Wigs on the Green (2 page)

Diana was not appeased. She froze Nancy out of her life for several years and never invited her to Wootton Lodge, the house in Staffordshire where the Mosleys lived between 1936 and 1940. When Diana was imprisoned in Holloway for three-and-a-half years during the war – under Defence Regulation 18B, which allowed the government to hold without charge anyone suspected of Nazi sympathies – her letters and visitors were restricted. Nancy wrote to her half-a-dozen times and did go to visit her, but relations only really began to thaw after the Mosleys were released and Nancy went to stay with them to finish
The Pursuit of Love
. The two sisters never referred to
Wigs on the Green
again in their voluminous correspondence, or indeed discussed the war or politics – subjects that would have made reconciliation difficult. Diana found out only after Nancy’s death that in 1940 she had denounced her to the Foreign Office as ‘a far more dangerous character’ than Mosley and had urged that she be put in prison. And she never found out that Nancy had protested against her release in 1943,
claiming that she was ‘wildly ambitious, a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted Fascist and admirer of Hitler’. Had Diana known, reconciliation would no doubt have been impossible.

The disparaging references to divorce that are sprinkled throughout
Wigs on the Green
must also have irritated Diana. Eugenia Malmains’ grandmother, Lady Chalford – an adumbration of Lady Redesdale – deems the death of her son from wounds received the day before the Armistice a lesser disaster that the fact of his divorce, and regards with horror ‘the tainted blood of an adulteress’ that Eugenia carries in her veins. Nancy did not approve of Diana leaving Bryan but had supported her decision. The Redesdales, however, were appalled, particularly by the fact that it was Diana who petitioned Bryan for divorce on the grounds of adultery. At the time, it was common for a man to assume the role of the ‘guilty party’ and arrange to be caught at a seaside hotel with a tart, but Diana’s parents thought it wrong and were deeply shocked that she should go along with it it.

Diana’s reaction to the publication of
Wigs on the Green
affected not only the two sisters’ relationship, but also eradicated any of Nancy and Peter’s pro-Fascist leanings. ‘I hope’, Unity wrote to Diana in November 1934, ‘that that utter swine Peter has resigned his membership
publicly.’
Nancy, having considered herself a Socialist, joined the BUF soon after she married, partly because Peter was initially enthusiastic about the movement and partly, no doubt, to support Diana. The two sisters had grown particularly close during the year before Nancy married, when Diana lent her a room at Eaton Square and they had seen a great deal of each other. Nancy and Peter had attended the Olympia meeting and Diana must have hoped they were true converts to Mosley’s cause. Nancy never liked Mosley himself – ‘Sir Ogre’ as she called him – and had an instinctive aversion to the violence implicit in his methods, but at first she defended his policies. Indeed there were aspects of the Fascist viewpoint that chimed with her own. Evelyn Waugh reminded her many years later that they had quarrelled after she attended a BUF meeting at the Albert Hall. ‘Did we,’ Nancy
replied, ‘I’d quite forgotten. I remember Prod [Peter] looked very pretty in a black shirt. But we were young & high spirited then & didn’t know about Buchenwald.’ Nancy shared with Fascism the belief that Western civilisation was decaying and in need of change; but while the BUF’s millenarian vision was of a bright new Britain, she looked back with nostalgia to a vanished past, where a public-spirited aristocracy still lived on the land and where ‘sensible men of ample means’ ruled the country – a patrician point of view that threads through much of her writing.

