Irrepressible (13 page)

Survival was the theme that Decca and Esmond embraced when they were alone. The future was unsure, but one thing was known: Flyers could survive and had. His brother Giles was by then being treated as a protected prisoner of war. Perhaps he was being considered a hostage to trade. The same thing might happen to Esmond. But those possibilities were all down the line.

Esmond had an almost mystical sense that he would survive the war. Decca had to feel this complete and total belief, too; anything less, any hesitation, could tear the fabric. They spoke to give comfort, heart, and courage to one another. Decca would write, “The unutterable blankness of such a separation loomed menacingly for both of us, and we each tried rather unsuccessfully to reassure the other that it wouldn’t really be for very long,
that soon we should be together again in England.” The atmosphere was charged with unresolved questions about their future, but one immediate question, when to join the Communist Party, seemed settled at last. Years later, Decca would say:

On the night before Esmond left, the two couples played poker until midnight. In the morning, after a week of fair weather, a nor’easter brought with it fierce wind and heavy rain. Decca stood on the dock watching Esmond board the ferry to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he would join his ship to England. In a letter written soon after, she told him, “I was so miserable when you left but now feel as though I was recovering from an illness, better each day.”

That week, the residents of Washington, like much of the rest of the world, were fixated on the extraordinary events in Russia. The Communist press, as Decca and Esmond had presumed, made an immediate turnaround in its editorial position from opposing intervention to emphatically endorsing it. In Congress, a coalition of Southern segregationist senators filibustered the poll-tax repeal to defeat, to Virginia’s great disappointment. Meanwhile, Virginia’s mother sank into a morbid depression, and the house filled with the sound of her weeping.

Decca struggled to take herself in hand and avoid indulging in her own fantasies of gloom and doom. There was no knowing where Esmond would eventually be stationed after his initial English posting and how long it would be before she could join him. She wasn’t constituted to wait patiently: “My two main preoccupations were to find and to join the Communist Party, and to equip myself to be useful once a member.” Her letters were cheerful
and illustrate her growing imperative to establish herself. She wanted to escape the “dead-end world of market research, retail selling and the like, and acquire some training.”

Returning to her long-cherished idea of becoming a serious journalist, Decca considered how best to ask Eugene Meyer for a job. First, she planned to enroll in a short summer course at the Columbia School of Journalism. Such useful training would go a long way toward helping her “feel much more confident about a possible
Post
job.” Esmond was all for it. They had come a long way from the days when he had run the show.

But Decca never did take that journalism course. The way she came to tell it, she had been all set to go until she realized Columbia University was in New York and not the District of Columbia. “By the time I discovered my mistake—and learned that to qualify for enrollment one must have an undergraduate degree—I was thoroughly settled in with the Durrs and disinclined to move.” She’d been stymied once more by her old nemesis, lack of formal education. Here, as elsewhere and often, she turned a disappointment into a punchline.

A
BOUT A MONTH after they separated, Esmond wrote that he was stationed in England. Decca discovered she was pregnant again and started looking for transportation to join him sooner rather than later: “I think it would be more difficult to get a passage if I was huge.” They needed money, she had to get a job, but being pregnant meant she couldn’t work in dress shops anymore. She left it up to Esmond to decide how much this news would change things. She was in a safe place with reliable comforts, but those weren’t the most important considerations. She wanted to be with him. “However the whole decision is yours & whatever happens don’t worry about it, but just say what you
really
think because I will be terrifically all right & happy whatever we decide.”

Esmond had arrived in Halifax to find himself promoted to officer’s rank. He hadn’t looked for a commission and considered rejecting it, but was too aware of the time it would take and the tribulations guaranteed if he were to reject the commission. Since school at Wellington, Esmond had been practiced at avoiding the worst excesses of the officer class, and it wounded him to think he’d be automatically lumped in with all the ghastly types he had run away from. His worst scenario materialized soon after he had boarded the boat to England, when a Canadian sergeant preferred not to drink alongside the uppity officer he supposed Esmond to be. But during some late-night poker playing, their long conversation turned to what they held in common. They were, they discovered, fellow travelers on this crossing. In a political sense, both were men of the Left, and in a practical sense, they were passengers on a warship threatened by German U-boat activity in the ocean around (at any moment perhaps even dependent upon one another
for survival). They drank some more whiskey and played another game. Fortuitously, their ship dodged the U-boats and made it safely across.

Esmond hadn’t been in England since 1939. One great pleasure after two and a half years was finding Philip Toynbee again. Philip and Esmond spent as much time as they could together, sometimes meeting up with other friends from London and their
Out of Bounds
newspaper days.

Esmond missed Decca dreadfully, and whether she should join him was the dominating theme of their correspondence. It was all very confusing, but he was satisfied that she and Dink had a very good place with the Durrs, better than anything they’d find in England, where everybody seemed to be splitting up. On August 17, 1941, he sent her a telegram: “Please don’t think of coming over for present as my own plans uncertain. Go ahead with other things instead.”

In Washington, the interventionist movement had stalled and all the interesting action that autumn seemed to be on the domestic front. The American labor movement, with its cycle of conflict and negotiations, had seized Decca’s imagination. Through friends of the Durrs’, she planned to visit the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, an institution that trained labor organizers through classes like labor history, union publicity, fundraising, and coalition building. To Decca, the school seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of education, an unusually enlightened institution where her passion to become politically involved might be instantly rewarded. It also seemed like the perfect transitional thing to do before she had to enter into another tedious job hunt.

Several days before she was to leave for Tennessee, and a few weeks into her new pregnancy, Decca miscarried. The doctor she consulted said that nothing could have been done to prevent it. In a letter to Esmond, she tried to downplay the importance of their loss and hoped that by displaying a sort of sangfroid, he’d do her the favor of playing along. She assured him that she had been taking good care of herself. “The whole thing is awfully disappointing, but now it has actually happened & the only thing to do is just forget it was ever up.”

She set off for Tennessee and returned to a bundle of letters from Esmond full of consolation and concern. Her two weeks away had provided a helpful distraction. She had been struggling all along with the desire to be useful, and at the Highlander School, so many things had clicked. Books, art, action, conversation all fused in the service of basic rights. The labor movement was just the kind of stage upon which she could apply her talents while she waited to join Esmond. There wasn’t any money in it, but she would have more patience to wait if she had something useful to do. She wrote that she had come to regret having bombarded him with so many letters on the theme of traveling to England.

Decca reassured him that her sadness had passed. His letters were affectionate: “I am thinking of you all the time, and simply longing to be able to see you again.” He added that he was aware that once she returned to England, her life wouldn’t be as “fascinating and interesting” and their daughter wouldn’t be as safe as she was in Washington, so he was torn and hesitated from letter to letter about whether she ought to come.

He had started flying as a navigator in the air crews, but there were long periods of waiting around, when he’d take the hours to compose a letter to his wife and daughter. He wanted their company, but considered it selfish to take Decca away from the life she had made in America, and he warned her that once he was transferred, she would probably have to live with her ghastly relations, or his. Decca said it was sweet of him to sacrifice the time they might have together for her comfort, but unnecessary. In case he thought she’d grown soft in America, she was as tough and capable as any of the other British women managing with less. Neither wanted to complain or burden the other with expectations.

Decca went back to the
Washington Post
, but even with Eugene Meyer’s patronage, she found nothing available in the newsroom or in advertising. The editor was all for hiring bright new talent, but there were the newspaper guilds to consider. He would have to get back to her. Aware that she needed some of the basics, Decca wrote to Esmond to tell him she had enrolled as a beginning student in stenography at the Strayer Business School:

Esmond replied on September 22: “I will never be able to explain how tremendously I miss you.” He asked if she had made any further investigations into “safety of passage, various options available, swiftness of trip.”

On October 9, Esmond transferred into a light bomber detachment in the East Yorkshire town of Linton-on-Ouse. Now that he knew where he’d be stationed for a while, he told Decca that he still felt their daughter would be safer in the United States, but “if she really frightfully wanted to and it was possible,” she ought to look into joining him. Immediately, Decca put in a call to the British air minister in Washington to inquire about passage home. She learned that she might even find a seat “on a bomber.” But, this turned out to be false information and she settled back into her life in Washington, still unsure about what Esmond wanted.

BY AUTUMN, PHILIP Toynbee had come to think that time and trouble had changed Esmond into a more sensitive, surprisingly empathetic young man. They both thought the thing to do was look to the future. You had to believe that the worst excesses were in the past. Socialism still offered hope and promise. Consider the alternative: the misery, inequality, and injustice that accompanied capitalism. For now, Esmond told Toynbee, “his only political motive was his dismay at human unhappiness.” How did this balance with the job ahead, carrying and releasing bombs? Toynbee later remembered how Esmond felt about his military missions:

Esmond was participating in raids at the rate of several times weekly. The worst part about the flights, he told Decca, half joking, “is the take off, piling onto the lorry, dressed up like a stuffed animal, for the ride across the hangar to the plane, treading on someone’s hand and upsetting their equipment as you get in. Once ‘airborne’ the outlook becomes very much better.” This letter continues in a more lyrical vein, describing their approach to the target until