Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (22 page)

By 1935 Peter was already seeing another woman: Mary Sewell, the daughter of Edwin Lutyens. Later the affair with Adelaide Lubbock would begin (in 1950 Nancy wrote that for the past twelve years Peter had ‘considered himself as married to her’). The assumption is that there were others along the way. He had been sent down from Oxford for having a girl in his room; in fact the wilful flagrancy of his womanizing had something in common with Mosley’s. It is unlikely that Nancy was ever truly in love with him, despite his blond beauty (described by Evelyn Waugh as ‘the sulky, arrogant looks of the young Rimbaud’). For one thing he was simply too boring. His mind was encyclopaedic, about everything from the Norman kingdoms in Sicily to the tollgate system in England and Wales (‘the Old Tollgater’ was a secondary nickname), but there was simply no edit button: out it all spilled, and it is hard to imagine that Nancy – with her intolerance of ‘crashers’ – would have held her peace. Clearly other women did. And the humiliation of this would have half killed her, not least because it followed so hard on the heels of the dreadfully public non-affair with Hamish St Clair-Erskine. She was no Diana, who could sit in smiling silence, waiting for her roving dog to return after a night à la chasse. Nancy’s façade was immaculate but it cracked easily; at a bridge party with the Sewells she stood up and fainted, a desperate cry for the situation to stop. ‘She’s only trying to get attention,’ Peter said, carrying his wife briskly out of the room before returning to his mistress.

So it is unsurprising that
Wigs on the Green
holds so much dry disillusionment, a sense of cynicism fashioned, with some effort, from disappointment. ‘A girl must marry once,’ says a character in the book. ‘You can’t go on being called Miss – Miss all your life, it sounds too idiotic. All the same, marriage is a great bore... It gets one down in time.’ The ‘time’ had not been very long: Nancy started the book just a few months into her marriage. The central character, Jasper Aspect, bears a strong resemblance to Peter, to whom the book is dedicated. Perhaps Nancy did not mean him to come across as quite so unlikeable, but he does. He steals money from women’s handbags, just as Peter did from hers, and when told that wives are not expected to keep their husbands he replies easily: ‘I never could see why not. It seems so unfair.’ Although the novel is a brilliant little piece – like almost everything that Nancy did – there is a peculiar coldness, a not-quite-natural toughness in the passages relating to Jasper, essentially at odds with the
benevolence
that characterizes her subsequent works. It is not, somehow, a novel written by a happy person. And the will to happiness was, in Nancy, at least as strong as Captain Jack’s will to achievement; but that, for her, came later.

Wigs on the Green
was not, therefore, designed entirely as a satire on the Fascist movement. The Union Jackshirts are all part of the comedic landscape – in itself a way of making them seem facile. Nevertheless the joke on them is a pretty good one. The airy teasing was too much for Diana to take; with all the cool, alarming strength of which she was capable, she demanded that Nancy remove parts of the book. The sacred Mosley had recognized an enemy in his midst, and this meant that Diana, too, must view her sister with suspicion. Although political ideology relishes combat, it really does not like being laughed at; this, too, the modern age reminds us. And from the time that
Wigs on the Green
was published, in June 1935, the relationship between Nancy and Diana changed: there was no absolute rupture, and later came a resumption of closeness, but a certain wariness remained. As much as anything Diana would have been pulled up by little asides such as: ‘Well, it’s not usual for ladies to be divorced, you know,’ which seemed to mock the months at Eaton Square, when each had succoured the other in their despair, and Diana had written ‘Darling you are my one ally’ to her sister. ‘Oh dear,’ Nancy remarked about
Wigs on the Green
, ‘I wish I had called it mine un comf now because uncomf is what I feel whenever I think about it...’

