The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters

Nancy spent the ‘phoney war’, the months between the declaration of war and Hitler’s invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, working in London at a first-aid post and writing her fourth novel, Pigeon Pie, a comic spy story that did not sell well. Peter joined up, ‘looking very pretty’ in his uniform, and they had a brief retour de flamme which resulted in a second miscarriage for Nancy. It was a depressing time and in her unhappiness she lashed out at her sisters: Deborah was ‘having a wild time with young cannon fodders at the Ritz’; Jessica was attacked for living in America: ‘You must be mad to stay there & like all mad people convinced you are sane’; Unity, whose suicide attempt had not yet reached the ears of her family, was rumoured to be in a concentration camp which was ‘a sort of poetic justice’; Pamela was living at Rignell, ‘in a round of boring gaiety of the neighbourly description’. Where Diana was concerned Nancy exulted when ‘Sir Oswald Quisling’ was imprisoned but thought it quite useless ‘if Lady Q is still at large’. Her hostility towards Diana did not stop at angry words. In June 1940, she was summoned by Gladwyn Jebb, an official at the Foreign Office, to give information on what she knew about Diana’s visits to Germany. She told him that she considered her ‘an extremely dangerous person’. ‘Not very sisterly behaviour’, she admitted to a family friend, ‘but in such times I think it is one’s duty?’ According to an MI5 report of the time, Nancy also informed on Pamela and Derek who she thought should be kept under observation because of being ‘anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and defeatist’.

Although Diana would probably have been interned regardless of Nancy’s character reference, her sister’s testimony must have lent support to the government in their decision to detain her. She was arrested on 29 June 1940 and sent to Holloway, a women’s prison in north London. Diana did not learn of Nancy’s act of disloyalty until 1983, ten years after her death. Had she known, it is likely that she would have cut Nancy out of her life for ever. Even if she had wanted to keep up some kind of communication with her, it is certain that Mosley would have forbidden it. In the event, once Diana was in prison, the five-year estrangement between the two sisters, that had started with Wigs on the Green, began to heal. After the novel’s publication, Nancy had written just twice to Diana, to congratulate her on the births of her two Mosley sons, which, by painful coincidence, had occurred within a few weeks of Nancy’s two miscarriages. While Diana was in Holloway, prison regulations restricted her letter-writing but when she was released in 1943 and was living under house arrest the correspondence between them resumed. This was in spite of Nancy having once again performed her patriotic duty by going to the authorities when the Mosleys’ release was announced and volunteering that in her opinion Diana should not be let out of prison because she ‘sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy generally’. Diana was never to know about this second betrayal as the government papers in which it was recorded were not made public until four months after her death.

During the first two years of the war, Nancy worked in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk and later looked after Jewish refugees billeted at Rutland Gate. In 1942, she found a job more to her liking at Heywood Hill, a bookshop in Mayfair, which soon became a meeting place for her London friends. In the same year she met Gaston Palewski, a Free French officer who was General de Gaulle’s right-hand man in London and who very quickly became the love of her life. This cultivated, sophisticated and amusing man was a passionate lover of women and a fiercely loyal supporter of de Gaulle – qualities that made up for his lack of physical charm. The ‘Colonel’, as Nancy always called him, worked the same powerful effect on her as Hitler, Mosley and Esmond had on her sisters. She became as indiscriminately pro-French as Unity had been pro-German; as ready to swallow her pride and put up with Palewski’s infidelities as Diana was with Mosley’s; as convinced that Gaullism was the answer to France’s problems as Jessica was that communism would solve the world’s injustices. Although Palewski was not in love with Nancy – and never pretended to be – he made her feel desired in a way that no other man had. The eight months that their affair lasted before he left to join de Gaulle in Algeria were among the happiest in her life and inspired The Pursuit of Love, the novel that made her famous. It is not clear when Nancy told her sisters about the affair; Palewski is not mentioned in her surviving letters until after the end of the war.

