarded - finally - as ‘grown-up’ and therefore free to run away. But the reality of being a débutante was less exciting than the anticipation: Decca found that Sydney still treated her as a child, and chaperoned her carefully from Rutland Gate to a seemingly endless series of lunches, tea parties, cocktail parties, dinners and dances. None of the ‘chinless wonders’ or ‘debs’ delights’, as the young men were known, interested Decca in the slightest. There is a picture of her in her presentation gown with extravagant train and court feathers; the dress is white satin with a row of pearl buttons down the front, which are twisted to one side and caught in the sash. She has made little effort with her appearance for the occasion and looks frumpily and balefully at the camera. There was an explanation for this disarray: recalling that Unity had grabbed some writing-paper when at the Palace, Decca felt she should do something. At the buffet following her presentation, she took some chocolates to eat later, and hid them in her bouquet. Sydney took her and Nancy, who was being presented again ‘on her marriage’, straight from the Palace to the photo studio. To Decca’s dismay when she picked up her bouquet to pose, the chocolates tumbled out all over the floor just as the photographer was about to shoot.

  However, the event that most coloured Decca’s Season as a débutante - she had only one - concerned her wicked younger cousin, Esmond Romilly, who had been in the news again. Having been expelled from Wellington he was now ensconced in a left-wing bookshop in Bloomsbury from where he was editing and publishing his Out of Bounds magazine, distributing it to public schools. He had not always been a Communist: he had recently converted from ultra-Conservatism. This had come about when he was asked to attack the Russian government in a school debate. He wrote to his uncle Winston, who replied that he was too busy to give detailed information and advised that the point to stress was that the Russians had murdered millions of people during the revolution. After blundering around for a while, confusing pacifism with Communism, Esmond came across the Daily Worker on his way to Dieppe on holiday. That put him on track and he became a daily subscriber. From this source he learned ‘that there was another world as well as the one in which I lived’. His own magazine was bright, informative and cheeky. The fact that it was banned in many public schools gave it a considerable cachet and he triumphantly emblazoned the names of those establishments on the front page. But he was clever enough to realize that he would not gain new readers through political editorials alone, and to increase circulation he included articles on subjects that were of primary importance to public-school boys . . . bullying by masters and older boys, the fagging system, and obscure hints at masturbation and homosexuality. In an article on how a thirteen-year-old new boy might expect to be warned by masters of what lay in store, Esmond wrote from his own experience: his housemaster had lined up the ‘wet bobs’ and explained incomprehensibly, ‘Men! There are men here who will try to take advantage of a man because a man is a new man. That’s all I have to say to you.’ There was even an article on that most shocking of subjects, co-education.17 Needless to say, underground copies of the magazine were soon to be found in every public school in the land and, once again, the national newspapers got to hear of it.

  Through gossip about his exploits, Esmond became a sort of hero to Decca. Although a year younger than her, he was an open rebel doing all the things that - had she the courage - she would have liked to do. She wished that somehow she could contrive to meet him. She might not have expected the apparition who greeted Philip Toynbee, though, who on 7 June 1934 ran away from Rugby School to join Esmond, fired with enthusiasm for the Communist cause by Out of Bounds. ‘At this point,’ Toynbee wrote of Esmond, ‘he was at the height of his intolerant fanaticism, a bristling rebel against home, school, society . . . the world.’ He had been living semi-rough in the basement of the shop on what he could earn from his magazine sales, sleeping on a camp bed, and smoking endless Craven A cigarettes. Nellie had washed her hands of him, unable to cope with an ideology that was opposed to everything in which she believed. ‘He was dirty and ill-dressed, immensely strong for his age and size; his flat face gave the impression of being deeply scarred, and his eyes flared and smouldered as we talked.’18

