The Horror of Love (14 page)

Pigeon Pie
is also the first of Nancy’s novels to touch on America. The anti-Americanism which was to become almost a fixation with her has its roots in what she perceived as the attitude of the US government in these first months of the war. Americans are portrayed as dull, money-grubbing hypocrites, their proud boast of democracy belied by their obsession with class and their apparent hope that Germany would win the war. In general, British people were unaware
of Roosevelt’s ardent behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings to overcome the restriction of the neutrality acts passed in the USA in the mid-Thirties, acts which he did not begin to publicly circumvent until September 1940. Senator Joseph Kennedy, the US ambassador to Britain who remained en poste until late 1940, made no secret of his pro-appeasement views or of his belief that democracy was ‘finished’ in Europe. Kennedy’s opinions were well known to Nancy, as Deborah Mitford was at the time close to Andrew Cavendish, whom she married in 1941. Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen would become Deborah’s sister-in-law in 1944, on her marriage to Andrew’s elder brother, the Marquess of Hartington. Nancy’s views of America were thus both informed and representative of what many people thought in that first period of the war.

The political framework of the novel is slight yet solid, deftly raised beneath the comedy of Sophia’s attempts to deal with her unruly lover and her hopes of being a ‘glamorous female spy’. Unwittingly, she outwits the sinister Boston Brotherhood, an American religious cult populated by German spies, who have kidnapped Ivor King, ‘the King of Song’, an affectionately bewigged portrait of Mark Ogilvie-Grant derived from an earlier story,
The Two Old Ladies of Eaton Square
. Rudolph and Luke, Sophia’s husband, are, as noted, a compound of Peter Rodd and his brother Francis. Rudolph comes out well – brave, clever and equal to his duty – but there is none of the fascination Nancy betrays in
Wigs
with his earlier incarnation as the brilliant, guileful Jasper Aspect. Sophie keeps Rudolph very effectively in his place, and is resigned to the view that while he is an ideal lover, he would be a disastrous husband. ‘Women are divided into two categories, those who can deal with the men they are in love with and those who can’t.’ Sophia, like Amabelle Fortescue, is very much the former type. Dealing with men was becoming Nancy’s perennial question, one that was to dominate her next four novels, as well as her biography of Mme de Pompadour, and the elements are all there in
Pigeon Pie
: when and how to make a scene, how to cope with infidelity and
jealousy, how to reconcile romantic idealism and the pragmatism required for an enduring marriage.

By the time the book was published, however, these eternal questions seemed trivial. The Phoney War was at an end, the Blitzkrieg had begun and France had fallen. ‘Poor sweet charming Sophia. She is, alas! an unimportant casualty, ’ concluded the
Spectator
. (When the book sold 10,000 copies on its reissue fifteen years later, Nancy reflected ruefully on how much that success would have meant to her during those ‘penniless’ years.) But she was about to make a more significant contribution to the war effort than a cheerful comic novel. On 20 June 1940, she visited Gladwyn Jebb at the Home Office, at his request, and denounced her sister Diana. ‘I regard her as an extremely dangerous person, ’ she told the under-secretary for economic warfare. It was not, as she wrote to Violet Hammersley, very sisterly behaviour, but she believed it was her duty.

And she truly did. Unlike her three stridently political sisters, Nancy has never been permitted partisan passion of her own. With her, it was always about the jokes. Nancy was always better prepared to lose a friend than a good laugh and the sharpness of her teasing brought her enemies as well as admirers. Nevertheless she did have political convictions. She was extremely well read in history, she had been at the very centre of political debate in Europe through her family for years and her hatred of Hitler and belief in Britain’s duty to fight the war was shared by millions of British people. Perhaps she was not politically sophisticated, but none of her sisters was renowned for the profundity of her views. Yet somehow, with Nancy, it has been made personal. One biographer suggests that her denunciation of Diana came down to nothing more than jealousy of her beautiful, brilliant sister, who had been loved by one adoring husband and left him for another equally enraptured, who had the children and the money so painfully absent from her own life. Another suggests that it was due to Nancy’s ‘increasing bitterness’ at the rift over
Wigs on the Green
, ‘proved’ by the ‘waspishness’ of her letters at the time (was Nancy ever anything other than waspish?).
²

