Irrepressible (20 page)

ON HIS TOUR of the Inner Hebrides in the 1780s, Samuel Johnson was delighted to find Inch Kenneth “a pretty little island about a mile long and about half a mile broad, all good land.” Over the course of his day trip, he walked the gentle hills, prayed in an ancient ruined chapel, and ceremoniously buried some scattered bones.

In 1938, around 150 years after Johnson visited the island, Decca’s parents, David and Sydney Redesdale, purchased Inch Kenneth and renovated its single Victorian house of a “vaguely castle-like architecture.” They found the island’s microclimate hospitable to vegetables and flower gardens and installed some goats, chickens, and sheep. They kept a boat and an old car to drive between the dock and home. Sydney loved the ocean and boats and was unfazed by the island’s isolation and its frequent dark and rainy weather. She walked everywhere across its compact terrain, enjoying things in their place—all dainty and far from the chaos of world politics.

It had been a blow when she had been denied this harbor for the first few years of the war. It must have been harder still, once she and Farve separated, to see that he could come and go to the island and that he stayed there with Margaret Wright, who had once been the parlourmaid in the house Sydney and her husband shared. When Farve’s cataracts grew worse, he and Margaret left the island for London. As the war wound down, Sydney and Unity were allowed to return to Inch Kenneth, the best place for them to live comfortably and economically. Lord Redesdale had given his son the island sometime earlier, and when Tom died, under Scottish law the property reverted to his sisters. Decca now owned one-sixth of Inch Kenneth.

In May 1945, around the time she first heard of her inheritance, journalists from around the world were in San Francisco to cover the newly emergent United Nations. The international movement for peace, historically pushed to the margins of powerful societies, found a home in the fragile new institution. Decca and her friends saw their own platform reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which every member of the new body had voted to accept: The document called for a fair standard of living, medical care, and social justice for all people—“universal and unalienable rights for all members of the human family . . . friendship among nations, racial or religious groups, and the maintenance of peace.”

Over the next decade, a gathering peace movement’s efforts to ban the bomb would be belittled as naive, crackpot, and dangerously red. But in this potent, nearly utopian moment, San Francisco was as close to a garden of peace as it would ever be, its denizens shouldering the pleasant duty of hosting diplomats and reporters from everywhere.

Among the Communist writers contingent, Decca met Claud Cockburn, who had also reported from the Spanish Civil War. It’s not hard to imagine a rollicking night on the town with Decca and Bob and some local comrades and Claude and other war-weary journalist friends, drinking in the Happy Valley Bar of the Palace Hotel. Decca, an authority, thought the Happy Valley Bar made the best martinis in San Francisco
“and possibly the world.” Pele was amazed at how emphatically English Decca became again around other Brits. She had a grand old time translating Cockburn’s often incomprehensible accent for the locals. The United Nations story could put even the most cynical newshound in a good mood. And to Cockburn, what a sidebar! One of those notorious Mitford sisters, now the dedicated financial director of the San Francisco Communist chapter, had deputized him to act on a family matter. She wished with Cockburn’s assistance to donate her inheritance of one-sixth of a Scottish island to the British Communist Party.

Decca had found her métier for the moment as a fund-raiser—raising money in dribs and drabs—but here was an opportunity for a spectacular publicity coup. It was a bit far for the San Francisco party to take full advantage, but London members could, why not? How many times did a portion of a Scottish island fall into your lap? They might use it as a holiday resort or a dacha for fatigued members, or to grow vegetables and raise goats, as Muv did. After a certain number of beverages, Decca agreed to give Cockburn power of attorney to speak to the British party leaders and set the transfer in motion. In an article years later, Cockburn summarized the idea: “What could possibly be more delightful to this lifelong enemy of the grown-ups than the mental picture—however unrealistic—of a horde of unbridled Reds cavorting Marxistically on the beaches, rattling the windows of ‘the Big House’ with nightly renderings of
Hurrah for the Bolshie Boys
and
the Internationale
.”