  After the 1935 Season ended, Decca hung around at Swinbrook, thoroughly miserable, waiting for mealtimes. Now she was depressed and unhappy, and everyone could see it. Sydney put it down to a late attack of adolescent misery and was sorry for her daughter, but any attempt to offer sympathy resulted either in floods of tears or in loud recriminations from Decca that she had not been allowed to have a proper education and therefore could not go to university. Being ‘grown up’ seemed to have no particular advantage at Swinbrook, and having had her year in France, and made her début, without attracting an ‘eligible’, Decca had nothing to do, and nothing whatever to look forward to. She had almost fifty pounds in her running-away account but she could not see the best way of using this to give herself a future. It seems that her boredom and unhappiness at this point coloured all memories of her earlier life at Swinbrook. This is the only possible explanation for differences between extant papers and the testimony of her contemporaries, and what she wrote of her childhood in Hons and Rebels.

  Sydney, though by no means won over to the Nazi regime by her visit, was enthusiastic about what she had seen in Germany, which prompted David to visit the country of his old foe, the Hun. In January 1935 he took Unity back after the Christmas break. She had stayed with Diana in the flat until the end of the previous term, but now she returned to ‘the heim’, and David stayed at a hotel. One day while they were lunching at the Osteria, Hitler put in an appearance. Unity was overjoyed. They did not speak, of course, but David was impressed. ‘Farve has been completely won over by him,’ she reported to Diana, after David left for home, ‘and admits himself to being in the wrong until now.’19

  Meanwhile, Unity had made progress towards her dream scenario, and in February 1935 she met Hitler face to face at last. Her Führer-watching had become more scientific by then: she scanned the newspapers for his movements. If he was not in Munich, or if he had a specific appointment during the afternoon, then it was pointless wasting time at the Osteria. She made friends with some of the guards at the Brown House (the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich), where she was a regular caller, and there she received odd snippets of information about when Hitler was expected. When he appeared she made small attempts to be noticed, such as dropping her book. Eventually this paid off. Hitler became used to seeing the tall, Nordic-looking girl - often alone - sitting in the same seat every time he visited the Osteria, and saw that her attention was fixed constantly on him. To her huge delight he began to nod to her sometimes as he passed her table. Eventually he became curious enough, exactly as she had hoped, to enquire of the restaurant owner, Herr Deutelmoser, who she was.

  The day of 9 February 1935 was, Unity wrote to David, though she claimed she was still almost too shaky to write properly, ‘the most wonderful and beautiful of my life.’ About ten minutes after she arrived at the Osteria, she wrote, Hitler spoke to Herr Deutelmoser and the two men glanced across at her. Deutelmoser walked to her table and said, ‘The Führer would like to speak to you.’ Unity continued, in an 800-word letter,

  I got up and went over to him, and he stood up and saluted and shook hands and introduced me to all the others and asked me to sit down next to him. I sat and talked for about half an hour . . . I can’t tell you of all the things we talked about . . . I told him he ought to come to England and he said he would love to but he was afraid there would be a revolution if he did. He asked if I had ever been to [a Wagner festival at] Bayreuth and I said no but I should like to, and he said to the other men that they should remember that the next ti
me.20

  Then they spoke of London, which he felt he knew well, he said, from his architectural studies. They went on to discuss films (Hitler said he considered Cavalcade the best he had ever seen), the new road systems being constructed all over Germany, the Great War and the Parteitag. He signed a postcard to her, writing in German: ‘To Fraulein Unity Mitford as a friendly memento of Germany and Adolf Hitler’. Then he pocketed the slip of paper on which she had written her name for him to copy, and left after instructing the manager to put Unity’s meal on his bill. ‘After all that,’ Unity continued in her letter to her father, ‘you can imagine what I feel like. I am so happy that I wouldn’t mind a bit dying. I suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world . . . you may think this is hysterical. I’m sure Muv will, but when you remember that for me, he is the greatest man of all time, you must admit I am lucky even to have set eyes on him, let alone to have sat and talked to him.’