She had seen a need, no question, to make light of the darkness in her sister’s life. Oddly enough, however,
Wigs on the Green
was not entirely critical of the Fascist creed. One Jackshirt speech inveighs against a society ‘rotten with vice, selfishness and indolence. The rich have betrayed their trust, preferring the fetid atmosphere of cocktail bars and night-clubs to the sanity of useful country life.’ This echoed a typical robust Mosley pronouncement – ‘Conservatives have chosen the financier, Fascism chose the British farmer’ – but it also prefigured Nancy’s attacks on capitalism in
The Pursuit of Love
. Perhaps, in that sense, she
had
responded to the BUF call. And perhaps her jibes sprang from a source that was not entirely disinterested: an envy of Diana’s palpable fulfilment with this man. Nancy saw through Mosley, but she also saw the charge between him and Diana, which was different altogether from her wobbly loose connection with Peter. Nonetheless she was quite sincere in her ridicule when, for example, a character in
Wigs on the Green
describes a ‘non-Aryan’ as:

‘The missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes.’

‘How about Siamese cats?’ said Jasper.

‘That’s true. But Siamese cats can possess, to a notable degree, the Nordic virtue of faithfulness...’

The young woman parroting this stuff is Eugenia Malmains, a splendid daughter of Gloucestershire with ‘eyes like enormous blue headlamps’ and ‘the gait of a triumphant goddess’, who makes speeches on ‘an overturned wash-tub in Chalford village green’. To a young man who responds to her greeting of ‘Hail!’ with ‘Snow’, she is severe: ‘If you continue to be facetious at the expense of our Movement I shall be obliged to degrade you before the comrades. In fact I will cut off all your buttons with my own dagger.’ Nobody takes Eugenia very seriously. When she sets up a Union Jack rally in a country-house garden and writes a speech for George III beginning: ‘Hail! And thanks for all your good wishes, we are happy to be among our loyal Aryan subjects of Chalford and district,’ this seems merely silly, rather endearing, the behaviour of a schoolgirl in the throes of a crush; one that will soon, when everybody comes to their senses, be over and done with.

Given that Eugenia was a portrait of Unity, this may be interpreted as wishful thinking on the part of her sister, whose need to see the joke in everything had come to the place where the laughter stopped.

VI

‘Hallo, Fascist!’

That was the greeting offered to Unity Mitford by Oswald Mosley, when he arrived at Eaton Square for tea on the day before Diana’s divorce hearing and offered her a party emblem to wear. She had been accepted as a member of the BUF.

It was June 1933. During the early part of that year Unity had attended art school while living in a house on Grosvenor Crescent, rented by her parents for the season (Rutland Gate had been let, as usual). Forbidden though she was to visit Diana’s little house nearby, she nevertheless did so, and inevitably got to know Mosley. She also became closer to Diana, her senior by four years and her physical near-twin. She observed her glorious sister, the strength of her purpose, her devotion to this glamorous man who spoke so brilliantly and had all the Mitford confidence, burnished with bombast. She may, too, have fallen a little for Mosley: that is supposition, but also quite possible (years later her aunt ‘Weenie’ would say that Mosley had actually tried to seduce her, an improbable story that – according to Diana – came from Unity herself, and as such should have been instantly dismissed). Anyway it was exciting for Unity to be in on the illicit Eatonry set-up, supporting the pioneers against the reactionaries: it would have been surprising, in these circumstances, had Unity
not
become a convert to the Fascist cause. It was not Diana’s fault, nor her responsibility. But her influence upon her bold yet uncertain sister was surely powerful, merely by the fact of her highly particular qualities, her very existence. ‘Weenie’ later accused Diana of unleashing the rebellions of both Unity and Jessica; on that occasion, her sometimes wayward spite found its mark.

Thus art school lost its interest for Unity, as another outlet – a daring alternative to the world of white dresses and callow dance partners – presented itself. It is somehow shocking to see Unity’s name appear in the court pages in connection with normal dutiful debutante things: selling programmes at a royal charity screening of
The Good Companions
, attending society weddings, going to Royal Ascot the week before her induction into the BUF. Her friend and fellow deb from the 1932 season, Mary Ormsby-Gore, would later claim to have seen the development of her political obsession. According to Mary, who quickly got engaged, Unity criticized her fiancé by saying that one could see that he had ‘Chinese blood’. The Mitfords, said Unity, were ‘pure bred Aryans’.
²²
By that time she had gone to Germany with Diana, and the die was cast.

