Irrepressible (5 page)

Decca wondered if her child would be a boy, and she hoped he would be pretty. Before the baby’s birth, she had a dream in which she was trapped in Swinbrook and awoke grateful to find herself back at Rotherhithe, where Esmond and she had made a quiet nest in the chaos. Their baby daughter was born December 20, 1937, and they named her Julia, after sixteenth-century poet Robert Herrick’s divine portrait of Julia, “the queen of flowers,” in
The Parliament of Roses to Julia
. As a subversive, exalting sensuality in a puritan society, Herrick suited the young couple’s taste. Another of Herrick’s poems,
The Bracelet to Julia
, spoke to the young mother Decca about new varieties of love:

Nanny Blor offered her services (for which the Mitford parents offered to pay), but Esmond vetoed the idea, thinking Blor would bring too much in the way of Mitford family associations. They planned to raise their child without nannies or governesses or any other such minions of British upperclass family life. Esmond himself had hoped to help out more, but he was
the only one working at the time. In any case, as he was “known for his inability to carry a teaspoon from one room to the next,” the principal care and welfare of their baby fell to Decca. Julia quickly became, Decca wrote, “the center of my existence.”

Decca and Esmond were beginning to feel at home among the brothers and sisters of the Bermondsey Labour Party. Bermondsey was a notable redoubt of radicalism, and its membership “considerably more militant” than that of the official Labour Party. Decca complimented her new neighbors for their “seriousness of purpose.” The Bermondsey mob was also fun to be around. She and Esmond attended lectures and joined in conversations, arguments, and radical sing-alongs, which Decca loved. She loved to harmonize, and she particularly loved to belt out a novelty song. (Noel Coward’s were her favorites.) Despite Britain’s nonintervention policy, which Bermondsey members resented and condemned, they held fund-raisers for Spanish orphans and Jewish refugees from Germany. Decca found the tale of the Bermondsey schoolchildren who had “lined up to boo Princess Mary, symbol of hated charity,” an especially appealing advertisement for her neighborhood. She liked their style.

So did Esmond.
Boadilla
had been published in autumn 1937 to good reviews but so-so sales. Still, at nineteen, he had two books under his belt and was confident of his ability to write well and complete his projects quickly. He had plans for a novel, but for the time being settled into work as a copywriter at the advertising agency of Graham and Gillies. Back in Spain, when Esmond had first received his fifty-pound advance for
Boadilla
, he and Decca had thought they might emigrate to Mexico, a world away from the dismal weather, the loss of Spain, and German aggression. But family life was at least for the moment more like a sanctuary than an exile. For a change, they weren’t running away or under fire, and they didn’t have to justify themselves to anyone. Esmond’s job had its amusements; he was good at jingles and jargon. The New Year looked promising. He was earning enough to support the three of them. Perhaps there was some adjustment necessary now that they were outside the limelight. Naturally, the
neighbors gossiped about the celebrity couple. There were nice cars parked outside from time to time, and well-dressed toffs going into and out of their house. But it was a good life in its almost ordinariness and one he would hardly have predicted for himself.

Decca, too, was learning the ropes and adapting. It is easy to imagine her out and about, buying the Craven A cigarettes they chain-smoked, a paper from the newsboy on the corner, a chop from a jokey butcher who called her
pet
or
love
. Sometimes, the wives of the “tired, white-faced dockers” would stop on the street and coo at Decca and her sweet baby. She and Esmond had been in the habit of being together all the time. It might have been hard at first to be alone—in her house full of siblings, she had never been alone for extended periods. But Decca adapted and caught up on her novel reading while the baby slept.

