Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (36 page)

The baby had not been Peter Rodd’s. He had been posted to Addis Ababa, so how she would have explained any new arrival is an imponderable. Despite Nancy’s best efforts to admire her husband for his instant plunge into war service, he had thrown her attempts right back at her. On his leaves in London he would dance smartly past his wife to an ARP post run by Nancy’s cousin, Adelaide Lubbock. This affair was almost certainly going on when Nancy fell pregnant back in 1940, but juggling females had never posed a problem to Peter.

Nancy believed in marriage as an institution, and tried to have faith in her own for longer than she probably should have done. To Violet Hammersley she wrote that she would struggle on with her ‘wretch’ of a husband, despite the friends who urged her to leave. She was made very unhappy by Peter’s behaviour; it is not necessary to love somebody to suffer from their infidelity. She had tried to be a good wife, but she lacked the calm insouciance that might have brought Peter closer to heel and her sharp, crackling asides did not naturally endear her to men – not, at least, as a mate. Nevertheless Peter betrayed her, as surely as she did Diana. He drained her, not merely emotionally but financially. As ever she was very poor, and Peter very profligate with what little money they had. Nancy’s allowance from David had been cut (he was rather broke also); the death of her father-in-law had stopped that particular source of income; and the money from her husband came erratically. Always thin, Nancy became spare, living only on a kind of hysterical adrenalin. ‘My hair is going quite grey,’ she wrote to Mrs Hammersley in late 1940, in a letter whose subtext seethes with the pain of her marital failure. ‘I feel older than the hills [she was thirty-six] – not a bit young any more isn’t it horrid and my own life has honestly ceased to interest me which must be a bad sign.’

Nancy reached a kind of nadir at this point.
Pigeon Pie
had been a failure. It was a joke on the Phoney War, which by the time of the book’s publication was over. By 1940 people really did not want to read that ‘countries were behaving like children in a round game, picking up sides’. Yet it is an entrancing novel, and can be seen as a transition between the chilly, faintly forced satire of Nancy’s first three books and the benevolent natural flow of what came after; starting with
The Pursuit of Love
in 1945. The tone of
Pigeon Pie
is authentic Mitford, relaxed and chatty and cool. The heroine, Lady Sophia Garfield, is a delightful creation. She yearns to be a spy but finds herself temperamentally unsuited to the work: it is not her nature to leave her house on a top-secret mission ‘after she had had her bath and changed her clothes’. This is the sort of remark that only Nancy could make with such bright and frivolous honesty. It was part of her gift to write the things that women think but do not bother, or dare, to express. And, as she would often do, Nancy used Sophia as a conduit for the easy worldly wisdom that she herself found so hard to achieve. Faced with a difficult man, a slightly more satisfactory Peter, Sophia behaves with all the innately feminine calm that Nancy could not conjure in reality. When her lover shows interest in another woman, ‘Sophia saw that she must look out. She knew very well that when a man is thoroughly disloyal about a woman, and at the same time begins to indulge in her company, he nearly always intends to have an affair with that woman.’ Too true. So Sophia, vexed but unfazed, tells her lover that she is dining with another man: ‘he must be taught a lesson.’ It was something that Nancy also needed to learn, as she knew all too well.

By the time the book had died, it seemed that the avatar of Sophia had become an irrelevance. Peter was not there to be handled and beguiled. Anyway he no longer even wanted to be. Yet Nancy
had
been taught something by
Pigeon Pie
, although it probably did not seem that way to her. She had primed her authorial voice for the next subject, which would be the re-creation of the ruined Mitford family: an imagining of the past that would give her a future. And, more subtly, she had identified in Sophia a philosophy that would sustain her. ‘Sophia had a happy character and was amused by life’: simple words, but they would become Nancy’s creed, her version of Voltaire’s ‘I have decided to be happy, because it is better for my health’, and she would hold to it as firmly as Diana and Jessica did to their ideological causes. It was not yet possible, as the bombs fell – ‘Ten hours is
too
long, you know of concentrated noise & terror in a house alone’ – and the image of Peter with Mrs Lubbock pranced grimly round her head, together with who knows what thoughts of the wreckage of her family. But it would become so, even though in many ways life became much worse, from March 1941.

