The Horror of Love (9 page)

Evelyn Waugh was encouraging. ‘I do think it’s top-hole about you and Rodd, and I foresee a very wild and vigorous life in front of you.’ All the same, he added while he was glad to think Hamish would now disappear from her work, ‘I won’t have you
writing books about Rodd because that would be too much to bear.’ In fact it was Evelyn who really immortalized Peter, as Basil Seal in
Black Mischief, Put Out More Flags
and the late story, poignant in the light of what actually became of him,
Basil Seal Rides Again
.

Whether she enjoyed or merely endured her honeymoon, Nancy set about married life with gusto and continuing assertions of happiness. She declared that she was learning to be ‘a rather wonderful old housewife’, and though she never learned to cook anything much beyond scrambled eggs, she was successful in turning Rose Cottage into a truly pretty house. Lady Redesdale had always had a talent for charming interiors, what Alexander Mosley called a gift for
mise en scène
, which was inherited by Nancy and Diana and, on a much grander scale, by Deborah, and her taste for spare lines, delicate colours, beautiful furniture and simple, delicious food characterized her daughters’ homes. As she would later at Rue Monsieur, Nancy hung festooned curtains, framing her views of the garden and the river, and with the help of Mark Ogilvie-Grant picked up cheap, effective pieces such as a sofa and a carved chimneypiece that complemented an Aubusson carpet and her beloved Sheraton writing desk. ‘That little house was really exquisite, there wasn’t an ugly thing in it, ’ Deborah commented. The
Evening Standard
even wrote up an evening of bridge-playing as ‘a gay, light-hearted affair’ even if Nancy did have to contrive space for her guests by cramming the tables into the bedroom.

Compared with most of their contemporaries, the Rodds were poor. ‘Not poor like poor people, ’ Nancy admitted, but beyond providing necessities like a servant and, later, a car, their income of £500 per year – made up of parental allowance, Peter’s salary, Nancy’s journalism and the earnings from the shares she had bought with the profits from her two novels – didn’t go far. Peter soon chucked his City job on a vague promise of a better post at £600 per year, but inevitably it never materialized, and Lord Rennell was left wondering whether ‘their house is healthy and they get enough to eat and keep warm … I should like to be
reassured that these repeated attacks of flu are not the result of inadequate resources.’ Lord Rennell occasionally slipped a discreet hand-out to Nancy behind his wife’s back, but Lady Rennell was blithely brazen about the fact that she gave much less money to Peter than to her other children. He always seemed to get by somehow, she claimed. How he got by was mostly Nancy.

Wigs on the Green
, Nancy’s third novel, which she began in early 1934, caused a cataclysmic row within the Mitford family and has remained her most contentious book. Nancy herself refused to allow her publishers to reissue it after the war, when anything with her name on it was a guaranteed bestseller. ‘We were young and high spirited then and didn’t know about Buchenwald, ’ she wrote to Evelyn. But before considering the political context, the financial circumstances of its production are worth recalling. Quite early in her marriage, Nancy had to confront the fact that Peter simply didn’t care enough for her to rouse himself from his over-entitled indolence. As ever, she put a good face on his incompetence, joking about what a lovely new set of bailiffs they were acquiring and inviting the embarrassed debt-collectors in for tea, but it was a horrible humiliation. Whenever Nancy did have some money Peter would ‘borrow’ or quite simply steal it from her in order to go off on a ‘bat’ in the London nightclubs. He refused to acknowledge her growing anxiety and was quite shameless about living off his wife.
Wigs
is in many ways an inadequate book, but also, in context, a brave one. There is a whiff of Grub Street about the novel, written swiftly in a cold house with the bills stacking up on the table and the duns at the door. Not quite
Richard Savage
, yet those who see Nancy as the frivolous child of privilege fail to recognize how urgent it was to her, at the time, to produce something that would permit the Rodd ménage to flounder on a little longer with some degree of self-respect.

Lord Redesdale and Hitler had similar views on make-up. Much to the despair of his daughters, the former, like his alter ego Uncle Matthew, ‘liked to see female complexions in a state of
nature and often pronounced that paint was for whores’. On her first trip to Paris Nancy had mourned the parental edict against powder (‘the others look
too
lovely’). No wonder, then, that the younger Mitfords slapped it on with such enthusiasm when safely out of sight, to the extent that Unity, who refused to do without lipstick, even scotched her first opportunity to meet Hitler rather than give up her warpaint. In the spring of 1933, Diana Guinness had been introduced to Putzi Hanfstaengl, a press-relations officer who had known Hitler for twelve years. This ‘very interesting German’
⁵
promised to introduce Diana to the Chancellor if she could come to the Nazi Parteitag, the first Nuremberg rally, in September.