During her teenage years at Swinbrook, Unity’s close companion had been Jessica, and this too in its way prepared the ground for what was to come. Both were fidgety, intermittently discontented. Jessica was the more politically aware, and later described herself as thinking in the same terms as Diana about the wider, troubling world: ‘By the time I was thirteen [1930] major storms were brewing outside the Swinbrook fortress. Whole population centres were designated “distressed areas” by the Government. I read in the papers of the great hunger marches, the great depression of the early 30s hit the country and police and strikers fought in the streets...’
²³
One has a sense that the cut-off, law-unto-itself, English fairytale upbringing of the Mitford girls – which in Nancy was turned to imaginative use – bred in Diana and Jessica a kind of hunger for what lay beyond, almost a romantic relish for its brutal hardships, which they were not called upon to share. Of course this instinct took them in absolutely opposite directions; but were they so different, really, when all was said and done?

Unity’s politics were not of this kind. There was nothing thought through about them; they filled some strange emotional chasm. It has been suggested
²⁴
that their origins dated back to 1930, when – aged fifteen – she acquired a copy of
Jew Süss,
a novel that portrayed a Jewish financier in such a way that the Nazis made use of the character when promoting anti-Semitism. Certainly the book may have worked upon the underlying Mitford tendency towards the Teuton, the towering Siegfried; but probably this came later. In Jessica’s recollection, she herself was fifteen and Unity eighteen by the time they had chosen their opposing political positions. Rather too old, one might think, for what they then did in the room that they shared at Swinbrook: the ‘DFD’, or Drawing from the Drawing room. According to
Hons and Rebels
this was divided into two, with one side a homage to Fascism, the other side to Communism. Jessica’s reading of her childhood is prone to
a posteriori
reasoning, and there is a convenient glibness about this image of the schizophrenic DFD. Nevertheless it is very Mitford, and quite possibly true. When a guest of Pamela’s was taken to Swinbrook, he was asked whether he was Fascist or Communist. ‘I am a democrat,’ he replied. ‘How wet,’ was the response, followed by peals of loud scornful laughter. The sense of play-acting, of showing off, is powerful. But the times could easily turn display into reality, if one allowed them to.

Naturally Unity attended BUF rallies. So too did Nancy. In 1934 Pam sat in the front row at the Albert Hall, where a spotlit Mosley made a strutting entrance to martial music; the spectacle is unlikely to have impressed her, although two years later she would marry a Fascist sympathizer, the scientist Derek Jackson. He seems a surprising husband for the passive Pam. ‘Being married to Derek was never an easy proposition,’ wrote Deborah, who as a girl had had a massive crush on him (chiefly because he was an extremely good horseman, who rode thoroughbreds to hounds with a jockey’s short leathers). A divorcee when he became engaged to Pam – who married in black, trimmed with astrakhan – he had six wives in all, plus homosexual tendencies. Except for his love of animals he was not particularly nice. Deborah, who did not go in for sensationalism, nevertheless claimed that Derek took Pam on a particularly bumpy car journey through Norway when she fell pregnant; she also speculated as to whether the miscarriage led to her sister’s dislike of children.

The mystery of Pam deepens further when one pictures her with this forceful little husband. Derek was a brilliant physicist and a professor at Oxford, a rider in the Grand National, the heir to the
News of the World
, and a man whose eccentricity was expressed through arrogance. On one occasion he tried to board a train with Pam and found the first-class doors locked. He marched furiously through third class then pulled the communication cord; when approached by a guard he forestalled any arguments, holding up a glove to show the mark left by the dirty chain, demanding that the glove be cleaned immediately. This sort of behaviour would be funny only in retrospect. According to Diana, he had been in love with most of the Mitfords, including Tom. This theory, with its
Brideshead
theme, is convincing: ‘So true to life being in love with a whole family, it has happened in mine,’ Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh after reading his novel (she may also have been thinking of James Lees-Milne). In marrying Pam, therefore, Derek was marrying the Mitfords – with the exception of Nancy, whom he was said not to like.
²⁵
He preferred his women to be adoring rather than amused; as did Mosley. Derek had a twin brother, Vivian, to whom he was intensely close and whose name Nancy filched for Eugenia Malmain’s horse in
Wigs on the Green
. The news that Vivian had been killed in an accident greeted the Jacksons when they arrived in Vienna for their honeymoon, and may explain some of Derek’s more
outré
behaviour; the kind of man that he was would express extreme grief in that fierce and oblique way.