Irrepressible (2 page)

Decca and Unity shared a room at the top of Swinbrook House, where they conspired and plotted their various plans to escape. By 1932, when she was fifteen, Decca’s own interests had begun to coalesce against the “beastly fascists.” In clarifying her opposition to Unity, Decca threw in with the
crowd she thought would end suffering, injustice, poverty, and cruelty. She wouldn’t join the Communist Party for ten more years, but it seemed to her the most powerful counterbalance.

Meanwhile, thanks to sister Diana’s affair with Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Unity enrolled, subscribed, and submerged herself in their cause. She would have found some way in, but such lubricated access suited her especially. She loved what groupies love, the reflected power and distinction of the limelight. When she sneaked away from Swinbrook to attend rallies or sell copies of the party organ,
Blackshirt
, she always wore her special fascist badge, awarded by Mosley himself. It had all seemed grand enough at first, but eventually, she had to move on to Berlin.

Unity met Hitler many times. He gave her other badges, autographs, possibly a gun. She dined with him and invited her visiting family to experience
der Führer
’s teatime sociability. (Decca and Nancy both declined.) Muv said Hitler had very nice manners. Later, Decca considered how easy it would have been to visit Unity and Hitler with a gun in her handbag. She was sorry she missed her chance to assassinate the Nazi leader. “Unfortunately, my will to live was too strong for me actually to carry out this scheme, which would have been fully practical and might have changed the course of history. I often bitterly regretted my lack of courage.”

Back in England, Decca and Unity were star-crossed. Decca “still loved Boud for her huge, glittering personality, for her rare brand of eccentricity, for a kind of loyalty.” The loyalty, forged in their early, more cheerful enmity, and a routine sense of gamesmanship was enough to sustain them. But Decca sensed that a “freezing shadow was approaching.” (For the Mitfords’ Oxfordshire neighbor J. R. R. Tolkien, then working on
The Hobbit
, the shadow grew along the lines of Mordor. Saruman the White was like Unity, caught on the verge of betraying Gandalf and all the creatures of Middle-Earth.)

THERE IS A photo of Decca, aged four, arms crossed, mouth pursed, hat clamped down, ready to wait it out. A rebellious, pent-up spirit, burdened by the world’s troubles, but always funny. Young Decca made fierce attachments. In nursery days, she loved their Nanny Blor. And in Diana’s opinion, Blor loved Decca best. Blor, whose real name was Laura Dicks, was probably Decca’s earliest progressive influence. Labour Party members were virtually unknown in the heavily conservative Swinbrook milieu, but Nanny Blor came from a liberal and nonconformist family and voted Labour herself. It was Blor who never stopped trying to move Decca along. She invented a prayer for the three youngest children: “God bless Muv, God Bless Farve . . . and make Decca a good girl, Amen.”

In adolescence, Decca flailed at the injustice of it all. Why had Muv let Unity attend school and later Debo, but not Decca? Unity had been expelled, and there perhaps was the answer: Who would wish to repeat such an experiment in a hurry? Muv was reacting to the heat of Decca’s passion, wishing to damp down what appeared excessive, unseemly, insincere. How could Decca
really
want to leave so
very
much? Muv refused to be stormed, chided, or charmed on this point, dressing her own stubbornness in drifty procrastinations and vague rebukes. Perhaps Muv just knew
this
daughter would not fail and would probably never look back.

Tom was the third Mitford child, a sweet, easy, indulged only son, who seemed to like everyone and whom everyone adored. Brother Tom introduced Decca to Milton, Balzac, and Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
and helped guide his sister through Huxley, Lawrence, and Gide. From that jumping-off place, Decca tore through books about the brutality and horror of World War I and “about great movements in England and other countries to divest the rich of their wealth.” She eavesdropped on the “irreverent outpourings of Nancy’s liberal leaning friends” and sharpened her political claws battling with Unity. Using a diamond ring, Decca and Unity etched symbols of their political affiliations into the window of the room they shared at the top of the house—Unity drew a swastika; Decca a hammer and sickle.

Finally, at the age of eighteen, Decca was considered old enough to emerge formally from childhood. It was her debutante season, and despite its traditional purpose of parading new merchandise for breeding, coming out also implied various new degrees of freedom. Decca wore ostrich feathers in her hair and was presented at court, where she took the opportunity to steal some royal chocolates from the palace (having learned the finer points of shoplifting or “a little jiggery-pokery” from one of her governesses). Otherwise, she went through the motions.

For all the patronizing, condescending, and infantilizing Decca felt in her home, there was kindness. For all the benign neglect, there was tenderness. For all the sarcasm and teasing and hostile sibling parrying, there was usually some kind of comfort. She knew it was positively time to find more like-minded friends, but to do so, she needed a plan. She longed to escape but feared that she wouldn’t get it right, that she’d make “an abortive attempt at running away, only to be ignominiously discovered and hauled back home to face greater strictness than ever.”

B
Y THE TIME she met Esmond Romilly, Decca was already a little in love with him. From childhood, the reports Decca heard on the Romilly cousins had typically teetered on scandal.
Had he really held Cousin Mary Churchill’s head in a bucket of water until she’d said there was no god? Brilliant!
Later, along with the rest of England, Decca could follow Esmond’s exploits in the tabloid press, each headline preceded by “Winston Churchill’s Nephew.” He was the “Public School Runaway,” the “Red Menace,” the “Precocious Author,” and the “Gallant Young Soldier in the Spanish Civil War.”