Tom Mosley (as Oswald was always known to family and friends) had begun an affair with his married sister-in-law Baba Curzon after his wife’s death. That summer, he was on a motor tour of France with his new mistress. Diana, in need of distraction from this latest evidence of the callousness of the man for whom she had sacrificed her life, suggested to Unity that they take a trip to Bavaria. They travelled from Munich to Nuremberg, where Putzi met them at the station and reacted with horror to their heavily made-up faces, not at all the sort of thing that pure, cosmetic-free Aryan womanhood was supposed to go in for. Despite vigorous backstage wiping, Putzi was unable to make good on his promise, but Unity and Diana were nonetheless overwhelmed by the Parteitag, three days of parades, speeches and rapturous saluting which confirmed them both in their absolute belief in Fascism. The Redesdales were disgusted and furious when they discovered what Diana had done. ‘I suppose you know without being told how absolutely horrified Muv and I were to think of you and Bobo accepting any form of hospitality from people we regard as a murderous gang of pests, ’ wrote Lord Redesdale, but Unity had already decided on returning to Nuremberg the following year to embark on her quest to meet her idol.

Given the Redesdales’ views on Nazism at the time, it seems astonishing that the next year Lady Redesdale accompanied
Unity to Munich to settle her into 121 Königstrasse, the home of Baroness Laroche, who took in English girls
en pension
. From then until the end of Unity’s life, Germany was her home and Hitler her obsession. On 9 February 1935, after a prolonged campaign of stalking and staring, Unity was able to write to her father describing ‘the most wonderful and beautiful’ day of her life. Hitler summoned her to his table in the Osteria Bavaria restaurant and they had a long conversation, at the end of which the Führer presented his twenty-one-year-old fan with a signed postcard: ‘To Fräulein Unity Mitford as a friendly memento of Germany and Adolf Hitler.’ Four months later, Nancy was writing to her sister:

Darling Head of Bone and Heart of Stone,

Oh dear oh dear the book comes out on Tuesday. Oh dear, I won’t let Rodd give a party for it … oh dear I wish I had never been born into such a family of fanatics. Oh dear … I wish I had called it mein uncomf now because uncomf is what I feel when ever I think about it. Oh dear.

In many respects,
Wigs on the Green
is less a political novel than a ‘light, accomplished comedy of manners’,
⁶
like its two predecessors. If anything, it is less concerned with Fascism than with the problem of Peter, to whom it is dedicated. He appears as Jasper Aspect, a charming wastrel who lives ‘from one day to another, picking up by fair means or foul enough cash for the needs of the moment and being dragged out of the bankruptcy courts about once every three years by protesting relations’. Nancy’s narrative voice might be that of Amabelle Fortescue. Love is viewed with a fashionable, hard-edged cynicism, as an ‘unethical and anti-social emotion’ and Jasper’s fecklessness justified by his remark that wives might as well keep their husbands, since although women have to endure pregnancy, chaps get hangovers, after all. Her marriage is dissected briskly and sharply and turned into a joke, since a joke was what she had to live with.

The Fascist parts of the novel centre on the beautiful, fanatical heiress, Eugenia Malmains, Unity to the life: strapping, blonde, with eyes like ‘enormous blue headlamps’ and her evangelical zeal for the ‘Union Jack’ movement, led by Captain Jack (who, in deference to Diana, never appears in the novel at all). Nancy was quick to protest to Diana that the novel couldn’t possibly damage her beloved Mosley’s cause.

A book of this kind
can’t
do your movement any harm. Honestly, if I thought it could set the Leader back by so much as half an hour I would have scrapped it, or indeed never written it in the first place … I still maintain that it is far more in favour of Fascism than otherwise. Far the nicest character in the book is a Fascist and the others all become much nicer as soon as they have joined up. But I also know your point of view, that Fascism is something too serious to be dealt with in a funny book at all. Surely that is unreasonable? Fascism is now such a notable feature of modern life all over the world that it must be possible to consider it in any context when attempting to give a picture of life as it is lived today.