It was then that Nancy wrote to Violet Hammersley, casually offering the news that a friend at the War Office had asked her to infiltrate what she called ‘the Free Frog Officers’ Club’ and try to pick up snippets of information. The Free French, headed by de Gaulle, had set up in London to work against the Vichy regime established in France after the country’s occupation by the Nazis, and headed by the puppet Marshal Pétain. Nancy reported that the Officers’ Club was rumoured to be full of spies; one particular operation planned in Africa had been leaked to Vichy. ‘Isn’t it tricky’, she remarked to Mrs Hammersley. ‘Seriously I don’t see what I could do...’ It sounds a rather exciting proposition, yet Nancy was essentially reluctant. Unlike Sophia, it seems that she did not hold even the illusory desire to be a secret agent.

For whatever reason, however – probably her sense of duty – she did use her social contacts to gain an entrée to the club; and all changed. ‘I live in a slight world of frogs now,’ she wrote to Jessica in July. ‘You can’t imagine how wonderful they have been, the free ones I mean.’ It was the first time that Nancy had been surrounded by men who truly
liked
women, who enjoyed them, who did not exactly make her feel young but, better yet, gave her to understand that youth was merely a phase: that a woman in the full bloom of sophistication was equally desirable. And she did now bloom. When happy, she looked years younger than her age, although that was no longer the point. Had she not known the French, Nancy could never have created Madame des Rocher-Innouis in her 1951 novel
The Blessing
: a sublime woman of about eighty, rich with humour, dressed in cutting-edge couture and emanating ‘great billows of sex’. As a girl Nancy had loved Paris, had stood on the Avenue Henri-Martin and felt a joy almost beyond bearing. Now she invested all her adult capacity for happiness in the image of France, which she saw reflected in these brave, courteous, laughing officers. She was ripe for new experience, but this one gradually revealed itself to be what everybody craves: a world in which they are appreciated for who they are. Furthermore it was a world free from the cling of her family. This, she was starting to need. They did not bring out the best in her. They could have Germany. She had France.

It was around this time that she began an affair with an attractive, cultured officer named Roy André Desplats-Pilter, codename André Roy, the father of the baby that had rendered her barren. The hysterectomy was a ghastly thing for Nancy. But it, too, represented a kind of liberation.

VI

Thirty years after writing her open letter about the Mosleys, Jessica was gracious enough to admit that it had been ‘painfully self-righteous and stuffy’.
²⁶
It had led to an invitation to join the Communist Party in America; on the application form, beneath the question ‘Occupation of Father’, she fortuitously remembered his days prospecting for gold in Canada and wrote: ‘Miner.’
²⁷

Although she disliked the tone in which she had written about Diana, she never changed in her attitude towards her sister, and saw her only once more after her marriage to Esmond Romilly. Was this, then, the division of the ‘DFD’ made flesh, a pure commitment to the belief that Fascists and Communists must be separated at all costs? Or was Jessica’s fixation upon Diana born of something more obscure and ignoble?

In 1947 she wrote to Nancy that Diana ‘would melt us all down for soap if she could catch us, most likely.’ This was absurd, and especially so given Jessica’s lifelong affection for the real Nazi sympathizer, Unity: ‘she was easily my favourite sister’.
²⁸
Perhaps that would have changed, had Unity remained her robust old self throughout the war, but somehow one feels not. What is odd is that there is also a sense in which Unity’s fanaticism was part of what Jessica loved in her, what bound them together. As for Diana – Jessica had worshipped her as a girl, and seems to have felt that her older sister had let her down: that here was another family betrayal. Perhaps the identification of Diana with the war – the desire to blame her – was also a sublimation, a way of holding her responsible for what had happened to Unity. Perhaps she felt, as did others, that Unity was an innocent, which Diana had never been.

Certainly it was irrational to hate Diana all the more when Esmond was killed in 1941. Yet that was Jessica’s stance, from which she did not outwardly deviate. Mitfords didn’t, on the whole.

