Irrepressible (6 page)

WHEN DECCA AND Esmond returned to London in August, they found that the government both counseled circumspection and continued to play down the growing dangers. A few years before, a scare had gone around the East End Jewish community. The rumor was that if Edward VIII hadn’t abdicated, he would have cut a deal with Germany to trade Britain’s Jews for entente. Decca felt nothing but contempt for the influential aristocrats and elite politicians (among them her relations) in favor of appeasement or a friendly alliance with Germany. “Their furled umbrellas so symbolic of furled minds.”

Back from Corsica, with a wider perspective and now unprotected by the happy family’s haze that had surrounded them in Rotherhithe, Decca and Esmond set themselves on track. They told one another that the best way to commit to the antifascist cause was to abolish illusions and be single-minded.

They moved to a smaller place in Edgware, to which they were soon tracked by a debt collector demanding action on Rotherhithe Street’s huge unpaid electricity bill. Since they were just scraping by, payment of such an enormous bill was “unthinkable.” It outraged them (they said only half-jokingly) to think that electricity, which ought to be free, was in fact a privilege. They considered a countersuit and brainstormed a strategy “on the grounds that electricity is an Act of God—an element like fire, earth and air.” A “pale, sad-looking youth in the employ of the London Electric Company” paced the pavement outside their house and did his best to tail them to the underground and the shops, but they were light-years ahead of him, donning goofy disguises and skittering past. One day, Esmond might emerge wearing a Groucho Marx mustache, another time in a top hat. Decca would tuck her hair under a worker’s cap or wear her starlet dark glasses. It took longer than they imagined for their “tormentor” to catch on, and dashing past him was only fun before they realized how slow and naturally confused he seemed. Then they stayed inside and watched him through their window watching them.

“Esmond had a theory that it was illegal and in some way a violation of Magna Carta to serve process on people in bed,” so they nested there for a
couple of days at a time. But they also felt besieged, while Esmond skipped work and their larder grew bare. “Obviously, life in England had become untenable, in more ways than one,” Decca wrote.

On September 11, 1938, Decca turned twenty-one. She had come to expect nothing much from her family. She saw Debo sometimes. Unity was swanning around with her swastika badge in London, racing back and forth to Germany. She hadn’t managed to make it to her niece Julia’s funeral the previous May, because just then she’d been arrested in Prague, confidently advertising her Nazi connections in that tinderbox.

But Muv, whose consolation Decca had limited at the time of Julia’s death, still indefatigably kept in touch. At her children’s birth, Muv had begun a savings account for each of them and deposited sixpence on their behalf every week. When she turned twenty-one, Decca received the balance of one hundred pounds. When she had first heard that she would be coming into money, Decca had experienced one of that traumatic year’s greatest pleasures. Her bonanza was enhanced by a certain triumph over her elder siblings, all of whom had invested their own trust funds in one of Farve’s crackpot schemes (in this case a treasure-hunting globe that descended the seas and, like the claw in a carnival game, was meant to scoop up precious ornaments fit for a sultan). The globe’s inventor had absconded with the Mitford family’s investment, so only Decca and Debo had received their trust funds intact. This, thanks to Muv, who despite Decca’s childhood pleas for permission to invest her own money, had said that at seven years old, Decca had been too young to do so. Decca remembered feeling envy and fury, so the pleasure of her inheritance when it came, with the process server still pacing outside, was spiked with schadenfreude.

Esmond and Decca spent their hours in bed considering their windfall. They were torn, but instead of paying their electricity bill, they decided to save their money and start a new running-away account.

 

THEY BOTH WENT back to work—Esmond returned to Graham and Gillies, and Decca took up her job as a market researcher. She traveled to
Southampton with her team, where they spent their days going house to house to interview homemakers about the new convenience products they used. It was hard to concentrate on the desirability of one kind of breakfast food compared with another when on the border of Czechoslovakia, the future of the world seemed so precarious. But it was also exciting to be out on her own earning money again, and sometimes, the housewives Decca met were fascinating in their convictions. A half-dressed woman might throw open her door in the middle of a lover’s tiff, or a lonely person might ask her to share some meager meal. There were suspicious types, flirts, and enthusiastic shoppers. Apparently, some people really did care deeply about their cleansers.

It was harder to be away from Esmond at night. She wasn’t anything like the baby she’d been on the job before she’d had Julia. Some of the girls knew how she had lost her daughter; they were sweet and gave her the breathing room she needed. But this type of work took being in a certain mood, and she would have preferred to have spent her days in a Lyons tea shop poring over the newspapers. The banner headline announcing the Munich Pact signed on September 29, 1938, quoted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s speech: “Peace in Our Time.” There was an eerie placidity that day in the population of Southampton. Where were the outraged crowds? Listening to the radio, Decca homed in on news about the latest wave of refugees. She was shocked to learn that some people, including one young woman in her market research group, took the Munich Pact not as tragedy but as reassurance and with a sense of relief. “Oh—Chamberlain,” she said vaguely. “But the paper says he’s for peace. That’s good, isn’t it?” All the stillness seemed such a topsy-turvy response.

Decca liked to move on things. She had so much energy, and much of it was concentrated in her politics. Politics gave her inspiration, but waiting while someone else made the decisions, old men who had gotten so many things so wrong so often before—men like her father—made her feel like jumping out of her skin. The misguided power at the top grated; the apathy and lethargy of the bourgeoisie was maddening.