Both Esmond and his brother Giles attended Wellington College, a public school known for its particularly militaristic tone. Wellington’s rigorous Officers’ Training Corps emphasized conformity, obedience, discipline, and an unassailable hierarchy. The OTC, field games, and other physical competitions were held to be the essential medium for assessing future generals, leaders of industry, and cabinet ministers. While a boy learned the importance of being earnest, loyal, true, and brave, he might also be wrung dry of sweetness and sympathy. This brutal, rigidly formal world was dangerous territory for freethinkers and romantics. A boy needed to have either a tough skin like Esmond’s or the lovers and intellectual allies whom Giles accumulated.

By the mid-1930s, radical politics was everywhere in the atmosphere. London was plastered with posters announcing protests and demonstrations for or against Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. There were debating societies, student leagues, and action and discussion groups across the political spectrum. Despite the efforts of headmasters and teachers to protect and isolate their ivory towers, boys and girls inside schools, as in the
greater world, were choosing sides. Esmond’s growing opposition to the way the OTC boys paraded and drilled excessively had fueled an early interest in pacifism. On Armistice Day, he tucked pacifist leaflets into the chapel prayer books. He requested and was granted an excuse from participation in OTC activities and, until he ran away, was Wellington’s most visible and indefatigable dissenter. Esmond read the Left journals, held a subscription to the
Daily Worker
, and kept a bust of Lenin in his room. Given any subject and opportunity, he’d argue the left-wing position. He had much to say in favor of progressive education and against sexual repression. More often than not, his arguments attacked Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. And though not himself a party member, Esmond liked to try to convert his classmates to Communism.

He was two years younger than Giles, but tended to lead his more scholarly, less impulsive older brother into their “joint rebellion.” Esmond was stronger, more assertive, and never at a loss. Giles, with finer features and a more slender build, was perhaps more conventionally handsome. He ran around with a crowd of other handsome comrades. Esmond was beautifully poised when debating politics, but otherwise a sloppy, callow youth for whom the word
frivolous
was an all-purpose put-down, useful in dismissing anything he didn’t care to do or didn’t know much about. The brothers bickered, though it was clear they adored each other.

Esmond was fifteen when he made his middle-of-the-night escape from Wellington. (“Mr. Churchill’s Nephew Vanishes.”) He found refuge in a room in Bloomsbury above a radical bookshop, which also functioned as a clubhouse for intellectuals of various Left schools of thought. There he met the fabulous denizens of grown-up bohemia, some revolutionary veterans of assorted international conflicts, and various writers, artists, and dilettantes. At first, being one among these disreputables must have seemed like a fantasy fulfilled. Everyone congratulated him, encouraged his audacity, applauded his courage. He was like a mascot (a characterization that would have driven him into a frenzy, had he believed it). They gave him Craven A cigarettes, tea, chocolates, books, and a camp bed to sleep on and claimed
to take him seriously. He met poets and philosophers, and once, even W. H. Auden asked to see the poetry Esmond had himself begun to compose in that milieu. One night, when they were alone together, Auden made a pass at the exciting young pet. Esmond apparently went blind with fury and threw the poet’s clothes out the window. As the story made its way around the demimonde, instead of gaining the sympathy he expected, Esmond found he’d lost both standing and glamour. He was considered even more uncouth, a young “barbarian, possibly prejudiced against homosexuals.” Decca, who found the story funny, later wrote: “Of course the real reason for E’s fury was hurt pride: he thought he’d been asked up because of his intellect, discovered to his chagrin it was for other motives. How many girls have gone through the same?”

Still, he was very young, and after he repeatedly refused to return to school or to their family home, his parents had him arrested. “We have done all we could. He quite refuses to submit to any control,” his mother, Nellie, told the judge, who sentenced sixteen-year-old Esmond to six weeks in a remand house for delinquent boys. In 1935, out on his own and scrambling again, Esmond teamed up with his brother to write
Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles and Esmond Romilly
.

IN JULY 1936, several right-wing Spanish army generals staged a coup to overthrow Spain’s democratically elected government, plunging the nation into a brutal civil war. Like Giles and others, Esmond viewed the battlefield of Spain as the last line of defense for liberalism, modernity, and democracy. At eighteen years old, he had enlisted in the International Brigades. Back in England, as one of only two survivors of his battalion, Esmond began to write
Boadilla
, a memoir about his experiences in battle.

When they met for that first time at their relative’s home for dinner, Decca found Esmond thin and surprisingly short, with “amazingly long eyelashes.” He hadn’t been back from Spain long. Decca thought herself
plump, but photographs reveal a lovely young woman with high cheekbones and a wonderful grin. Esmond’s closest friend, Philip Toynbee, described her in those days as “very pretty, incautious and enthusiastic.” From their first course to the end of dinner, the couple whispered together. They were hungry but did not note the menu, our heroine and her first love. When he answered yes, he would take her with him to Spain, it was all intensely romantic. Boy with no illusions meets girl with plenty. Who would change whom? Running away was an art form, which Esmond had practiced repeatedly and Decca had dreamed about for years and years.