The Romillys had left home for America before the outbreak of war, where they worked their way around the country. Jessica took jobs as a salesgirl, Esmond as a door-to-door salesman. Among the contacts that they been given – the sort of thing that could never have happened to a member of the working class – was Katherine Graham, whose father, owner of the
Washington Post
, loaned Esmond money with which he started a bar in Miami. He was a figure of some interest in the US press. In 1939 he was interviewed by
Life
magazine, and said: ‘If England is drawn into a war now I shall go back and fight... but I have no illusions about England fighting for democracy.’ The war, as he put it, was ‘imperial England against imperial Germany’. What this meant, if anything, was surely that he would enter the war only on
his
terms. The letter that Nellie Romilly wrote to her son, accusing him of having fled the war scene, was not entirely just; whatever else he was, Esmond was not a coward. He joined the Canadian Air Force in 1940 and volunteered to serve in Europe. ‘I’ll probably find myself being commanded by one of your ghastly relations,’ he said to Jessica. (His relations too, as it happened. In fact the man whom he sometimes claimed for his father was by now in charge of the whole shebang.) Having entered in the ranks, Esmond applied for a commission as a pilot officer; he justified this apparent endorsement of the hierarchical class system with the argument that commissions were based on performance rather than social background. Having an answer for everything was another of his characteristics.

Jessica was now living in Washington DC, a semi-permanent house guest with a family called the Durrs (the husband was high up in broadcasting, but crucially – fortunately for one’s principles – they were all Democrats). Her social life was cosmopolitan. Being introduced as the wife of Churchill’s nephew did her no harm with people like Lyndon Johnson. Again, there was nothing notably communistic about this lifestyle, but she found the direct American manner more congenial than the roundabout, oh-you-are-kind Englishness that she nevertheless could use to her advantage.

If she missed the Mitfords, there was no particular sign of it. Yet she stayed in close touch through letters. She had been devastated about Unity, and refused large sums to talk about her to the American press. Her mother told her of the pitiful conditions in which Diana was living; her reply to that is not recorded (perhaps just as well). Deborah wrote in her familiar ‘dear old Hen’ style and from Swinbrook gave news of Unity: ‘I think Bobo is a bit better but I don’t know.’ Pamela wrote to say that ‘Air Force blue’ suited Derek’s eyes – something oddly touching about this – ‘& I expect it suits Esmond also’. In very different tone, and as if in league against their pro-Germanic tribe, Nancy wrote often. Her droll, dry, elliptical letters suggest a kind of relaxation with Jessica, who would get all her jokes and for whom she felt no uncomfortably strong emotions. She was rarely able to resist a little dig about their mother’s politics (‘she is, I fear, very unsound at heart’) and emphasized her own status, of which she was proudly aware, as the only sister to be contributing to the war effort (‘you see I WORK Susan’). Although Nancy always made great play of her hatred of America – the butt of many jokes in
The Blessing
–
and teased Jessica about living there, she may also have empathized with her sister’s desire to escape the Mitfords by moving to another country. In fact Jessica intended to return to England, and it is interesting to imagine what her life would have been had she done so; but this did not work out as she had planned.

In February 1941 Jessica gave birth to a daughter, Constancia, who this time was strong and healthy (also very beautiful). Three months later Unity sent congratulations to her sister, apologizing for the delay and explaining that she still wrote very slowly: ‘You know I got shot in the head.’ In June, Esmond visited on leave then sailed to England, from where he was to fly in nightly operations over Europe. Jessica, who had again fallen pregnant, miscarried in August but wrote to her husband: ‘I don’t mind a bit about it any more, and I hope you don’t. The Donk [Constancia
²⁹
] is so frightfully nice and companionable, she is really all I need.’ Except Esmond, of course. She was still deeply attached to him. Like the Mosleys, whom the Romillys would have scorned to resemble, this marriage that had cut them off so forcefully from their previous life was obliged to succeed: the love was sincere, but it was also a necessity.

Meanwhile Esmond was unhappy and nervous, with good reason. His brother Giles – to whom he was extremely close, his fellow public-school rebel – had been taken prisoner at Dunkirk, then held in Colditz (Giles survived the war, but killed himself in 1967). The night flights were wearing, terrifying. Only a man like Derek Jackson – who with typical perversity barked orders in German as he buzzed through the air – would have relished them. Jessica wanted to hitch a ride on a ‘lend-lease bomber’ and meet Esmond in England, but for a time he sought to discourage her; he was lost in despair after losing four of his closest friends to the war. Yet by November 1941 his attitude had shifted, and he sent Jessica a reflective, kindly, stoical letter, a hint towards the man that he might have become. He recognized that Jessica wanted to return to her home country, and felt that he was selfish to dissuade her on account of his depression. ‘I want’, he wrote, ‘to be with you again more than anything in the world.’ Then he continued: