The Viceroy's Daughters (42 page)

With the Halifaxes gone, Victor Cazalet had more time for his other friends. On October 10 Irene again went to stay with him at Great Swifts, where they were joined by her other admirer, Leslie Hore-Belisha. After lunch Hore-Belisha and Irene had a long walk, discussing Victor. “I sniggered inside to think of two beaux in one weekend whom I might have ‘taken unto myself' but I am sure God guided me not to. Victor says Leslie is only absorbed with himself but I am not sure that criticism could not be applied also to the person who made it.”

Victor, unaware that Hore-Belisha was a rival, summed him up more prosaically. “Leslie can be very agreeable but he is getting far too fat,” he wrote in his diary. “I was rather doubtful if I had enough of the right food for him. However for one dinner he had soup, two goes of chicken, two helpings of pie and all the butter and biscuits he could collect.”

After dinner all of them were depressed by listening to Lord Haw Haw telling them how the German army was advancing, it seemed inexorably, on Moscow. Gloomily, Hore-Belisha predicted a great victory for the Germans in the Middle East, after which, he said, “They will then switch to us.”

Irene was still doing all she could for the Mosley children: discussing his future with eighteen-year-old Nick and entertaining for Vivien, now twenty. That October she took a party of Vivien and her friends to the Lansdowne to dine and dance, followed by a nightclub. She felt that she should visit Tom in Brixton Prison, but when she suggested it, both Nick and Baba failed to respond—though they took her car to visit him the following day.

Balked of a visit, on October 26 Irene sent Tom a long letter full of the news she had meant to tell him in person of Nick's future plans and about Micky who had started at St. Ronan's that term. Four days later, she received a brutally brief reply. It was a single line, written by Tom's solicitor Oswald Hickson, saying only that a year at Oxford was better than a half [a term] at Eton.

Irene was disgusted both at Tom's rudeness and his lack of interest in his children. “I shall take no more trouble with him,” she wrote in her diary, underlining the words heavily.

33

The Halifax Letters

The threatened Windsor visit to the U.S. took place in October 1941. The duke and duchess were accompanied by the duke's valet; two lady's maids; a chauffeur and secretary; their comptroller, Gray Phillips; their three cairn terriers, now so bellicose that the Halifaxes' dog, Franklin, had to be shut away to avoid attack; and seventy-three pieces of luggage, too much even for their sumptuous suite at the Waldorf Towers, New York, so that the passage outside was lined with half-unpacked trunks. Their visit to the Washington embassy was marked by a similar lavishness. “They were both most amiable and—except for their ridiculous amount of luggage, of which the papers were so critical—behaved most decently and ordinarily,” wrote Dorothy Halifax, adding: “I was a little outraged by being presented with a bill for £7.10 for hire of a lorry to take their luggage to and from station—it did seem a little unnecessary for a 24-hour visit.”

Lady Halifax was too charitable to mention that a luncheon for twenty-two had to be canceled at the last minute, the duchess preferring to send out for food and the duke to drink tea and eat fruit in his bedroom. But a dinner party went well and their general comportment was praised. Both, it was thought, behaved impeccably, with particular kudos going to the duchess at one gathering where she refused the offer of tea or cocktails and drank a glass of water instead—“tea would have been too English and cocktails too fast!” noted Halifax approvingly of this subtlety.

Halifax sent Baba a full description of a tête-à-tête with the duke, who had asked himself to luncheon and stayed until five-thirty. They talked generalities for some time, and then the duke launched into a discussion of his own position.

Whatever people thought of the Abdication, that was bygones, and if it had not been for the attitude of his own family—whom he never wanted to see again—things might have worked quite smoothly [wrote Halifax]. The Bahamas was exile, etc etc. He would stick to them for the war but then? He had thought he could have lived in England but he was not going to expose himself or the Duchess to insults and humiliations from the family. And so on. You know it all by heart.

I said that I well knew all the difficulties and tried to be as sympathetic as I could—but I thought he ought not to mistake the friendly welcome that he received from people here. Different feelings were still smouldering and excessive prominence before the public would quickly bring them out. People had thought, rightly or wrongly, that he had “quitted” on his job, and quite apart from that were very critical of her. In what way? he asked. Because of their feelings about divorce, said I, and so we talked for two hours.

He made it pretty plain that he does not look any more, unless his family have a change of heart, to settling down in England. He thinks France will be pretty difficult after the war but likes the New World if it wasn't so expensive! He said that he was, as he looked, extremely happy and “had a wonderful wife.”

I must say I was very sorry for him and thought he was a very pathetic figure. Not that I change my general feeling either about his coming back to England or her being HRH.