If there was anything personal about Nancy’s hatred of Fascism, it stemmed from what it had done to her own family: Unity was a wreck and her parents were tearing one another apart. She had experienced a form of political awakening in Perpignan, her husband and many of her beloved friends were fighting. Moreover, Hitler’s creed was the antithesis of everything she believed about civilization, promising nothing but ignorance and cruelty. A convinced anti-appeaser, she was disgusted by the surprise expressed by those who had been pro-Munich at Hitler’s consistent failures to keep his word ‘as though he had ever behaved any other way’. Nancy’s declaration was made four days after the capitulation of the Pétain government to the Nazis. With France in Hitler’s power, invasion became a strong possibility. She had every reason to sincerely believe that her much-loved sister, her closest friend, was a genuine threat to her country.

This opinion was based on both Diana’s avowed close friendship with Hitler and the visits she had been making to Germany since 1933. These had begun when she accompanied Unity to the first Nuremberg rally. On her return in 1934, she took a flat for three months in Munich. In January 1935 she went again, with Lord Redesdale, was introduced to Hitler in February and presented him to Mosley in April. In 1936, she attended another Nuremberg rally and in October she and Mosley were married in Munich. In total she made five trips to Germany between April 1936 and February 1937. She was at the Parteitag that autumn and continued to visit Hitler in Berlin through 1938. Three more journeys to Munich took place in 1939, the last for the Bayreuth Festival in August, less than a month before Britain declared war. Nancy could hardly be blamed for finding this extremely sinister, and the fact that the authorities were clearly anxious (why else should she have been summoned? It was not her own initiative) endorsed her own suspicions. The paranoia she had mocked in
Pigeon Pie
seemed more plausible after the fall of France and with posters proclaiming ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives!’ displayed everywhere. Unsurprisingly, according to
Dianas biographer, ‘In this climate, British Fascism was inevitably seen as a vehicle for future Nazi influence in Britain.’
³

What Nancy could not have known was that the purpose of Diana’s visits had been the establishment of a commercial radio station which could raise money for the BUF (or, as it had become in 1936, the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists). After the riots of Mosley’s notorious march in Cable Street in London’s East End, the government had passed the Public Order Act, giving police the power to break up demonstrations and forbidding the wearing of uniforms. The act removed the basis of much of the party’s popular appeal, while Cable Street discouraged Mussolini, who had been donating to it for several years. After Il Duce’s financial support was withdrawn in 1935, Mosley was looking for alternative funding. Recognizing that his name might put off both potential advertisers and listeners, he took on two partners, Bill Alan and Peter Eckersley. Eckersley and his wife Dorothy were committed Nazis (they had been taken by Unity to gaze on Hitler in Munich in 1937) and Dorothy Eckersley would eventually be imprisoned for broadcasting propaganda from Germany between 1937 and 1941.

Diana’s persistent requests for permission to set up a radio station were finally granted in 1938. She and the company’s lawyer, Frederick Lawton, travelled to Berlin to meet the minister of posts and telegraphs, who granted the concession for the wavelength, and the station was registered as a company in December that year. During this visit, which took place a few months after the Munich agreement, Lawton heard Diana describe a dinner with Hitler and Goering at which they had discussed their plans for the takeover of Czechoslovakia. Diana did not consider it her patriotic duty to report this to the British government, and Lawton finally decided it would be a betrayal of his client’s confidentiality to do so.

Special Branch had been investigating the BUF for some time. Two days before war was declared, Mosley had set out the BUF’s official line.

The Government of Britain goes to war with the agreement of all Parliamentary parties … Neither Britain nor her Empire is threatened, therefore the British government intervenes in an alien quarrel. In this situation, we of the British Union will do our utmost to persuade the British people to make peace … Our members should do all that the law requires of them and, if they are members of any of the forces … they should obey their orders and, in every particular, obey the rules of their Service. But I ask all members who are free to carry on our work to take every opportunity within your power to awaken the people and demand peace.

This statement would have seen Mosley prosecuted had it not been for the convenient timing. The authorities did not yet consider him a direct threat, despite their present knowledge of the radio station. The agreement that Lawton had drawn up stated that ‘programmes shall contain no matter which can reasonably be construed as political propaganda or cause offence in Greater Germany or Great Britain’. However, anti-Nazi jokes were to be forbidden and a Nazi official present in the studio to supervise broadcasts. ‘Greater Germany’ might have been a further hint, in 1938, to the hapless Lawton. Special Branch also reported a private meeting of top BUF officials in January 1940, at which Mosley explained: ‘Reward and victory are in sight … You must bring in new members … reliable men and women who would take their place in the ranks when the time came for the sweep forward … as their brother parties in other countries had made when their hour of destiny struck.’
⁴

In April Vidkun Quisling helped the Nazis to power in Norway, placing himself at the head of a collaborationist government. Writing to Mark Ogilvie-Grant on 24 May, Nancy observed: ‘I’m glad Sir Oswald Quisling has been jugged, aren’t you, but think it quite useless if Lady Q is still at large.’

Mosley had been arrested two days after the government had pushed through an amendment to the Emergency Powers Act,
known as ‘18B’. Under the new clause, the home secretary was empowered to detain anyone who was a member of an organization believed to be ‘subject to foreign influence or control’ or whose leaders ‘have or have had associations with persons concerned in the government of, or sympathetic with the system of government of, any power with which His Majesty is at war’. Special Branch had reported to Sir Alexander Maxwell that the BUF was ‘not merely advocating an anti-war policy, but a movement whose aim it is to assist the enemy in every way it can’.

Nancy opened the letter to Mrs Hammersley in which she admits to denouncing Diana with the ‘heartbreaking’ thought of all ‘our’ refugees, no doubt now destined for execution under Franco. She wrote that Peter was back for a brief visit before joining his battalion, then describes the visit to Gladwyn Jebb. She says she really knows very little about Diana’s activities, but had advised Jebb to examine her passport. There is a narrative of justification in this letter: first the refugees, then Peter, then the admission that she has done her unsisterly duty. Diana’s home had already been raided (luckily she had the presence of mind to hide the photograph of Hitler she kept by her bed) and on 29 June she was taken to Holloway, where she remained for the next three years. She did not learn of Nancy’s actions until after her sister’s death.

Diana was not imprisoned because her sister betrayed her. Her former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, had written to Lord Swinton, the chairman of the Security Executive, about his concern at her ‘extremely dangerous character’.
⁵
His letter was passed to MI5 and the Home Office and the order for Diana’s detention had been countersigned by Alan Harker, the acting head of MI5 and a member of Swinton’s secret committee. Sir Alexander Maxwell at the Home Office, conversely, advised caution, but by then it was too late. Diana’s own unrepentant testimony when she was questioned by Norman Birkett on 2 October led the advisory committee to conclude that: ‘It would be quite impossible, having regard to her expressed attitude and
her past activities with the leaders of Nazi Germany, to allow her to remain at liberty in these critical days … Lady Mosley could be extremely dangerous if she were at large.’

Nancy has been accused of the most grotesque hypocrisy in writing to her sister when she was permitted to do so, for sending her books and accepting gifts, including the money to buy a rare Guerlain lipstick, for playing the supportive sister. But she had done her political duty, and now she did her family duty. She was unrepentant about the conditions Diana had to endure: the dirt, the squalor, the confinement and the terrible pain of being separated from her eleven-week-old son Max. True, Diana had committed no crime and had not been tried, but under 18B there was nothing illegal about her imprisonment. Diana herself was appalled to find herself condemned for nothing more than her political beliefs, but then she did not seem able to make the connection between this and the regime she supported. In Nancy’s view, Diana unequivocally deserved prison, and her feelings of sympathy for her sister could not be allowed to get in the way. She wondered what Diana did after 5pm lights-out in Holloway – ‘I suppose she sits and thinks of Adolf.’ Such remarks are quoted as more evidence of Nancy’s callousness, her attempts to joke her way out of her own treachery. They were written at a time when London was suffering the worst of the Blitz and Nancy was caring for Jewish refugees at the Redesdale town house in Rutland Gate. In that context, they appear quite restrained.