It was a spectacular tease, but there was something else going on. Decca was still reeling from all sorts of conflicting emotions. It was her style to suppress any public display of grief (a “concrete upper lip,” Virginia Durr called it). She had absorbed the loss of Esmond, her sister Unity’s suicide attempt and resulting brain damage, and her brother Tom’s death so late in the war, when it had seemed so sure he would make it through. She had been stalwart through all these traumas and preserved a sort of civility in all her exchanges with her mother, rarely mentioning the political furies that divided them.

To Decca, the island signified her family’s culpability in the war. She wanted to punish them to some extent or at least force them to acknowledge “what a criminal thing it was to have supported Hitler and an appeasement policy for England.” This wasn’t a particularly feasible plan, and eventually her indignation against everyone (except the Mosleys) subsided. They were all too far away.

Several months would pass, and though their encounter lay heavy on Decca’s mind, she heard nothing from Cockburn. Back in England, Cockburn met with British party leaders, who were baffled by Decca’s donation. He also tracked down Lord Redesdale in Westminster, who persuaded him that Inch Kenneth, so very far away, was the “very small” home of an old lady and a sick girl. By that point, his assignment wasn’t much fun anymore, and Cockburn backed away from the project.

Next, Decca tried to sell her part of the island. She told her sisters that she’d be willing to sell them her share or to divide the proceeds with them. Nancy alone recognized the power of such a tease but wondered, “At what price?” The others sisters were angry at Decca’s game. Rather than break with Decca, Muv agreed to become her partner and, on her behalf, had the island appraised.

Decca’s inheritance and subsequent effort to sell Inch Kenneth were also a matter of great interest to the FBI, whose increasing scrutiny of Decca resulted in a file of her political activities and consequently a sort of log book. The agent in charge had many informers who reported on her membership in the Twin Peaks branch of the Communist Party and her outstanding success in selling subscriptions to the
People’s Daily World
and in other fund-raising. She was followed to a picnic, a New Year’s Eve ball, conferences, lectures, and classes, but nothing seemed to spark the engagement of her followers like the story of Inch Kenneth. One agent wrote: “XXX advised XXX that the subject stated that she had inherited one-sixth of an island off the coast of Scotland and reported that she in a joking manner stated that she might give it to the Soviet government for a naval base.”

When Farve had written at the time of Nicky’s birth, he may have thought the time right to end hostilities, but Decca was just winding up. After the Inch Kenneth business, she never expected to see her father again. She told Dobby she hated him for the way he had acted at the start of the war. Decca always claimed that she understood her father’s actions, but his rejection hurt her, even when she was older.

Years later, Decca attended an authors’ luncheon. Like others of its kind, there was a rubber chicken dinner, some gossip, and some fundraising. It wasn’t until the guests had enjoyed a few drinks, when a fellow author asked Decca to contribute an article to an anthology on the subject of fathers. Decca stormed out. Her hosts might not have known why, but she felt she’d been set up and she was furious.

T
HE TREUHAFTS WERE moving to Oakland. Nancy was appalled—New York and Washington, like Rangoon and Bombay, were on a map from which one might return with amusing stories, but Oakland? Decca might as well wear a calico bonnet. Meanwhile, Decca and Bob could hardly believe their luck. The Oakland general strike, which had shut down the city in 1946, had left it with an attractive reputation for socialist dreamers. The Treuhafts found a sweet little house on a tree-lined street on a steep hill near a rose garden. In Oakland, the weather was perfect all year. Bob, a junior partner at Gladstein, Grossman, Sawyer and Edises (or, as Decca called them, “Gallstones, Gruesome, Sewer & Odious”), pulled in sixty dollars a week, and Decca bought her first new refrigerator. Bert and Pele Edises also moved to the East Bay, but up into the Berkeley Hills, where Pele felt utterly marooned, so far from jazz clubs and artists’ studios. In her new surroundings, she thought her children too vulnerable and exposed, “looked on as dangerous reds.”