Esmond and Decca still liked to have a lot of friends around, but what was once a gambling palace now smelled of diapers. Guests to their transformed casino brought bottles of beer, wine, and liquor; food hampers; and fish and chips wrapped in newspapers. Decca and Esmond shared with their guests and with almost everyone they knew—everyone awake, at any rate—a sense of always needing to be on the alert. Around the Romilly household, there was an enduring brightness, a nimbus of power and energy symbolized by their fabulous electricity bill. Neither Decca nor Esmond understood the social contract in capitalist societies regarding public utilities (like where, when, or how to pay), so they ran up their bill without worry. Other generations of Romillys and Mitfords wasted their fortunes on horses and cards. This all-night parsing of the issues, betting on the future surrounded by light, was another kind of gamble.

In March 1938, while General Franco’s armies were crushing the Republican forces in Spain, Hitler annexed Austria and initiated the threats that would soon lead to German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Despite the wretched news from Europe, Decca and her friends were eager to take on what would come. Esmond had anticipated the loss of Spain. He grieved, but like the practical, perpetual motion machine that he was, he forged
ahead. They had new plans, hopes, and dreams. If not Mexico, perhaps they could move to Paris, where Julia would grow up “a little gamine trudging to a lycée with books in a satchel.” In any case, their daughter would be “born to freedom and May Day parades.”

To Decca, those early May Day parades seemed the apotheosis of socialist delight. By the time the May Day march of 1938 came around, there was a feeling in Decca’s circle that the fight against fascism would be long and vicious, but that they and their comrades had the courage, the strength, and the determination to beat back any threat. Starting with its throngs in the street, she painted the day of the march—“the entire community turned out”—full of passion and confidence in their solidarity. With people’s collective power and dedication, they felt that they could stop any juggernaut. Decca carried Julia, with Esmond and their friend Philip Toynbee arm in arm. The trio sang “The Red Flag,” then teased their soberer comrades with altered lyrics—instead of “The people’s flag is deepest red,” they sang, “The people’s flag is palest pink. It’s not as red as you may think.”

Decca and her friends marched with the Bermondsey Labour Party contingent. It seemed that every antifascist organization and person in London had turned out, thousands upon thousands, and thousands more joined at every intersection—the co-ops, the Communist Party, the Independent Labour Party, all with their flags. The unofficial theme of the day was repeated on banners snaking through the parade: “United Front Against Fascism.” The march was good-natured at the start. There were children and baby buggies and flirtations of every variety. It was a long walk to Hyde Park. Along the way, a marcher might rest with a bottle of beer or take off her shoes to cool her feet and wonder at the holes in her stockings. Whole extended families might stop to take tea along the route, amusingly furnished with proper cups and saucers. But the marchers would be wary, too, that Mosley’s British Union of Fascists troopers would line the parade route and at some point attack as those antagonists had been attacking each other in a miniature world war for years.

Decca was ready for the Blackshirts to disrupt the May Day parade, and they showed up on schedule, jeering and harassing. There were fistfights on side streets as groups peeled off and then rejoined the march scratched, bruised, and bloody. At some point, Decca saw her sisters Diana and Unity, both statuesque like twin nautical figureheads, up on some prow pedestal or perhaps just standing on cars and above the crowd as they liked to be, waving their swastika flags and giving the Nazi salute. Decca shook her fist back, though they were too far away to see her. She later said she would have gone for them, too, anything to shake their smug confidence, but Esmond and Philip held her back and then threw themselves into the fray. Decca saw a fascist gang armed with rubber truncheons and knuckledusters beaten back by the Bermondsey faction. Later, Esmond and Philip would wear their bloody cuts and black eyes as badges of honor.

 

DECCA’S MOTHER AND sisters Debo and Unity continued to visit when Esmond was at work. They brought gifts and fluttered around Julia, whom Muv thought “too thin.” Every week, Decca would bring her baby to one of the Labour Party’s free health clinics to be weighed and for a dose of free cod liver oil. Toynbee admired Decca’s resourcefulness, her “light-hearted maternal competence.” Then Julia caught the measles.