  Several days later she wrote to her mother of Hitler’s pleasing simplicity: he had been ‘so ordinary that one couldn’t be nervous . . . I still can’t quite believe [it] but I have my signed postcard as proof ’.21 Nothing Hitler could say or do would subsequently destroy Unity’s admiration of him. She had swallowed the Nazi bait whole: waving banners, emotional anthems, torchlight processions, and anti-Semitism.

  There must have been some extraordinary quality in Unity that not only attracted Hitler’s attention but caused him to establish a deeper relationship by continued invitations to her to join his table. Other people regularly visited Hitler’s known haunts in the hope of catching a glimpse of him, but he never noticed them. Unity wrote of how some congratulated her after that first meeting, and she was amazed that they were not jealous of her, a foreigner, for having been singled out for notice.

  Two weeks later she was having tea at the Carlton tearooms with a fellow student when Hitler spotted her and invited both girls to join him. In the following week she was there with Michael Burn, who later became well known as a journalist, writer and poet. Burn had known Unity since he attended a Rutland Gate party during Unity’s year as a débutante and, like Derek Hill, he was struck by Unity’s extreme reaction when Hitler appeared. As Hill had witnessed, she trembled. ‘Hitler passed our table and spoke to her,’ Michael Burn recalled, ‘and then he went on to his table in the garden. One of his adjutants came back and said Hitler had invited her to join them. She rushed off after him. I might not have existed . . .’22 A week after that a similar invitation was extended to her at the Osteria; this time Unity was introduced to Goebbels. Her diary reveals that between their first meeting in June 1935 and her penultimate meeting with him in September 1939, on the eve of war, she and Hitler met and talked on 140 occasions - an average of about once every ten days, remarkable when one considers what Hitler’s schedule must have been like in those four years leading up to the war. Can one even imagine Churchill or Roosevelt behaving like this with a foreign student? But so quickly did Unity find a place as a friend of Hitler that, within months, when Diana, Tom, Pam and Sydney visited her, she introduced them to him without any difficulty.

  Was this purely because of Unity’s ‘presence’, the unique quality that Decca wrote about in her memoir yet which she could not quantify? Or might it have been that Nazi intelligence sources had connected her with Diana Guinness, mistress of British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, which led in turn to the even more surprising information that the twenty-one-year-old English student was a close relative of Winston Churchill? However, it is doubtful that any connection would have been made initially with the divorced Mrs Guinness, and it is reasonably certain that, whatever happened subsequently, those first meetings occurred as the result of Unity’s own personality.

  That April, when she had met him three times, Hitler invited Unity to a luncheon party. To her surprise, Unity discovered when she arrived that it was in honour of Mosley, who was paying a private visit to Hitler. It was the first meeting between the two men, and they met only once more. Neither spoke the other’s language, and neither was especially impressed with the other. Besides an obvious interest in meeting the man whose name was on everyone’s lips, Mosley possibly hoped to obtain financial support from Hitler: funding for the BUF from Mussolini (which Mosley always denied receiving) was drying up, the organization was rapidly eating up the donations of major supporters in England, and was in danger of draining Mosley’s own fortune. In the event it is doubtful that Mosley even broached the subject of finance in the short time allowed for discussion, after which they joined the ladies in the dining room of Hitler’s comfortable apartment. As well as Unity, two other women had been invited: Winifred Wagner, the brilliant English-born widow of Richard Wagner’s son, Siegfried, and the Duchess of Brunswick, only daughter of the Kaiser and a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. These English connections were intended as a graceful compliment to the guest of honour. Hitler, apparently, was not aware of the relationship between Unity and Mosley,23 for he appeared taken aback to find that his young English student friend knew Mosley so intimately. Later, he asked her who her father was. Hitler was unfamiliar with the customs of the English peerage, and when Unity said he was Lord Redesdale, not Mitford as Hitler had expected, he assumed she was illegitimate, patting her hand and murmuring sympathetically, ‘Ah, poor child!’