 

As to the duchess, reported Halifax, she was very agreeable and very anxious to justify their abandonment of Fruity in Paris. He conceded her chic, but thought her hands, “always a most revealing test of quality, dreadfully common, stumpy and coarse. No, I wouldn't have given up my Empire for her!”

The Halifaxes had been worried in case the duke talked indiscreetly to the wrong people, especially about his future prospects. “We were all on tenterhooks,” Dorothy wrote to Baba. Halifax, who had always believed the visit would be a mistake, had his opinion confirmed by the unfortunate publicity which the couple generated. “The general press roundup on the Windsor visit has come out pretty badly and I think the visit certainly did harm. Extravagance [the duchess had fallen on the shops]; pleasure; England being bombed; where did they get the dollars from? Lease Lend money? I hope it may not become a biennial affair, sorry as I am for them in their St. Helena.”
*

 

In November Fruity was posted to Cairo. Irene gave him a farewell lunch at the Savoy Grill, where Fruity, fifty-four, out of the second job he had really loved and surrounded by younger men sporting decorations, wings, crowns or red tabs, admitted that he felt “a bit down” at still being only a flight lieutenant, overtaken by younger men who seemed to become squadron leaders with ease. Irene's sympathetic heart was touched and she sent a collection of the best new books to Claridge's Hotel, where he was staying. He left the following day, after saying a brief goodbye to Baba and fourteen-year-old David, who had come up from Eton.

When Baba dined with Irene that evening, the old irritation surfaced. Irene was by now a considerable personality on the wartime “talk” circuit, lecturing, doing some broadcasting and speaking to schools on subjects like “Youth in Wartime,” so her younger sister's automatic dismissal of her views did not go down well. “I am maddened by the cocksure way Baba downs anything one ever says about Charles Peake, the P.M. or anyone as if one's own views were puerile and not worthy to be pronounced.”

Baba's assumption of superior knowledge was, as ever, founded on the confidences of her devoted admirer in Washington. Halifax wrote to her almost within minutes of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941:

Ten minutes before [I was] going out for a ride, the President rang me up from the White House to say that the Japanese were bombing Hawaii and asked me to pass it on to London as quickly as I could. So that's that. If war was to come with Japan I can't imagine any way in which they could have acted more completely to rally, unite and infuriate American public opinion. The report is of pretty severe damage to ships and aeroplanes but most of the fleet was at sea already and none of their newer ships in harbour.
*
I have no doubt we shall all have some ugly surprises but I also have no doubt that the Japs will learn that they have made the biggest mistake in their history. It will be interesting to see whether Germany follows suit in declaring war on the U.S.

 

Four days later, Hitler did exactly that.

In the same letter, Halifax showed how aware he was of Baba's own concerns, putting aside his personal feelings about Tom Mosley to advise her to tackle the prime minister direct. Then, at Christmas, he was able to give her some welcome news: at last, something was being done about Tom. “On December 23 Winston led us apart in the White House in the evening to say that he had settled up Tom Mosley's business, he had had to have a special meeting of the War Cabinet and read the riot act to H. M[orrison] and that he (Winston) had had to assume his most ‘puppy dog' attitude. He said he had not written to you but wished me to tell you! I hope it really is an improvement. It was not very clear from what he said exactly what had been done.”

What had happened was not the release Baba had hoped for, but Tom's reunion with the woman she still continued to detest.

Churchill, for whom imprisonment without trial or charge was, as he later put it, “in the highest degree odious,” had written a strong note to Morrison stating that “internment rather than imprisonment is what was contemplated” when Defence Regulation 18B was put into effect. The result of this was that those internees who were married were, at last, allowed to be together. For most of them this meant the Isle of Man (where many of the wives were already). For Tom Mosley this was not an option—it was felt that to place the Leader among his devoted flock would only lead to trouble—but it was clearly unfair to keep the Mosleys apart when other couples were allowed to be together. Accordingly, on Sunday, December 21, Tom was taken from Brixton to Holloway Prison, where he and Diana, and another couple, were accommodated in a small separate block. It was, wrote Diana later, “one of the happiest days of my life.”

At Little Compton, New Year's Eve was celebrated in the traditional way. Friends came to dinner and afterward everyone happily played “the Game,” a version of charades. “Baba doing the Immaculate Conception was a scream and Viv Great Expectations with a cushion up her tummy was wonderful,” wrote Irene. “Then suddenly [Colonel] Ted Lyon got up and did Every Dog has his Day by crawling round the room and lifting his leg on us and the furniture. Just before midnight we went outside and saw the New Year in with Auld Lang Syne. So ended a dreadful year of stress and strife.”