Even when being sincere, Nancy could not take herself seriously. In July 1934 she contributed an article, ‘Fascism as I See It’, to the
Vanguard
, a journal edited by Alexander Ratcliffe, the anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic founder of the Scottish Protestant League. It is a curious piece of writing, not least because much of it is an only slightly toned-down version of the hymn to Fascism that Eugenia proclaims from an overturned washtub at the beginning of
Wigs on the Green
. It is not clear whether Nancy wrote the article then realised she had the germ of a novel, or whether she had already started
Wigs on the Green
and conveniently lifted Eugenia’s speech for the
Vanguard
. Nor is it known why she agreed to contribute to the magazine in the first place;
Vogue
and
The Lady
had been the usual outlets for her journalism until then. The article begins soberly enough by explaining that Fascism was an attitude of mind that could no more be understood by people of the old school than Picasso by admirers of representational art. It goes on, with mounting pomposity, to decry the moral turpitude of an age where ‘respect for parents, love of the home, veneration of the marriage tie’ was at a discount and where allegiance to ‘a great and good Leader’ was the one thing that could lift the country ‘from the slough of despond in which for too long it has weltered.’ It ends on a note of pure bombast – as does Eugenia’s peroration – with the description of old politicians creeping about Westminster like withered tortoises, ‘warming themselves in the synthetic sunlight of each others’ approbation,’ before being commanded by the Leader to choose between ‘ignominy and a Roman death.’

The article was taken seriously by Edgell Rickword, the Communist founding editor of
Left Review
, who described it in that journal as ‘a very well-developed case of leaderolatry’. But Unity was not deceived and realised that Nancy was parodying Mosley at his most messianic. ‘I’m furious about it,’ she wrote to her, ‘You might have a little thought for poor me, all the boys know that you’re my sister you know.’ In the same letter, she struck a cautioning note about
Wigs on the Green
, ‘Now seriously, about that book. I have heard a bit about it from Muv [Lady Redesdale], & I warn you you can’t
possibly
publish it, so you’d better not waste any more time on it. Because if you did publish it I couldn’t
possibly
ever speak to you again.’

Unity’s reaction on reading the novel is not recorded. Shortly after its publication, she admitted to Diana that she had not yet read it but that Nancy had written to assure her that she wouldn’t mind it, in fact that she would ‘positively
like
it’, adding, ‘she [Nancy] does have quaint ideas.’ Perhaps when Unity eventually came to read the book she found her portrait as a beautiful blonde goddess sufficiently gratifying to take the sting out of Nancy’s teases. Certainly the few surviving letters exchanged between the sisters after publication are in the same light-hearted tone as before, with Nancy addressing her sister affectionately as ‘Head of Bone and Heart of Stone’, and joshing her with a poem in mock German.

When Nancy was writing
Wigs on the Green
, Unity had not yet met Hitler, his policies had not yet resulted in systematic genocide and it was still possible – by turning a blind eye to the nature of the regime – to believe that National Socialism could regenerate Germany and usher in an era of peace in Europe. Unity was an impressionable nineteen-year-old when she accompanied Diana to the 1933 Nuremberg Parteitag and came under the spell of Nazism, and just twenty-five when Britain declared war on Germany. Unable to face a conflict between the two countries she loved, she went to a public garden in Munich and put a pistol to her head. The bullet failed to kill her but left her brain-damaged and she died of meningitis nine years later. During the five years
she spent in Germany, Unity came to know Hitler personally and embraced the Nazi creed whole-heartedly, including its most virulent anti-Semitism. Nazism, as she wrote to a cousin, ‘is my religion, not merely my political party’.

The dark side of Unity’s character is plain enough to see: ruthlessness, naïveté and a love of showing off, combined with an attraction to violence and a desire to shock, produced moral blindness of an extreme kind. More difficult to understand is what so endeared her to those who loved her, which her family and friends did, however much they deplored her politics. The bond between the Mitford sisters was strong but it did not stop Jessica from cutting Diana out of her life when politics drove them apart; yet she never broke off relations with Unity, even though they took opposite political sides. ‘So what was lovable about her?’ Jessica wrote to Unity’s biographer, ‘and why did I adore her, which I really did … There is a dimension, or facet, of her character missing in your book; but what is it, exactly? … Well she was so ’uge and obdgeg-joinable,
²
such a joke, after
Wigs on the Green
partly a Nancy-created joke – and she [Unity] saw the joke of herself.’ Diana described her as ‘intelligent and affectionate’ and her funeral as the saddest day of her life. To Deborah, the youngest sister, she was, ‘funny and loyal and brave’. Lady Redesdale, who assumed the demanding task of caring for her daughter after her suicide attempt, wrote after her death, ‘I shall miss her always, she was a most rare character.’