Diana and Unity were by no means the only people to be enraptured by Hitler. Despite the fact that, as a political movement, pacifism was by far stronger than either Fascism or Communism during this period, in the early Thirties Mosley was still respectable and Fascism was considered by many as a serious force for good. The
Observer
compared the two leaders in 1933: ‘Where Mosley is like Hitler is in his sense of the dramatic. There is an extraordinary sense of drama about a Mosley meeting, a sense that great things are about to happen.’ In January 1934, the
Daily Mail
was trumpeting ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ from its front page.

Nancy’s own declared support of Fascism was, as Diana knew, initially borne out by fact. Just before her marriage, Nancy had heard Oswald Mosley speak in Oxford and in 1934 she and Peter
had bought black shirts and attended several BUF meetings, joining the 15,000 strong crowd at the notorious Olympia rally of 7 June 1934. Nancy herself chimed in that summer with an article for the
Vanguard
entitled ‘Fascism as I See It’. Possibly this departure from her usual field of
Vogue
and
The Lady
was a pre-emptive strike against potential criticism of her novel, and certainly its conclusion is strikingly similar to one of Eugenia’s rousing perorations. Nancy denounced a culture where ‘respect for parents, love of the home, veneration of marriage ties is at a discount’ and where only the authority of a great leader would be able to lift the country ‘from the slough of despond in which it has too long weltered’. Nancy’s article came out in July. But however sincere she may have been at Olympia, and however ‘pretty’ Peter looked in his black shirt, she now saw Fascism as a joke.

Unity, for once, was more prescient than the editor of the
Left Review
, who described the piece as ‘a very well-developed case of leaderolatry’. Unity, though, knew a Mitford gag when she saw one and recognized the article for the parody it was. ‘I’m furious about it, ’ she wrote. ‘You might have a little thought for poor me, all the boys know I’m your sister you know.’ She also warned Nancy that she had heard about
Wigs
from Lady Redesdale and threatened that she would never speak to her sister again if it was published.

But Nancy did publish, and she was prepared to risk her relationships with the Fascisters in order to do so. Hitler might not as yet have been considered a monster, and the BUF might have attracted an estimated 40,000 adherents at the peak of its respectability, but even at this stage there were dissenting voices, and those voices were audible in the Mitford sisters’ circle. In the autumn of 1933, while Diana was staying in Rome with Gerald Berners after her first Nuremberg rally, Victor Gollancz had published
The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror
by a group calling itself the World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism. Containing a list of over 250 murders carried out by the Nazis since 3 March that year, it detailed, with photographs,
the appalling treatment of the Jews under the Reich, the application of anti-Semitic laws and the number of German intellectuals and scientists who had been driven into exile by those laws. In her autobiography, Jessica Mitford described her passionate reaction to the book and the ‘bitter rows’ that ensued between herself, Unity and Diana who, according to Jessica, claimed that these atrocities were justified in pursuit of the Nazi goal.

Unity was prepared to dismiss the claims of the Brown Book even though she had experienced them at first hand. In June 1933, she had attended an Oxford production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, staged by the great director Max Reinhardt. Having fled Germany along with Einstein and Thomas Mann, Reinhardt was reduced to working with undergraduates. Unity was also friends with Anthony Rumbold, whose father, Sir Horace, was British ambassador to Berlin from 1928 to 1933. Sir Horace was a virulent critic of Nazism, stating in his final dispatch: ‘It would be misleading to base any hopes on a return to sanity …[the German] government is encouraging an attitude of mind which can only end one way.’ His notes were shown by the then foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, to the Mitfords’ cousin Winston Churchill. They were found sufficiently ‘disquieting’ to make them instrumental in the passing of the 1936 Public Order Act, aimed largely at restraining the excesses of the increasingly militaristic BUF. In a well-publicized incident, Anthony Rumbold himself was beaten up by a stormtrooper captain and ejected from Germany in February 1934. That same month, two manifestos on ‘Liberty and Democratic Leadership’ were issued, numbering Harold Macmillan, the art historian Kenneth Clark and Virginia Woolf among their signatories, while in March, the establishment of the Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes in Paris was reported in the British press. In 1935, the pro-Labour
Daily Herald
reported a survey finding that millions of Britons across the political spectrum disapproved of Fascism. Closer to home, Robert Byron, a friend
of both Nancy and Diana, had been an outspoken opponent of the Nazis since the early Thirties.