 

As 1942 opened, the hail of letters from Lord Halifax continued. “An interesting visit this morning from Steinhardt, the late US Ambassador to Moscow,” he wrote on January 1. “He said that the Russian cold didn't really begin before January and expressed his opinion that unless the Germans could get out fairly quickly, they were in for what he called as ghastly a disaster as history had ever seen. It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but I devoutly hope he is right.”

His next letter described how he had cheered himself up when he had flu—a remarkably aggressive fantasy for a man of such devoutly Christian principles. “If and when we are winning I am bound, I think, to realize my great ambition of seeing Hitler shoot himself or be shot! For flight is impossible, apart from the fact that it is discreditable for a Dictator. Where can he fly to? Do let us pray we live to see him having to make his horrible choice of method of suicide.”

On December 2, 1941, Ernest Bevin, the minister for labor, announced a massive mobilization of womanpower (something which Nazi Germany, extraordinarily, never contemplated even when calling up boys and old men): all single women between twenty and thirty were to be conscripted for some form of war work. Vivien wanted to work in a factory and left Little Compton to live in a comfortable hostel with two girlfriends doing similar work, taking with her Andrée, who would look after them all. Baba too was leaving: as the Blitz had virtually stopped, she had decided to return to London to nurse in Bermondsey. Before she left, she received an unexpected letter—an olive branch from the duchess of Windsor, who wrote on January 31, 1942:

Dear Baba,
I have been sorry not to have had a word from you all these months. Even if the Duke and Fruity have agreed to disagree I hoped
we
haven't. I am afraid British Mission No. I was never Fruity's affair—from the moment he looked it over and returned to Harefield House with the reports of the personalities there, and I am happy he has been fortunate in finding a suitable and interesting job.

The Duke has not been as fortunate—
this
gift from the “gods” was anything but welcomed and was in fact most heartbreaking for both of us. The story of Lisbon is too bad, but I am afraid our book will be filled with chapters like that as long as we have anything to do with officialdom and naturally the war has placed us in that position. However we have accepted the exile and have tried to do the small and trying, due to its very provincialness, job as well as possible with the motto “Do thy part—therein all honour lies.”

It was divine to get away from here but the trip to the U.S. was spoiled by crowds everywhere—though they were
most agreeable
we longed for a private life. And then the press, always so really terrific and following one everywhere and whether one is kind or rude to them, they invent more lies and silly notions—however that is the great U.S.A. and one must learn to take it.

I am afraid Ld Halifax has had quite a beating from them, also the Embassy from the Washington press where he is certainly far more popular than the members of his staff. He was magnificent with the eggs and tomato throwing in Detroit and only the throwers were ridiculous. Now that the U.S. is at war however all these things will cease as we are now
really
allies . . .

 

Baba replied immediately, in terms that made it clear she had neither forgotten nor forgiven the duke's appalling behavior to Fruity.

Dear Wallis,
I know nothing about the Duke and Fruity agreeing to disagree and I'm sure this explanation would come as a complete surprise to Fruity. Anyway, between friends of 20 years that friendship is not broken because they “disagree,” especially when on one side so much devotion and loyalty has been given. True friendship is very rare and I feel it calls for better treatment than this. Although it does not directly affect me I can't help feeling sad and shocked that the Duke should have felt it unnecessary to communicate with Fruity in any way since the day he motored out of Paris in June 1940. He did not even warn him he was going the night before.

Perhaps my views of the obligations of friendship and what it involves are too high. I am surprised you should not understand my feelings and where my loyalties are bound to lie as I thought we rather agreed on these matters.

Baba

 

The war news was appalling. Germany was pushing back the 8th Army in the Western Desert, the Allies were unable to halt the advance of the Japanese through Malaya, and on February 15, 1942, the “impregnable” fortress and great naval base of Singapore surrendered to the Japanese. Irene, dining with Victor Cazalet, heard of his visit to Malta, which had suffered over two thousand raids by Nazi bombers and where Valletta harbor was full of wrecks.

At the same time, there was a glimmer of hope: the first American soldiers had arrived (in Northern Ireland), Britain had signed a treaty of alliance with Russia and, in the air, was at last able to go on the offensive with a devastating raid on the shipbuilding Baltic port of Lübeck.

The country was tightening its belt. Losses from convoys across the Atlantic to Hitler's wolf pack of U-boats were huge and people were doing what they could to alleviate food and clothing shortages. On the government-issue utility clothing, skirts rose and cuffs on trousers disappeared, while women were using beet juice as lipstick and gravy browning to tint their legs to save on stockings, the seams drawn in with eyebrow pencil (Halifax thoughtfully sent Baba some American nylons).