Oswald Mosley’s message to his supporters on 9 May 1940 to ‘resist the foreign invasion with all that is in us’ did not forestall his arrest. On 23 May 1940, he was sent to Brixton Prison under Defence Regulation 18B, which enabled the government to detain without trial anyone suspected of being a threat to the country. Diana, an ‘extremely dangerous and sinister young woman’ according to the Home Office official who signed her detention order, was arrested a month later. In October, she appeared before an Advisory Committee appointed to decide whether she should remain incarcerated. Diana treated her hearing with contempt, as ‘an absurd and insulting farce’, an attitude that she later admitted to regretting. Her loyalty to her friendship with Hitler and her refusal to repudiate Nazi policies led to the recommendation that she be kept locked up. On her arrest, Diana left her two youngest sons, Alexander, who was eighteen months old and Max, who was just eleven weeks and not yet weaned, with their nanny. Lady Redesdale would have taken them to live with her but she was fully occupied caring for Unity, so the children went to live at Rignell with Pamela, whose nickname ‘Woman’ belied the fact – unluckily for the little boys – that she was the least maternal of the sisters. After a year and a half at Rignell, they went with Nanny Higgs as paying guests to the new owners of Swinbrook House. Diana missed her four children terribly and their occasional brief visits were overshadowed by the anguish of having to part with them. But her greatest complaint was being separated from Mosley. Other couples detained under 18B had been moved to married quarters and the Mosleys began to press for permission to be housed together. At the end of 1941, they were reunited in Holloway and lodged in a flat in the prison grounds where they spent two further years in detention. In the autumn of 1943 Mosley contracted phlebitis and the prison doctors reported that his life could be in danger. The Mosleys were released in November and settled at Crux Easton, near Newbury, where they remained under house arrest until the end of the war. The government’s decision to release them was met with a storm of protest and countrywide demonstrations.

Nancy was not the only sister to remonstrate against the decision to free the Mosleys: Jessica wrote to Winston Churchill to demand that they be kept in jail because their release was a ‘direct betrayal of those who have died for the cause of anti-fascism’, and she sent a copy of her letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. In her second volume of memoirs, A Fine Old Conflict, Jessica wrote that on re-reading this letter thirty years later, she found it ‘painfully stuffy and self-righteous’, and noted that Nancy had written condemning her action as ‘not very sisterly’ – the very same words that Nancy had used for her own behaviour when she denounced Diana in 1940. Jessica’s views, as she herself honestly admitted, were mixed with a ‘goodly dash of familial spitefulness’ and with bitterness over Esmond’s death in action in 1941. There is no evidence that Nancy ever told Jessica that she too had denounced Diana, or conceded that in performing her ‘duty’ she might also have been acting with a not insignificant dash of sisterly spite – and without Jessica’s justification of having lost a husband in the fighting.

The Romillys spent their first months in America scraping a living in various occupations; Jessica worked as a salesgirl in a dress shop before landing a job selling Scottish tweeds at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. A clutch of letters of introduction from family and friends helped the couple to make contacts, some of whom, such as Katherine Graham of the Washington Post, were to become lifelong friends. They went to Washington, where Esmond worked as a door-to-door silk-stocking salesman, and then on to Miami, where Jessica found a job selling costume jewellery and Esmond became part owner of a bar with a $1,000 loan from Katherine Graham’s father, the wealthy financier Eugene Meyer. When Chamberlain resigned and Churchill formed a National Government, Esmond decided to join the war effort and signed up with the Canadian Royal Air Force, applying for a commission as a pilot officer. In June 1941, four months after their daughter Constancia was born, Esmond was posted to Britain as an air force navigator. Six months later, a few days before Jessica was planning to join him in England, Esmond was declared missing after his aircraft went down over the North Sea. Winston Churchill, who was on a visit to America to meet Roosevelt, saw Jessica and gave her details of Esmond’s disappearance. He made it clear that there was not the slightest chance that Esmond was being held prisoner of war but Jessica continued to hold out hopes of his survival and it was months before she could accept that he was dead. There are no letters to her sisters to tell of her devastating loss, and in Hons and Rebels his death is recorded in a mere footnote. Jessica buried her grief as her upbringing had taught her and refused to give in to misery or despair. She turned her anger on Diana and her ‘precious friends’. Where previously she had felt revulsion for her sister’s politics, her hatred was now personal. Unity escaped any share of the blame, perhaps because her pitiful state made her impossible to hate.

After Esmond’s death, Jessica decided to stay in America and eventually found a job in the Office of Price Administration, a federal agency established to prevent wartime inflation, where she fell in love with Robert Treuhaft, the son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary who was working as an enforcement attorney and who shared her commitment to radical causes. They were married in the summer of 1943 – in secret, like the Mosleys. After the hounding she had received from the press when she first arrived in America, Jessica was anxious to preserve her new-found anonymity in San Francisco. She wanted to be considered on her own merits and not merely as one of the Mitford girls. In 1944, she forfeited her British citizenship in order to join the American Communist Party and threw herself into tireless fund-raising and recruiting on its behalf. Although Lady Redesdale wrote to her regularly, keeping her informed of family news, Jessica’s contact with her sisters was sporadic. She had made a conscious effort to break away and was carving out a life for herself in deliberate opposition to the world of privilege and prejudice she felt her family represented. Her deep well of feelings for her sisters remained intact, but mistrust had entered their relations and behind the long-standing jokes and teases was a wariness that was never dispelled.

Pamela spent the war years at Rignell where – like Lady Redesdale who in Unity’s little book of questions All About Everybody had put as her favourite occupation ‘woman at the till’ – she kept a close eye on expenditure. Her housekeeping and farming skills came in useful when coping with wartime rationing and labour shortages. In the bitterly cold winter of 1942 when the water tanks for her cattle froze, the youth who had replaced her cowman told her that there was no need to fetch fresh water for the cows since they could eat the snow. Pamela’s experience of running the Biddesden dairy farm had taught her otherwise. ‘How do you know what they want?’ she scolded. ‘You’ve never been an in-calf heifer’. As a leading scientist, Derek would have been exempt from active service but he was determined to join up and volunteered for the Royal Air Force. He went into action in 1941 in a night-fighter squadron and finished the war as a heavily decorated wing commander. When the Mosleys were released in 1943 and had nowhere to live – the lease on Wootton had been surrendered in 1940 – Pamela and Derek immediately offered to take them in, just as they had taken in their two boys at the beginning of the war. Diana never forgot Derek and Pamela’s loyalty, and it brought her closer to her sister than she had been since Biddesden days.

The beginning of the war was a particularly miserable time for nineteen-year-old Deborah. She had travelled with her mother to Switzerland to collect Unity after her suicide attempt and suffered the shock of finding her a completely changed person. She was witness to the increasingly bitter political arguments between the Redesdales and their decision to separate. When Unity came out of hospital, Deborah, except for a few months when she worked in the forces canteen at St Pancras Station, was cooped up with her sister and mother in the small cottage at Swinbrook, or stayed at Inch Kenneth with her grim and physically diminished father. In April 1941, Andrew Cavendish, to whom she had considered herself unofficially engaged for some time, formally proposed and they were married the following month, both aged just twenty-one. Deborah spent the first two years of her marriage following Andrew, who was in the Coldstream Guards, to his different training grounds across the country, living in small pubs and, occasionally, rented houses. She bore three children during the war, two of whom survived: a daughter, Emma, and a son, Peregrine. In 1943, while Andrew was fighting with his battalion in Italy, she moved to The Rookery, a house on the Derbyshire estate of her parents-in-law, where she spent the rest of the war.

Dear Deb Dahlia

Haven’t had a letter from you for ages, what has happened? How are the P[arent Bird]’s – everyone I see asks if they are interned & poor Ld Londonderry has had to deny publicly that he is.

Tell Muv I have written to the Duchess of Aosta & asked her to find out from the wop consul in Munich how & where Boud is. This is very round about & will take time but it should work.

I suppose they are pleased about having the Russians on their side1 – do note the reactions. Dear me how I regret not having taught you how to write. And what about Hitler’s weapon, is it the Russian air force or some awful gas or bomb? Do they know?

Now be tactful & don’t tell the P’s I asked the trend but I do simply so die to know.

Where is Squalor? Coming home or not or what. I long to write to her & don’t know where.

I am learning to shoot with Rodd’s revolver so that I can be like the Polish grandmothers when the Germo-Russians turn up here which I suppose they will do soon.

Give my love to Blor & mind you write soon.

Love from NR

P.S. Everybody here is being inoculated for all the diseases they can remember as they think H’s policy is bacteriological warfare. I have quite refused as it always makes me so ill.

What is your policy? Now TACT Dahlia & tear this letter up for laud’s sake.

Darling Susan

Here I sit in this awful dark cellar all day from 11–7 & no day off not even Sunday & this is the sixteenth day I’ve been here & I feel as if it were seven years already. It is gas &, therefore, air proof & one has a racking headache after the 1st half hour. I hope you are harrowed.

Susan Stalin how could you let him. Honestly Soo I had such an awful dream, that I was in Harrods & I saw a big crowd so I thought it was the Queen & Q. Mary & when I went to look it was Adolf & Uncle Joe. I woke up yelling.

Peter has a commission in the Welsh Guards. He was offered a job in propaganda but says he must kill Germans. Luckily he won’t go abroad for two months at least. Tud is quartered quite near here & he & Nigel [Birch] come to dinner quite often.

Susan the P’s. The day war broke out I was leaving the Island1 & Muv was taking me to the station & I said something only fairly rude about Hitler & she said ‘get out of this car & walk to the station then’, so after that I had to be honey about Adolf. Then later I said Peter had joined up so she said ‘I expect he’ll be shot soon’, which I thought fairly tactless of her.

Altogether she is acting very queer. Farve has recanted in the Daily Mirror like Latimer.

Poor Boud I do wonder. Fleet St says she has been put on a farm for Czech women – we have written to the Duchess of Aosta to find out what has really happened to her & if she is awfully miserable she could perhaps go to Italy. Probably she is on top of the world though.

Susan Hitler’s secret. Well if he wipes us all out with it PROMISE you’ll take a dose over there in revenge. I absolutely trust you to.

Do write & tell the American form. I imagine they just don’t want to think about the war like us & the Abyssinians & heavens I don’t blame them.

RSVP

Love from NR

Dear Miss

I see you have learnt to write in a single night.

Really, the Fem! She always thinks anybody who isn’t a hidebound Tory is a communist – if she knew the trouble I have with the C[ommunist] P[arty], & that the Labour Party have always hated them worse than anything – but these little niceties seem to have escaped her! Actually, I have always said that there wasn’t a pin to put between Bolshies & Nazis except that the latter, being better organized, are probably more dangerous. It’s the Fem herself who was always writing articles trying to point out the (invisible) differences.

Rodd has got his commission & goes off on Friday & we are having a GRAND BALL on Thursday, white ties & ball dresses & dinner for 30 people at Blomfield. Ambitious?

Write again soon. I wish I was on the Island. I too have been digging up my lawn, oh the hard work. I am going to keep recs.1 I had a very grumbly letter from Woman.

Love from NR

Darling Steake1

I wonder so much how you are both getting on now & if you like your new jobs. Do write & tell me all about your holiday & where you went.

Our flying journey home was wonderful but it was rather frightening when we took off.2 The plane seemed far too small to battle all across the Atlantic. We came down at Botwood in Newfoundland & were able to go for a walk while the plane was being filled with petrol. The next stop was at Foynes in Ireland. The whole journey only took 28 hours! Derek had a special job for three weeks on research for the Air Ministry & now expects to go off again soon for a similar job. Muv, Farve & Debo are all still up at the Island & say it is lovely there. Uncle George, Aunt Madeleine & their two children3 are going to stay up there for two weeks with them. Nancy is working at a casualty depot & has of course had nothing to do. I heard from her a few days ago & she said she had been given an indelible pencil to write on the foreheads of her dead & dying & what would she do if a black man was brought in!!! So Nancy-like.

We had a refugee family in one of our cottages but they left at the end of the week because they found it too far from the public house. We are more or less full here: Tello & her granddaughter4 were here for three weeks but have now left. We have a friend’s baby with his nurse, & they come (the parents) every weekend. So far food has not been rationed but it is going to be. And we may only have ¾ the amount of coal. Petrol is very severely rationed & we only get fifteen gallons a month for the two cars. As I have to fetch nearly all the food from Banbury because the shops also have very little petrol the fifteen gallons will not last very long.

We can never get into Banbury for the cinema these days partly on account of the shortage of petrol & partly because it is so horrid driving in a blackout. We went to London for a night last week & saw the barrage balloons5 for the first time. They are so very beautiful & make a wonderful decoration.

I am sorry to have been so long before writing but I have been so terribly busy the last five weeks that I have not had a moment to spare for writing. One of the most difficult things has been blacking out this house. We have had to make black curtains for all the windows. Even if a pin prick of light shows through the police come rushing down on you!

There is no more family news at the moment but I will write again soon & I do long to hear from you.

Much love to you both from Woman

Darling Boud,

Your Boud is so sorry you are ill, I’ve written to you very often but I think the letters may have gone astray. I’ve been so longing for news of you & am awfully glad you are back home again with Blor & everyone to take care of you.

Esmond & I have got jobs in a Miami bar, you must admit rather ‘fascinating’. The other people there are heaven (mostly Italian & Spanish) & we have all our food there which is wonderful, because it’s the most delicious food I’ve e’er noted. We’ve got to know the most amazing people here; for instance, I have one friend whose only interest in life is birth control, & when I go to tea with her she takes me round in her car for free handouts of contraception to nigger families. Miami’s rather like the South of France or Venice, all the people here have got something extraorder about them. Well Boud I’ll write again soon, & do get well quickly.

Very Best Love, Yr Boud

Darling Boud

When I got your letter, I nearly went off my head! You SEE, I had ached for your, because I do love you so much.

Oh, Boud, I have a Goat! The Fem gave her to me & I LOVE her.

Oh Boud, I AM so sorry to be short, but will write again soon!

Dearest Cheerless

Well dear, I’m here for the weekend and although it’s very comfortable, it’s pretty bloody in some ways because Woman will keep telling one to keep one’s dogs off the daffodils etc & one feels that if one settles down with one’s book someone will say something & interrupt one.

Birdie is here & is so terribly pathetic, it really makes one miserable to see her. I can hardly bear the idea of this summer because she & Muv & I will be all boxed up at Swinbrook together & when Muv gets gloomy it’s awful. Actually she is wonderful, I believe I would have gone mad if I had been with poor Bird all this time. She is like a completely different person, it is extraordinary & awfully horrifying. She has stages of doing things, really like a child, I mean she has now got a habit of standing up till everyone in the room has sat down, & is furious if anyone starts eating before the Fem has started. The whole thing is really so awful it doesn’t bear thinking of. I wish you could see her, I long to know what you would think. She is very apologetic & funny in that way, always says ‘I’m awfully sorry’ before she says anything else.

[Incomplete]

Darling Diana