Back in Washington, President Harry S. Truman was cleaning house. He’d already dropped the bomb, and now his to-do list read something like this: Assert the victor’s role; protect the sphere of influence; keep Soviets from world domination; pick up dry cleaning. He asked Congress to support a global war against Communism and issued a new Loyalty Order, which barred “subversives” from government employment. This version of the order, designed for the cold war, empowered the attorney general to publish a list of proscribed organizations. The definition of the word
loyalty
was assumed to be self-evident. Subversives were an undermining constituency, and membership in any of the attorney general’s listed organizations was immediate cause for investigation. Passports, federal loans for housing,
and applications to live in federal housing were all subject to a wiggly standard of loyalty.

In October, Bob and Decca’s second son, Benjamin, was born. With each of her children’s birth Decca’s experience had been that much more complicated. For Benjy’s birth in 1947, the doctor had induced with “5 big doses of castor oil, 5 Triple-H enemas (so called by the nurses—it stands for High, Hot & a Hell of a lot), and 45 shots of something or other. Also innumerable pills.” High-priced hospitals, highly regarded physicians, and technological advances did not seem to make anything go easier. These observations and her lifelong respect for the midwife’s skill would become the source material for
The American Way of Birth
, which she would publish forty-five years later.

In the fast-moving postwar economy, midwifery was considered old-fashioned and unnecessary. All across the workforce, women workers were returning home. Madison Avenue ad campaigns featured sparkling new appliances in immaculate kitchens. Model mothers wore high heels and aprons around nipped-in waists. Such was not the style chez Treuhaft, where “the tidal wave of washing and cleaning . . . daily threatened to engulf.” Decca had three young children and plenty of volunteer party work to do. Dinky, Nicky, and Benjy came along to meetings and on the weekends would accompany their parents to picnics, benefits, and concerts. She liked their company, but longed for outside work: “For a few depressing months I stayed at home trying to cope.” She was like the farm girl who had once seen the bright lights of Paris. In her case, glamour was a full-bodied submersion in subversion. She knew how much she had to offer. She hated being bored at home, surrounded by that particular nightmare called housework.

The theme of Decca’s domestic dyslexia was often a source of comedy—her smart and deliberate choice. There was very little reward that she could perceive for superior housewifery. The consequence of excellence in the field was further encouragement, and the concept of virtue as its own reward was distinctly unsatisfying. In the end, cleaning would be like typing. If she
had learned to type well in the days when typewriters were clunky with inky ribbons and springy keys, perhaps she would have become a desirable secretary instead of a subeligible one. But then she might have been stuck in the typing pool, working for others, and it might have been just that much harder to imagine becoming the journalist she wanted to be. She had studied and practiced typing, but it wasn’t until she was writing her own books that she really mastered the skill. There was also a political component to housework, which Decca might never have fully appreciated if she hadn’t spent these several months at home. She hung this quotation from Lenin above her kitchen sink: “Housework is highly unproductive, most barbarous and most arduous, and it is performed by women. This labor is extremely petty and contains nothing that would in the slightest degree facilitate the development of women.”

As party members, Decca and her friends felt particularly encouraged to take leadership roles in organizing, fund-raising, and education. She met a roadblock early on when it came to restarting her journalism career. She approached the
People’s Daily World
in the hope of training to become a serious reporter. A male editor who saw her as undereducated, lighthearted, and one of the more vociferous defenders of the “Vicky Says” column steered her toward writing for the Women’s Pages. Over time, Decca had come to believe (as the Women’s Commission had pointed out) that the Women’s Pages were “patronizingly stupid,” so she resented his implication. She had spent years defying expectations and didn’t like to be underestimated. She would periodically freelance for the paper, but she never joined its staff.