In
Wigs on the Green
, the riddle that was Unity is seen through her eldest sister’s distinctive lens. Nancy paints a caricature of an already larger-than-life young woman, under-educated, overprotected and wilful, who takes up politics to fill the void of boredom that is her life. The adolescent aspects of the Jackshirt movement – belonging to a gang, dressing-up in uniform and devotion to a leader – appeal to her strongly; just as the emotional charge of Fascism did to the youth of the 1930s. ‘When you find
schoolgirls like Eugenia going mad about something,’ one of the characters declares, ‘you can be pretty sure that it is nonsense.’ Nancy, like many others at the time, underestimated the lethal consequences of the ‘nonsense’.

The novel is Nancy’s attempt to make sense of a phenomenon that would ultimately tear Europe and her family apart. When you add to this some vintage Mitfordian jokes and teases (and in Peersmont, the lunatic asylum for batty peers, one of her best conceits) it becomes a very fascinating book indeed. However understandable her objections were to its re-publication three quarters of a century ago, today Nancy’s fans and all those curious about a particular slice of twentieth-century history will welcome its return.

Charlotte Mosley
, daughter-in-law of Nancy Mitford’s sister Diana, is a journalist and editor of several volumes of Mitford family letters.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Noel Foster, ‘not sufficiently attractive.’

He said this in unusually firm and final accents, and with a determination which for him was rare he hung up his office telephone receiver. He leant back in his chair. ‘That’s the last time,’ he thought. Never again, except possibly in regard to the heiresses he now intended to pursue, would he finish long and dreary conversations with the words, ‘Not sufficiently attractive.’

Now that he was leaving the office for good he felt himself in no particular hurry to be off. Unlike other Friday evenings he made no dash for the street; on the contrary he sat still and took a long gloating look round that room which for the last two years had been his prison. With the heavenly knowledge that he would never see them again he was able to gaze in perfect detachment at the stained-glass windows (a cheerful amber shade, full of bubbles too, just like champagne), and the old oak furnishing – which made such a perfectly delightful setting for the charms of Miss Clumps the pretty typist, Miss Brisket the plain typist, and Mr Farmer the head clerk. This amiable trio had been his fellow prisoners for the last two years, he most sincerely hoped never to see any of them again. He said goodbye to them cordially enough, however, took his hat and his umbrella, and then, rich and free, he sauntered into the street.

He had not yet had time since good fortune had befallen him to leave his dreary lodging in Ebury Street, and as a matter of habit returned to it now. He then rang up Jasper Aspect. This he did knowing perfectly well that it was a mistake of the first order. Poor young men who have just received notice of agreeable but moderate legacies can do nothing more stupid than to ring up Jasper Aspect. Noel, who had been intimate with Jasper for most of his
life, was aware that he was behaving with deplorable indiscretion, nevertheless some irresistible impulse led him to the telephone where the following conversation took place:

‘Hullo Jasper?’

‘My dear old boy, I was just going to ring you up myself.’

‘Oh, what are you doing to-night?’

‘I thought it would be exceedingly agreeable to take a little dinner off you.’

‘All right, I wanted to see you; where shall we dine – how about Boulestins? Meet you there at eight?’

‘Look here, I haven’t got any money, you know.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Noel. He would keep his glorious news until such time as he could see the incredulity and disgust which would no doubt illumine Jasper’s honest countenance when it was broken to him. Jasper now once more proclaimed his inability to pay, was once more reassured and rang off.

‘This is all exceedingly mysterious,’ he said when they met.

‘Why?’ said Noel.

‘Well, my dear old boy, it isn’t every day of the week one can get a free meal off you, let alone an expensive one like this is going to be. Why did you choose me for the jolly treat? I find it very puzzling indeed.’

‘Oh! I wanted to see you. I want your advice about one or two things actually, and after all one must eat somewhere, so why not here?’ And fishing for his handkerchief he produced, as though by accident, and replaced with nonchalance, a roll of ten pound notes.