Irrepressible (12 page)

The style of this action recalls Esmond and Philip Toynbee’s theft of top hats from Eton a few years before. At that time, they had still been children: two rogues and a nymph, an adventuress and her highwaymen. Decca’s “pee-in” was another kind of action, born not of boredom but of indignation. She believed she was defending the weak, using her brain, plotting a tease, and having a laugh—and in all this, she felt her power.

Esmond phoned the hospital nearly every day. Decca adored hearing from him, but telephoning was pricey and simply not enough. Letters could be read and reread. During her hospital stay, they had their first extended disagreement since Esmond had been away. She thought they might name their child Esmé, but he vetoed that. Then, since she had been reading
In Place of Splendour
, the autobiography of Spanish Civil War heroine Constancia de la Mora, she suggested Constancia. In his return letter, he said he was wary of nicknames (like Connie) and nixed Constancia. Then Decca, from a proud, nicknaming tribe, replied:

He’d done nothing except assert his prerogatives, and she was being impatient. The strain of the distance between them was starting to show. It’s hard to always be good. In a subsequent phone call (in euphoria disregarding the cost), they compromised on their child’s name: It’s “Anne Constancia,” but, “If you really want to change it we can,” Decca wrote.

In March, Decca packed up her newborn, still called Dinky-Donk for short, and went to meet Esmond in Hamilton, Ontario. She had planned to visit for the weekend, but decided to stay and rent an apartment near his base.

Decca borrowed a pram, and she bathed the baby in a big saucepan. Although the town was full of young women like herself, temporary residents there on account of their soldier husbands, she felt terribly lonely. Esmond visited their apartment as often as he could get leave, one day out of four, but he lived on the base. Decca had been brought up in a teeming household, with a phalanx of sisters, a kennel full of dogs, a parade of weekend visitors, the constant presence of Muv, and Nanny plus rotations of governesses. When her father roamed through the house, he filled the corners, his every mercurial mood noted. Decca would say that she often felt alone in her youth amid the tumult, perhaps a loneliness tied to an adolescent sense of feeling misunderstood by those she counted on most. Her loneliness in Canada was of a different stripe. In New York, on the road, and in Florida, as a dynamic duo she and Esmond had rocketed forward—there were always new things to observe and to adjust to. She had been on her own when Esmond worked in the bar, but he always came home at the end of the day, and if she had been bored, she could have visited him. Besides, she had her own job. She may not have thought she enjoyed anything about her celebrity, but she missed the attention. This was the first time she felt completely without it.

 

IT’S EASY ENOUGH to imagine Esmond as the young soldier, sick of any place in which he was a foreigner, alone, moving from one martial environment to another. Canada’s winter was long, and he had spent it far from his young wife, missing the birth of his daughter. He’d chosen this path, he studied hard, and he was no sentimentalist, but the war was going badly, and there were deep doldrums. But he was glad to be back together with Decca. They made love, made jokes, made much of their darling child. They danced and sang along with the radio, drank and ate (the remainder of the hampers of
delicious, exotic food, courtesy of the Meyers—prewar pâté de foie gras, cornichons, marrons glacé), caught up on the news and family gossip, and planned for their future.

Sometimes, Esmond just wanted to sleep. He was so tired of people telling him what to do. It wasn’t easy assembling 197 parts of a machine gun, as he was expected to. She thought she might be able to do it, though, given the chance. It wasn’t always easy to submerge her own emotions. Sometimes, she’d been up in the night with the baby, and much as she might have liked to look fresh and be receptive, she sometimes felt aggressive. A soldier’s wife had a role to play, she knew, but he wouldn’t love her as much if she were less smart or less pretty because she was climbing the walls from boredom. She longed to be with him always, but did they really want to expose their new child to the hardships of travel? This child could not be allowed to get ill. It would help, she knew, to get another job. In Washington, the Durrs’ Alexandria home had been crowded, she’d had to fight to carve out a space, but they’d been kind and she had fit in to her satisfaction. From the distance of Canada, it looked like an excellent place to be, if only Esmond could be there, too. He wouldn’t be. They would transfer him to someplace in Canada that was even colder and more godforsaken, and then they’d ship him overseas first to England, then to Europe. There was no doubt about that. He was in training to drop bombs.

Decca’s letter to her mother in April spoke of the many things she was turning over in her mind.

Decca returned to Washington while Esmond went on to Manitoba for the final phase of his flight training. In England, her sister Nancy had been working in a first-aid post; then she had opened up the Mitfords’ London house at 26 Rutland Gate and taken in homeless evacuees. First, the Mitfords sheltered the family Sockolovsky and, later, other Jewish refugees, most of them Polish. Nancy was brave and graceful under pressure, a sister to admire. Her observations of those first days of the bombing had been suitably apocalyptic, but now she had her “sweet refugees.” She was just scraping by, not much of a housekeeper, but she managed the coupons and the food and fuel. Meanwhile she was writing away—books, articles, letters. From Nancy, Decca learned that Farve and Muv had become so deeply divided over their politics that they were living apart. Before the war, both parents had been champions of Hitler, but recognizing the Nazi threat, Farve had turned violently against Germany. Muv still defended
der Führer
as a courteous and maligned friend of her daughters Unity and Diana. To prove a point, Muv had once kicked Nancy out of her car for making rude remarks about the German leader. Nancy generally cut her mother a lot of slack, but now England was in a war against fascism, and the daughter was fed up with her mother’s ignorance.