As soon as she had heard of the latest measles epidemic raging through London that May, Decca had visited her clinic to ask about the danger to Julia. The overworked, inundated nurse explained about the contagion of childhood diseases and the immunity conferred by a breast-feeding mother. But a mother could only confer immunity if she had had the disease herself, and Decca hadn’t. There was no inoculation. A few days later, both Decca and her daughter contracted the disease. Decca suffered with a high fever for two days. Esmond did his best, with nurses to help, but little Julia caught pneumonia and died on May 28, 1938.

Did Decca blame Muv, who believed in the good body’s ability to heal itself? Or Esmond, who had stubbornly refused Nanny Blor? Or herself, for
acquiescing? Nanny Blor might have known what to do. Decca couldn’t listen to anyone’s sympathy. Philip hadn’t wanted to, but one drunken night, Decca and Esmond forced him to tell them what people were saying at their dinner parties: It was because they’d exposed their child to the vapors and stink of the East End. Esmond had been roundly excoriated, while she was supposedly some kind of pitiable, mesmerized zombie. Their marriage, strangers and friends alike supposed, would never survive this.

Decca and Esmond left London the day after their baby’s funeral. They wanted to escape and to grieve without the added burden of family solicitude. Esmond had made it his business to put a lot of distance between the Mitfords and them. He knew they would have to run for it before the women in their black clothes led them back consolingly to the bosom of the clan. Esmond and Decca agreed they could best console each other if they got as far away as fast as they could. They made for Corsica, though not before Decca wrote a polite thank you letter to Debo. “Dearest Hen, Thank you so much for writing. We are going tomorrow morning, so I do hope you will write to yr. hen. Please give my love to Muv, & thank her for her letter & for offering to help with the house, but as a matter of fact Esmond has already arranged for Peter Nevile to try & let it for us. If any of you hear of a likely person, would you let him know?”

The Corsican months included many nights of weeping and drinking and regret. Decca swam in the sea and let herself be fussed over by the ladies of the Grande Hotel de Calvi, who had heard the whispered gossip. Everyone knew her secret, though no one was crass enough to say it aloud. They plied Decca with the local delicacies: the sea urchins, strong Corsican cheese,
figatelli
, donkey sausage, and dark purple wine in ceramic bowls. Down on the beach, some veterans of the Spanish Civil War had pitched tents. Decca and Esmond found a refuge among other young radicals. Though they talked of war and struggle, the way they lived day-to-day was by distraction, trying their best to keep their memories of Spain and their apprehension of the coming European war at bay, in exchange for a few hours of peace.

At night, they sat on their veranda or out on the beach with the campers. Someone would roll cigarettes to hand around; someone would play a guitar, point out a constellation, quote a poem. “Murmur a little sadly, How love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” There were so many stars. Once in a while, someone would hiccup or change positions with a groan. In the quiet, you could hear another cork being pulled.

Esmond and Decca had expected the loss of the war in Spain, but back in England in a happier time, it had seemed more of a diminishing horizon, twilight into darkness. Here, confronted by the most recent events as told by men and women of the International Brigades (from France, Germany, the United States, and England) who had witnessed them, the horrors of the endgame took shape. They heard about the retreats, the enemy’s vast superiority in firepower, tanks, and numbers, and the final plunge in morale.

Some of them, in their earliest idealism, had believed that the example of their conviction—their “willingness to fight and die to prevent the spread of fascism”—would have influence. They believed it might take some time, but even if theirs was an underground current, it had the power to charge others. They had to persuade the leaders of neutral Western democracies to finally, even at the last minute, even in a
deus ex machina
moment, rescue Spain. There were so many lies, so many deaths, such a waste. As they drank their wine around campfires, the veterans on the beach discussed the newest race laws in Germany: laws forbidding Jews from having driver’s licenses, owning radios—even owning carrier pigeons. It was public knowledge that the Communists not already in prison were being arrested. Germany military aggression escalated every day. All of this was reported, every fascist act scrutinized in the English and European papers. With so much at stake, the intoxicated veterans of the International Brigades wondered aloud to their English comrades,
Why won’t Britain act?!