Decca had never seen Esmond so depressed and restless. His sadness must have been painful for her to absorb since he was naturally so sure of himself. His moods were so intense, and he was unable to let his guard down except with her. On October 9 and 10, 1938, they read in the papers about violent mobs that were led by German storm troopers who shattered the windows in Jewish synagogues, shops, and homes in Germany and Austria. Orchestrated by the Nazi leadership,
Kristallnacht
—crystal night, a strangely poetic name for such terror and anguish—was a German pogrom that signaled the start of a systematic anti-Semitism, leading to the so-called Final Solution. In the days that followed, observers noted the shattered glass layered over the streets, in some places deep as their ankles.

The previous autumn, Decca had been full of hope. Now, the first anniversary of Julia’s birth was approaching.

SOMETIME THAT AUTUMN, Decca had an abortion. With five one-pound notes and an address in her handbag, she traveled alone by bus and tube to the East End of London.
Sheila sent me
, she said to the woman who opened the door and who then checked the street for prying neighbors or police. There had been no telephone to reserve an appointment, and if Decca had felt apprehension or dread, she was relieved just to have found the address. Paying her money in advance—five pounds was the going rate that day in the East End for a soap-induced abortion—she was ushered into where the deed would be done. It interested her to find the practitioner no “Dickensian crone,” but “an ordinary middle-aged English woman plying her trade”:

The deed itself consisted of the abortionist introducing grated carbolic soap into Decca’s womb through a syringe. It was “horribly painful,” and after several hours finally induced labor. It was also horribly dangerous for the patient and for the practitioner, the latter risking arrest, imprisonment, and capital punishment. Death by hanging was still the punishment for the crime.

Why hadn’t Esmond accompanied her or, at the very least, sent her in a taxi? At the time, Decca and Esmond had been together for nearly two years. Defiant as she may have been to others, it was unusual for her to oppose him, but it would have been even less likely for him to leave her to have an abortion on her own. The idea that this might have been another man’s child (a drunken night in Corsica?) is possible but seems unlikely.

Esmond didn’t help her find a more sanitary or reliable practitioner, because, as it turns out, he didn’t know a thing about it until the procedure was all over and done. Decca made this decision on her own. She may have thought that it was too soon, that they needed to be lighter on their feet, that the world was too vicious a place on principle, or that Esmond would have made these arguments had she asked. Years later, when her oldest living daughter was grown, Decca remembered thinking that Esmond wouldn’t have wanted a baby.

When Decca finally told Esmond about her abortion, “he was absolutely furious.” She argued that he had taken plenty of dangerous risks in his life. Whom had he consulted before enlisting to fight in Spain? That had been his decision, and this had been hers. It had been horrible, she conceded, but she did what she thought she had to do, and it was long since over; they would have to move on.

E
SMOND AND DECCA cast their thoughts westward. Earlier, they had considered emigrating to Mexico, but now their shared dream was to reach distant, isolationist, jazzy New York. With the one-hundred-pound inheritance Decca received on her twenty-first birthday, they bought a second-class stateroom on the Canadian SS
Aurania
and planned to stay at the Shelton Hotel in New York City for $3.50 a night. Esmond said that he would return and fight when England “was drawn into a war,” but when that war would begin, and even how the allies and enemies would line up, was still unclear. As they embarked in Southampton, England, in February 1939, Unity was busy in Germany, a member of Hitler’s social circle. In conversation with the British consul in Munich, Decca’s sister “mentioned that Herr Hitler believed that he had been sent by God and that when one heard him say that one believed it too.” Of family and friends only Philip Toynbee, Tom Mitford, and Nanny Blor waved bon voyage.

Decca and Esmond held much in common with many others traveling from Europe that February: their age, energy, haphazard education, and eagerness to escape the old country. But in other ways, they were two rare immigrants. Esmond was something of a literary prodigy; as every tabloid headline regarding him trumpeted, he was also Winston Churchill’s nephew, the son of the powerful Conservative leader’s sister-in-law. Decca, the red debutante, was herself twice famous—for opposing her family’s public attachment to fascism and now for being the Mitford girl who got away. The couple’s arrival in New York generated a few gossip column items and several welcoming invitations to dine and visit, but nothing that might immediately be translated to real income, which was what they desperately needed.

They came to the United States armed with extraordinary letters of introduction collected in the months before their departure. Decca said that on their very first night in town, they sat in the Shelton Hotel bar and agonized over the best wording for the letters they composed to introduce themselves. “We sat in a dim, plushly upholstered corner ordering dry martinis, absorbing the amazing un-Englishness of it all.” They must have felt giddy to have made their escape from London, where they and their friends had come to feel so discouraged. From the other side, America had shone like the big rock-candy mountain, sunshine and peppermints.

They considered their precious list of contacts a lifeline of favors to call in. These were family acquaintances and friends of friends, as well as artists, writers, and even Hollywood moguls, anyone who might know someone who might give them a break. For instance, a letter from their friend Roger Roughton provided the names and thumbnail descriptions of New York residents e. e. Cummings “an amusing and sometimes very good writer, he’s an authority on burlesque; politically he’s pretty cynical” and James Thurber, who was “exactly as you would imagine him and very kind,” as well as Carl Sandburg in Chicago.

At some point, Esmond hit upon Hollywood as a place where he might have strong earning potential, either as the foreign correspondent for the
London News Chronicle
or as a screenwriter. Roughton suggested they look up Walter Arensberg, “an elderly millionaire, very good natured with a magnificent collection of contemporary paintings and a belief that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.” He also encouraged them to meet homegrown artists like left-wing actor Lionel Stander, experimental filmmaker Ken McGowan, and Edward Weston, who “is very nice indeed, with a character much like Henry Moore’s.” In Carmel, “Bloomsbury on the Pacific,” the person to see was Ella Winter, “an English communist who was married to Lincoln Steffens. She knows a lot of people in Hollywood and will give you many introductions.”