In her letter to Decca, Muv simply evinced sympathy for the homeless refugees. “Little D.” had turned out in some ways to be as ferocious as Farve, and Muv didn’t want to give this daughter another grudge to harbor. Times were difficult on all fronts. Her husband was a particular disappointment. He wasn’t at all able to bear being around Unity, as she had become childish, sloppy, and incontinent as a result of her injury. Muv was caring for Unity in a cottage near Swinbrook House. She had hoped to live with her daughter on Inch Kenneth, the family’s island home in Scotland, but
the area was declared a coastal protected zone and Muv and Unity were forbidden access because of their fascist sympathies. In 1940, Farve stayed on Inch Kenneth for six months. The rest of the year, he lived with Nancy in London. Diana was also in London, detained in the Holloway women’s prison. Sister Pam looked after Diana’s sons while managing a large farm.

In April 1941, Decca’s youngest sister, Deborah, married Andrew Cavendish, the son of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, at the Mitfords’ London home. Muv covered the windows broken in the Blitz with thick wallpaper that looked just like brocade. The Cavendishes sent up one hundred red camellias from their Chatsworth estate, and the families invited over three hundred guests. Nancy, Pam, Unity, and Tom attended.

In May, Decca wrote to Nancy from Alexandria. She had now spent nearly a year at the Durrs’. She had become independent and much more aware of the way things worked, of her own place in the big picture. She had pretty good judgment and wanted to let Nancy know that she hadn’t been wasting her time in America. On the contrary, she’d been acquiring an excellent education. You just had to breathe the air in Washington to absorb political science, social philosophy, and economics. All of prolabor America seemed to find itself at the Durrs’ table. A year of dinners there was equal to a graduate degree in organization and administration and campaigning. Decca read every newspaper and magazine she could get her hands on, and her earnest letters show off a growing political acumen. At this point, impressing Nancy with her focus and analysis had become important to Decca.

Decca didn’t receive her sister’s reply until July 1941. By that time, the Germans had invaded Russia. Nancy didn’t spare much time in analysis. She wanted to talk about her new niece. “I think Constancia a heavenly name & I am going to make a will & leave her all my things.” And she wanted to talk about Russia. “Up the Reds! Aren’t they heaven? Quite my favorite allies.”

WHEN DECCA AND Esmond had first come to America, they had spent several weeks on Martha’s Vineyard. In those last four days before Esmond would board a troop ship for service in England, they returned to the island together and reluctantly left five-month-old Dinky with Virginia.

Coming in on the ferry from the Massachusetts mainland, Decca and Esmond saw a scene almost identical to the one they had left two years before. In the distance were white sailboats and family fishing boats, swimmers in the water, and umbrellas on the beach. It all looked unchanged, a lost universe, an excellent harbor. They stayed again at the Menemsha Inn, whose every building and path was framed with flowers: pink hydrangeas, blue hyacinths, red geraniums. Their housekeeping cottage had a screened-in porch smelling of citronella, calamine lotion, damp, and the creepy tang of flypaper. There were wood-chipped paths to follow down to the ocean through fields sectioned off by stone fences. The ocean had a wonderful brackish smell, and from the beach you could see the Gay Head Lighthouse beacon. Later that day, they planned to meet their friends Selden and Hilda Rodman for dinner and drinks.

The Romillys had first met the Rodmans on Martha’s Vineyard in September 1939, a month after Stalin had signed the nonaggression pact
with Hitler. That news had naturally dominated their joint vacation. There was an interesting symmetry to this reunion on June 22, 1941, because Germany had spectacularly broken the agreement by invading Russia, and it became, in Decca’s words, “a whole new ball game.” The foursome listened to the radio together as Winston Churchill declared, “Any man or state who fights against Nazism will have our aid.” By then, they were all used to the thrill of Uncle Winston’s oration, but this was a turning point and everyone knew it. England had been fighting alone against the Nazis; now it would be England and Communist Russia: Liberals, Tories, and Socialists all on the same side. All this they discussed and absorbed over local lobster and clams. It was important to maintain perspective, to keep a healthy skepticism, and to have some more blueberry pie and another Tom Collins.

From hour to hour, their time was as full of play as politics. Selden recorded their tennis and their swimming and one raid on a neighbor’s ice-box for lemonade. Esmond mocked with tongue in cheek the local “over-abundance of resources. Too many tennis courts, too many beaches, many too many cars and much too much ocean.” Once, when they were alone, Selden, who had received his draft notice, asked Esmond if he had any “misgivings about going on a raid.” Esmond answered, “None,” and added, “I have no doubt at all that I will survive this war whether shot down or not.”