  The meeting between Hitler and Sydney, which occurred soon afterwards, was something of an embarrassment to Unity. They joined him for tea at the Carlton tearooms, and Unity had to translate her mother’s lecture about the value of wholemeal bread. ‘Whenever I translated anything for either of them,’ she complained to Diana, ‘it sounded stupid translated . . . I fear the whole thing was wasted on Muv, she is just the same as before. Having so little feeling, she does not feel his goodness and wonderfulness radiating out like we do . . .’ In fact, Hitler was something of a health-food fanatic and probably agreed with Sydney about the bread.

  Unity found Pam little better than Sydney as a potential fellow worshipper of the Führer. Pam had given up managing the farm at Biddesden in the previous autumn and spent the rest of the pre-war years travelling extensively, visiting parts of Europe by car that after the war were behind the Iron Curtain. In June 1935 she called on Unity with Wilhelmine ‘Billa’ Cresswell [later Lady Harrod]. Billa was an old friend of all the girls and lives on in literature as Fanny, the narrator of Nancy’s most famous novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, and the major character in a subsequent book, Don’t Tell Alfred. It was during Pam’s second visit that autumn that she met Hitler. She and Unity were lunching at the Osteria and had just finished eating when there was a flurry of activity, which Unity knew meant that Hitler’s black Mercedes, with a similar car containing members of his party, had been spotted arriving outside the restaurant. She told Pam to go and stand by the door if she wanted a good view of him. As Hitler passed her, he looked straight into Pam’s eyes, the most strikingly blue of any of the sisters’. A short time later Schaub, one of Hitler’s adjutants, came over and asked Pam if she was Unity’s sister. On receiving a positive answer he said that the Führer had invited both of them to move to his table. The sisters cheerfully ate a second lunch with Hitler. When she returned to England and was asked about him, Pam described Hitler vaguely as ‘very ordinary, like an old farmer in a brown suit’. But she recalled every detail of the food they ate and was rhapsodic over some of it, ‘Oh, the new potatoes . . . they were absolutely delicious, ’ she said.

  Tom’s reaction was more to Unity’s satisfaction. He paid several visits to her while staying with his friend Janos von Almassy. That summer he and Unity argued hotly about the Nazi regime for although Tom had conceded the transformation in Germany that the Party had brought about since coming to power, he was opposed to the racial creed it espoused. Nevertheless, he was interested in seeing Hitler for himself, which caused Unity to worry that if she introduced him he might say what he felt to Hitler, which would rebound on her. She therefore took Tom to the Osteria very early,
knowing that Hitler never arrived before two o’clock and often later than that. On this particular day, however, Hitler arrived early and Tom was duly introduced. To Unity’s relief, ‘Tom adored the Führer,’ she wrote to Diana. ‘He almost got into a frenzy like us. But I expect he will have cooled down by the time he gets home.’

  But if Unity felt irritated by the casual demeanour of Sydney and Pam in the presence of her earthly god, then she soon gave her entire family every reason to feel aggrieved by her own behaviour. In June that year she wrote a letter to a publication owned and edited by the notorious Julius Streicher. Copies of Stürmer were displayed in bright red boxes all over the Reich. It was less of a newspaper than a propaganda organ, but it carried stories of a popular nature and had a circulation of 100,000 copies. Streicher was an old acquaintance of Hitler - indeed, Hitler made few new friends after 1930; most of those with whom he surrounded himself were from the Kampfzeit, the years of struggle, or die Altkampfer, the old fighters. Streicher’s membership card in the Nazi Party was number two and Hitler’s was number seven. Soon after Hitler came to power Streicher was made Gauleiter of Franconia, a region he purged not only of Jews, but of all non-Aryans without mercy. It was Streicher, for example who made a party of Jews clear a meadow by tearing out the grass with their teeth, an incident that evidently caused much amusement in the higher echelons of the Nazi Party.